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Regional Accent Discrimination in Hiring Decisions: A Language Attitude Study
Evidence is presented to support the notion that US regional accents influence decisions in the hiring process. Fifty-six people who hire for a variety of corporations participated in a computerized survey, during which they listened to speakers from regions of the US reading the same passage. Respondents judged the speakers on personal characteristics commonly considered in hiring decisions, attempted to identify the speakers' regions, and selected job categories for each speaker, in addition to providing information about their own linguistic security. Results indicate: 1) judgments based on regional accents strongly correlate to selection of job categories, 2) respondents were not able to identify regional accents correctly, and 3) negative judgments were assigned to the speakers of accents that were correctly identified.
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Markley, E. Dianne
System:
The UNT Digital Library
I. Korean address and reference terms between married men and women; II. Metaphorical extension in Korean compound verbs
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I. This study attempts to investigate the address and reference terms between Korean husbands and wives in different situations by means of the questionnaire. In addition to the results by the questionnaire, questions relating to gender, age, culture and society were partially answered through out this survey. II. This study attempts to analyze metaphorical extension of Korean compound verbs. The patterns found in Korean compound verbs are similar to the work of Abby and Chelliah. That is secondary verbs in the construction of compound verbs which have two sequential verbs have bleached meanings in the processes of grammaticalization.
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Seo, Eun-Jeong
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Nature of Things
The Nature of Things is a collection of stories and a preface that examine character motivation. The author is concerned with unexpected reactions and surprising outcomes. The stories are independent of each other and involve a wide range of characters.
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Byno, Ashley
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Paradox of the Christian Poet: George Herbert's Problematics
The thesis examines the paradoxes in Herbert's poetry and attributes the many contradictions and vacillations within The Temple to Herbert's own "spiritual conflicts" as a Christian poet. The thesis explores the poems as interconnected expressions of Herbert's dual nature as Christian-Poet. The thesis discusses over sixty of Herbert's poems, concentrating on close readings and intratextual connections. Chapter One reviews critical approaches to Herbert's poetry and outlines the study. Chapter Two examines Herbert's life and the expression of his struggles in poetry. Chapter Three discusses Herbert's poetry itself and comments on the deceptively simplistic style. Chapter Four explores the conflict between the worlds of the Christian and the poet. Chapter Five concludes that, more than merely an artistic exercise or catechistic tool, Herbert's poetry accurately records the duality of the poet's spiritual journey.
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Casey, James Edward
System:
The UNT Digital Library
What Happens to the Where, When and How in Malay?
In this thesis, I analyze three positions of the wh-word in Malay and attempt to explain what accounts for the differences between them. Specifically, I consider if the movement of the wh-interrogative is really wh-movement or if something else is going on. In regard to the the in-situ wh-words and the partially moved wh-words, I consider whether these move covertly and if they do, if this is feature movement or covert phrasal movement.
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Muthiah, Kalaivahni
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Body Matters: Gary Snyder, The Self and Ecopoetics
Gary Snyder has offered, in poems and essays, ways to acknowledge the interrelationships of humans with the more-than-human. He questions common notions of selfness as well as understandings of what it is to be human in relationship to other species and ecosystems, and he offers new paradigms for the relationship between cultures and the ecosystems in which these cultures reside. These new paradigms are rooted in a reevaluation of our attitudes toward our physical bodies which impacts our relationship to the earth and raises new possibilities for an ecological spirituality or philosophy. The sum of Snyder's endeavors is a foundation for an understanding of ecopoetics. Snyder's poem "The Trail is Not a Trail" is an interesting place to begin examining how human perceptions of the self are central to the kinds of relationships that humans believe are possible between our species and everything else. In this poem there is a curious fusion of the speaker and the trail. In fact, with each successive line they become increasingly difficult to separate. The physical self is central to Snyder's poetry because his is a poetry of the self physically rooted in ever-shifting relationship with the biosphere. The relationship of the self to …
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Murray, Matthew
System:
The UNT Digital Library
No Slip-Shod Muse: A Performance Analysis of Some of Susanna Centlivre's Plays
In 1982, Richard C. Frushell urged the necessity for a critical study of Susanna Centlivre's plays. Since then, only a handful of books and articles briefly discuss herand many attempt wrongly to force her into various critical models. Drawing on performativity models, my reading of several Centlivre plays (Love's Contrivance, The Gamester, The Basset-Table and A Bold Stroke for a Wife) asks the question, "What was it like to see these plays in performance?" Occupying somewhat uneasy ground between literature and theatre studies, I borrow useful tools from both, to create what might be styled a New Historicist Dramaturgy. I urge a re-examination of the period 1708-28. The standard reading of theatre of the period is that it was static. This "dry spell" of English theatre, most critics agree, was filled with stock characters and predictable plot lines. But it is during this so-called "dry spell" that Centlivre refines her stagecraft, and convinces cautious managers to bank on her work, providing evidence that playwrights of the period were subtly experimenting. The previous trend in scholarship of this cautious and paranoid era of theatre history has been to shy away from examining the plays in any depth, and fall back on …
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Herrell, LuAnn R. Venden
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Playing Jonah's Hand: Poems
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Playing Jonah's Hand: Poems is a collection of poems with a critical introduction. The introduction consists of two independent essays, both of which examine intersections between poetry and Christian theology. In the first essay I identify the imaginative faculty as the primary source of agency for the speaker in John Donne's "Holy Sonnets." Working upon Barbara Lewalski's assertion that these sonnets represent "the Protestant paradigm of salvation in its stark, dramatic, Pauline terms," I consider the role of the imagination in the spiritual transformation represented within the sequence. Donne foregrounds a Calvinistic theology that posits both humanity's total depravity and God's grace and mercy as the only avenue of transcendence. Whatever agency the speaker exhibits is generated by the exercise of his imagination, which leads him to a recognition of his sinfulness and the necessity of God's grace. In the second essay I investigate the presence of a negative theology within "Lachrimae, or Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans," a sonnet sequence by Geoffrey Hill. In this sequence, Hill demonstrates the possibilities that surface through an integration of negative theology with postmodern theories of language, both of which have been influenced by the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger. The …
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Dyer, Gregory A.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women
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This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, …
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Collins, Margo
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Asleep in the Arms of God
A work of creative fiction in the form of a short novel, Asleep in the Arms of God is a limited-omniscient and omniscient narrative describing the experiences of a man named Wafer Roberts, born in Jack County, Texas, in 1900. The novel spans the years from 1900 to 1925, and moves from the Keechi Valley of North Texas, to Fort Worth and then France during World War One, and back again to the Keechi Valley. The dissertation opens with a preface, which examines the form of the novel, and regional and other aspects of this particular work, especially as they relate to the postmodern concern with fragmentation and conditional identity. Wafer confronts in the novel aspects of his own questionable history, which echo the larger concern with exploitative practices including racism, patriarchy, overplanting and overgrazing, and pollution, which contribute to and climax in the postmodern fragmentation. The novel attempts to make a critique of the exploitative rage of Western civilization.
Date:
December 1999
Creator:
Clay, Kevin M.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Remembering the Forgotten Beauty of Yeatsian Mythology: Personae and the Problem of Unity in The Wind Among the Reeds
Remembering the Forgotten Beauty of Yeatsian Mythology: Personae and the Problem of Unity in The Wind Among the Reeds
Date:
December 1999
Creator:
Tomkins, David S.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Night of No Exile
Night of no Exile is a collection of poems preceded by a critical article entitled "‘Exile seems both a blessing and a curse': A Blissful Reading of Li-Young Lee's Poetry." That article discusses Lee's quest to achieve communication, truth, and transcendence through poetic language and concludes that he finally reaches his goal through a leap from narrative poetry to lyricism. The "exile" alluded to in the title of the article is not only geographic, but also interioran exile due to the natural limitations of all languages, and which can be bridged only in linguistic ways. Lee's solution to that problem (lyricism) turns his poetry into what Roland Barthes would call "a text of bliss," a text that manages to deeply destabilize language, while simultaneously achieving a new kind of meaning. In the main body of the manuscript, the first section contains short love lyrics. The second section, "Night of no Exile," is an attempt at the demanding genre of the longer lyric poem. The third section uses short lyrics to explore various topics, such as discovering one's identity, friendship and solidarity between women, family history, and childhood memories. Finally, the last section includes poems, four of them longer, attempting to …
Date:
August 1999
Creator:
Jones, Marie C.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
What Spins Away
What Spins Away is a novel about a man named Caleb who, in the process, of searching for a brother who has been missing for ten years, discovers that his inability to commit to a job or his primary relationships is both the result of his history with that older missing brother, and his own misconceptions about the meaning of that history. On a formal level, the novel explores the ability of traditional narrative structures to carry postmodern themes. The theme, in this case, is the struggle for a stable identity when there is no stable community against which or in relationship to an identity might be defined.
Date:
May 1999
Creator:
Irwin, Keith
System:
The UNT Digital Library
From Skeletons to Orchards
This thesis is a creative work that is segmented into three main phases in order to display the developing poetic growth and control in the work of Paul Andrew Thies. The first phase is titled "Skeletons and Rhinoceri." It was a phase where I focused on more classical forms of poetry, namely accentual and syllabical sonnets. This phase was greatly influenced by both Charles Baudelaire and William Butler Yeats. The second phase, titled "Clandestinies," was one in which I tried to develop a more dense form. Lord Byron and Pablo Neruda were the two main influences on my work at this time, largely in terms of imaginative exoticism and figurative energy. The third section of this thesis, titled "Graffiti in the Orchard," is an exploration of my current work as a poet. In this phase, Rainer Maria Rilke was the primary influence as I began to develop a more fluid and expressive style.
Date:
May 1999
Creator:
Thies, Paul Andrew
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison
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In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even …
Date:
August 1999
Creator:
Erickson, Stacy M.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
A Thousand Miles Out of My Mind
The dissertation is a collection of creative and non-fiction work, including a novel with critical introduction, four short stories, and three essays. The novel is a modern day Grail quest that takes place primarily in the Southwestern United States. The short stories are mostly set in the southwest as well, and take for their topic what Paul Fussel refers to as "hope abridged." The essays are non-fiction.
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Sisk, Grant
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Evolution of AIDS as Subject Matter in Select American Dramas
Dramatic works from America with AIDS as subject matter have evolved over the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, dramas like Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, William Hoffman's As Is, and Robert Chesley's Night Sweat educated primarily homosexual men about AIDS, its causes, and its effects on the gay community while combating the dominant discourse promoted by the media, government, and medical establishments that AIDS was either unimportant because it affected primarily the homosexual population or because it was attributed to lack of personal responsibility. By the mid-eighties and early nineties, playwrights Terrence McNally (Love! Valour! Compassion!)and Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey)concentrated on relationships between sero-discordant homosexual couples. McNally's "Andre's Mother" and Lips Together, Teeth Apart explored how families and friends face the loss of a loved one to AIDS. Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America epic represents living beyond AIDS as a powerful force. Without change and progress, Angels warns, life stagnates. Angels also introduces the powerful drugs that help alleviate the symptoms of AIDS. AIDS is the centerpiece of the epic, and AIDS and homosexuality are inextricably blended in the play. Rent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Jonathan Larson, features characters from an assortment of ethnic and social …
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Sorrells, David J.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Jezebel's Daughters: A Study of Wilkie Collins and His Female Villains
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The term "feminist," when applied to Wilkie Collins, implies he was concerned with rectifying the oppression of women in domestic life as well as with promoting equal rights between the sexes. This study explores Collins the "feminist" by analyzing his portrayals of women, particularly his most powerful feminine creations: his villainesses. Although this focus is somewhat limited, it allows for a detailed analysis of the development of Collins's attitudes towards powerful women from the beginning to the end of his career. It examines the relationship between Collins's developing moral attitudes and social beliefs, on the one hand, and the ideas of Victorian feminists such as Josephine Butler and feminist sympathizers such as John Stuart Mill, on the other. This interaction, while never overt, reveals the ambivalence and complexity of Collins's "feminist" attitudes. Of the five novels in this study, Antonina (1850), Basil (1852), Armadale (1866), Jezebel's Daughter (1880), and The Legacy of Cain (1889), only one was published at the zenith of Collins's career in the 1860s. Each of the villainesses in these novels, their ideas and experiences, are crucial to understanding Collins's "feminist" impulses. Looking at them as powerful women who detest domestic oppression, one becomes aware that Collins …
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Colvin, Trey Vincent
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Stretched Out On Her Grave: The Evolution of a Perversion
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The word "necrophilia" brings a particular definition readily to mind that of an act of sexual intercourse with a corpse, probably a female corpse at that. But the definition of the word did not always have this connotation; quite literally the word means "love of the dead," or "a morbid attraction to death." An examination of nineteenth-century literature reveals a gradual change in relationships between the living and the dead, culminating in the sexualized representation of corpses at the close of the century. The works examined for necrophilic content are: Mary Wollstonecrafts Mary, A Fiction, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, Emily Brontës Wuthering Heights, and Bram Stokers Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars.
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Angel-Cann, Lauryn
System:
The UNT Digital Library
L2 acquisition of Spanish telic se constructions
This thesis examines the acquisition of the aspectual properties of the Spanish se in transitive constructions by L2 learners of Spanish. Based on a parameterized distinction of the telic features in English and Spanish, this study investigates whether second language (L2) learners are able to reset the aspectual value of the English parameter to that of Spanish in their interlanguage grammar. Results indicate that L2 learners' responses to a picture interpretation task vary according to proficiency levels. Low-intermediate and intermediate learners did not differentiate between telic and atelic constructions whereas advanced learners successfully acquired the telic properties of the transitive se constructions. Results were interpreted in the light of current theories of second language acquisition and the mental representation of aspect in interlanguage.
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Suárez Cepeda, Sonia
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Imagining The Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature
William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal …
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Walther, James T.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Redemption and the Other: The Supernatural Narrator and the Intertextual (Sub)version of the Miltonic Command
In literary discourse from the Genesis creation myth through John Milton's Paradise Lost and beyond, Eve has been patriarchally considered to be the bringer of Sin and Death into the world. In Paradise Lost Eve is depicted as deceiving Adam into the Fall by way of the Serpent. Paradise Lost creates a Miltonic command that helps to further blame Woman for Sin and Death. Milton's poem is based on the Genesis creation myth written by Canaanite authors. In this myth the Canaanite authors wished to rid the world of Goddess worship and, by humanizing Eve, they successfully obliterate that form of worship. As a result of this obliteration of the Goddess, Eve, as a humanized form of the ancient Goddess Asherah, remains unredeemed for her sin and forever held to blame. Throughout what Michel Foucault calls the archive, or discourse in which power resides, Eve/Woman continues to be seen by patriarchal discourse as to blame for the Fall. There has never been a successful redemption for Eve in the archive. Although Samuel Richardson's Clarissa has been suggested as a successful redeemer of Eve, Clarissa's blatant will to death and, therefore, will to power precludes a successful redemption of Eve. The …
Date:
May 2000
Creator:
Gowdy, Robert Douglas
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Questioning Voices: Dissention and Dialogue in the Poetry of Emily and Anne Brontë
My dissertation examines the roles of Emily and Anne Brontë as nineteenth-century women poets, composing in a literary form dominated by androcentric language and metaphor. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly concerning spoken and implied dialogue, and feminists who have pioneered an exploration of feminist dialogics provide crucial tools for examining the importance and uses of the dialogic form in the development of a powerful and creative feminine voice. As such, I propose to view Emily's Gondal poetry not as a series of loosely connected monologues, but as utterances in an inner dialogue between the dissenting and insistent female voice and the authoritative voice of the non-Gondal world. Emily's identification with her primary heroine, Augusta, enables her to challenge the controlling voice of the of the patriarchy that attempts to dictate and limit her creative and personal expression. The voice of Augusta in particular expresses the guilt, shame, and remorse that the woman-as-author must also experience when attempting to do battle with the patriarchy that attempts to restrict and reshape her utterances. While Anne was a part of the creation of Gondal, using it to mask her emotions through sustained dialogue with those who enabled and inspired such feelings, her …
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Kalkwarf, Tracy Lin
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Wandering Women: Sexual and Social Stigma in the Mid-Victorian Novel
The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine …
Date:
August 2000
Creator:
Jackson, Lisa Hartsell
System:
The UNT Digital Library