In her introduction to a special issue of the South Central Review on literary biography published in 2006, Linda Leavell writes, "Many would trace the disdain for literary biography—in both senses of the word “literary”—back through Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” to the New Critics’ division of text from context all the way to T. S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality. Critical theory of the past century has generally deemed an author’s life, personality, and intentions irrelevant to the text" (1). Leavell’s explanation of how critical theory of the twentieth century came to shape the current scholarly attitude towards literary biography establishes the genre’s status in an era of literary theory that is commonly characterized by the diminishment of the author as the source of meaning in a text, an era in which we remain. This characterization, however, overlooks the different ways that the theorists of the era displaced the author as the dominant figure in literary studies. This paper demonstrates how these different ways, despite whatever damage they might have done to the status of literary biography, actually benefit the study of the genre. Additionally, this paper argues that they not only comprise one side of Vladimir Nabokov’s contradictory views on his own authorship, which makes him an ideal subject for the study of authority over biographical representation, but also gave rise to new methodologies of literary biography, which are the methodologies of Nabokov’s biographers themselves. As a result, this paper concludes, “an author’s life, personality, and intentions” in turn have assumed new relevancy in literary studies. / text

Contempory writing theories do not explain many of the writing behaviors exhibited by basic writers in the classroom. Many theorists (Emig, Fitzgerald, Rose, and Perl) have identified similar and distinct writing behaviors which have also been identified by instructors of basic writers. This study focuses on two college-level basic writing students by using the results of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and identified writing behaviors of theorists; these case studies shed light on writing processes in relationship to personality. The results suggest a correlation between writing behaviors and personality types which affects the writing and the teaching of the writing processes. / Department of English

In recent years, many composition teachers and theorists have turned to the process approach to writing in an attempt to better understand both the act of writing and the writers themselves. Even though various theorists have made headway in the analysis of students' writing processes, further research is needed to explore whether college basic writers are aware of their own writing processes and whether this awareness can lead to discovery of the self as a writer and to diminished writing anxiety.One way for students to become aware of their composing processes is through process journals, in which they write about their actions in creating and revising their papers. Using process journals as an independent variable, this project studied differences among three groups of basic writers at Ball State University: those who wrote process journals frequently, infrequently, and not at all. I evaluated effects of process journals on self-reported awareness of process, as measured by a Writing Skills Questionnaire, and on writing apprehension, as measured by the Writing Apprehension Test (WAT). To measure changes among groups over two semesters, I analyzed students' questionnaire responses using mean scores and two Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests.Results showed that process journals did have a significant impact on students' attitudes about themselves as writers and on their awareness and control of writing processes. This study did not find, however, that process journals significantly decreased students' writing apprehension scores. In addition, it did not find Ball State University's basic writing students to be highly apprehensive writers. Although further research is needed to verify these results and expand the scope of research in process journals, the initial findings here suggest that process journals can be an important part of many students' writing experiences. / Department of English

The perspectives of gay men on college and university campuses is informed by a rich gay social history and extensive roots of community politics. The experiences of gay undergraduate men have been illuminated in segmented ways in scholarly literature to date. This narrative inquiry develops and advances those efforts by exploring how gay undergraduate men construct, experience, and make meaning of their gender as a population ascribing to both liberationist and assimilationist viewpoints. Data for this qualitative study were collected at one public, four-year research university in the southeastern United States in the fall 2015 semester using recorded personal interviews with eleven men. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed for data analysis. The men included in the study represent a broad range of personal identity backgrounds, including a variety of college majors and years of experience in university study. Self-authorship and queer theoretical frames were used to analyze participants’ gender interpretations. Findings suggest men do not understand gender in isolation, but in tandem with intersections of familial ethnic and cultural backgrounds, social class status, and involvement on campus. Four major themes of experience that effect self-authorship of gender evolved from narrative analyses: masking, agency, costs, and policing. Implications for higher education professionals, including faculty, staff, and administrators, are discussed. Opportunities for further research in navigating lived experiences of marginalized campus subpopulations are also suggested and explored.

"Why did George Eliot live and Currer Bell die?" Victorian pseudonymity is seldom treated to any critical scrutiny - the only sustained interest has been in reading masculine pseudonyms as masks for "disreputable femininity," signs of the woman writer's "anxiety of authorship." This thesis proposes that pseudonymity is not a capitulation to gender ideology, but that a nom de plume is an exaggerated version of any authorial signature - the abstraction (or Othering) of a self into text which occurs in the production of "real" authors as well as fictional characters. After an introductory chapter presenting the theoretical issues of selfhood and authorship, I go on to discuss milieu - the contexts which produced Bronte and Eliot - including a brief history of pseudonymous novelists and the Victorian publishing and reviewing culture. The third and fourth chapters deal with pseudonymity as heccéité, offering "biographies" of the authorial personas "Currer Bell" and "George Eliot" rather than the women who created them, thus demonstrating the problems of biography and the relative, multiple status of identity. The three following chapters explore the concerns of pseudonymity through a reading of the novels: I treat Jane Eyre, Villette, and even Shirley as "autobiographical" in order to address the construction of self and narrative; I examine how Eliot's realist fictions (notably Scenes of Clerical Life, Romola, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda) trouble the "reality"/"fiction" binary; and finally I read Bronte specifically for her engagement with "dress," using queer theories of performativity with Victorian theories of clothing and conduct to question "readability" itself. My final chapter is concerned with agencement (adjustment) and "mythmaking": the posthumous biographical and critical practices surrounding these two writers reveal that an author's "name," secured through literary reputation, is not static or inevitable, but the result of constant process and revision.

The purpose and problem of this thesis is to formulate a theory on screenplay aesthetics with Eisenstein's montage as the mother theory providing the aesthetic nourishment for the proposed concept of imaging. The theory of screenplay imaging proposes that the screenplay is a montage of sub-narratives occurring in the sensual, emotional, and intellectual dimensions and expressing the grand narrative theme. It further suggests that the interaction between the screenplay and the reader-interpreter should yield a prolificity of interpretation with a unified meaning. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter I, Introduction, lays the background for subsequent arguments. Chapter II, The Principles of Montage, discusses Eisenstein's theory. Chapter III, The Theory of Imaging, explains imaging and develops Gonzalez's Model of Imaging. Chapter IV, The Principles of Sensual, Emotional, and Intellectual Imaging, explains the three dimensions with examples. Chapter V, Conclusion and Recommendation, suggests improvements and applications of the theory.

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day activities, it is apparent that Perkins was guided by a unique editorial double vision—the propensity to appreciate the aesthetic experience while retaining the critical detachment necessary to appraise a literary work from a commercial standpoint—when solving the paradoxical dilemmas inherent in modern publishing.

This project is about giving in to the impulse of ideas. My mind is a little messy and cluttered, swirling with bits of stimuli. The spark of an idea happens when the bits collide. I prefer not to initiate or control the process so much as keep it fed and active. Through graphic design, I bear witness to these ideas, giving them form as a series of visible, tangible objects. Viewed comprehensively, the work establishes an ongoing chronicle of my creative life and mind.

This thesis will examine the representation, consequence and transformation of the idea of authorship in the work of James Joyce and suggest a way of re-addressing the contentious question of authorship. While postmodern criticism has emphasised the “revolutionary” cultural and political ramifications of Joyce’s response and the ways that his work has helped to deconstruct this question for modernity and postmodernity, this thesis will trace the ideas and ideologies, individuals and characters, historical, cultural and biographical circumstances that contributed to both the prominence and the hermeneutical consequence of the question of authorship in Joyce’s work. Highlighting Joyce’s awareness of and fascination with the multivalency of a question shaped by theological, historical, political, philosophical, philological, epistemological, methodological and hermeneutical ideas as well as literary representations, it will examine Joyce’s reformulation and response to this question through four pervasive models of authorship in his work: critic, philosopher, bard and theologian. While each chapter will make a distinction between these models in order to analyse their characteristics and significance, as a way of tracing not only the evolution of these models but also the complex network of interrelation that is established between these distinctive but also intertwining ideas of authorship, the thesis will be structured historically, biographically and “ergographically” (in Barthes’ definition of an ‘ergography’) as well as thematically. As a way of approaching the ideologically overdetermined concept of authorship, but also avoiding another postmodern “renaming” of this concept, these models will be proffered in order to examine the construction, fabrication and invention as well as the deconstruction of the idea of authorship and the representation of the role of the author in fiction, culture, society and history in the work of Joyce. The “drama” of authorship will be interpreted in terms of Joyce’s fictional and hermeneutic dramatisation of the role and idea of the author, but also in terms of the consequence of Joyce’s interest in and early idealisation of the genre of drama. This thesis will finally suggest that Joyce’s “failure” to become a dramatist and engagement with philosophical analyses of this genre contributed significantly to his deconstruction, reconstruction and dramatisation of the role and “exagmination” of the author. The thesis as a whole will delineate how each of these four models gradually becomes more distinctive but simultaneously also inextricable from a variegated template that is only methodologically divided into four parts; the four exegetes in Finnegans Wake inconspicuously multiply. The first three chapters will follow the attempt outlined in Joyce’s early draft of the Portrait ‘to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts’- the growing self-consciousness of the artist’s understanding of his role(s) as an artist and of the idea(s) of authorship. In the last two chapters that will look at Ulysses and Finnegans Wake these four models will be more clearly differentiated although the growing theatricality in their portrayal and widening nexus of relations will complicate and indeed undermine the idea of a “model”.

There has been a considerable amount of research done on questions of authorship over the past century or so, and the interest in the subject is still going strong today. This essay takes as its point of departure two seminal poststructuralist essays on authorship—Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”—as these texts have had a significant impact on the discourse. It examines how scholars like Seán Burke and Jane Gallop have explained this anti-authorial tendency and extended the connection between authors and death, and how their findings relate to a performative conception of authorship. The study will take as its central critical approach the study of authorship as cultural performance as formulated by Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor, and Sonja Longolius. It will utilize this approach to analyze four contemporary American novels—James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), Ron Currie Jr.’s Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (2013), and J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013)—and the different ways in which these novels problematize notions of authorial self-invention. The focus of the analysis will be on the author-reader relationship, moments of recognition, and developments in writing technology. These issues have been selected for their connection to current conceptions of the creation of author personae, which can in turn be viewed as reflecting performance as it takes place in daily life and therefore give indications as to the cultural climate in which the novels were produced. Ultimately, the aim is to have illustrated how these novels present the reader with textually traced author personae that are highly aware of their own performances. In addition, it is suggested that authors are dependent on their readers to recognize these personae for them to become felicitously legitimized.