Ernest J. Gaines' work articulates the social, political, and economic position of society's most vulnerable citizens: the poor, voiceless, disenfranchised, and invisible. From his youthful days on the plantation to his adult years in California and to his eventual return to the Point Coupee Plantation, his affection for the land has not diminished. My examination of Bloodline (1968), Gaines' only collection of short stories, In My Father's House (1978), and A Lesson Before Dying (1993) will show how the central themes of his fiction have remained consistent throughout the years and how his sense of place has not wavered. Each work depicts the common strivings of the disenfranchised, the control of subservient labor by the majority class, and the folk culture that helps foster leadership and generate change. As Gaines writes openly and passionately about the common people of his childhood, the most critical aspect of each work in this study is the impact of racism upon black men -- especially husbands and fathers -- and the overall effect it has on the black family. Additional to this study is a personal interview conducted with Gaines at his residence in Oscar, Louisiana, on May 31, 2006. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2008. / October 9, 2008. / Southern Landscape, Vernacular, Dialogue, African Americans, Southern Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Bruce Bickley, Professor Directing Dissertation; Susan N. Wood, Outside Committee Member; Stanley E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Anne E. Rowe, Committee Member.

The Tears of a Clown questions the pervasive narrative that men have begun only recently to realize the limitations society places on them as men. Scholars of masculinity contend men now are starting to see masculinity as an unattainable ideal that restricts, oppresses, and frustrates them. This questionable claim functions as a rhetorical move to create simultaneously a space for male voices in feminist discourse and to validate masculinity studies as a field of inquiry, which seemingly needs no legitimization when one considers the popularity of gender studies in the academy and the value such work can bring to our understanding of politics, history, culture, and society. My study uses an analysis of comic texts to glean information about the fluctuating ideological script of postwar American masculinities. My contention is that the comic--comedy, humor, and laughter--functions as a viable way for men to redirect and sublimate the fear, anxiety, and anger they experience as men. Since many associate this strategy for dealing with emotion as "kidding around," few people, even within the academy, take humor and laughter seriously. Therefore, it does not betray masculinity's requirement that men remain stoic and instead serves a vital social function. By close reading comic texts, I reveal the diverse ways male protagonists employ this strategy, and in the process, I reveal the importance of the comic in understanding the relationship between the male subject and society. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / April 30, 2012. / comedy, film, humor, laughter, literature, masculinity / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, University Representative; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member; David Ikard, Committee Member; David Ikard, Committee Member.

Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Sherley Anne Williams, and Gayle Jones are contemporary African American women novelists who are keenly aware of and genuinely concerned with Black women and their ability to define themselves. The authors know that Black women live very complex lives and that Black women have been historically removed from that process. Subsequently, their texts enlighten readers about Black women's desire for their own space, a place of refuge fled to by Black women in order to combat the social politics that lead to oppression. Their texts depict and speak to a relatively broad range of Black women's forms of objectification. Sula, Praisesong for the Widow, Dessa Rose, and Corregidora share similar concerns: How does the Black woman respond to an oppressive and patriarchal society? What anti-patriarchal practices are used to combat this oppression? What are some of the specific agents used by Black women implemented to maintain a defined Space? Is obvious accessibility the only reason folklore and vernacular speech are used as a means of self-definition? While many critics and scholars have identified the importance of Black women escaping oppression and objectification, what remains is a more in-depth analysis of the methods involved as the Black women work to define themselves in their own sovereign Space. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2012. / March 19, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Maxine Montgomery, Professor Directing Dissertation; Kathleen Erndl, University Representative; David Johnson, Committee Member; Dennis Moore, Committee Member.

This fantastical novel follows the first-person narrative of Molly, a girl living in a near-empty Quaker commune in Calumet City, IL, whose exploits lead her to the housing projects of Chicago during the summer of the (fictional) 1997 Chicago World"s Fair. One of my aims with this novel is to reconcile the kind of grand, maximalist novels of the nineteenth century with the stripped-down but open-throated first-person voice found in the work of contemporary writers like Mark Richard and Yannick Murphy. While the novel itself is outside the bounds of realism, the narrator"s voice originates in the realist tradition, influenced by minimalist writers like Carver, and Hemingway before him, whose crisp, staccato rhythms I"ve attempted to adapt according to my own maximalist narrative agenda. My intention, then, is to take a narrative voice employed primarily in minimalist fiction and attach it to something much more mythic and strange. The result, I hope, is a hybrid novel that appeals simultaneously to readers of both postmodern and mainstream literary fiction. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2011. / March 28, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Julianna Baggott, Professor Directing Dissertation; John Corrigan, University Representative; Diane Roberts, Committee Member; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member.

This project seeks to complicate the ahistorical and binary-oriented treatment of multimodality in contemporary scholarship. I pose the questions: how does multimodality function within the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, an illuminated manuscript from the eleventh century, and what enlarged picture of literacy might we gain from such an examination? The answer, my analysis uncovers, is twofold: 1) in the Hexateuch, we see that modes cannot be separated; and 2) the blurring of the semiotic boundaries between modes also blurs the boundary between the Hexateuch and its audience, constituting an embodied literacy. From this analysis, I offer that we nuance our understanding of multimodality from a recent phenomenon to the interplay of interpenetrating literacy tools that are always already working together in any composition. In so doing, we open ourselves up to a more capacious and historical understanding of multimodality and of literacy. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 11, 2012. / frame, imageword, Kress, multimodality / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Thesis; Elaine Treharne, Committee Member; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member.

This is a collection of eleven short stories submitted as a thesis project to Florida State University in spring, 2012. The stories, though varied, largely take place in the Caribbean (be the islands real or imagined composites of many islands), though "Follow" takes place in America and "The Princess Nemona Takes a Walk" is set both on a mysterious submersible and on the bottom of the ocean floor in an ocean that may or may not exist on Earth. The idea of parallel worlds or universes is explored in many of the stories, most prominently in the final story, "Governorship," a historical piece that brings up the question of how the idea of these parallel worlds might affect readings of history. The collection is also a stylistic exploration in many ways, as certain stories, like "Viola and the Passing of the Ghost Train" (written almost entirely in one sentence) are stylistically significantly different others, like "Hyper Manicou plus Elliot Versus Destroyer of Universes." These stories examine, often indirectly, what, if any, meaning we can extract from life after having learnt, through centuries, that we are tinier and less remarkable in the cosmic scheme of things than we could have ever imagined. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2012. / March 15, 2012. / Caribbean, Dominica, fiction, magical realism, parallel universes, stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Julianna Baggott, Professor Directing Thesis; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; Diane Roberts, Committee Member.

The Kindness of Strangers, takes place in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and is composed of three books, each the narrative of one day, one January 10th -- date of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake -- in the lives of its characters. I examine the notions of human cruelty and of `the other' in existentialist terms. / A Thesis submitted to the College of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Summer Semester, 2012. / April 30, 2012. / English, fiction, novel / Includes bibliographical references. / Diane Roberts, Professor Directing Thesis; David Kirby, Committee Member; Virgil Suarez, Committee Member.

This dissertation develops notes towards a descriptive model of literate practice by reporting on a study of student work collected from a course on 21st Century writing and editing and analyzed using a combination of coding and deep textual analysis, both informed by a social semiotic theory of multimodality. The research questions ask how students compose across different modes and media, how students make specific rhetorical choices in various modes and media, and how student composing and their rhetorical choices might contribute to a descriptive model of student literacy as practiced in both print and digital environments. This inquiry into student composing for print and digital environments--provides the field with one of its first systematic studies of 21st Century composing in an upper-level undergraduate context. In addition, by linking several methods, this dissertation allows a chance to see both broad patterns across a range of students as well as a close-up view of particular cases. Bringing together coding and case studies with surveys and student texts, the dissertation builds towards a descriptive model of literate practice. The study resulted in four claims about students' use of writing, image, audio, and layout. First, students often used writing and image in their compositions, and they often used them together. Second, students rarely used audio; when they did, however, it played a substantial and sophisticated role in their texts. Third, students used layout to orchestrate relationships of orientation between modes, between textual levels, and between texts and viewer. Fourth, platform has encouraged the usage of certain modes and modal ensembles in student texts, while discouraging or disallowing others. Additionally, the study resulted in six claims about student literate practice in print and digital environments. Student literate practice was multimodal and multimedia: as a group and as individuals, students used an impressive suite of meaning-making modes in their texts, and they designed and delivered those texts in an array of different media. Student literate practice was complex, if uneven: although students demonstrated surprising facility and variety in composing with different modes and media, they were not always able to create texts with complex relationships between those elements. Additionally, students were only sometimes able to articulate their intentionality with regard to choices that affected their composing. Student literate practice was patterned, but not determined, by conditional constraints such assignments, genres, specific platforms, and software programs. Whether assigned or chosen by the student, these constraints had a non-deterministic influence on student composing. Student literate practice was contingent upon a specific set of circumstances for its fluent practice. This point may seem somewhat self-evident; however, the composing that students did in these courses weaves together not only their experiences within educational instructions, but also their experiences outside them. Student literate practice was material, involving specific attention to the rhetorical, aesthetic, and physical dimensions of composition. Though generalizable across the entire set of participants in the study, several students demonstrated this particular characteristic of student composing. Student literate practice was also layered and embedded: student composing was an iterative and remixable practice that created meaning as it purposed and repurposed, worked and reworked texts. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 13, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Wayne Wiegand, University Representative; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Michael Neal, Committee Member.

HIGH TEST: A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES features five linked stories of lives in flux in the fast-changing landscape of contemporary China. From migrant workers in coastal factory towns to a nouveau-riche millionaire immigrating to the West, this collection presents a mosaic portrait of characters teetering in the wake of China's sweeping economic and social transformations of the past three decades. Through closely-focused first-person points of view and crisis-inducing circumstances that fragment the individual identity, these characters negotiate the understood boundaries of culture, gender, and class. Their grappling with the changing rules of familial relations, the complications of money, the expectations of gender, and the ever-shifting social definitions converge to make this collection a portrayal of the universal search for individual identity and equilibrium. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2012. / October 29, 2012. / China, Fiction, Short stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Dissertation; Feng Lan, University Representative; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Daniel Vitkus, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the ways in which the science of insanity informs the creation of the American citizen during the years of the early Republic. By utilizing the medical texts of "America's first psychiatrist" Benjamin Rush, as a way of interpreting early American literature, I discern that the uses of insanity factor into some of the key discourses about the creation and function of citizenship in the decades just proceeding the American Revolution. Recent scholarly trends in early American literature have started to understand how disease, especially small-pox and yellow fever, uncover the strategies at work in transforming individuals into national citizens. In the late-eighteenth century, insanity is conceived as a disease capable of spreading throughout a geographic space. By examining the public's reaction to this "epidemic of the mind," I reveal that the appearance of insanity in texts by Crèvecoeur, William Hill Brown, Charles Brockden Brown, and Leonora Sansay gesture towards the precarious position of former loyalists, women, and slaves during the late eighteenth century. In each chapter I argue that the language of madness and the discourse on citizenship mirror each other, with both offering a bleak assessment of post-Revolution America. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / April 19, 2012. / citizenship, insanity, madness, revolution / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis Moore, Professor Directing Dissertation; Edward Gray, University Representative; Cristobal Silva, Committee Member; Maxine Montgomery, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.