This dissertation investigates several topics in the morphology, syntax and semantics of the Nez Perce verb and verbal clause. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the morphological segmentation of the Nez Perce verb and on the semantic description of the verb and clause. Chapter 1 provides a grammar sketch. Chapter 2 discusses the morphology, syntax and semantics of verbal suffix complexes for tense, space, aspect and modality. Chapter 3 investigates the modal suffix o'qa, which is variously translated can, could (have), would (have), should, may, and must, and used to make circumstantial, deontic and counterfactual claims. I argue that this suffix has only a non-epistemic possibility meaning, and that apparent necessity meanings are artifacts of translation. Chapter 4 investigates the future suffix u', generally translated will. Based on evidence from truth-value judgment tasks, conjunctions of u' sentences describing incompatible states of affairs, and negation, I argue that u' sentences have non-modal truth conditions. I also discuss challenges to this analysis from free choice licensing and from certain acceptable conjunctions of incompatible u' sentences. The second part of the dissertation explores the syntax of the verb and clause as revealed by the system of case-marking. Nez Perce case follows a tripartite pattern, with no case on intransitive subjects, and both ergative and objective cases in transitive clauses. Transitive clauses may alternatively surface with no case, however. I show that caseless transitive clauses in Nez Perce come in two syntactically and semantically distinguished varieties. In one variety, the subject binds a possessor phrase within the object. Chapter 6 takes up this construction together with possessor raising, which I analyze as involving movement to a &thetas;-position. I argue that the absence of case under possessor-binding reflects an anaphor agreement effect. In the other variety of caseless clause, the object is a weak indefinite. Chapter 7 concludes that such objects are not full DPs. In chapter 8, I propose a morphological theory of case-marking which captures the cased/caseless distinction for transitive clauses. Both ergative and objective cases are analyzed as morphological results of the syntactic system of agreement.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how and why Toni Morrison employs biblical allusion, biblical names and entire books of the Bible both directly and ironically in order to emphasize the importance of ancestry and community in the lives of African-Americans. Morrison begins in Sula emphasizing the idea that communities that are not cohesive cannot survive. She challenges her readers to question how The Bottom community could have thrived if the people thought of it as more than just a place, but as a group of neighbors who help each other to live and grow. She continues in Song of Solomon with the emphasis not only on community but also on ancestry as identity. When Jake agrees to give up his name, he prevents his descendants from knowing or understanding from where they came. In not knowing their past, they are empty. She culminates her argument in Beloved where she fully emphasizes both community and ancestry with the incarnation of Beloved as the community of all slaves that have gone before. All three novels are heavily laden with biblical allusion that culminate in Morrison’s challenge for all not to forget and to let their history lead to a reclamation of ancestry and community.

This study explores humor, irony, and satire in the wake of the September 11th attacks, and in relation to nationalist, conservative, and racialized ideologies in the United States. Employing a case study approach, the dissertation analyzes a range of media texts spanning the decade following 9/11, including: political sketches from Saturday Night Live’s 2001-02 season; an episode of South Park that aired on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that ran in the Danish Jyllands-Posten in 2005; Stephen Colbert’s keynote address at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2006; the satirical cover of a 2008 issue of the New Yorker magazine (Barry Blitt’s “The Politics of Fear”); and, finally, Jon Stewart’s response on The Daily Show to Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011. These humorous, ironic, and satirical media texts at times challenged, and at others underscored, dominant discourses around September 11th and the Bush Administration’s response. In mapping these texts and their engagement with different sources of power, the dissertation illuminates how ambivalently they do so, as well as the extent to which the meaning of comedic texts are particularly dependent on their contexts. The study’s primary orientation is cultural studies, but it also borrows from rhetorical analysis and critical race theory in its larger discussion of the potentials and shortcomings of such texts as tools of oppositional politics. The questions and goals of the dissertation are both theoretical and political, as it addresses the significance of such comedic texts not only as sources of entertainment and catharsis, but also as essential components in political discourse and cultural engagement. At the heart of the project are questions and issues related to hegemony, subversion, corporate media, stable and unstable irony, discursive communities, authorial intention, context, ironic (or hipster) racism, and ideological blind spots. Moving beyond simple binaries—“getting” or “not getting” irony, humor, or satire—this study argues that humor texts are complex ideological amalgams that contest and solidify power relations in rich, and, at times, contradictory ways.

Thisiinvestigation focuses on the decision making relative to plants by Native Americans on one of the oldest and most continuously occupied reservations in the United States, the Mashantucket Pequot Nation. Within an agency framework, I explore the directions in which decision making about plants were changing from 1675-1800 A.D. I evaluate plant macroremains, specifically progagules (seeds), recovered from ten archaeological sites and the historical record from the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, located in southeastern Connecticut. I demonstrate how decision making about plants related to food and medicinal practices during the Colonial Period were characterized by heterarchical choices that allowed the Mashantucket Pequot to retain their sense of economic and cultural autonomy from their colonizers. This type of problem-directed agency analysis will aid in placing Indigenous individuals and communities into the contexts of colonization as more active participants in their own past, and as long-term stewards of the environment. More specifically, this dissertation shows that even as small a space as the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation is a rich testimony to the 11,000-year history, and continues to provide important information about how households and communities (re)conceptualize their socio-natural worlds under the most severe constraints.

Punishment and the proper means of rehabilitating and reforming criminals stand at the forefront of public concern in American society. This dissertation examines the historical precedents of the modern debate over imprisonment by considering power, work, and the manner in which they were negotiated within the world of the nineteenth-century reform institution. The primary case study derives from historical archaeological investigations of Rhode Island's first State Prison in Providence. Constructed in 1838, the prison was enlarged and rebuilt in several phases before its abandonment in 1877 and its demolition in 1893. Other case studies include the Smithfield (Rhode Island) Town Farm and Asylum (1834–1870), established to meet the local need for poor relief, and the various orphanages, asylums, and juvenile reform structures at the State Farm in Howard, Rhode Island. Archaeological and architectural analyses of these complexes address different aspects of the questions raised in this dissertation about the relationship between landscape, labor, and power in the milieu of industrial capitalism.

Coming Into Clover traces the evolution of cinematic representations of Ireland and the Irish in early American cinema. From the birth of the medium in 1895 until the full emergence of the so-called classical cinema in 1917, these images underwent a fascinating evolution with the crude "stage Irish" stereotypes of Paddy and Bridget steadily giving way to a more positive and diverse set of representations beginning in the early- to mid-teens. The reasons for this transformation are many, but can be traced to two seemingly separate yet inter-dependent factors. Firstly, the social and economic forces that gave rise to the classical mode of production demanded an overall gentrification of the form and content of American cinema. Secondly, an increasingly powerful and influential class of Irish-Americans took an active role in transforming the nativist perceptions that for so long had worked to ostracize them from mainstream society. The result was the emergence of set of visual and narrative tropes that would define Hollywood's representation of the Irish for next three decades.

This dissertation examines how tourists used photography during a period when economic prosperity and guaranteed vacation time meant increasing numbers of Americans gained the ability to travel for vacation; cameras and film became less expensive and travel photography more ubiquitous; and photographs produced by tourists helped shape the visual imaginary of the West. Tourists used the activity of photographing to be engaged in their vacations and their photographs represent authentic interactions among traveling companions. Typically, cultural critics view tourists as passive consumers who unthinkingly follow guidebooks' prescriptions and whose photographic practices prevent them from having authentic vacation experiences. While photographs in guidebooks, travel magazines, and other advice literature showed potential tourists what they should capture on film, tourists did not strictly follow that advice. Instead, tourists creatively engaged with photography to enhance their vacation experiences. My examination of tourist photographs reveals that tourists made choices about their photographic subjects, even as they also photographed iconic western scenes. Vacationers shot a variety of subjects, many of which are unexpected. As they traveled through the West, tourists used their cameras to connect with their companions, to amuse and entertain themselves and to create vacation stories to share with family and friends. My argument restores agency to tourist subjects by engaging concretely with their photographs. Because I emphasize tourist photographs, reading them as aesthetic constructions that enact the processes of creating meaning and identity, my project intervenes to quarrel with scholars and cultural critics who have often viewed tourists and the activity, aesthetics, and meaning of their photographs as inauthentic, vacuous and overly mediated.

In this dissertation, I first briefly examine the history of technology as it impacts on literacy practices, and especially the history of resistance to technological developments in the humanities. In so doing, I also briefly examine some of the possible ideological underpinnings of this resistance, including looking at some of the arguments proposed to counter it. More specifically, I consider how literacy practices, pedagogical practices, and assessment and gatekeeping practices in the field of composition studies impact on and are impacted by the intersection of computer technologies and our field. Finally, I offer some suggestions for ways in which our pedagogical practices may need to be reconsidered in light of changes in how we communicate. In particular, I propose guidelines for writing teachers to help negotiate the transitional period between traditional and neo-traditional forms, bridging the gaps between existing standards for producing print documents and as yet undetermined standards required by new forms. That is, I present guidelines that I hope, rather than stifle change, can help guide authors in determining which existing standards make sense for new new forms, and which need to be reconsidered, thereby providing the flexibility necessary to cope with change. Because it is imperative that we consider the effect of our teaching of writing and reading on the further development of these technologies, as well as the effect of further development of these technologies on our teaching and study of writing and reading, I also suggest ways we may need to rethink the academy, including the position of the composition classroom itself.

In this dissertation, the use of apocalypse and elegy in contemporary American literature has been explored in an attempt to draw some conclusions about America's complex twenty-first century consciousness. I have selected the millennial novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde), Don DeLillo (Underworld), and Philip Roth (American Pastoral), since all three, written at the century's end, are at once apocalyptic and elegiac in tone, and comprise a useful trilogy tor giving voice to the fracturedness of the American experience. My analysis of the texts traces apocalyptic moments in the novels -- moments of destruction and rebirth, endings, new beginnings, and great revelations -- against some of the most turbulent and often despairing twentieth-century events, in an attempt to show the connection between public and private history. While contemporary apocalypse diners from its biblical origins, the desire for regeneration and renewal persists despite its necessary deferment -- and, even, failure. Yet the apocalyptic impulse persists, and it is this determined future-looking and repeated self-reinvention that I discuss. In terms of the elegy, I argue that the overwhelming sense of loss and mourning that permeates the novels is reflective of a much larger national sense of disillusionment and disappointment at the failure of the American Dream and the dissolution of the America conceived of in the imagination of its first European settlers. While the traditional elegy moves towards consolation, the contemporary elegy often denies the mourner such release from grief. Consequently, in the contemporary novels discussed, consolation is to be found elsewhere. Indeed, I conclude that despite the melancholia of novels that deal so intensely with death, suffering, and tragedy, the act of writing an apocalyptic novel -- of presenting an image of the apocalypse, even if not an apocalypse that gives way to rebirth -- is itself an act of hope, and a call for change.

Few scholars have attempted to conduct a close examination of Whitman's relationship to his publishers in the context of Leaves of Grass. In their "Typographic Yawp: Leaves of Grass , 1855--1992," Megan and Paul Benton present a minimal, but interesting examination of the typographic story of Leaves, but they ignore three of the editions and deal with author-publisher relations only superficially. Other articles examine individual editions of Leaves of Grass, but none really explore what Whitman's complicated relationships with the publishers of his time tell us about the conditions for his work and for authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America. Most studies tend to focus on Whitman's poetry, rather than on issues associated with his publication history. In his Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass, for example, Michael Moon carefully examines various editions, but chooses to concentrate on Whitman's poetic revisions and program, rather than discussing aspects related to the publication story behind Leaves of Grass. This study will try to address this gap in Whitman scholarship and, in so doing, try to answer the following questions: Were Whitman's ambitions for his Leaves of Grass fulfilled? Did he ever reach his intended audience?