Few world cities can claim to have had as much of an impact on American literature as the Moroccan city of Tangier. The writers who resided in or passed through the city in the 1950s and the works of literature produced there have re-charted the course of American letters. Tangier's status as an international city, its sizable Arab population, and its location situated among the violence of Morocco's bid for independence all undoubtedly helped to inspire the radical reinvention of literature undertaken by its American literary residents. The works of the period reveal men and women struggling to come to terms with who they are, what writing is, and what their American identity means to them. One of the earliest and most prominent of the American expatriates in Tangier, Paul Bowles, embarked on a quest to rid himself of American national and cultural identity by adopting the transnational identity of the Tangerino. Like Bowles, his characters don't try to become Moroccan citizens outright or wholly adopt Tanjawi culture; instead, they attempt to escape their American national identity by becoming residents of the international zone and embracing liminal Tangerino identities, products of both American and Moroccan nationalities and incorporating cultural aspects from each. William S. Burroughs has said in interviews and letters that he made the decision to live in Tangier after reading Bowles' Let It Come Down. With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1958, he expressed both his admiration for the transformative potential of revolutionary violence and his dismay that this potential went unrealized in Morocco. Jane Bowles and Brion Gysin both explore differing ways in which to "go native" and, ultimately, whether such an endeavor pays off in the end. Both her short work and his novel, The Process, each in some way reflects, antagonizes or responds to the influence of the international zone and the notion that Tangier represents (or potentially represents) a place set apart from the American influence. Finally, Alfred Chester and John Hopkins both wrote memoirs in Morocco during the 1960s and 1970s. Their reports reveal a concerted effort to distance themselves from the old style colonialism of the previous generation of expatriates as well as well as their ultimate inability to do so. / 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 25, 2012. / Colonialism, Maghreb, Morocco, Orientalism, Post-war, Tangier / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Alec Hargreaves, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.

This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of a living learning community at a large public university in the Southeastern United States. The research was conducted over a four-month period within a program called the Social Justice Living Learning Community (SJLLC), which is sponsored by the Center for Leadership and Civic Education at this institution. The purpose of the study was to gain insight into the relationship between communal and individual beliefs as each is represented through discourse within a community. The study focused on a first-year public speaking course devoted to the values and purpose of the SJLLC. I used ethnographic observation/notes, videotapes of class sessions, recorded interviews that I conducted with leaders and members of the SJLLC, interview data gathered by the Center for Leadership and Civic Education about members' experiences, and drafts of students' speeches to explore this topic. The dissertation focused on the research questions: What is the relationship between a community's core values/beliefs and individual members' textual performances? How do communal values/beliefs constrain and/or enable individual members' production of discourse? My findings demonstrate that communal and individual beliefs interface with one another through ongoing textual performances--texts operating at their highest level of significance--within the SJLLC. Communal beliefs are established through shared communal texts that I classify into three categories: linguistic textual performances, visual textual performances, and participatory textual performances. Linguistic textual performances communicate the SJLLC's belief system, visual textual performances connect students with examples of the belief system through visual media, and participatory textual performances engage students with the belief system through embodied action. The over-arching theme of the community's belief system is a shared belief in positive social change based on A Social Change Model for Leadership Development, Guidebook, Version III. The basic premise of leadership according to the guidebook is that leaders effect positive social change, that positive social change requires collective action, and that a person does not have to hold a "formal position of leadership" to effect such change (16-17). In classroom practices--and in composing their speeches--members of the SJLLC interpret and use this common belief in positive social change for a variety of purposes and in a variety of ways. They re-invent the communal belief and find ways to engage it in connection with their personal beliefs, demonstrating that communal beliefs do enable and engage personal beliefs rather than constricting or silencing them. The study also reveals the reality of tensions that exist between communal and personal beliefs, demonstrating a need for educators to be aware of the challenges students face when negotiating personal beliefs within classroom, professional, and/or societal discourses. Overall, the study demonstrates a need for college educators to develop teaching strategies that allow students to explore the interface of communal and personal beliefs in their lives and as they write in college. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2011. / October 10, 2011. / belief, community, discourse, ideology, performance, social change / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Andy Opel, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Elaine Treharne, Committee Member.

This dissertation presents a novel that focuses on an immigrant family that struggles to understand the tragic death of one of their own. Thirty years ago, ten-year-old Mina Zand, the youngest child of Iranian immigrant, died, presumably while attempting to climb a tall rock in a secluded park near her home. Thirty years later Mina's older sister, Keyana, now a scholar of American silent film, returns home after the death of her father and struggles to understand what happened the day her sister died. The novel replays how the actions of each family member indirectly contributed to the child's death. While the family members, collectively and individually, wrestle with the guilt of their unintentional contribution to the death of their youngest child, the novel reveals how Mina's death is actually connected to the murder of elderly widow who once starred in silent films. Part murder mystery, part exploration of nationality and ethnicity, Ways to Kill Babies is a novel that attempts to shadow the noir literature of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith, while threading together multi-layered narratives in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Margaret Atwood. / 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 22, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Juan Carlos Galeano, University Representative; Anne Coldiron, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

This dissertation resists the tendency to focus on metropolitan patterns of consumption of major export goods like sugar and tea in order to account for the laboring bodies producing these colonial commodities, which scholars such as Alan Bewell and Charlotte Sussman ignore in their discussion on the cultural and political discourse surrounding colonialism and eighteenth-century diet. The central premise of my dissertation revolves around creole food consumption and production. Creole, a geocultural designation, refers to a fusion of people, foods, and cultures in the Atlantic rim. In the eighteenth century, colonialism functioned as a burgeoning modern system, one where both the enslaved and colonists forged new identities and foodways. In pointing out the transatlantic relationship between foodways, this dissertation broadens the "Caribbean cultural paradigm," to borrow Maureen Warner-Lewis's phrasing, to include Africa, which is often omitted. In this project, I achieve two aims. First, by reading literary texts alongside other genres such as travel narratives, captivity narratives, medical documents, and cookbooks, I uncover literary tropes embedded in archival documents such as the use of sentimentality in eighteenth-century medical writings and travelogues. Secondly, my project, drawing on Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic and notions of "rootlessness," reassesses the colonial past from a new angle--one of creation--thereby generating new questions of what it meant to consume a creole diet, how colonial labor and diet impacted eighteenth-century identities and markets, and how racialized dietary myths were created. In so doing, I do not ignore colonialism's violence but demonstrate that creative culinary acts were one response to this violence, thereby countering the hegemonic and single story of consumption and production that often arises out of colonial stereotypes and one-sided perceptions of labor and diet. Diet as an analytical tool calls for a re-evaluation of spatial, temporal, and geopolitical discourses. Engaging Leonard Tennenhouse's model of homeland as an unobtainable "geopolitical site" for displaced British American subjects, I extend the discussion to the creole subjects of the West Indies and explore how the literature of the Americas reveals an integration and slow shift in cultural perception through the culinary adaptations required in these new environments. The simultaneous need for the enslaved and Creoles to preserve "Old World" cultural practices both as a means to survive physically (e.g., depending on ackee for food) and culturally (e.g., using dance and drums in order to communicate) and to adapt to a new environment results in the creation of a "New World" geopolitical space within the Americas. Moreover, my dissertation offers critics a way to historicize the current global food crisis by examining the emergence of local food economies and dietary practices in the context of transatlantic markets and imperial violence. / 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 10, 2012. / cookery, dietary consumption, Enlightenment, postcolonial theory, subsistence agriculture, transatlantic / Includes bibliographical references. / Candace Ward, Professor Directing Dissertation; Martin Munro, University Representative; Meegan Kennedy Hanson, Committee Member; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member; Cristobal Silva, Committee Member.

A collection of stories, in progress, about women seeking identity, control, and connection--especially with other women. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Summer Semester, 2012. / April 23, 2012. / Florida, Key West, Kuwait, Miami, Pole Dance, snake house / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Diane Roberts, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

A collection of short stories detailing backpackers in foreign countries, Dominican Americans coming to terms with their identity both here and abroad, and the quintessential American return to home. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 20, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Diane K. Roberts, Committee Member.

Glorybower is a collection of poems that explores the complex process of coming to live in a space--of uncovering its history, of negotiating the extent to which you can, or even should, make your own mark on it. As such, its poems chronicle the endemic and imported trappings of place (domestic, cultural and natural) and also nod to the pervasive echo of past spaces and lives. The intended result is an intimate portrait of life in rural North Florida that is nevertheless resonant with a larger common--though not static--mythos. / 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 30, 2012. / Florida, poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / James H. Kimbrell, Professor Directing Thesis; David K. Kirby, Committee Member; Andrew D. Epstein, Committee Member.

A quixotic scholar eating peanut butter on a spoon and translating Machaut's poetry is interrupted by a rumination on desire for love lost. This moment from "Fugue for Sexual Tension, Androgeny, and Wingmen in A Minor" is perhaps exemplary of the poems in False Idol Flash Mob: they depict a speaker trying to reconcile a world in which boundaries between sacredness and sacrilege, sexuality and purity, and myth and reality are never obvious or lucid. The result is a man suffering anxiety from trying to construct identity in chaos' midst, a situation comical, frustrating, and latent with yearning. The title of this manuscript is derived from the large cast of characters and concepts that the speaker makes an idol of in attempts to find solace. From Sufjan Stevens to Saint Lucy to Satan to ex-girlfriends, these characters flood the speaker's consciousness and leave just as quickly, and the speaker is abandoned, feeling empty and dirty as the streets of New Orleans the morning after a parade. The development in many of these poems mimics J.S. Bach's use of fugue. The Harvard Dictionary of Music describes a fugue as, "Imitative counterpoint, in which the theme is [..] tonally established, continuously expanded, opposed, and reestablished" (336). For example, the poem "Fugue for Alligators, Anton Webern, and Disorder in Bb Major" juggles several thematic threads to portray the speaker's fear of disorder: the sexuality of alligators, the untimely death of many icons who attempted to create order, and the relationships between musical pitch and meaning. Several poems also use fixed formal structures such as the double helix abecedarian or sestina. The contrast between the high order of strict forms and the disorder of the speaker's situation both laments and celebrates the tension and beauty found in language and the human condition. The goal of these poems, then, is not to answer the impossible questions about faith or identity that are raised, but rather to celebrate and bring those struggles to light through, as Barbara Hamby said about the work, "wordplay and verbal pyrotechnics." / 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 30, 2012. / Catholicism, Identity, Idol, Poetry, Religion, Rob / Includes bibliographical references. / Barbara Hamby, Professor Directing Thesis; David Kirby, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member.

Backwards & Inside Out, a novel, tells the story of Albee, Karl and Emily Herman, a divorced and dysfunctional Jewish, each trying to individually rebuild their identities following the breakup of their family. Albee Herman, thirteen years old, is torn between his parents' acrimonious relationship and convinced that his body's rapid changes from puberty are somehow an extension of his parents' conflict. Karl, Albee's father, has found his faith as an Orthodox Jew following his divorce, but also fallen in love with the serenely imperturbable, and gentile, Margot Parrish. Emily, Albee's mother, remains trapped in the past. She blames her ex-husband for the failure of their marriage, is bitter that he seems to have moved on without paying a price. She is also terrified that Albee, will become like Karl. All three Hermans struggle to free themselves from their dysfunctional and shameful past, but they each still carry all the quirks and flaws that made their family dysfunctional in the first place. As a result, their attempts to change themselves, and the world around them, inevitably result in chaos, confusion, and hilarity. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Fall Semester, 2011. / October 18, 2011. / Novel / Includes bibliographical references. / Julianna Baggott, Professor Directing Thesis; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

These nine stories are a reflection of the shifting culture and rapid economic growth of Northwest Arkansas, the birthplace of Walmart and Tyson Foods. While the stories may have a distinctly Southern flavor in their setting, they are essentially global in their perspective of the homogenization of culture. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2011. / September 14, 2011. / Creative Writing, English, Fiction, Short Story Collection / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, University Representative; Diane Roberts, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.