I designed a study of online courses that combined ethnography and teacher research. I observed and described the elements of two completely online second semester first-year composition courses in the Spring 2004 semester, one that I taught and one taught by another instructor. Throughout the project, I gathered all documents relevant to the courses I studied, and produced a thick description of them. Document gathering provided the context for the classes themselves—syllabi, calendars, assigned reading materials. I also conducted interviews with the other teacher participating in my study about her design choices and pedagogy, technology and teaching background, and reading and writing habits. I answered the same questions that she did. During the course of the semester, I administered to students, by email, three questionnaires. These helped contextualize the content analysis portion of my project by providing me with information about the people participating in the discussions—their backgrounds with technology, their reading and writing habits, their levels of participation—all of which affect their writing/participation in online discussions. Finally, I analyzed the content of the students' discussions about their assigned reading. I tracked students' discussion in order to identify characteristics of students' writing about assigned reading. I based the unit of analysis on individual posts and described what I saw by providing representative examples of comments. I used the examples to help illustrate how online discussions might develop in contexts similar to those I studied. Online courses are a new component of composition. We don't know yet how best to structure our courses and how to assign readings and help guide/structure/generate discussion of texts so that online discussion in our classrooms is productive. My study has the potential to help create effective reading assignments that maximize learning, thinking, and writing skills. I also hope to help those unfamiliar with online teaching and distance education research better understand online classrooms—potential online teachers and administrators who are deciding whether to start online programs in their departments or who are restructuring distance education programs in order to meet new challenges that web-based distance learning creates. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: October 19, 2006. / Online Discussions, Content Analysis, Rhetoric and Composition, First-Year Writing, Distance Education / Includes bibliographical references. / Bruce Bickley, Professor Directing Dissertation; Pamela Carroll, Outside Committee Member; John Fenstermaker, Committee Member; Deborah Coxwell-Teague, Committee Member.

In the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century, Britain's transatlantic colonies resisted political, social, and religious control in order to establish a government controlled by the people, which allowed freedom and equality for all citizens. However, this ideal form of freedom did not extend to women and slaves within the newly formed American colonies. Until the middle of the twentieth century, critics often have overlooked, or ignored, the erasure of female history and the crucial position women, regardless of race, occupy within the colonial and republican societies. This project aims to (re)examine race and gender within the Caribbean and early American context, reinstating the role and struggle of women. Aphra Behn, in Oroonoko, and William Earle, in Obi, reveal the potential threat and rebellious spirit of female slaves within the Caribbean. In The Coquette, Hannah Foster questions the freedom and equality of women in the republican society, and she draws a comparison between the republican marriage contract and the institution of slavery. Leonora Sansay's Secret History places two American women in the Caribbean to illustrate the importance of female community and collectivity in removing women from patriarchal control. Using the Haitian Revolution as her backdrop, Sansay uses the slaves' success to provide an example for women to follow. Americans, as former inhabitants of England, become Creoles in the American colonies, undergoing a process of creolization that resembles that experienced by Caribbean colonists. However, as the early United States formed its own independent nation, its citizens adopted British colonial ideology and, at the same time, distanced themselves from the perceived limitations of Creole subjectivity. This project attempts to illustrate this contradiction between the ideals of freedom and equality and the reality of the colonial and republican societies in the transatlantic colonies and to illustrate the influence and interconnection between Europe, America, and the Caribbean. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: June 4, 2007. / Aphra Behn, Female Communities, William Earle, Caribbean, Hannah Foster, Leonora Sansay, Gloria Naylor, Eighteenth Century, Transatlantic, Republican Mother, Body, Haitian Revolution, American Revolution, Early United States / Includes bibliographical references. / Candace Ward, Professor Directing Thesis; Dennis Moore, Committee Member; Amit Rai, Committee Member.

To study Southern literature is to inevitably study the search for Southern identity. Challenged by issues of gender, race, and class, the Southern literary tradition is immersed in the search for a static, definitive concept of Southern identity. Southern writers attempt to define this identity through an understanding of the past. But the South is a region with a particularly troubled history, marred by the ghost of slavery; as such, the South has essentially become the nation's "other," what Teresa Goddu calls "the repository for everything from which the nation wants to disassociate itself." In spite of its dubious reputation, Southern writers seemingly take pride in the region's status as "other," reflecting on human experience through the lens of the "outsider." Canonical Southern works, most notably the novels of Faulkner – such as Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, or Sanctuary – typically present issues of racial or gender othering, using the other to question conventional codes and explain experience. In this study, I examine four contemporary novels – Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark (1968) and Child of God (1973), William Gay's Twilight (2006), and Harry Crews's A Feast of Snakes (1976) – and suggest that these authors no longer focus on the racial or gendered other, but instead consider the other, the outsider, as the sexual deviant. I argue that these authors, in an attempt to decode Southern experience through their respective treatments of incest, necrophilia, and bestiality, reveal and question the cultural and ideological contradictions of Southern convention, ultimately as an indictment of Southern social values. In doing so, this study will posit that McCarthy, Gay, and Crews recontextualize the concept of the "other" as an attempt to also recontextualize existing definitions of Southern identity. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: April 23, 2008. / Necrophilia, Incest, Harry Crews, William Gay, Cormac Mccarthy, Bestiality, Southern Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Timothy Parrish, Professor Directing Thesis; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member.

This thesis examines the employment choices available to single women on a typical 19th-century Georgian estate, represented by Barton Park in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The word "employment" appears more than 65 times in her six novels, with approximately 13 references in Sense and Sensibility. Although "employment" signifies a variety of meanings throughout Austen's work, in this study I analyze the word's significations of a single concept, a concentrated activity contributing to a larger, individually-motivated project. Austen's repeated usage of "employment," coupled with her satiric exposure of Lady Middleton, indicate an underlying consciousness of the tensions associated with the landed gentry's elite status as a leisure class and the culture of boredom that permeated the estate, precluding the normalization of employment. In this work, I focus on a particular slice of the traditional private/public scholarship on 19th century British literature and argue that both male and female estate residents locate themselves in multiple positions along the continuum between boredom and employment. I analyze the characters of Lady Middleton, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in order to understand the variety of possible cultural responses to this continuum that Austen offers her audience. Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first published novel, tangibly exemplifies an employment choice available to single women of the landed gentry – reading and writing satire – and thus revises the intangible "nothingness" of Lady Middleton's boredom satirized in the novel. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004. / Date of Defense: October 27, 2004. / Employment, Georgian Estates, Boredom / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Walker, Professor Directing Thesis; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Nancy Warren, Committee Member.

Shirley Temple Dreams is a collection of linked stories about Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II, the times ranging from the turn of the century to the postwar fifties. Eleven stories are structured into three parts: stories that are situated in Japan; stories in American internment camps; and stories of postwar diaspora and return. The collection opens with a story about a writer who realizes the centrality of stories in her life, and it closes with a story about a man who learns to share his stories. These stories are about passages—of time and place; of one generation that strides into the future and another that searches the past; of the move from foreign soil to the fields and forests of the western United States; of settlement, displacement, and resettlement. The stories are set against the backdrop of social trauma, but they are foremost about people—characters in trouble, man-made and self-made—and how they cope, survive, or fail. I have brought to these stories my interest in Japanese culture, literature, and folk lore as well as American popular culture. The tension between the two sides of the hyphenated identity, Japanese-American, is a major presence. Inclusion vs. exclusion, the group vs. the individual, duty vs. freedom are classical themes now seen through the lens of an "other." / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2008. / April 9, 2008. / World War II, Japanese-American, Fiction, Immigration+, Internment / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, Outside Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member.

"The Future Is Open" for Composition Studies: A New Intellectual Property Model in the Digital Age examines problems with the current intellectual property paradigm and focuses on the application of open source methods of knowledge production as the potential solution. Since the birth of copyright with the Statute of Anne in 1710, commercial interests have continually worked toward the enclosure of intellectual property. Despite the value to society of having a public commons of works which anyone may access and use, these companies champion romantic ideals of authorship as a means to privatize all intellectual property. This particular situation has accelerated as of late with the formation of large media conglomerates and other companies who own creative works of all types—music, scholarly articles, works of fiction, patents on new technologies and biological processes, etc.—and who vigorously protect and extend their ownership rights, including lobbying for and receiving recent legislation which solidifies their control even further: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) and Copyright Term Extension Act (1998). As we move from a print-based culture to a society whose texts are mostly electronic, enclosure will continually cause negative effects on literacy, a stifling of technological innovation, a worsening crisis in academic publishing, a further encroachment of fair use rights, and self-censorship by creators of works. In response to such problems with intellectual property, significant grass roots movements have begun in the past twenty years centered around the idea of "openness": open source software development, open access to scholarly publishing, and Creative Commons. Writing teachers will find that within the principles of openness these movements represent, they will recognize an ideology parallel to their own beliefs about sharing and social constructionist epistemology and come to understand that the Utopian dream of an open source idea economy is the antithesis of the dystopia imagined by content providers. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2006. / May 25, 2006. / Intellectual Property, Rhetoric And Composition, Computers And Writing, Open Source, Open Access / Includes bibliographical references. / John Fenstermaker, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ernest Rehder, Outside Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member; Deborah Coxwell-Teague, Committee Member.

In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams asserts that his readers' perception is alienated from the world by a "barrier." In particular, he argues that these readers are alienated from the present moment. This state of alienation is affected and maintained, in part, by a version of false art, which Williams deems the "the beautiful illusion." In this thesis, I argue that Spring and All is Williams's attempt to both articulate the alienation problem through the text's prose and resolve the problem by creating the present moment through the text's poems, thus presenting readers the opportunity to remove "the barrier" to their perception of the world. In order to provide a framework for theorizing about our perception of temporality, I turn to Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay, "The Sublime and the Avant Garde," for his philosophy of the present moment. Lyotard's essay, which theorizes the impulse driving modernism, characterizes the present moment as simply "the event," an occurrence preceding our understanding of what that occurrence means. Lyotard argues that such an artist event is sublime in its incommensurability to our understanding, demonstrating the notion that something, rather than nothing has occurred. I argue that the stake of Williams's aesthetic in Spring and All is embedded in this impulse. I examine how the impulse to create the present moment is at work in four of the text's poems, revealing that Spring and All is firmly set within the modernist impulse that Lyotard articulates. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2008. / March 28, 2008. / William Carlos Williams, American modernism, Avant-garde, Jean Francios Lyotard / Includes bibliographical references. / R. M. Berry, Professor Directing Thesis; Robin T. Goodman, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.

My thesis is a collection of five short stories, each dealing with characters who continue to wrestle with issues from their youths, specifically unresolved conflicts with their parents that affect their present lives. Having lived in Texas most of my life, my stories take place in and around the greater Houston area because this is what I know and remember. "This Side of the Gulf" refers to the location of most of these stories but it also refers to the literal and figurative gulf that exists between young adults and their parents. As a young adult who is just finding her way apart from her family, I feel compelled to write about what I have left behind and perhaps more importantly, what I have taken with me. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2005. / October 28, 2005. / Estrangement, Houston, Short Stories, Families / Includes bibliographical references. / Julianna Baggott, Professor Directing Thesis; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member; Ned Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

There is a famous Chekhov quote that goes, "There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws." Passive protagonists having good days are hardly, if ever, the components of lasting, memorable fiction. The protagonists of these stories confront life's claws. Developing these stories, I was particularly concerned with knowing the protagonist's voice and using it to guide my writing. The stories are all either first-person or third-person-limited. Sometimes I knew where the story was going from the outset; other times the path of the story unfurled as it was written. The crux in writing these stories was to stay consistent with the narrative voice, through every impulsive maneuver. Humor is an important component of these stories. I admire characters that find solace in humor, and I find humor is an effective device to subtly punctuate the deftness of many risky narrative situations. Every story contained within is a footnote to other stories; they are the stories of an apprentice given go at the forge. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2003. / October 23, 2003. / Nonfiction, Fiction, No yearning, Yearning, Human, Short Stories, Darkly Funny, Disturbing, Serious, Dynamo, Sprawling, Sad, Menacing, Surreal, Real, Muscular, Rhetorical / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; R. M. Berry, Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member.

Iconic Androgyne" explores the nature of androgyny in both the poetical works of Lord Byron and in the composition of Byron's own persona. Most contemporary scholarship approaches androgyny from a queer theory or feminist theoretical base, and explore androgyny as a condition where a male character slides away from absolute masculine subjectivity to occupy a space that hovers somewhere between the masculine and feminine poles. The result of this idea is that scholars most often view the androgyne as lacking power. This paper seeks to reevaluate the androgyne and redefine it in a new environment wherein the persona incorporates the strongest elements of both genders to create a powerful third sex. Lord Byron helped to create himself as a mythical androgyne who was eagerly received by a counter-culture comprised of youth and the rising urban, working class whose radical agenda was to seek social equality, which included sexual democracy. Thus, the mythic Byron persona became a figure for a socio-sexual revolution behind which the counter-culture could rally. Byron's influence is still felt in the modern day as androgynous or sexually ambiguous celebrities such as David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and other leaders of the Glam rock revolution took up the reins to drive the revolution that Byron began. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2005. / May 2, 2005. / Counter-Culture, Sexuality, Androgyny, Byron / Includes bibliographical references. / James O’Rourke, Professor Directing Thesis; Eric Walker, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.