Five stories.

Minding the Gap: A Rhetorical History of the Achievement Gap arose as an inquiry into the rhetorical congestion around the phrase achievement gap in public discourse. Having been used in support of multiple, often competing, education agendas, the phrase seems versatile almost to the point of emptiness, and yet it seemingly retains its persuasive power. Examining the history of the phrase, I reveal that the notion of the achievement gap is rooted in the logic of segregation and the rhetoric of disability, and serves to construct students in ways that paradoxically undermine efforts to expand access to educational opportunity. Although achievement gap is most frequently invoked in the name of educational equity, I argue that its rhetorical force can be infelicitous, erecting a discursive boundary that contains and limits students who are understood to be on the wrong side of the gap. This project is the first analysis of gap rhetoric, focusing on its heretofore-unexamined origins in the 1950s and the way its inheritances shape discourse since the 2001 No Child Left Behind act. I demonstrate that even equity-driven uses of achievement gap carry the baggage of the phrases history, which operates to re-marginalize already marginalized students and to construct educational equity as an unattainable goal.

In Friends of Bill F.: Alcohol, Recovery, and Social Progress in Southern Fiction, I argue that many southern writers use the trope of drunkenness to investigate the Souths often hesitant stance toward social change. The overwhelming presence of hard drinking in southern fiction is so ubiquitous that it becomes nearly invisible, and what distinguishes twentieth century southern literary representations of alcohol from their antecedents is how overconsumption reflects a dis-ease in both the individual drinker and the region as a whole. Emerging from the concept of diseased drinking is the idea of recovery, and by foregrounding recovery language alongside depictions of addiction, these texts privilege drinking-recovery as the metaphor through which to signify how southerners confronted progress. My intervention into the discourse of the South and modernity traces the literary contours of alcoholism alongside the emerging Sobriety Movement that became popularized with the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous, to suggest that recovery from alcoholism perhaps anticipates individual and social progress. I argue that progress remained conceptually problematic for writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Cormac McCarthy who saw the Souths tepid relationship to social change as hypocritical.

Personal essays and memoir essays about home, family, inheritance, the West, the spaces we choose to inhabit, and the ones that come to us.

The problem of how to provide useful contextual and extra-textual information to readers of Ulysses has vexed Joyceans for years. The debate has generated lively and opinionated discussions in print and at Joyce meetings, forums and listservs. On one side are scholars who argue for scaled-down annotations that present only basic information as simply as possible, minimizing the amount of interpretation involved. On the other side are the actual first-time readers, struggling to make sense of Joyces complex, highly allusive text, and willing to accept help wherever it may be found. The work of annotation is both complicated and enriched when it is undertaken in a hypermedia environment. This thesis addresses these issues, particularly as they relate to the task of annotating a list of characters in the novel for The Joyce Project, a hypermedia version of Ulysses under the direction of Professor John Hunt at the University of Montana. With brief entries for more than 180 characters, the list is intended primarily as an aid to help readers keep track of the dozens of characters who inhabit the pages of Joyces work. However, creating the list in hypermedia, with links between characters in the list, between the text and the list, and between the text and external sources, creates a virtual web of connections which leads to new insights and directions for further study.

Wedding Belles and Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings in Fact, Fiction and Folklore Dissertation directed by Professor John Wharton Lowe, Robert Penn Warren Professor of English Pages in dissertation, 380, Words in Abstract, 234 Abstract Along with rites of passage marking birth and death, wedding rituals played an important role in ordering social life on antebellum Louisiana plantations, not only for elite white families but also for the enslaved. Louisiana women's autobiographical accounts of plantation weddings yield considerable insights on the importance of weddings for Louisiana plantation women before, and especially during, the Civil War. Moreover, information contained within the Louisiana Writers' Project narratives reveal various types of wedding ritual used to unite the enslaved on Louisiana plantations despite laws and codes that prohibited slave unions. In contrast to these historical accounts, plantation weddings in the fictional imagination reveal that the figure of the bride reflects careful authorial negotiation of racialized and gendered ideologies. Fictional images found in a wide-ranging collection of texts portray the Louisiana plantation wedding as a site of struggle by white or black brides against racial and patriarchal constraints. Currently, heritage tourism perpetuates notions of whiteness on Louisiana plantations, fostering romantic nostalgia of the past and adaptation of that past into the present. For contemporary brides, choosing a Louisiana plantation as a wedding venue evokes stereotyical notions of the Old South in terms of gendered femininity. Yet, there is some indication that previously entrenched notions of racial and class hierarchies are slowly being overturned. This project begins with a reenacted wedding at Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site, providing a discursive framework for examining the manner in which the white southern belle or the enslaved bride and her wedding on a Louisiana plantation recycle through historical, fictional and contemporary productions.

Leaving Oz tells the story of Cassie, an eleven-year-old girl who has grown up on a commune in Idaho not knowing who her real mother is. She soon discovers the least likeable of the commune mothers, Mina, is her biological mother and has to leave the commune with this woman. She is tossed into the strange world of the digital age and meets her even stranger extended family. This screenplay explores what it means to be a family and a part of a community.

Blame: Marriage, Folklore, and the Victorian Novel contends that the intersection of folk and legal discourses of responsibility and culpability shapes the way the Victorian novel imagines blame. Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of official legal discourses such as trial testimony and standards of evidence to the development of narrative form during the nineteenth century. However, by attending to folk modes for establishing blameworthiness in Victorian novels, I show that folk and legal standards of culpability are mutually constitutive. The legal system is designed to identify the culpable in a fixed process codified in slow-changing statutes that begins with crime and ends with punishment. The counter-discourse of folklore by definition constantly changing distributes blame more widely than the legal system allows. The resulting circulation of blame blurs the distinction between public and private by showing that the stakes of domestic conflicts extend beyond husband and wife, underscoring the communal investment in failing marriages and their symptoms, which include marital violence, bigamy, and adultery. Examining marital conflicts in works by Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and William Makepeace Thackeray, I argue that the novels conceive of blame not as a single event but as a process of continuous negotiation and redefinition of standards of responsibility, moral agency, and culpability.

The theatre of the Victorian era is often ignored in literary studies or denigrated when it is discussed. This project, however, seeks to provide a framework within which we can explore the power of Victorian theatre as it responded to and shaped ideas in London between 1848 and 1882. Looking specifically at how these theatres adapted material already situated within the ideological context of the period, I argue that the adaptations of three major Victorian novels highlight the ways in which minor theatres engaged with the genres often considered high art and used that material to create new meanings for an often ignored sub group--the working class. In particular, I investigate multiple adaptations of Charltote Brontës Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskells Mary Barton, and M.E. Braddons Lady Audleys Secret for what the adaptation can reveal about how these playwrights conceptualized class relations.<p> These adaptations exist within a series of relations--to the original novel, to the history of the theatre, to the audience, and to the conversations occurring when they were performed. Some of the theatres were popular houses like the Old Victoria or the St. James, while others were relatively small and obscure like The Globe in Newcastle Street and the Queens, and each had a distinct relation to the larger society and social discourse of the era. I contend that these plays reveal the ways in which seemingly disparate conceptions of class in the Victorian era in fact interacted in these theatres as the playwrights appropriated the conversations concerning paternalism in the 1840s and 50s, the push for social reforms in the 1860s, and the ways in which society defined a gentleman in the latter part of the century in order to create new versions of class relations for the working classes. This project seeks to examine the voices speaking for and to the working classes in the theatrical conversations of the mid to late Victorian years and how these theatrical adaptations crafted narratives of the Victorians that worked in relation to but simultaneously against much of the public discourse concerning class and specifically the working class.

This project seeks to understand the complex ways in which Dakota people have responded creatively to the pressures of modernity and colonization to create cultural continuity and ways of belonging across the violent ruptures embodied by the U.S.-Dakota War, its subsequent confinements, and exile. In reading this moment and its textual productions up until passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, I move between conventional textual archives (missionary journals and letters, newspapers and pamphlets, legal cases, and literary works by Dakota authors) and an archive of Dakota oral histories. My purpose in doing so is twofold: first, moving between Native and non-Native texts allows the dialogical character of the conflict over Native lands to more fully take shape, and allows a view of contested grounds as emerging from competing, and much different, ethical understandings. Second, by placing Dakota oral tradition alongside the literary depictions surrounding Native dispossession of homelands in the mid-nineteenth century, I assert not only that oral tradition is history, but that it is critical history: oral tradition embodies significant counter-memories, epistemologies, and ontologies which challenge settler state authority. Its embodied and performed narrations of Dakota nations, then, constitute philosophical and indeed, literary, challenges to US national, legal narratives of belonging.