This dissertation examines the relationship between literature and zoology in early twentieth-century Britain, arguing that modernist literatures representations of animals drew on and revised zoological understandings of animals and vice versa. Recovering a network of zoological modernistswriters, biologists, and filmmakers who knew and read each otherthis dissertation reveals the biographical and textual points of intersection between such figures as H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Charles Elton, and the creators of the Secrets of Nature film series. Against the dominant critical understanding of modernisms animal representations as symbols of human pre-history or the Freudian unconscious, I suggest that at least one strand of modernist writers found real, material animals, the kind studied by zoologists, aesthetically and intellectually compelling. Meanwhile zoologists, challenged by modernisms destabilization of realism and representation, developed in their texts self-conscious, modernist strategies for writing about animals.

Miami, Florida is a uniquely situated city. Though it is technically located in the US American South, since the latter half of the 20th century, it has been radically transformed in the wake of substantial waves of immigration. This thesis explores representations of Miami in Joan Didions Miami and Tom Wolfes Back to Blood as diverse and culturally rich on the one hand and rigidly segregated and racist on the other. Using a comparative examination of different immigrant groups to show the favorable treatment of Cuban exiles and refugees, I focus primarily on the representations of Cuban and Haitian refugees in these two works. I argue that Cuba exiles in Miami have received preferential treatment, which I call selective Cuban-American favoritism. I use this idea to expose biases in US immigration policy and to argue that there are shared racial and socio-economic hierarchies in the US and in Cuba. Throughout this project, I employ sociological, anthropological, and historical works to contextualize the cross-cultural conflicts that Didion and Wolfe depict. This contextualization helps me show how these conflicts speak to the broader US structures that have set parameters on Miamis diversity.

This dissertation explores the unstable concept of the proper name and how mid-Victorian female authors strategically used their legal names to market themselves as professional writers in order to gain and maintain economic security. The names of women authors carry multiple meanings, including legal signature, linguistic/textual sign, brand name (in the case of celebrity authors), familial/ancestral marker, and, particularly for sensation authors, potential scandalous disguise. The newly hybridized sensation genre emerged in England in the 1860s as a crystallization of numerous socio-legal and economic anxieties, particularly about gender and identity. The ideology of separate spheres and the gendered distinctions between public and private work and identity construction were breaking down with the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which led to increased publication of private sexual affairs via divorce court coverage, as well as the slow but steady entry of women into the professional sphere, particularly the literary profession. I argue that during the mid-Victorian period, proper names functioned as the ultimate sensational trope, particularly for women: they provided easy, straightforward identification and self-definitionthe ultimate signifier of patriarchal inscriptionwhile also being always unstable, changeable, and alienable. For female authors, authorial names become shorthand narratives. Their names gained momentum, separate from these original authors intentions, once they entered the literary market as celebrity signifiers and brands, becoming encoded with an array of overlapping, contradictory narratives. In the process, the circulation of these names reconceptualizes the literary profession. This project examines the nominative narratives of a select group of celebrity authors, from Queen Victoria and the Hon. Mrs. Caroline Norton to Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Oliphant, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Their names de- and reconstruct categories of gender and identity in an array of interpenetrating social structures, including legal discourse, the family unit, and the economic market, calling attention to the discursive nexus operating between sensation, professionalization, and gendered celebrity during the mid-Victorian period.

This thesis considers the function and purpose of propaganda across three notable moments in the career of W.E.B. Du Bois: his journalistic work for The Crisis, his sociological and curatorial work for the 1900 Paris Exposition, and his fictional and autobiographical work in The Souls of Black Folk. This paper argues that Du Bois's international public relations campaign built for the "new Negro" at the 1900 Paris Exposition, as well his vision of progress articulated in Souls, respond to violent and nonsensical rhetorics emerging from the journals and lecterns of prominent Social Darwinists and eugenicists. The implications of this project point toward a framing of Du Boiss double consciousness as the ethical and epistemological foundations of a radical, pro-Black liberation movement in its infancy in the first decades of the 20th century.

In this essay, I wish to study Frances Burneys theorization of history in her preface to The Wanderer, and her choice to frame Juliets representation through narrative deferrals and silences as the means through which this guiding aesthetic principle illuminates the novels consideration of an ethics of reading. I specifically argue that Burneys particular imagining of history and reading is encoded within her representation of Juliets shifting racial presence in the novel. By invoking an ethics of reading, I would like to suggest that however permeable and changeable Juliets skin color becomes in the text, her representation becomes a site from which readers could encounter and respond to migrant figures circulating the Atlantic world, and that Burney carefully narrates an array of responses to Juliet through the voices of other characters in the novel. Finally, I argue that Juliets entrance in the novel as (seemingly) a francophone black woman would seem to reference the emergence of the first black republic, Haiti, in 1804 at the conclusion of the slave revolution in the French colony of St. Domingue, an event Juliets entrance appears to obliquely dwell on.

Taking Gayle Jones Corregidora as a metaphor for the nature of the United States' relationship in the present day to its history of slavery, this thesis seeks to enter the existing discourse on continuing racial tension and disparity by establishing what role social mythology has in directing and informing efforts to resolve these sources of social strife. By considering the life trajectories of the Corregidora family, a lineage created in slavery and still ruled, in the middle of the 20th century, by its influence, this paper seeks to illustrate the ways in which memory and history of the multi-generational trauma of slavery can be either a hindrance or help in moving beyond them productively.

Vietnamese people have many difficulties when pronouncing English. Among those, this paper will firstly deal with the hypothesis “English word-final consonants are not pronounced in a native-like way by Vietnamese speakers”. Theoretical phonological research about final consonants in the Vietnamese language and English has been carried out to characterize the difficulties. Data from Vietnamese informants were collected and analyzed, then synthesized to the most significant problems. Vietnamese effort to pronounce English word-final consonants will be towards omitting, adding schwa or replacing by sounds closer to those existing in their mother-tongue. Results of native speakers’ evaluation of Vietnamese-accented final consonants are also concluded to clarify how comprehensible informants’ pronunciation is. These findings will hopefully be useful for those who are interested in the topic and for further research.

In Spite of Yourself: The Asignifying Force of Humor and Laughter calls upon the interruptive moments of uncontrollable laughter to challenge rhetorics historical treatment of humor and laughter. Anyone who has ever suffered a fit of hysterical laughter at precisely the wrong moment, or has begun to laugh spontaneously at an inappropriate joke before stopping short, can attest to laughters uniquely uncontrollable force. Beyond all reason and control, laughter interrupts us and reminds us of the limits of the human subject. Because laughter does not signify meaning in the traditional communicative sense, it exerts an asignifying force irreducible to the questions of truth, understanding, and presence. While rhetoricians like Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian attempt to confine laughters force to calculated aspects of persuasion, their approaches simultaneously reveal an understanding that laughters effects lie beyond the rational control of the orator. By tracing the often-unintended effects of humor through a range of comedic performances including stand-up comedy, radio, and film, this project ultimately argues that laughters rhetorical power resides not in what it means, but in what it does. Ultimately, because laughter is not a signifying language, yet it still produces rhetorical effects, taking up laughters asignifying force provides a chance to expand the field of rhetoric in ways beyond the reason, beyond signification, and beyond the human.

Octavia Butlers Kindred and Nalo Hopkinsons Brown Girl in the Ring are African diasporic texts that trouble the boundaries of nation, home, time, and genre, as they are traditionally defined. This thesis argues that Butler and Hopkinson accomplish such a troubling through the use of post-apocalyptic frameworks that displace the characters in time and space in their respective national contexts. With Kindred set in the United States and Brown Girl in Canada, the effect of national context on the experience of post-apocalypse in the African diaspora is felt strongly, making salient the differences between the United States melting pot and Canadas government sanctioned multiculturalism. Through exploring scholarly theorizations of time, belonging, home, and nation within and without the African diaspora, I argue that the dynamic differences and similarities Brown Girl and Kindred offer within their post-apocalyptic contexts mirror those that exist for literary analysis of African diasporic texts more broadly. This theoretical basis helps clarify the productive possibility of considering certain African diasporic texts as post-apocalyptic without foreclosing their position within existing literary genres, including speculative and science fiction, and the neo-slave narrative. Butler and Hopkinsons texts help us understand that post-apocalypse in the African diaspora presents more than a fevered warning of what could come if our actions continued on unfettered in certain trajectories. Post-apocalypse is a reminder of a past that will not disappear, and a call to embrace the longevity of this past in the interest of best serving our possible futures.

This dissertation analyzes the early modern emergence of a provisional narrative and imagistic mode which suspends the linear progress of time through past, present, and future as it evokes multiple and simultaneous probabilities. I call this probabilistic narrative-image the Subjunctive Aesthetic. As the term suggests, the forms most defined linguistic markers are terms like should, could, and might. My analysis connects these grammatical markers to images of planning, especially building plans. The Aesthetic, in both text and image, moves in a ranging series of probable outcomes, as opposed to a single narrative plot. Plansarchitectural ground plots, governmental plans, and diagrammed military tacticstypify the Aesthetic. But other forms, especially utopian pieces, grapple with probability and space. The image-narratives of the Subjunctive Aesthetic mediate between theory and history, the past and the future. Ultimately, the images and stories of the Subjunctive Aesthetic overlap and pivot between the practical and the imaginary.