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This is the pilot episode of a television series, which explores a young girls descent into suburban drug culture. In this episode, the main character, Ally, follows her disaffected love interest, Marco, to the squat, an abandoned building inhabited by runaways and addicts.

Ball and Chain is a coming-of-age story that explores the pain and joy of an unusual first love. Patsy is a twenty-six-year-old virgin. As her body begins to deteriorate as the result of an unknown ailment, she finds herself intrigued by the beautiful and vibrant Anita. Initially unwilling to admit her attraction, Patsy distracts herself with work, her best friends quest to find the perfect tattoo artist, and the politics of her wealthy Houston family. When Patsy grows increasingly ill, she decides that she must find a way to get Anitas attention before its too late.

Hardy Runyan, an obese dishwasher from Louisiana, seeks to become a champion gurgitator through the guidance of Trina Hicks, a coach of competitive eating whos starving to reclaim her former glory. Armed with a stunted gag reflex and a stomach he can stretch to the skin, Hardy eats his way toward a showdown in which he dethrones the world champion of oyster eating.

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This new historicist study chronicles the life and work of a Louisiana French Creole, Leona Queyrouze (1861-1938) who grew up in the turbulent era following the Civil War. Her articles and poetry, mostly written in French, were published in the local periodicals, LAbeille, Comptes-Rendus, the Picayune and the Crusader under the pseudonyms, Constant Beauvais, Salamandra, and Adamas. She also translated plays from French into English in New York under at the request of Harpers Bazar and wrote two symphonies that were performed at the World Exposition in New Orleans in 1884. Through an ever-widening critical lens, I focus upon her personal life, her ethnic identity as a Creole, the Vieux Carré, and her salon that included such notables as writer Mollie Moore Davis, Charles Gayarré, historian; Paul Morphy, chess player; Dr. Alfred Mercier, novelist and dramatist; General P.G. T. Beauregard, Adrien Rouquette, bohemian poet-priest, and Lafcadio Hearn who later became an important figure in the fusion of eastern and western literature. Her salon functioned as a folk group, one that created the Athénée for the preservation of French culture through its literary organ, the Comptes-Rendus. In the symbolic acts of conservatism and dynamism, according to the twin laws of folklore, they were instrumental in preserving the French Creole culture at the same time they were factors in its change. In her writing, Queyrouze addresses the key issues of the period and calls for egalitarian reform and suffrage even as she struggled with her own elitism and assumptions of racial hierarchy. In the final analysis, I compare her work to that of mainstream American writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin who were calling for social reform from within the patriarchal social structure while Queyrouze was positioning herself as an outsider in work that was both elegiac and rebellious. Contrary to the Protestantism and realism of her counterparts, including George Washington Cable, Queyrouze followed the French romantic aesthetic traditions codified by Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset, and as such, her work challenges our notions of a monolithic American literature.

Greg Jenkins has observed that adaptation "is a presence that is woven into the very fabric of film culture." Although this statement is true, no definitive theory of adaptation exists. Critics and scholars ponder adaptation, yet cannot seem to agree on what makes an adaptation a success or a failure. The problem of adaptation stems from many sources. What, if anything, does a film owe the novel on which it is based? How, if possible, does a film remain faithful to its source? Is a film a version of a story or its own autonomous work of art? Who is the author of this work? What is an Author? Which text is given primacy: the novel or the film? What is a Text? These questions, and many others, are at the heart of adaptation studies. This project does not pretend to address them all, nor does it claim to be the final answer to the question of adaptation. It does, however, provide a possible solution that is both theoretical and practical. It is theoretical in that it asks viewers to consider what a particular adaptation is doing with a film; practical in that it attempts to bring method to the madness by applying the theory to a sample case study: Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick is not an arbitrary choice as he encompasses the major questions of adaptation. Although all of Kubrick's major films were based on works of fiction, he fits into that highest echelon of filmmakers, the auteur. He is the unquestioned "author" of his canon. The range of Kubrick's films also proves useful for this study: most of Kubrick's adaptations are successful, a few are not; many of his films have surpassed their literary ancestors, others have elevated them to new heights; some stay rather faithful to the source text, others deviate greatly. This discussion will consider the films of Kubrick's canon that center on two of his recurring themes, love and war, by considering each novel's thematic appeal for Kubrick followed by an analysis of the film in terms of what it is doing with the text.

When I began teaching 11th grade English in Houston, Texas, I quickly discovered that students who speak English as a second language are sometimes drastically under-prepared for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test, the states high stakes test required during the 11th grade year. The result of their inability to pass the test is that they do not graduate, which limits their future career and academic choices. In a semester-long research study at a typical high school in Houston, Texas, I explored the possibility of assisting ESL/LEP students transplanted to Houston as they struggled with English proficiency through a peer tutoring program. I outline the difficulties these students face, including personal and familial difficulties with acclimation to a new environment, repeated testing, and special needs (both personal and academic). I also examine the difficulties I faced with accountability and misunderstanding from other teachers, administrators, and the students themselves as I tried to develop a program to help these and future students become fluent in English. To conduct this study, I designed a tutoring program for ten ESL/LEP students and seven tutors, and we found that discovering who we were as a center was a never-ending process. Though not a typical writing center, our space was a place based on typical writing center philosophy, and our goal was to assist these students, through tutoring in English, as they prepared for their futures. Our center was originally intended to serve those LEP students who had taken and failed the test at least once, but these case studies show how we had to change that conception as we struggled with class sizes, scheduling, budget cuts, teacher and administration misunderstanding, and time constraints. Although the results of this study seem negative, as only two of our students passed the TAKS test at the end of the year, the case studies presented show that peer tutoring can and does work for increasing the language proficiency of ESL students. Test scores did not necessarily show the students progress, but progress is evident in their development of social capital and through their linguistic gains.

My dissertation identifies ways in which novelists have used an ad-man protagonist as means to investigate the social and psychological implications of advertising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Soliciting Desire takes as its primary subjects H.G. Wellss Tono-Bungay, Theodore Dresiers The Genius, Frederick Wakemans The Hucksters, Jonathan Dees Palladio, and William Gibsons Pattern Recognition and demonstrates that the ad-man characters particular constellation of traits provides a rich vehicle for fictional explorations of desire and subjectivity as they are formed in relation to ideologies of consumer capitalism and art. Guided by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamins theories of cultural/ capitalist relations, building upon Jennifer Wickes work on advertising in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, and drawing upon studies of intersections between economics and literature such as those conducted by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, my dissertation goes on to define the integral role of desire in navigating subjectivity amidst the symbolic orders of modern and postmodern consumer capitalism as they are depicted in these ad-man novels. Lacanian concepts of subjectivity and desire are central to my study, as are the ways in which these concepts are refined by Mark Bracher, Slavoj iek, and Kaja Silverman, all of whom insist that psychoanalysis has valuable applications extending beyond the individual, into the social and cultural realms. My dissertation finds that the ad-man character in its many manifestations actively represents dilemmas of desire and subjectivity common to each of us living in a late capitalist consumer culture in which advertising has grown from a cottage industry into a basic existential paradigm. Furthermore, my study concludes that the novel is an ideal form for exploring individual and collective engagement with consumer capitalism: within the dialectics of narrative, text, reader and context resides the possibility of analytic discourse. In the ad-man novels specifically, the potential is for discovery of the ways human desire may be constructed, channeled, or compromised by the dominant fictions of the advertising industry and for allowing such knowledge to inform ones own re-construction of desire.

Looking first at Byrons canon, I trace the evolution of the Byronic heroes offered in his poetry, arguing that these heroes are the culmination of images of the poet as he interacted with and was interpreted by his female reading audience. Working with his readers, Byron fundamentally altered his poetic heroes to suit changing public opinions about himself. In later chapters, I show how this image continued to evolve as the Byronic hero was co-opted, adopted, and adapted in the novels of female authors across the nineteenth century, especially Lady Caroline Lamb in Glenarvon, Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, Anne Brontë in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre, and George Eliot in Daniel Deronda. How female novelists interpreted the Byronic hero as the century wore on was dependent on which images of the poet they had access to including: the real man Byron, the heroes of his poetry, his myth, or some amalgam of the three. All five female novelists demonstrate a measured and typical, though different generational response, offering various levels of imitation, revision, and rejection in their novels. Ultimately, this project shows the enduring legacy and importance of Byron, his myth, and the Byronic hero to scribbling women throughout the long nineteenth century.