This study proposes a new interpretive apparatus to examine readers' experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. Postmodern texts explore literature's ability to signify and materialize experiences, mediating the physical conditions of everyday existence with the physical conditions of reading and writing. In this exploration, avant-garde writers disrupt traditional signifying techniques, emphasizing the materiality of the medium of their texts—print, sound, page, orthography, syntax, etc. This disruption provokes an erotic examination of language and encourages a bodily relationship with the textual medium. I investigate this mode of writing and its political consequences in Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Carol Maso's AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell's VAS (2002), as they produce examples of both thematic and structural erotics through visual experiments, metaphors, or allegorical representations of theoretical connections between pleasure and language. Informed by feminist theorists Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, film critic Laura Marks, philosopher Georges Bataille, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, and the writings on avant-garde literature by Roland Barthes, this study clarifies American experimental literature's ability to counterbalance and demystify contemporary rhetorical apparatuses that foster conservative political agendas. This project thus repositions postmodern texts as feminist practices that call for a political reevaluation of social systems which confine fictional examinations of the body, and their interpretations, to patriarchal paradigms. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: May 28, 2008. / Stephen Farrell, Steve Tomasula, Carole Maso, Contemporary American Literature, Joseph McElroy, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Postmodernism, Eroticism, Feminism, Semiotics, Haptic, Avant-garde, Excess, Georges Bataille, Hélène Cixous, Georges Didi-Huberman, Julia Kristeva, Corporeality, Roland Barthes / Includes bibliographical references. / R.M. Berry, Professor Directing Dissertation; Antoine Cazé, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Lauren Weingarden, Outside Committee Member; Mathieu Duplay, Committee Member; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; S.E. Gontarski, Committee Member; François Happe, Committee Member; Claire Maniez, Committee Member.

This work evaluates and compares the ancient rhetorical method and the modern case method of legal training. Further, it diagnoses an apparent problem with the modern method: lawyers are graduating from law schools without an understanding of the fundamental principles of argumentation. In advocating for a return to the rhetorical method, I propose that modern legal institutions abandon their inductive teaching methods and revive the deductive methods of old. This work explains how forensic rhetoric (courtroom oratory) is most useful to law students. Ultimately, this work achieves its goals in three ways: (1) by analyzing the historical relationship between ancient rhetoric and law, (2) by discussing specific heuristics ancient rhetorical/legal educators used to prepare students, specifically stasis theory and declamatio; and (3) by analyzing the methods and texts modern institutions use and offering ways to implement the return to a deductive and rhetorically based legal education. / 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, 2004. / Date of Defense: August 12, 2003. / Case Method, Forensic, Deductive, Inductive, Heuristics, Argumentation Theory, Argumentation, Law, Legal Education, Declamation, Oratory, Ancient Rhetoric, Education, Rhetoric, Legal Training, Contemporary, Stasis Theory, Stasis / Includes bibliographical references. / Carol Poster, Professor Directing Thesis; Mark Cooper, Committee Member; Bruce Bickley, Committee Member.

Since the earliest records of culture, mankind has represented its ocularcentric focus through images of sight. Freud theorizes that these images of viewership represent dynamics of power: those who see, actively control, and those who are seen, passively wait to be acted upon. In the archetypes of Western culture, these visual dynamics follow a gendered binary—active/masculine versus passive/feminine. Freud believes that these visual behaviors are determined during the psychosexual stages of development, and these roles are then reinforced through cultural norms. Freudian theory stood as the accepted model of behavioral analysis until late into the twentieth century when feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Laura Mulvey, and Ann E. Kaplan began examining and deconstructing patriarchal beliefs about visuality. These theorists agree that women can assume the masculine position of visuality and co-opt the active position of sight for themselves. This particular assumption of power can be seen in women's colonial narratives of the eighteenth century, where European women were vested with power over colonial subjects, native men and women alike. In an interesting duality, European women simultaneously inhabited the object position of passivity vis-à-vis their male colonizer counterpart and the subject position of activity vis-à-vis the colonial Other. This multi-dimensional position allowed for identificatory bonds across gender and racial lines and resulted in contradictory images of spectatorship within women's colonial narratives. This study examines the spectatorship imagery in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko, Charlotte Smith's Desmond and The Wanderings of Warwick, and Anna Maria Mackenzie's Slavery, or the Times to account for the shifts in loyalty and explain the situational alliances that women forged both with their countrymen, viewing the Other as inferior and sub-human, and with the colonized, viewing them as subjects in their own right, as their equals. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009. / Date of Defense: December 5, 2008. / Anna Maria Mackenzie, The Gaze, Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne, Charlotte Smith, Colonialism / Includes bibliographical references. / Helen Burke, Professor Directing Dissertation; Eundok Kim, Outside Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

My thesis is a collection of five stories. The title story is a formally experimental piece designed to supply a choice of reading strategies. / A Thesis submitted to the English Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2005. / Date of Defense: February 28, 2005. / Short stories, Fiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; R. M. Berry, Committee Member.

This is a collection of poems. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: October 27, 2005. / Greek Theatre, Anatomy / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Thesis; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member.

Mia Carpenter has spent most of her adult life avoiding her father and resenting him for running out on their family when she was twelve. Now approaching her thirtieth birthday, Mia once again fears she's being left behind by a man she loves, her husband Tim, who has been working as a news anchor for Channel 38 in Gulf Point, Florida, and confesses he's been unfaithful to her during their summer apart. Determined not to let Tim get away as her father did, Mia moves to Gulf Point and tries to put her marriage back together. Standing in her way are her brother Danny, whose cynicism and attention to detail unnerve her; her father Owen, who arrives in Gulf Point unannounced and admits he's recovering from a heart attack neither of his children knew about; and Tim himself, who uses work as an excuse to avoid having to talk about their problems. Southern Boys examines how our families shape us. Mia learns that in order to make amends with Tim, she must first accept her father's misdeeds and forgive him for always seeming more like a buddy than a parent. She must see how Danny acts and figure out how to avoid his cynicism. Most importantly, Mia must realize how she blames others and drives them away because she hangs on to a past that cannot exist anymore. / 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, 2003. / Date of Defense: June 19, 2003. / Family Relationships / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Wendy Bishop, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

Digital archives of early modern printed materials—on Early English Books Online, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg, among others—are rife with scanning errors, incomplete metadata, typos, and other odd, frustrating artifacts of mediation. Each technological change in writing brings its own version of problems in preserving and mediating our print history—problems which may, paradoxically, proliferate errors as they seek to correct prior mistakes. “The Progress of Error” traces a history of these fractious, recursive, debates about error correction and mediation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when editors, printers, and critics squabbled over the best means of preserving classical texts, Shakespeare, Milton, and early English ballads. I argue that the literary past is literally made of mistakes and attempts to correct them which go out of control; these errant corrections are not to be fixed in future editions but rather are constitutive of Enlightenment concepts of mediation, criticism, sensory perception, historicity, and agency. Editor and satirist Alexander Pope played both sides of the error correction and creation game, translating and editing texts at the same time as he reveled in satire’s distorting lens and its potential for correcting others’ moral and intellectual failings. Classical editor Richard Bentley, a target of Pope’s scourge in the first edition of the Dunciad, practiced extraordinary editorial hubris in insisting that he could conjecturally correct not just typos in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, but entire lines that he felt were blots on the poem’s design and style. Lewis Theobald followed Bentley’s intellectually provocative but over-reaching, bombastic style when he turned his scrutiny onto Pope’s editorial methods: his Shakespeare Restor’d was a method composed of broken lines and phrases as he animadverted on his rival’s work. Less sharp-tongued but even more ambitious, Thomas Percy undertook a gigantic editorial vision of composing a world history of poetry in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and related editorial projects, many of which were left unfinished: a hodgepodge of misprisioned scale and poetic scope. Correction’s effects thus extended beyond fixing a particular error in a poem or play; the protocols engendered new technologies of social behavior in print and new forms of mediating agency. I am fascinated by those printer’s errors and scanning glitches, those moments when mediation goes awry. Following Marshall McLuhan, media historians Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have used the term “remediation” to consider how digital technology refashions media across forms and genres. With McLuhan’s background in early modern literary criticism in mind, I adapt the term for the study of print technology. I fold in related meanings of remediation—to remedy a mistake, to intervene in a situation, to renovate a landscape—to describe an emergence of literary effects generated by the iterative interventions of textual error correction. I pay attention to editors’ critical vocabularies of mediating conjectures, surveying prospects, and sifting through reams of information. The same debates about errors in perception and transmission of knowledge which engaged Enlightenment philosophers such as Francis Bacon, George Berkeley and John Locke took place on the margins of pages as editors debated how to use these new tools of mediation. My dissertation historicizes and breaks down these protocols and interactions into their smallest radical units—errors—with the goal of theorizing how these procedures have come to constitute both objects of study and critical practices in the field of literary study. It is a meta-reflective experiment in mediating among fields of book history, media theory, experimental poetics and digital art, and disciplinary histories to ask questions about where we may go next.

abstract: This thesis focuses on the nine-page diary present in Ernest J. Gaines’, A Lesson Before Dying. The diary is the only real form of communication from Jefferson, a young African American man who was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. After being stripped of his manhood while on trial, it became a group effort to assist this man in regaining his manhood. In this thesis, the diary became the topic of focus and was examined to see why it had such an important role in the novel. Separated into three chapters, each looking at specific moments and people that helped the diary come to fruition. The first chapter focuses on key moments that helped influence the diary. The second chapter focuses specifically on the content of the diary and dissects the entries. Lastly, the third chapter focuses on the effects of the diary not on the main character but to those involved in his journey. Thus, the thesis becomes centered on answering why a nine-page chapter in the African American Vernacular English uncovered one’s manhood and ultimately defines his journey to death. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2019

Conversations with Ray Bradbury, edited by Steven Aggelis and published by the University Press of Mississippi in Spring 2004, is a collection of Ray Bradbury interviews from 1948 to 2002, with the last of these interviews being conducted by the editor. Besides the interviews, the university Press of Mississippi collection contains an introduction, chronology, and index. This dissertation includes and supplements the published work. Although the interviews in the published collection appear in the hard-copy of the dissertation, along with other interviews not in the University Press of Mississippi collection, they are excluded from the electronic copy, due to copyright restrictions. However, the electronic version does contain the following additional dissertation material: the unabridged introduction; chronology; two Bradbury interviews by Steven Aggelis, including the published interview and one not previously released; an annotated bibliography of published interviews with Ray Bradbury that consists of interviews selected for the collection as well as entries and excerpts from others not chosen; and an exhaustive bibliography of Bradbury primary and secondary sources, i.e., works by and about the author and his writings. The interviews reveal Bradbury's recurring interest in science, an appeal to and reliance on emotion versus reason, censorship and tyranny, urban planning, comics and cartoons, death, education, Hollywood, love or passion as a creative force, magic, outer space, morality, myth, philosophy, politics, psychology, racial relations, technology, sex, the economy, the future, the horror genre, films, the media, the use of metaphor, war, writing and writers, religion, and more. / 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, 2003. / Date of Defense: September 22, 2003. / Ray Bradbury, Conversations, Interviews / Includes bibliographical references. / R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Professor Directing Dissertation; Leo Sandon, Outside Committee Member; William T. Lhamon, Jr., Committee Member; Joseph McElrath, Jr., Committee Member.

The Wheels of Heaven, a noir fable, chronicles the adventures of a man after he loses the one thing he cares about most, his wife. Combining the determinism of a Fritz Lang movie with the revenge themes found in samurai stories, it affirms the idea that good prevails. Sooner or later, no matter the odds, good always prevails. / 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, 2004. / Date of Defense: October 13, 2004. / Detective, mystery, novel / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Dissertation; Ernest Rehder, Outside Committee Member; Deborah Coxwell Teague, Committee Member; Douglas Fowler, Committee Member.