Through an application of Kenneth Burke's theory of dramatism, my study identifies in the first-person shooter (FPS) game genre what I call visual tropes: the repeated use of specific visual situations to provide cues and instruction to the player audience. Like Burke's own examinations of stage drama, I analyze the scene/agent, scene/act, and scene/agency ratios in these games in order to begin a discussion of their effects on player identification, motivation, and interaction in game space. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2008. / March 26, 2008. / Rhetoric, First Person Shooter, Burke, Dramatism, Pentad, Visual, Image, Motivation, Video Games / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Yancey, Professor Directing Thesis; Phil Steinberg, Outside Committee Member; Kristie Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Michael Neal, Committee Member.

This dissertation is a collection of sixty-four pages of original poetry. The poems in this collection reflect the poet's interest in playing with language, invention, and a variety of approaches and forms. They are predominantly a combination of the lyric and the narrative, are written in form such as sonnet, pantoum, and sestina; many are free verse, and a few are experimental. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2004. / March 3, 2004. / Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Virgil Suarez, Professor Directing Dissertation; Anita Gonzalez, Outside Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member.

Look at My Sky is a collection of poems that expresses the value of living, the need we have to be heard, loved and understood. These pictures on the inside walls of a moment evoke emotion, celebrate the human spirit, and give voice to things we are afraid to say. These moments live a lifetime in their brief passing, their flight across the sky when they burn brightest; become alive and worth remembering—they are the reasons we think and love and feel and change more than we did before. We become witness to ourselves when ordinary becomes extraordinary, when the moment makes it so. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / April 16, 2003. / Expresses The Value Of Li, Collection Of Poems / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Thesis; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member.

This work is a collection of five short stories, each of which deal in some way with romantic love. This is not to say that these are all typical "love stories," wherein characters pursue each other in various ways for the purpose of coming together happily in the end. Instead, characters try to navigate their own feelings and the feelings of others—with awareness levels ranging from hyper-sensitivity to total obliviousness—and often end up in situations more dire than those in which they started. I explore an experience of first love in "They'll Never Really Be Saved," the only story in the collection that features a male protagonist. In this story, I have tried to bring out the strangeness of realizing romantic feelings for the first time at a very young age. I continue with the idea of first love in "A Meeting at the Old Dead End," a story set in western Pennsylvania in the 1930's. This story was inspired by a series of Depression-era photographs taken by German documentary photographers Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth. At this time in America, the intersection of union and labor law development with the business interests and practices of corporations often resulted in a dangerous clash. "Caroline in the Tunnel of Love" also takes place in the past, but the romantic tension blooms from the choices of the characters, rather than the circumstances of history. It is here when love begins to go wrong, specifically for Bonnie, the young protagonist. Bonnie is forced to revise her definitions of love and relationships after troubling incident with her boyfriend and a strange friendship with an elderly friend of the family. The idea of one revising her ideas about love and relationships surfaces often in this collection; similar themes occur in both "Summer of Diane" and "The Shipswallower." The protagonists of each, as in all of the stories in the collection, must wrestle with their developing feelings. However, it is not just the newness that the characters must deal with; they reflect, and act, reflect, and must act again. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2005. / April 8, 2005. / The James River, Coney Island, Playland / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Thesis; Ned Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Mark Winegardner, Committee Member.

The following dissertation is a collection of poetry that, in large part, reveals the narrative of Zinnie Lucas, a fictional character set among historical events in my family's past. The poems are told from the point of view (sometimes in first person, sometime with the second-person "you") of Zinnie. The collection begins with letters, composed beyond the grave, written to Zinnie from her murdered father. At the beginning of the manuscript's main sequence, the second section, Zinnie lives in the Guyandotte River valley of West Virginia in 1888, about the same time as the beginning of the Hatfield and McCoy feud of legend. The Guyandotte River valley is located several miles north of the Levisa fork where much of the killing of the Hatfields and McCoys took place. However, Zinnie's story is not a retelling of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict, but of similar, less-publicized violence. Shortly after the sequence begins, 15 year old Zinnie's father is shot by Paris Brumfield, a member of a chronically violent family in the area. Many of the poems deal with Zinnie's grief over her father's death, and her contemplation of her future without him. At the time of the murder, Zinnie is the oldest daughter. Zinnie's widowed mother, pregnant with her fifth child, attempts to avenge her husband's death. After nearly shooting the wrong man, she makes plans for her family to escape the violent area. During the spring floods, while logs from the timber boom are being sent down river, Zinnie's mother loads her children onto a raft and floats with them more than 50 miles to the city of Huntington at the confluence of the Guyandotte and Ohio rivers. The sequence follows the Lucases' attempts to integrate into city life, and, eventually, the remarriage of Zinnie's mother. After a short departure, the fourth section titled "Revisitation" adds further detail to the historical-fictional narrative laid out in the abecedarium sequence of the second section. The third section, "A Short History of the Future," departs from the 19th century; it is a selection of lyric poems told from the perspective of a young Appalachian woman in the 20th and 21st centuries. This section of "ancillary" poems gives the book a greater historical arc while still speaking to many of the Zinnie sequence's themes: childbirth, death, and an attempt to reconcile sexuality with a fundamentally religious upbringing. The final section of the book, a short series of erasures of the first section's epistles, returns to the voice of Zinnie's father, as the memory of his life and murder begins to fade. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2008. / March 19, 2008. / Poetry, 19th Century, West Virginia, Appalachia / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Nicholas Mazza, Outside Committee Member; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member.

Sequent Introduction is a rejection of Richard Rorty's assertion that traditional philosophical problems are no longer of use. This text is strong poetry, introducing new vocabularies and metaphors to redescribe traditional philosophical problems and renew their usefulness for contemporary pragmatists. Relying heavily on both form as well as content, to invoke formal rhetorical and analytical traditions, this thesis will borrow its form from formal symbolic logic. The arc of the work will imitate a symbolic logic problem by using the theme of sequent introduction: if one has a given problem or sequent that has already been proven, one can introduce that sequent into the problem provided there is an equal substitution of variables. That sequent then becomes a unique but applicable rule to "shortcut" an excessively long proof. The work is divided into five sections that re-interrogate traditional philosophical problems: eudaimonia, or happiness; aletheia, or truth; flesh; It, or the Other; and finally Logos, or rationality. As the individual poems within each section test, play with, and offer potential solutions to that section's primary concern, the sections themselves offer a serious consideration of the value of the traditional philosophical question at hand. As a result, each short section functions on its own as a short completed logic problem. Though the sections are substantially different in both form as well as content, each section is then a proven sequent, which, when used in context with the other sections, constructs a positive answer to the problem of whether traditional philosophical problems can be remade useful. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Summer Semester, 2007. / July 6, 2007. / Experiential, Flesh, Poems, Poetry, Pragmatism, Science, It, Happiness / Includes bibliographical references. / James Kimbrell, Professor Directing Thesis; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member.

In Hard Facts, Amiri Baraka's first volume of Marxist poetry, the poem "When We'll Worship Jesus" catalogues the poet's disillusionment and ambivalence about accepting religion as a possible weapon to combat racial and economic injustice. Baraka writes: capitalists racistsimperialists not afraidof jesus shit they makin moneyoff jesus […]jesus aint did nothing for usbut kept us turned toward thesky (him and his boy allahtoo, need to be checkdout!) (251-252) Aside from his insistence on the inability of Christianity to positively influence the political realm ("capitalists racists / imperialists not afraid / of jesus"), Baraka reveals the power of subjugation that religion holds over the politically and socially disenfranchised since its inception into mainstream culture by the culturally and economically elite: we aint gonna worship jesus cause jesus dont exist […] except inslum stainedtears or trillion dollar opulence stretching back in history, thehistoryof the oppression of the human mind (253) For Baraka, Christian religion is just another slave-system—an instrument of economic subjugation that forces the lower classes to view their subservient status as natural and sanctioned by a higher, abstract form. "Beginnings: Malcolm" from his most recent volume of poetry, Somebody Blew Up America reveals the origins of the devil in Western capitalistic systems: When the Beast emerged from the western sea […]he had no soul, and they'd created money, the animal king, the coin, the khan,the con, hard currency (3) The Beast's origin in "the western sea" accounts for Baraka's view of capitalism as an instrument of evil designed to oppress the lower economic classes. Capitalism is also posited as a residual element of the West-African slave trade. Just like slavery, religion keeps "us turned toward the sky," constantly promoting submission to the cultural elite. In this way religion advocates "slum stained tears" and the creation of cultural martyrs that view oppression and pain as a viable and necessary part of the social order. Baraka also maintains that the bourgeoisie and its "trillion dollar opulence" advocate these oppressive systems in order to limit social mobility and ensure the continued exploitation of the lower classes and the continued dominance of the cultural elite. Baraka's attention to economic striation and the burdens of capitalistic systems in his Third-World Marxist phase seems to inform his recent adoption of religious imagery to delineate the difference between the oppressor and the oppressed—the predator and the prey. To the extent that world religions—particularly Christianity—do not address class difference and the liberation of subjugated peoples, Baraka maintains an overt aversion to their embrace of victimization as a vehicle to attain abstract notions of comfort in otherwise oppressive capitalistic systems. But while Baraka is quick to point the finger at Christianity for its complicity in maintaining the status quo, he does not go so far as to identify exact points of reference for his criticisms. Rather, he often concerns himself with vague attacks and incomplete evaluations of Christianity's influence on the motion of world history. He is also quick to associate the Roman Catholic Church—the main beacon of Christian philosophy prior to the reformation—with other post-reformation sects that each harbored distinct beliefs regarding the ownership of slaves and the ability of the lower-classes to ascend the social and economic ladder. Tracing Baraka's beliefs about the inability of Christianity to address the potential liberation of subjugated peoples globally, one must inevitably conclude that his assessments are based on very broad, subjective situations and outcomes. As an artist, Baraka has the unique ability to ask certain questions and reach certain conclusions without resorting to scientific methods of evaluation, which may, if they are employed properly, lend credibility to his assessments. But Baraka is neither concerned with an objective class analysis or with positing a true scientific theorem within the existing body of cultural studies. His concerns are steeped within an artistic platform that utilizes emotionalism and spontaneous shock values in order to posit the inevitable decline of Christianity and its lack of a true scientific base. To reach such conclusions within a constantly shifting subjectivity such as Baraka's is to inevitably undermine the entire enterprise, but Baraka's views on Christianity should not be side-stepped or written off as the incoherent ramblings of a reactionary. His beliefs are steeped within an expanding body of historical data and are, for the most part, in accordance with the ebb and flow of modern history, despite his tendency to fracture or reduce certain historical points into easy-to-digest—and sometimes skewed—vantage points. But with regard to Baraka's belief that Christianity lacks the capacity to tangibly improve the life of subjugated peoples, we must lend an open ear. His work takes us on a ride through the ups and downs of modern history in order to show us the true face of modern religious movements and their tendency to subjugate peoples and resort to violence as a manifestation of the prophet's message. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of the Arts. / Summer Semester, 2007. / July 23, 2007. / Amiri Baraka, Baraka, African-American Literature, Black Literature, Counter culture, Art, Poetry, Prose, Drama / Includes bibliographical references. / Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Thesis; Christopher Shinn, Committee Member; Jerrilyn McGregory, Committee Member.

Previous second language studies (Benati, 2004; Buck, 2000; Cadierno, 1995) have shown Processing Instruction (VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993a) to be successful in altering L2 learners' incorrect processing strategies. Studies conducted from the Input Processing perspective (VanPatten, 2004) have found that English learners of French incorrectly assign direct object nouns/pronouns as subject nouns/pronouns and confuse who is doing the action to whom. Heilenman & McDonald (1993a) suggest that teaching dislocation can help these learners to rely less on word order and more on clitic pronouns. Input Processing as well as other research (Harrington, 1992; MacWhinney, 2005; Mikaye & Friedman, 1998) suggests that working memory plays an important role in L2 acquisition. In this study, I evaluate the effect of instruction type on altering L2 processing strategies and the influence of working memory on instruction type. Second and third semester French students received either Processing Instruction (PI), Traditional Instruction (TI), or no instruction. Those receiving instruction learned about dislocation while the PI group also learned how to interpret OVS, OSV and SOV strings. The two instructional groups practiced what they had learned through oral and written activities: structured input activities for the PI group and mechanical and meaningful drills for the TI group. Each participant also did an in-class reading span test, and was classified as having a higher or a lower working memory capacity. Success of the instructional types was operationalized by the scores of an immediate and a delayed posttest. Results indicate that the PI group did better on the interpretation task while the TI group scored higher on the production task. Participants performed as they had been taught. In addition, learners with certain cognitive resources did not benefit from one type of instruction over the other. Those with higher working memory scored higher than those with lower working memory on both tasks. These results do not support other Processing Instruction findings because the PI group was not as successful as the TI group on the production task. They do, however, support previous working memory research and indicate that working memory plays a role in both comprehension and production activities. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2007. / February 19, 2007. / Processing Instruction, L2 Learning, Working Memory / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen Sunderman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Leigh Edwards, Outside Committee Member; Michael Leeser, Committee Member; William Cloonan, Committee Member.

This thesis opens for speculation the idea, largely neglected in scholarly research to this date, that women were instrumental in creating and administering the basic and complex magical/medical procedures in Anglo-Saxon society, not just for themselves and their children, but also for their husbands, male relatives, neighbors, and friends. It begins with an in-depth study of the position of Anglo-Saxon women in their culture, and continues with an examination first of the childbirth charms and then of the other charms within this context. I hope to show strong evidence for the possibility that Anglo-Saxon women, unlike American women, were active, if not primary, initiators and extractors of their system of health care. That women's history is often seen as a niche of medieval history is addressed, and the argument that an integrated perspective that acknowledges that medieval society consisted of women and men is called for. Though it seems that comprehensive works about the metrical charms have been accomplished, the works lack any real consideration of the part women played in medicine. A line or footnote admitting that there is no real reason to believe that women did not participate in the charms' creation or administration is not enough, for it does not truly attempt to consider the perspective of women. This is the task I have attempted to undertake. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / June 18, 2003. / Feminine Tradition Of Medical Wisdom / Includes bibliographical references. / David Johnson, Professor Directing Thesis; Marcy North, Committee Member; Eugene Crook, Committee Member.

After a messy divorce, Jeff moves to Hawaii to escape his pain and to start afresh. Running cannot stop the flood of emotions and memories, as he soon finds. He meets a beautiful young stripper who accepts him as he is, but his chronically poor selfesteem and self image lead him to make some of the same mistakes that spelled the downfall of his marriage. The sexuality of the women of his life, past and present, begin to conflate and Jeff begins to punish himself for his frailties. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Art. / Summer Semester, 2003. / July 9, 2003. / Short Story / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Committee Member.