This thesis explores Hogg's interpretation of indeterminacy both throughout his career and in Justified Sinner, especially in the character Gil-Martin. Hogg seems to reject the tradition of choosing one side over another in such a dichotomy, and instead chooses to look at both extremes as equally co-present. Hogg wrote Justified Sinner within the framework of the literary Gothic tradition and used Gothic tropes to create ambiguity throughout his novel, as is the case throughout his body of works. Many of the ambiguities in Justified Sinner center on the character Gil-Martin. My interpretation of Gil-Martin's ambiguity complicates the traditional scholarship on Justified Sinner. / Master of Arts

A self-educated shepherd, Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) spoke from a position outside the dominant discourse, depicting issues of his age related to gender, class, and ethnicity by giving voice to people from the margins and, thus (either consciously or unconsciously), revealing gender politics and Britain's imperial aims. Hogg’s contemporary critics received his work rather negatively, viewing his subjects such as prostitution, out-of-wedlock-pregnancy, infanticide, and the violence of war as violating the principles of literary politeness. Hogg’s obstinacy in addressing these issues, however, supports the thesis that his aim was far more significant than challenging the expectations of his contemporary readers. This project shows that pragmatics can be applied productively to literature because its eclecticism offers the possibility of developing a detailed discussion about three aspects of literary communication—the author, the reader and the text—without prioritising any of them. Literature is an instance of language in use (the field of pragmatics) where an author creates the texts and a reader recreates the author’s message through the text. Analysis of Hogg’s flouting of Grice’s maxims for communication strategies and of his defying the principles of politeness enables a theoretically supported discussion about Hogg’s possible intentions, as well as about how his intentions were perceived by the literary establishment of his time; while both relevance theory and Bakhtin’s socio-linguistics enriched by a historically contextualised politeness shed new light on the negative reception of Hogg’s texts.

This ethnographic analysis of the social and physical effects of Hurricane Ike in Galveston, Texas and the consequent recovery that emerged afterward is based on 20 months of field research conducted immediately before and after the storm’s landfall. The introductory chapter locates the ethnographer just prior to the hurricane as he prepared for an unexpected evacuation. It then presents the conceptual framework for a multi-sited ethnography of “disaster culture” and introduces analytic keywords of “vulnerability,” “resilience,” “dreamworlds,” and “catastrophe.” It concludes by discussing a set of historical and contemporary socio-economic conditions in Galveston. This provides a frame of reference of both the social formations of storm experiences and the public recovery dynamics that attended with Ike’s aftermath that are discussed throughout the text. This is further supplemented with an explanation of Ike’s flooding and the geographic distribution of storm damage. Chapter two begins with an ethnographic vignette of the first townhall meeting held in Galveston after Ike. This introduces several recurrent topics of concern that were formative of disaster-culture dynamics. It then provides a literature review of the anthropology of disaster before segueing into a presentation of storm narratives. It ends with an analysis that further elaborates on the formative dynamics of Galvestonian disaster culture. Chapter three provides an analysis of the public deliberations that emerged over long-term redevelopment initiatives; particularly, the advocacy practices of a faith-based consortium; advocacy on behalf of restoring the University of Texas Medical Branch; the public Long Term Recovery Committee, and a FEMA buyout program that benefited higher income property owners on the western end of the island. The fourth chapter provides an extended case study concerning the rebuilding of 569 units of public housing that were subsequently destroyed after the hurricane. The rebuilding of public housing became the most vitriolic public issue during the course of fieldwork. The concluding chapter invokes the concepts of “dreamworlds” and “catastrophe” used by historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin to show the processual dynamics between the initial hopes for collectively strengthening Galveston through federally funded redevelopment and the increasingly negative assessments of the city’s long-term urban fortunes. / text

The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and its serialized prequel “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” and James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

English abstract To understand why the doppelgänger, or the phenomenon of double personality, developed such literary presence in the fin-de-siècle Victorian Britain we must look to the dramatic social changes which had taken place since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as well as to the nascent science of psychology and its preoccupation with the subconscious in relation to consciousness. The doppelgänger typically emerges where one component of personality is suppressed due to supra-individual requirements and expectations. The doppelgänger is, therefore, closely linked to its environment. It is not so much a literary figure as an intense dialectical relationship between two sides of personality. The doppelgänger frequently constitutes a flight from the conscience, which in itself is a social construct. Both Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray are fully conscious of the possibilities open to them through their alter egos - they may ignore the dictates of the public opinion as well as other institutions whose goal is effect a certain degree of conformity in society. The doppelgänger enables the subject to realise its unconscious ambitions. The doppelgänger may also be analysed in the context of the artist and their creation. Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward and Dorian's portrait, leaving aside...

These three studies use two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to investigate the influence of parents’ religious commitment and involvement on children’s internalizing and externalizing problems over time. In addition, the analyses will examine of different forms of family instability and parenting practices mediates this relationship. Furthermore, does parental religiosity moderate the relationship between instability and children’s mental health problems? The first study shows that children whose parents are both religiously unaffiliated, exhibit elevated internalizing problems compared to children from mixed-faith households. Evangelical Protestant affiliation moderated the relationship between parents’ frequent arguments and internalizing problems. In addition, children whose mothers are more theologically conservative than the fathers show elevated levels of internalizing problems. In addition, theological dissimilarity (mothers more conservative) plays a moderating role between frequent arguments and internalizing problems. The second study shows that children from religiously homogamous households, exhibit lower than average externalizing problems. In addition, fathers’ religious involvement protects their children from externalizing problems, even when accounting for various forms of family instability and parenting practices. Furthermore, children whose mothers are more theologically conservative than fathers, show elevated levels of some externalizing problems. Structural equation modeling analyses show that parents’ socioeconomic status is related to parental religious dissimilarity, parental divorce and parental praise of children. When mothers are more theologically conservative than fathers, these couples are at higher likelihood of frequent parental arguments. As a consequence, their children are at an elevated likelihood of difficulty concentrating, internalizing problems, and externalizing problems. Frequency of parental arguments is also positively related to divorce. If high conflict marriages end, children are at a reduced likelihood of externalizing problems. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. / text

This dissertation examines the process of using oral history and digital video to revise interpretation and represent more inclusive histories at three rural Texas historic sites—-Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, the Lyndon Baines Johnson State Park, and Varner-Hogg Plantation—-21st century sites that, to varying degrees, have persisted to interpret a Texas master narrative that is no longer socially tolerable in its silencing of marginalized Texas voices. In particular, the dissertation focuses on complicated and rarely discussed ethical issues that surfaced during my work from 2001 to 2006 shooting, editing, and situating interpretive documentary videos at the each of the three sites. Historic sites in Texas, like others across the United States and worldwide, have been receiving increasing pressure from scholars and community groups to represent women, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups more prominently in the narratives they interpret. Oral history and digital media have played key roles in this ongoing movement. Oral history has widely been touted as a tool to democratize history, and advocates of digital video interpretation cite its affordability, relative ease of use, and its ability to “say so much in so little time.” These factors are all the more compelling for local, regional, and state-wide historic sites that are chronically under-funded, under-staffed, and that must often interpret multiple, complicated narratives with very little time or space in which to present them. However, little has been done to explore the unique and complicated ethical issues that arise from using oral history and digital video at historic sites. This dissertation takes a case study approach and uses as its intellectual framework ideas of reflective practice, part of the contemporary discourse among public history practitioners. Each case study introduces the site through a critical analysis of the images and texts produced by the site; presents the central historical silence at each site; describes the solution that oral history and digital video interpretation was expected to provide; and then uses the project’s process-generated video footage and records to examine key situations that led me to raise ethical questions about the individual projects and the overall enterprise. / text

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In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language. / text

This study explores the western Romantic period as a transition between the medieval “open body” and the modern “closed body.” It focuses on “closing body” phenomena such as “mesmerism” (i.e. animal magnetism), somnambulism, substance abuse, and the “second-self,” including notions of the subconscious and the trope of gothic Doppelgängers. This study draws from many pieces of western Romantic literature but is most centered around James Hogg’s 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This new reading of Hogg’s novel suggests a core theme of body anxiety, rather than theological dispute.