The period of 1919 to 1939 was a significant one for the development of the literature of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The literary work produced in the region prior to the first world war was greatly influenced by the "Genteel tradition" of the late nineteenth century. By 1939, however, the literature of Oregon and the region had emerged from the outdated literary standards of the pre-war period and had found a new, realistic, natural voice, strongly regional in nature and rooted in the modern American tradition.

For several reasons Dos Passos is important to the development of American literature. His novels, with their integrity, breadth, and architectonic form, are painted on a larger canvas than any other American writers. In Manhattan Transfer, his fourth novel, he attempted to portray the greatest metropolis in the world, New York City. He succeeded as well as anyone ever has. Then, refusing to rest on his cars, he went on to the trilogy U. S. A., which takes all of twentieth century American life as its subject. This is Dos Passos' epic of modern Americanlife, the most successful of the many attempts to write the "great American novel". So the vert scope and excellence of Dos Passos' novels demand consideration Then there are technical innovations--tentative in Manhattan Transfer, thoroughgoing in U. S. A.--which have added dimensions to the American novel. Some of these are entirely original, some stem from James Joyce's Ulysses. Yet even the borrowed devices have been completely assimilated. These new techniques arose partly because of the feeling that naturalism gave an inadequate picture of all aspects of humanity. And, as the critic Edmund Wilson has shown, Joyce met this problem by a synthesis of the two French literary methods, symbolism and naturalism. Now Dos Passos has introduced this symbolism-naturalism into American literature. And he has democratized the experimental techniques; Joyce is read mainly by literary experts; Dos Passos can be read by anyone. If, as some believe, the importance of this amalgamation of symbolism and naturalism lies in the future, then Dos Passos will be remembered as the first American writer to use it. While Dos Passos has always been in the vanguard, his relations with his generation have been intimate and pervasive. In many ways he is more typical of his generation than any other significant writer. The Zeitgeist of the War generation is fundamental to all his books. He is both a result and a cause of America's coming of age--and the defeat of neo-Humanism. Even the development of his political ideas has in many ways paralleled the ideas of other writers, For instance, his disillusionment in the radical parties contained in Adventures of a Young (1939) came to nearly all writers later in the same year with the Russian-German pact, Thus, though Dos Passos was an innovator, neither his internal development as an artist nor his contribution to American literature can be understood except in the context of his age. This is to be, then, a study of the interrelations between Dos Passos' personal philosophy, objectives, and techniques and the influence of the Zeitgeist on them.

This thesis examines Henry David Thoreau’s relationships with New England-based authors, publishers, and natural scientists, and their influences on his composition and professional development. The study highlights Thoreau’s collaboration with figures such as John Thoreau, Jr., William Ellery Channing II, Horace Greeley, and a number of correspondents and natural scientists. The study contends that Thoreau was a sociable and professionally competent author who relied not only on other major Transcendentalists, but on members from an array of intellectual communities at all stages of his career.

More than a decade has passed since the United States Supreme Court made its historic decision in Lau v. Nichols on January 21, 1974. Ruling in favor of the non-English-speaking Chinese plaintiffs, the Court upheld earlier guidelines established by the office for Civil Rights for school districts with more than five percent national origin-minority group children. In delivering the Court's opinion, Justice Douglas reiterated these words of J. Stanley Pottinger, former director of OCR:

An examination of Graham Greene, his writing, and its relationship with Catholic teachings through an anaylsis of the Catholicity of his characters.

Divination is a trope Cormac McCarthy employs time and again in his work. Augury, haruspicy, cartomancy, voodoo, sortition and oneiromancy all take their places in the texts, overtly or otherwise, as well as divination by bloodshed (a practice so ubiquitous as to have no formal name). But mantic practices which aim at an understanding of the divine mind prove problematic in a universe that often appears godless—or worse. My thesis uses divination as the starting point for a close reading of each of McCarthy’s novels. Research into Babylonian, Greek, Roman and African soothsaying practices is included, as well as the insights of a number of McCarthy scholars. But the work of extra-­‐literary scholars—philologists, Jungian psychologists, cultural anthropologists and religious historians whose works explore the origins of human violence and the spiritual impulse—is also invoked to shed light on McCarthy’s evolving perspective.

When Tennessee Department of Education adopted Common Core in 2010, Tennessee implemented New Critical ideas associated with the college classroom, but did not present this connection to English teachers. Comparing high school education reforms like A Nation at Risk (1983) and TNCore to the New Critical works of Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, reveals that New Criticism is the literary method grounding current ELA education reform. Referencing Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), Diana Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), and questionnaires completed by Tennessee teachers, this study tracks New Criticism’s influence from the college classroom to the high school classroom. Presenting English teachers the history behind what and how they teach will equip them to explain their methodology to students.

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror by the Aikins. This thesis offers a method of tracking the Gothic as a consistently middle-class genre throughout history, and it ends with a chapter that questions the continued relevance of the Gothic as a middle-class genre in a world where the division of wealth is so skewed.

A collection of poetry.

<p>This thesis analyzes the impact of the Dark Age of comics on Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles, specifically arguing that the traditional superhero figure enacts a certain narrative violence on the characters and text itself, both through direct violence and in the limiting of potential narratives. The first chapter establishes The Invisibles’ contemporary comic tropes, establishing Dark Age superheroes as an exceptionalist figures who use extreme violence to separate themselves from a perceived corrupt society. As such, this thesis moves from a psychoanalytic approach to heroism towards a schizoanalytic approach found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how similar cycles of pathologization found in their critique of psychoanalysis also apply to The Invisibles’ attempt to innoculate itself against its own sensationalized violence. In doing so, the series eventually purges itself of the hero’s underlying ideological violences and attempts to actualize a Morrison’s own notions of utopia through the medium of comics, valuing multiplicities and the production of narratives to inform the experience of reality over a limitation of narratives based on violent conflict.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)