Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 10, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Thesis advisor: Dr. Kevin Wise. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 2002. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-125).

This thesis is about a problem of interest to reading theorists, psychological anthropologists and cultural studies researchers alike: why we find some narratives, plots, and images compelling and what this phenomenon can tell us about the cultural bases of human motivation. Gesturing to the interdependence of emotion, cognition, and motivation, the notion of the '(dis)positioned self' is proposed as a conceptual tool by which to address how motivation is both acquired and expressed in the way the self as 'feeling-mind' reads, that is, negotiates an interpretation of the signifying systems of a text to render it personally meaningful. (Dis)position allows us to overcome the sociocultural determinism of French structuralist and some poststructuralist reductions of the self to a precipitate of cultural constructs by reconceptualizing the interpreting self as an embodied, affective agent who employs unconscious knowledge that itself draws on another form of sociality. On this account, reading performance is culturally informed action and interpretations are motivated. Emotion is introduced as symptomatic of the intrapsychic investments which mediate how readers internalize cultural knowledge. The thesis looks at three soundings from social discourse--Janice Radway's Reading the Romance; The Singing Detective, a contemporary metafictional text; and the literature and group therapy practices associated with the codependency movement--in order to examine how presuppositions about emotion and the psychical reality of fantasy appear in cultural representations of the 'ill self as reader' while being fundamental to psychological notions of the self upon which healing practices themselves depend for their efficacy.

This dissertation demonstrates how poetry about Appalachia expanded American considerations of democracy, ethnicity, and cultural values. I argue that poetry is profoundly communal in its construction and investigate how the value of poetry changes based upon its transfer through varying networks of production, circulation, and reception. Informed by theories of cultural capital and rhetoric, the chapters trace three books of poetry from their composition and publication to their reception and influence, noting how central political and social institutions and individuals shaped that process. The dissertation establishes how the poets crafted their writing to sway specific interpretive communities attitudes on pluralism. In Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937), James Still sang about the erosion of the quiet earth for the liberal, middleclass readers of The Atlantic. In U. S. 1 (CoviciFriede, 1938), Muriel Rukeyser wrote about the deaths of migrant and African-American miners, the Spanish Civil War, and the threat of fascism for popular-front readers of The New Republic, Poetry, and the New Masses. In Clods of Southern Earth (Boni and Gaer, 1946), Don West catalyzed resistance in an interracial readership of southern (and mountain) sharecroppers and factory workers. In each case, the complex interrelations between history, authors, and readers show their mutually transformative effects on pluralism. Within American pluralism from1900 to 1948, my work reveals the vital relations between established ethnicitiesAfrican-American, Jewish, Anglo, American Indian, and Southernand Appalachia. My account follows the concrete connections of pluralism from Plessy vs. Fergusons judicial theory of racial purity, through a cultural pluralism based on national origins during WWI, to the Harlem Renaissance, and ends with an examination of regional pluralism in the 1930s. Appalachia was then often understood as preserving remnants of a premodern America, and the authors about whom I write used it to authenticate the values of community, which they felt to be endangered by the threats of modern dissociation, industrial exploitation, and fascist culture. Through close readings of poems in the three books, I establish Appalachias role in the discourse of modern American pluralismthe poetics of region and race.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Submitted to the Dept. of English. Adviser: John M. Fyler. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-196). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Scott Romine; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 31, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-178).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-163). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-163). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (MA)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2010. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert Bennett. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 63).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 Jun 10.