The research examines the development of women's prison writing through the journal of the Kingston Prison for Women, Tightwire. The journal enabled the prisoners to articulate their experience of prison for themselves as a specific subject-group, as women and as legal subjects. The research connects the prison writing to alterations in legal discourse which reflect the emergence of women as a specific group. The prison writings suggest that extra-legal discourse transforms legal discourse and practice. The appendix includes a selection of poems and comments from Tightwire .

The first purpose of the present study was to determine whether the duration of preschool children's drawing and writing activity could be increased by introducing the process of dictation and dramatization of children's own stories. The second purpose of this study was to determine whether taking dictation from preschool children and facilitating the dramatization of children's dictations had an impact on print awareness. Samples of convenience were selected from a child care center in a small midwestern city. Results were based on the participation of 16 3- to 5-year-old children in the intervention group and 21 3- to 5-year-old children in the control group.Each participant's print awareness level was measured at the beginning and end of the study using the Print Awareness Test (Huba & Kontos, 1986). Videorecordings were made of the activity that occurred at a designated writing table. The duration of each child's writing and drawing activity was recorded (in seconds). For three hours a week during the eight weeks of the treatment period, children in the treatment group were encouraged to dictate their own individual stories to an adult who wrote their stories and read the stories back to the children. During the last four weeks of the treatment period, children in the treatment group also were encouraged to dramatize their own stories.The findings of the study were:1. A significant difference in children's print awareness was found in both the treatment and control groups (p<.05). There was no difference in print awareness change scores between the treatment and control groups.2. There was a moderate positive correlation (.471) between the number of stories dictated during the first four weeks of intervention and changes in print awareness scores within the treatment group.3. There was no significant difference between the control and treatment groups in the duration of writing and drawing at the end of the study. However, within the treatment group, during the time children were dictating and dramatizing their own stories, the duration of writing and drawing was significantly greater than either before or after intervention. / Department of Elementary Education

My dissertation concentrates on Americans writing at home and abroad in the inter-war period and contextualizes their expatriation with reference to debates between modernist critics over the nature and substance of the American literary tradition. I clarify the definitions of terms like "exile," "emigrant," and "expatriate" central to my analysis but muddied by years of misuse. I do so with reference to coercion, a concept which I develop in accordance with recent work in the philosophy of action. At the same time I make the case for a realist, causalist hermeneutics. Next I explore the aesthetic corollary to my argument with reference to the fiction, autobiography, and literary criticism of Gertrude Stein. I argue that Stein's decision to leave America must be viewed as uncoerced, and as therefore indicative of her emigration to France. Viewed as an emigrant, and not as an exile or expatriate, Stein can be shown to manifest tendencies in her work (towards subjectivity, abstraction, and retrospection) which reflect her dissociation from, rather than ongoing connection to, America. Lastly, I look closely at the work of Van Wyck Brooks and Harold Stearns, two modernist literary and culture critics whose writings on expatriation demonstrably influenced generations of subsequent biographers and intellectual historians. Steams and Brooks can be counted among the most articulate and vociferous proponents of literary change in America, and can be situated at the poles of a vigorous debate within the literary community of their day over whether American letters were better served from within or without the United States. I contrast Brooks' civic humanism with Steams' rugged individualism and identify in the debate over expatriation a powerful analogue to ongoing debates in literary and cultural critical circles referred to as "the culture wars."

This thesis is grounded in philosophy and in literature. It is concerned with the recognized human need for self-affirmation and with the consequences of its denial caused by exile. For the victim this means the loss of social interaction and public moral agency within his natural community through which self-affirmation can be actualized. / In certain types of exilic literature constructive reactions were found to counteract this loss of freedom of choice of action and place, which entails potential annihilation of the exile's personal integrity. / In the exilic text of Dante as my chosen case study, I investigate the use of philosophical and literary means admitting of various kinds of self-referential expressions and of similacra of moral agency as substitutes for self-affirmation by public acts. Stimulated by these means, an intellectual and moral 'self-portrait' of the poet eventually emerges in the reader's consciousness. This 'portrait' is no static image of a pre-existent character, but a dynamic presence of an evolving human person of intellectual and moral integrity, as a reflection of the poet's self-perception. / By sample analyses and comparisons, my exposition substantiates the claim that Dante's text exemplifies the distinct and identifiable literary mode to which I refer as 'Exilic Discourse'.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of French and Italian, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Adviser: Sonia Hofkosh. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-310). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-122).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 1999. / Examines the work of five 18th century poets: Mary Collier, Mary Leopor, Elizabeth Hands, Ann Cromartie Yearsley and Janet Little--Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 216-228). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Merrill Swain.

Thesis (M.A.(Hons.)) -- University of Western Sydney, 2002. / "M.A. (Hons.) Communication and Media, 2002, University of Western Sydney"