This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create them. The fourth chapter is composed of three case studies of Bresland’s work in an attempt to analyze the continuing evolution and breadth of the form.

This paper evaluates whether students’ perceptions of Appalachian English improve through a method of instruction that uses dialect literature in the classroom. Most existing methods of instruction tend to portray dialects as wrong, incorrect, or in some way less rule-governed than Standardized English, despite the numerous studies that have demonstrated otherwise (e.g., Labov 1969, Wolfram 1986). The data from this study derives from two groups of students enrolled in introductory composition and communication at the University of Kentucky. Each group is given a pre-test to determine attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standardized English. An experimental group is then exposed to a method that incorporates texts that use Appalachian English features, while no specific dialect literature is included in the control group. After the conclusion of the lessons, students in both groups complete a post-test used to analyze whether their perceptions of Appalachian English changed throughout the study. The experimental method results in significant increases in several of the attitude measures for Appalachian English, while the students that did not receive this method of instruction experienced no increase for the linguistic variety. These results demonstrate that this method has potential for reducing negative perceptions towards speakers of non-standard dialects.

This thesis explores the trickster character through the lens of his role as a cultural hero. The two characters that I chose to examine are from North American myth, specifically Winnebago Hare and Brer Rabbit. These two characters represent the duality of the trickster while simultaneously embodying the lauded abilities of the hero. Through their actions these two characters shape culture through the very action of disrupting societal norms.

According to Matthew Arnold an open mind is one of the chief essentials for true literary criticism. One is impressed by the truthfulness of this statement when he seeks to evaluate Negro poetry. The term, Negro poetry, has several interpretations. In its most general sense, the one in which it is used in this paper, it means poetry written by Negroes on any subject. In a more restricted sense it refers to poetry that contains allusions, rhythms, sentiments and idioms more or less peculiar to the Negro. In its narrowest meaning it refers to poetry of racial protest and self-exhortation. It is the undue publicity of poetry of protest and race pride that has displeased many readers. As far as most Americans are concerned, the Negro has been appropriately called "the great American taboo." It is this race prejudice that confronts the critic. A Negro is inclined to praise too highly or, to avoid the accusation of favoritism, to condemn unjustly. The white critic is unconsciously influenced by a feeling of superiority. One of mixed blood is prejudiced toward one side or the other. An honest attempt, however, has been made in this paper to judge fairly the Negro poetry of the twentieth century.

Jook is a spirited collection of historical persona poems situated in the vibrant rent party scene of 1920s Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance of New York was a decade of black innovation, artistry, and cultural expansion spanning 1920-1930. During this post-Emancipation, Great Migration era, black families leaving the South moved north only to encounter new forms of oppression. They were fleeing the lynchings, racism, and segregation that they experienced back home. In Harlem, black families earned disproportionately lower wages and paid much higher rents for subpar housing conditions compared to white families. To supplement their low incomes and to make the rent for the month, tenants hosted house-rent parties, also called social whist parties, in their apartments. They offered southern food, jazz and blues music (often live), and bootlegged liquor. Party guests paid a modest cover fee of 25 or 30 cents to enjoy the amusements, thus helping the hosts to pay their rent. The resistance work of this black joy in the face of economic, environmental, and social racism fascinates me and led me to research and uplift these narratives via persona poetry. The central figure in these poems is a 20-year-old Georgia migrant named Mae Lynne King. Mae has moved north with her older sister Maddy. The daughters of a southern preacher and a seamstress, the women find their footing in New York in very different ways. Mae works as a domestic and takes in laundry and sewing on the side while 24-year-old Maddy Jane becomes a streetwalker. The two young women live together and quickly become immersed in the rent party phenomenon while working to build a life away from the strict religious upbringing they knew back home. Mae and Maddy struggle against racism, sexism, and poverty discovering their roles as lovers, friends, and members of a new black Harlem. Mae’s journey through Harlem is one of revelation and awakening, and Maddy’s is one of self-actualization, autonomy, reclamation. Both women embody the womanist attitudes and practices, blackness, and sexual fluidity that are central to my work overall and that were highly visible during the Renaissance. While swaths of literature celebrate the art, music, and culture of the Harlem Renaissance, no contemporary collections of poetry contend with the oppression that African American people who migrated from the racially segregated South to Harlem faced. Jook is an offering of history, memory, language, and research to bridge that gap. This collection draws from Langston Hughes’ poetry and autobiography The Big Sea, Zora Neale Hurston’s novels and dramas, all of Harlem’s “negro literati,” jazz and swing music, photography, and archival materials from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale University. Jook traverses free verse and formal boundaries while championing persona and a unique Harlemese vernacular in order to celebrate the fierce subversion that African Americans in 1920s Harlem engaged in via their rent party gatherings. I enter these poems with music and memory at the fore of my creative process and craft employments. I call on forms such as Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Gigan, the jazz sonnet, contrapuntal, and the ghazal to illustrate the simultaneous artistry and travailing that defined the Renaissance for African American people. I also borrow from the narrative elements of fiction to explore a specific arc within the lives of a cadre of imagined personas. The aim of this project is to recover and celebrate the unexplored stories of rent parties and to acknowledge the suffering and striving that these gatherings were born out of.

Dans un village du Haut Atlas marocain, une fête abandonnée depuis plus de quinze ans a été renouvelée en 2010, attirant des journalistes, des anthropologues et des associatifs. L’étude du renouvellement de la tradition lors de cette fête, au niveau du discours, du contenu des performances et des interactions sociales, nous permet de réinterroger les modèles théoriques de la fabrication de tradition. Un processus sous-jacent apparaît comme la base de ce renouvellement, la singularisation, une forme particulière de résistance à la culture de l’État-nation ou à toute autre culture hégémonique. La singularisation est présente dans chaque élément de la fête. Elle définit un certain rapport au passé par lequel celui-ci est un miroir inversé du présent, mis en scène comme objet de perte. Elle définit également le choix culturel entre deux traditions musicales présentes dans la région. Ces mécanismes reposent sur une nouvelle logique spatiale qui résulte des récents changements économiques et politiques au Maroc. Dans cette nouvelle organisation spatiale où le pouvoir se situe en dehors du local, les femmes sont marginalisées et les figures intermédiaires deviennent le centre du renouvellement de la tradition. L’étude de la singularisation permet de mettre en lumière des processus de fabrication de l’identité, de dégager les conditions de survie culturelle d’un groupe, de caractériser le rapport entre un événement culturel et le changement social, et de préciser les modèles théoriques sur la tradition. / In a village of the High Atlas in Morocco, a celebration which has been abandoned for more than fifteen years has been renewed in 2010, bringing along journalists, anthropologists and militant associatives. The study of the renewal of tradition in this celebration, through discourse, performances and social interaction, allows us to put into question the models on the fabrication of tradition. The underlying process of this renewal is singularisation, a specific form of resistance to the nationalist culture or any other cultural hegemony. Singularisation is present in every element of the celebration. It determines a specific link to the past by which it appears as the reversed image of the present, staged as object of loss. It also determines cultural choices such as the one between two musical traditions. Such mechanisms respond to a new spatial organization which is a direct consequence of the recent economic and political changes in Morocco. In this organization, power is no more in the local but outside the community’s territory. Women are marginalized and intermediary figures become the center of the renewal of tradition. The study of singularisation enables to explain how identity is made, to determine conditions for the cultural survival of a group, to characterize the relation between a cultural event and social change, and to bring new elements to the theories of tradition.

A collection of short stories based on Korean folk and fairy tales.

My study aims to reveal how ideologies, the way we perceive our world, what we believe, and our value judgments inextricably linked to a dominant discourse, have real and material consequences. In addition to explicating how these ideologies stem from a Western philosophical tradition, this thesis examines this thought-system alongside selections from Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Caramelo or Puro Cuento. My project reveals how Cisneros’ spatial narratives challenge ideologies concerning the border separating the United States and Mexico, which proves significant as the project of decolonization and understanding of identity formation is fundamentally tied to these geographical spaces. Through the main chapters in this thesis, it is proposed that Cisneros’ storytelling does not attempt to counter fixed ideas of spaces and identity or an alleged objective Truth and single History by presenting a true or better version, but offers alternative narratives as a form of resistance to dominant discourse.

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Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, Miller argues that an essential piece of people’s identity is linked with the land, and, through recognition of the importance of topography on the development of the self, individuals can foster a deeper sense of community through appreciation of their place.