Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

Within this dissertation, I pay exclusive attention to methodologies of cross-cultural communication in post–World War II Anglophone Arab literature. Hitherto critical accounts discussing cross-cultural communication in this kind of literary tradition focused special attention on the use of English to reach a wide audience and on the process of cultural representation. Most accounts examine methods of delivery as an expected consequence of more complex representations without devoting much space for theorizing cross-cultural communication. Much of post-1960 Anglophone Arab literary production in the diaspora addresses the problem of cross-cultural communication differently. As cultural translators, interpreters, and mediators, Anglophone Arab writers insist on reframing current misconceptions about themselves. Negative depictions manifested in representing a collective Arabic identity stand in contrast to the actual heterogeneous identities of Arabic-speaking individuals and their descendants. In addition to these superficial representations, dramatic events such the Arab-Israeli conflict (1948–present), the Six-Day War (1967), the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), the Iraq War (2003–present), and 9/11 and the consequent War on Terror enlarged divisions between “East” and “West,” which resulted in conflating Arabic and Arab diasporic identities with global politics. In order to overcome this dilemma of conflation and association, Arab writers produced literary pieces that depict more complicated representations of themselves as individuals who exhibit cultural and political diversity. This self-appropriation is not only limited to producing more complicated and heterogeneous representations via Arab diasporic writing, but also extends to posing major challenges to approaches about expressing the Self. Nowhere are these challenges more keenly evident than in contemporary Anglophone Arab writers' literary production. My disserta (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Adeleke Adeeko (Advisor); Pranav Jani (Committee Member); Frederick Aldama (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Asian American Studies; Australian Literature; Bilingual Education; British and Irish Literature; Canadian Literature; Communication; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Foreign Language; Language; Literature; Middle Eastern History; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Near Eastern Studies; Personality Psychology; Rhetoric

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2018, English

Shyam Selvadurai's novel, Funny Boy (1994), challenged the conceived sentiments of queerness in Sri Lanka, providing the kindling for an open conversation about alternative modes of sexuality in a culture that resisted such conversations. In this essay, I argue that the protagonist, Arjie, achieves sexual awakening through his active literary imagination, alliances with other marginalized characters, and manipulation of public and private spaces—all of which prevent him from being shamed into heteronormative behavior. Despite living in a society that labels queer people simply “funny” out of fear that articulating queerness would legitimize it, Arjie is not only able to withstand the oppressive shame culture, but actively resists it. I take special emphasis on reclaiming the loose term “queer” (applying Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's open definition of the term), as critics tend to read Arjie as a homosexual; I find this view of the novel counterintuitive, as Selvadurai emphasizes the lack of definition throughout the novel. In presenting “queer” as an alternative to “homosexual”, I offer the joint argument that Arjie's queering of physical and metaphysical spaces allows him to transcend the boundaries other characters grapple with, and thus not only survive but thrive in a family governed by shame and adherence to patriarchal doctrine. Reading through a queer perspective also allows for analysis that identifies other, previously unexplored, “funny” aspects of the novel such as how Selvadurai subverts genre-specific expectations of the bildungsroman and disrupts the format of the traditional novel by dividing it into six distinct stories.

Committee: Parama Sarkar PhD (Advisor); Melissa Gregory PhD (Committee Chair); Skai Stelzer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Literature; Asian Studies; Canadian Literature; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; South Asian Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, EDU Teaching and Learning

Children with disabilities began to appear with increasing frequency as characters in children's books following the United States Congress's passage in 1975 of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the precursor to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Researchers have done important work over the past forty years by examining these books while thinking about the effects that this literature can have on its readers and their understanding of disability and disabled people, addressing elements including characters, plot, and representations of specific disabilities, pointing out problematic tropes and titles. In this dissertation, I built on this research and brought together concepts in rhetorical narrative theory, specifically narrative progression, and disability studies in order to offer an even more in-depth analysis of the designs and effects of this corpus of children's books. By engaging in a close reading of 178 picturebooks featuring disabled characters from a rhetorical narrative theory approach, my research illuminated how the rhetorical choices that an author makes in both her text and illustrations have consequences for the way that disability is presented to her readers. Specifically, my dissertation undertook a two-step analysis of those rhetorical choices. The first step was to read the books on their own terms and the second was to assess those terms through the lens of disability studies. Each of my five chapters examined the use of one kind of narrative progression, centered around one or more disabled characters—and occasionally non-disabled characters— attending to how this progression situated its readers ethically and affectively. Each chapter also assessed the potential effects, positive and negative, on the reader's understanding of disability, its contexts, and its consequences. I argued that readers need to be more cognizant of authorial purpose, because while many authors attempt to create narratives about (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Barbara Kiefer (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member); Amy Shuman (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Asian Literature; British and Irish Literature; Canadian Literature; Early Childhood Education; Education; Language Arts; Literature; Special Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

In Books with Bodies: Experientiality in post-1980s Multimodal Print Literature , I examine contemporary British and North American authors' use of books as platforms for multimodal narration. “Multimodality” refers to the concurrent use of several semiotic systems (such as writing, maps, charts) for communication. The pointed juxtaposition of different semiotic systems in a literary text requires a combination of perception processes on the reader's part. My dissertation charts the ways in which multimodal literary books published in response to the proliferation of electronic reading and writing interfaces from the 1980s onward prompt metacognitive awareness about "reading" as an experience that is grounded in bodily interactions and sensory contact with the modes and the platforms that mediate literature. I term this metacognitive awareness about the readers' embodied engagement with the text's material form "presence," by revising Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of "presence-effect." The theoretical framework for this dissertation comes from three fields: I combine approaches to multimodality that originated in the study of social semiotics, insights from the cognitive sciences--the “second-generation” models of cognition--and twentieth century philosophies of experience, particularly those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, and Gumbrecht. By analyzing multimodal fictions, poetry, and lyrical essays such as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005), Anne Carson's Nox (2010), Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes (2010), and Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams's S. (2013), among other texts, Books with Bodies subverts the distinction between higher-order mental abilities (such as language processing) and lower-order perceptions (like touch) which underlies prior scholarship on the cognitive impact of literature. Indeed, I argue that the tendency to unpack the literary exp (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian McHale (Advisor); Frederick Luis Aldama (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Jesse Schotter (Committee Member); Danuta Fjellestad (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Canadian Literature; Comparative; Literature; Mass Media; Modern Language; Philosophy of Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, French and Italian

This dissertation reconstructs a narrative trajectory of French-Canadian girlhood in the twentieth-century through literature and film, revealing the French-Canadian girl as temporary sovereign of the contested borderland of her own body. In the works studied in this project, the girl-body emerges as a corps frontalier, a gendered borderland between childhood and womanhood, a space of no-longer/not-yet-ness that disrupts stable, traditional structures of identity and subjectivity. The girl herself, inhabitant of that body, is a troublesome subject-in-process, a figure marked by ambivalence, uncertainty, fluidity, and potentiality. She resists categorization as either child or woman, seeking instead to claim sovereignty over the territory of her body and her destiny as a girl. In many ways, she is like French-Canadian society, perpetually and actively en devenir, always working to define herself. Life in that unstable zone is at once exhilarating and exhausting, and appears untenable – but must this be the case? Or can a new conception of girlhood align with new conceptions of Quebecois(e) nationality to make it possible for both to retain the active potentiality of being mineur(e)? In order to better understand the relationship between feminine adolescence and French-Canadian identity, this project traces the evolution of girlhood as narrated in a set of literary and cinematic works. Chapter 1, a reading of Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine (1913) and Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion (1945), addresses the conflict between traditional notions of feminine destiny in French-Canadian culture and the more subversive individual desires of the girls expected to follow those notions, revealing the heavy expectation of almost literal self-effacement imposed upon girls as French-Canadian society prioritizes survivance. The second chapter brings together Anne Claire Poirier's film La fin des etes (1964) and Anne Hebert's novel Kamouraska (1970) to engage with the question (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Danielle Marx-Scouras (Advisor); Jennifer Willging (Committee Member); Wynne Wong (Committee Member) Subjects: Canadian History; Canadian Literature; Canadian Studies; Film Studies; French Canadian Culture; French Canadian Literature; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, History

This paper addresses two important black settlements in Ontario, Canada. Wilberforce and Elgin, why one failed and one succeeded. My research shows that the Wilberforce settlement failed because of the impact that the enforcement of Ohio slave laws had on the slaves' decision to flee Cincinnati hastily. Also, the timing of the Wilberforce settlers' flight into Canada, their lack of leadership, lack of job skills and education, the specific location of their settlement in Canada, and their inability to switch from single-crop farming to subsistence farming are some of the factors that affected Wilberforce's ability to thrive in Canada. The Elgin settlement succeeded because of the leadership qualities of Reverend William King, his organizational skills, his contacts in Canada that assisted him in purchasing land that would benefit his former slaves and the impact the Canadian Railway Company had on providing jobs for the Elgin settlers. King had a paternalistic relationship with his ex-slaves and this led to an orderly departure and arrival from the United States to Canada that helped the Elgin settlers become more accepted into Canadian society. I utilized primary sources such as letters and memoirs from both settlements which contributed significantly to my understanding of Wilberforce's and Elgin's past. The William King Collection from the National Archives of Canada provided insight into the Elgin settlement's ability to thrive in Canada. It is a wonderful primary source set on the organizational style of King and how he taught the former slaves to survive and prosper in Canada. Austin Steward, Twenty-Two as a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (1857) provided iii insight on being a slave and freeman and what impact Steward's leadership had on the Wilberforce settlement. A number of variables led Wilberforce and Elgin in opposite directions which capitulated into each settlement taking a different trajectory. The implications of each settleme (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rebecca Mancuso (Committee Chair); Michael Brooks (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American History; Canadian History; Canadian Literature; Canadian Studies; Education; Museums; Teacher Education; Teaching; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, English

Taxonomies of biological life are historical and political products. In particular, distinctions made between humans and other species have historically served as the fulcrum upon which social hierarchies balance. For example, in formulating species according to morphology, eighteenth and nineteenth-century science helped shape anti-abolitionist claims that black slaves were inherently distinct from whites. Likewise, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a focus on reproductive relations as the bedrock of species categorization precipitated the development of state-sanctioned eugenics in the United States. This dissertation examines how the scientific, cultural, and literary imagination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries employs theories of speciation both to augment and contest normative human identity with a special emphasis on race and sexuality. Spanning eight decades of scientific and literary activity from the 1930s to present day, I explore how late modernist and contemporary American authors intervene in what is known as the "species problem"— a set of enduring questions on how to define species and how they arise. Working at the juncture of queer theory, feminist science studies, and animal studies, I reveal authors excavating the indeterminacy of species life, and thus of race and sex, by representing intimacies between humans and other animals. I begin by tracing a genealogy of the species body beginning with what historians refer to as "the eclipse of Darwinism." Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species notably triggered an ideological crisis in the scientific and political landscape. I investigate the extent to which Darwin's most radical ideas about species porosity continue to be repackaged in order to uphold established social orders and regulatory controls. Each of my four body chapters shows authors contributing to the scientific conversations on race, sex, and species of their respective decades, for exa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Debra Moddelmog (Committee Chair); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Animals; Canadian Literature; Environmental Studies; Gender Studies; Science History; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2013, Theology

This dissertation examines Catholic devotionalism's positive impact on the novelist Jack Kerouac's work. It examines how Kerouac's engagement with devotionalism fostered his sacramentality and his sensibility of the imminent presence of the sacred, and the dissertation examines how Kerouac's sacramentality/sensibility moved him to attempt to convey the same sensibility to his readers. After the introduction, the dissertation examines how the Catholic subculture of Lowell, Massachusetts cultivated and fostered Kerouac's sacramentality. Then, it explores the interaction between Kerouac's devotionalism and sacramentality with mid-twentieth century/postwar America while it explores how his sacramentality offered him a way to critique the increased commodification of American life. Finally, it explores Kerouac's travels in Mexico and seeks to understand why that was the place where he achieved his greatest vision - a vision of God's face.

Committee: Sandra Yocum Dr. (Committee Chair) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Canadian Literature; Canadian Studies; French Canadian Culture; French Canadian Literature; History; Latin American Studies; Literature; Religion; Theology

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2009, English

This dissertation traces a distinctive form of literary citation in the late twentieth century and proposes that a number of important late twentieth century works reuse essentialist and possibly racist discourse to create more humane and ethical concepts of selfhood. The texts in this dissertation “play” with and critically engage with the notion of the “other” through intense allusion and citation of dominant literary and cultural narratives in order to resist the exclusionary, dominant ideology of American selfhood. My project focuses on four such novels – Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Thomas King's Green Grass Running Water, Percival Everett's Erasure, and Robert Coover's The Public Burning – which redeploy narratives that represent ethnic minorities in racist and essentialist ways. For example, Maxine Hong Kingston builds her novel around the writings and performances of Walt Whitman, Sui Sin Far, Frank Chin, and the nineteenth century “Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker. Alluding to Far's idealized Eurasian “one family,” Chin's authentic ethnic self, and the exotic “other” represented by the Bunker twins, Kingston critiques and reformulates essentialist discourse to produce an anti-racist subject. The chapter on Percival Everett's Erasure traces a similar critique of resistance as Everett draws on aspects of both sides of an historical African American dialectic between separatism and universalism. The third chapter considers the imperialist narratives that Thomas King uses to build his novel, Green Grass Running Water, and shows how his allusive storytelling reimagines the traditional form of the Western, linear story. Robert Coover in The Public Burning parodies the narrative of Manifest Destiny and the repression of dissent on the American's journey to the apotheosis of his self. This dissertation proves that one can ironically engage with the very discourse that might erase one as a “legible” subject in order to reformulate discourses of ex (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Timothy Melley (Advisor); Dr. Stefanie Dunning (Committee Member); Dr. Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Dr. Marguerite Shaffer (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Canadian Literature; Native Americans

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2012, English

With the rise of the gaming culture comes a similar increase in literature which addresses this lifestyle and those who live it. Without identification, this genre has gone without notice and relatively little scholarly discussion, largely due to a lack of familiarity with the subject due to prevalent misleading stereotypes. This thesis names that burgeoning genre: gamer realism. The first part of this thesis identifies its characteristics and general goals, along with some small examples of texts which exhibit some aspects of those characteristics. The second part examines the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley as a case study, in order to demonstrate how it exemplifies this new genre.

Committee: James Boehnlein PhD (Advisor); Thomas Morgan PhD (Committee Member); Patrick Thomas PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Asian Literature; Canadian Literature; Canadian Studies; Comparative Literature; Language Arts; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2012, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Through the utilization of Jean-Francois Lyotard's views on the Postmodern Condition, this paper highlights the failure of metanarratives to accurately convince, as well as convey information and understanding in a postmodern society. This is due in part to what Lyotard believes is an increasing skepticism towards the grand totalizing nature of metanarratives and their reliance on some form of universal truth. In order to reverse the overarching effect of the metanarrative, its all-encompassing nature, and its power to legitimize illegitimate versions of institutionalized truths; one must focus on what Lyotard describes as “petit recits” or “little stories”. This theoretical framework will serve as the foundation for understanding the interrelated functions of truth and identity within Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Set in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war, Ondaatje uses his protagonist, Anil Tissera, to highlight not only the failure of the West to understand the decades long conflict, but also to indict the Sri Lankan government's complicity in the extrajudicial murders of its own civilians; as well as showcasing the relationship between testifying and witnessing unspeakable acts of violence. Because colonialism sought to bring the colonized other under a single law of imperial imposition, it is in a way a type of metanarrative; whose aftereffects continue to linger in post-independence era nations. These aftereffects have caused the traditionally fragmented South-Asian society to fragment even further when the unifying feature of colonialism dissolved. The personal stories of the characters within Ondaatje's novel serve to not only showcase their understanding of the conflict, but also as an allegorical allusion to the island and its conflicts as well. Anil's identity creation; the conflict between brothers; the failure to prove hidden truths; and giving a voice to those who cannot or will not speak, are all attempts by Ondaatje and his characters, to shed (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jennifer M. Jeffers PhD (Committee Chair); Fredrick J. Karem PhD (Committee Member); Adrienne Gosselin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian American Studies; Asian Studies; Canadian Literature; Comparative; Ethnic Studies; Families and Family Life; Forensic Anthropology; Gender Studies; History; Holocaust Studies; Human Remains; International Relations; Language Arts; Literature; Minority and Ethnic

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2008, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

This essay analyzes the role of masculine domination in the twenty-first century as portrayed in Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel of speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake. I argue that Atwood's uncharacteristic choice of male primary characters highlights the masculine/feminine and the human/nature binaries in order to critique the destructiveness of a continued masculine domination of nature and the feminine. I utilize Donna Haraway's theory of speculative fiction as an alternative space in which we can begin to explore new relationships with nature to critique Atwood's novel. In my first chapter, I posit that Atwood utilizes Judeo-Christian allusions to situate the novel within the framework of biblical hierarchy. In my second chapter, I show that Atwood inverts the symbol of the monster in order to illustrate the continued domination of nature and the feminine and to designate the masculine as monstrous through its appropriation of nature and the feminine. My third chapter explores the boundary crossing of the genetically altered Crakers as an attempt to reconstruct the social body that ultimately fails because of Crake's embeddedness in a culture of masculine domination. While some critics read Jimmy/Snowman as the possibility for humanity's redemption, my fourth chapter argues that he actually reinscribes an ideology of masculine domination into the Craker culture through his mythologies and ritualistic teachings. I contend that Atwood's characters fail to realize the true possibility of change in the “elsewhere” she creates by virtue of their inability to cross the boundary of their own Judeo-Christian centered ideology which acts as a critique of the West's current culture of consumer driven environmental degradation.

Committee: Jennifer Jeffers PhD (Advisor); Gary Dyer PhD (Committee Member); Jeff Karem PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Canadian Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2011, Creative Writing/Fiction

These stories concern, chiefly, art: the making - or not making - of it, its function in our lives. Some stories, such as “Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds,” “Art Thou Troubled,” and “The Many Iterations of Walter Rose,” are attempts at “ekphrastic fiction”: responses to particular songs or pieces of art. Others deal with what it means to be an artist, and yet others are about negotiating the divide between ‘art' and ‘artifice' : a young woman finds solace in a virtual world, a dog is cared for as if it's a child, a couple adopts a mouse in lieu of having a baby. In each, a character that is confused about his or her place in the world of creating finds a place to land.

Committee: Lawrence Coates PhD (Advisor); Michael Czyzniejewski MFA (Committee Member); Wendell Mayo PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Canadian Literature; Fine Arts; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2010, English/Literature

Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short story writer, has written, over the course of her long career, no fewer than seventeen stories that feature an ill mother as the primary or tangential theme in a daughter's narrative. While some critics focus on uncovering autobiographical elements of the stories (Munro's mother endured early-onset Parkinson's disease), and others vaguely complain that Munro is merely re-writing the same story again and again, no critic has investigated the range and depth of affect produced by maternal illness proffered in her stories, a topic that appears to be a major concern of Munro's creative life. This thesis serves to initiate this critical discussion. An analysis of Munro's story, “Spelling,” provides fruitful material for the discussion of the discourse of caretaking. Women are socialized to provide caretaking via the cultural ideal of the good mother; daughters are socialized to be good daughters by caring for their elderly ill mothers. Middle-aged daughter Rose returns home to care for her stepmother Flo. I track Rose's caretakingjourney by first discussing her entrapment in the gendered norms of caretaking. Then, I argue that Rose capitulates to the discourse of sacrificial caretaking by desiring to care for Flo in a full-time capacity. I submit that Rosebegins to reclaim her subjectivity after she arrives home when she realizes she cannot become the perfect caretaker. After Flo moves into the County Home, Rose resists the stereotype of the non-caretaking daughter by deploying certain strategies to justify her role of the non-caretaking daughter. I argue that Rose's focus on combating the stereotype of the non-caretaking daughter overshadows her subjective response to caretaking. Her thoughts and actions, therefore, re-inscribe the polarized norms of the good daughter/bad daughter binary. I conclude that Munro's story illuminates a daughter's affective difficulty in claiming subjectivity when attempting to legitimize her careta (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Bill Albertini (Committee Chair); Beth Casey (Committee Member) Subjects: Canadian Literature; English literature; Families and Family Life; Gender; Gerontology; Health; Personal Relationships; Sociology; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2013, English

Literary scholars often delve into psychology to interpret works of fiction, but rarely has fiction been used to inform psychological theory. The primary aim of this thesis is to understand what one might be able to learn about adolescent development and narrative formation from young adult literature. Largely by applying Dan P. McAdams “life-story” framework for narrative development--especially his ideas of communion, agency, and imagoes--to young adult novels, I intend to show how narrative psychology is extremely important to existing notions of adolescent development. I will explore these ideas in three novels: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, and Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Committee: Joseph Bianco (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Canadian Literature; Comparative Literature; Literature; Psychology