OU - Dissertations

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Open Access
A Reflection on One Writing Across the Curriculum Model
(2010) Carter, Mary Catherine; Kates, Susan||Welch, Kathleen
This dissertation first looks at historical iterations of the primary form of first and second WAC implementation, the workshop model. It is necessary to first situate WAC models in their respective institutions and then assess if strategies used in other contexts represented a "best fit," so different modes of workshop implementation will be examined as well. Integral to stimulating change is providing consistent support for WAC components; in smaller institutions, a tipping point of changing views across the institution may provide that support, but in a large research university, faculty are more insulated within their departments where attitudes may be slower to change. The one-to-one model has great potential to affect change in the area of faculty development in larger institutions. Continuing one-to-one support for faculty may be key to the lasting success the WAC program at large doctoral-granting universities. Drawing on many topics integral to the first-wave workshop setting, one-to-one WAC collaborations cover assignment design aspects, such as clarifying goals and objectives and developing criteria, classroom implementation, such as low-stakes writing, modeling exercises and peer review, and responding to student writing through a drafting process and using rubrics. Overall, the three WAC scenarios here represent a range of faculty attitudes toward the implementation of new pedagogical methods. Because of the depth of penetration achieved within a department, the tangible support provided to faculty, and prospects for long-term WAC sustainability, writing fellows paired with faculty on semester-long projects offer benefits in a large institutional setting that workshops cannot provide. The variables comprised by the participants in the collaborative relationship have the largest confounding effect on the results achieved; therefore very effort has been made to quantify skills needed to maintain this relationship.
Open Access
A Return to Relationship: How Prophetic Rhetorical Strategies Energize Pedagogy
(2009) Dean-Kyncl, Rhonda Carol; Kates, Susan
The foundational element of the educational enterprise is the basic relationship of two human beings working collaboratively to accomplish something together that neither could accomplish alone. Faculty want to teach and students want to learn within thriving academic communities where such relationships are encouraged. This work focuses on returning foundational human relationships to the forefront of our work as educators. My premise is that the strategies enacted by the ancient Hebrew prophets give us a profound model for engaging in positive, community-creating relationships.
Open Access
Acts of empathic imagination: Contemporary Native American artists and writers as healers.
(2001) Robins, Barbara Kimberly.; Hobson, Geary,
This dissertation uses the model of Native American "Morning Prayers" to establish four geographic and cultural regions within the United States as the means to discuss the relationship between health and contemporary artistic expression by Native American writers and artists. The colonial experience has resulted in intergenerational Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Native families and communities, concepts explained by Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran. Chapter One focuses on the region of the Northeast and explores the early contact period between Europeans and Native Americans and the resulting colonial consequences of tribal land losses, deaths due to disease and enforced Christianity. The works of Louise Erdrich and Ric Danay Glazer establish the artistic context for discussions of continued suffering caused by these historical events. Chapter Two is devoted to the region of the Southeast. Writers Rilla Askew and Diane Glancy relate the continuing traumas caused by the Indian Removal Period and patterns of domestic violence. Artist Dorothy Sullivan offers visuals models of family and nurturance for contemporary Indian families. Alcoholism and other addictive behaviors in the region of the Southwest are the focus for Chapter Three. Leslie M. Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and artists Diego Romero, Mateo Romero, Gerald L. Clarke and Kukuli Velarde offer images of historical violence that have created the need for self-medicating practices to prevent psychological dissociation. Chapter Four completes the prayer cycle in the Northwest and examines the possibilities of personal transformation as alternatives to suicide. The overwhelming nature and experience of pain itself, as described by Elaine Scarry, is related to contemporary acts of violence against others, specifically torture and murder. Sherman Alexie provides an example of the violent community in his fiction and artists Rick Bartow and John Hoover provide visual models of transformation borrowing from their traditional tribal backgrounds. The final chapter examines the healthy possibility of uwoduhi, the Cherokee concept of balance. The works of Edgar Heap of Birds provide examples of converged literary and visual expressions that in turn offer suffering Native Americans healing words and concepts.
Open Access
Alterity and hybridity in Anglophone postcolonial literature: Ngugi, Achebe, p'Bitek and Nwapa.
(2001) Woode, Edward Winston Babatunde.; Dharwadker, Aparna,
Chapter 2 also finds similarities between Petals of Blood and Anthills of the Savannah. It explores the ramifications of Westernization, and the role of politics in the postcolonial nation/state. Characters' sociolects are dialogued and their subjectivities become undermined.
Open Access
American Indian Composition Pedagogy: Related Histories, Dialogues, and Response Strategies
(2009) Vasquez, Lee S.; Hobbs, Catherine L.
The field of composition and rhetoric needs to invest greater time and resources into the higher educational needs of American Indian students in writing courses. Data from local and national education surveys reveals that the systematic mis-interpretation of American Indian cultures and educational desires continues to present these students with roadblocks to their success in writing classrooms. American Indian students and their families desire a wider recognition that tribal values are equally integral to the experience of higher education as mainstream values. In seeking to understand the points of view of students, however, we uncover the myriad ways in which the knowledge that is currently furthered in writing classes contradicts, if not discounts, American Indian ways of creating and using knowledge. In response to inquiries as to what students need from higher education, many students and researchers who are committed to the success of this student group report that classrooms need to provide the intellectual space for different interpretive models of the uses of language, offer a variety of approaches to teaching certain ideas or constructs, and foster a learning environment that is respectful and aware of American Indian identities and worldviews.
Open Access
Antimodern strategies: Ambivalence, accommodation, and protest in Willa Cather's "The Troll Garden".
(2004) Gross, Stephanie Stringer.; Schleifer, Ronald,
In this project I argue that Willa Cather's earliest collection of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), demonstrates the antimodern ethos of the American fin de siecle period as characterized by both progressive rhetoric and resistance to modernity. This work also responds to social and economic issues examined by Cather's contemporaries Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Thorstein Veblen in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) as well as by Walter Benjamin early in the 20th century. I argue, using historian T. J. Jackson Lears' notion of antimodernism as both "protest" and "accommodation" to modernity, that Cather figures the celebrity artist and the dandy as representations in an attempt to come to terms with her own contradictory impulses. Cather's early work confronts issues which include American individualism, consumerism, class, and aesthetic consumption in addition to gender. In addition I argue that her antimodern aesthetic is a "sensational" aesthetic, based upon Paterian and Fordian impressionism as expressed by T. E. Hulme, which is itself both a form of protest of and accommodation to the pressures of modernity upon the artist in bourgeois, modern America. Cather's early literary practices situate her within a particularly American Aestheticism traceable through European and American influences from other antimodernists such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Candace Wheeler, and Oscar Wilde. Cather's ambivalence towards modernity as portrayed in her aesthetic is compatible with Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of art as "answerability" and the necessity of an "excess of seeing" in confronting the complexity of this period---characterized by high finance capitalism, competition for cultural capital, and the resultant competing, simultaneous rhetorics of fears for the republic and progressive belief.
Open Access
Anzaldúan Theory: Frameworks of Self-Love, Healing, and Transformation
(2020-12-18) Cuellar, Amanda; Davis-Undiano, Robert Con; Wieser, Kimberly; John, Catherine; Nelson, Joshua; Cane-Carrasco, James
Approaches to the critical theory advanced by Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa tend to focus primarily on the concept of borderlands or other concepts—such as El Mundo Zurdo, the Coatlicue State, mestiza consciousness, nepantla, and the path of conocimiento—in ways that disconnect them from one another. Understanding the connections between each concept threads together Anzaldúa’s scholarship on identity, reflexivity, and community. This project tracks the indigenous Mesoamerican influences in Anzaldúa’s theoretical paradigm, and through this indigenous Mesoamerican lens, the cyclical nature of Anzaldúa’s critical development emphasizes the relationship between her theoretical concepts. This project aims to contextualize Anzaldúa’s theoretical framework through Mesoamerican and Chicana/o/x histories; further, the project proposes that Anzaldúa’s framework functions as both praxis and analytic. The interpretation of Chicana/o/x literary texts highlight the analytical properties of Anzaldua’s framework. Additionally, film production strategies and Chicano mural making practices model the praxis of Anzaldúan theory. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how Anzaldúan theory offers ways to enact practices of self-reflection, cultivate community building efforts, and develop transformational epistemologies and ontologies.
Open Access
The art that will not die: The story-telling of Greg Sarris and Thomas King.
(2001) Mackie, Mary Margaret.; Hobson, Geary,
This study addresses the importance of the continuance of storytelling through the written medium in the understanding of one's individuality in relationship to place the community. More importantly, it investigates the storytelling techniques of Native American writers, specifically the works of Pomo/Miwok Greg Sarris and Cherokee Thomas King, and how they fulfill their roles and responsibilities as story-tellers. Chapter One offers background on the importance of traditional storytelling to contemporary Indian writers. Discussed in this chapter is the labeling imperative (and the role of academics in criticizing and theorizing about Native American literature), as well as an exploration of the proper perspective in terms of both a writer's qualifications to write about a given topic. This chapter also address Walter Benjamin in context of his essay "Storyteller" and why his claim that the art of storytelling is coming to an end is erroneous. Chapter Two offers a definition of "story-telling, " and explores the questions: "Why do we tell stories?", "What is the role and responsibility of both the storyteller and her/his audience?", and "What does her story say about the storyteller herself?" Chapter Three focuses on the work of Greg Sarris, in particular Watermelon Nights and Grand Avenue, as well as Keeping Slug Woman Alive and Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. For Sarris, his identity is merged with his tribal identity, and how he both illuminates this in his writings and also fulfills his roles and responsibility as a story-teller. Chapter Four addresses the stories of Thomas King by expanding on the discussion begun in the previous two chapters, through an analysis of his three novels: Medicine River, Green Grass Running Water, and Truth and Bright Water. Chapter Five concludes this particular angle of introspection on story-telling---not meant as the final word, but rather an encouragement of the continuation of the discussion of the role and importance of story-tellers in contemporary society.
Open Access
Ashes Over the Southwest.
(2005) Brown, Nathan Lee.; Davis-Undiano, Robert Con,
Ashes Over the Southwest was a dissertation written in fulfillment of an interdisciplinary PhD between the English and Journalism departments at the University of Oklahoma. The key areas of concentration within the departments were Creative and Professional Writing respectively. This dissertation is a creative work consisting of a body of original pieces (a collection of poetry) preceded by a critical introduction. The introduction is, basically, a collection of critical essays covering the topics of: (1) my key influences; (2) the problems with academic language; (3) the current state of poetry in America; (4) current issues in teaching; and (5) a discussion on the very un-postmodern topics of "passion and place" and issues with regionalism. The body is a collection of poems written over a three year period that centers in and around the life and culture of the southwestern states of Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Chapter 1 Among the Okie Detritus, Chapter 2 City of Holy Faith, Chapter 3 Texas Almost Touches Colorado, Chapter 4 Odes to Nothin Bodeswell, Chapter 5 Reunion, Chapter 6 Psalms. The first three chapters are very regional in nature. They describe the people, places, and flavors of this unique geography in the southern half United States. The fourth chapter is a "quasi" autobiographical stab at the various key stages of growing up in this region. The fifth chapter is a small, but potent, collection of poems that deal with my experiences attending a twentieth high school reunion. The final chapter covers my struggle with growing up a considerably liberal preacher's kid in the buckle of the Bible Belt. It portrays a deep struggle with faith, spirituality, and religion as well as how those three things do not necessarily go together. The poetry (the main body of the dissertation) is intended to be a collection for publication.
Open Access
Bells and whistles: The mass (re)production of female bodies for male consumption.
(2003) Orban, Maria.; Velie, Alan R.,
In this work I examine the way female bodies are constructed by contemporary ethnic U.S. women writers in the clash of cultures, thus involving a process of negotiation between the dominant culture and ethnicity. Of special interest to my approach is how their construction of female bodies challenges the arbitrary limits, constraints and restrictions imposed by the Western androcentric view, and how social structures are embedded in the female body.
Open Access
BIFOCAL LENSES: MEETING SPACES OF JEWISH-AMERICAN AND "MAINSTREAM" AMERICAN LITERATURE
(2011) Rabkin, Orit; McDonald, William H||Sawaya, Francesca
This dissertation critically examines the concept of Jewish-American literary hyphenation, analyzing its historical and theoretical consequences (chapters one and two), then applying the results of that analysis to three pairs of texts: Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) (chapter three); Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and William Dean Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) (chapter four); and Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923) and John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) (Chapter five). My thesis is that Jewish-American writers working at the turn of the twentieth century negotiated a space for themselves inside of the American literary mainstream and that their reception currently continues to be defined by confining systems of literary hyphenation.
Open Access
"Can the sensational be elevated by art?" :
(1997) Biles, Susan Rebecca.; Gross, David,
Since few scholars are acquainted with Braddon, I spend Chapter 1 recounting her background and the works of previous scholars about her. Chapter 2 delves into the serialized mode of production in order to contextualize its considerable influence upon Braddon, her readers, and her critics. Chapter 3 begins with the rationale and set up of her experiment then explains the methodology that I use to examine the six novels. Chapter 4 focuses upon the first pair of texts by applying the my methodology. Chapter 5 deals with the second pair in light of the editorial choices Braddon made based upon the previous year's experience. Chapter 6 addresses the third phase of Braddon's experiment and discusses the author's place in literature.
Open Access
Categories of the self-conscious narrator in Wolfram, Dante, and Chaucer /
(1984) Arbuckle, Nan,
These four categories may be discovered in each of these romances. Their presence indicates conscious efforts by these narrative poets to manipulate complex audience/text/narrator interaction. The sophistication of the use of the self-conscious narrator shows the medieval narrator in a direct line with his modern counterparts.
Open Access
Coin Flip: Reestablishing a Reciprocal Relationship Between Rhetoric and Athletics in American Higher Education
(2013) Rifenburg, James Michael; Carter, Christoper S
In the following pages, I consider the troublesome relationship between rhetoric and athletics in American higher education and how this relationship plays out in the first-year composition classroom. Specifically focused on Division I universities and the high-profile and high-revenue sports of football and men's basketball, I move from illustrating how athletics was instrumental to the rise of rhetoric during fifth and fourth century BCE Greece, to theories of multimodality in the contemporary first-year composition classroom. Throughout, my emphasis is on charting how the field of composition and rhetoric has exacerbated this troublesome relationship but is well-positioned to advocate on behalf of student-athletes and (re)discover fruitful connections between athletics and rhetoric.
Open Access
A comparative analysis of planning considerations in the composing process :
(1981) Merz, Mary Ann,
Chapter I introduces the investigation, states its purpose and problem, its limitations, a definition of terms, and a preview of its organization.
Open Access
COMPOSING AGENCY: USING INQUIRY TO PROMOTE SOCIAL ACTION
(2017-08-01) Gurley, Leanna; Kates, Susan; Carter, Christopher; Tarabochia, Sandra; Leitch, Vincent; Reedy, Justin
In Rhetoric/Composition studies, agency has been a highly contested concept, straightaway invoking the tension between two dominant perspectives. Agency is viewed as either an internal quality possessed by an individual or a construction of external discourses. While such discussions seeking to define agency are important, they tend to focus on interpretation and analysis over the production of agency, which is a key component of social action. People must believe their deliberate actions can cause positive socio-political change. With this dissertation, I propose that thinking of agency as a form of rhetorical invention puts the focus on the production of agency for effective social action. In working towards this goal, I develop the notion of activist inquiry: a non-prescriptive, inquiry-oriented approach to inventing agency for social action based on Jane Addams’s rhetorical strategies in Democracy and Social Ethics.
Open Access
The concept of responsibility in Milton's major poetry /
(1975) Saunders, Frances Marie,
Open Access
Constructing an Ethos in the Borderlands
(2008) Keller, Marsha; Mair, David
Since the 1960s, classical rhetoric has been a significant site for theorizing composition pedagogy in the United States, informing scholarly work in the field and generating textbooks and teaching practices for first-year composition classes. Despite the influence of ancient rhetorics, seen especially through the appropriation of Aristotelian argument, little attention has been given in composition studies to theorizing ethos, though the ancients found it a significant element of persuasion and even a purpose of rhetorical education.
Open Access
Constructing an Ethos in the Borderlands
(2008) Keller, Marsha; Mair, David
Since the 1960s, classical rhetoric has been a significant site for theorizing composition pedagogy in the United States, informing scholarly work in the field and generating textbooks and teaching practices for first-year composition classes. Despite the influence of ancient rhetorics, seen especially through the appropriation of Aristotelian argument, little attention has been given in composition studies to theorizing ethos, though the ancients found it a significant element of persuasion and even a purpose of rhetorical education.
Open Access
Contextualizing Byron's homographic signature: Explorations of his other self and voice.
(2001) Keegan, Abigail F.; Rapf, Joanna,
The redefinition of the sodomite in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality produced a new sexual subjectivity in England. The sodomite became a more visible figure in the eighteenth century, but in Regency England, this new subject was increasingly represented as the abject other to what Foucault has called the Malthusian couple. By considering these new representations of the sodomite and George Gordon, Lord Byron's own writings on and experiences of same sex desire, this study contextualizes the influence of homosexuality on Byron's emergence as a public writer and on his development of the Byronic hero in a series of poems he suggested be read together: Childe Harold I and II, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara.