385 Matching Results

Search Results

Results: 1 - 24 next
open access

Non-Native Speakers of English and Denominal Regularization

Description: The purpose of this study was to determine whether nonnative speakers of English have access to specifically-linguistic constraints governing past tense morphology. Forty non-native speakers of English rated the naturalness of 29 exocentric, or headless, verbs in a partial replication of Kim, Pinker, Prince, and Prasada (1991) which looked at the same phenomenon in native speakers. Nonnative speaker performance was similar to the 40 subject native speaker control group. A correlation also exist… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Borden, David S. (David Scott)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Why Orville and Wilbur Built an Airplane

Description: This dissertation comprises two sections. The title section collects a volume of the author's original poetry, subdivided into four parts. The concerns of this section are largely aesthetic, although some of the poems involve issues that emerge in the introductory essay. The introductory essay itself looks at slightly over three centuries of poetry in English, and focuses on three representative poems from three distinct periods: the long eighteenth century and the Romantic period in England, a… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Jenkinson, John S.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Diane Di Prima: The Muffled Voice of the Beat Generation

Description: The Beat rejection of conventional values meant a rejection of marriage, family, and a nine-to-five job, and few women were prepared to make that kind of radical shift in a society that condemned women for behaving the way the Beats behaved. Though she has faced difficulty in getting published, Beat writer Diane Di Prima has been publishing steadily for the past forty years. Di Prima has also lived the life of a Beat, wandering the country, avoiding nine-to-five work and supporting herself with… more
Date: August 1997
Creator: Goggans, Heather
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Overcoming the Regional Burden: History, Tradition, and Myth in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy

Description: In Overcoming the Regional Burden: History, Tradition, and Myth in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, I contend that McCarthy's literary aesthetic develops and changes as he moves from Tennessee to Texas. McCarthy's conspicuous Southern and Southwestern regional affiliations have led critics to expect his works to recapitulate native history, traditions, and myths. Yet, McCarthy transcends provincial regionalism by challenging the creation of the regional and national myths we confuse with our actu… more
Date: August 1997
Creator: Wegner, John M. (John Michael)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Unearthing the Spiritual Message in Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire

Description: Unearthing Edward Abbey's spiritual philosophy is not an easy task. One must sift through Abbey's humor, sort through Cactus Ed's flamboyant character, look under the veneer of this character, and beyond Abbey's overt objective of convincing readers to defy the destruction of wilderness, and only then does the spiritual philosophy of Abbey become visible. To understand his perception of spirituality, one must define what constitutes a mystic and determine what American theological philosophies … more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Jacobs, Pamela
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Rhetoric of Androgyny: Gender and Boundaries in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness

Description: The androgyny of the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness is a vehicle for Ursula Le Guin's rhetoric concerning gender roles. Le Guin attempts to make the reader identify with an ideal form of androgyny, through which she argues that many of the problems of human existence, from rape and war to dualistic thought and sexism, are products of gender roles and would be absent in an androgynous world. The novel also links barriers of separation and Othering with masculine thought, and deconstruct… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Gleason, Benjamin P. (Benjamin Patrick)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Useful Arts

Description: This creative nonfiction dissertation is a series of braided narratives that chronicle the author's career as a trombonist in the John Smith Ensemble. As an amateur trombonist, the author is shocked to be hired as a professional musician for an orchestra that plays on PBS and at Carnegie Hall. She quickly realizes, however, that the job requires her to play the trombone quietly in front of an unplugged microphone while a CD recording of another, more talented trombonist is blasted out toward … more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Hindman, Jessica
Partner: UNT Libraries

Home: A Memoir

Description: Home: A Memoir, a creative non-fiction thesis, is a memoir in the form of personal essays, each exploring some aspect of the meaning of home, how my sense of self has been formed by my relationship to home, and the inevitability of leaving home. Chapter I explores the nature of memory and of memoir, their relationship to each other and to truth, and how a writer's voice shapes memoir. Chapter II, “Paternity,” is an attempt to remember my father, resulting in renewed interest in his past and re… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2001
Creator: Lovell, Bonnie Alice
Partner: UNT Libraries

Anne Brontë's New Women: Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as Precursors of New Woman Fiction

Description: Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were published more than forty years before the appearance of the feminist type that the Victorians called the “New Woman;” yet, both novels contain characteristics of New Woman fiction. By considering how Brontë's novels foreshadow New Woman fiction, the reader of these novels can re-enact the “gentlest” Brontë as an influential feminist whose ideology informed the construction of the radical New Woman. Brontë, like the New Woman writ… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2001
Creator: Phillips, Jennifer K.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

John Graves and the Pastoral Tradition

Description: John Graves's creative non-fiction has earned him respect in Texas letters as a seminal writer but scarce critical commentary of his work outside the region. Ecological criticism examines how language, culture and the land interact, providing a context in which to discuss Graves in relation to the southwestern literary tradition of J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek, to southern pastoral in the Virgilian mode, and to American nature writing. Graves's rhetorical strategies, includi… more
Date: August 2001
Creator: Anderson, David Roy
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Moral Training for Nature's Egotists: Mentoring Relationships in George Eliot's Fiction

Description: George Eliot's fiction is filled with mentoring relationships which generally consist of a wise male mentor and a foolish, egotistic female mentee. The mentoring narratives relate the conversion of the mentee from narcissism to selfless devotion to the community. By retaining the Christian value of self-abnegation and the Christian tendency to devalue nature, Eliot, nominally a secular humanist who abandoned Christianity, reveals herself still to be a covert Christian. In Chapter 1 I introduce… more
Date: August 2001
Creator: Schweers, Ellen H.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Anything Like Us

Description: Anything Like Us is a collection of poems with a critical introduction. In this introduction, I explore modern alternatives to Romantic and Neo-Romantic lyric expression. I conclude that a contemporary lyric that desires to be, in some fashion, about itself, must exhibit an acceptance of the mediating influences of time and language, while cultivating an inter-subjective point-of-view that does not insist too much on the authority of a single, coherent voice. The poems in Anything Like Us r… more
Date: August 2002
Creator: Roth, Matthew
Partner: UNT Libraries

Reflections of Other/Reflections of Self

Description: This Thesis collection contains a critical preface and five stories. The preface, “Reflejos y Reflexiones” (translated: Images and Thoughts), addresses the issues of writing the cultural or gendered Other; these issues include methodology, literary colonialism, a dialogue between works, and creating distance through defamiliarizing the self. “Perennials” is the story of Noemi Tellez, an immigrant to the U.S. who must choose between working and taking care of her family. In “Load Bearing” Lui… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2002
Creator: Bebout, Lee
Partner: UNT Libraries

The things I left behind

Description: This thesis consists of a preface and twenty-one original short stories. The preface examines the differences between creative nonfiction, autobiography, and memoir. The twenty-one interrelated stories included are autobiographical in nature, in some ways memoirs and in some ways creative nonfiction. The over-all theme of the collection explores one character's journey of self-discovery and transformation.
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2002
Creator: Keyes, Laura
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Literature in the Age of Science: Technology and Scientists in the Mid-Twentieth Century Works of Isaac Asimov, John Barth, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut

Description: This study explores the depictions of technology and scientists in the literature of five writers during the 1960s. Scientists and technology associated with nuclear, computer, and space science are examined, focusing on their respective treatments by the following writers: John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Despite the close connections between the abovementioned sciences, space science is largely spared from negative critiques during the sixties. Th… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Simes, Peter A.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Chorus of Trees

Description: This two-part thesis includes a critical preface and a collection of my poems. Using three poems-Louise Glück's "Lullaby," Bob Hicok's "Poem for My Mother's Hysterectomy," and Nick Flynn's "Memento Mori"-the critical preface examines how, in poetry, the transformation of a body negotiates trauma and triggers a conceptual shift, the creation and revision of identity, and the release of the duende's inspirational force. The collection of poetry that follows seeks to transfigure the body as a way … more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Lyons, Renée Kathleen
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Regional Accent Discrimination in Hiring Decisions: A Language Attitude Study

Description: Evidence is presented to support the notion that US regional accents influence decisions in the hiring process. Fifty-six people who hire for a variety of corporations participated in a computerized survey, during which they listened to speakers from regions of the US reading the same passage. Respondents judged the speakers on personal characteristics commonly considered in hiring decisions, attempted to identify the speakers' regions, and selected job categories for each speaker, in addition … more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Markley, E. Dianne
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Nature of Things

Description: The Nature of Things is a collection of stories and a preface that examine character motivation. The author is concerned with unexpected reactions and surprising outcomes. The stories are independent of each other and involve a wide range of characters.
Date: August 2000
Creator: Byno, Ashley
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Paradox of the Christian Poet: George Herbert's Problematics

Description: The thesis examines the paradoxes in Herbert's poetry and attributes the many contradictions and vacillations within The Temple to Herbert's own "spiritual conflicts" as a Christian poet. The thesis explores the poems as interconnected expressions of Herbert's dual nature as Christian-Poet. The thesis discusses over sixty of Herbert's poems, concentrating on close readings and intratextual connections. Chapter One reviews critical approaches to Herbert's poetry and outlines the study. Chapter T… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Casey, James Edward
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Night of No Exile

Description: Night of no Exile is a collection of poems preceded by a critical article entitled "‘Exile seems both a blessing and a curse': A Blissful Reading of Li-Young Lee's Poetry." That article discusses Lee's quest to achieve communication, truth, and transcendence through poetic language and concludes that he finally reaches his goal through a leap from narrative poetry to lyricism. The "exile" alluded to in the title of the article is not only geographic, but also interioran exile due to the natural… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Jones, Marie C.
Partner: UNT Libraries

Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison

Description: In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 1999
Creator: Erickson, Stacy M.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Thousand Miles Out of My Mind

Description: The dissertation is a collection of creative and non-fiction work, including a novel with critical introduction, four short stories, and three essays. The novel is a modern day Grail quest that takes place primarily in the Southwestern United States. The short stories are mostly set in the southwest as well, and take for their topic what Paul Fussel refers to as "hope abridged." The essays are non-fiction.
Date: August 2000
Creator: Sisk, Grant
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Evolution of AIDS as Subject Matter in Select American Dramas

Description: Dramatic works from America with AIDS as subject matter have evolved over the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, dramas like Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, William Hoffman's As Is, and Robert Chesley's Night Sweat educated primarily homosexual men about AIDS, its causes, and its effects on the gay community while combating the dominant discourse promoted by the media, government, and medical establishments that AIDS was either unimportant because it affected primarily the homosexual popul… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Sorrells, David J.
Partner: UNT Libraries

Jezebel's Daughters: A Study of Wilkie Collins and His Female Villains

Description: The term "feminist," when applied to Wilkie Collins, implies he was concerned with rectifying the oppression of women in domestic life as well as with promoting equal rights between the sexes. This study explores Collins the "feminist" by analyzing his portrayals of women, particularly his most powerful feminine creations: his villainesses. Although this focus is somewhat limited, it allows for a detailed analysis of the development of Collins's attitudes towards powerful women from the beginni… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2000
Creator: Colvin, Trey Vincent
Partner: UNT Libraries
Back to Top of Screen