Browsing by Author "Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member"

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Examining the Portrayal of Family in Twentieth Century African American Literature: Theory and Practice for the High School English Classroom
(2006-08-02) Hayhoe, Rebecca Sims; Sheila Smith McKoy, Committee Member; Barbara Bennett, Committee Chair; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member
In this project, I explore the need for an improved approach to incorporating multiculturalism in the high school English classroom. Research has shown that teachers who do desire more multicultural classes often face two problems: 1) lack of materials that fairly and accurately represent minority writers and 2) fear of teaching literature that raises controversial issues. I have designed a three-and-one-half-week thematic unit focused on family life in twentieth century African American novels. This unit, by using Harvey Daniels' strategy of literature circles, introduces students to at least six African American novels and includes numerous poems and short stories from other African American writers. I include detailed lesson plans for each day; the structure provided by these plans should help teachers confront and manage the anxiety they might feel about teaching literature that provokes sensitive and sometimes difficult conversations. These plans provide a more complete and balanced approach to introducing minority works than the approaches of traditional literature anthologies. Within this project, I provide a brief overview of how each novel on the reading list relates to the theme of family life. I also explain the value of literature circles and the steps that must be taken to incorporate this strategy in the classroom. In addition to explaining the benefits and uses of literature circles, I also explore the importance of teaching students about dialect. I include several lesson plans that help students evaluate the use and significance of literary dialect. The final chapter of this project includes the specific plans for each day of the unit. I have provided detailed assignment sheets for each of the major forms of assessment within the unit. This thematic unit provides students with choice and responsibility, which should increase their interest and investment in the readings and activities. They will finish the unit with a greater exposure to African American literature, and because of their ability to be active learners in the unit, the students should also gain a deeper understanding of this literature.
Feminist Re-Visioning And Women's Writing: The Second Wave's Effects On Katherine Anne Porter's Literary Legacy
(2007-08-03) Riney, Erin Kelly; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member; Deborah Hooker, Committee Member; Michael Grimwood, Committee Chair
Unquestionably, second-wave feminism's influence on American literature positively changed the canon by forcing the inclusion of women's expressions. As part of their efforts to counter networks of discrimination in common culture, second-wave feminists addressed literary representation to challenge institutional and informal reproduction of sexism. However, much like many feminists of color and third-wave feminists who questioned the negative effects of the second-wave feminists' unqualified power to define female voices in literature, so too does this thesis suggest that feminists of the 1970s, revisioning women's literature, may have inadvertently but unnecessarily stifled some female authors' contributions. Using Kate Chopin's fiction as a comparative lens, I examine why second-wave feminist scholars adopted some women's literature while displacing other talented women writer's works. Specifically, this thesis explores the reasons for which Katherine Anne Porter's works have not received the feminist consideration that Kate Chopin's have. I discuss the links between criticism of Porter's works and the influence of this critical attention on Porter's perceived incompatibility with feminist ideology and goals of the 1970s. Examining the authors' depictions of their female protagonists' perceptions of their sexuality, I provide explanations for feminists' adoption of Chopin as a representative of women's contributions to literature and their lack of recognition of Porter's merits. By examining a selection of each author's short stories, the form to which both authors dedicated their greatest efforts to refine as a craft. I trace the reception and popularity of Chopin's stories to the feminist movement's need for consciousness-raising literature, focusing on Chopin's portrayal of female sexuality in two of her most anthologized works, "Desirée's Baby" and "Athénäise." I then discuss the critical literature of three of Katherine Anne Porter's most anthologized and analyzed short stories—"Theft," "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," and "The Grave," provide interpretations of the works based on depictions of female sexuality, and suggest explanations for feminists' reluctance to adopt Porter's literature for their cause. By examining the reasons many feminists neglected to apply feminist literary criticism to Porter's works, modern feminist scholarship may progress to include more of the still unheard voices that are necessary for society's progress. While feminists' promotion of Chopin's works starting in the 1970s clearly benefited the movement, this thesis asserts that Porter's short stories offer much to contemporary women readers and perhaps more to today's feminist interests than Kate Chopin's works.
"An Innocent Sky"
(2002-09-08) Hoppenworth, Elizabeth Jane; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member; William Henderson, Committee Member; John Kessel, Committee Chair
"An Innocent Sky" is a coming-of-age story in novella form. The novella is almost a kind of literary Purgatory, in a nebulous category all its own somewhere between the short story and the novel. Although it should have a tight structure and limited point of view, like a short story, the novella allows the luxury of unfolding time and space, and including a larger cast of characters, that the short story cannot accommodate. Told from a limited point of view, as in a short story, "An Innocent Sky" follows a young boy who will turn twelve on July 20, 1969, the day the first men set foot on the moon. Like most Americans in July, 1969, Tommy Ryan closely follows the momentous events of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Even in the small town of Mormons' Crossing, in southeastern Iowa, where "nothing ever happens," there is a sense that the moment men set foot on the moon, nothing will ever be the same. For five days, between July 16, when the Apollo 11 rocket left the confines of earth, and July 20, when the spacecraft touched down on the surface of the moon, Tommy and the people around him watch expectantly, not knowing what will happen. Tommy learns that growing up is "not all it's cracked up to be." Worlds great and small can change within a matter of days, and in only one moment, a boy can cross a line and leave innocence and childhood forever.
More Than One Shape: Unity Among Fred Chappell's Varied Literary Works
(2004-01-12) Piver, Courtney Lorraine; Michael Grimwood, Committee Chair; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member; Sharon Setzer, Committee Member
The purpose of the research has been to develop a theory of unity between Fred Chappell's prose and poetry. His works thematically range from Southern gothic, regional Appalachian, magical realist, and science fiction. One application of this theory of unity has been explored through the idea of a common heroic character. Another application of this theory of unity has been explored through the reliance on fantasy during the hero's journey in the search for truth. But there is a danger in fictive realities — they can both hinder and help the hero reach his goal. Ultimately Chappell's more regional works predominately use fantasy to allow a protagonist to gain truth in self-knowledge while his more gothic and science fiction works tend to use fantasy in order to lead the hero away from truth.
One Hundred Years of Stuff: A Biographical Sketch of Louise S. Hartin
(2006-12-08) Rhame, Mary Elizabeth; Carmine Prioli, Committee Member; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member; Elaine Orr, Committee Chair
While a student in the Master's of English program at North Carolina State University, I have developed a particular fondness for the telling of one's American experience through memoir. Books such as Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, Richard Wright's Black Boy, and Virginia Holman's Saving Patty Hearst, coupled with my own fascination with recent American history, oral history, the struggle for civil rights for various groups, and research, inspired me to begin my own creative nonfiction essays with my great-grandmother, the late Louise S. Hartin, as my central character. Oral history has always been important in my family. We tell and retell stories, some of them rather extraordinary, some of family members who have passed on and some about those of us who are still around. I've always been a writer, and in the past decade a journalist. For those of us who describe ourselves this way, I think it is our responsibility to listen to the stories of others and preserve them. I consider it my personal responsibility to make official recordation of family stories involving my great-grandmother. I will use my thesis as a vehicle to combine a conglomeration of materials found through research, family stories, and personal interviews into one narrative with Louise Hartin at its center. Chapter Outline Below is a list of proposed chapters with a brief explanation of each. Chapter One This chapter will serve to introduce the reader to Louise, my central character. I will introduce her by describing her experience waiting out Hurricane Hugo alone in her home, and the attention she commanded the morning after the storm. I also begin establishing my own credibility as the author and as Louise's great-granddaughter. Chapter Two Here I describe in detail the house in which Louise lived over sixty years, and all the changes that occurred in the neighborhood surrounding the house. I begin to give the reader a sense of the town, Sumter. I talk about our relationship and what we did when we were together. I further introduce Louise as a character, and include her setting: Sumter, South Carolina, and more specifically, the house she occupied for more than half her life. Chapter Three The focus of this chapter is Louise's church, Trinity United Methodist Church. I detail its importance in her life and describe the scene where she went to it as firefighters were extinguishing the blaze that gutted the sanctuary. I use her to tell the story of the church's rebuilding. Chapter Four I give historical context to Sumter in the 1960s by describing pertinent historical events in the region. I discuss South Carolina politics and Senator Strom Thurmond. I discuss the segregated social system that went through major changes during the Civil Rights Movement. Chapter Five Here I show how Sumter integrated the town. First, the hospital. Second, the military base. And, third, the public schools. Chapter Six Here are profiles of Dorothy and Alice, Louise's maids for about forty years. I ponder the life of a black domestic worker. Chapter Seven This chapter profiles Efred, Louise's yard man. Chapter Eight This chapter details two specific civil rights strides in Sumter, lunch counter and church sit-ins. Chapter Nine Finally, I discuss her death, the circumstances leading up to it, and my place in it all. Epilogue A wrap-up of all that has appeared before, and I use it as a place for me to record my final thoughts about Louise's life and/or the project.
The Quarterdeck: Leadership and Authority in Herman Melville
(2006-04-28) Zupancic, Anthony Edward; Leila May, Committee Member; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member; Anne Baker, Committee Chair
This thesis examines the theme of leadership and authority in three of Melville's works. America, in the 1840's and 1850s, was struggling through the issues of slavery and western expansion and the resolution to both resided in the countr's leadership. Melville recognized the important role the nation's leaders played in the development of the new county's role in the world. He also realized the detrimental effect that weak or ineffective leaders would have on the nation and the people. In this thesis, I examine Melville's ideas about leadership as represented in the novels White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, and in the short story 'Benito Cereno.' My analysis does not demonstrate a progressive definition of leadership but instead shows Melville's struggle with the concept of leadership and authority. Melville constantly struggled with the obligation to respect and adhere to authority and the moral responsibility of the people of a democratic country to be vigilant against tyranny and oppressive leaders. Even though Melville provides the reader with no clear model of leadership, he does, through his characters and narrative style, inspire a discussion about the relationship between the leader and the led and ensures that the people remember their role within that relationship.
Sailing, Rafting, Time Traveling, and Strait-Jacketed: The Evolution of the American Adam
(2005-06-28) Berg, Christopher Benjamin; Allen F. Stein, Committee Member; Lucinda MacKethan, Committee Member; Thomas D. Lisk, Committee Chair
In 1923, D. H. Lawrence asked a question that has dogged American Literature scholars ever since. His work, Studies in Classic American Literature, gave the European perspective on American Literature: Where is this new bird called the true American? Show us the homunculus of the new era. Go on, show us him. Because all that is visible to the naked European eye, in America, is a sort of recreant European. We want to see this missing link of the next era (3-4). High school English teachers perpetuate this myth: many call American Literature "derivative," and arbitrarily assign the birth of American Literature as distinctly American at varying points during the nineteenth century. Before "X" author — Cooper, Poe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, or any of a myriad of others — they claim, American Literature was English Literature in a different setting. Responding to this challenge, R. W. B. Lewis, in his 1955 book, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, answered Lawrence's challenge, identifying the "true American" in literature as a prelapsarian Adam figure. He culled the name for his American bildungsroman hero from Emerson's Journals: "the plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world." The authors he named as participating in the myth of the American as Adam read as a canon of nineteenth century American Literature: Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Cooper, and the younger Henry James. These men, he argued, created the identity of an initiatory protagonist who was "morally prior" (128-9) to the world in which he lived. Lewis's work was a stunning success; however, it had several oversights. Lewis also wrote that in our modern era, post-World War II America, the picture of the American as Adam has been "frowned quite out of existence" (195). He bemoaned the "current rigidity" (196) of American Literature, which characterizes positive thinking and innocence as willful ignorance. Ihab Hassan, in a 1961 book entitled Radical Innocence, wrote of contemporary scholars' belief in the idea that current fiction was "a spent form, irrelevant to the goals of a Supersociety committed to a galactic adventure, and therefore no longer receptive to the piteous heroics of the individual soul" (3-4). My thesis will attempt to demonstrate that the American as Adam has not disappeared from our Literature; that, indeed, he had not disappeared even when Lewis wrote his book. I will examine four novels from various periods in American Literature, including Herman Melville's Redburn, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade. Redburn being named in Lewis's book as an exemplary novel of the American Adam, I will first examine its protagonist, Wellingborough Redburn. I will explore each character in order to compare the aspects of their Adamic natures. I will compare their encounters with society, their morals, their confrontations with evil, and finally the manner by which each character chooses to continue his life in relation to his fellow man. Furthermore, I will look for ties between them that Lewis may not have found. My conclusion will explain my findings and discuss the evolution of the Adamic figure into the mid-twentieth century.