Scholarship & Research
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Item My dildo called Nicaragua: rewriting cultural mythos(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Benton, Sonja Annalise; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Linda KarellThis, more than anything, is a retelling of a story. It is a retelling of being an activist, a cancer victim, a writer, a student, a teacher, and an American. It is a new mythology of the classroom, the university, of the creation of language. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde, and countless others, to guide a new conception of how to move in the world, how to become, and how to rewrite the myths that have been told about us. I hoped to create an answer and precedent for my own experience and shed new light on the work of 80s intersectional feminists as a guide for activism in the 2010s and 2020s to come. Its success as a paper depends on those who do work in the future, on the guidance it manages or doesn't manage to provide to others. I will never know how this work concludes, since it is just a continuation of previous work meant to help fork into new continuations in the future. It is the drawing of a map that was already partially drawn, and that is nowhere near finished yet. It is a call for more people willing to draw.Item The written word as oral transcription : an examination of Dickens's oral literary style(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2004) Langley, Rodney Christopher; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Marvin D. L. LansverkThe focus of this thesis is on the oral quality of Dickens's literature. Although Dickens himself can be viewed as large participant in the rise of written culture, I explore the orality of his work in relation to the rise of literacy. By looking at the influence Victorian theatre had on Dickens, his narrative techniques and his characters I trace and examine the oral quality of his work. I feel Dickens was very concerned about the loss of an oral community and ironically used his fiction to explore this topic. I want to suggest that Dickens occupied a unique position in history where he could at once see the death of an oral community and the rise of an alphabetic society.Item Lolita last star : a theoretically informed narrative of survivance(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2010) Young, Micaela Marie; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Greg Keeler; Susan Kollin (co-chair)Common missteps by non-Native writers lead to literary representations of Native Americans as tragic figures slumping towards inevitable annihilation, as museum Indians and simulations of the real, mystical and noble "savages," (yes, this still occurs in contemporary film and literature), or simply as inactive members of contemporary life. Authors also attempt to unveil and profit from sensitive spiritual and personal secrets, and offer explanations that do not match reality, leading to grave offenses, and the continuation of harmful stereotypes. In this respect, Lolita Last Star intentionally avoids discussions of spiritual and cultural traditions, or the actual personal lives of "real life" people, because these areas are guarded for good reasons, and instead focuses on native presence in contemporary American life, in the surprisingly complex, globalized space of the Rocky Mountain West. In other words, the final product is a narrative of Survivance; a concept first explored academically by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, in his book Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Survivance, I would argue along with many others, may not be as theoretically complex as it first appears. At its most basic level, "Survivance is a practice, not an ideology, dissimulation, or a theory." The concept of Survivance only becomes difficult when we look to the spectrum of responses to conditions that inspire the need to do more than survive. Survivance is coping, but it is also subversion, creation, amusement, ingenuity, reimagining, the provision of new explanations, and recapturing one's own destiny. The characters and their actions in Lolita Last Star respond in illustrations of full human vibrancy that transcend space and time, definitions, borders, accusations of authenticity, oppression, domination, petty moralities, victimry, and they move us all one step closer to self-sovereignty and human dignity. They show that if anything westerners contain cultural universes and are better for it. The only frauds are the people too scared to step out of their narrow focus of what a westerner, an Indian, a firefighter, or a cowboy is. They are never afraid to ask, "Where the hell are we supposed to go from here?"