Neoliberalism, as both an economic and a cultural system, diminishes the notion of education as a public good and weakens educational standards in First Year Composition programs. Rhetorical Literacy is delineated as a set of pedagogical practices that can combat the adverse effects of neoliberalism upon Higher Education and the Liberal Arts. Rhetorical Literacy emphasizes immersion in print culture, contextualizing skills, metacognition, and critical thinking. A table of Rhetorical Methods is included as a pedagogical tool. The Community College program “Guided Pathways” is critiqued as a neoliberal effort to lower standards and exclude Rhetorical Literacy from college level general education curriculum.

Attention to family relationships in work by Chicanas and Latinas reveals mothers as paramount figures to a daughter’s identity formation. Mothers may serve as gatekeepers of patriarchy and also as a daughter’s closest female role model—as a result, mother-daughter relationships may also be source of deep ambivalence. The literary and cultural study I undertake in this dissertation examines how Chicanas and Latinas find their voice through asking difficult questions of both their mothers and of the institutions that guide them. The primary texts I examine are foundational to the development of Chicana literature, feminism, and cultural criticism since the 1980’s, and take into account a spectrum of mother/daughter experiences. This work considers how daughters discover their voice through and against their mothers, and how self-expression on the page and on the cultural stage are necessary sites for creation and articulation of a daughter’s agency.

Modernism has traditionally been viewed as the zenith of White male genius, even though the forms that have marked the period’s innovation were largely created by women, and especially queer women and queer women of color. Examining poetry in particular provides a unique opportunity to understand the fluidity of the modernist period not only in regards to its kaleidoscopic forms and innovations but also in relation to its burgeoning alternate sexualities and gender expressions in art and literature. This dissertation is a restorative project that refocuses a handful of queer modernist women poets toward the center of a canon that has historically left them on the margins due to their gender, sexuality, race, and/or because their work has been considered too vulgar or eccentric. H.D., Angelina Weld Grimké, Djuna Barnes, and Hope Mirrlees are part of what I call the “metro of modernity,” which is a mode of alternative modernist production that emphasizes women’s artistic or creative labor rather than their biological function. I argue that “metro,” a compounded word denoting the city, the subway, poetic verse, and etymologically the womb or mother, is the mode through which these queer poets navigate and create modernity.

Low image contrast is a major limitation in transmission electron microscopy, since sampleswith low atomic number only weakly phase-modulate the illuminating electron beam, and beam-induced sample damage limits the usable electron dose. The contrast can be increased by converting the electron beam’s phase modulation into amplitude modulation using a phase plate, a device that applies a π/2 radian phase shift to part of the electron beam after it has passed through the sample. Previous phase plate designs rely on material placed in or near the electron beam to provide this phase shift. This results in image aberrations, an inconsistent time-varying phase shift, and resolution loss when the electron beam charges, damages, or is scattered from the material.

In this thesis, I present the theory, design, and implementation of the laser phase plate,which instead uses a focused continuous-wave laser beam to phase shift the electron beam. A near-concentric Fabry-Perot optical cavity focuses and resonantly enhances the power of the laser beam in order to achieve the high intensity required to provide the phase shift. We demonstrate that the cavity can surpass this requirement and generate a record-high continuous-wave laser intensity of 590GW/cm^2. By integrating the cavity into a transmission electron microscope, we show that the ponderomotive potential of the laser beam applies a spatially selective phase shift to the electron beam. This enables us to make the first experimental observation of the relativistic reversal of the ponderomotive potential.

We then theoretically analyze the properties of the contrast transfer function generated bythe laser phase plate. We experimentally determine that resolution loss caused by thermal magnetic field noise emanating from electrically conductive materials in the cavity can be eliminated by designing the cavity with a sufficiently large electron beam aperture. Finally, we show that the laser phase plate provides a stable π/2 phase shift and concomitant contrast enhancement when imaging frozen hydrated biological macromolecules. We use these images to successfully determine the structure of the molecules. This demonstrates the laser phase plate as the first stable and lossless phase plate for transmission electron microscopy.