English Language and Literature Commons^™

Marlowe's Ovid: The "Elegies" In The Marlowe Canon, M. L. Stapleton, Michael L. Stapleton

English and Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Magical Process, Patrice Loar

Senior Honors Theses

The use of supernatural beings in four of Shakespeare’s plays – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and The Tempest – is examined in order to show the change in Shakespeare’s thinking about magic, and how the mortal and supernatural can co-exist. The shift from properly controlled benevolent female power, to out-of-control malevolent female power, to the eradication of female power and triumph of the male magus is examined; the ideal co-existence of the human and supernatural worlds is assessed.

The Road To The American Dream - Analysis Of Its Distortions Through The Grapes Of Wrath And Little Miss Sunshine, Autumn Murphy

Honors Program Senior Capstone Collection

While most book-to-movie adaptations are transparent, this project explores the nuanced adaptation of the novel The Grapes of Wrath into the movie Little Miss Sunshine. Little Miss Sunshine promulgates a unique approach to adaptation; additionally, the analysis of these two works provides conclusions for matters beyond literature. The project addresses the “American Dream” and differing perspectives on “winning” and “losing.” The initial step was a close reading of The Grapes of Wrath and a critical viewing of Little Miss Sunshine. From there, a research plan was developed, focusing on distortions of “The American Dream.” The research materials included books, scholarly ...

No Equality. No Social Justice. Why Not Equity?, Anthony John Marquez '14

2013 Spring Semester

In regards to most current and past social discrepancies, such as between races and sexes, people tend to protest in favor of all individuals being treated equally. However, as demonstrated in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, striving for utter equal treatment in hope of achieving social justice is not necessarily conducive to an uncontestable, utopian society. Social justice, as thoroughly defined by the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, categorizes social justice as a process that “empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential…and ...

The Mask Of The 'American Dream', Saraswathi Nookala '15

2013 Spring Semester

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology are heralded as some of the greatest insights into human nature in American literature. Both authors ask the reader to scrutinize the actions and emotions of the characters in their books to understand the true meaning behind their double-sided statements. From analyzing the characters of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Lambert Hutchins, the reader can conclude that although they have the inordinate amount of wealth everybody in America works toward, they are dissatisfied, and use their money and aristocratic position to project the exterior of contentment ...

The Beginning And The Present Day African American Authors From Kentucky, Reinette F. Jones

2013 College Language Association Convention

No abstract provided.

Transatlantic Print Culture And The Rise Of New England Literature, 1620-1630, Sean Delaney

History Dissertations

Despite the considerable attention devoted to the founding of puritan colonies in New England, scholars have routinely discounted several printed tracts that describe this episode of history as works of New England literature. This study examines the reasons for this historiographical oversight and, through a close reading of the texts, identifies six works written and printed between 1620 and 1630 as the beginnings of a new type of literature. The production of these tracts supported efforts to establish puritan settlements in New England. Their respective authors wrote, not to record a historical moment for posterity, but to cultivate a particular ...

"Radiant Imperfection": The Interconnected Writing Lives Of Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don Mckay, And Jan Zwicky, Kostantina Northrup

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the course of the past two decades, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky have come to be known as a coterie of ecological writers and ethicists. All five poets have inhabited the Canadian university at various points throughout their careers, and by discussing their ecopoetics in light of their commentary on academic epistemologies and contemporary education in the humanities, this dissertation observes how the poets’ respective approaches to aesthetics, philosophy, and pedagogy are intimately intertwined. By contextualizing the group’s ecopoetics in light of their academic interventions, I argue that their public reputations as ...

Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian And Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives, Michelle Coupal

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reconceptualizes generic distinctions between fiction and testimony in accounts of childhood trauma. Scholars such as Leigh Gilmore have argued that while writers of trauma stories are burdened by legalistic definitions of evidence and anxieties about truth-telling, they nonetheless push at the limits of autobiography, often scuffing the border between fact and fiction, in their effort to bring their traumatic stories into language. There has not, however, been a sustained effort to understand and legitimize the place of fiction in testimony, particularly in cases of adult narrations of recovered memories of childhood traumas. My research addresses this lacuna by ...

Romancing The Stone Age: John Updike's "Wife-Wooing" And The Naturally Occurring Nuclear Family, Susan Norton

Articles

No abstract provided.

95th Connecticut College Commencement Address, Howard Gordon

Commencement Addresses

Emmy-winning television writer and producer Howard Gordon told the Class of 2013," The fictional characters I create live in the same crazy, complicated world as the rest of us. How they navigate through the world is what makes them compelling. How you navigate your way through the world is what will make your story compelling.”

The best way to do it, he told the Class of 2013, is to heed the sage words of advice printed on the poster in his office: “Work hard and be nice to people.”

He apologized for "what may sound like fortune-cookie philosophy," but said ...

The Consumption Of Children In A Capitalistic Society, Jessica Melendy

Undergraduate Review

Audre Lorde’s, “Now that I Am Forever with Child”, and Sharon Olds’, “The Moment the Two Worlds Meet,” juxtapose the natural aspects of childbirth with late capital methods of consumption and reproduction. In “Now that I Am Forever with Child”, Audre Lorde describes her fetus as a budding flower but feels detached from it during and after delivery. Sharon Olds also uses the metaphor of an opening flower to demonstrate the climax of delivery in “The Moment the Two Worlds Meet.” In both poems, the birth of the child is anticlimactic and disappointing for the mother who feels like ...

Revisiting A Seminal Text Of The Law & Literature Movement: A Girardian Reading Of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, James Mcbride

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Impossible Storyworlds And The (Unnatural) Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, Mitchell C. Lilly

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The following thesis defends reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as an early example of an “unnatural narrative” in American literature. Adapting unnatural narrative theory, a recent area of study in narratology developed to analyze the existence of unnatural storyworlds, minds, and acts of narration prevalent in postmodern fiction, this thesis analyzes the unnatural dynamics at play in Pym’s storyworld and storytelling that do not comply with what the reader knows is otherwise physically, logically, or humanly impossible in the physical world. Legitimating Poe’s novel as a work of unnatural narrative coincides with ...

Melville In Tahiti: A Gis Approach, Jessica Ewing

Student Research Initiatives

This presentation will focus on Melville's period in and around Tahiti in 1842, a part of the biographical record vexed by conflicting scholarly accounts of Melville's whereabouts and actions, and by inconsistencies—as well as outright falsehoods—among surviving documents and the author's own account of his experiences in his second book Omoo. Digitally expanding on methods of traditional scholarship, I will present the evidence in visual, electronic form by using ArcGIS software to map Melville’s movements, supplying relevant data and documentation and mapping alternate interpretations of the author's travels. The layered digital maps will ...

Third Way Poets: Navigating The Streams Of Modern And Postmodern Poetic Uncertainty, James A. Richie

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines the career arcs of four representative current poets in order to develop a tentative narrative to account for recent and emergent poetic practice. Poets who began publishing between the 1970s and 1990s inherited two powerful aesthetic traditions. On the one hand, they write in the shadow of postmodern poets who find liberation in the embrace of radical linguistic, epistemological/ontological, or subjective uncertainty and exhibit intense skepticism about intellectual closure or claims of privilege for aesthetic production. On the other hand, they also find aesthetic reserves in the work of high modernists who felt they faced similar ...

“Under The Seams Runs The Pain”: Four Greek Sources And Analogues For The Modern Monster In Anne Carson’S Autobiography Of Red, Joshua M. Carmel '13

Student Publications

This work seeks to explore the monster figure in its evolution from the Classical to the contemporary literary canons. Using Geryon, a three-headed and red-hued monster, as the central figure and Carson’s 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, it evaluates the underpinnings of the alienated “other” and attempts to shed light on its role in modern society.

Victorian Influence On Beauty And The Beast, Elizabeth Stone

4710 English Undergraduate Research: Children’s Literature

This essay examines a unique publication of the well-known Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. W.B. Conkey Company’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast demonstrates the influence of Victorian culture on children’s literature (1897). An in-depth analysis of the cultural and historical context of the publication uncovers new meaning in the lost text. This three-part analysis discusses norms of Victorian courtship, explains Victorian literary elements, and applies these cultural contexts to textual analysis. This lens highlights W.B. Conkey Company’s tailored message to a young Victorian audience.

Understanding School Genres Using Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Study Of Science And Narrative Texts, Allison D. Canfield

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to examine elementary level textbooks (grades 2-4; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing; The Trophies Collection) using Systemic Functional Linguistics as the theoretical framework to study the different types of lexical choice and grammatical options made in the textbooks. The two genres examined are science and narrative, which are significantly different from each other. Science texts are “information based,” and narrative texts, “story based.” It is very important for teachers to understand how the genres are different so that they can convey those differences to their students.

The two school genres, science and narrative, differ from ...

A Contrastive Systemic Functional Analysis Of Causality In Japanese And English Academic Articles, Masaki Shibata

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Typological differences between languages have been a much debated topic in linguistic studies. Despite their usefulness in understanding syntactic features of various languages, such contrastive analyses have yet to thoroughly explore semantic variation among languages; furthermore, the results obtained have not been practically utilized in other areas of applied linguistics. This situation may come from the fact that a large number of contrastive studies have eclectically examined isolated areas of language variation either from syntactic, morphological, or from pragmatic perspectives. Viewing this issue from another angle, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) focuses on language from a multi-dimensional perspective, where language is ...