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The Effect Of A Narrative Intervention On Preschoolers' Story Retelling And Personal Story Generation Skills, Trina D. Spencer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Narration, or storytelling, is an important aspect of language. Narrative skills have practical and social importance; for example, children who tell good stories receive attention and approval from their peers. When children accurately recount events surrounding an injury or dispute, vital information is passed to parents and teachers. Additionally, early childhood narrative skills are moderately correlated with reading comprehension in primary grades. Because narration is socially and academically valued, language interventionists often address it. The research literature on narrative intervention has most often included school-aged participants and those with language or learning difficulties. Only a small number of studies have …

Cascade Lake: A Novel, Camille Marian Pack

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Twenty-two-year-old Macy Oman narrates the book in retrospect from Cascade, Oregon, where she is visiting her mother. Macy's father moved with her to Portland shortly after the accidental death of her brother, Nick, seven years before the narration begins. Macy's mother stayed behind in Cascade. Thematically the work centers on the emotional repercussions of these losses. Macy's, and her older lover Jason's, involvement with Nick's death is unknown to everyone. Her guilt and her mother's perceived betrayal are disabling. Taking her longing for closeness to nature and to her reclusive friend Celia, Macy discovers folklore that inspires a vision quest …

Disordered: A Tale Of The Body, Elizabeth M. Benson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

While a body of creative nonfiction writing exists regarding experiences with various psychological disorders, few personal accounts have been written about the physical complications of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Some memoirs tell a tale of serious illness in a straightforward narrative line. On the opposite end of this spectrum, other memoirs intentionally blur the lines of truth and heighten the confusion of a disorder. This thesis is as much a narrative of my experience with Generalized Anxiety Disorder as it is a response to the void in creative nonfiction surrounding this specific disorder and the narrative forms others have chosen to …

Music From The Dead: The Tune-Making Of John Macdougall, Robert Macdonald

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia has been a stronghold of active and integrated community traditions of Scotch-Gaelic music and dance since it was settled by large numbers of Scottish emigrants in the nineteenth century. Though these emigrants brought with them an extensive store of tunes common to the Highlands of Scotland, the majority of them were carried in the collective oral memory. Consequently, the traditional Scottish repertoire of Cape Breton fiddlers steadily declined as generations of fiddlers who never learned to read or write music died. In the nearly two centuries that Scots have populated the island, there have been many …

The Cult Of True Motherhood: A Narrative, Jacoba Lynne Mendelkow

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis consists of five chapters including a traditional introduction and four chapters, which investigate cultural interpretations of motherhood within the genre of memoir and personal essay. In the introduction, I discuss my research as it relates to the larger collection and detail how this work is different from other works within the "mother memoir" genre. Chapters II thru V, then, are all essays which begin to explore the major themes of cultural motherhood: ambivalence, loss, legitimacy, morality, and sin. These chapters, especially chapter II, identify and detail the traits of true motherhood as patience, compassion, sacrifice, and strength.

Chapter …

Storytelling Through Brushstrokes: Minerva Teichert's Visualization Of The Mormon Pioneer Experience And Messages To Her Audience, Amy L. Williamson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

"We must paint the great Mormon story of our pioneers in mural decorations so that 'he who runs may read,'" remarked Minerva Teichert. When she created her pioneer panorama, Teichert attempted to do something different; whereas other Mormon artists had drawn on their personal pioneer experiences or sought inspiration from Church-approved publications regarding the trek, her visual inspiration came from the oral narratives she heard as a child. Because she used these narratives, Teichert portrayed the Mormon pioneer experience from a woman's perspective and voiced their experiences to male and non-Mormon audiences. Not only did Teichert offer a counterpoint to …

Land In Fairyland: Edmund Spenser And Emerging Perceptions Of Ecology And Gender In The Faerie Queen, Megan Angela Sieverts

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is an eloquent text brimming with images of nature, flowers, and gardening. Nature is not simply what is in the outdoors of the text or a passive backdrop for action to upstage; she is a character who has an active role in influencing the plot and characters of the story. Plants come alive through Spenser in many ways as he makes the natural world of his text into an enchanted fairyland. The imagery of nature is not only personified, but also actually personifies characters. Flowers found in The Faerie Queen are both plants and actual …

Grounding To Place And Past: Motherhood In The Novels Of Native American Writers Louise Erdrich And Linda Hogan, Elise Doney

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The interconnectedness in both form and content ofNative American literature originates from the complex relationship between cultural and personal identity as inextricably intertwined with spiritual and natural realms. In Louise Erdrich's Tracks and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Power motherhoodliesatthecenter ofthisinterconnectedweb ofrelationships among identity, community, tradition, and landscape. Each novel centers on a protagonist who is, in some form, distanced from her primary mother/daughter relationship, consequently literally and figuratively displaced. The disrupted maternal relationship results in the child's displacement, functioning as a metaphor for the community's severance from tradition and the land. However, surrogate mother/daughter relationships develop in each novel …

Loss Translated: Saudade In The Poetry Of Elizabeth Bishop, Corey D. Clawson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

In 1954, former U.S. poet laureate Elizabeth Bishop wrote in a letter from Brazil to Robert Lowell, a dear friend and fellow poet: "With much love and saudades as they say here, a very nice word that seems to include all the sentiments of missing friends in one.” This insightful observation illuminates a concept central to Brazilian culture which has been designated one of the most difficult words to translate. Later, Bishop defined the idea as “the characteristic Brazilian longing or nostalgia,” which she “strongly associates with homesickness.” Bishop’s fascination with the concept, I argue, is more than that of …

“Changes” In The Country Of The Mind: Seamus Heaney’S Revision Of William Wordsworth’S “Tintern Abbey”, Trenton B. Olsen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

For almost thirty years, critics have been interested in William Wordsworth’s influence on Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.

Zamyatin's We: Persuading The Individual To Sacrifice Self, Jeffrey Steven Carr

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The artistic aspects of the novel are excellent. Zamyatin has attained full maturity here—so much the worse, for all this has gone into the service of a malicious cause.

Reinterpreting The Comedy Of Errors: Exploring "Madness" And The Need To Belong, William K. Smith

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Since The Comedy of Errors' rescue from the literary bargain bin where it was tossed by nineteenth and early twentieth-century critics, many modern scholars have provided insightful cultural, linguistic, and theatrical commentaries on a play that is clearly more complex than it first seems. One area these recent discussions frequently address is the play's portrayal of madness in early modern society. However, what many of these discussions fail to remember is that ultimately Errors is a comedy "performed for the Delight of the Beholders" and that no one in the play is actually mad. Therefore, this essay argues that The …

The Last Honest Man, Daniel Arpad Nyikos

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Born to a Hungarian mother and a father of Hungarian descent, I have spent my life trapped between two worlds, never quite able to be entirely part of either. As such, it seems fitting that for thesis I chose to do a novella, an art form that is neither short story nor novel. The novella is, I argue, a form that is uniquely suited to the task of examining a single theme at length, which I do in my thesis. It is through this little-studied form of fiction that I create a story through which I examine my own identity …