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English Language and Literature

2023

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Treating Traum(A): Examples In The Tanakh That Mirror Events During The Life Of Bonhoeffer And Crimes Of The Ian Rankin Novel Knots And Crosses, Geraldine Mitchell Dec 2023

Treating Traum(A): Examples In The Tanakh That Mirror Events During The Life Of Bonhoeffer And Crimes Of The Ian Rankin Novel Knots And Crosses, Geraldine Mitchell

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) contains a wealth of stories reflecting life in the ancient world including struggles and wars that prove(d) traumatic. It is shown time and again that history repeats itself, and the stories of the Bible reappear in the modern world, both real and (crime) fictional. In this paper, traumatic experiences associated with the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as the fictional character DI John Rebus created by the crime writer Ian Rankin, are linked with similar incidents recorded in the Tanakh. The first novel in the Rebus series, Knots and Crosses, also forms the basis …


Decolonization Of The Writing Classroom: Creating Space For Decolonial Theory, Tools, Anti-Racist Pedagogy, And Methods To Improve The Emerging Bilingual Student Experience, Desiree L. Brown Dec 2023

Decolonization Of The Writing Classroom: Creating Space For Decolonial Theory, Tools, Anti-Racist Pedagogy, And Methods To Improve The Emerging Bilingual Student Experience, Desiree L. Brown

Masters Theses

In this thesis, the author addresses the colonial roots of the secondary writing classroom and the origin of standard academic English which enables strict standardized testing and writing assessment requirements that in-turn incite linguistic violence towards emerging bilingual students. The author frames her study within the framework of April Baker-Bell and Asao B. Inoue through a reflective/reflexive study of her teaching in a ninth grade writing classroom in a primarily Hispanic school district in South Texas, which is assessed by the state of Texas through STAAR. This study seeks to identify instances of linguistic violence being perpetuated in the writing …


Echoes Of The Spanish Civil War In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Alexander Retakh Dec 2023

Echoes Of The Spanish Civil War In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Alexander Retakh

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Spanish Civil War had a profound effect on the literature of the 1930s and 40s; however, it has been almost neglected in Tolkien studies. This article examines both Tolkien's potential views of the Civil War and their effect on his writings of the late 1930s such as the emerging story of Numenor. The dearth of primary sources can be rectified by studying the position on the War taken by other British Catholic intellectuals. Very likely Tolkien viewed the Civil War primarily as a religious conflict and was shaken by the highly publicized cases of anti-clerical violence. The combination of …


Evolving Expressions Of Trauma In James Joyce, Jean Rhys, And Caryl Phillips, Sean M. Mccray Dec 2023

Evolving Expressions Of Trauma In James Joyce, Jean Rhys, And Caryl Phillips, Sean M. Mccray

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Evolving Expressions of Trauma articulates ways that dynamic, changing theories of trauma can provide a language and conceptual space to examine innovative modes and means of expression in Modernist novels and in later, post-colonial and experimental novels. This dissertation asserts that as trauma theory has expanded to encompass and describe different types of traumata, including the mundane, the insidious, and empathetic, it has provided a scaffolding for studying difficult, even impenetrable works from the Modernist period and beyond. The works examined here are strategically selected to demonstrate scope and particularity in the growth of trauma theories and their potential applications …


Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert Nov 2023

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …


Law And Its Limits: Ethical Issues In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus, David S. Caudill Oct 2023

Law And Its Limits: Ethical Issues In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus, David S. Caudill

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The law and literature movement is frequently associated with the use of literary images of law as a point of reflection upon the ethical obligations of lawyers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—the story of a young scientist whose unorthodox experiments end up creating the famed “monster”—is not, at first glance, a likely candidate for that enterprise. However, Dr. Frankenstein’s ambition and ruthless pursuit of knowledge has become a contemporary image of science out of control and the need for ethical limitations on scientific progress. Consequently, the novel raises currently important issues of regulating science and technology. Given the lawyer’s ethical obligation …


Satire In Swift And Voltaire: Towards A Humanist Dialectic, Ola Kittaneh, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb Sep 2023

Satire In Swift And Voltaire: Towards A Humanist Dialectic, Ola Kittaneh, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

This article examines how the Enlightenment writers Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s attitudes and works resonate with our modern writers’ concepts on the role of the humanist intellectual. Informed by Edward Said’s recent theoretical concepts on the humanist intellectual, the article compares the way the two writers use the power of satire to achieve a humanist end that focuses on the pitfalls of identitarian thinking which often leads to national or religious fanaticism. There is certainly a need for Swift and Voltaire to be repositioned in relation with the broad contours of modern writers’ notions of the intellectual. By reading the …


C.S. Lewis’S Inferno: Did The Two Queens Wish To Leave Hell?, Kyoko Yuasa Aug 2023

C.S. Lewis’S Inferno: Did The Two Queens Wish To Leave Hell?, Kyoko Yuasa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

C.S. Lewis depicts “inferno” not only as the otherworldly vision of Hell, but also as how you would choose your life in the present. In Beyond the Shadowlands, Wayne Martindale discussed, in separate chapters, how Jadis and Orual chose Hell. This presentation will add to his research a comparison of the two queens’ choice of “living in the self” and refusal to abandon themselves. In The Great Divorce and The Silver Chair, a protagonist moves out of the present world into a dimension of Inferno or Elysium, while Jadis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Orual …


Gerontology In Bryony Lavery’S A Wedding Story (2000) And Sebastian Barry’S Hinterland (2002), Rania M Rafik Khalil Jul 2023

Gerontology In Bryony Lavery’S A Wedding Story (2000) And Sebastian Barry’S Hinterland (2002), Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Old age is perceived as a narrative of decline, recently, an alternative perspective was introduced known as positive aging or Gerotranscendance. This paper examines ageing in Bryony Lavery’s A Wedding Story (2000) and Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002) through the theory of gerontology. Gerontology in British and Irish modern theatre, according to Giovanna Tallone (2020) and Heather Ingman (2018), is a new category in literary studies and theory. The paper aims to examine the challenges of retaining agency in old age in comparison to the notion of aging as a process of inner harmony further proving that despite the process of …


Mythprint Vol. 3 No. 5, Glen Goodknight Jun 2023

Mythprint Vol. 3 No. 5, Glen Goodknight

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.


“We Could Do With A Bit More Queerness In These Parts”: An Analysis Of The Queer Against The Peculiar, The Odd, And The Strange In The Lord Of The Rings, Yvette Kisor Jun 2023

“We Could Do With A Bit More Queerness In These Parts”: An Analysis Of The Queer Against The Peculiar, The Odd, And The Strange In The Lord Of The Rings, Yvette Kisor

Journal of Tolkien Research

As developed in The Lord of the Rings, “queer” is a special term, one uniquely associated with the Hobbits, and Tolkien crafts a very specific set of resonances that embed it in provincial mistrust, a sense of real outside threat, and places within the ancient natural world that appear foundationally opposed to the ordinary realm of civilization. While Tolkien cannot be said to use the word “queer” in its more modern sense of “homosexual” or nonnormative sexual and/or gender identity, he included an owning and even embracing of the term that follows a similar pattern.


International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera Jun 2023

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …


Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra May 2023

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …


The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii May 2023

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …


C. S. Lewis And The Occult Temptation, Thomas Garrett Isham May 2023

C. S. Lewis And The Occult Temptation, Thomas Garrett Isham

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Twice in his life C. S. Lewis encountered—and greatly admired—authors involved in occult theory and practice.1 The first such figure was William Butler Yeats, the second, more than two decades later, Charles Williams. Lewis reacted to their occult preoccupations in quite different ways, even while acknowledging his continuing fascination with the subject.


Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes May 2023

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …


The Story Of A Half Sovereign, Albert James Lewis Apr 2023

The Story Of A Half Sovereign, Albert James Lewis

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

An imaginative tale, reminiscent of Dickens, by C. S. Lewis's father, Albert J. Lewis.


"A Dreadful Thing": C.S. Lewis And The Experinces Of War, Timothy J. Demy Apr 2023

"A Dreadful Thing": C.S. Lewis And The Experinces Of War, Timothy J. Demy

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

From a Christian perspective, war entails the death and killing of people who are all created in the image of God and therefore have inherent dignity and incalculable worth. And yet, even after experiencing war at firsthand, C. S. Lewis believed that war is sometimes justifiable and necessary.

Like others of his generation, Lewis was deeply affected by the experience of war. He lived through the First and Second World Wars, serving as an officer on the Western Front between November 1917 and April 1918. His brother Warren (“Warnie”) was a career officer serving in the British army in both …


Robert Burns’ Poetic Style Through His Poetry, Songs, And Correspondence, Abigail Druckenmiller Apr 2023

Robert Burns’ Poetic Style Through His Poetry, Songs, And Correspondence, Abigail Druckenmiller

Senior Theses

This thesis explores connections and contradictions within the songs, correspondence, and poems of Scotland’s bard, Robert Burns. A selection of works from each of these categories is presented to compare the ways Burns writes verse, lyrics, and letters. Through this thesis, I analyzed his work looking at subject matter, use of the Scots dialect, structure, and poetic devices in order to offer holistic commentary on Burns’ style in a way that includes his letters more heavily than most other Burns scholarship. Overall, I thought Burns remained a consistent man of conviction and societal criticism throughout my findings, as well as …


Blood On The Snow, Soot On The Carpet: Belief As Pedagogy In Terry Pratchett’S Hogfather, Michael A. Moir Jr. Apr 2023

Blood On The Snow, Soot On The Carpet: Belief As Pedagogy In Terry Pratchett’S Hogfather, Michael A. Moir Jr.

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, children largely refuse to conform to the ideas that adults form about them as a class. While the adults of the Discworld seem to regard childhood as a time of innocence and wonder, the children who inhabit Pratchett’s universe show themselves to be violent, cynical, manipulative, and naturally skeptical of any phenomena which they cannot directly sense. As such, when the beloved seasonal figure of the Hogfather, a former Winter Solstice deity transformed over time into a gift-giving fat man with a taste for sherry and pork-pies, is assaulted by entities who want to make …


The Trauma Of Partition In Michael Longley’S Poetry Of The Irish Troubles And Murīd Al-Barghūthī’S Palestinian Exilic Poetry, Asmaa Youssef Apr 2023

The Trauma Of Partition In Michael Longley’S Poetry Of The Irish Troubles And Murīd Al-Barghūthī’S Palestinian Exilic Poetry, Asmaa Youssef

Journal of the Faculty of Arts (JFA)

Violence, migration, and displacement shape postcolonial societies; they help in dividing colonised countries into geographical partitions. The political and communal aspects of the partition have individual and collective influences, particularly when it comes to the splitting of both Ireland and Palestine. The colonial partitions in Ireland in the wake of World War I and Palestine at the end of World War II offers an extensive study of the social and cultural heritage of state divisions, where the trauma of partition constitutes political events up until today. This paper concentrates on the political and cultural legacies of partition in Ireland and …


The One Ring Of King Solomon, Giovanni Carmine Costabile Apr 2023

The One Ring Of King Solomon, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien source criticism has long been looking for the source of the One Ring in the wrong places. Neither the historical ispiration from World War II and the Atomic Bomb nor the proposed literary influences such as the Ring of the Nibelungs, Wagner's Ring, or the several examples of invisibility rings found in world literature may suffice to explain the complexity of Tolkien's unique creation. Nonetheless, the same cannot be said so easily with regards to another possible source once we survey the richness of the related legends: it is the fabled signet ring of King Solomon.


Vol. 42, No. 4 - Whole No. 277, Eleanor M. Farrell Feb 2023

Vol. 42, No. 4 - Whole No. 277, Eleanor M. Farrell

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.


Vol. 42, No. 2 - Whole No. 275, Eleanor M. Farrell Feb 2023

Vol. 42, No. 2 - Whole No. 275, Eleanor M. Farrell

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.


Vol. 41, No. 8 - Whole No. 269, Eleanor M. Farrell Feb 2023

Vol. 41, No. 8 - Whole No. 269, Eleanor M. Farrell

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.


Novelizing The Feminist Biography, From Nancy Milford's Zelda To The Present: What Are The Ethics Of Sourcing?, Joanne E. Gates Jan 2023

Novelizing The Feminist Biography, From Nancy Milford's Zelda To The Present: What Are The Ethics Of Sourcing?, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation arose out of two parallel tracks: the desire to novelize my own feminist biography of Elizabeth Robins and the awareness -- especially made acute in the essay on Emma Tennant's two treatments of the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes material by Diane Middlebrook, "Misremembering Ted Hughes" -- that for a novelist to base fiction on historical subjects risks not merely critical exposure; it also has its ethical and sometimes legal complications.

Anyone of a certain age remembers or can mark the impact of Milford's study of Zelda Fitzgerald, published 1970, the finalist in several book awards and scores …


“The Weird And The Occult” In Carmilla And “The Portrait Of Roísín Dhu”, Eliza Lehman Jan 2023

“The Weird And The Occult” In Carmilla And “The Portrait Of Roísín Dhu”, Eliza Lehman

Senior Honors and Award-Winning Theses

This thesis brings together two Irish Gothic texts that contemplate queer intimacy and reveal similar logics of imagined Irish Catholicism. By reading Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla and Dorothy Macardle’s 1924 short story “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu” alongside Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), this thesis examines the literary treatment of Irish Catholicism and queerness as “backward.” In both texts, the embedded narrative undermines the frame, allowing more subversive and complex themes to haunt the hopeful, nationalist frame of “The Portrait of Roísín Dhu” and the patriarchal, imperial frame of Carmilla.


“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman Jan 2023

“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation explores trauma, memory and violence against women in Western North Carolina murder ballads “Tom Dooley,” “Poor Omie Wise,” “Poor Ellen Smith,” “The Ballad of the Lawson Family,” and “Frankie Silver.” I posit that these ballads were influenced by prescriptive societal conceptions of femininity, which in turn influenced societal ideations of violence against women. Using folklore performance theory, I analyze the text and context of these ballads and their subsequent histories, eventually arriving at a template for polyvocality that incorporates multiple ballad variants and encourages diverse performances.


"I Remember!": Irish Postcolonial Memory In The Early Short Stories Of Seán O'Faoláin, Rebecca Norden-Bright Jan 2023

"I Remember!": Irish Postcolonial Memory In The Early Short Stories Of Seán O'Faoláin, Rebecca Norden-Bright

Honors Projects

Seán O’Faoláin (1900-1991) was an Irish writer, cultural critic, and editor of the literary magazine The Bell. He wrote prolifically throughout the twentieth century, and while his short stories are often anthologized, much of his work is now out of print. This project will examine O’Faoláin’s first two short story collections, Midsummer Night Madness (1932) and A Purse of Coppers (1937), within the context of the post-independence period in Ireland. The 1930s is a period often glossed over in both political and literary histories of Ireland, overshadowed by the Literary Revival and primarily characterized by deepening conservatism and political strife. …


The ‘Others’ In John Lanchester’S The Wall, Gregory White Jan 2023

The ‘Others’ In John Lanchester’S The Wall, Gregory White

Government: Faculty Books

No abstract provided.