Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 15 of 15

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

It's Alive! The Gothic (Dis)Embodiment Of The Logic Of Networks, Anna Katharine Bennion Dec 2007

It's Alive! The Gothic (Dis)Embodiment Of The Logic Of Networks, Anna Katharine Bennion

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis draws connections between today's network society and the workings of gothic literature in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. Just as our society is formed and affected by the flow of information, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was formed by the merging and flow of scientific "technology" (or new scientific discoveries) and societal norms and rules. Gothic literature was born out of this science-society network, and in many ways embodies the ruptures implicit in it. Although gothic literature is not a network in the same sense as informationalism and the culture of sensibility are, gothic literature works according …


Wordsworth's Evolving Project: Nature, The Satanic School, And (Underline) The River Duddon (End Underline), Kimberly Jones May Nov 2007

Wordsworth's Evolving Project: Nature, The Satanic School, And (Underline) The River Duddon (End Underline), Kimberly Jones May

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss Wordsworth's evolving nature project, particularly during the Regency, when his sonnet collection The River Duddon offered an alternative view of nature to that found in the works of Byron and Shelley. This thesis argues that The River Duddon deserves renewed critical attention not only because of the acclaim it received at its publication in 1820, but also because it marks yet another turn in Wordsworth's evolving nature project, and one that comes in opposition to the depiction of nature given during the Regency by Byron, and Shelley. Wordsworth's portrayal of nature dramatically …


A Virginia Woolf Of One's Own: Consequences Of Adaptation In Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Brooke Leora Grant Nov 2007

A Virginia Woolf Of One's Own: Consequences Of Adaptation In Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Brooke Leora Grant

Theses and Dissertations

With a rising interest in visual media in academia, studies have overlapped at literary and film scholars' interest in adaptation. This interest has mainly focused on the examination of issues regarding adaptation of novel to novel or novel to film. Here I discuss both: Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, which is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and the 2002 film adaptation of Cunningham's novel. However, my thesis also investigates a different kind of adaptation: the adaptation of a literary and historical figure. By including in The Hours a fictionalization of Virginia Woolf, Cunningham entrenches his adaptation with Virginia …


The Play's The Thing: Investigating The Potential Of Performance Pedagogy, Tamara Lynn Scoville Nov 2007

The Play's The Thing: Investigating The Potential Of Performance Pedagogy, Tamara Lynn Scoville

Theses and Dissertations

In the last ten years there has been a resurgence of interest in teaching Shakespeare through performance. However, most literature on the topic continues to focus on the pragmatic selling points of how performance makes Shakespeare fun and understandable while remaining surprisingly silent on issues of theory and ethics. By investigating the ethical implications of performance pedagogy as it affects our students' construction of identity, empathy, and pluralistic tolerance we can better understand and discuss the potential of performance pedagogy in relation to the ethical goals of the Humanities. Performance Pedagogy has particular ethical potential due to the structure of …


Holmes, Alice, And Ezeulu: Western Rationality In The Context Of British Colonialism And Western Modernity, Andrew B. Schultz Jul 2007

Holmes, Alice, And Ezeulu: Western Rationality In The Context Of British Colonialism And Western Modernity, Andrew B. Schultz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Western rationality, contextualizing that subject in British colonialism and Western modernity. Using Scott Lash's description of academic characterizations of modernity, I explore the “high" modernity of the social sciences represented in the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I then explore the cultural studies critique of that characterization of modernity in the book Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. Using the theory of Jean Francois Lyotard, Martin Heidegger, and Theodor Adorno, I look at Western rationality through its manifestation in British colonialism. I argue that …


In Defense Of Ugly Women, Sara Deborah Nyffenegger Jul 2007

In Defense Of Ugly Women, Sara Deborah Nyffenegger

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected in the novel, and how authors respond to the issue of plainer women and issues of their marriageability. I look at how these authorial attitudes shifted over the century, observing that the issue of plain women and their marriageability was dramatized by nineteenth-century authors, whose efforts to heighten the audience's awareness of …


Libertas Reborn: A Legend Of Florence And Leigh Hunt's Literary Revival, Adrianne Gardner Malan Jul 2007

Libertas Reborn: A Legend Of Florence And Leigh Hunt's Literary Revival, Adrianne Gardner Malan

Theses and Dissertations

According to traditional accounts, following the premature deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron in the 1820s, literature in England fell into a sort of slumber until the late 1830s and early 1840s, when a new generation-a generation we now call the Victorians-came on the scene. Literary scholarship has tended to ignore this period of slumber as an uninteresting gap between the two dynamic movements of Romanticism and Victorianism. It was during this transitional period, however, that Leigh Hunt, one of the most radical of Romantic figures, wrote and staged A Legend of Florence (1840) in an attempt to stimulate a …


A Gentlemen's Benevolence: Symptoms Of Class, Gender, And Social Change In Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, And The Mill On The Floss, Aubrey Lea Hammer Jul 2007

A Gentlemen's Benevolence: Symptoms Of Class, Gender, And Social Change In Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, And The Mill On The Floss, Aubrey Lea Hammer

Theses and Dissertations

Austen, Dickens, and Eliot each responded to discussions of their time concerning class, gender, and social change. One of the ways they addressed these issues, and sought to find solutions to the problems facing their culture, was through benevolence. Knightley, in Emma, uses benevolence as a means of mediating self-interest and sympathy. By acting out of sympathy, through benevolence, he achieves the self-interested benefits of reinforcing the class system and achieving his romantic conquests. Likewise, Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby learns how to use benevolence as a means of social mobility from his mentors, the Cheerybles. Throughout Nicholas Nickleby the hero learns …


Taking Mormons Seriously: Ethics Of Representing Latter-Day Saints In American Fiction, Terrol Roark Williams Jul 2007

Taking Mormons Seriously: Ethics Of Representing Latter-Day Saints In American Fiction, Terrol Roark Williams

Theses and Dissertations

My paper examines the ethics of representing Mormons in serious American fiction, viewed through two primary texts, Bayard Taylor's nineteenth-century dramatic poem The Prophet and Maureen Whipple's epic novel The Giant Joshua. I also briefly examine Walter Kirn's short stories “Planetarium” and “Whole Other Bodies.” Using Werner Sollors' and Matthew Frye Jacobson's writings on ethnicity as foundational, I argue in that Mormonism constitutes an ethnicity, which designation accentuates the ethical demands of those who represent the group. I also use W.J.T. Mitchell's theories of representation as the basis of my arguments of the ethics of representing ethnicity. As ethical theorists, …


In Search Of Copia: Using Rhetoric To Teach Creative Writing, Ryan Solomon Jul 2007

In Search Of Copia: Using Rhetoric To Teach Creative Writing, Ryan Solomon

Theses and Dissertations

James Berlin, in his book Rhetoric and Reality, points out that our disparate epistemologies lead to inevitable classroom practices, which mean that different epistemologies impact our pedagogical approach and enforce certain views about the role and function of writing in classrooms. This thesis highlights the impact of Romantic beliefs about writing on creative writing pedagogy, as well as exploring how those beliefs hamper the critical function of the workshop. Romantic beliefs have enforced the idea that talent and genius is most important in creative writing, and that writing is spontaneous, organic, original, and expressive. Because of this, many creative writing …


Beyond Fidelity: Teaching Film Adaptations In Secondary Schools, Nathan C. Phillips Jul 2007

Beyond Fidelity: Teaching Film Adaptations In Secondary Schools, Nathan C. Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

Although nearly every secondary school English teacher includes film as part of the English/language arts curriculum, there is, to this point, nothing published about effectively studying the relationship between film adaptations and their print source texts in secondary school. There are several important works that inform film study in secondary English classrooms. These include Alan Teasley and Ann Wilder's Reel Conversations; William Costanzo's Reading the Movies and his updated version, Great Films and How to Teach Them; and John Golden's Reading in the Dark. However, each of these mention adaptation briefly if at all. Rather, they approach film as a …


To Take Posesion Of The Crown: Forms, Themes, And Politics In Julia Palmer's Centuries, Brittany Beahm Mar 2007

To Take Posesion Of The Crown: Forms, Themes, And Politics In Julia Palmer's Centuries, Brittany Beahm

Theses and Dissertations

Julia Palmer, a little-known religious poet, composed two centuries-collections of one hundred poems intended to be sung as hymns-in the two years between 1671 and 1673. Palmer's manuscript is unique in that its author was perhaps the only self-taught Nonconformist woman to have composed centuries during the Restoration period. Although religion shaped the lives of most British citizens at the time, the public literary expression of spiritual experiences-particularly by middle-class women-was uncommon within conventional Puritanism. The poetry's hybrid of forms, proliferation of religious themes, and undertones of political subversion offer an important glimpse into the way Puritan women writers of …


Modern Literacy: New Media's Gift To Nonfiction, The Self, And The Community, Tracey S. Carlton Jan 2007

Modern Literacy: New Media's Gift To Nonfiction, The Self, And The Community, Tracey S. Carlton

Theses and Dissertations

Integrating new-media nonfiction into secondary-level English provides an efficient and effective resource in teaching modern literacy, which requires an understanding of the participatory element of communication today. Messages can be consumed and created among multimodalities and multimedia. The form and interactivity of a publication can affect its interpretation. Technology extends students' publishing capabilities and their reach to a bounty of discourse communities.This thesis, which is available in conventional hard copy and electronic forms, explores the definitions of New Media and modern literacy, how teachers can adopt the use of New Media nonfiction, and the resources needed to do so. A …


The Need For Caring Pedagogies: A Personal Look At Education In Depressed Economies, Catherine Curran Jan 2007

The Need For Caring Pedagogies: A Personal Look At Education In Depressed Economies, Catherine Curran

Theses and Dissertations

By grounding my work in this series of four essays in literary theory, but telling stories to which almost anyone can relate I hope to begin making the connection between sometimes heady academics and everyday working-class Americans. Only when learners understand their circumstances and the need for education, can they begin to take control of what they learn and how they employ that knowledge.


Blogging In The Writing Classroom: A Move Toward Dialogue, Design, And Citizenship, Meghan E. Foster Jan 2007

Blogging In The Writing Classroom: A Move Toward Dialogue, Design, And Citizenship, Meghan E. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

A bridge connecting student's new multi-modal abilities and schooling can be built. Students choose between school and other activities outside of the classroom walls (and sometimes even inside the classroom) and schoolwork seems to be losing ground in the battle of spare time more and more. Students could benefit from an electronic space that incorporates their media know-how, their studies, and others in the classroom. Blogs, or weblogs, provide just that type of space by relying on the user's insightful writing and creativity to retain a dynamic position in the Internet blogging community. Blogs have the ability to better the …