Digital Commons Network^™

Learning English Through Interactive Weblogs: Student Experiences Blogging In The Secondary Esl Classroom, Glori H. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative action research project examined the experiences of high school English language learners as they created personal weblogs and responded to queries on a class weblog. The data from the project demonstrates that blogging as a classroom writing activity is effective in helping students to obtain, process and construct the English language.

Welcome To Syria : Annual Jesuit Report Of 1626 From Latin To English, Charles Richard Fontana Jr.

Honors Theses

My project is a translation from Latin to English of a Jesuit correspondence written in 1626 reporting the status of a Syrian mission to propagate Christianity. It was composed by Gaspar Maniglier and Jean Stella, the first two Jesuit fathers to be sent to the Middle East on a mission. This letter represents how the Jesuits navigated through uncharted territory, and it lends an invaluable perspective on their new lives, in which they forged amicable and hostile relationships, and faced many other challenges from naval warfare to excommunication. In this edition, I have completed a short historical and methodological introduction, …

Dying Fish Have Poor Grammar, Ryan A. Hanson

Culminating Projects in English

No abstract provided.

The Horse And Chivalry In Arthurian Literature, Ryan A. Hanson

Culminating Projects in English

No abstract provided.

Missionaries And Other Stories, Bradford Eugene Tice

Doctoral Dissertations

Bradford E. Tice's debut collection, Missionaries and Other Stories, is a series of stories that attempts to capture the restless spirit of modern America. The characters here are driven by a cause--on a mission to find meaning in a world that no longer makes sense to them. In the title story, two Mormon missionaries set their sights on two vastly different goals, one secular and one celestial, as they go door to door in search of answers to the questions of who they are and what they are made of. Other stories in the collection feature characters who seek understanding …

Transforming Whiteness: Seeing (And) Shifting Representations Of Whiteness In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Film, Meredith Mccarroll

Doctoral Dissertations

Transforming Whiteness: Seeing (and) Shifting Representations of Whiteness in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film both explores the ways that whiteness has remained unseen in American socio-political realms and in American cultural texts and points to ways of seeing beyond the white/non-white dichotomy in order to revision race. The word "transforming" functions as an adjective, signaling the ways that whiteness has changed shape, and also as an active verb, looking at ways that we may shift whiteness out of its position of dominance. As critical race and whiteness scholars have demonstrated, as long as whiteness maintains its invisibility, it maintains its …

Carefully Guarded Borders, Yekaterina Mikhailovna Zemmel

Masters Theses

"Carefully Guarded Borders" is a collection of poetry that focuses on the experiences of individuals often seen as other--deviant women, gender transgressors, and immigrants. The poems, along with the critical introduction, present a challenge to linear trajectories of poetic descent by offering openness of interpretation, as well as openness of form. The collection is arranged associatively, and its thematic threads recur rhizomatically. Although at its inception "Carefully Guarded Borders" was a biographical account of the migration from Tajikistan to the United States, at the time of the manuscript's completion, this theme was subverted by cross-currents; the finished work questions borders …

Visual Rhetoric And Usability In User Documentation, Thorin Richard Alexander

Masters Theses

While debates continue in regards to the importance of usability in user documentation, many of those arguments have been focused on the importance of the type of language used--many pushing (rightly so) for a plainer, less technical style. However, while it is certainly important to focus on the words being used, it is equally, if not more, important to pay attention to the way those words are presented. Designing user documentation with a strong sense of visual rhetoric (specifically in terms of color and typography), the technical communicator is able to take control of how their work affects the user …

Modernity, Historical Trauma, And The Crisis Of Ethics Reading Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts After Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird

Masters Theses

Nathanael West's tragically brief creative career was intensely concerned with the anomie of modern society, especially in the landscape of twentieth-century America. For West, this landscape is one populated by the disintegration of traditional community and the interrogation of values once posited as unassailable. As such, conventional West criticism has read the author as an intractable nihilist. Within the last decade, however, West criticism has taken an entirely new approach. Critics like Jonathan Greenberg and Justus Nieland have attempted to erect an ethical West by placing him within the discourse of modernist antisentimentalism. It is within this critical reevaluation of …

Of Rain, A River, Ryan D. Woldruff

Masters Theses

This section of Of Rain, A River was written, workshopped, revised, revised, reworkshopped, revised, revised, etc. while the author was a Master's candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. This novel section introduces the fictional landscape of Dine, Missouri and Nemanya County, in Northwest Missouri. This section follows the characters of Wes, Jory and Bill Schmidt, Carson and Danny Sellers, and Xenia. "Of Place" is a short essay about the various places in, and of, fiction.

Dog Days, Margrethe Hansen Krogh

Masters Theses

This collection includes a series of poems and one short story. The work is a creative exploration of personal landscapes, both inner and outer. In particular, the poetry was inspired by working with dream material and blending it with memory, or imagined memory. Recreating the mother monster and closed worlds of communication are dominant themes in this collection; themes that address issues of emotional and physical abandonment, substance abuse and grief. The short story, "Driving Lessons", focuses on three siblings negotiating the difficulty of growing up with an alcoholic mother. This piece of fiction, like the poems, addresses a world …

Parts Of A Man, Timothy J, Sisk

Masters Theses

This collection of poems explores intersections of identities and societies in the construction of a man's understanding of himself. Issues tackled include gender and sexuality, class and regional identities, and place in a family. Poetry is used to express these intersections because of the genre's ability to address complex emotional and metaphorical issues concerning the topics addressed, as well as poetry's power to construct history through song, image, and narrative. Indeed, narrative is key in the making of the individual poems as well as the collection itself, as the piece is organized so that each poem builds with those surrounding …

Student Engagement In English 101 At The University Of Tennessee, Knoxville, Laura Mcintosh Orr

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student engagement and teaching techniques in English 101 courses at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville. Specifically, the main goals of this study were to determine which techniques are most related to engagement, and whether students and instructors consider the same techniques to be beneficial. Student and instructor surveys were collected from approximately 215 students and nine teachers. Student responses to multiple choice questions have revealed that student engagement is most closely associated with variables related to course organization, feedback and assessment, active learning techniques, and institutional involvement. Additionally, …

Arresting Beauty, Framing Evidence: An Inquiry Into Photography And The Teaching Of Writing, Kuhio Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the uses and conceptualizations of photography in college Composition. Composition has long been conflicted over the relation between form and content---and since the 1970s, between aesthetics and politics. Today, this disciplinary tension manifests in how the visual is brought into pedagogy: either it is approached aesthetically, as something to beautify a text, or politically, as a source of cultural critique. The field's uses of photography have been positioned within this aesthetics/politics binary, but to understand the medium as only one or the other is to miss its full practical and theoretical potential.

Theoretically, photography is powerful and …

Ballads As "Poetic" Rhetoric In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Norma Jeanne Peterson

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis explores the rhetorical effect ballads have had as a medium of argument for those who were "free of literary influences and fairly homogeneous in character." The ballad, speaks to us poetically and by tradition reveals human interests emerging from distress and frustration. Three men (John Lomax, Alan Lomax and Harry Smith) were instrumental in collecting and recording early ballads before they were lost; this effect has lingered from an early period in time to the 1960s, and beyond when the value of ballads was rediscovered.

Mandeville's Intolerance: The Contest For Souls And Sacred Sites In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Robert Patterson

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

As the first medieval text to combine the matter of the East with the matter of the Holy Land, The Travels circulated widely in over 300 manuscripts, making it an important text when studying medieval Christian attitudes toward non-Christians. Although many scholars point to The Travels as a tolerant text ahead of its time, a historicized approach reveals that Mandeville's project is better understood in terms of his intolerant universalism. I argue that in casting non-Christians as proto-Christians who stand as evidence of Christianity's global spiritual hegemony, the author appropriates and consumes them in service of his universalist agenda. I …

United States Mainland Speakers' Use Of Hawaiian Creole English And Standard American English Across Social Situations, Nicole Kaylani Kanahele Stutz

Theses Digitization Project

This study will focus on Hawaiian Creole English and standard American English (HCE/SAE) speakers who grew up in Hawai'i and relocated to the mainland as adults, and how their use of HCE and SAE varies across different social situations. In Hawai'i much of the population speaks Hawaiian Creole English and Standard American English, speakers often code-switch between the two varieties. Fluency in HCE and SAE differs among speakers, and this fact has implications for communication in a preferred language variety in particular social situations.