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Uno Website-Gened Committee-English And Writing, Uno General Education Assessment Committee

Student Learning

The work of the university is to construct and share knowledge. Because this work is done largely by means of the written word, it is important for students to gain control over written language Proficiency in reading, research, and written expression is essential for professional success and effective citizenship.

Fundamental academic skills, consisting of English & Writing, Public Speaking and Mathematics coursework, comprise 15 hours of your general education requirements. Students must complete nine credit hours of English & Writing coursework.

The nine credit hours include English 1150 and English 1160 (students may test out of one or both courses), …

Evaluating The Phonology Of Nicaraguan Sign Language: Preprimer And Primer Dolch Words, Julie Delkamiller

Special Education and Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

Over the past 30-years linguists have been witnessing the birth and evolution of a language, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), in Nicaragua, and have initiated and documented the syntax and grammar of this new language. Research is only beginning to emerge on the implications of ISN on the education of deaf/hard of hearing children in Nicaragua. The purpose of this comparative exploratory field study was to evaluate preprimer and primer Dolch sight words and sign language frequency between English, American Sign Language (ASL), Spanish and Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN). The research focused on word and sign frequencies …

Does Mooch The Cat Speak French?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In the 1990s, I lived in Athens, Georgia, where I was a doctoral student in linguistics. I read the newspaper almost every day, and I started reading a comic strip called Mutts, by Patrick McDonnell. I loved the strip — the sweetness and good intentions of the dog, Earl, was paired with the slightly self-centered cat, Mooch, who also happened to be not quite as smart as Earl in many ways. These two characters are neighbors who live in an urban area that is best characterized as a city in the northeastern United States.

In the series that this …

Linguistics And The Study Of Comics , Frank Bramlett

Faculty Books and Monographs

Editor: Frank Bramlett, UNO faculty member.

Chapter 8: Linguistic Codes and Character Identity in Afro Samurai, authored by Frank Bramlett.

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role …

Healing Springs., Elizabeth Diane Mack

Student Work

Introduction: The first snow of winter is falling outside my window as I leaf through the pages of Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Published under the pseudonym of Mrs. Mary Clavers in 1839, A New Home is the account of early American pioneer Kirkland as she and her family attempt to settle an eight-hundred-acre village in Pinckney, Michigan. In the spring of 1836, Caroline Kirkland, with her husband and four young children, left their home in the East and headed west to unknown territory. The Kirklands were among the hopeful pioneers to go in search of a new …

Sex, Desire, And Grace In Walker Percy And Frederick Buechner., Michial D. Farmer Ii

Student Work

In this thesis, I argue that Frederick Buechner and Walker Percy use fiction to expand and elucidate on the Christian existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel. More specifically, I argue that sex tends to function in their novels as an avenue of grace, which ends or at least soothes the existential alienation and despair that is the hallmark of the human condition. Buechner's treatment of this theme in his novel Lion Country is less sophisticated than Percy's, seen in The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming: sex is wholly positive for Buechner' s characters, while for Percy, sex …

Cleaning Out, Marni Valerio

Student Work

Two nights ago, I dreamt I was on a rocky, unpopulated island in the Pacific where Paul Theroux set one of his many travel essays. Theroux visited this empty island to “hear” the silence and test some tech equipment: night vision goggles, and a battery-operated telephone and camcorder. A traveling acquaintance was also there to observe the habits of sea turtles. My husband, Dan, inadvertently woke me up when he came into our room, but I was not really awake. I was in that half-dream state that is either blissfully pleasant or horrifying depending on the dream. There I was …

Nineteen Eighty-Four And The Poetics Of "Orthodoxy-Sniffing", Mark R. Myers

Student Work

Despite his reputation as a political writer, George Orwell exhibited an earnest appreciation for the aesthetic aspect of his craft while explicitly advocating creative independence for artists living in a hyper-politicized world. This paper explores Orwell's literary credo insofar as it matters amid an increasingly urgent flight of artists and critics into the nest of political orthodoxy. Sacrificing objective and query to “orthodoxy-sniffing” critics of his time dismissed writers and works of art whose politics clash with their own. Creative writers, too, sacrificed their artistic vision to the constrictive demands of party ideology. In this atmosphere, or well fashioned a …

I That Am Lord Of Lif: The Christ-Knight Figure Of The Ancrene Riwle, Piers Plowman, And The Faerie Queene, Melissa Ann Conroy

Student Work

Throughout medieval literature, the allegory of Christ as a knight appeared in numerous text, and the Christ-Knight figure was an extremely important literary, religious, cultural, and historical force. This thesis traces the origins and the first appearance of the Christ-Knight figure in English literature and analyzes three prominent medieval and early modern text which offer depictions of the figure.

Western Fathers/Writing Daughters: The Place Of Gender In The Autobiographical Nonfiction Of Mari Sandoz, Mary Clearman Blew, Linda Hasselstrom, And Julene Bair., Nicole Zickefoose

Student Work

Introduction: It was a hot humid late-summer day, typical during baling season in Iowa. I waited with my sister Summer in the kitchen; we were supposed to take sandwiches and drinks over to the barn for the baling crew at noon. We had both offered to drive the tractor or help load hay onto the rack and then the haymow, but has been turned own by my father. Instead, he has wanted the names of any high school boys we knew who could help this afternoon. When questioned about these old-line notions by my fairly opinionated and liberal mother, he …

Skin Conditions: The Black Black Woman In African American Literature, Helen L. Fountain

Student Work

While much has been made of the dominant culture's use of radical monsters in the US national narrative, there is evidence, this study contends, that US literature written by African Americans reflects a monster-making of its own. The texts under review here demonstrate the vulnerability of visibly dark female skin to monster-making, decoding and recoding, by an elitist groups of blacks who, in their efforts to negotiate a positive American identity (i.e., sought to integrate themselves into the American mainstream) traded in black black female skin. Critical inquiries generally lump all African American women into one homogenous group, even as …

Looking For The Highway: Familiar Essays On The Mythic Journey., Sherman Sutherland

Student Work

Introduction: I stumbled upon the form of the familiar essay by chance, Dr. John McKenna, out Graduate Chair and the Chair of my Thesis Committee, suggested I enroll in a course called Modern Familiar Essay. I was skeptical. At the time, I was fairly burned out on writing, and besides: creative nonfiction? That’s memoirs and stuff, right? Failed journalists ghostwriting for professional athletes. If I was going to write, I was going to be a serious writer. Fiction, the Great American Novel, that sort of thing. This was more or less my frame of mine when I talked to Dr. …

The Sought-After Trigger: Essays From Inside The Hunt, Jeffrey Kurrus

Student Work

Contemporary American hunting and fishing literature draws upon a tradition which, like the acts of hunting and fishing themselves, is complex and often contradictory. From the transcendentalist approach of Henry Thoreau to the adventure narrative of Dan O’Brien to the financial focus of Norman Maclean, hunting and fishing literature has evolved to encompass a rich diversity of personal, social, and literary concerns. As a writer of this literature myself, however, I have been repeatedly drawn back to several key critical issues in my own work and the work of others. Primary among these are the ways narrators and other characters …

Bridging The Gap: Connecting School And Community With Service Learning, Sarah K. Edwards

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

Why do I even look for teaching ideas in the education catalogs that fill my mailbox? I know that these offerings of prefabricated units and generic novel activities will not satisfy the desires of my students. Looking around my orderly classroom, I confess that I am probably the only one who adores the posters with colorful scenes from my favorite poems. During my past ten years as an English teacher, I have found myself in a mental tug-of-war as to how to connect my students with the state curriculum standards. Finally, in the abyss of Internet lessons and teaching seminars, …

Stories From The Choir: An Exploration Of Narrative Voice In N. Scott Momaday's "House Made Of Dawn"., Monica Nicole Kershner

Student Work

This thesis shows that much of contemporary criticism of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn is split among two ideologically different readings: the AmerEuropean and the Native American readings. The author describes ensuing difficulties in scholarship and the process of literary couverture, the masking of multiple readings of the novel, by one privileged interpretation. This novel defies critical categorization in many ways because it embodies the convergence of AmerEuropean writing traditions with the American Indian oral tradition. The metaphor of the choir is chosen to explain the multiple narrative points of view used by the author in order to …

Where Time And Eternity Meet: The Yearning For Transcendence In The Fiction Of Joyce Carol Oates., John Donnelly Jr.

Student Work

In writing about the psychological states of Americans and the society that they encounter, Joyce Carol Oates repeatedly finds herself depicting the failure (or marginal success) encountered when humanity confronts a chaotic and indifferent world. Early in her career, Oates stated that she hoped to find way of transcending this bleak predicament.

Tillie Olsen, Counter-Revolutionary., Melissa Wilkinson Warr

Student Work

Literary historians have often referred to Tillie Olsen's background as a Communist. This is not surprising, since her writings are overtly political, and she contributed a great deal to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in her younger days through her literature as well as through other forms of activism. However, Olsen is actually a counterrevolutionary because as a feminist writer, her themes and style concern the emotional, individual, and even the spiritual. These features contradict the rational mode with dominated Communist Party leadership. Music, an important part of the Communist movement, also plays a significant …

The Memoirs Of Ivan Doig: Donning New Roles And Revising Old Myths, Ellen M. Fangman

Student Work

“If, somewhere beneath the blood, the past must beat in me to make a rhythm of survival for itself—to go on as this half-life which echoes as a second pulse inside the ticking moments of my existence—if this is what must be, why is the pattern of remembered instant so uneven, so gapped and rugged and plunging and soaring? I can only believe it is because memory takes its pattern from the earliest moments in the mind, from childhood. In childhood is a most queer flame-lit and shadow-chilled time” (Sky 10). In his memoirs, Heart Earth and This House of …

A Study Of The Sublime In English Romantic Aesthetics, Derek T. Leuenberger

Student Work

The nature and role of sublime experience has been an enduring topic of discussion in the history of aesthetics, dating back nearly 2000 years to the rhetorical sublime of Longinus. The emergence of English romanticism at the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrought substantial change on conceptions of the sublime, driven primarily by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley each develop a theory of sublimity grounded in the expression of unified and universal experience in human consciousness. Naturally, certain philosophical differences arise within the theoretical discourse of the authors - most …

Lost In The Savage Garden: A Nihilistic Interpretation Of Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles"., Angela S. Mcmullen

Student Work

This study examines Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles in light of the nihilist tradition. Nihilism is defined in this study as the absence of meaning. Rice uses vampires to explore problems created through this philosophy that ultimately leaves a void in human existence. In a sense, this study is an exploration of the ways which humanity fails to find an adequate reason to live. Louis begins the exploration by searching for God. Unable to find supernatural answers in his animated state, he falls into spiritual decay. Lestat, however, takes an aggressive approach patterned on Fredrick Nietzsche. By killing God and giving …

Manifesting Individuality As A Heideggerian Approach To Toni Morrison's "Trilogy"., Thuy T. Tran

Student Work

Within our self-defining quest to create and uncreate ourselves and our place in the world is a discourse that encompasses both our life and our literature.

Synthesizing An Understanding Of The Nature Of Culture With Literary Theories Sensitive To Culture's Presence In Texts., Janet L. Sutherland

Student Work

The selection of the theme "Cross-Cultural Criticism" for the 1990 Summer Institute of the National Council of Teachers of English signaled that "multiculturalism" had become more than a buzzword; it was a "prized awakening" (Burton 115), but not without its critics.

Memory And Remembrance In Selected Nonfiction Works Of Elie Wiesel, Jordana L. Nissen

Student Work

Although nonfictional writing provides critical insights into history in ways that fictional writing never could, it is very often relegated to a “second-class citizen” status in the realm of literary criticism and appreciation. Literacy tradition has created a hard line between literature, specifically novels and short stories and poetry, which we regard as created fictions and nonliterary test – journalism, biography, history, essays, and so on- which we think of as records of actuality. This distinction is what prevents us from applying to nonfiction the analytical tools we use to uncover the secrets of "literary art. (McCord 748)

The Creation Of A Heroine: Sibling Relationships In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Sandra S. Hannibal

Student Work

These excerpts from conduct and courtesy books of late 18th and early 19th century England illustrate the strict codes of behavior, speech, and thought which consequently stifled authentic expression of emotion during the era of Jane Austen. Consequently, a social pantomime flourished among English Gentry whose mere adherence to subscribed conduct codes inhibited one's ability to discern the true character and principles of Gentry men and women. Whether used for guidance or “artifice,” breeding and education created among the English Gentry a society in which public conduct was often misleading as “moral” motivation was easily disguised between mask of learned, …

Delivering Us From Evil: An Introduction To Russell Kirk's Supernatural Fiction, Ray Andrew Newman

Student Work

Russel Kirk, one of the founding fathers of the post-war conservative movement in the United States, is widely known for his works of history, politics, and literary and social criticism. He also wrote ghostly tales and novels, and this party of his work has been neglected. With his supernatural tales, Kirk sought reawaken a sense of mystery, to remind his fellow wayfarers in this world of timeless truths, and to have some eerie fun. This thesis provides an introduction to Kirk's supernatural fiction.

Social Commentary In Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Seeing The World Through The Eyes Of Marlowe And Millhone., Lisa A. Cook

Student Work

This study examines how the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction has been and continues to be a unique medium for social commentary and an exploration of human nature. The study focuses on two novelist, Raymond Chandler, considered by critics to be the godfather of the genre, and Sue Grafton, a contemporary novelist. I have chosen to research two very different authors of this genre to explain that despite the diversity of the novelist and the age in which they wrote, they both use the techniques of the hard-boiled detective novel to mirror their perception of society. Both authors show that …

In All Its Purple Flurry: Willa Cather's Earliest Journalism, Doug Barber

Student Work

Before she established herself as one of America's foremost novelists, Willa Cather built a reputation as one of America's most promising journalists. She started her professional career writing reviews, feature articles and columns for the newspapers of Lincoln, Nebraska during her years as a student at the University of Nebraska. From there, Cather went to Pittsburgh as a magazine and newspaper editor for several years before moving to New York City, which would become her permanent home, to be a writer and ultimately managing editor of McClure's, widely considered the foremost muckraking magazine of its time in the United States. …

Breaking Boundaries: The Autobiographical Revolution In Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club And Edna Wu's Clouds & Rain, Jacqueline P. Franzen

Student Work

Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and Edna Wu's Clouds & Rain break the boundaries between autobiography and fiction forging a new vision in literary tradition. They create works that reflect the complexity of their search for self: how in every generation each individual must reinvent and reinterpret her cultural heritage (Fischer 195). Their works are a montage of patterns, inherited from tradition and interwoven with their unique conventions to create an autobiography inclusive of their identity, their culture, and their new vision. In an attempt to express …

Uses Of Sound And Music: Euphony And Cacophony In "The Silmarillion" And Other Works By Jrr Tolkien, Marian Shalander Kaiser

Student Work

J.R.R. Tolkien presents music in his Middle-earth mythology (The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit) as something that simply is--an internal and divine essence existing outside of time and physical measure. In his mythological account of the creation and the evil that subsequently enters into the world, music emanates from God as something eternal, holy, and humanly incomprehensible beyond its incomplete temporal manifestation. Music serves as a vehicle to mirror Christian concepts, reflect the thoughts and motivations of the agents of good and evil, create mood, and elicit reactions from the reader.

Measuring Entry Characteristics Of Writing Program Participants: Apprehension And Previous Exposure To Specific Writing Strategies., Gladys E. Haunton

Student Work

This investigation is a descriptive study designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Daly-Miller Writing-Apprehension Scale (DMWAS) and the Student Exposure Survey (SES) in describing entry level characteristics of students entering Methodist College of Nursing and Allied Healt (NMC). Results from the study will be used to design a student outcomes-based evaluation component for a Writing Across the Curriculum program. The following assumptions were tested: 1. NMC students, who have chosen careers in health care, will report higher apprehension than University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) students, who are entering a variety of other occupations. 2. Exposure to specific writing …