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Narrative

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Story Of Identity: Narrative Self-Fashioning In Kazuo Ishiguro’S A Pale View Of Hills And When We Were Orphans, Hayley Angle May 2024

The Story Of Identity: Narrative Self-Fashioning In Kazuo Ishiguro’S A Pale View Of Hills And When We Were Orphans, Hayley Angle

English Theses

The moments we remember from our lives are the foundation of the stories we tell about ourselves. I have spent many a night trying to fall asleep by running through my memories like the montage scene of a movie—clips of a funny moment with a friend, the smile of a loved one, a stupid thing I said to someone I was supposed to impress. These moments I remember portray, at the deepest level, who I want to be, who I am scared to be, and who I most understand myself to be. Intentional remembrance, as opposed to actual experience, tends …


Noticing The Brush Strokes: Literary Markers In Hebrew Narratives, Shelbey Hunt Apr 2024

Noticing The Brush Strokes: Literary Markers In Hebrew Narratives, Shelbey Hunt

Masters Theses

As the people who set out to write, edit, and form the Bible may have used embellishments to enhance their narratives, could they also have left literary markers to help the reader chart a course between the historical and the enhanced? The purpose of this thesis is to find these literary markers. Exposing any potential grammatical or syntactical signpost can help the reader understand how they should view a given Biblical story and help reveal the messages the authors behind the scripture were sharing. The book of Jonah will be used as a case study to both discover and elaborate …


Judicial Rhetoric And The Rhetoric Of Myth In "Till We Have Faces", Maria Wilkening Jan 2024

Judicial Rhetoric And The Rhetoric Of Myth In "Till We Have Faces", Maria Wilkening

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

C.S. Lewis is unquestionably one of the more enduring influences in the 20th century, due in part to his personal popularity during his lifetime, as well as to his prolific and approachable oeuvre in wide-ranging genres such as apologetics, fiction, and public debate and address. Lewis has only become more popular since his death, with continued interest building after the more recent development of movie interpretations depicting both his fiction and life. C.S. Lewis’s corpus is certainly vast, and even more has been written about C.S. Lewis and his writings since his death. Strong scholarship exists, particularly in the areas …


Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim Jun 2023

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …


Narratives Of Existence And The Narrative Existence: Ontological Unity In The Border Trilogy And Quantum Theory, Rebecca Leigh Mcintosh May 2023

Narratives Of Existence And The Narrative Existence: Ontological Unity In The Border Trilogy And Quantum Theory, Rebecca Leigh Mcintosh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Because the humanities and the sciences approach philosophical questions in contrasting ways, the study of literature and the study of physical science are often viewed as unrelated realms of scholarly inquiry. Science aims to provide a methodological approach for gathering knowledge about the world, while the humanities focus on criticism or analysis of cultural artifacts. However, even though the conceptual frameworks applied in scientific study and literary study are often incompatible or remarkably divergent, their methods for conceptualizing and transmitting ideas are the same, for humanity understands the world and experience of this world through narratives composed of referential metaphors. …


From Story To Song: Exploring The Storytelling Potential Of Instrumental Music, Celine Darr Apr 2023

From Story To Song: Exploring The Storytelling Potential Of Instrumental Music, Celine Darr

Honors Projects

For this project, I have composed a piece of program music with the aim of capturing scenes from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" through music. The project seeks to answer questions regarding the elements that make instrumental music "programmatic", or able to portray a story.


Unfairy Tales And Other Refugee Stories: Creating Relations Through The Humanitarian Imagination In Mohsin Hamid's Exit West And Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread, Gabriella Pishotti Apr 2023

Unfairy Tales And Other Refugee Stories: Creating Relations Through The Humanitarian Imagination In Mohsin Hamid's Exit West And Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread, Gabriella Pishotti

Graduate Student Scholarship

Contrary to many analyses of refugee narratives that focus on how their subject matter becomes compromised by issues of authority, believability, and expectation, this article explores how refugee novels such as Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread lean into such problems in a way that appeals to the humanitarian imagination. These novels recognize the incomprehensibility of the refugee experience and play upon this reality by intermixing their stories with fairy tale elements. In doing so, the tropes of fairy tales provide these stories with greater narrative flexibility while making the unfamiliar realities of refugees comprehensible through familiar narrative …


Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall Jan 2023

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …


A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak May 2022

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …


Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene May 2022

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …


Whump, A+ Parenting And Fantasy Racism: Trauma Narratives In Marvel Fanfiction, Sadie Fick Apr 2022

Whump, A+ Parenting And Fantasy Racism: Trauma Narratives In Marvel Fanfiction, Sadie Fick

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Fanfiction, especially fanfiction based on superhero stories like those from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is an important but often overlooked vehicle for analyzing how society understands trauma. Using genre analysis and narrative analysis, this project is a wide-reaching exploration of how fanfiction both reflects and shapes popular understandings of trauma. It describes the unique fanfiction medium-genre and breaks down topics like whump, savior narratives, and fanfic's love affair with emotionally broken men, as well as topics like post-traumatic growth and deficit framing. The project also explores the intersections of trauma, identity and representation, discussing topics like structural trauma and childhood …


Girlpwrd: Amplifying Silenced Voices Of Women Through Digital Storytelling, Brooke Schumann Dec 2021

Girlpwrd: Amplifying Silenced Voices Of Women Through Digital Storytelling, Brooke Schumann

English Theses

Drawing on data from a multi-month digital storytelling community project, this qualitative case study offers portraits of three marginalized women who re-author pivotal moments of silencing in their lives. The foundational framework blends scholarship on rhetorical silence, rhetorical listening, and semiotics of multimodal expression. These cases demonstrate how digital storytelling allows women a space to form and give voice to their silence, where they are the empowered agents of their own stories. The digital platform elevates these underrepresented narratives by creating new pathways for listening.


'Across The Sea': The Narrative Function Of Medieval Bridal Sea Voyages In Marie De France’S “Guigemar” And “Eliduc", Rebekah Olsen Dec 2021

'Across The Sea': The Narrative Function Of Medieval Bridal Sea Voyages In Marie De France’S “Guigemar” And “Eliduc", Rebekah Olsen

Student Works

This paper analyzes the common medieval trope of the sea voyage in Marie de France's medieval romances, "Guigemar" and "Eliduc." Through framing both texts through an ecocritical lens tied to the associated symbolism of water and feminity, the paper highlights the importance of the sea due to it's association with female passivity in the medieval era. However, this paper focuses primarily on the narrative tropes found in the two stories and shows that throughout the lais, Marie both implements and subverts the assumptions of the Medieval sea voyage trope, which is clearly defined in Albrecht Classen’s article “Sea Voyages in …


“The Hidden Door That Leads To Several Moments More”: Finding Context For The Literacy Narrative In First Year Writing, Denise Goldman Sep 2021

“The Hidden Door That Leads To Several Moments More”: Finding Context For The Literacy Narrative In First Year Writing, Denise Goldman

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The literacy narrative has emerged as a useful genre in composition pedagogy because of the perceived bridge it provides between personal narrative and academic literacy. Although there remains disagreement among practitioners with regard to its purpose and efficacy, it continues to be a staple in the writing classroom because it has the potential to help students learn analytical skills while fostering investment through the features of a personal narrative. Recent efforts in the field, especially with regard to questions of transfer of writing, have focused on the benefits of genre and community discourse analysis as a means to help students …


Procedural Rhetoric And Language: How The Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes The Importance Of Context In Content, Jessica Kimber Aug 2021

Procedural Rhetoric And Language: How The Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes The Importance Of Context In Content, Jessica Kimber

English Theses

Procedural Rhetoric and Language: How the Orwell Videogames Series Emphasizes the Importance of Context in Content


Story And Sorority: How Sisters Shape The Novels Of Jane Austen, Morgan Elizabeth Reid May 2021

Story And Sorority: How Sisters Shape The Novels Of Jane Austen, Morgan Elizabeth Reid

Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact and use of sisters and sorority in the novels of Jane Austen, answering the question of how they are shaping the narratives of the stories. Focusing in particular on Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility, I highlight the ways that Austen’s writing crafts plots that rely upon sisters to function. Austen also uses sister figures to reveal the characteristics of her main protagonists and to express the themes she is most concerned about within each story. I also show Austen’s pattern of affirming the value and importance of …


Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy And Communal Benefits Of Narrative Innovation, Aysel Atamdede May 2021

Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy And Communal Benefits Of Narrative Innovation, Aysel Atamdede

English (MA) Theses

Can gaming be considered narrative? Should gaming be allowed in a pedagogical space? Tabletop roleplaying games are probably not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about how to innovate narrative structure and teaching composition. Often considered a nerdy pastime, participants ridiculed for playing pretend and caring about imaginary characters, TTRPGs have nonetheless entered a sort of renaissance in recent years. While video games have slowly become more incorporated into pedagogy by teaching students more abstract concepts of interactivity with narrative, audience, and player engagement, TTRPGs have been slower on the draw. But incorporating the highly interactive and …


Playing With Noise: Anne Elliot, The Narrator, And Sound In Jane Austen's And Adrian Shergold's Persuasion, Brianna R. Phillips Nov 2020

Playing With Noise: Anne Elliot, The Narrator, And Sound In Jane Austen's And Adrian Shergold's Persuasion, Brianna R. Phillips

The Corinthian

This paper pushes against the critical tradition that views silence or listening in relation to passivity and powerlessness by exploring the role of noise in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and in Adrian Shergold’s experimental 2007 film adaptation of that novel and how sound relates to Anne Elliot’s emotional legibility. Austen fills the narrative landscape with sounds that are filtered almost exclusively through Anne so that even when she is silent, she is “making noise” through her focalizations and through free indirect narration. Both Austen and Shergold align noise with Anne’s emotions such that Anne’s sensorial responses to shocking, loud, and disruptive …


(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas Jul 2020

(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas

English Presentations

My goal with this project has been to deepen my understanding of why people play games, how to make games narratively compelling, and what technical methods are effective in play. This has allowed me to investigate both the technical, scholarly assessments of board game dynamics while also exploring their real-world applications, successes, and weaknesses. Building on my research, my project has culminated in a full prototype of an original board game that has both narrative structure and an engaging gameplay structure. I have also produced a reflection paper on the experience and an annotated bibliography of my research texts and …


Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin May 2020

Lost Voices: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, And The Nature Of History, Luke Hardin

Undergraduate Theses

The novels of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are nothing if not haunted. Though the authors themselves remain, in many ways, diametrically opposed, their works remain inextricably entangled due to the looming specter of history that hangs over their pages. Perhaps more-so than any other writers in the 20th Century, these two towering figures of American fiction took seriously the task of unpacking the migrainous burden of history. Read together, they offer differing perspectives on the nature of writing one's own past, and how this is informed by race and class. Specifically, Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded …


An Architectural Reading Of Kristeva, Woolf, And Shakespeare, Bailey M. Graham Apr 2020

An Architectural Reading Of Kristeva, Woolf, And Shakespeare, Bailey M. Graham

English Literature Student Projects and Publications

Julia Kristeva’s seminal theories of the signifying process and the abject illuminate texts that challenge readers’ expectations. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and linguistic ideas build analytic links between texts as seemingly disparate as Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and William Shakespeare’s late 1590s play Titus Andronicus. In this portfolio, I will apply Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic to elucidate the multiple meanings of nature in Woolf’s Orlando, as well as utilize Kristeva’s notion of the abject to analyze the narrative breakdown of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In doing so, I will trace the development of Kristeva’s ideas …


Narrative Control In Chaucer's Troilus And Criseyde, Liam Ainslie Mayo Jan 2020

Narrative Control In Chaucer's Troilus And Criseyde, Liam Ainslie Mayo

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.


'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl Jun 2019

'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.


"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva Jun 2019

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …


How To Build A Museum, Anna L. Davies Apr 2019

How To Build A Museum, Anna L. Davies

Student Symposium

Who are museums for? This question drove our research. Originally motivated by a Travel-Learning Course in Spring 2017 to Manchester, London, and Liverpool, this project seeks to explore the narratives, motivations, and cultural implications for museum exhibits. We focused particularly on art museums. Our primary inspiration was the International Museum of Slavery at the Maritime Museum (Liverpool) and the London, Sugar and Slavery exhibit at the Museum of London Docklands (London). While both historical exhibits, we wanted to examine the symbolism and motivations for creating these exhibits as a form of public history and consciousness in Britain, and apply it …


“‘The Strata Of My History’: Reading The Ecological Chronotope In Wendell Berry’S That Distant Land”, Ellen M. Bayer Apr 2019

“‘The Strata Of My History’: Reading The Ecological Chronotope In Wendell Berry’S That Distant Land”, Ellen M. Bayer

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This article examines Wendell Berry’s short story collection, That Distant Land (2004) through the lens of the ecological chronotope. Berry’s characters cultivate an intimate relationship with their physical environment, and the land, in turn, inscribes their history within it. Furthermore, it is through a shared sense of responsibility to the land that the characters foster a sense of community, shared history, and timeless connection with each other. My analysis of Berry’s fiction employs the notion of the ecological chronotope as a lens for understanding the environmental implications encountered at the intersection between time and place in That Distant Land. …


Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Keyan Shayegan , '22, Peter Schmidt Apr 2019

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Keyan Shayegan , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. After completing the lesson plan, students should have an enhanced understanding of the following learning goals: the similarities between different types of internal and external migration, and the effects migration has on individuals and their senses of identity; why nativism is so prevalent, the negative impact it has on humanity, and how it can be overcome by shared experiences between people; how authorities such as governments and mass media corporations use technology to deter immigration, via both force and influencing the public, in ways that dehumanize immigrants; how …


Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Ruby Guerrero , '22, Peter Schmidt Apr 2019

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Ruby Guerrero , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to high school grades 11-12, community college, and/or college and university students. This lesson is planned for three weeks and three times a week, but I recommend that teachers revise these plans as needed in order for the lesson to fit their class schedules. Learning Goals: students will be able to identify stereotypes of migrants and refuse to accept these as proper understandings of people; students will be able to reclaim their identities using the novel as a basis for this outcome; students will learn to identify the different types of narration, how …


Choosing A Door: Narrative Interactivity In Videogames, Daniel Hawkins Apr 2019

Choosing A Door: Narrative Interactivity In Videogames, Daniel Hawkins

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.


Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos Mar 2019

Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes Chicana feminist texts to frame a discussion of survival as a theoretical concept. Using Emma Pérez’s historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I introduce the concept of survival narrative as a framework for analysis of Chicana literature, and briefly review Chicana feminist theory to support the argument. Examples from Perez’s novel illustrate the power of the survival narrative to advance a decolonial perspective. The novel reinscribes mainstream representations of gender violence that characterize the traditional Western by focusing on the empowerment that comes from solidarity amongst women and …