Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Only A Rite, David Lee Miller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Re-Examining Vonnegut: Existential And Naturalistic Influences On The Author's Work, Marybeth Davis

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis looks at several Vonnegut novels through both the lenses of existentialism and naturalism, claiming that each is just as important and present in his work as the other. It examines his life, as well, and how his experiences and observations on life tie into his writing.

Domesticity And The Modernist Aesthetic: F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, And Gertrude Stein, Allison Elise Carey

Doctoral Dissertations

Literary modernism has been presented, in scholarship and critical histories, as a masculinized movement: a literature largely by men and concerned with issues of literary form rather than with everyday life. This critical tunnel vision has inevitably prevented a full accounting of many key aspects of modernist literature. One issue of modernism that has been persistently overlooked by scholars is the central role of domesticity in many modernist texts and the importance to modernists of reclaiming the domestic as a subject of high art. As this study demonstrates, modernist texts often focused on everyday life, and these modernist treatments of …

Socio-Cultural Interactions And Esl Graduate Student Enculturation: A Cross Sectional Analysis, Ethan W. Krase

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation reports findings from a five-month qualitative study of a group of five ESL students pursuing graduate degrees in disciplines in the humanities. Focusing on disciplinary enculturation processes, the study sets out to answer two primary research questions: 1) What roles do literacy activities play in disciplinary enculturation? 2) What sorts of subject positions do ESL learners occupy as they enculturate into academic discourse communities? Answers to these questions are important because they can lend definition to the obstacles that confront ESL learners as they attempt to move towards professional participation in target discourse communities.

Anchored in the language-related …

John Fox Jr.'S Commentary On The Roles Of Women In The Progressive Era., Heather Mac Sykes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

John Fox, Jr. provides commentary on the changing roles of Progressive Era women in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, “A Cumberland Vendetta,” and “The Pardon of Becky Day.” Fox’s portrayals provide evidence that although he recognized the changes in his society with women spearheading reform, he did not entirely approve of these changes or of women taking an aggressive role in advocating change.

This thesis provides textual examples and analysis demonstrating Fox’s beliefs. Chapter two focuses on the stories of “The Pardon of Becky Day” and “A Cumberland Vendetta.” Chapter three analyzes The …

Breaking The Bonds Of Silence: The Immigrant Experience In Magical Realist Novels Of Katherine Vaz And Chitra Divakaruni., Hillary Dawn Hester

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The genre of Magical Realism is normally explored on the sole basis of its identification with and fantastic expression of Latin-American cultural identity. However, the genre, when employed by non-American immigrant women, takes on new characteristics. It not only highlights the mystical underpinnings of everyday life but instructs in a subliminally didactic manner by opening the reader to new possibilities through delightful imagery and a plot woven around transposed myth and folklore.

In examining how two female Magical Realists translate their narratives of immigrant life in twentieth-century United States, the instructive nature of the genre is laid bare. Both use …

Alteration In Exile: Byron’S Mazeppa, Mark Phillipson

Mark Phillipson

A big shift in Lord Byron’s style is usually noted: the potently gloomy Eastern Tales, showcasing the magnetically alienated Byronic Hero, give way to a sharply contrasting style, that of the conversational Don Juan. Accounts of Byron’s career tend to treat this alteration as sudden or whimsical. In fact, it is intrinsically tied to exile, a connection illustrated by the verse romance Mazeppa (in many ways the forerunner of the contemporaneously begun Don Juan). Mazeppa is Byron’s most elaborate--even systematic--depiction of exile; its hero, tied onto a wild horse and sent off into the wilderness, learns to endure amid dramatically …

So What's Your Point? Relevancy In Conversation, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Every rare once in a while, I find myself caught in a conversation where the person I'm talking to goes off on a tangent. And I don't mean a little aside. I mean a "What the hell are you talking about!?" tangent.

Luckily, for the other 99% of conversations, there are some general guidelines for engagement that help us avoid making mistakes like this one. H. Paul Grice, a language philosopher, is the scholar credited with first writing about these rules in a widespread way. Grice theorized that participants in conversation operate by an overarching approach that we now call …

Midwife And Mother: Maternal Metaphors In The Composition Classroom, Cynthia Britt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examines the maternal metaphors of midwife and mother used to describe instructors and teaching practices in the composition classroom. In the introduction the author describes her interest in the topic based on her own experiences as a mother and as a beginning composition instructor. The paper explains the initiation of the metaphors, what the metaphors and maternal pedagogy mean in terms of classroom practices and philosophies, criticisms of maternal practices, and the relevancy and legitimacy of the metaphors and maternal pedagogy in classrooms today. Section one explores the development of the metaphors to describe composition teachers related to …

To Glory Or To Ruin : Guinevere And Vivien In Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls Of The King, And Edwin Arlington Robinson's Merlin And Lancelot, Eunice W. Carwile

English & Modern Languages: Theses, Dissertations & Student Publications

From Malory's Morte Darthur, through Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and through Robinson's Merlin and Lancelot, Guinevere and Vivien evolve from mere servants of a masculine plot and theme to well-rounded characters who struggle with the same problems that confront their male counterparts. Malory's world is about knights, warfare, and a holy quest, with women acting or reacting in certain ways only to move the plot along. While Tennyson develops female characters more fully than Malory, the great Victorian pays no homage to Arthurian womankind, bringing to his work a philosophy of sin-weakness-destruction that makes Vivien an evil seductress and …

"We Were There": Anatomy Of A Successful Series Of Historical Novels For Young People, Deanna Lee Gasteiger Schwartz

Theses & Honors Papers

The study of history has always been an important part of learning. Young people might ask, "Why do I need to learn about something I cannot change?" When asked "Why Study History?" William H. McNeill states in Historical Literacy : The Case For History in American Education that the "value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that" (104). Between the years 1955 to 1963 Grossett and Dunlap Publishers introduce a concept that brings personal involvement into …

On The Treatment Of Group Words In C-E Dictionaries, Gang Zhao

Gang Zhao

No abstract provided.

John Milton, Blackfriars Spectator?: "Elegia Prima" And Ben Jonson's The Staple Of News, Timothy J. Burbery

English Faculty Research

In the spring of 1626 John Milton was temporarily expelled from Cambridge University, perhaps over a quarrel with his tutor William Chappell, and sent home to London, where he remained for at least several weeks. There, the seventeen-year-old poet composed his first elegy, a Latin verse-letter to his closest friend, Charles Diodati. In it, Milton claims to be enjoying his unexpected holiday by reading, girl watching, and attending the theater. Milton scholars have never reached consensus about his alleged playgoing, for while the young man speaks as a spectator, the plots and characters he mentions-these include comic types such as …

Merton's New Novices: The Seven Storey Mountain And Monasticism In A Freshman Seminar, David A. King

Faculty and Research Publications

Offers observation on Thomas Merton's book "The Seven Storey Mountain." Experience in teaching an introductory literature course to sophomore students at Kennesaw State University in Georgia; Reflections on monastic life; Description of Merton on Trappist monasteries.

Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework For Studying Intellectual Property, Sarah Robbins

Faculty and Research Publications

To probe one case of free-ranging textual circulation, and to address issues associated with producers' rights to textual ownership and authorial credit, Robbins examines the Americanized versions of British writer Anna Barbauld's Lessons for children. Robin states that examining multiple specific cases of distributed authorship, and linking them to contemporary textual ownership issues, may well lead to nuanced extensions of the basic framework for understanding intellectual property that pioneers in the field have already formulated.

Several Letters By Tennyson And His Family, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"In the years since Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon edited Tennyson's letters (1981-1990), I have been able to acquire for my collection several letters by Tennyson and by other members of his family. I print those here, along with some other material relating to Tennyson..."

A Different Kind Of Bilingüismo, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In last month's column, I wrote about the presence of Spanish in Omaha, attested by its occasional appearances in the broader English-speaking market. I also mentioned the phenomenon of people speaking two or more languages, called bilingualism. When a person has command of two languages, then that person is considered bilingual.

Considering that one language (like Swahili) might be called a code, and another language (Arabic) is another code, and a third language (like English) is another code, then conceivably a person who lives in Tanzania might carry on a conversation with another speaker from Tanzania in three different languages …

Jacobite Past, Loyalist Present, Michael Newton

e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies

This article is the first analysis of Gaelic sources relating to the involvement of Scottish Highlanders in warfare in North America from the opening of the French and Indian War to the end of the American Revolution. A careful reading of these primary sources — almost totally unknown to historians — can provide a unique window on the sentiments and reasoning of Highlanders regarding these conflicts. This analysis of contemporary Gaelic poetry demonstrates that there is a high degree of continuity and consistency in the ideological framework of the lines of political argumentation from the Jacobite era through the end …

Mother Courage And Its Abject: Reading The Violence Of Identification, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but reproductions can show the distortion of photographs - so The Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar options. Fidelity in art can mean 'infidelity' in life, lead to 'adulterated' reproductions, and impugn understandings of inherited and performed identities - concerns which resurface in The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.

Can The Cosmopolitan Speak: The Question Of Indian Novelists’ Authenticity, John C. Hawley

English

The marketing of books is often beyond the control of their authors; nonetheless, dust jackets sometimes offer amusing evidence of the audience that publication houses, if not authors, wish to reach. Thus, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain ( 1995), Vikram Chandra apparently offers readers the sto1y of "an eighteenth-century wan-ior poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America ... [and] ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV." By way of context, consider Lee Siegel's academic novel, Love in a Dead Language …

Departures From Karachi Airport: Some Reflections On Feminist Outrage, Ambreen Hai

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

Prefatory Note: This essay revisits an experience - my encounter with an airport border control official as I was leaving Pakistan - that occurred in October 2000. At First, this otherwise trivial incident seemed to me illustrative of several postcolonial and/feminist concerns, such as the regulation of national and gender identities at sites of border crossing, or the patriarchal oppressiveness of state power and practices. But as I retold the story, I began to realize that there were additional dimensions to it that called for something else, that required me to re-examine, though not altogether repudiate, my initial indignation. This …

Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism And The Materiality Of Nature, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

A Review by James C. McKusick. In Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, Onno Oerlemans embarks upon an ambitious project to re-situate Romantic poetry in the hard, physical reality of the material world. This study endeavors to place several of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, within the larger intellectual and material contexts of their period, attending not only to the social and cultural currents that shape poetic discourse, but also to the concrete physical substrate of poetic production.

An Evening To Remember, Ivan Davis

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Chocolate Bunnies And Pork For Passover: The School And Home: A Symbiosis For Family Literacy, Karen C. Waters

Education Faculty Publications

This article explores the literacy partnership between school and family when intergenerational stories are made public.

Un Glossario Bernense, Scott Gwara

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Forming The Collective Mind: A Contextual Exploration Of Large-Scale Collaborative Writing In Industry, By Geoffrey A. Cross., Barbara Couture

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We have come a long way in studies of writers in professional settings, learning with each exploration how these behaviors differ from and relate to the processes we have taught beginning writers in our classroom. Studies of these processes have become increasingly more sophisticated since Selzer (1983) treated researchers to his intriguing account of a technical writer’s composing processes. Next, we saw case studies of writers designed to produce real-world writing contexts for students—such as Cases for Technical and Professional Writing, which I coauthored with Rymer Goldstein (1985)—and then more detailed descriptions of how writers learn to become proficient communicators …

What Part English, What Part Spanish?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Back in July, I was sitting in my office at school, working on a syllabus for a new sophomore- level class on language and society. I was exploring the U.S. Census Bureau website to get a sense of the most current information we have about language communities in the United States. I had the radio on, too, and while I was browsing census data about Nebraska, I heard an advertisement on one of the FM stations. The ad was primarily an English-language ad, but it also had a few Spanish words. It turned out to be a job advertisement for …

The Current State Of Composition Scholar/Teachers: Is Rhetoric Gone Or Just Hiding Out?, Krista Ratcliffe

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.