English Language and Literature Commons^™

Jane Austen And A Biographical Study Of The Historical Narrative Process, Serena Young

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Jane Austen, beloved national literary icon of Great Britain, is world-renowned for her fiction. Biographers have attempted to authentically piece together her life and often, try to connect her narrative to when and how her fiction was written, as well as point out circumstances within her personal life and speculate their influence on her work. Literary analysts and critics that have examined the historical narrative process, Hayden White and Kevin Gilvary, have found that the way in which a historical account is presented plays a significant role in how history is understood and perpetuated. When examining Jane Austen’s life, many …

Composing From The Margins: The Breaking Of Writing Barriers, Empowering Voices & Broadening The Work Of Feminist Composition Studies, Jasmin Salgado

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The concept of identity politics within Composition Studies acknowledge how a writer’s social identity (race, gender, sexuality, disabilities, etc.) influences their writing style and shapes their language. Understanding the relationship between social identity and writing practices means recognizing the diverse perspectives writers bring to the writing classroom. In alignment with this perspective, feminist composition studies emphasize the importance of centering marginalized voices and creating inclusive learning environments where students can safely express their identities through writing. However, research reveals that diverse perspectives haven’t always been welcomed in academic spaces. Feminist compositionists unveil how discourse around writing conventions and language norms …

Plagiarism And Original Authorship In The Age Of Ai: Present Complications And Future Directions, Sarah D. Lagioia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The concept of plagiarism, or the passing off of work produced by others as one’s own without appropriate acknowledgement of the source of creation, is not a new one. It is, however, being complicated in new and interesting ways by technological innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI)-based natural-language processing (NLP). In this paper, I investigate the present complications of defining and responding to plagiarism in the age of AI and suggest the future direction of our grappling with text-generative NLP programs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This paper will describe perspectives on plagiarism and potential reasons behind the use of AI …

The American Dream, The American Lie: An Examination Of Queerness, Disability And American Identity In Miss Lonelyhearts, Vivian Arias

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project, informed primarily by queer theory and disability studies, examines the ways in which queerness, disability, and marginality are central to Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and his critique of the American Dream. Nathanael West, Jewish American novelist and screenwriter, is remembered for his work critiquing the American Dream; however, one aspect that has remained understudied is how his novels feature non-normative outsiders, past and present. The primary analysis of this project is focused on the 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Other works by West are also referenced. From West’s perspective, the American Dream was the American nightmare for …

“Too Good To Kill”: Literary Gerontology And Late Style In Margaret Atwood’S Gilead Novels, Serina Item

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, and her 2019 sequel, The Testaments, illuminate the author’s continued interest in the connection between a woman’s age and the notion of her usefulness and complicity within a hegemonically masculine society. Focusing on literary gerontology and the author’s late style, this essay highlights Atwood’s persistent rejection of patriarchal representations of older women in literature. I analyze the ways in which Atwood’s “ustopian” (Atwood’s literary genre invention, combining “dystopia” and “utopia”) novels develop older women characters beyond “old age as motif and metaphor” by removing age and gender as significant barriers to …

The Hate U Give As Counternarrative: A Rhetorical Site Of Competing Frames & The Disruption Of Dominant Narratives Through Counter-Storytelling & Homing, Jackeline Camacho

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Angie Thomas’s novel, The Hate U Give, is an African American Young Adult novel (AAYA) that captures the violence and devastating effects of police brutality and the gruesome rhetorical strategies that the dominant public sphere uses to criminalize, regulate, and dehumanize Black Americans. In this paper, I use the theoretical framework of counter-storytelling, the theoretical concept of homing, and the rhetorical strategy of framing, to analyze how Thomas exposes the ways in which the dominant public sphere silences, excludes, and discredits the voices and experiences of Black people to give readers access to the dominant public sphere in order …

Conceptions Of Space, Gender, And Movement Within Literature And Film: An Analysis Of "The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs" & Westward The Women, Stephanie Fishleigh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Often portrayed as static, and neutral, “space,” as it is used in this paper, refers to a literary conception, one which encompasses a sphere of locations as well as settings of events, characters, and objects within a literary narrative. Much to our detriment, humans are often compelled to codify and compartmentalize the world around us, using perceived differences as our epistemological touchstone. This phenomenon extends even to our relationship to space. In examining the interplay between space, geographies, genre, and gender, using two objects of analysis, this paper seeks to further the current scholarship on how gender ideology informs our …

Language Ideologies In First Year Composition Textbooks, Joanna Clevenger

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis examines how standard language ideologies are perpetuated in the five most frequently assigned first year composition textbooks from four higher education institutions in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Standard language ideologies position one variation of a language as superior, correct, appropriate and the normal variation of a language which everyone should be able to speak. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the five textbooks were analyzed in order to uncover the embedded power and hegemony over women, people of color, and those from a lower socioeconomic status which are prevalent throughout society because they are unchallenged and widely accepted as the …

Slow Violence, Cli-Fi, And Opportunities For Change How Bipoc Futurisms Promote Activism, Francisco Baeza

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The threat of anthropogenic climate change is discussed almost exclusively in terms of “scientific” data to the exclusion of the humanities. For some worlds, climate change has already destroyed their ways of life and forced them to adapt. Climate fiction – or cli-fi – written by BIPOC authors is one way we can begin to think of how the planet is not just one world but a plurality of worlds. This project centers authors and world-makers who come from communities that have been left at the margins of the science fiction and cli-fi genres. By looking at fictions from a …

Image, Text, And Sound Through The Arabesque In Thoreau's Walden, Lupina Farhana

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This essay looks at Thoreau’s Walden through the lens of the motif of the Arabic arabesque. It first considers the arabesque in a playful paradigm, that interrupts, crosses, and breaks boundaries through a Derridean parergon. However, this event results in an overturning of the binary that had, for centuries, deemed merely the center to hold the highest of importance. Art historian Cordula Grewe utilizes Derrida’s parergon to analyze the poems of Goethe in the context of an arabesque frame which gives the sensation of sound by imitating the repeatedly playful consonants of the text written in the center. Thus, text, …

“My Brand Is Sick Girl”: Identity Formation In The Young Adult Chronic Illness Novels The Fault In Our Stars And Sick Kids In Love, Natalie Thompson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis explores the identities of the chronically ill protagonists in The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and Sick Kids in Love by Hannah Moskowitz, specifically by looking at the young protagonist’s self-identity, their relationships with their family members, and the romantic relationship they have with the chronically ill male lead. John Green, who does not identify as chronically ill, writes a novel that ultimately reflects ableist ideas of the medical model of disability, which sees disability as a problem to be solved by medical intervention, and compulsory heterosexuality through the portrayal of Hazel and her relationship with …

Exploring The Rhetorical Power Of Speculative Fiction Through Jewelle Gomez’S The Gilda Stories And Octavia Butler’S Fledgling, Monique Dixon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

There are apparent similarities between Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. However, this thesis will demonstrate that they share more than similar subject matter and yet differ in substantial ways. Utilizing Black feminist theory and alternative rhetoric this thesis examines how Gomez and Butler harness the potential of speculative fiction to critique the world around them and imagine an alternative world for those who are intersectionally marginalized.

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

Chicano English At The Dinner Table, Elena Silva

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Dinner talk, or dinnertime conversations, have been investigated and studied by many scholars such as Blum-Kukla (1997) Ochs (1995), Haesook (2006), Arcidiacono (2009), and Herot (2002). Dinnertime conversations are the locus of family interactions and language socialization (Ochs 1986) in that they represent recurring activities or speech events in which all or most family members participate. Conversations at the dinner table serve as a daily (or near daily) forum for family members to interact and converse with each other and in so doing, instantiate their identities as parents, siblings, and children and express their stances.

While dinner talk has been …

Nystagmic Poetics In Lorine Niedecker’S Postwar Poetry, Edward Ferrari

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In this article I explore the work of Lorine Niedecker, a poet not conventionally associated with disability studies, in order to flesh out an account of the function of visual disability in midcentury poetics and praxis. To do this I read Niedecker’s formative sequence “For Paul,” the late long poem “Wintergreen Ridge,” and other poems, through deformative practices in the belief that such an engagement shows how Niedecker’s hybrid objectivist praxis can be integrated with critical models of disability studies. Such an integration is then bodied forth in what I’m calling a “nystagmic poetics.” In such a poetics, the physical …

English Language Learners In K-12 Classrooms: Problems, Recommendations And Possibilities, Trisha Henderson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Since California is the state with the highest number of English Language Learner (ELL) students in the nation (Abedi and Levine, 2013; Estrada, 2014), there is clearly a need for what Abedi and Levine (2013) call "accommodation" in educating ELLs in K-12 classrooms. This paper is an attempt to synthesize the current scholarship surrounding K-12 educational practices of ELLs nationally, but with special emphasis on key states: California and Arizona. It begins by describing the achievement gap between the growing number of ELLs and their native English speaking peers (NSP). The paper will first discuss possible reasons for this achievement …

Utilizing Visual Rhetoric: A New Approach To Comics, Superheroes, And Red Suns, Tabitha Rose-Ann Zarate

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Comics and graphic texts require complex engagement from readers, engagement that relies on a developed understanding of text and image, and how they interact to create meaning. There are several theories about how readers engage with comics, many from comic creators themselves, and some from scholars in literature and composition. This project introduces an approach to comics utilizing visual rhetoric, which reconsiders the stricter text/image dynamics often conceptualized in Comics Studies, includes the reader as creator, and explores comics as collaboratively created texts. This approach is applied to Superman: Red Son, a popular text that focuses in on Superman, …

Building A Strong Chicana Identity: Young Adult Chicana Literature, Rocio Janet Garcia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis considers the use of Young Adult Chicana Literature in the classroom to help young Chicanas work through their process of finding their identities. It begins by making the case that Chicana identities are complex because of their intersectional borderland positioning between Mexican and U.S. American cultures, which makes the identity formation process more difficult for them than others. By relating these complex issues facing young Chicanas to literature that is more relevant to them and their struggles, it is argued that teachers can help ease some of the tensions that exist within their students and help them work …

(Un)Welcome To America: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric In Trump’S Speeches And Conservative Mainstream Media, Erika Sabrina Quinonez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project makes the empirical assertion that U.S. President Donald Trump and conservative news media outlets contribute to a national narrative of xenophobia that frames immigrants, particularly those of color, as parasitic and dangerous to the American way of life. Through this study, I assert that the use of demagogic and dehumanizing language along with more subtle discursive strategies, such as positive representation of ‘us’, negative representation of ‘them,’ and metaphorical constructions are being used to stoke fear and anti-immigrant sentiment and to strip individuals of their humanity for the purpose of rendering them unworthy of dignity and of the …

Examining Experiences With English Language Studies In Taiwan And In The United States, Ying-Mei Chien

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The importance of learning English to find success in today’s global community has never been more vital. However, choosing the best method for teaching English language skills in the second language (L2) classroom is still open for debate. This paper examines L2 strategies for teaching English in Taiwan. More important, it examines the notion that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) training in Taiwan could be made more successful by incorporating more effective EFL teaching strategies, including a communicative, or creativity based methodology for second language learning. EFL teaching methodology in Taiwan has and continues to emphasize a teacher centered …

The Functionality Of Reboots, Dustin L. Shepherd

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to better understand how film reboots empower fans by offering unique insight as critiques of the original texts and by displacing hierarchies amongst audience, critic, and author. My hypothesis is that reboots, as an act of adaptation, allow audience members of the original franchise to become authors, in this case screenwriters. By extension these screenwriters become critics by highlighting, expanding, or even disregarding themes found in the original film series. This complicates the reboot beyond a simple capitalistic venture to make money and invites us to consider the way they position and displace interactants to better foster …

Coming Out Of The Coffin As The Posthuman: Posthuman Rhetoric And Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse Series, Rebecca Ann Garcia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In this article, I argue that the vampires in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels illustrate clearly the posthuman self in its connection beyond itself to other vampires, humans, and non-humans. Learning to co-exist becomes problematic in Harris’ series, where we encounter a “new” representation of vampire. These vampires have come out of the coffin, and their revelation allows us to explore how they can be viewed in connection to the human world and how their transcendence can be seen as a move toward posthumanism, as its particular blend of body and community help demonstrate what the self expanded could be. …

The Phenomenology Of Second Language Acquisition: Poiesis And The Emergence Of The Multilingual Subject, Courtney E. Scarborough

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This study explores relationships between second language acquisition (SLA), poetic language, and embodied cognition and its connection to second language speakers’ linguistic self-formation, or their distinct ways of speaking and thinking. In particular, this study examines processes by which second language (L2) learners’ subjective realities are constructed and demonstrates that these processes are inherently poetic, emerging from a combination of the constraining structures of the language system and second language speakers’ phenomenological experiences. The context of the study is a poetry-making activity the researcher designed and took place in the English Department Writing Center at California State University, San Bernardino. …

Visualizing Hate: Maus As Holocaust Literature, Geoffrey Daniel Curran

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus affected traditional classifications of Holocaust writings, specifically literary memoir. Genre studies use Holocaust writings especially those classified as "literary memoirs", to define a narrow group to exclusion of texts like Maus. If Maus was not 'allowed' to be defined as memoir then was it solely cast as fiction? To view it as fictional would have denied that Maus was a graphic novel which interlaces both received testimonial 'truth' and receptive 'truth'.

Identity, Morality, And The Human-Monster: Dexter As A Postmodern Text, Robyn Carol Nelson

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines notions of postmodern identity and morality as portrayed in the Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay as well as the Showtime television series based on Lindsay's works.

To Speak Or Not To Speak: The Implications Of Silence In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Margaret Rose Jones

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis explores the function and importance of silence throughout William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Along with analysis of Shakespeare's text, this thesis also reviews and analyzes three film versions of the play: Laurence Olivier's 1948 production, Kenneth Branagh's 1996 production, and Michael Almereyda's 2000 production. All of these showcase various depictions of silence while working with the same Shakespearian text and plotline. Throughout the text and film analyses this thesis explores three areas in which silence plays an important role: refusal to join a conversation, emotional distress rendering someone silent, and societal limitations placed on the individual. This thesis attempts …

Is Gothic Dead?:Tthe Evolution Of The Vampire Novel, Janis Haigwood Hudson

Theses Digitization Project

Critic Fred Botting claims that the gothic genre is dead due to reader's assimilation of horror in their everyday lives. He cites violence on the news and graphic documentaries as ways in which people can be desensitized to gothic books and movies. This, according to Botting, results in a lack of expected reader/viewer reaction and is the basis of his assertion. This thesis examines three vampire novels: Dracula (1897), I Am Legend (1954), and Carrion Comfort (1984). These three novels were written over a span of one hundred years and published almost fifty years apart. When examined from a male …

Sources Of Fear In American Society: Representations In Short Horror Fiction, 1950s-Present, Mona Moin Syed

Theses Digitization Project

This study examines the ways in which short American horror fiction has always revolved around fundamental fears of mortality, and how these fears have shifted across the span of three specific timeframes. Using a historical lens, this study also explores what the specific nature of mortality fears, as reflected in particular instances of short horror fiction, historically reveal about contemporaneous cultural attitudes toward end of life issues, loss, doubt, and grief. This study also traces how the perceptions of mortality have dynamically changed in American society from 1950s to present times in accordance with powerful historical events, varying cultural contexts, …

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.

Whitman, Elegy, And The Nineteenth Century Culture Of Death And Mourning, Susan Renee Nylander

Theses Digitization Project

In this thesis, the author offers a close reading and analysis of several of Walt Whitman's elegies and poems about death and mourning through the nineteenth century practices of mourning and death.