English Language and Literature | Open Access Articles

Heaven's Disco Dances, Savannah Leigh Osbourn May 2015

Heaven's Disco Dances, Savannah Leigh Osbourn

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Heaven’s Disco Dances is a collection of poetry about finding identity through defamiliarization and displacing oneself from reality to better understand it. Within the literary community, there is a great deal of derision toward writing that fails to be “real” or “serious” enough, and poetry is an excellent example of how sometimes the extraordinary speaks to us in ways that realistic fiction cannot. The marvelous and fantastic might serve as an escape from the world, but not necessarily from reality. Rather, they give readers a different lens on life, and sometimes that makes it a more powerful one, because people …

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Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger Jan 2015

Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger

English Faculty Publications

Many a medievalist has been seduced by Chaucer. Perhaps it’s the totality of Chaucer’s enduring characters, memorable tales, elusive narrator, and fragmented whole that keeps us coming back. We are fascinated and delighted, too, by his linguistic play and the lyrical cadence of Middle English. Chaucer may have led us to graduate study in the first place and remains a treat that organizes our pedagogical lives. For some who teach in smaller programs or two-year colleges, Chaucer’s canonical status may provide the only guaranteed place for medieval texts in the curriculum and thus represents one small chance to share our …

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Zephyrus, Western Kentucky University Jan 2015