English Language and Literature Commons^™

Ethics Of Counter Narrative In Delillo’S Falling Man, Qingji He

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ethics of Counter-Narrative in DeLillo's Falling Man" Qingji He analyzes Don DeLillo's counter-narrative in his post-9/11 novel Falling Man. The objective is to show how ethical dimensions function fundamentally in formulating an appropriate counter-narrative and why DeLillo's counter-narrative echoes views expressed in his "In the Ruins of the Future." He argues that DeLillo's counter-narrative entails the necessity of ethical consciousness and responsibility. It is Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings instead of media representation that become pivotal in Lianne's transformative and redemptive process after the terrorist attack. Similarly, David Janiak's performance art and Richard Drew's picture …

Human Cloning As The Other In Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Wen Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Human Cloning as the Other in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go" Wen Guo analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's novel with focus on Ishiguro's analogy between human cloning and people of marginality in contemporary society. Guo discusses the novel's ambience of doubt and suspense and elaborates on how the theme of otherness is addressed by Ishiguro's mock-realism in a landscape of science fiction. Further, Guo analyses the "unhomely" Hailsham of the novel, the clones' self-pursuit, and their ethical attitudes. Guo argues that in Ishiguro's novel a person's ethical choices are determined by his/her situation which confirms Ishiguro's beliefs with …

Perspectives Of Ethical Identity In Ng's Steer Toward Rock And Jen's Mona In The Promised Land, Hui Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Perspectives of Ethical Identity in Ng's Steer toward Rock and Jen's Mona in the Promised Land" Hui Su examines Fae Myenne Ng's and Gish Jen's novels. In the novels, the protagonists make different decisions: in Steer Toward Rock Jack after displacement in China adopts US-American identity and in Mona in the Promised Land Mona, a second generation Chinese American, selects Jewish identity. Owing to their different situations, the two protagonists reflect challenges of identity building in the case of the "Other" in US-American culture and society. Su argues that Ng and Jen, although varying in their …

Use Of Wikis In Second/Foreign Language Classes: A Literature Review, Mimi Li

Mimi Li

Wikis, as emerging Web 2.0 tools, have been increasingly implemented in language classrooms. To explore the current state of research and inform future studies, this article reviews the past research on the use of wikis in second/foreign language classes. Using Google Scholar and the ERIC database, the researcher examines twenty-one empirical studies published in fourteen peer-reviewed journals from 2008 to 2011. Specifically, the researcher takes a holistic review of this body of literature, including theoretical frameworks, research goals, contexts and participants, tasks and wiki applications, and research methods and instruments. The researcher identifies four main research themes investigated in the …

"Carried Away": Love, Bly, And Secrecy In Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw 2015, Natalie G. El-Eid

Master's Theses

The function of the prologue in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is decidedly ambiguous, as the characters in the prologue, much like the uncle of the main text, are seemingly never seen again. For this reason, the purpose of this prologue is much debated.1 As Rolf Lundén states in his article “‘Not in any literal, vulgar way’: The Encoded Love Story of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw,” “The openness of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw has invited more analytical attempts, and more critical controversy, than most literary texts” (30). Lundén summarizes four schools of …

Conventional Wisdom In The Writing Classroom: A Short Defence Of Grammar Instruction, Sue Norton

Articles

This article considers whether instructors of writing in higher education ought prescriptively to involve students in the mechanics of standard written English or, rather, encourage them to prioritise ideas and content. Recognizing the reluctance of many practitioners to distract learner-writers with rules, and thereby alienate them from their creativity, it nevertheless recommends judicious delivery of lessons in conventional grammar, syntax, and punctuation. Taking standard written English as a variant that continues to hold sway in general, academic, and professional readerships, the article concludes with a selection of language components relevant to undergraduate writing and commonly addressed by readily available resource …

Nature And Technology: Angelic And Sacrificial Strategies In Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Tolkien is often lightly accused of having a romantic view of nature, in that he portrays the natural environment as an embodiment of goodness, while technology is evil. Indeed, more than one critic has seen The Lord of the Rings as an attack on modem science and technology. This view is more commonly expressed word-of-the-mouth than in print, but it can be found even there, with Lee Donald Rossi, in his dissertation, classing Tolkien and Lewis as "reactionary fantasists" who would "get rid of most of the machines and return to a primarily agrarian economy" and Walter Scheps noting that …

The Latest Model, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Though it was only superficial, the lesion on the three-year old's arm looked sinister. Oddly symmetrical and oval, it looked like a pinkish field of delicate needlepricks on the pudgy arm and elbow, oozing a little and forming a crust the color of lemon yogurt on the edges. The child sniffled as Sandra gently explored his injury. His cheekswere still red from bawling.

Sweet As Muscatel, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Although my grandfather had made his fortune in trade, I had been educated as a gentleman and at first I expected Flora society to accept me as such. After a youth spent in Paris and Vienna, I was anyone's equal in deportment. My attire, always elegant without flashiness, had elsewhere disarmed the stuffiest arbiters. So when with a lover's shyness I followed the Lady Celia into the Contessa di Filipini's salon at Flora, I was not expecting difficulties from the threadbare remnants of aristocracy which infested that small city. I took no special notice of Prospero until the night he …

The Fountain And The Black Fish, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

It was late afternoon when Oscar Verplank and his mother arrived at his Aunt Penny's apartment. The boards of the porch creaked as they crossed to the heavy oak door. "The house is more than a hundred years old,"murmured his mother as she rang the bell. A buzz sounded and Oscar quickly opened the door. "They had to update the place to make it livable, Mother," he noted. As they climbed the creaky stairs, the door to the upstairs apartment was thrown open. "Louise! It's been too long!" cried the woman who rushed out. As the sisters embraced each other, …

The Earthly Paradise In Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Valinor, modelled on the Earthly Paradise, is described more fully in Tolkien's posthumously published works than in The Lord of the Rings. Yet the fleeting Valinorean images within the trilogy have a powerful impact, heightening and simultaneously providing consolation for the horrors of Mordor.

Heroic Orual And The Tasks Of Psyche, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

C.S. Lewis's last novel, Till We have Faces: A Myth Retold, concerns transformations. After all, it deals with the myth of Psyche. In Greek, Psyche means not only soul but also butterfly.1 This brings to mind the metamorphosis of a crawling caterpillar into a winged butterfly, analogous to the protagonist's transformation from mortal to goddess. In Lewis's retelling, not only does a mortal human becomes an immortal goddess,2 but also, an ugly soul turns beautiful, a coarse, barbaric populace grows into a gracious civilization, and cruel divinities with a thirst for human blood become loving guardians of the human race. …

Falcandus And Fulcaudus Epistola Ad Petrum Liber De Regno Sicilie Literary Form And Author's Identity, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

In Paris, in 1550, when the printing press was still relatively new, Gervais de Tournay published a medieval chronicle under the title, Historia Hugonis Falcandi Siculi De rebus gestis in Siciliae regno iam primum typis excusa [« The History of Hugo Falcandus the Sicilian, concerning things done in the Kingdom of Sicily, now printed for the first time »]. He had discovered this history, as he explains in his preface, in a codex placed at his disposal by Matthew Longuejoue, bishop of Soissons, a codex so ravaged by time that it looked repulsive enough to poison the hand that dared …

Foreground And Background: Three Literary Treatments Of The Bubonic Plague, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Though many diseases bring suffering and death, plagues strike the imagination with special awe because they threaten death to whole cities and nations. So it is not surprising that novelists have treated of plagues now and then. A visitation of bubonic plague is the central event in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’s The Plague. In Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, it is the culminating event, through which all the plot lines are finally resolved. Though much separates these writers, including language, culture, century. and philosophical outlook. each presents the plague accurately according to the scientific knowledge …

Medieval Love-Madness And Divine Love, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Lovers in the Middle Ages had a tendency to go mad. In fact, they were subject to a whole range of disorders which nowadays are considered symptoms of mental illness, from pining away to outright suicide, to raging and raving madness. Of course, then as now, these manifestations of inner turmoil were not mutually exclusive. Malory's Sir Lancelot goes raging mad at one stage of his career and starves himself to death at the end of it. There are also more or less pure examples of each type: of pining away, Malory's Elaine, the fair maid of Astalot; of suicide, …

The New Writing Series, Spring 2016, The University Of Maine Honors College

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

In its thirty-fourth consecutive semester of programming, the New Writing Series will host six readings featuring four poets (John Keene, Prageeta Sharma, Divya Victor, and John Yau) and two fiction writers (Emily Fridlund and Joanna Walsh).

These writers are all highly active across the full spectrum of literary activity. They are editors, publishers, and anthologists; translators and tale-tellers; art-makers and trail-blazing scholars.

The New Writing Series brings innovative and adventurous contemporary writing to the University of Maine's flagship campus in Orono on selected Thursdays at 4:30pm.

A Better Question Would Be: Are We The Watchmen?, Alexander Lawriw

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This assignment was meant to be a literary analysis of the famous graphic novel, Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. In this analysis, we were supposed to look at some of the various writing/visual strategies of the novel and note how these strategies either related to or did not connect with various Catholic Intellectual Traditions. I, personally, decided to look at two of the main characters of the book, Rorschach and The Comedian, and examine how they related to the deeper Catholic and Philosophical understanding of what it means to be human. In particular, I …

Stereotypes Of Disabled In Society: A Call For Change, Emily Kimble

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

The purpose of this assignment was to research and write in an academic discipline. Students were asked to conduct academic research and to produce an argument about a “super.” The argument required that one joins an academic conversation, as he or she practiced the research and writing conventions expected of a member of an academic discipline or community. To get started, I began thinking about a topic—something that was not only important to me, but also important to society. I looked at the links provided to me by my professor that gave background information on numerous superheroes. After analyzing the …

Anti-Gay Legislation In Russia: Western Perspectives, Kelsey A. Clayback

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

My writing process first began when my English 200 professor, Dr. Kisel, assigned our final informative synthesis essay. We were given a list of topics to choose from, all of which addressed different aspects of censorship in Russia. I chose the topic of the controversial gay propaganda law enacted by President Vladimir Putin in modern-day Russia. As a class, we met in the library and learned how to find appropriate sources using UD’s online databases. We were given the assignment of finding and summarizing five credible sources for our essay. Next, we were to narrow the sources down to four …

Love Vs. Capitalism, Blake R. Coury

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

My purpose in writing this Summary and Response paper was to take a deep look at Norris’ essay, The Secret Ingredient, and focus on a main aspect that I found to be important to me. I am trying to show, using Norris’ essay as evidence, that I agree with Norris’ assertion that people are too materialistic today and that people should be focuses on love instead. The hardest challenge for me when I was working on this paper was trying to balance between using textual evidence and using my own words. I wanted to make sure that I provided …

Breaking Through The Veneer, Julia K. Hall

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I initially approached this paper merely as an assignment for my English 100 class, but I became increasingly enthusiastic as I continued to develop my thoughts. This ordinary assignment transformed into a fun, exciting process. I pondered my favorite books, my influential teachers, and my childhood before beginning to write. The conclusions regarding my personal identity as a reader and a writer that I make in this paper were revealed to me through my reflection. After a few drafts and a trip to the Write Place, I have produced an essay that mirrors my personal literacy journey.

This Honey Bunny Ain't So Funny, Molly E. Moesner

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This assignment consisted of recounting an experience or time when you learned either a primary of secondary literacy. After a few brief brainstorming exercises including a five-minute free-write, my mind was instantly drawn to an experience I had when I was younger. This experience stuck out in particular, not only because it was the foundation of my ability to read, but also because it was my first known embarrassing story. Once I decided on this topic, I began jotting down as many details from that time as possible. I eventually pieced together my thoughts and began composing the narrative, adding …

Revision In The Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn From The Superhero, David Hyman

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Constant and ongoing revision is the compositional tactic through which many contemporary superhero narratives negotiate the powerful struggle between reiteration of the genre’s past, and creative expression of its future. Instead of a gradual succession of improved renditions of a text, each one effacing and superseding the imperfections of its predecessors, revision is revealed as the production of multiple versions whose differences and diversities are “capable of being in uncertainties”, as Keats describes the creative attitude which he terms Negative Capability: ontologically equal textual variations that wear their inconsistencies openly, and reject the pressure to resolve their multiplicities into the …

Praesentia Sublimis: Studies In The Differend, Dylan T. Vaughan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Interrogating the notion of the differend, taken from Jean-Franҫois Lyotard’s book of the same name, in which a wrong occurs along with the impossibility of its representation as a wrong, this thesis attempts to rearticulate the relationship between the distant and heterogeneous theories dealing with a supposedly common subject matter: namely, the sublime. The sublime as it is taken up in the rhetorical pedagogy of Longinus, the transcendental aesthetic of Immanuel Kant, and the postmodern theory of Jean-Franҫois Lyotard refuses to yield a shared dimension that could bind together these major moments of thought. There are sublimes, it seems, …

Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge And Hospitality In Derrida, Puspa Damai

Puspa Damai

‘‘Listen first to those who, like myself, did not have to watch TV to know that SOME of L.A. was burning,’’ Derrida wrote to a newsletter in response to the riots triggered by the Rodney King events in 1992, adding, ‘‘L.A. is not anywhere, but it is a singular organization of the experience of ‘anywhere’’’ (‘‘Faxitexture’’ 28). At a time when one hardly needs to watch TV to know that many cities around the world are burning, or are targeted and wounded, bombed and invaded—as if the Biblical injunction, ‘‘Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge …

Spectrogenetic Translation In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Elsewhere, Puspa Damai

Puspa Damai

South Asians, in their attempts to articulate post-colonial subjectivity, have themselves only reinscribed various aspects of colonial exoticism in their work. South Asian author Arundhati Roy’s rendering of untouchability in terms of godliness in The God of Small Things resonates with colonial ideologies that read “subalterns” as objects, not as subjects. Roy’s invocation of colonial methods of translation envisions untouchability in “absolutist terms”—a strategy that may ultimately mitigate against a recognition of the highly varied experiences, social agencies, and subjectivities of dalits living in South Asia and abroad.

Cosmopolitanism After Derrida: City, Signature And Sovereignty, Puspa Damai

Puspa Damai

Cosmopolitanism in Derrida's works sounds like an afterthought in comparison to other more recurring themes of his texts, like 'writing', 'differance', 'supplement', 'metaphysics', or 'violence'. Cosmopolitanism seems to belong to deconstruction, which is often associated with decentring, fragmentation, and critique of totality and universality, only as an intimate other, a foreign element grafted in the body by force, or by miracle. That is the reason why, perhaps, hardly any cosmopolitanist refers to the issue of cosmopolitanism in Derrida or in deconstruction, so much so that even Derrida has written very sparsely on it as it belongs perhaps to the dormant, …

African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …

Owning A Virus: The Rhetoric Of Scientific Discovery Accounts, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

No Abstract Available

"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.