English Language and Literature Commons^™

Understanding Second-Person Point Of View In Fiction, Anastasia L. Hawke

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis consists of a critical introduction followed by a short story and reflection. The critical introduction introduces and analyzes second-person point of view. The first section establishes a working definition for second-person narrative and maps out its unique relationship between narrator, protagonist, and reader. The second section explores the way second-person point of view is taught. The third and last section of the critical introduction focuses on the effects second-person point of view has on fiction narratives.

The short fiction “Pregnancy and Other Dysfunctions” following the critical introduction demonstrates a narrative effectively using second-person point of view. It follows …

Those Who See: Emily Dickinsons And May Swensons Poetic Language Of Spiritual And Scientific Possibility, Samantha Latham

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Emily Dickinson and May Swenson are major American poets who use scientific language in order to explore the productive tension developed when core spiritual beliefs are challenged by new scientific observations and theories. Rather than shrink from the uncertainty resulting from the challenge to faith posed by Darwin in nineteenth-century America, Dickinson and Swenson blend scientific and spiritual language to move beyond the binary opposition often seen as separating these discourses. Dickinson responds most immediately to the advent of Darwinian thought, while Swenson builds on the work of Dickinson as she examines twentieth-century scientific discoveries ranging from the microscopic (the …

Navigating The Outdoor Recreation Folk Group: A Functional Analysis Of The Personal Narrative, Lori Lee

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Among the participants of the outdoor recreation folk group, or people who participate regularly in human-powered outdoor recreation as a lifestyle, personal narratives are an integral and integrated part of interaction. This group is particularly rife with stories, because in the natural order of their lifestyle they regularly engage in activities filled with adventure and challenge. As members of this folk group engage in recreation together they share their personal narratives because it is the common tie between them, not only in interest, but in current participation and thus natural conversation. This common and simple tie sets the stage perfectly …

A Place For The Personal: Autobiographical Literary Criticism Through The Lens Of Transformative Learning, Jennifer Scucchi

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Up through the 1980s, literary criticism scholarship had been primarily defined by New Criticism, an ideology which suggests that the approach to literary studies should be objective, focused solely on the text itself, and should not take into consideration authorial intent or readers’ response. While this approach to literary studies seems practical in undergraduate literature courses in which students are still learning how to read literature, excluding different approaches to reading, understanding, and writing about literature can and does have inadvertent consequences. Although literary scholarship has been increasingly welcoming of alternative forms of literary criticism since the 1980s, including cultural …

A Painted Void, Kevin Larsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This creative thesis contains four original short stories and a literature review written by Utah State University student Kevin Larsen. The four short stories were written and revised in 2013 under the mentorship and guidance of Professor Jennifer Sinor. Works for the literature review were selected by Kevin Larsen after reading extensively within the horror and magical realism genres.

Horror and magical realism both are well established genres with their own rules and tendencies. By pulling from both genres, these stories explore ideas and themes of horror fiction using the structure and setting that magical realism allows. This isn’t to …

"We Want To Get Down To The Nitty-Gritty": The Modern Hardboiled Detective In The Novella Form, Kendall G. Pack

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

My novella explores the character of a detective, Whitney Sloat, who lives and works in the hardboiled tradition, distant from reality. The characters of this fictionalized
Ogden, Utah act as they would in a hardboiled novel, but without the actual criminal element of that world.

Whitney and the characters that inhabit the novella are more products of detective fiction than inhabitants of that world. In line with Geraldine Pederson-Krag’s analysis of the primal scene as it applies to detective fiction, Whitney and those he associates with enact the detective fantasy and gratify their “infantile curiosity with impunity.” The world crumbles …

The Legend, The Madman, And The Prophet A Memoir About Fathers And Sons, Erik K. Thalman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Legend, the Madman, and the Prophet is a memoir about fathers and sons, about the experience of being a son of a man of the Rocky Mountains, a legend grown old. The narrative centers around my struggle with the fact that my father had grown old and sick while I was still young, and my consequent search for other fathers, employing two primary examples—a martial-arts instructor from my high-school years who was later exposed as a pedophile, and the eccentric figure of my ex-girlfriend’s wealthy and traditional Egyptian-American father. The memoir relates the story of my father’s impact on …

Reimagining The Rhetorical Canons For Professional Communication Pedagogy, Jocelin A. Gibson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

One of the most significant challenges for professional communication educators is identifying and providing the skills students need to succeed in their careers. The rapidly evolving professional landscape complicates this identification; the skills a college student needs when she enters the program could be dramatically different from what she needs when she graduates. A crucial change in the past decade is the shift from a largely solo composing environment to one featuring distributed work, in which professional communicators “find themselves becoming "dividuals" – one part writer, one part project manager, one part programmer, one part student”; this has them involved …

Propaganda Powers Social Reform: The Visual Rhetoric Of Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, And Norman Rockwell, Shelly Stock Halling

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The scope of this thesis is an examination of visual rhetoric and its societal impacts. The framework is an historical timeline from the end of the 19^th century to the middle of the 20^th century. The thesis is an interdisciplinary activity that embeds Art History in American Studies. It is beneficial to scholars in a variety of fields, including, but not limited to: English, American Studies, Art History, Photography, Sociology, Anthropology, and History. It braids together the theoretical perspectives of propaganda, visual rhetoric, and advocacy. The thesis is based on library research with no outside funding.

The Underground Gang: Cyclist Group Identity As Expressed Through Folk Art, Folk Events, Narratives, And Community Spaces, Anna P. Christiansen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a study of the “underground” cycling community in Ogden, Utah. This thesis establishes a groundwork understanding of the nature of underground cycling culture, particularly in relation to identity. Using folkloric definitions of identity and subculture as my foundation, I conducted fieldwork with the Ogden cycling community to examine four different facets of cyclist activities: folk art, folk events, narratives, and the community’s use of space. Each of the four facets also illustrated the different levels of identity, shifting from individual levels, outward to the performance of identity as an individual and group within a larger local and …

Graphic Memoir As A Tool For Imaginative Leaping, Shay Larsen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The idea for this capstone was sparked in the last semester of my third year of undergraduate research at Utah State University. I had been researching the ways in which creative nonfiction writers approached the realm of surreality in their work with my honors contract advisor, Dr. Jennifer Sinor. Sinor herself had written a piece ("Holes in the Sky") that dealt heavily in abstractions paralleled with the works of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. While discussing the difficulties of expressing surreality in writing I made an offhand comment along the lines of "makes you wish you'd been a painter instead of …

The Many Voices Of Sylvia Plath, Millie Tullis

Research on Capitol Hill

No abstract provided.

Giving Birth To Self, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

In GIVING BIRTH TO SELF, the author, using the techniques of "thought-runs," meditates on Marquez's statement that "human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them to give birth to themselves. The focus in this essay is then on context and use, the "where" and the "how" of self. Where do representations of self, oneself and that of the other, typically occur in written texts and how does the author use self: how does it perform?

The Fascination Of The Unfinished, Abandoned And Wrecked, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

The unfinished, abandoned (e.g., ruins), and wrecked provoke a strong reaction in such diverse persons as antiquarians, artists, writers and journalists. One can say that the UAW cause the new thing to appears. They are "news." In this book are a collection of unfinished MSS. The author invites the reader to, if not finish them, at least continue the ideas of each

Voices Of Usu: An Anthology Of Student Writing, 2015, Utah State University Department Of English

Voices of USU

This collection of student writing represents the voices of over 2,000 students who enroll each academic year in Utah State University’s second-year composition course, Intermediate Writing: Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode. Voices of USU celebrates excellence in writing by providing undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and disciplines the opportunity to have their work published.

"Hills Like White Elephants": Epistemic, Nonepistemic And Nonseeing, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

This essay, a though-experiment, explores the value of reading literary texts (with the example of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants") from the point of view of epistemic, nonepistemic and nonseeing. Epistemic seeing is defined as seeing with "belief-content" nonepistemic seeing without it. The technique is to examine each example of the word "seeing" (or one of the members of its family, "look, watch," "blink") and let it "lead" you to the object, its contest, and implications in the story as a whole..