English Language and Literature Commons^™

Requiem: Heart-Wrenching “Mass Song” Or A Smoke Screen?, Marie Peteuil

Quest

Bibliographic Trace

Research in progress for ENGL 2333: World Literature II

Faculty Mentor: W. Scott Cheney, Ph.D.

In an 1870 letter, Emily Dickinson described poetry this way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” During the twentieth century, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote poetry that embodies Dickinson’s intense definition. My …

Du Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Caitlyn Aldersea, Justin Bravo, Sam Allen, Anna Block, Connor Block, Emma Buechler, Maria De Los Angeles Bustillos, Arianna Carlson, William Christensen, Olivia Kachulis, Noah Craver, Kate Dillon, Muskan Fatima, Angel Fernandes, Emma Finch, Colleen Cassidy, Amy Fishman, Andrea Francis, Stacia Fritz, Simran Gill, Emma Gries, Rylie Hansen, Shannon Powers, Jacqueline Martinez, Zachary Harker, Ashley Hasty, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Kathleen Hopps, Adelaide Kerenick, Colin Kleckner, Ci Koehring, Elijah Kruger, Braden Krumholz, Maddie Leake, Lyneé Alves, Seraphina Loukas, Yatzari Lozano Vazquez, Haley Maki, Emily Martinez, Sierra Mckinney, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Audrey Mitchell, Kipling Newman, Audrey Ng, Megan Lucyshyn, Andrew Nguyen, Stevie Ostman, Casandra Pearson, Alexandra Penney, Julia Gielczynski, Tyler Ball, Anna Rini, Christina Rorres, Simon Ruland, Helayna Schafer, Emma Sellers, Sarah Schuller, Claire Shaver, Kevin Summers, Isabella Shaw, Madison Sinar, Claudia Pena, Apshara Siwakoti, Carter Sorensen, Madi Sousa, Anna Sparling, Alexandra Revier, Brandon Thierry, Dylan Tyree, Maggie Williams, Lauren Wols

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

DU Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Works

Watching The Storm: Old Testament Reinvention Of God In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Evelyn Kelly

Language, Literature & Writing Student Scholarship

Author Zora Neale Hurston once claimed that “the Negro is not a Christian really” (Harvey 191). Yet she not only wrote a novel with “God” in the title, but multiple stories that echo specific biblical themes and motifs of salvation, judgment, violence, and pilgrimage. English scholar and professor Glenda Weathers has explored in depth one such parallel, the motif of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in her article, “Biblical Trees, Biblical Deliverance.” With Weather’s analysis, Janie is a Black Eve who is not saved by a male descendant but starts to experience echoes of paradise once …

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 25, 2023, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

"You Can Disagree Without Being Disagreeable": A Rhetorical Study Of Tweets About Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg And Amy Coney Barrett, Lauren Durham

Honors Theses

The selection, nomination, and swearing in of Justice Amy Coney Barrett took place amid an already tension-ridden political and cultural landscape. As a figurehead of women’s rights and equality, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not want President Trump to choose her successor. Her dying wish was for her seat to be replaced after the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, Trump moved his Supreme Court nominee through the process at an unprecedented rate, and within six weeks of Ginsburg’s passing, a conservative constitutional originalist named Amy Coney Barrett took her place.

The nature of the Supreme Court position, the contrasts between the two …

The Sanctuary In Polish Hill, Annabelle M. Harsch

Honors Theses

The Sanctuary in Polish Hill, a short story cycle set in the late 1900s to 2008, surrounds a women’s shelter in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. Ruta Laksa, a second-generation Polish immigrant, moves to the neighborhood named for the influx of Polish immigrants in the late 1800s. Through vignettes of her life, Ruta finds solace in food and community as she struggles with her mental illness. Scattered throughout her own story are vignettes of other women struggling with their own mental illness and those who seek solace and safety. These women build community with each other through food, conversation, and relationship, …

The Author’S Words And The Editor’S Pen, A Self-Study In Editorial Decision Making, Margaret M. Cahill

Honors Theses

This study investigates the practices that professional editors use when evaluating manuscripts for publication. Specifically, I ask: 1) Which edits are the most essential to the overall development of a text? and 2) How does the editor serve as the bridge between writer and reader? In seeking answers to these questions, I apply the editorial practices for reading and manuscript development reported by professional editors to my work as an editor of one writer’s memoir manuscript currently in the process of revision. Drawing on interviews with the author and changes to the manuscript itself, I examine the role of the …

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 23, 2021, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Sustainable Community In Literature And Lancaster County: Finding A Way Forward On Small Farms, Christine Bye

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

"There are very few things that will motivate a thirteen-year-old child who has grown up comfortably and surrounded by supermarkets to pick green beans and to pick them joyfully. Dusty bean plants covered in yellow beetle larvae and located beneath a glaring sun do not exactly inspire an adolescent (or any sane person, really) to caper and sing. Neither do interestingly mottled rashes on the forearms - which appear after extensive rummaging through bean leaves - encourage the picker to return readily to the task. When my parents bought the family farm from my grandparents, they had some idea (as …

Intentionally So: Morality In Children’S Literature, Anna Edwards

Honors Theses

There are tales that follow us from childhood and into adult life: they take the shape of children’s stories. Within these books there are moral lessons to be learned; often times these lessons are communicated through enchanting characters and strange settings. However, in addition to the morality that can be found in the pages of these texts, I believe there is also a morality surrounding their creation. More specifically, the way their authors approach their writing. By looking at the two works The Complete Adventures of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, a …

Misreading The Hybrid Face: The Alienation Of Performed And Authentic Self In Danzy Senna’S Caucasia And Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, William E. Landers

Honors Theses

Race is epistemological. It shapes worldviews, conceptions of self, and interactions with society. It defines who belongs in the national community and who counts as fully human. The myth of whiteness as a homogenizing and nativist identity creates false personas around and within racialized others. These personas define non-white populations according to exclusionary stereotypes. These stereotypes, in turn, separate populations based on appearance and cultural practice. This thesis applies Critical Race Theory and comparative racialization tools to examine the historical implications of race on the conception of an authentic, or internally true, identity. These implications are illustrated by the dynamics …

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 21 Fall 2019, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Reading Her Queenly Coiffure: A Collaborative Approach To The Study Of Marie-Antoinette's Hairstyles, Hélène Bilis, Jenifer Bartle, Laura M. O'Brien, Ruth R. Rogers

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Four colleagues--a faculty member, a digital services librarian, a research librarian, and a curator of Special Collections--take turns describing their role in creating an undergraduate student project around an eighteenth-century almanac that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. In recounting the steps taken, the collaborative process, the student research, and the analysis of the contents of the Trésor des Grâces almanac, we share the lessons learned for completing a digital exhibit over the course of one semester.

Murky Water, Fluid, And The Borderlands Of Language: An Exploration Of Toni Morrison’S Beloved, Julia K. Hall

Honors Theses

Centered on Toni Morrison's Beloved and her process of writing the novel, this thesis links the crossing of a river, the birthing of a child, and the creation of a text. By drawing upon theories of composition, motherhood, and genre theory, this exploration of Beloved balances discussion of writing process, genre, and textual analysis. Buttressed by a complimentary text, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the connection between creation of identity and body through the gestation period and birthing of a text is reflected in Morrison’s own process. The revolutionary splash Beloved made in the field of literary scholarship—and …

Evidence In Online Political Discourse: How Everyday Citizens Argue About Politics On Social Media, Diane Leverich

Honors Theses

This thesis project examines evidence use and participatory dynamics in political conversations on the social networking site Reddit.com. Reddit.com is a network of user-created, interest-based forums in which users, or Redditors, engage in discourse with others about any topic of their interest. I selected the politically-motivated forum, or subreddit, r/PoliticalDiscussion for examination and collected 1,000 of its most recent conversations, or threads, to compose a data corpus. I read, categorized, and analyzed these conversations in terms of how Redditors participated in the subreddit and how they incorporated evidence into their discussions of politics. Two rounds of qualitative data coding revealed …

Re-Painting The Lion: Female Transgression And Authorial Reincarnation In The Works Of Marie De France And Jane Austen, Katherine Rachel Mccaffery

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I argue that Marie de France and Jane Austen transgress social and gender norms in their writings and participate in a process of female authorial reincarnation; through using their voices, these female authors challenge the dominant patriarchal temporal narrative. In Chapter One I explore the Lais of Marie de France, focusing on her anonymity as an author and the implications of her stories as a rejection of the role of women in traditional chivalric romance. Chapter Two deals with Jane Austen’s life, specifically how little we really know about it, and the often overlooked, transgressive aspects of …

When Feminism Meets Hip-Hop, Kylie Thompson

Honors Theses

This paper was conceived from an interest to apply my understanding of race and gender to a genre I love: hip-hop. Hip-hop began as a socio-political genre and as a means of advocacy via its ability to mobilize listeners toward social change. As hip-hop became more popular, its recognizable features were taken and appropriated for mass production and consumption, applying economic pressure to severely obstruct its original purpose and function. Yet, hip-hop continues to lay claim to being an important artistic genre through artists’ innovative adaptation of form and the presence of deeper political critiques. While these social critiques have …

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 20 Fall 2018

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Whose Voice The Waters Heard: A Short Story Cycle, Grace E. Hagan

Honors Theses

Abstract In this collection of short stories, each short story is a unique exploration of the powerful and often enigmatic concept of loss. The common unity for the collection presents itself in two parts: place and theme. Characters of all ages, from all walks of life, go to the river to have their voices heard and to grieve a particular form of loss. The collection takes a dynamic and expansive view on loss, and each short story reflects a different idea or experience of loss. It seeks to examine not only what can be lost, but also what can and …

Young Adult Fiction: Inside The Mirror Image, Paige Christin Flannelly

Honors Theses

Identity and image-of-self are concepts intertwined throughout the pages of Young Adult Fiction Literature. Characters in Young Adult Fiction interact with their surroundings and as a result form an identity based on these interactions. Research has shown how young adults respond to the feedback of their surroundings whether embodied by other characters or their environment. The way in which identity and the image characters see in the mirror are formed is directly related to the interactions characters experience in their daily lives. Interactions with landscapes, peers, illness, grief, and parents are the specific interactions discussed in this thesis. The novels …

Ambiguous Pleasure(Ers): Negotiating The Bodies Of Falstaff And Moll, Lauren Van Atta

Honors Theses

The British Early Modern Period was a time of shifting social ideologies where class as well as gender were mapped onto bodies and embedded in the very material conditions of life. But class and gender were not discreet categories with dichotomous definitions like ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘nobility’ and ‘peasant’. They had many inbetweens, and the theater was perhaps the most glaring inbetween of all. The theater necessarily complicates definitions and ways of viewing bodies as no body is what they seem. And at the heart of these ambiguous identities lay the fat body. It is consumptive, it is transgressive, …

Aiscrima E Checchi Italian-American Dialect And Development In The New Millennium, Elizabeth Loyacano Pedrotti

Honors Theses

The Italian-American identity is inextricably linked with language. Italian immigrants and their descendants have formed a culture in the United states with a dynamic history, particularly when it comes to language use and perceptions. This study examined multigenerational Italian Americans’ perceptions of English, Italian, and the unique Italian-American dialect; it aimed to discover changes in the usage of Italian-American dialect over time. Italian Americans in the Dayton area were interviewed and presented with surveys to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. Results indicate that while overall usage and recognition of Italian-American lexical items has decreased dramatically since the 1980s, younger …

Activism, Community And Cultural Heritage: “Communitism” In Creek Literature, Rachel Maria Cain

Honors Theses

"Communitism" refers to literature that encourages activism by celebrating and promoting American Indian communities. This thesis investigates how the literary works, The Fus Fixico Letters (1902 – 1908) and Drowning in Fire (2004), are communitist by supporting specific political and social changes in Creek communities. Through The Fus Fixico Letters Alexander Posey promoted his progressive political convictions, including that Creeks should embrace land allotment and endorse the creation a separate state for American Indians. Drowning in Fire, by Craig Womack, takes place throughout 1904 – 1993 and relates traditional Creek stories and practices to modern life. The novel delves …

Poetry And The Post-Apocalyptic Paradox: North American Indigenous Disruptions To The Westernized Self, Joseph Benjamin Ziegler Ferber

Honors Theses

This three-chapter project explores the work of three poets, each identifying with different North American indigenous tribes. Their work challenges western poetic conventions and notions of individualism to offer alternative worldviews and complicate mainstream oversimplifications of American Indian identity. Brandi MacDougall investigates assumptions of the Western Self represented by the "I" Perspective common in Western thought; Sherman Alexie revises the sonnet form to portray the complexity of how contemporary American Indians navigate the blending of capitalist institutions and native traditions; Kristi Leora offers readers an enlightened conception of self-hood by balancing processes of western socialization with native cosmology. Ultimately, this …

Back To The Future: Student Time Period Analyses, Jordan Barge, Sarah Ebert, Anna Gaskin, Renay Gladish, Quinn Hamilton, Morgan Hanson, Hannah Markham, Mark Mclean, Callie Smith, Bertha Vega, Shelby Watkins, Jamie Weihe, Jillian Whitney

Student Publications

This newsletter began with the Fall 2015 Honors English class. These students were challenged to initiate research over a topic they thought was interesting and show how it related to our campus, Stephen F. Austin State University. It is our hope that this cumulative research will help readers look at SFA a little differently.

Genre Controversy: Human Universality Or Plagiarism In The Dystopian Genre?, Taylor V. Kingston

Honors Theses

In a fusion of behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology, and literary analysis, this thesis considers the possibility that human nature dictates the types of rhetoric utilized in any given genre. Operant conditioning emerged as the governing device in a case study of the dystopian genre since readers must be made to associate fear or hope with particular government structures. Implicitly then, literature is molded into its genres by the human desires addressed by that genre’s reigning themes. This “mold” seems to have created a strain of novels within the dystopian genre that are so similar there have been accusations of plagiarism. …

Mostly True: An Exploration Of My Family History, Jessica Urban

Honors Theses

Family histories are tricky things, especially when the people in the stories don't necessarily want to talk about their pasts. My family immigrated to the US in the early 1800's, many to escape the anti-Semitism that was rampant in their countries. Through a series of personal interviews, family stories passed down from generation to generation, and my own imagination to fill in the gaps, I have compiled a series of short stories about my family and their lives in America from their arrival here in the 1800's to the present day. Although each family has a different story to tell, …

The Seal Of Solomon: An Exploration Of Storytelling, Ryan M. Krisby

Honors Theses

The Seal of Solomon is a work of fantasy with steampunk, flintlock-fantasy elements exploring Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is both a physical and personal journey in which the hero ventures from their common world and into a realm of supernatural wonder where they encounter challenges, until they enter the “belly of the whale,” undergo an apotheosis and achieve the ultimate boon. They return to their common world changed, enlightened from their experiences and with a freedom over their life that they did not have before. I explore the tropes and elements of …

Sherlock Holmes And James Moriarty: Victorian Genius In A Millennial World, Allison K. Carey

Honors Theses

In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first novel regarding the detective Sherlock Holmes. He would go on to publish another three novels and 56 short stories detailing the great detective’s endeavors. Today, 128 years later, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is as popular, as relevant, and as alive as ever. Adaptations continue to be made and achieve success, including the BBC’s mini-series, Sherlock. This modern adaptation and its interpretation of Conan Doyle’s characters, novels, stories, plots, and themes allow for a unique combination of Victorian and Modern England. It highlights the similarities and differences of a Victorian Holmes and …

Developing Social Consciousness Through Multicultural Young Adult Literature, Megan R. Abbate

Honors Theses

In this study, the novels We Were Here and Mexican Whiteboy by Matt de la Pena and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, works which feature male protagonists struggling tolocate their multicultural identities, will be analyzed. This research will legitimize the use of multicultural young adult literature, specifically these three texts, in the classroom, despite the presence of controversial themes. This research will demonstrate the value of these texts due to their potential to foster social consciousness and aid the establishment of identity within a global context. This thesis will demonstrate ways in which young …