Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Humanesis By David Cecchetto, Max Ritts

The Goose

Review of Humanesis by David Cecchetto.

Stories In A New Skin: Approaches To Inuit Literature By Keavy Martin, Allison K. Athens

The Goose

Review of Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature by Keavy Martin.

X: Poems & Anti-Poems By Shane Rhodes, Tom Miller

The Goose

A review of Shane Rhodes' X: Poems & Anti-Poems. This review focuses on the link between language and landscape, and considers the ways in which that link, reflected in Rhodes' work, comments upon the use of language as an oppressive tool in the treatment of Native Americans and Canadians.

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …

Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dystopian fiction is expected to reflect deeply on the interactions between identities, bodies, and state control. Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy is no exception. The disturbing trilogy situated animality, disability, and trauma (both of non-humans and of humans) as being firmly controlled by the power of the state (the Capitol). Through its portrayal of hunting and genetic manipulation, the trilogy constructed a state-created animality which refused definitive labeling and insisted upon facing animal subjectivity while simultaneously disregarding the needs and desires of those considered to be non-human. Similarly, the state held sway over both the creation and elimination of …

Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments reads Ralph Waldo Emerson as a writer of assignments for living and working whose senses can be taken up across a wide array of creative and exploratory fields. Shifting between an interdisciplinary array of contexts ranging from philosophy and poetics to dance, performance, and somatic movement experiments, I join the practical sense of creative inquiry embodied in these fields to the abstract images of Emerson's assignments. I argue that Emerson's descriptions of intelligence and power, and so his approaches to navigating skepticism and loss, as well as the non-possessive sense of what "self" …

"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though …

A Study On What Factors Influence Teachers To Remain In The Teaching Profession, Louis S. Jensen Jr.

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the employment factors that schools have control over and how teachers and administrators perceive these factors to have the most effect in influencing teachers to remain in the profession. This study was conducted by administering a survey to public school building administrators and public school teachers in Indiana. Teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions were measured on what reasons a teacher (hypothetically) might leave the profession. A total of 2,219 teachers and 208 building administrators submitted complete responses to the Teacher Retention Survey. The Teacher Retention Survey was developed by this researcher to quantitatively …

The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual, Archie Lavelle Porter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the academic novel - a literary genre which fictionalizes the lives of students and professors in institutions of higher education. In particular this project focuses on academic novels written by black writers and which address issues in black higher education. This dissertation has two concurrent objectives: 1) to examine the academic novel as a particular genre of literature, and to highlight some specific novels on black American identity within this genre, and 2) to illustrate the pedagogical value of academic fiction. Through the ancient practice of storytelling, academic novels link the travails of the individual student …

A Chant Of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, And The Language Of The Mind, Anton Borst

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Chant of Dilation analyzes Walt Whitman's poetic engagement with two very modern ideas: the materiality of the mind and the discursive nature of science. During the antebellum period these ideas found expression in the popular science of phrenology, the theory that the mind was divided into various faculties physically located in different parts of the brain. This theory would find a ready audience in Whitman, a poet preoccupied with the body, the soul, and their connection. The writings and publications of premier American phrenologists Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, surveyed in this project, rhetorically mediated emerging conceptions of the brain-embodied …

Gender And Self-Representation In Maya Angelou's Autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 2014, Jay-Nel Steitz

Master's Theses

A voice that has been silenced for so long has much to say. Whether still confined or set free, the statement applies equally to both. The silenced voice wants not only to tell his or her story, but to share the life experiences which in turn reveal the identities of these individuals. These silenced voices then are not those of the oppressors, but the oppressed; and when an oppressor wants to share his or her story, the oppressed wants to tell their side of it as well. How can those labeled the marginalized outcasts of society express their feelings and …

Alice Munro: An Appreciation, Michael Boyd

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Motherless Women Writers: The Affect On Plot And Character In The Brontë Sisters’ Novels, Laci J. Baker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through the use of biographical materials, and three selected works from Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, parallels were found between their lives, character design, and the plot of their works. The lack of a mother figure in the lives of the Bronte sisters caused their upbringing to differ from that of other children, and as a result influenced their perspective of the world. Motherless female characters were found in each of the three novels by the Bronte sisters and in each instance commonalities were shared with the author of the work, to a degree that indicates that the lives that …

Shelterbelt: Land That Speaks, Ryan Oberhelman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is a collection of short stories drafted in between 2012 and 2014. The stories in this collection have been selected for their common themes of masculinity, work, fractured families, and rural decline. Many stories offer fragmented, non-linear approaches to narrative.

Note: This thesis deposited as hard copy only. There is no digital document associated with this record. beyond the title page and abstract.

Using Stable Isotope Analysis To Study Altitudinal And Latitudinal Bat Migration, Lily Arias

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The general lack of knowledge on basic aspects of the biology of temperate and tropical bats, their low reproductive rates, and threats such as white-nose syndrome, wind farms, and habitat loss, make them very susceptible to population declines. My research uses an innovative technique, the analysis of stable isotopes, to study the ecology of bat migration with the main goals of contributing significantly to the understanding of bat biology and assessing the conservation status and susceptibility of bats. In the first chapter, I measured the content of hydrogen isotopes in fur samples of migratory bat species killed at a wind …

Gaines's Preachers And Their People: Personalism, Community, And Social Action In A Lesson Before Dying, In My Father's House, And A Gathering Of Old Men, Brooke Light

Masters Theses

Personalist theology, along with Ernest J. Gaines's fiction, resists the idea of isolation and instead highlights the importance of the communal good, criticizing social and religious institutions that fail to uphold the value of human dignity and community. In "Personalism and Traditional Afrikan Thought," Burrow argues that "the church exists for the person and not the other way around" (347) and that churches should be judged and evaluated on the extent to which they meet the needs of the community. Representing their churches, the preachers in three of Gaines's novels (A Lesson Before Dying, In My Father's House, and A …

Queer Tastes: An Exploration Of Food And Sexuality In Southern Lesbian Literature, Jacqueline Kristine Lawrence

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Southern identities are undoubtedly influenced by the region's foodways. However, the South tends to neglect and even to negate certain peoples and their identities. Women, especially lesbians, are often silenced within southern literature. Where Tennessee Williams used literature to bridge gaps between gay men and the South, southern lesbian literature severely lacks a traceable history of such connections. The principal objective of this thesis is to explore the ways in which southern lesbians manipulate food metaphors to describe their sexual desires and identities. This thesis only begins to lay out a history of southern lesbian literature as many lesbian writers …

We’Ve Got The Blues, Deno P. Trakas, Sue Shuping, Kameron Union

Arthur Vining Davis High Impact Fellows Projects

At the Byrnes Freshman Academy, English 2 Honors students are the top students. They attend English class for one semester, 90 minutes a day, and enjoy in-depth understanding of different cultures. They have the ability to analyze and evaluate new material and use it to further expand their knowledge and create original and unique projects.

“We’ve Got the Blues” provides a unit of study for English 2 Honors that encourages students to develop an understanding of the blues and how it applies to literature. The unit enables students to gain an appreciation of the blues while understanding its historical significance. …

A Posture Of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’S Location, Position, And Displacement, Aaron Cloyd

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Drawing on work from autobiographical studies that distinguishes between but correlates position and location, this paper examines Mary Rowlandson’s situatedness in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and argues that she is a figure of removal and displacement. Although Rowlandson seeks to position herself through voice, actions, and text, such expressions of agency occur within the locating structures of culture, expectation, and memory. The resultant tension between self- positioning and other-locating leaves Rowlandson perpetually removed as she is unable to fully reposition herself within any significant site.