Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Overlooked Vampire: Might Macdonald’S Lilith Be Repopularized?, A. J. Prufrock

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Lilith (1895) is George MacDonald’s premier work of symbolic fiction. W.H. Auden asserts that Lilith is “equal, if not superior, to the best of Poe." A cursory reading of the novel reveals much in Narnia can be traced directly to passages. Why has MacDonald’s Lilith received so little commentary and why is it picked up and then put down by even avid readers of fantasy? Universalist theology and chauvinism have been blamed, but literary style is unarguably the main stumbling block. C.S. Lewis, who says of MacDonald, “I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not …

Tolkien As A Folk Horror Author, Monica Sanz

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Folk Horror, although being identified as a cinematographic genre quite recently, sinks its roots in an undeniable tradition of English writers who used English rural landscapes, ancient beliefs and culturally differentiated communities as humus for their prose and poetry. From the literary tradition of the 8th Century on, creatures and beliefs belonging to dark times have left their mark on our literature, traditions and folklore. Tolkien, as a philologist, was well aware of the hints and bits of these almost unknown legends and creatures left in our language, in the form of loose words, etymologies and fragmentary texts. In this …

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

Subtle Speech And Use Of Pronouns In Tolkien's Novels And Old English Poetry, Chiara Marchetti

Journal of Tolkien Research

In human conversations, verbal exchanges follow rules. Applicable both to Old English poetry and Tolkien's fiction, rules governing speech set the right quantity and quality of information to be transmitted and provide strategies to avoid conflicts. What is too redundant or scanty in a speech might indicate more layers of meaning, which are implied or suggested.

Language can create or resolve conflicts; the careful use of words and even pronouns can make a difference between self-assertion and cooperation, unity and separation. Such refined linguistic technique is visible in Old English poetry, where dialectal ability is as important as valour, where …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

Language In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Axel Ahdritz

CMC Senior Theses

AI language models can now produce text that is indistinguishable from our own, forcing us into a confrontation with the romantic assumptions underlying ‘natural language’ in the West. In this thesis, I will conduct a genealogy of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ qualities of language through the literary, philosophical, and mathematical texts in which our ideas of authorship are premised. My hope is that this discussion will deepen our understanding of the language produced by AI models, answer why we feel compelled to anthropomorphize these machines, and situate readers in the reality of our present linguistic moment.

Greenpeace In Germany And The U.S.: A Case Study In Non-Profit Web Design, Maximilian J. Weirauch

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis draws on Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model, connects it to basic principles of web design, and applies it to a website analysis of the global non-profit organization Greenpeace. This case study of cultural dimensions in web design utilizes Hofstede’s framework from 1974 throughout all its chapters and focuses on the cultural differences between Germany and the U.S. My hypothesis that successful marketing materials such as websites must communicate differently with their U.S.-American and German audiences is partially borne out. But it is important to note that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model cannot fully account for certain intercultural dimensions of …

Owning Your Story: Agency, Power, And Freedom In Greta Gerwig’S Faithful And Radical Little Women Adaptation, Siobhan Cooney

Honors Program Theses

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) has an extensive lineage of film adaptations. The classic novel’s most recent film adaptation was written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig (2019). This thesis employs adaptation theory as well as visual and verbal close reading and critical analysis of the film, source novel, and popular film reviews. Gerwig’s adaptation looks, sounds, and feels like the Little Women that has been cherished for decades. The director fulfills these aesthetic expectations to subvert our understandings of sentimentalism, domesticity, individuality, and the relinquishment of childhood. An examination of art’s imitation of life, the epistolary …

Cambridge 1629 Anglican Trilogy, Dale B. Billingsley

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In 1629, Thomas and John Buck, Cambridge University Press printers, published three texts—the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible and the Whole Book of Psalmes (known as the “Metrical Psalter”)—that were often bound together in one volume [UL], 1 one copy of which is now on permanent loan to the Archives & Special Collections of Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville. We do not know with any certainty when UL was bound, but because the KJV second edition was published in 1638, with many scholarly corrections based on the original languages, we can assume that the three texts were bound together …

Multimodal Expertise Training For Writing Center Tutors, Erin E. A. O'Day

English Department Theses

As digital technology becomes more common on college campuses and multimodal compositions are assigned by more instructors, writing centers must incorporate support for multimodal projects into their tutoring. However, no method for training writing center tutors to understand the basic principles of multimodal compositions is currently available. This thesis, therefore, proposes a method for training multimodal expert tutors in writing centers which focuses on both the importance of rhetorical choices in communicating a message in different media and on the basic principles of design for four primary areas: visual, audio, video, and web design. Example tutor training handouts for these …

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Video Games And Their Potential As Literacy Tools, Jessica Reich

University Honors Program Senior Projects

Video games are an essential part of emergent popular culture, with millions playing games every day. With how popular gaming has become, it is logical to research its full potential as a literacy tool both inside and outside the classroom. This thesis contributes to the discussion of the importance and potential of video games as a literacy tool that can be utilized educationally and through gaming at home. This thesis includes a section for gaming definitions, a literature review on research on video games and their impact on education and literacy skill development, a discussion of video game narratives, and …

Parent And Child Cookbook For Parental Involvement, Natali Juarez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The agency with the internship opportunity is the Greenfield Branch Library. The purpose of this capstone project is to address the problem of lack of parental involvement. The lack of parental involvement in the community could have major consequences like low academic achievement, low literacy rates, and childhood obesity. The project is a cookbook with healthy recipes consisting of both meals and snacks. The recipes are made specifically for children to be able to make with their parents. The capstone project is a 6 week program. Every Wednesday there is a grab and go bag with a copy of a …

Through Critique And Beyond: Speculative Fiction As A Tool Of Critical Pedagogy, Syd Thorne

Master's Projects and Capstones

This field projects centers around the issue of hopelessness among teachers and students and examines the genre of speculative fiction as a potential tool for cultivating critical hope in the classroom and as an asset to critical pedagogy. Utopian pedagogy and critical pedagogy make up the theoretical framework of this research and project development. The research explores the use of speculative fiction in three areas: activism and identity, student engagement, and utopian performance. The review of the literature demonstrates that the use of speculative fiction in the classroom has the potential to engage students in conversations about social justice and …

The Exploration Of Various Literary Genres Through Short Story Writing, Abigail Cowan

Honors Theses

This project contains four short stories and one collection of poetry. The first, “Touch-Me-Nots,” explores self-harm and healing using the touch-me-not plant as an analogy for avoiding self-harm and leaves readers with the hopeful sentiment of a person willing to heal by “leaving it alone.” Next, “The Bear and the Ant,” inspired by Aesop’s Fables, anthropomorphizes a bear and an ant and leaves readers with a ‘moral’ in true Aesop Fable fashion. Inspired by the ants who ransacked my six-month-old Halloween candy stash, I detail a Bear which attempts to “save” its honey for a day that never comes. The …

Editorial Introduction, Katherine Daily O'Meara, Betsy Gilliland

Journal of Response to Writing

No abstract provided.

Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …

On The Theory And Praxis Of Nonsense Poetry As Dialogic Scrum; Or, The Poetical Hermeneutics Of A Retro-Teleological, Post-Diegetic Transom (Notes Towards An Investigation), Michael Heyman, Joseph Thomas

Faculty Works

This essay explores the nonsensical elements of the composition and staging of “A Short Program of Poems for Young People, in Four Chapters,” a fifty-minute poetry reading by Michael Heyman and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. prepared for the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association’s 2019 annual conference, “Send in the Clowns,” focusing primarily on the theory and practice of nonsense in relation to the writing and staging of “A Short Program of Poems for Young People, in Four Chapters,” which was performed in San Diego by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. and Michael Heyman at the 2019 Pacific Ancient and Modern …

The Film Adaptation As An Essay On Feminism In The Victorian Novel, Rylee Thomas

Holster Scholar Projects

In this essay, I compare nineteenth-century novels to the film adaptations they inspired throughout history. Specifically, I examine how filmmakers amplify and detract from feminist themes present in the original works. To do this, I consider the film adaptation as an essay on the source text. No matter how directly a filmmaker attempts to transpose the narrative, the representation of narrative gaps within the source text will change. I theorize that these changes arise in tandem with cultural change, and that film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels that actively revise the text fall under the category of the essay film.

"Writing Unspeakable Things: Speechlessness, Abjection, And The Ethics/Aesthetics Of (Not) Representing Sexual Violence In Three Korean American "Comfort Women' Novels", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes “comfort women” novels by the Korean American authors Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee in terms of the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language. I specifically look at these authors’ stylistic strategies to describe rape in writing and how they (more or less successfully) avoid voyeuristic portrayals of the “comfort women” by controlling the narrative point of view and relying on traumatic “speechlessness” and abjection. Building on relevant notions from the fields of photography, cinematography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this analysis suggests that in-progress representations of rape in language become a futile project …