Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Ease Of Iconicity, Azaria Brown

Student Scholar Showcase

To the untrained eye, sign language looks like an unconnected group of gestures, because it is a language that is separate from the spoken language that dominates its country of origin. Even with this in mind, there are several signs that may be universally understood by people who do not know that particular sign language. For example, though they are not completely the same, the signer touching their fingers to their mouth is similar to the act of eating food, and onlookers may determine that this sign means ‘eat’. Signed words can be related to their meanings through hand shape, …

The Horse And The Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators Of Morality In Lancelot, Don Quixote, And Tolkien, Kirsten G. Rodning

English MA Theses

There is a strong connection in Don Quixote and the works of Chretièn de Troyes and J.R.R. Tolkien between a character’s moral decisions and the way that said character treats his horse or horses. The Horse and the Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators of Morality in Lancelot, Don Quixote, and Tolkien studies the moral factors that affect the way heroic characters are revealed to readers and how these morals relate to the ways in which characters interact with horses. This ecocritical study focuses on the protagonists in Chretièn’s Lancelot, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and …

Language Teachers’ Evaluation Of Curriculum Change: A Qualitative Study, Seyyed Ali Ostovar-Namaghi

The Qualitative Report

This study aims at theorizing language teachers’ evaluation of a top-down curriculum change by eliciting their perspectives through open-ended qualitative interviews. In line with grounded theory procedures, concepts and categories were theoretically sampled from the perspective of participants who were willing to share their views with the researcher. Iterative data collection and analysis revealed a set of categories which show the conflict of interest between practitioners and policy-makers. Practitioners focus on immediate classroom concerns and reject the syllabus change because of its lack of small-scale try-outs, inappropriate timing, vague methodology, inappropriate in-service program, learner homogeneity fallacy, unrealistic expectations and increased …

27 Months Of Solitude: A Peace Corps Story, Christopher A. Gordon

Projects

In 2014, I was sent to Colombia’s Caribbean coast to serve as an English teacher through the Peace Corps. I spent two years teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) at both the elementary and secondary levels in Colombian public school settings, which included time in both urban and rural areas. Despite many hardships and setbacks, my experience in the Peace Corps was overwhelmingly positive. By teaching the alphabet at the elementary level, and focusing on vocabulary, test-taking strategies, and reading comprehension strategies at the secondary level, I was able to make a positive impact in public schools which had …

English In A Multilingual Algeria, Kamal Belmihoub

Publications and Research

The presence of English in the former French colony of Algeria has been dramatically increasing. The impact of the language in Algeria has fluctuated due to sociopolitical instability in the late 1980s and 1990s. Prior to describing the impact of English, some general background about the country is provided, along with a brief historical overview of the linguistic diversity. Historical highlights of the spread of English in Algeria are also described. A profile of the users of English in the Maghreb nation is detailed as well, before discussing the various uses of English in various domains. The competition between English …

What Binds Them Together, Rachael Peckham

English Faculty Research

When a MacArthur grant-winning poet and classicist writes about her ex-lover, she doesn’t commit a “thick stacked act of revenge” against him, a tempting “vocation of anger” enacted on the page. Yet Anne Carson, author of “The Glass Essay” (from the collection Glass, Irony, and God), knows it’s “easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.” It makes sense. Where there’s an ex, there’s the story of a relationship a clear beginning, middle, and the dreaded end, with a natural protagonist in us versus them, the Exes.

That …

'Welcome To Hell': Writing Parents, Parenting Writers, Rachael Peckham

English Faculty Research

Literary history is populated with plenty of notable parent-and-child writers, across the years (Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley; Andre Dubus II and Andre Dubus III, to name a few)-which is not to place my own parent child relationship in such renowned company. Rather, I'm seeking to explore the unique patterns and themes that emerge where parenthood and the profession of writing intersect. What are the inherent privileges and problems that mark such relationships? How do they develop? To what extent does the parent-writer cast both a shadow and a light on the child's career-and vice versa? How do they negotiate …

"The Mouth Of The Void," "Hum", Hannah L. Comeriato

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project presents two distinct pieces of short fiction, linked through intentional stylized language, grammatical patterns, and a sectionalized narrative structure. Each individual piece of short fiction functions independently – as separate and distinct from the other, with no explicit connection in content (i.e. recurring characters, parallel timelines etc.). However, each narrative also displays a kind of complex interaction with the other, each crafted to produce, when read alongside one another, a shared indistinct aesthetic and emotional experience. This aesthetic and emotional experience is crafted, specifically, by the use of stylized verbs, the em-dash, and alternating dialogue-based and image-based sections. …

Richard Wright's And Chester Himes's Treatment Of The Concept Of Emerging Black Masculinity In The 20th Century, Peter M. Brown

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

A Study Of The Tradition Of Extreme Literature, Matthew Chi Hei Chan

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis endeavours to investigate some of the many ways literary works can engage with the tradition of extremism. In so doing, the author hopes to demonstrate the importance of the tradition as a vessel for understanding the world around and within us. In an effort to show the breadth and endurance of this tradition, this thesis critically analyses selected works by Robert Browning, Harold Pinter, and Frank Bidart in context with various other literary works.

Living Subversive Narratives: Shahrazad’S Stories Of Women, Caleb Nicholas

Honors Projects

Though scholars have examined The 1001 Nights’ Entertainments or The Arabian Nights, few have thoroughly explored the function of Shahrazad’s tales as they relate to her position as a woman. Closely reading the stories of the Nights reveals that there are chiefly two types of female characters who emerge in her stories: the heroic, who have no apparent autonomy, and the villainous, who have overflowing autonomy. These depictions of women are problematic from the viewpoint of present-day feminism, but are understandable, and even genuinely subversive, in Shahrazad’s context. Although some scholars have dismissed questions about the function of the …

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …

The Nature Of God: Perceptions Of God With Exposure To Nature And Natural Events, Holly Ann Kolberg

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research studies have shown that the sense of awe evoked by natural settings may be associated with transcendental thinking about God. Similarly, other researchers have suggested that people attribute events to God when they cannot develop a sufficient naturalistic explanation for a phenomenon. People appear to prefer attributing events to a benevolent God but will modify their beliefs to assume that God is punitive if event outcomes do not appear to favor their well-being or religious attributions do not accommodate a situation. In the current study, the goal was to evaluate how exposure to photographs of different environments influenced beliefs …

Final Ma Portfolio, Lindsey Balla

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains four works completed at the graduate level at Bowling Green State University. The first research paper explores the effects of social media and texting in adolescent students. The second examines Psychoanalysis in the context of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The third compares the texts Northanger Abbey and "The Grey Woman," and the fourth research paper explores effective methods of providing feedback to student writing at the secondary level. This portfolio is a compilation of work and research completed as a capstone project for MA in English with a specialization in teaching English.

Responding To Modern Flooding: Old English Place-Names As A Repository Of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Richard L.C. Jones

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

Place-names are used to communicate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by all indigenous, aboriginal and First Nations people. Here and for the first time, English place-names are examined through a TEK lens. Specifically, place-names formed in Old English—the language of the Anglo-Saxon—and coined between c. 550 and c. 1100 A.D., are explored. This naming horizon provides the basic name stock for the majority of English towns and villages still occupied today. While modern English place-names now simply function as convenient geographical tags Old English toponymy is shown here to exhibit close semantic parallels with many other indigenous place-names around the world. …

Real Or Not Real: Fragmentation, Fabrication, And Composite Identity In The Hunger Games And The Mass Effect Trilogy, Tessanna Curtis

Masters Theses

As one glance at box office ratings from the past decade can attest to, twenty-first century Western society seems particularly fixated on coming-of-age stories. These stories reflect the quintessential search for identity, as explained by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson. As Erikson argues throughout his works, the fundamental task of the individual on his journey to becoming a healthy, mature adult is the formation of a personal identity and sense of self that is both unified and whole. What seems particularly ironic, however, is that these coming-of-age stories are released into a culture that is largely dismissive of Erikson’s theory of …

Superiority In Humor Theory, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I consider the standard interpretation of the superiority theory of humor attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, according to which the theory allegedly places feelings of superiority at the center of humor and comic amusement. The view that feelings of superiority are at the heart of all comic amusement is wildly implausible. Therefore textual evidence for the interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, or Hobbes as offering the superiority theory as an essentialist theory of humor is worth careful consideration. Through textual analysis I argue that not one of these three philosophers defends an essentialist theory of comic amusement. …

Her Behind Him, Tim Brennan

The Goose

Poetry by Tim Brennan

The Language Of Fashion: Communication, Conceptual Clothing, And The Runway Performance, Jarred Johnson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Scholars have long neglected the study of fashion as anything other than a socioeconomic and cultural phenomena that reflects the more substantial political and historical zeitgeist of a time period. This study takes up Gilles Lipovetsky’s plea for a “theoretical facelift” of the study of fashion. Using an original theoretical framework that delineates the communicative structures of fashion as fabric, drape, and accessory, this work analyzes the conceptual meaning of runway performances by designers Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs. Though conceptual fashion shows are often described as spectacles intended to stir up a label’s recognition and ultimately bolster sales, the …

Junot Díaz’S The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao And Its Punishment Of Failed Gender Performances, Bruno Yupanqui Tovar

Masters Theses

Junot Díaz’s renowned novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao), presents the brief and wondrous life of its main character, Oscar Wao, but also describes the exceptional lives of Lola and Belicia, his sister and mother, respectively. While the story’s title asserts an enthusiastic tone to the lives of Oscar—and the females in his family—the story actually reveals the victimization and demise of these characters. Though Díaz offers the spell of Fukú americanus, a Dominican superstition, Feminist Theorist Judith Butler provides a more advantageous, concrete explanation for the subjugation of these characters. Butler argues that culture dictates …