English Language and Literature Commons^™

Robo-Teaching? : Automated Essay Scoring And K-12 Writing Pedagogy, Swati Viren Chauhan

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper will examine the current state, and future, of AES in secondary literacy education through a review of current research in the topic. An analysis of the history of assessment will seek to explain why AES systems have gained such popularity within high-stakes assessment, and how the use of AES in secondary education, high-stakes testing affects pedagogy. This paper will also look into reliability and validity issues that are presented when using AES as a form of scoring essays. Finally, this paper explores some ways that AES can be used effectively within the K-12 writing classroom, rather than solely …

Putting Pedagogical Compositional Theory In Action : A Case Study Of Process Based Approaches To Exploring Unfamiliar Writing Tasks, Brett Conrad

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this paper, I explore how employing process theory can aid eleventh grade AP English Language and Composition students in adjusting their writing to an unfamiliar composing task: the AP exam’s argument essay. I also investigate how to assist developing writers in adapting their composing to the unknown through their use of prewriting, drafting, and revising, and in their use of these reflective writing strategies that Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi (2011) call “discursive resources”: accessing prior knowledge, possessing genre awareness, crossing boundaries, developing problem solving dispositions, and identifying as novice writers. Furthermore, I examine how to implement these …

Sorry, Not Sorry : Speech As Action For Women In The Works Of Aemilia Lanyer And John Milton, Tiffany Ann Errickson

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Using the works of Aemilia Lanyer, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson, I will be exploring the idea of speech as action in 17th Century England and its connection to agency and community amongst women. These authors chose to show a distinct strength and sense of power in Eve and her descendants; each female subject not only has a voice, but uses it to her benefit. This is an enormous gift from an author, to whom words and language are the fruit of awareness, knowledge and power. Each representation uses their language as both a shield and sword to defend themselves …

Dynamic Future : Movements Beyond Postmodernism In Three Contemporary American Novels, Christopher Aleixo Teixeira

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores the criticism of and attempts to move beyond postmodernism in three contemporary American novels. Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close offers a view in which shared experience, and specifically traumatic experience, necessitates the creation of metanarrative communities. Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club navigates the difficulty of addressing postmodern concerns without accepting the conclusions of postmodern thinkers. Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic o f Orange posits an ever expanding world which can only be truly understood through metanarrative.

Beelzebub : Satan's Consort In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Beth Tippenreiter

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis contends that Beelzebub is the erotic and political consort of Satan in John Milton’s 1667 poem, Paradise Lost. Chapter one first examines Milton’s relative contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and his play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Within Doctor Faustus, we find not only an earlier representation of the erotic and political consort relationship between Beelzebub and Satan, here named Belzebub and Lucifer, but that the primary purpose of Marlowe’s Belzebub is to be Lucifer’s consort. Chapter two’s section one focuses on the erotic consort relationship between Milton’s Beelzebub and Satan. Questions and concerns of intimate language and sexual …

Ghettoizing Black Women's Literature : A Socio-Historic Study Of Black Women Writers And The White Publishing Industry, Kimberly Wiley Luna

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper contributes to the conversation of race/publishing by concentrating on black women’s literature, exploring how it has been produced over the course of the last one hundred years and the impact of the white/black divide which has created a power structure where white publishers are able to assert control over black women’s writing. The focus is on three commercially successful female African American writers— Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove. All three women were published by mainstream New York publishing houses made up of primarily white editors and publishers.

The research in this paper is informed by editorial …

Unveiling Fantasy In The American Gothic, Olga Jacqueline Neroni

English

In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek charts the relationship between theoretical ideology, fantasy, and ideology in practice. While ideology roots itself firmly in our lives—it crafts our very reality according to Žižek—it is a paradoxically fragile and self-destructive system of interacting symbols. We consume and perpetuate fantasy in order to elucidate and internalize the laws of ideology by placing these symbols into dialogue with one another. In turn, fantasy often draws these laws to their conceptual edge, granting bodies and voices to the underlying fears and desires implied by these symbols. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and William Faulkner’s The …

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 …

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 …

E. M. Forster And Women, Kaila Toce

Honors Scholar Theses

E. M. Forster was a British author in the early 20th century. He was heavily influenced by the women in his life, and this influence is reflected in the women characters of his novels--especially A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. But, he only wrote women two ways, either as the bright, young thing, or the wise, older woman. The one character to surpass this was Margaret Schlegel of Howards End.

Contesting Victorian Beliefs: The Unintended Effects Of Victorian Novels, Christina Barquin

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Victorian society reproduced polarized gender roles known as the ideology of the separate spheres in order to confine the authority of women. However, as the Victorian Era progressed social norms were gradually contested, and the consequences of the assertion of female authority led to reform. In reinterpreting the Victorian women’s movement, I will interpret the effects of the writers of the late nineteenth century who argued explicitly against proposed changes in the traditional position of middle-class women. I will most closely examine how the late Victorian novels, A Marriage Below Zero by Alan Dale and The Revolt of Man by …

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

A Qualitative Historiographical Case Study Of The Educative Properties Of Eugene V. Debs And John Dewey: 21st Century Implications For Education, Bradley Countermine

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to shed light on the current state of educational reform rhetoric through an analysis of previous attempts to shape public education for the benefit of all. Analyzing Eugene V. Debs’s and John Dewey’s views on democracy and education during the Progressive Era promotes a version and vision of education that inspires people to think critically, to navigate contemporary society, and to acknowledge current issues within public education and United States society at large. Because education both reflects society and has the power to transform it, the struggle for fair, equitable, and enlightening education is paramount to the …

Teacher Involvement In Implementing State Personal Finance Mandates, Deanna Franklin

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined strategies teachers are implementing for personal finance instruction in answer to the state financial-literacy mandates in Central Texas. One-on-one interviews, focus groups, and document analysis found that teachers are relying on personal experience, community resources, and Internet resources to instruct in personal finance in absence of personal finance curricula. No data emerged that school districts were providing resources; however, administrators are willing to provide resources if they were available. Teachers are using a variety of creative methods to enhance personal financial literacy in the classroom. Sporadic in-service/professional-development opportunities were available to train teachers in personal financial-literacy instruction; …

Fatherless Homes And Implications On Student Achievement, Timothy James Garland

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if there is a relationship between fatherly involvement in students’ lives and select factors of student descriptors and school success. Specifically, the study sought to discover if there is a significant relationship between fatherlessness and student success and if there is a significant relationship between fatherlessness and select student descriptors. Descriptive statistics and linear regression were used to interpret and analyze the data for the study. There were 1,780 respondents who participated in the study. Respondents included seniors from rural, suburban, and urban public schools. In conducting this study, the …

Independent Publishers And Transition To Nonprofit: Distress Call Or Mission-Based Evolution?, Meagan Lobnitz

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

It has been widely reported in recent years that a few independent publishing houses, which were formed as for-profit organizations, have adopted nonprofit status. Given the sheer quantity of independent publishing houses in the United States and the complexities involved with establishing and maintaining nonprofit status, it is worthwhile to explore whether or not there has in fact been growth in nonprofit publishing houses in recent years, to consider if that growth is indicative of a trend, and to inquire what factors may lend to the success or failure of nonprofit independent publishers. Furthermore, it is useful to consider the …

Changing Publisher-Author Relationships In The Midst Of Developing Crowd-Funded Publishing Platforms, Margaret Schimming

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

With the growth in crowd-funded publishing houses and imprints, it is high time to consider the implications of this type of publishing arrangement for author–publisher relationships. What are some of the factors that drive an author to this type of publishing arrangement? How do these relationships differ from traditional author-publisher relationships?

A Publisher’S Look At Ebooks And Their Affect On Young Readers, Caitlin Waite

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

As publishers it is important to learn about new reading platforms and how to use them to the benefit of readers. There have been numerous advancements in the past several years with regard to electronic books (or eBooks), including an emergence of technology that allows for relatively easy and cost effective ways to create eBooks for children. As eBook technology advances, questions are arising about the eBook’s validity as a learning tool, and whether it is even safe for children to be using eBooks at all. Studies have been conducted in the recent past with the goal of answering these …

Prescribed Fire, Moira J. Mcavoy

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

As the culmination of my nonfiction seminar (ENGL 470C) with Professor Colin Rafferty, I chose to explore three disparate, but interwoven, narratives: the death of and delayed grief over my high school mentor; my struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; and, the 2011 wildfire that destroyed much of the Great Dismal Swamp. Through a use of segmentation, lyric language, and a manipulation of tense, I explore the tensions underlying these narratives, namely the idea of futility of preparation and the insistence on destructive cycles which sustain themselves. Ultimately, the essay serves on a rumination not on mortality, but on our cultural …

Overcoming The Symbolic Annihilation Of Females In Classroom Literature, Lisa B. Johnson

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Although there are more than enough children's books with female protagonists available for children to read, girls are often underrepresented in classroom literature. This symbolically annihilates girls, leading them to believe that they are unimportant members of society. In order for boys and girls to feel that they are equally vital members of society, it is important that they are evenly represented in the classroom. While past studies have indicated that the cause for this is boys' distaste for literature with female protagonists, this study investigates why boys dislike literature with female protagonists and how teachers can approach such literature …