English Language and Literature Commons^™

American Masculinity, Corinn Pratt

BYU English Symposium

This paper explores Walt Whitman’s “Children of Adam” and contends that the writer and his work are an embodiment of American masculinity. Within our current culture neither Whitman nor his work would be perceived as masculine, let alone the epitome of it. However, a review of historical information within Whitman’s time period, particularly Dr. Fowler’s book of creative and sexual science, gives a unique view of masculinity and of Whitman. Taking this information into consideration Whitman’s “Children of Adam” takes on new meaning. This paper concludes that a historical reading leads one to realize that Whitman believes himself to be …

Kenneth Burke's Poetic Metaphor And Obama As Poet, Devon S. Cook

BYU English Symposium

This essay connects Kenneth Burke’s briefly used poetic metaphor with his theories on the use of “poetic” language in the essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning.” What results from this synthesis is a critical tool for rhetorical analysis which allows for the discussion of style as a vehicle for communication about ethics and morals in public discourse. Obama’s The Audacity of Hope is used as the example of a text which uses “poetic” language in order to discuss moral and ethical issues in a national arena. Obama ultimately dramatizes his own synthesis of values, putting himself in the position of a …

A Holler To My Sisters On Welfare: Mothers In The Works Of Shakur And Hughes, Wesley Turner

BYU English Symposium

For the purposes of this paper, I will juxtapose the work of Tupac Shakur with Langston Hughes in order to reveal Shakur’s engagement with African American literary history. Both Hughes and Shakur have recurring maternal relationships in their works. However, both artists incorporate these relationships very differently. Hughes primarily discussed mothers and children in order to show how far African Americans have come in gaining equal rights in their country. His mother-child relationships are ones that hope for continued steps towards equality and a breakdown of the black/white color line. Shakur, however, discusses children and mothers in the context of …

Religion In Young Adult Contemporary Realistic Fiction, Natasha B. Mickelson

BYU English Symposium

Young adult contemporary realistic fiction attempts to portray real life, and readers of these novels should be able to relate to the characters therein. While many YA novels deal with controversial topics in an attempt to be realistic, one aspect of life still largely considered a literary “taboo” is religion.

Through examining studies done and looking at a sample of novels in the YA contemporary realistic fiction genre I found that most of these books either mention nothing about the religious beliefs and backgrounds of their characters or religion is portrayed negatively. Since this genre attempts to portray real-life teenagers, …

The Castle Of Otranto As A Christmas Ghost Story, Conor Hilton

BYU English Symposium

The seasonal Christmas ghost story tradition pre-dates Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but the narrative is filled with holes. Some place The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole within this narrative, striving to fill the gaps that exist. Despite the novel’s publication on Christmas Eve and note in the preface that it is part of the canon of the Church of St. Nicholas, the evidence is too thin to make a definitive claim that Otranto was written as a Christmas ghost story. In fact, examining newspaper archives from the eighteenth century surrounding the publication of Otranto, delving into …

Oz: A Reflection Of America, Monica D. Allen

BYU English Symposium

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was one of America’s first fairy tales. As such America is embedded, as well as outright discussed, in the book. It is quite clear that around the turn of the century Baum saw the need for a change in America involving the economy and leadership, and noted that this change was beginning to take place. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reflects this and in his book, Baum brings two conflicting ideas of what America was becoming—the Emerald City—and what he thought America should be like—the rest of Oz, specifically the Munchkin …

Pay No Attention To That Man: Government Crimes In The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, Isaac Lyman

BYU English Symposium

L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" demonstrates the deeper motivations behind his editorials on the treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century. Specifically, the principal kingdoms and rulers of the novel mistreat and endanger their constituents in the same way that 19th-century governments marginalized and oppressed the scarcest and weakest of their country's denizens. The Winged Monkeys of Oz exhibit the characteristics of a society of "noble savages," words Baum used to lament and encourage the extermination of the Native Americans, amid heated cultural concerns about the safety of white settlers after the Wounded Knee Massacre. The …

Baum's Dorothy And The Power Of Identity, Camille Pay

BYU English Symposium

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz portrays a relationship between Dorothy as an individual and Oz as a whole; however, this relationship has been viewed by critics as solely political. Dorothy penetrated Oz deeper than political interference, though: she enabled those around her by helping them in personal ways. When Dorothy first entered Oz, she acted as a political catalyst, but throughout the story, she became a more intimate leader by enabling those around her. She made it possible for her companions to act, later helping them to be leaders themselves. Through Baum’s inclusion of Dorothy in The …

"That Lady, Sir, Is Her Own Mistress": Evelina's Condemnation Of Rape Culture, Rose Hadden

BYU English Symposium

Fanny Burney’s 18th Century novel Evelina is a canny critique of rape culture and the pervasive assumption of female consent. Evelina navigates a social world in which she nominally has the right to say no to anyone in any matter regarding her own body, but where that right is consistently undermined by social punishment, victim blaming, and deliberate ignorance. Earlier scholars have characterized Evelina’s compliance as a flaw in her character, a result of her lack of confidence and experience, but I contest that Burney’s text clearly absolves Evelina herself of all guilt. Burney instead condemns the society that would …

You Grow This Way: An Analysis Of Mother And Daughter Selves In Anne Sexton’S Poem “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman", Kennerley Roper

BYU English Symposium

The maternal speaker in Anne Sexton's poem “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman” speaks to her maturing daughter about the wonders of the female body by revising the literary tradition that already exists about the female body. What the speaker ultimately conveys to her daughter is the power the body has through the use of parallel body and earth imagery. However, the daughter is distanced from this notion through a contrasting image: the string bean. The speaker uses that distance to show the mixed images of entanglement and separation of mother and daughter in order to expound wisdom to …

Rhetorical Leadership: Intentionality And Communication, Katherine L. Neish

BYU English Symposium

This presentation aims to explore how intentionality factors into effective communication and the importance of this communication in the role of rhetorical leaders. Rhetorical leaders have an ethical responsibility to their followers to create a space in their conversations for constructive feedback, and rhetorical followers have an ethical responsibility to provide that feedback in a constructive manner. When both rhetorical leaders and rhetorical followers intentionally fulfill these responsibilities, they stand the best chance of being understood and furthering the pursuit of truth.

“The Black Cat:” A Reflection Of Pre-Civil War Slavery, Hannah Walker

BYU English Symposium

In 1843, Edgar Allan Poe published “The Black Cat” amid one of the most foreboding ages in American history: the pre-Civil War era. Critics often attempt to make sense of the violent plot of Poe’s classic by pointing to flaws in the human psyche or supernatural undertones which pervade many of Poe’s other pieces. However, by recognizing distinct parallels between the Southern practice of slavery and symbolic plot points in “The Black Cat,” readers can unveil richer implications behind Poe’s dark tale. Specifically, “The Black Cat” functions as a racial allegory that depicts the injustices of slavery and, ultimately, shows …

What Of "Kubla Khan"?, Pablo I. Tapia

BYU English Symposium

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, "Kubla Khan," tends to avoid interpretation. Years of scholarship have approached the poem differently, and many critics have dismissed Coleridge's "Preface" to the poem, stating it is merely an explanation for the poem's incompleteness. This paper looks over several popular interpretations of the poem, but it attempts to establish that the "Preface has become part of the poem, not only for its description of the conditions the poem was written in, but also for Coleridge's process of creating poetry. Although some of the popular approaches shed light on bits and pieces of the poem, they fail …

American Masculinity As Presented By Walt Whitman, Corinn Pratt

BYU English Symposium

As a homosexual Romantic poet neither Walt Whitman nor his work would immediately come to mind as particularly masculine. However, through a brief historical look at what Whitman was learning about as well as a close reading at some of the text it is clear that Whitman paints a very masculine picture. Whitman uses the sexual act as a way to understand what it means to be a man with himself at the helm. Within “Children of Adam” is Whitman uses this ultimate fulfillment of gender relations to explore masculinity and ultimately paints himself as the embodiment of masculinity.

Empathic Encounters: Negotiating Identity In 9/11 Fiction And Translation, Kirsty A. Hemsworth

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Dominated by the polarized strategies of domestication and foreignization, conventional literary translation approaches tend to operate on the assumption that source and target cultures, and, by extension, their literary works, are fundamentally irreconcilable on the basis of linguistic, stylistic and ideological differences. Dislocated by the traumatic force of the event, only to be further uprooted by the translation process itself, the identities at stake in American works of 9/11 fiction cannot be so clearly differentiated and securely defined. Moreover, any attempt to fictionalize and translate this real-world trauma inevitably encounters the event as a visual singularity, whereby the image supersedes …

Contextualizing The Writings Of J.R.R. Tolkien On Literary Criticism, Sherrylyn Branchaw

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay offers a reinterpretation of Tolkien's writings about literary criticism, which are focused on Beowulf, fairy stories, and his own works. Whereas his writings have often been taken to mean that analytic scholarship is not valid and should not be pursued, my essay takes the intellectual climate of the time into consideration and offers an alternative interpretation, according to which he did not mean to forbid these studies outright and indeed intended that scholars should continue writing them. The essay ends with a call to academics not to be discouraged by his strong language from producing analytic studies.

Erin O'Connor, Class Of 2015, Musselman Library, Erin C. O'Connor

Next Page

In this current issue of Next Page, Erin O'Connor, Class of 2015 and winner of this year's Silent Leader Award, tells us which influential courses and works inspired her to develop her own major, Diversity and Development in Education, what conversation she would like to have with Paulo Freire if given the chance, and which books are on her "To Read" list for after graduation.

Women's Narratives Of Confinement: Domestic Chores As Threads Of Resistance And Healing, Jacqueline Marie Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The term "narratives of confinement" redefines the parameters by which first-person, fictive and non-fictive, accounts of female captivity are classified, broadening the genre beyond Indian captivity narratives and slave narratives to include other works in which female narrators describe physical and/or psychological confinement due to tangible or non-tangible forces. Often these narratives exhibit the transformation of the drudgery of housewifery into powerful symbols of resistance and subversion, especially in reaction to traumatic events related to confinement. Needlework and food, including its preparation and distribution, frequently emerge as metaphors that express the ways in which disempowered women seek to regain control …

Superheroes Unmasked, Jillian M. Malone

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

In this assignment, I was asked to analyze one rhetorical strategy in the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I was also asked to consider the Catholic Intellectual Tradition as a rhetorical context. As the class read the book, we had in-class writing assignments that helped us trace our strategy throughout the text and develop our analysis that would eventually become the backbone of our papers. I used these in-class assignments along with my notes on the book to create a comprehensive list of every flashback in the novel. I used this list to develop my thesis …

Rhetorical Analysis On "It's Not As Simple As It Seems", Nathan Machel

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I wrote this essay as an assignment for my English class, themed Remix Culture. Throughout the course, we examined the originality and even legality of numerous "remix" art forms from music mash ups to a classic novel. Delving further into the legality aspect, we examined the extent to which different works were plagiarized. Did Robin Thicke steal the beat for "Blurred Lines"? Did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Or did God write it, as she claimed? Is anything truly original? Or is everything a derivative of some pre-existing elements? In "It's Not as Simple as It Seems," …