English Language and Literature Commons^™

P-14 Discourse And Narrative: Creating Gender Control In Junot Diaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Charles Lee

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-Winning 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores Dominican masculinity through narrator Yunior de Las Casas’s portrayal of protagonist Oscar de León’s family history. Yunior’s perceived virility shapes his understanding of masculinity, which he stresses through the novel’s plot and structure. This analysis considers how Yunior constructs Dominican masculinity through his narrative by marginalizing and emasculating passive characters such as Oscar. I argue that Yunior’s narrative closely links definitions of masculinity and power as he strives to dominate passive characters in order to assert his virility as the “best” method for being a Dominican man.

P-20 “The Story Which He Never Stops Telling Himself”: Autobiography, Narrative Community, And The Deconstruction Of Selfhood In Virginia Woolf’S The Waves, Melodie Roschman

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

This paper examines narrative, biography, and selfhood in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). The novel, a “play-poem,” follows six friends’ monologues from childhood to death. I analyze aspiring writer Bernard from his childhood of telling stories about companions to his inability to narrate his autobiography, arguing that he fails because he has no self to narrate. Referencing Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology’s (1974) theory of the deconstructed self identifiable only in conversation, I argue that Bernard destroys his identity by silencing his friends and becoming the sole speaker; Woolf’s biographical theory thereby establishes the communal self, prefiguring tenets of postmodern …

Discordant Desire: Morley’S Polyphony In Shakespeare’S Twelfth Night, Helen Plevka

2015 Awards for Excellence in Student Research and Creative Activity - Documents

From Orsino’s opening line, “If music be the food of love, play on,” to Feste’s concluding song of solitude, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will is relentlessly full of music, whether explicitly calling for sound or indirectly invoking references to musical ideas (1.1.1). Shakespeare utilizes music not only to entertain the listeners of his plays but also to employ its inane ability to enhance and empower human speech. The musicality of this play, first performed at a feast on February 2, 1602, would have been understood and appreciated by its original audience as Elizabethan England experienced a golden …

Fullness Of Life For Virginia Woolf And Mrs. Dalloway, Jared Hedges

Library Research Prize Student Works

The great eighteenth century pragmatist William James worried once that a particular philosophy was “too economical to be all-sufficient” (James 83). He goes on to say: “Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality’s key-note.” Virginia Woolf knew this instinctively and profoundly; indeed practically her entire body of work can be read as a comment on the fullness of life. Although she is better known for her writing’s detailed delicacy and her tragic suicide, it is her assertion of life’s profusion that contrasts her most starkly with other Modernist writers, for whom negation and “its correlative states—absence, void, emptiness, and …

Remediating The Past: Doing “Periodical Studies” In The Digital Era, Maria Dicenzo

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ivy Leaves, Volume 90, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2015 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Jonathan Kurtz, Charlotte Stapp, Callie Renfrow, Courtney Couch, Angel Hisnanick, Taylor Kaiser, Yvonne Didway, Noelle Hisnanick, Taylor Henry, Mitchell Dallas Herring, Rebekah Rhoden, Logan Hickey, Josie Maszk, Julia Madden, Kenneth Keller, Alex Dib, Micah Peek, Benjamin Mahaffey, Justin Parker, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker.

The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2015 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee

The Center for Children's Literature

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2014. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.

Shakespeare And School Counseling, Nick Abel

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

In the ongoing search for therapeutic tools and techniques to use with students from kindergarten through the 12^th grade (K-12), it is unlikely that many school counselors have considered the work of William Shakespeare. Generally confined to upper-level high school English classrooms, the work of “The Bard” is more likely to be considered an obstacle for students to overcome than a resource to enhance their academic, career, or personal/social development (Anderson & Anderson, 2003). While Shakespeare may not have a place in every school counseling program, below are some possibilities for using his work in contemporary K-12 settings.

“Healing A Hurting Heart”: Femrite's Use Of Narrative And Community As Catalysts For Traumatic Healing, Candice Taylor Stratford

Theses and Dissertations

FEMRITE, the Ugandan Women Writers Association, was created in 1996, and over the last twenty years, it has become the largest and most successful women's writing group in East Africa and one of the most influential literary communities on the African continent. It has become an essential element of Ugandan literary society, and a large proportion of its writings reflect various forms of trauma, begging an engagement with trauma theories. I will argue that through strategies of narrative recuperation and the establishment of communities, FEMRITE has created avenues for women writers, their subjects, and their readers to engender healing from …

Influenza, Heritage, And Magical Realism In Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories, Katherine Snow Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the devastating scope of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, curiously few references to the flu exist in literature. Katherine Anne Porter offered one of modernism's only extensive fictional treatments of the pandemic in her short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” decades after her own near-death encounter with the flu. Porter was able to give voice to an experience that had traumatized others into silence by drawing on an early form of magical realism. Magical realism's ghosts—everyday presences rather than otherworldly beings to be feared—are of particular relevance to “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” since ghosts “haunt” Porter's semi-autobiographical Miranda …

Shakespeare And Teaching Rhetorical Technique In The Speech Classroom, Amanda Arp

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Shakespeare’s artistic communication within the speeches of his plays has the potential to augment student learning in college speech communication courses. Studying Shakespeare is appropriate in college speech communication courses because students could achieve improved rhetorical skills. Studying Shakespeare could even fulfill learning objectives of speech communication classes. For example, at Iowa State University, one of the learning objectives of the speech communication foundation course, SP CM 212, is to “select appropriate language to communicate ideas vividly, accurately, and respectfully” (LeFebvre 3). William Shakespeare’s plays have thrived because of his vivid, rhetorical language. Therefore, by studying the language of several …

Reading Aloud: Poetry At Its Finest, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Social Class In Applied Linguistics By David Block, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As Block writes in the prologue and the epilogue, the book is primarily about erasure; his motivation for writing the book is to highlight “the substantial and sometimes complete erasure of social class in applied linguistics research due to the ways in which applied linguists frame their discussions of issues such as identity, inequality, disadvantage and exclusion” (pp. ix–x). Overall, Block achieves his goal of illustrating the widespread absence of social class in applied linguistics; however, the book itself makes some missteps in exploring the very construct it claims as its focus.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter …

Androids In The Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, And Cultures Of The Self . By Adelheid Voskuhl., Minsoo Kang

History Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

A Contemporary Ophelia Reads The Sonnets, Vicki J. Simpson

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a complex character—she’s multilayered, conflicted, and evocative. Exactly how a woman from such a golden age of exploration and expansion in England’s history could have lived such a circumscribed existence is certainly understandable, given the time period, but it’s also an incalculable tragedy. In this piece, I invite you to suspend your disbelief and join me in an imaginative quest to see how this star-crossed noblewoman from Denmark might approach Shakespeare’s Sonnets 29, 30, and 122, from a decadent, epicurean, self-indulgent, and entirely postmodern perspective.

Reality In Shakespeare And The Digital World [A Review By John Sievers Of Shakespeare And The Digital World: Redefining Scholarship And Practice, Edited By Christie Carson And Peter Kirwan], John Sievers

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The collection of essays edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, came to me at a pertinent moment. I started reading it after I had pushed a squeaky-wheeled cart full of twenty-eight iPads to class, then used a document camera displaying my iPad and fingers to show the class how to search a database. Later that day, I also observed a student use a smartphone-based online dictionary app to hear how to pronounce Ceres. The student then used his new knowledge to further a group discussion about scansion in lines …

A Review By Regina Marler For Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries And The Diaries She Read, By Barbara Lounsberry, Regina Marler

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Very rarely, when bending the head over some worthy academic volume, perhaps with a title something like, Post-postmodernisms of Cross-colonial Language Theories or (Mal)contents: Forematter Errata in Eighteenth Century Rural Sermons, a revelation strikes the reader around page fifteen: “My God, I am actually going to enjoy this.” Some of us have experienced this jolt of pleasure and intellectual communion but few realize that it can occur even when the author has, unaccountably, snatched one of the best titles from a handwritten shortlist the reader has kept taped near her desk for her own current work-in-progress. Such, I can …

The Broadsheet- Issue 11, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• English Dept. Fall Preview
• Talking Poetry w/ Andrea Cohen
• Meet Danielle Jones-Pruett
• Student Profile: Ashley Frye
• Book Profile: Orphan Train

Blood Money: The Commodification Of Menstrual Education In The United States, Meghan Radosevic

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

girl’s first menstrual cycle is often considered the first step of the seemingly ritualistic passage into womanhood. However, most girls within the United States who experience menarche fail to view it as a rite of passage, and instead see it as an event they must endure rather than celebrate. Menstruation is a mystifying process for young girls, and the mystification is intensified through the lack of open conversations between pre- and post-menarcheal females. While pedagogical strategies in period education have evolved over time, the one constant within menstrual education is silence. This thesis aims to write into the silence surrounding …

Shakespeare's Art And Artifice: Passing For Real In As You Like It, Kristen Nicole Cardon

Theses and Dissertations

Gender performativity, detailed by Judith Butler and accepted by most contemporary queer theorists, rests on an agentive model of gender wherein “genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 716). This academic orthodoxy is challenged, however, by the increasing presence of transgender persons joining the theoretical discourse, many of whom experience an essential gender as a central facet of their identity. I respond to Katie R. Horowitz’s recent modification of Butler’s theories—a theory of omniperformance to dissolve the distinction between performance and performativity, and thereby between artifice and “real life.” I argue that gender-as-art, a schema that …