English Language and Literature Commons^™

March 23, 2014: Maisha Winn Visit To Wmu, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Hemingway’S Flapper Transcending Hollywood Norms: Brett Ashley And The Sun Also Rises, Sam Vaughn

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Hemingway’s portrayal of the “new woman” of the 1920s, namely Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, is more strikingly complex than those portrayals in popular films of the time. In Brett, Hemingway develops a complexity and depth of the “new woman” portrayal by utilizing Brett’s tumultuous past, which is in stark contrast to her filmic counterparts. Her conflicted characterization sets her apart from the typical flat representation of the woman of her time in film. Hemmingway provides a glimpse into a “real new women’s” complex way of being in the new 1920’s metropolitan world.

A New Heroine: Renovation Of The Saint Theresa Archetype In George Eliot’S Middlemarch, Aaron Elijah Sims

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Dorothea Brooke is a passionate, capable woman in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but she is tragically portrayed as an updated version of Saint Theresa of Avila from Catholic Mythology. The novel opens, “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed” (Eliot 2). There is nothing dishonorable in being a woman of loving heartbeats who sobs for unattained goodness; however, the inconvenient reality is that sobbing will not achieve any practical good, and passionate, able women …

The Art Of Perception: An Analysis Of How A Desired Public Image Affects One’S Actions, Alexandria Mccollum

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Written in 1859, Adam Bede was George Eliot’s first novel and marked the beginning of her fascination with class distinction and social perception. The main characters of her novel, Adam Bede and Hetty Sorrel, find themselves engaged in efforts in maintain their respective images, fulfill societal expectations, and transcend class distinctions. Initially, Adam is painted by Eliot as a devoted, hardworking, hypercritical man while Hetty is depicted as childlike and innocent. As each character struggles to maintain her/his public image and find their place in the class system, they encounter challenges that call for reevaluation of the importance of image. …

Xenophobia, Whiteness, And Citizenship In The United States, Carolyn Dapper

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

In January 2014, the Republican Party released new "principles of immigration" which among many reforms, made space for the possibility of a pathway toward "legal status" for certain groups of undocumented immigrants in the United States. This paper investigates the rhetorical difference between "citizenship" and "legal status" and claims how these principles reflect the GOP's motives to ease their conservative constituents' anxieties surrounding the protection of a traditional, euroamerican definition of American citizenship. This paper analyzes the relationship between whiteness and citizenship, a class which extends beyond ethnicity and involves education, income level, and values associated with WASP America.

March 19, 2014: New Issue Of Comparative Drama, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

March 18, 2014: Grad Student Featured In New Publication From The Newberry, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

On Man, On Nature, And On Human Life: William Knight's Life Of William Wordsworth And The Invention Of "Home At Grasmere", Patria Isabel Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Victorian scholar William Knight remains one of the most prolific Wordsworth scholars of the nineteenth century. His many publications helped establish Wordsworth's positive Victorian reputation that twentieth and twenty-first century scholars inherited. My particular focus is how Knight's 1889 inclusion of "Home at Grasmere" in his Life of William Wordsworth, rather than in his chronological sequencing of the poems, establishes a way to read the poem as a biographical artifact for his late-Victorian audience. Knight's detailed account of the poet's life, often told through letters and journal accounts, provides more contexts-including Dorothy's journal entries and correspondence of the early 1800s-to …

Putting A Human Face On The Minimum Wage, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

What is a “livable wage,” and should we strive to raise wages for American workers?

There are lots of conflicting studies and reports. The Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs while raising the incomes of nearly 17 million Americans.

Even prominent economists like David Card and David Neumark diametrically disagree on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage, and their studies of results in New Jersey have consistently yielded conflicting results for decades. [excerpt]

Night, Glen R E Phillips Professor

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Environmental Writing

Linguistic Vomit Ferments The Brain: Exploring The Boundaries Of Narratives, Katherine Dubois

Theses and Dissertations

Our minds require binaries to process and categorize information. A given piece of knowledge is either true or false. It helps us to process narratives as fiction or nonfiction. Narratives are neither wholly true or wholly false. Rather the borders that separate them are artificially constructed. By breaking down these barriers, authors break the traditional scheme for understanding literature, but they also lead us to question why the author is making the choices. The confusion leads to a constructive questioning of the purpose of the breakdown. Through this we develop a means of examining experimental narratives..

The Union Ticket

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

‘The union ticket’ is a short story comprising 3,800 words. Set in 1895 with the focus on shearing unionism and brutality of the era contrasted to the apparent calm of the landscape, ‘The union ticket’ tells the story of an orphaned teenager, adopted by his uncle and taken from the city into the bush for work experience in the shearing shed. The uncle wrongly assumes that a union ticket is not compulsory for a young, harmless boy, but the union representatives think differently and the story ends with dire consequences for the boy. The Australian bush sets the scene for …

Editorial Note: Environmental Writing Issue

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Editorial

To Whom It May Concern

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

In the closing decades of the 20^th Century the long tradition of writing and storytelling focused on nature and place began to attract for the first time a substantial, theorised body of critical response, usually brought together under the rubric of ecocriticism (Hornung ix). Landmark anthologies (e.g. Warren; Plant) and monographs (e.g. Buell; Murphy) began laying out a rough map of the theoretical territory and there were heated and lively contributions and contentions from different disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy (Plumwood; Cuomo; Warren); sociology (Salleh; Gare); politics (Bookchin; Eckersley). In 2011, Buell, Heise and Thornber offered a thoroughgoing review of …

The Inlet

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Environmental Writing

“Hewing Against The Grain”: John Haines’S Critique Of Robinson Jeffers

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

That American poet John Haines was in some way influenced by Robinson Jeffers is difficult to dispute. Literary critics have especially noted the similarity between Haines’s and Jeffers’s biographies. And yet, while a number of distinct parallels join these poets, perhaps more interesting are the ways in which Haines’s poetics differ from Jeffers’s. In particular, Haines utilizes Jeffers’s concept of the “inhuman” for his own purpose—namely, that is, to investigate the protean border between human artifice and the natural world. Haines utilizes a unique, often elegiac, voice to do so, ultimately arriving at a decidedly generous tone.

Affirmed

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Environmental Writing by Les Wicks

P-03 Republic ‘On Earth As It Is In Heaven:’ The Freedom Of The Fall In Paradise Lost And His Dark Materials, Jordan Arellano

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

The epic poem Paradise Lost (1667, 74) retells the Biblical creation story through the blind eyes of the Christian political-poet John Milton. Three hundred years later, Milton’s work is recast by the atheist children’s and fantasy novelist Philip Pullman in the His Dark Materials trilogy (1995, 97, 2000). Although one might assume that these two writers’ perspectives would contradict one another, Pullman’s adaptation—though a perverted story of the Fall—still pursues the same goal as Milton’s by imagining a new and better social structure. And not only do they share that goal, but they also explore the same mechanism—free will.

P-15 Evolution Over Revolution: A Generic Criticism Of The Muscle Car’S Past And Present Hierarchy, John Irvine

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

Since the early 1960’s the Muscle Car has been seen as representative of American cultural idealism; a post-war expression of Americanism through the medium of octane obsession. Muscle Cars are seen abstractly as an embodiment of several cultural principles; however, what physically constitutes this embodiment, the convergence of these features into the ‘soul’ of the muscle car, is broadly the subject of speculation. The ‘soul’, or formative characteristics, will be established through the generic criticism of a cross section of First Generation 1960’s Muscle Cars. Through analysis of physical features and technical specifications, the substantive and stylistic elements necessary for …

How Do Song And Speech Go Together In Comics Panels?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In my last post, I wrote about simultaneous talk in comics, exploring the way that speech balloons can be positioned in a panel to convey a sense of overlapping talk. This post continues the series on the possibilities of simultaneous discourse. However, this one asks how visual and verbal cues might tell us something about the way readers are supposed to imagine hearing the production of both speech and song in the same panel.

The first example is drawn from Full Color, a graphic novel by Mark Haven Britt. I have taught this book a couple of times, …