English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Mime, Rachel Richardson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 126

Her Familiars, Eric Bilman

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 182-185

Forest Cemetery, Shane Seely

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 128

Spyglass, Kara Van De Graaf

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 143

Sinatra And The Ordre De La Santé Publique, Stefanie Worthman

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 156

Birmingham Poetry Review 41 (End Matter), Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 199-213

Confronting The Spectacle Of The Other (Than Human): Posthumanism And The Convergence Of Art, Aesthetics, And Ethics, Matthew Lerberg

English Dissertations - Archive

This project argues that humans should recognize the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in literature, film, and art that use or represent nonhuman animals. Too often, the right of artists to express their "message" trumps the ethical obligations humans should have to nonhumans. In this scenario, the materiality of nonhumans becomes subjugated to their role as semiotic content--as signs not bodies. Generally, this process of signification ignores the rich entanglements of history, biology, semiotics, materiality, and shared places. Also, this process can lead to negative consequences for nonhuman animals. In order to address these issues I posit a theory of …

Positioning First-Year Composition: Hybrid Learning For Student Engagement And Sustainability, Lorie Stagg Jacobs

English Dissertations - Archive

This study uses quantitative and qualitative methodology to describe, and analyze the use of social media to create a blended learning environment in the first-year composition classroom. Findings indicate hybrid courses foster retention-minded best practices, increase student engagement in course material, extend concepts and assignments beyond the classroom, and encourage critical analysis of multiple media, thereby supporting the development of a digital literacy. Furthermore, I argue seizing participatory culture as a teaching and learning frontier positions First-Year Composition at the forefront of college retention efforts and provides connections to STEaM endeavors, raising the status of the field generally, and suggesting …

The Tool/Maker: The Bird, The Cage, The Radio, The Sea, The Rock, The Eye, The Space, Johnny A. Stein

English Dissertations - Archive

As street politics began to operate academically after the civil rights eras, academic turns toward socio-constructive theories dominated critical philosophies of the subsequent eighties and nineties (especially in the West). This paper examines the linguistic turn in light of a New Digital World Millennium that is the continuation of the Rise of Science that emerged in the 17th century. Material voices that were overshadowed by linguistic or terministically-centered philosophies are today more than ever emergent through tool use. The wireless revolution of the late 19th century has today created technological tools at hand that are deeply impressing the human being-in-the-world, …

The Pedagogy Of Conclusions: From Rhetorical Ancestry To Modern Composition With A Research Study On Pedagogy In The Classroom, Sarah E. Visser

English Theses - Archive

The main focus of my thesis is to uncover what students know about conclusions (from current pedagogy, composition textbooks, questionnaires and classroom research). I analyze what instructors are taught about conclusions and how this advice is based in the teachings of ancient rhetoricians. Then I detail how conclusions are covered in American college textbooks. Seeing the need for instructor material to teach conclusions, the next chapter gives multiple lesson plans teaching students to compose stronger and livelier conclusions. In the next chapter, I summarize my research employing some of these lesson plans and analyze student texts created before and after …

Art At The End Of The World: Bioart And Posthuman Ethics In The Anthropocene, Sean Farrell

English Theses - Archive

Bioart is a vital contemporary aesthetic movement that involves the use of animate matter (such as animal bodies or DNA) and is generative of productive encounters between theoretical methodologies of posthumanism, new materialism, and continental philosophy. I analyze this fruitful intersection of ideas in the context of the Anthropocene in order to excavate the possibility for a posthuman ethical encounter between the artist, the artwork, and the audience. I examine a wide variety of bioartworks by artists such as Eduardo Kac, Damien Hirst, and BCL; I also provide an in-depth analysis of synthetic biology and its productive potential within the …

Chaucer's De-Colonized Custance, Rod S. Sachs

English Theses - Archive

Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale (MLT) contains several non-Western views, religious practices, cultures and laws. Most importantly, within the MLT readers can discover an alternative to viewing non-Western people as enemies. By role-modeling the simple law of good, Custance becomes a hybridized queen who holds disparate contexts together. This essay blends postcolonial theory with decolonial options to show how Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale presents a less dehumanized narrative than most scholarship maintains, especially when compared to Nicholas Trive's version of the same story. Rather than vilifying the common foes of Christian Western Civilization, Chaucer's Custance demonstrates a de-colonization of …

The Little White Dish Of My Faith: Anne Sexton, The Body, And Spirituality, Elizabeth J. Barbee

English Theses - Archive

This thesis examines how Anne Sexton pits the body and soul against one another in her poems. Her work suggests that these two facets of being are more than just benignly and fundamentally different: they are enemies. Her speaker continually vilifies the body by suggesting that its superficial needs obstruct the more wholesome and essential needs of the spirit. The thesis demonstrates that spirituality is the most resilient theme in Sexton's work and argues against critics who claim that the body is Sexton's central preoccupation.

'Schyre Leuez' And Cesspits: An Ecocritical Reading Of Land Use And Apocalypse In Cleanness, Katelyn Jaynes

English Theses - Archive

This thesis examines land use and apocalypse in Cleanness in order to investigate how land use participates in the construction of medieval social and political systems and how the apocalyptic destruction the land acts out functions to make us question the primacy of the human in medieval thought. While some critics have discussed land use in the Pearl-Poet's works, they often discuss land in allegorical religious terms or in theories of space and place, rarely investigating the land's vital role in the construction of social and political order or its role in the preservation or destruction of mankind. This thesis …

More Than Just A Piece In Their Games: Agency And The Docile Body In The Hunger Games And Reality Television, Kathleen Denison

English Theses - Archive

In recent years, with the rise of social media and normalized forms of surveillance there has been an increase in the visibility of how female bodies are policed within Western society. As the fight for women's rights over their own bodies continues there has been an increase in the number of strong female protagonists in Young Adult literature, particularly literature classified as dystopian. Contemporary young adult (YA) literature is now filled with characters, such as The Hunger Games' Katniss, that are taking on corrupt social institutions that represent exaggerated versions of those we quite regularly encounter in America. As many …

Shakespeare's Successful Sisters: The Reincarnated Judith In The Works Of Munro, Egan, And Gilbert, Caitlin M. Adams 14

Honor Scholar Theses

None

Dystopian Language And Thought: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Applied To Created Forms Of English, Kristen Fairchild 14

Honor Scholar Theses

None

The Empathetic Human: The Story Of How Story Increases Cognitive And Social Ability, Olivia C. Flores 14

Honor Scholar Theses

This thesis all started from my reflections on being an English Literature major. I mention this not because it is rare or unique, but rather because realizing my interest in literature and considering the cognitive effect it has on humans initiated my current academic endeavor: writing a very, very long paper. Even though the skills English majors exercise seem like the mundane activities of introverted bookworms, these experiences with language are spectacular phenomenons that prove to be, in fact, universal. Many argue that literature has an adaptive function that not only demonstrates why we gravitate toward story and how we …

"Wood For The Coffins Ran Out": Modernism And The Shadowed Afterlife Of The Influenza Pandemic, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Here’s what we already know—during the First World War, soldiers and civilians often had remarkably different experiences of the war corpse. Dead bodies were omnipresent on the front line and in the trenches, an inescapable constant for the living soldier. As critic Allyson Booth notes, “Trench soldiers . . . inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses.”¹ In Britain and America, however, such corpses were strangely absent; unlike in previous conflicts, bodies were not returned. This dichotomy underscores some of our central assumptions about the differences between the front line and the home front: in the trenches, dead bodies and …

Conversion Calls For Confrontation: Facing The Old To Become New In The Work Of James Baldwin, Mckinley E. Melton

English Faculty Publications

Book Summary: The recognition and study of African American (AA) artists and public intellectuals often include Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.DuBois, and Malcolm X. The literary canon also adds Ralph Ellison, Richard White, Langston Hughes, and others such as female writers Zora Neale Hurston, MayaAngelou, and Alice Walker.

Yet, the acknowledgement of AA artists and public intellectuals tends to skew the voices and works of those included toward normalized portrayals that fit well within foundational aspects of the American myths reflected in and perpetuated by traditional schooling. Further, while many AA artists and public intellectuals …