English Language and Literature Commons^™

Discovering Eve Through The Eyes Of Jonathan Edwards, Zachary M. Hutchins, Dr. Steven C. Walker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Eve’s name jumped out at me as I squinted on the fifth floor of the library. Hmm…I wonder what an Orthodox Calvinist preacher from New England has to say about Eve. I did not know at the time how remarkable my discovery was, that I had picked up the one volume of Jonathan Edwards’s twenty-two volume collected works which provides an in-depth commentary on Eve. Still, I was intrigued, so I checked out several of the ponderous tomes and rode my bicycle home.

Distortions Of Perspective: The Literary Influence Of Edgar Allan Poe On Oscar Wilde, Brian Wall, Dr. Brandie Siegfriend

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Transatlanticism, or the study of the relationship of England and the United States through shared textual themes, is a developing literary movement on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Most researchers emphasize the influence of British authors on the development of the American literary canon. With this paradigm in mind, my proposed research centered on viewing Victorian authors and texts as historical harbingers of contemporary United States society. My findings, however, suggested the presence of a reverse relationship, and my focus shifted as I delved into the works of Oscar Wilde, my selected British Victorian author.

“The Impulse Tragic” An Honors Capstone Creative Project, Stillman Wagstaff, Dr. Kimberly Johnson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My ORCA grant was given to fund a creative project of original poetry that would simultaneously fulfill the honors requirement. Since my funding, I have written nearly 40 new poems and been able to devote over 100 hours to the project with the financial independence the funding has given me. I have included two of the poems written since I have been funded below.

September 22, 2013: Sss Fall Party Welcomes Department Grads, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter place. …

“Permission To Be Real”: Elouise Bell And The Personal Narrative, Danille Christensen Lindquist, Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist

Journal of Undergraduate Research

“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not? Of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”1 So Ralph Waldo Emerson champions the collection of ordinary stories. Others have stressed the importance of stories in general: author Leslie Marmon Silko believes that stories, while entertaining, are also “all we have . . . to fight off illness and …

Amy Dailey, Assistant Professor Of Health Sciences, Musselman Library, Amy B. Dailey

Next Page

In this next edition of Next Page, Assistant Professor of Health Sciences Amy Dailey shares with us which article she recommends to students for a better understanding of the health care crisis in America along with her mild fascination with dystopian literature and books about mammograms.

William Stafford: Memoir Of A National Poet In Prose And Poetry, Nathan Furr, Dr. Lance Larson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”– William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl

Manuscript Variation In The Canterbury Tales, Melissa A. Gallup, Pual Thomas

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales before his death in 1400, producing his tales over the space of approximately 14 years. But even with over twenty thousand lines of poetry and prose, his work was still unfinished, for the plan was that each pilgrim would share two tales on the outward journey and two more on the homeward journey. When Chaucer died, he left only 23 tales (plus a prologue and retraction), with little direction as to their order and placement within the larger framework of the action, It was up to his literary executors and later editors to decide …

Are Comics Predictive, Or Do They Simply Follow The Society They’Re Produced In?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In early August 2013, Alyssa Rosenberg posted an article about a panel discussion she attended, which was a press tour to promote a new documentary about the history of comics in the U.S. One of the panelists was Gerry Conway, who made the claim that “comics follow society. They don’t lead society.” This was in the context of a discussion about the nature of superhero comics and representations of male and female characters.

Rosenberg’s article explores the disappointment she feels with the restrictive, underdeveloped representation of women in superhero comics. I think we can also ask similar questions about representations …

Homophonic Translation, Appositional Writing, And The Monster, Ryan Landry Clark

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation features a combination of critical and creative work

exploring the ethics of appropriative writing and the reparative potential of homophonic translation. The opening essay examines the ethics of appropriation- based poetry and introduces the concept of what I call "appositional writing," a term to describe ethically-minded works of poetry that make use of appropriative writing methods. The next three parts of this dissertation are each appositional writing projects that make use of homophonic translation as the primary method of composition. "Arizona State Bill 1070: An Act" is a homophonic translation of the anti-immigration bill of the same name. …

Teaching Acceptance In Middle School: A Young Adult Literature Unit, Rachel Hoggan, Dr. Sirpa Grierson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Does contemporary young adult (YA) literature belong in the secondary education classroom? That is the question that has been on everyone’s tongues in the last several decades. In 1973, The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) was created as a subunit of the NCTE (National Council for Teachers of English). It was the beginning of a movement to promote adolescent literature in the classroom (Gill). It seems logical that “adolescent” literature should be taught to adolescents, and yet the topic has sparked serious debate. Many teachers are unsure how to work with adolescent literature and they still cling to the …

H.P. Lovecraft’S Search For Truth And Meaning Through The Medium Of The Gothic Hero’S Quest, Jacob Hodgen, Dr. Dennis Perry

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The intent of my project was to seek to better understand the structure and ideology of the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft. Through my research I discovered that nearly every one of his stories can be directly linked to the archetypal hero’s quest—as popularized and brought into Western culture through the tradition of the Arthurian Grail Romance. I began to trace the roots of Lovecraft’s style and structure through his idol Edgar Allan Poe and learned that both Lovecraft and Poe used the structure of the questing hero myth that they had undoubtedly read from the likes of Malory, Geoffrey …

September 10, 2013: Interdisciplinary Work Group In Digital Humanities, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Rebirth, Individuation And Illumination, Mary E. Illions Wilde, Claudia Harris

Journal of Undergraduate Research

For my project, I analyzed Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and D. H. Lawrence’s short story, The Horse Dealer’s Daughter, using the Mythic/Archetypal approach. First I identified the archetypes of water, light and mud in both works and intended to compare the way each author used them. As I proceeded with my research, however, I could not find any literary criticism that compared Hurston’s novel with Lawrence’s short story nor any criticism that focused on my topic in either of the works alone. I had stepped off an edge. The primary sources thus became …

September 9, 2013: Gwst/Women's Caucus Fall Reception, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Shaker Aesthetic At Sabbathday Lake, Elizabeth Pinborogh, Dr. Kimberly Johnson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My goal was to study the Shaker aesthetic, the distinctive set of characteristics that define Shaker art and architecture. Through preliminary research, I had discovered that Shaker buildings where characterized by symmetry, straight lines, squareness, and simplicity, and I wanted to experience the aesthetic firsthand. The questions I was trying to answer were: Why is the Shaker aesthetic appealing to artists and to people from many different academic disciplines? What is my poetic interpretation of the Shaker aesthetic? I also wanted to read Shaker women’s autobiographical and spiritual writings that I could not get access to anywhere else.

Gender Politics And Education In 1920s Ireland: Public And Private Editorializing In Tcd: A College Miscellany, Katherine Fisher, Dr. David Hatch

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When I began this project, I planned to investigate the ways in which Irish students engaged with and wrote about certain philosophical and literary tenets of modernism. As I conducted background research on the social and political climate in Ireland during the 1920s, however, my focus shifted somewhat to an exploration of the cultural, religious, and social tensions that informed Irish modernism generally and the writings of Trinity College students in particular. I traveled to Ireland and spent a week in the archives of Trinity College, Dublin, reading contemporary issues of a once-popular student-published newsletter, TCD: A College Miscellany. I …

A Slice Of Pye: The Unique Position Of Henry James Pye In English Literature, Sean Johnson, Dr. Susan Howe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Henry James Pye, poet laureate from 1790 to 1813, occupies a unique position in English literature. In the half dozen or so published retrospectives of the lives and works of the poets laureate, he is consistently called the worst poet ever to hold the office. Had he not been ridiculed by so many of his famous contemporaries—with Lord Byron and Robert Southey among his detractors—his name would probably have been forgotten all together. Byron called Pye “eminently respectable in everything but his poetry” (Hamilton 203). Southey, in a moment of self-deprecation, proclaimed, “I have been rhyming as doggedly and dully …

Reflections Of The English Tradition In James Henry’S Poetry, Ryan D. Stewart, Dr. John Talbot

Journal of Undergraduate Research

James Henry (1798-1876) was an Irish classicist most well known for his long and eccentric commentary of Virgil’s Aeneid—Aeneidea, or Critical, Exegetical and Aesthetical Remarks on the Aeneis—and known to some extent for his work as a physician and his penchant for pamphleteering. In the mid-1980s, however, Christopher Ricks—a prominent Victorian scholar—discovered a privately printed volume of Henry’s poetry “‘unopened’, as the book dealers say,” (meaning the pages had not been cut) as he was browsing the stacks at the Cambridge Library. He included some of Henry’s poetry in the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), which he edited. …