English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Placenta In My Living Room And Other College Epiphanies, Joseph Franklin, Dr. Patrick Madden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Nothing was more important to me in creating this collection of essays than keeping a regular record of personal experience, reflection, and inquisition. From pre-writing, to drafting, to revising, my daily record has provided an indispensable source of material for this collection. Three of the essays, “The Proper School,” “Marriage in Pieces,” and “A Suitcase Full of Rations,” as well as many of the brief essays in “Selected Shorts,” all began as blog entries. When I wrote every day, the ideas flowed and the work progressed. When I wrote sporadically, the ideas sludged forward, usually as muddy as they were …

Romantic-Era Drama And The Resurgence Of British Feminism, Jessie Leatham, Dr. Nicholas Mason

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Mary Wollstonecraft is a complicated figure in the history of British feminism. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. One of the earliest proto-feminist treatises, Wollstonecraft’s work responded powerfully to “the woman question” that was burgeoning in her day and would surface again and again in the literature and politics of the nineteenth century. In the years following her 1797 death, however, Wollstonecraft’s work was not necessarily helpful to the women’s rights movement, as many tried to distance themselves from her ideas because of her allegedly scandalous life. Equally detrimental to the advancement …

Two Civil Wars Of Words: Milton As An American Revolutionary, Megan Roeling Coplen, Dr. Brandie Siegfried

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Traditionally, scholars have labeled the American Revolution as a “creation,” but this project seeks to examine it as an extension and eventual reinvention of an English national identity established a century before the war. My goal was to find what influence the writers of the English Civil War had upon the leaders of the American Revolution, showing the extent to which the American colonists borrowed ideology from their English forbearers.

Post-Ascension: Homelessness And The Humanitarians In Bucharest, Romania, Kelcie Gubler, Dr. Steven Walker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As Romania recovers from the problems created by Communist rule, their economy is in a major upswing having joined the European Union in January 2007, unemployment among the middle class at a low 6.1% with a GDP continuing to stay above 4%. Over 25% of the population is reported as living below the poverty line while 27.4% of the population lives in the highest income bracket. These most recent numbers begin to show signs of an emergence of a middle class. Literacy among this middle class is estimated as 97.3% of the population being classified as literate. All of which …

'A Moment Of Magic': Coyote, Tricksterism, And The Role Of The Shaman In Rudolfo Anaya's Sonny Baca Novels, Roy Turner

English Language and Literature ETDs

In Rudolfo Anayas Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring, the protagonist—Sonny Baca—undertakes a murder investigation that ultimately leads him to confront Raven, a mysterious figure whose acts of violence threaten the social fabric of Albuquerque, the American Southwest, and the entire world. In battling Raven, Sonny comes to realize that both he and his foe have the ability to access a spiritual power that takes root in the myths and belief systems of various cultures, including Sonny's Chicano community, Native American peoples of the region, and ancient civilizations throughout the world, from which Sonny draws power …

Jack Ryan, Vice Provost, Musselman Library, Jack Ryan

Next Page

In this first edition of Next Page, Vice Provost Jack Ryan shares with us his reading habits, book recommendations, and which returning television show will likely soak up a solid eight hours of his reading time.

Summary Of Creative Research Grant Results And Thesis Summary, Lana Robinson, Dr. William A. Wilson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The results of being awarded this grant are: a collection of 600 minutes of tape recording personal narratives of under privileged urban black South African women; 58 pages of transcribed, typed and edited text of interviews with one black South African woman; and an honor’s thesis discussing the power of personal narratives in under-privileged women’s lives. The tapes I collected in South Africa will be placed in the archive’s of the Harold B. Lee Library and will be available to the public for use and research purposes.

Milton’S Prose: Why Did He Do It?, Shawn D. Rossiter, Dr. O. Glade Hunsaker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project came about as a result of a computer database of Yale’s edition of Milton’s Prose being constructed by the Brigham Young University English Department. The completion of the database has been delayed, however, and consequently I was compelled to shift the object and approach of my study. Originally, I had planned to make an analysis of the development of Milton’s religious thought over time by tracing his use of significant words. Instead, for the ORCA project I have completed a thorough reading of Milton’s prose with an attempt to formulate an informative hypothesis for why the prose was …

History Of The Duchess Of C**** (1812) [Supplemental Material], Jennifer Lunde

Gothic Archive Supplemental Materials for Chapbooks

No abstract provided.

Camera Arriving At The Station: Cinematic Memory As Cultural Memory, Russell J A Kilbourn

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

This paper explores the modern metropolis as an ironically concrete metaphor for the collective memory and the mourning of cinema’s passing, as it—the “city”—is digitally constructed in two recent, auteur-directed, special effects-driven blockbuster films, Inception and Hugo. The modern city, and mass media, such as the cinema, as well as modes of mass transport, especially the train, all originate in the 19th century, but come into their own in the early 20th century in their address to a subject as the mobilised citizen-consumer who, as Anne Friedberg makes clear, is also always a viewer. Additionally, as Barbara Mennel has recently …

The Family Profession, Cruz Medina

English

In a photo taken at the community college where my father Julian Medina taught, he’s wearing a tie and a middle-management, short-sleeved buttonup shirt, shaking hands with farm worker advocate César Chávez. As in my father’s proud image, I too work hard to project a professional appearance, often wearing a tie the first few weeks of the semester. I do so because of the often mistaken assumptions students make about my knowledge and the wisdom of assigning readings by writers of color. Unfortunately, this feeling of insecurity comes from lived experience. When my Anglo mother married my Mexican American father, …

The Broadsheet- Issue 2, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• Jamaal May Performs at the Writers House
• The Great Gatsby (2013) Review
• Meet Andrea Cohen, the new Director of the Writers House
• Upcoming Events
• New Courses Spring 2014

Rhetorics Of Girlhood Trauma In Writing By Holly Goddard Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Cisneros, And Jamaica Kincaid, Stephanie Marie Stella

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines representations of sexual-based girlhood trauma in American literature during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Using critical theories in the fields of trauma, feminist, and rhetorical studies, it focuses on the evocative demands rhetorical structures place upon readers' interpretations and completions of plot, which effectively draw readers' attentions to the social conditions surrounding girlhood trauma. Thus, the literature of focus in this dissertation ultimately functions to expose, question, and undermine oppressive cultural constructs that facilitate the psychic and physical traumas of fictional characters. Equally important is that this study demonstrates the alignment between narrative strategies and …

“Seeing, Seeing, Seeing”: Deafness, Knowledge, And Subjectivity In Elizabeth Bowen, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

In What is Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe enlists Temple Grandin’s account of her autism to critique reductive ideas of subjectivity. He quotes Oliver Sacks’s comment that Grandin’s first book was “unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no ‘inside,’ no inner life, in the autistic, or that if there was it would be forever denied access or expression” (129). As Wolfe sees it, that dogma is founded in no small part on the too-rapid assimilation of the questions of subjectivity, consciousness, and cognition to the question of language ability—a dogma that is perhaps …

Gothic Adaptation, 1765-1830, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Cwpa Position Statement On Pre-College Credit For Writing, Krtistine Hansen, Jeffrey Andelora, Heidi Estrem, Clint Gardner, Joseph Janangelo, Susan Miller-Cochran

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the CWPA Position Statement on Pre-College Credit for Writing (see attachment), the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), an organization that advocates for best practices in the teaching of writing in postsecondary institutions, compares the three main alternatives high school students have for completing early the required first-year writing (FYW) course they would otherwise take after matriculating at college. These alternatives are Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and dual credit or concurrent enrollment (DC/CE).

Because so many stakeholders have an interest in understanding how these high school alternatives compare to FYW, the position statement discusses the history and …

Prelims, Preface To Ssl 39: G. Ross Roy And Susan Manning, Patrick G. Scott, Anthony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Preface includes information on usage of the digital version of Studies in Scottish Literature in its first year, together with short tributes to two board members who recently died, the journal's founder G. Ross Roy, and Prof. Susan Manning of the University of Edinburgh.

G. Ross Roy As Editor, A Tribute, Carol Mcguirk

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reviews the fifty-year history of the journal Studies in Scottish Literature since 1963 and pays tribute to the editorial work of its founder G. Ross Roy (1924-2013), sole editor of the journal 1963-2008, drawing attention to the range of subjects and approaches he welcomed and to his encouragement of women scholars.

Divergent Authenticities: Editing Scottish Literary Texts: Introduction: How Editorial Theories Have Changed, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reviews changing approaches to the editing of Scottish literary texts, from the dominance of the Greg-Bowers theory of copytext to the emergence of the Social Text theory associated with Mackenzie and McGann; illustrates the developments from a variety of major Scottish authors and scholarly editions (specifically Thomas Carlyle and Walter Scott); and concludes by discussing the critical implications of differing approaches to editing two frequently-taught Scottish works, Robert Burns's "Tam o' Shanter" and Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.

Textual Messages: Scholarly Editions And Their Role In Literary Criticism, Alison Lumsden

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the editing of Scottish literary texts, specifically recent editions of Walter Scott and James Hogg, and argues that textual investigation is not simply technical and preliminary but an integral part of literary criticism.