English Language and Literature Commons^™

Two New Heuristics In Response To Formulaic Writing: What Lies Beyond Oversimplified Composition Instruction, James T. Davis Ii

English Dissertations

Many high school and college composition students have misused formulaic organizational structures, most conspicuously the five-paragraph theme, as invention tools. This misappropriation comes from teacher and student tendencies to oversimplify both the processes of writing instruction and its practice into countable and inflexible forms. In order to help students move towards improved invention models that respond to the overall rhetorical situation, this dissertation offers two new models of invention, the x, y thesis and the argument guide models. Beginning at the invention stage and extending recursively to all stages of the writing process, these two heuristics help guide students towards …

Curriculum, Pedagogy, And Teacherly Ethos, Marshall W. Gregory

Marshall W. Gregory

In considering how curriculum and teaching influence education, it is revealing to note that most faculty members treat curriculum the way bankers treat investments. They generally spend much time, planning, and careful thought on curricular matters-reasoning here, analyzing there, relying on experience, and carefully considering both the long-term and short-term dividends of knowledge - but when it comes to teaching, many faculty members operate less like bankers and more like barnstormers, flying by the seat of their pants and guiding themselves primarily by instinct or by repeating whatever worked yesterday.

The Unsuccessful Harvesting Of Figs From Thistles And Other Failures Of Idealized Masculinity In Ella D'Arcy's The Bishop's Dilemma, Elizabeth Watson Christianson

Theses and Dissertations

Although confusion about the genre of New Woman Ella D'Arcy's only novella has resulted in a lack of scholarship, The Bishop's Dilemma can now be read as a social commentary that reaches beyond the New Woman subversion of the Victorian marriage plot, broadening the gender discussion at the fin-de-siècle. In this essay, I examine how D'Arcy uses Catholicism as a vehicle to create a unique space in the Catholic ritual of the confession that gives her reader privileged access to Victorian manhood. I argue that by placing her examination of masculinity in the context of the Catholic priesthood, D'Arcy renders …

Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization: The Dialectics Of Love, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Presents a psychoanalysis of romantic idealization in Thomas Hardy's novel 'Far From the Madding Crowd.' Biography of Hardy; Effect of narcissistic conflicts and idealizations on Hardy's relationships with women in his life; Plot of the novel; Characters in the novel..

The Bonds Of Love And The Boundaries Of Self In Toni Morrison's "Beloved", Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Toni Morrison's Beloved penetrates, perhaps more deeply than any historical or psychological study could, the unconscious emotional and psychic consequences of slavery. The novel reveals how the condition of enslavement in the external world, particularly the denial of one's status as a human subject, has deep repercussions in the individual's internal world. These internal resonances are so profound that even if one is eventually freed from external bondage, the self will still be trapped in an inner world that prevents a genuine experience of freedom. As Sethe succinctly puts it, "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed …

Transitional States And Psychic Change: Thoughts On Reading D. H. Lawrence, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

One of my favorite scenes in literature occurs in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915). Tom Brangwen's Polish wife Lydia is upstairs in their home giving birth. Tom is downstairs with Anna, Lydia's four-year-old child by her first marriage. Anna is panic-stricken, screaming in terror for her mother, and Tom is responding to her with irritation and mounting anger. Like the child, he too is feeling shut out and abandoned by Lydia. Tom is made particularly furious by the "blind" and "mechanical" nature of Anna's crying.

Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

No abstract provided.

The Death-Ego And The Vital Self: Romances Of Desire In Literature / Book Review, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Psychoanalysis and literary romance share much in common: both are concerned with desire, with elusive objects of desire, and with the dark, hidden, and fantastic dimensions of the human imagination. Gavriel Reisner’s The Death-Ego and the Vital Self explores the interrelationship of psychoanalysis and literary romance with original and often illuminating results.

Trauma And Sadomasochistic Narrative, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

This essay applies trauma theory and relational psychoanalysis to a close reading of Mary Gaitskill's short story "The Dentist." It argues that the sadomasochistic relationship central to this story, and to much of Gaitskill's fiction, is rooted in trauma and can be illuminated by an understanding of the post-traumatic condition.

Psychoanalysis And The Problem Of Evil, Barbara A. Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Since "evil" has become a term much in vogue in our current political climate, it seems ever more important to explore its psychic meanings and origins. What, first of all, do analysts and therapists mean by the word "evil"? The grandiosity of the term, as well as its traditionally religious connotations, perhaps make it unsuited to the therapeutic context. As Ruth Stein (2002) has commented, "Evil' may sound too allegorical or too concrete, too essentialist or too objective for psychoanalytic ways of thinking that are oriented towards the study of individual subjectivity" (394).

The Death-Ego And The Vital Self, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Reviews the book "The Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis," by Gavriel Reisner.

The Realm Of The Real: Imitation And Authenticity In Edith Wharton's The Custom Of The Country, Brittany Brie Atkinson

Theses and Dissertations

Edith Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country reveals a national concern with defining and preserving authenticity in social and cultural life. A study of the novel through the lens of scholarship concerning the modernist obsession with "the real thing," including such seminal texts as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, opens up a broad discussion of authenticity and imitation as defined by Wharton's characters. This paper challenges the traditional interpretations of the much-abused term. First, I outline a brief history of the study of authenticity …

Cell Phones From Hell, Steven Bruhm

Department of English Publications

Recently Hollywood has remade a number of movies from the 1970s, movies in which young women are terrorized by a murderer calling from a telephone located elsewhere in the house. In the remakes, the murderer uses a cell phone, which effectively destroys the sense of space and distance on which earlier horror films were predicated. In one way, these films gesture to Jean Baudrillard's idea of “the transparency of evil,” in that they depict the collapse between the speaking self and the technologies of monstrosity against which the self might be defined. In another way, though, the films proliferate sites …

Footnotes, Issue 9, Spring-Summer 2011, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

The Great American Love Affair: Indians In The Twilight Saga, Brianna R. Burke

Brianna R. Burke

No abstract provided.

Imperial Boyhood: Piracy And The Play Ethic, Bradley Deane

English Publications

Representations of perpetual boyhood came to fascinate the late Victorians, partly because such images could naturalize a new spirit of imperial aggression and new policies of preserving power. This article traces the emergence of this fantasy through a series of stories about the relationship of the boy and the pirate, figures whose opposition in mid-Victorian literature was used to articulate the moral legitimacy of colonialism, but who became doubles rather than antitheses in later novels, such as R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island and Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Masculine worth needed no longer to be measured by reference to transcendent, …

Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone city in the north of Nigeria. Father wouldn't move us with him so he lived apart and visited only once in two weeks, always coming at midnight on Fri- days and disappearing at dawn on Sundays. Each time he returned, mother would detail how the house had fared in his absence - a breakdown of home …

Ibn Arabshah: The Unacknowledged Debt Of Christopher Marlowe’S Tamburlaine, Ahlam M. Alruwaili

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis suggests strong relations between Marlowe’s Tamburlaine I & II and Ibn Arabshah’s 1436 account of Tamerlane’s Life (‘Ajaib al-maqdur fi nawa’ib Timur: The Wonders of Destiny Concerning the Calamities Wrought by Tamerlane), clarifies controversial issues, and explains previously baffling allusions editors have pondered long. In general, the thesis enriches our understanding of Marlowe's wide ranging sources, im­plies a critique of western-biased source scholarship, and opens possibilities to re-evaluate eastern contributions to the Renaissance in general. The first chapter high­lights some well-recognized events in the play and in historical sources (the caging of Bayazid and ill-treatment of his …

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Good Writing: The Problem Of Ethics, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article focuses on good writing in the English classroom. It mentions that the way to know if one has good writing is to see how the audience reacts to it. Writing professionals argue that good writers anticipate readers' reactions as they shape style, page design, and content and every aspect of their writing. It notes that one of the main goals in professional writing is to teach students to use of rhetoric tools to influence their audiences and to emphasize ethical decision-making.

The New Chicana Heroine: Representations Of Anzaldua's Mestiza Consciousness In Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions, Monica E. Montelongo

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis analyzes Gloria Anzaldúa‟s mestiza consciousness as a representation seen thematically in Chicana feminist cultural productions. Mestiza consciousness, defined in Anzaldúa‟s Borderlands/La Frontera, is a non-binary feminist ideology, which proposes a third space in female identity, explored in terms of gender, class, race, and sexuality identification. The representation of mestiza consciousness in Chicana feminist cultural productions is proposed as a new trope in Chicana\o cultural studies, which I term the “New Chicana Heroine.” The New Chicana Heroine is both a proposal and representation of a third space in female identity. An examination of several authors, artists, and filmmakers, spanning …