English Language and Literature Commons^™

At Second Glance: Retroactive Continuity In Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Stephen Clancy Clawson

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores Junot Díaz’s incorporation of nerd culture into his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and that move's larger impact on the genre of trauma narratives. By using allusions to nerd texts such as The Lord of the Rings to structure his depiction of the brutal reign of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, Díaz effectively rewrites Dominican history, creating a retroactive continuity of fantasy. Retroactive continuity, or retcon, is a little-discussed interpretive strategy of the nerd community with striking parallels to Lacanian notions of fantasy. A reading of Díaz's retcon ultimately casts doubt on …

The Poetics Of A Dominican Holocaust And The Aesthetics Of Witnessing, Andrew Mark Merrill

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines Julia Alvarez's best-known works, García Girls and In the Time of the Butterflies, to explore the intertextuality within Dominican-American fiction through the vocabulary and methodology of trauma studies and witnessing. Alvarez's work indicates that traditional academic discourse about witnessing often translates trauma survivors into tourists by legally dispossessing them from the witnesses they could provide as they seek to assign blame and pass judgment on the source of their traumatic experience. This process of exclusion threatens to hinder the ability of Dominican-Americans to work through their shared, traumatic experience with the Trujillo regime. Furthermore, this study …

Nourishing The Self: Cookbooks As Autobiography, Rebecca Quist Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

Though casual readers may often assume cookbooks are primarily reference materials,cookbooks actually offer readers a type of autobiography; I examine cookbooks as literary autobiographical acts by analyzing three celebrity chefs' cookbooks and the recent film, Julie and Julia. Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, illustrates several key autobiographical ideas, specifically Barthes' ideas of readerly and writerly texts and the distinction between an author and a persona. The film acts as a visual representation of the way a reader engages with a text and makes it a writerly text while successfully distinguishing between an author and …

March 8, 2012: News From Dr. Perryman-Clark, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Respect Des Fonds D'Archives: Theory And Application, Danielle Lee-Muma

Data and Test Instruments

This paper examines the principle of Respect des fonds, its history and reason for becoming a dominant principle, and what its aspects mean: interpreting original order as an internal arrangement, and discussing external arrangement in the principle of provenance. Case studies (both real world examples and hypothetical examples based on real fonds and archives) will be used to discuss how the twin principles of respect des fonds, original order and provenance can be put into practice. The case studies are used to discuss what problems can arise in the application of respect des fonds.

March 5, 2012: Rhetoric & Writing Studies/First Year Writing Position, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

March 2, 2012: Ph.D. Student Brandon Jennings Recent Publications, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Ivy Leaves, Volume 86, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2012 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Anna Davis, Brianne Holmes, Emmy Wheatley, Cara Dillon, Drew Welborn, Jesica Hooper, Robert Causey, Rachel Spoon, Mandie Wines, Jenni Elledge, Naomi Nakazato, Emily Weiland, Laura Jones, Jivan Davé, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker. Photography by Jivan Davé and Rachel Spoon.

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Literature-Based Professional Writing: An Oxymoron Whose Time Has Come, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema, Kelley R. Newhouse, Michele L. Propper, Ruth M. Riedel, Barbara S. Teitelzweig

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article discusses a study regarding the integration of professional writing in English classes. It mentions the proposal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in its annual convention on associating professional writing with literature. It also states that connecting literature with technical writing in English classrooms provides students with opportunities to absorb real life writing experiences.

Is It The Way To Teach Language The Way We Teach Language? English Language Teaching In Rural Pakistan, Ali Nawab

Professional Development Centre, Chitral

With the growing importance and need of English language in the global context, efforts are being made in the developing context to improve the quality of teaching English with the assumption that teaching of English facilitates the acquisition of English Language. What is Pakistani teachers approach to the teaching of English language and does the way they teach English facilitate the language acquisition? The current study explores this question at secondary level in the context of Chitral, a remote district of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province Pakistan. The researcher visited the randomly selected secondary schools and consulted English teachers interviewing them and …

El Choteo En Cien Botellas En Una Pared Y Raining Backwards: El Gracioso Disfraz De Las Circunstancias Trágicas Durante La Revolución Cubana Y El Período Especial, Kristin Nicole Lisenby

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to explore the idea that the combination of tragedy and humor in Cuban and Cuban-American literature is a form of “choteo” or “no tomar nada en serio,” which demonstrates a coping strategy used by Cubans during hard times. In the case of Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared, and Roberto Fernandez's Raining Backwards, I believe that the two authors use his and her own personal insight into a Cuban's life during the Cuban Revolution of the 60's and the Special Period of the 90's, and that those personal experiences are reflected throughout the novels …

Dead Or Exploding: A Book Of Letters, Jerika Marchan

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Timeline Of Creating The Original Performance Work, A Scotch Verdict, Cynthia Goatley, Rebecca Burkhardt

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

We first conceived the idea of writing a hybrid piece containing elements of opera and musical theatre in 1998. The musical, as we now call it, is based on Lillian Faderman’s Scotch Verdict, which revolves around the true story of Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods who ran a boarding school for girls in 1810 Edinburgh, Scotland. The accusation of one of their students, Jane Cumming, illegitimate grandchild of wealthy and powerful Dame Cumming Gordon, brought ruin upon the school and the schoolmistresses. Jane Cumming had accused the schoolmistresses of committing “unnatural acts” together. This tale told to Dame Gordon …

Power Of The Narrator (Review), Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

Reviews the book Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles by L. Timmel Duchamp. Seattle, WA: Aqueduct, 2010

A Literature Of Transgression And Subversion: Review Of John Clute's Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika In The World Storm, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Future's Past: Review Of Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock: A Story Of 22nd-Century America, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Tales Of Empire: Orientalism In Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature, Brittany Renee Griffin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Children's literature often does not hold the same weight in the studies of a culture as its big brother, the novel. However, as children's literature is written by adults, to convey information which is important for a child to learn in order to be a functioning member of that society, it can be analyzed in the same way novels are, to provide insight into the broad sweeping issues that concerned the adults of that era. Nineteenth-century British children's literature in particular reveals the deep-seated preoccupation the British Empire had with its eastern colonies, and shows how England's relationship to those …

February 23, 2012: Graduate Student Conference, 2/24, Center For Humanities, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

How Will We Manage The Alt Text?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

My interest in comics from an academic standpoint is how language codes function. Mostly I examine how dialogue is structured and how characters build their relationships and identities through their talk. This approach blends tenets of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. (For an example of this kind of research, see my article on The Rawhide Kid in the journal ImageTexT.)

One methodological concern for analysts who do similar work is this: how is the language in the comic best prepared for analysis? To analyze dialogue, we can create a transcript to account for typical features of conversation. For …

February 22, 2012:Utz Prefaces Volume On Neo-Medievalism In The Media, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.