English Language and Literature Commons^™

Critical Pop Culture Consumers: Using Tupac And Music In The Classroom To Teach Critical Literary Analysis Of Pop Culture, Marilyn Miller

The Utah English Journal

Teaching critical analysis is a unit that I designed to get students to understand the elements in an increasingly complex world where language provides the vehicle to refine thought. Because students are imbued in the element, they are often persuaded, cajoled, and tricked into embracing messages and images that may negatively influence their lives. Teaching them to look at the music and the videos that influence them and critically analyze the persuasive techniques and the impact of these messages on their developing values empowers them to choose more carefully the music they embrace or at least understand the influence of …

Book Review: Out Of My Mind, Jenna Fitch

The Utah English Journal

Melody is one of the brightest students in her class, but no one knows. All of the words she wishes she could express are stuck inside—Melody has cerebral palsy and can’t talk. Only through the help of a new, special computer does Melody find her voice and correct many of her classmates’ misconceptions about people with disabilities. Unfortunately, neither Melody nor her family anticipates the additional stigmas and judgment that will arrive along with Melody’s new voice.

This 300+ page quick read says what many of the physically and mentally disabled students in our schools can’t: include me. Through Out …

Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

The Sacrament Of Violence: Myth And War In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Tanya Engelhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My primary aim for this study is to illuminate the Ransom trilogy's inherent psychological and spiritual themes, as well as demonstrate how these themes clarify Lewis's philosophical and political goals for the text. Specifically, by investigating Lewis's mythic imagery and suffering motifs in light of psychoanalytic and theological literary criticisms, I elucidate the reasoning behind Lewis's unique—and at times, horrific—portrayal of fear, violence, and death. I also investigate how Lewis integrates his theology with the horrors of personal and intrapersonal suffering, as well as how he utilizes imagination and myth to explicate the practical (or political) implications of his theodicy. …

The Best And The Brightest: The Overachievement Rhetoric During America's Polio Epidemics, Samantha Taryn Putman

English Theses - Archive

In 1985, Dr. Richard Bruno, a post polio syndrome specialist, conducted a study on the personality traits of polio survivors, ultimately concluding that polio survivors have a significantly higher incidence of reporting overachieving tendencies than both people who did not have polio and people who have other, even similar, disabilities. The idea that polio patients were overachievers, however, has been a common theme in a variety of works, from memoirs written by polio patients to medical journals, since the epidemic period. If polio survivors were more likely, as both Bruno's study and the great wealth of anecdotal evidence supports, to …

A Graduate English Major's Search For Meaning: Toward A Pedagogy Of Creative Rhetoric, Lindsey Gendke

English Theses - Archive

Building upon recent work by Gerald Graff, Tim Mayers, Douglas Hesse, and Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll, I propose a pedagogical approach that integrates creative writing with rhetoric, much as the emerging "creative writing studies" is integrating creative writing with literature. As I demonstrate through a fusion of personal, academic, and creative writing, composition pedagogies that have ignored creative writing have alienated writing-disposed students such as myself, as well as failed to prepare them for basic and necessary writing and teaching tasks outside the university. As an antidote to these problems, I suggest Creative Rhetoric, a pedagogy that champions authentic …

Blood Path: An Original Screenplay Based On The Life And Works Of John Rollin Ridge, Jennifer Chamberlain

English Theses - Archive

Blood Path is an original, feature-length screenplay based on the life of John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867), a mixed-blood Cherokee whose work of sensational fiction, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, is considered the first novel written in English by an American Indian author. A synopsis of the plot is as follows: After seeing his father murdered before his eyes at the age of 12, Ridge vows revenge on the rival faction responsible. As a young man, Ridge kills one of his rivals during an argument and is forced to flee to Gold Rush California, where he becomes obsessed with …

"What Shall We Use To Fill The Empty Spaces?": Displacement In Frank Norris's Mcteague, Jennifer Bugna Lambeth

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Author's abstract: McTeague, Frank Norris's Naturalistc text written in 1899, depicts the corruption of a California couple due to influences outside of their control. In positioning Trina McTeague as a woman unable to identify with either of the two major feminine ideologies of the day, the Angel in the House and the New Woman, this paper examines her identity as conflicted because of this lack of autonomy. Her failure to identify herself leads to a mental break that is reflected in the domestic spaces she inhabits. The places she lives each become smaller and dirtier reflecting her diminished mental capacity. …

Tree Rings: Post-Holocaust Memory And Representation, Rory Davidson

Undergraduate Student Research Awards

No abstract provided.

The Shamanic Archetype In Robinson Jeffers Poetry, Steven B. Herrmann

Jeffers Studies

This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista …

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Daniella Kostroun And Lisa Vollendorf, Editors Women, Religion, And The Atlantic World (1600-1800): Book Review, Robin Runia

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This recent collection of essays promises to transcend the Old vs. New World, Catholic vs. Protestant, and European vs. indigenous dichotomies that have dominated the emerging field of Atlantic studies. Edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf and drawing from a colloquium sponsored by UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600-1800)explores how religion and spirituality shaped local politics, economics, gender, and race in Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America. The alternative directions described and modeled in the volume all assume a women's and …

Jason E. Vickers Wesley: A Guide For The Perplexed: Book Review, Richard P. Heitzenrater

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Attempts to analyze John Wesley seriously will sooner or later (probably sooner) result in growing perplexity in the minds of the analysts. There are two main reasons for their consternation. First, difficulties naturally arise from trying to understand a person who was a major national figure during much of his life over two centuries ago. Wesley's was a long life marked by growth, development, change, arguments against opponents from all sides (in different ways at different times and places), and his status as legend in his own day-a reputation that was, in part, of his own doing. Second, the variety …

Patrick Muller: Latitudinarianism And Didacticism In Eighteenth~ Century Literature: Moral Theology In Fielding, Sterne, And Goldsmith: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Latitudinarianism is one of those terms modern authors use when discussing disputes within the eighteenth-century Church of England, often without providing a definition of the term itself. Liberal and conservative, Whig and Tory, are unhelpful in identifying a person's place on a religious spectrum that was not necessarily political. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy are germane only when considering debates that crossed denominational lines-or, at the very least, threatened to cause schism. So scholars often use the term "latitudinarian" by default.

Anti~Catholicism And The Gothic Imaginary: The Historical And Literary Contexts, Diane Long Hoeveler

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

General historical consensus (long in the grip of Whig assumptions) has frequently proclaimed that religion during the Enlightenment period was no longer the highly contentious issue that it had been since the reformation in England. By the mid-eighteenth century, the long siege of fighting and dying over religious beliefs was, in fact, believed to be safely in the past as an elite class and an enlightened bourgeoisie embraced the brave new world of rationalism. This upper crust relegated religious disputes to a much earlier European culture that had been prone to such primitive, superstitious, and irrational behaviors and beliefs. The …

Joris Van Eijnatten: Preaching, Sermon, And Cultural Change In The Long Eighteenth Century: Book Review, Anna Battigelli

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

For decades, the eighteenth-century sermon has fallen into scholarly neglect, despite its role as the foremost performance of public self-definition. The sermon provides insight into the experience of daily life, evolving national self-definitions, and changing cultural trends. Indeed, it is difficult to absorb the complexity and paradoxes of the period known as the Enlightenment apart from the kinds of sermons it produced. The essays in this volume focus on the eighteenth century and cover all of Europe, casting some needed light on the sermon's theological foundations, its transformation throughout the course of the eighteenth century, its content, and, most interesting, …

Wherein Lies Virtue? Secular Matters And Godly Matters In The Works Of Sarah Fielding, Mary Ann Rooks

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Like many writers of the eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding frequently proclaims that the function of her narratives, and of fiction in general, is to inculcate virtue through entertaining storytelling; in her novels she forthrightly intends, as she says in the introduction to The Cry, to "entertain and instruct:' In her prefatory and other critical materials, she tends to draw from an arsenal of commonly referenced classical poets and early modern philosophers, essayists, and literary masters to illustrate and defend her moral purpose. Indeed, one might be led to believe, based solely on reading the ancillary, nonfiction expressions surrounding Fielding's …

Robert D. Cornwall And William Gibson, Editors: Religion, Politics, And Dissent, 1660-1832: Essays In Honour Of James E. Bradley: Book Review, Dustin D. Stewart

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I n reviewing a Festschrift, one shouldn't lose sight of the volume and focus overmuch on the work of its dedicatee. The success of a party is the responsibility of the hosts rather than the guest of honor. Yet for a certain kind of honoree one may well expect a certain kind of party, so the relationship between the honored work and the honoring work demands attention. The editors of Religion, Politics and Dissentbegin their book by depicting James E. Bradley, whose sixty-fifth birthday occasioned the collection, as an opponent of what they call "the dominant historical position" …

Full Issue

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Kathryn Duncan, Editor Religion In The Age Of Reason: A Transatlantic Study Of The Long Eighteenth Century: Book Review, David B. Paxman

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When asked what would follow race, class, and gender as the new "center of intellectual energy in the academy:' Stanley Fish answered, "religion" (ix). Kathryn Duncan's collection of twelve essays in Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century turns our attention in that direction and, in so doing, demonstrates why religion merits greater attention. Six of the twelve essays have appeared in an issue of AMS's Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, volume 4, edited by Duncan.