English Language and Literature Commons^™

"Lord Of The Flies": The Educational Value Of Golding's Text, Erin M. Frank

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

This paper takes a careful look at the content of Lord of the Flies often questioned by censorship advocates. Next, an exploration of the import behind William Golding’s symbolic objects and characters reveals the specifics of the literary and human value of the novel. Finally, insight from case studies helps further demonstrate the appropriateness and effectiveness of the novel in high school English curriculums while also revealing student responses in regard to Golding’s work and the worldly issues informed by it.

Meaningful Meaninglessness: Albert Camus' Presentation Of Absurdism As A Foundation For Goodness, Maria K. Genovese

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In 1957, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature. By that time he had written such magnificently important works such as Caligula (1938), The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), The Rebel (1951), and The Fall (1956). Camus was a proponent of Absurdism, a philosophy that realizes the workings of the world are inherently meaningless and indifferent to the human struggle to create meaning. Absurdism, however, is not a nihilistic philosophy. In The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, and Caligula, Camus offers a foundation of optimism and morality.

Perilous Pilgrimage: A Lady’S Flight Into The Rocky Mountain Wilderness, Jane Koerner

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

“Perilous Pilgrimage: A Lady’s Flight into the Rocky Mountain Wilderness” is comprised of four thematically linked essays set in the Colorado Rockies. In these essays I probe my fascination with masculinity at an early age, the impact of my rape at age twenty-two, the dependency and resentment that undermined my marriage after the rape, and my quest after my divorce fifteen years later to define myself on my own terms. The link joining these strands is the tension between my drive for independence and my disassociation from my mind and body as a result of the rape.

“Perilous Pilgrimage” revisits …

Hold, Hold, My Heart, Andrew Berthrong

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis consists of a traditional introduction followed by a first-person, fictional story told in seven chapters. The story begins with the protagonist in his apartment preparing to write, a brief account of his stalling, and then his beginning to write. Those chapters taking place in the vicinity of the apartment are in the present tense and those relating past adventures are written in third person, one chapter for each adventure: Africa, sailing, and Navajo Mountain. After each adventure, the narration returns to the apartment.

This piece is the embodiment of both the vigorous internal work in search of understanding …

From Main-Travelled Roads To Route 66: Transitions In Prairie Naturalism, Michelle Nicole Munkres

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

To best represent a people of a specific spatial and historical context, literary texts must necessarily demonstrate a vested interest and familiarity of a region and its inhabitants’ common experiences. In examining one particular aspect of regional naturalism in American literature, this study explores the basic tenets of Prairie Naturalism as defined by three major authors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck. The short stories in Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891) establish the foundation of Prairie Naturalism with meticulous attention to daily lives on the plains and with political strategies to improve the lives of the oppressed. Willa Cather’s …

Monarchs In Love And Other Stories, Matthew Swetnam

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Monarchs in Love and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories. These stories are structurally and tonally heterogeneous, and it is this heterogeneity of form that emerges as the collection's central concern. Present are stories which borrow other forms' organizational conceits (the almanac entries of "Excerpts from the Dwarf-Monger's Handbook"), stories which arrange themselves around arbitrary organizational conceits (the order of the letters of the alphabet in "26 Characters"), and stories which employ radically traditional formal models ("Blind Boy and Mammoth.") Present are stories narrated in the first-person point-of-view ("For a Walk," "Harem Girls"), stories narrated in the …

The Impact Of Cooperative Video Games On Team Cohesion, Greg Anderson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In today’s economy, productivity and efficiency require collaboration between employees. In order to improve collaboration the factors affecting teamwork must be examined to identify where changes can be made in order to increase performance. One factor contributing to teamwork is team cohesion and represents a process whereby members are joined by a common bond in the pursuit of a common objective. A popular social bonding activity sweeping the world is playing cooperative video games. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of playing cooperative video games on team cohesion. Subjects (N=56) were randomly placed into 15 teams …

Impact Of Forest Management Techniques On Bats With A Focus On The Endangered Indiana Myotis (Myotis Sodalis), Jermey J. Sheets

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how forest management practices impact bats is important for maintaining a diverse bat community; rare species, especially the federally endangered Indiana myotis (Myotis sodalis) need special consideration. Bats play an important role in the environment because they prey on insects, especially pest species, and conservation of viable foraging and roosting habitats is critical. Positive and negative aspects of the implementation of forest management techniques are discussed for each bat species. Bats were sampled using mist nets at four locations in Morgan-Monroe and five locations in Yellowwood State Forests twice during each summer 2006-2008. Netting locations were adjacent to or …

Extracellular Matrix Proteins: Implications For Angiogenesis, Kent Edward Williams

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is an essential requirement for maintaining permanent shape and rigidity in multicellular organisms. The ECM serves two main functions: scaffolding and signaling. Insoluble collagen and soluble proteoglycans, glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), and glycoproteins allow for water retention and flexibility. The signaling role of the ECM is essential for a multitude of events including vascular development and angiogenesis. Via interactions with vascular endothelial cells, proteins of the ECM can induce or repress angiogenesis.

With His Guitar In His Hand: Representations Of U.S. - Mexico Border Masculinity In Robert Rodriguez's “El Mariachi”, Marlene Galvan

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis closely examines Robert Rodriguez’s film El Mariachi and its portrayal of border masculinity - the masculine identity which exists on the physical space between the U.S. and Mexico, but also the masculinity created by the melding of cultures. The film ignores this complexity and instead dichotomizes maleness along the traditionally Western lines of hard versus soft masculinity. Further, the film glorifies violence, the exploitation of female bodies, shows women as only useful agents of man, punishes transgressive women, and depicts men as only possessing or aspiring to possess individualistic, economic, phallocentric, and patriarchal power which reinforces a variation …

An Examination Of The Life And Work Of Gustav Hasford, Matthew Samuel Ross

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket has remained in the national consciousness twenty years after its release, the author of its source material, Gustav Hasford, has not. Few people know or remember that the Oscar-nominated film was not an original work but was adapted by Hasford, Kubrick, and Dispatches author Michael Herr from Hasford's 1979 novel The Short-Timers. Fewer people remember that following the well-reviewed The Short-Timers Hasford published a sequel, The Phantom Blooper, as well as one final novel A Gypsy Good Time, a frenetic parody of detective fiction. To say that Gustav Hasford is primarily remembered as …

"Subject To Change" : The Composition Course Syllabus And Intersections Of Authority, Genre, And Community., Christopher Michael Alexander 1976-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an investigation of composition's disciplinary conceptions of the course syllabus, from its often-relegated position as textual object to a more interactive and complex subject of our discipline. The course syllabus is an example of an occluded genre, operating behind the scenes while serving commitments and obligations of a dominant ideology. This position as an occluded genre offers opportunities for composition instructors to thoroughly examine what our syllabi are really doing. By further exploring how we think about course syllabi, we can contribute to the development of our own teaching, as well as the teaching styles and practices …

English At Oberlin: 1880-1960, Robert Longsworth

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defining A Metaphorical Space To Speak From : Exploring The Relationship Between Women And Place Within Gloria Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place And Toni Morrison's Sula, Adriana Maria Immediate

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores the complex yet indispensable relationship that exists between the Black female character and place in Gloria Naylor’s novel The Women of Brewster Place and Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. The representation of place, both landscape and homeplace, are examined through a close reading of language, particularly through metaphorical elements. Naylor and Morrison employ metaphorical elements to not only emphasize each woman’s intimate engagement with her sense of place, but also to acknowledge the transformative powers that place wields over each woman’s identity. For each woman that has been suppressed and silenced within a patriarchal society, the home becomes …

‘But They Would Not Teach Her To Play’ : Child Heroines, Fantasy, And The Victorian Debate On Female Education, Nicole Papaioannou

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

For England, the nineteenth century was a time of transformation. The landscape of England changed rapidly as industrialization and urbanization took hold of the nation. The population boomed, and children overpopulated cities and towns. With so many youngsters running about, mass education became a major public concern. By the midnineteenth century, the sad state of the nation’s public education system had been exposed by the Newcastle Committee, and reforms were beginning to take place.

In particular, the education available for females came under scrutiny. Many lower class girls left school unable to read, write, or perform basic mathematics, while middle …

Changing Clothes: Re-Dressing Voice For A Stylish Return, Deborah Gail Jones

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This paper concerns the idea of voice within the field of composition studies and more specifically the canon of style. I examine the current rise of style to a place of prominence within composition and take issue with the exclusion of voice from this resurgence. By looking more closely at the complex definitions surrounding voice as well as the associations and critiques which have worked to repress its contemporary discussion, I demonstrate the unfounded nature of its dismissal. After revealing the ways in which voice is compatible with postmodern thought and usable despite its complexity, I outline some of the …

`Finding Gold In A Gully': Nineteenth-Century Australia In Constructions Of British Domesticity From Sensation Fiction To Realism, Lisa Vandenbossche

All Theses

This thesis investigates nineteenth-century Australia as a frequently disregarded site of colonial discourse where men and women were able to create wealth but unable to transform economic gains into social currency upon return to England and irrevocably weakened English patriarchal authority when they attempted to do so. Unlike many of the other British colonies such as India and Africa, due to its demographics the Australian colonies by and large remained absent from nineteenth-century racial violence, thus allowing greater possibilities for economic advancement and social rehabilitation of disenfranchised English populations. By combining travel narratives with the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth …

Book Review: David Rosen, "Power, Plain English, And The Rise Of Modern Poetry", Alan Golding

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Inkheart, Directed By Iain Softley. Reviewed By Lynn Maudlin., Lynn Maudlin

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

C.S. Lewis On The Final Frontier: Science And The Supernatural In The Space Trilogy, By Sanford Schwartz. Reviewed By Ryder W. Miller., Ryder W. Miller

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.