English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Comparison Between The Verbal Interruptions By Speakers Of English As A Lingua Franca (Elf) And Speakers Of English As A Native Language (Enl), Yue Yuan Li

Lingnan Theses

Previous research focused primarily on how interruptions vary according to social factors in situations where English is the native language for all speakers (see Menz and Al-Roubaie, 2008; O‟Reilly, 2008; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Zimmerman and West, 1975). Little has been done on interruptions in situations where English is used as a lingua franca. The purpose of this research is to 1) provide conversational evidence on how experienced ELF speakers make interruptions, 2) explore functions of interruptions in ELF communication; 3) compare the types and functions of interruptions in ELF communication with those in ENL communication; 4) compare the types …

At Home With American Literature, Shauna Robertson

The Utah English Journal

In 1822, the American actor, poet, and playwright John Howard Payne wrote a song called “Home! Sweet Home!” It became an instant hit, and its refrain, “[b]e it ever so humble, there's no place like home,” has become etched in our cultural memory. The author L. Frank Baum echoed this sentiment with a twist at the end of his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Most people are familiar with Dorothy’s chant as she clicks the heels of her ruby slippers together in the 1939 film, but Baum’s literary version is even more powerful. "No matter how dreary and gray …

Sunset Song: The Stony Limits Of Romanticism And Modernism, Hillary Gamblin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Katherine Anne Porter And The Problem Of Critical Assessment Across Borders, Max O. Johnson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Cover And Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

The Politics And Economics Of The Romantic Poetess, Rachel A. Wortman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Calvinism And Military Justice In American Literature, Nadia Hamilton Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores judicial process in the military as revealed in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny and Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. The purpose of my project was to conduct an in depth study of Essentialism in military justice that is indicative of a culturally specific form of information management, as revealed in these texts. Essentialism is a form of information management that relies upon classification qualified through intuitive knowledge and superficial signification. This signification is used to certify the existence of self-contained states that function as a metaphorical metonymy for multiple unknowns. Moreover, …

All The Things I'Ve Been, Richard Helmling

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard identifies narrative as a distinct type of knowledge created and reshaped by individuals as nodal points. The novel All the Things I've Been explores this paradigm in Postmodern thought by following a narrator disconnected from ostensible reality as he attempts to create a new explanatory narrative to excuse his own misdeeds. Living in a subterranean hole, he draws on elements of the literature he hoards about him to construct a plot that will account for a past he is unwilling or unable to confront.

Passing, Segregation, And Assimilation: How Nella Larsen Changed The Passing Novel, Vivian Maguire

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The two had lost touch when Clare's father died and Clare was forced to move in with her two white and racist aunts. When they meet again, Irene is living in Harlem with her two children and her husband, who practices medicine. Clare has married a successful businessman, John Bellew. Clare's husband however, is a white racist who is unaware that Clare is in fact black. …

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

In The Margins: Thresholds Of Text And Identity In U.S.-Mexico Border Literature, Allison E. Fagan

Dissertations

My project links discussions of U.S.-Mexico border literature's emphasis on marginalized identity with the growing textual studies interest in the marginal, often-invisible processes which aid the production and shape the reception of books. The dissertation not only calls attention to textual instability, or the places where the differing and even opposing intentions of authors, publishers, and editors often become strikingly clear, but also focuses on the political, racial, ethnic, and social instabilities inherent in publishing the work of borderlands writers. It advocates and advances a sustained attentiveness to the conditions under which border literature can and does get produced. Authors …

Uncommon Sense In Renaissance English Literature, Eric Byville

Dissertations

My project explores the distinctive union of Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan satire in Renaissance English drama, particularly the works of John Marston and William Shakespeare. Unlike Ben Jonson, who incorporated both Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan satire in his drama but did so in different plays (Catiline, Every Man Out), Marston and Shakespeare combined the two traditions in one and the same play, such as the former's Antonio's Revenge (1600) and The Malcontent (c. 1603) and the latter's Troilus and Cressida (1601) and Timon of Athens (c. 1606). They recognized and exploited a deep compatibility between the two traditions, a compatibility …

Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity In Early Modern Literature, Tripthi Pillai

Dissertations

A study of Renaissance literature's engagement with temporality, my project is a critical evaluation of the concept of early modern futurity, of which I propose three categories: "Material futurity"; "Biological futurity"; and "Political futurity." In the moments that I identify in texts composed during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns in England, I demonstrate that the future--as an idea--structures individuals' actions and ruptures social formations. Futurity, which I define as a play of multiple desires that exist simultaneously within our present beings, is a volatile agent of imagination in early modern literature. Futurity collides with the cultural sites of memory …

Virginia Woolf: Radio, Gramophone, And Broadcasting, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Hull Iowa: Yesterday And Today, Lisa Jansma

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this research project was to teach the history of Hull, Iowa through an informational book for the elementary students. The research created a history book of Hull, Iowa that will be used to supplement the upper elementary Iowa History Unit at the Boyden-Hull Elementary School and others in the surrounding area.

Katelyn's Story: Using Fiction To Combat High School Dropout, Cecilia La France

Graduate Research Papers

High school dropout continues to be a problem for schools, communities, and the individuals who leave an academic high school program. High school dropouts suffer in greater health problems, economic struggles, and legal issues than those who complete a high school program. Despite the persistence of the high school problem in American culture, young adult literature doesn't keep pace in representation of the subject. Additionally, among the limited number of books addressing the topic of high school dropout, female protagonists lack representation reflecting their percentage of the dropout rates.

Young adult literature provides readers a learning and reflection opportunity in …

Early American Self-Reflexive Writing: Revising The Tradition, Susie Scifres Kuilan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study focuses on self- reflexivity in early American texts. This self-reflexivity demonstrates that these early American authors were attempting to define “American fiction” and were participating in a new literary tradition that was developing simultaneously with the development of the new country. After the introduction, Chapter One lays the groundwork for my study by exploring current views of these texts and what led to these views. Chapter Two explores the difficulties facing post-Revolutionary authors and their reactions to these obstacles as reflected in their prefaces and their other writings. I show the way these authors self-consciously respond to the …

Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction And India, Suparno Banerjee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that science fiction as a genre intervenes in the history-oriented discourse of postcolonial Anglophone Indian literature and refocuses attention on the nation’s future—its position in global politics, its shifting religious and social values, its rapid industrialization, the clash between orthodoxy and modernity, and ultimately the dream of a multicultural nation. Anglophone Indian science fiction also indicates India’s movement away from a nation trying to negotiate the stigma of colonialism to a nation emerging as a new world power. Thus, this genre reconstructs the Indian identity not only in the domestic sphere, but also in a …

Writing About The South "In Her Own Way": Gender And Region In The Work Of Southern Women Playwrights, Casey Kayser

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how identity—gender, race, sexuality, regional affiliation—intersects with considerations of the dramatic genre, commercial and critical factors in the American theatre, and understandings about the American South to complicate how contemporary southern women playwrights represent region. In light of the always-already "performative" nature of the South, and geographical, commercial, and ideological factors that set the South in opposition to the North, southern women playwrights face additional difficulties in navigating issues of authenticity and simulacra, the universal versus the specific, ideas about southern "backwardness" versus northern sophistication, and audience participation in fetishizing or distancing the South. Using drama as …

Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies Of Collective Resistance, Jessica Ketcham Weber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance, I argue that representations of contemporary activism against corporate globalization, as analyzed in three different sites of commercially-driven media texts—newspapers, film, and websites—teach people to move away from public forms of collective activism and towards privatized and institutionally-sponsored forms as part of the larger project of neoliberalism. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the representations of, and responses to the representations of, two events—the protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999 and the protests during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York City—as …