English Language and Literature Commons^™

Lawful Injustice: Novel Readings Of Racialized Temporality And Legal Instabilities, Danielle N. Mercier

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project, “Lawful Injustice: Novel Readings of Racialized Temporality and Legal Instabilities,” examines three specific BIPOC communities across literature—Native American, African American, and Asian American—to understand the influence of U.S. legal frameworks and temporalities upon both the collective and the individual. I assess how legal frameworks create and protect their own instabilities as well as understand how they are produced by the uneven temporal structures of the law. I examine how such legal and settler colonial temporalities are at odds with Native American, African American, and Asian American temporalities. These temporalities—a legal/juridical temporality which reinscribes settler colonial oppression and the …

Textual Variants In Eudora Welty’S "A Piece Of News”, Brooke Derrington, Abby Choe

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Eudora Welty’s “A Piece of News” presents the question, how does one achieve self-actualization? For the protagonist Ruby Fisher, the answer is language, although that answer is not clear in the original 1937 published version of the story. That story’s focal point is Ruby’s tumultuous and complicated relationship with her husband, Clyde. In contrast, the revised 1941 version from Welty’s collection A Curtain of Green shifts the focus from Ruby’s abusive marriage to her interiority. The subsequent increase in word count, shifts in narration, and emphasis on Ruby claiming her name when she reads it in a newspaper elevates the …

Analyzing The Cynical Perspective Of Death In The Book Thief, Dorothy Elizabeth Hollar

Masters Theses

In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, death is used as a theme and a character to convey the plot of the story. The character of death is used as a device to show the life of a young girl living in Nazi Germany through the eyes of something more sinister and pessimistic. The story explores trauma, friendship, and the power of words when it seems all hope is lost. This thesis will explore the aspect of death as a character and will examine how it works in the story. The creative portion of my thesis will examine the themes …

"We Are Bad Feminists!": Understanding Genre And Rhetoric In (Post)Feminist Dramedy Television, Cailin Rolph

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Centered on Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016) this thesis examines the use of genre conventions in dramedy to facilitate feminist critiques of postfeminist ideals. In conducting a case study of feminist rhetoric present in the shows Girls and Fleabag, this thesis addresses a gap in genre studies concerning the social and political potency of the dramedy genre. The thesis utilizes rhetorical critique, through generic methods, to identify the specific techniques used by Dunham and Waller-Bridge. Through its analyses, this thesis argues that dramedy can uniquely operate as a work of social action and critique, using …

“Éowyn It Was, And Dernhelm Also”: Reading The ‘Wild Shieldmaiden’ Through A Queer Lens., Sara Brown

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Éowyn we first meet in 'The Two Towers' is a woman who has been traumatised by the loss of her parents at a young age, the recent loss of her cousin Théodred, the apparent weakening of her uncle Théoden, and her inability to escape the lascivious gaze of Wormtongue. Marginalised by her gender and by social expectation, her desire to find purpose in her life as a shieldmaiden is repeatedly thwarted. Seeking to reclaim control over her life and to make her own choices, she rides out with the Rohirrim not as Éowyn, but as Dernhelm.

Past scholars have …

Norse Inspired Tales: Four Changes Of Fate, Pete Wille

University Honors Theses

Norse Inspired Tales: Four Changes of Fate is a collection of four original short stories meant to act as an introduction to a broader literary world where Norse myth meets late eighteen hundred's, San Francisco. The introduction gives background on my literary journey and explains some of the choices made within these stories. Each following story reveals the characters and the world they currently inhabit.

Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Creating And Maintaining Black Life-Worlds”: The Black Aesthetics Of Bernardine Evaristo’S Blonde Roots And Girl, Woman, Other, Sharanya Dg

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Black Aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into the objects and practices of expressions coming from people who have been racialized as black. These expressive practices then lend to the creation of the life-worlds of people subjected to racist discourses. One such author in the contemporary English society, Bernadine Evaristo, responds to anti-black racist discourses by exploring the cultural plurality of British black life-worlds. This paper is a textual and formal analysis of two experimental novels of Evaristo to study how they distinctly present the quotidian lives of various characters in their racialised bodies to reflect on the sociocultural and political …

Beyond "His Native Town": Travel And Alienation In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Erin G. Quinn

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein features a surprisingly extensive variety of locations through which Victor Frankenstein travels, ranging from the vibrant cities of London and Oxford to the isolated Orkney islands and Arctic lands. Scholars have analyzed the roles which some of these settings, namely, the Alps and the Arctic, play in the novel, and many have noted the importance of travel to the text. However, little scholarship exists assessing how Victor’s travels as a whole impact him, as well as their collective purpose within the story. Given the prominence of travel in Shelley’s text, as well as the fact …

Milton, Immortality, And Obtaining Eliot's "Significant Emotion", Aaron By Gorner

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T. S. Eliot famously asserts that very few can actually access "significant emotion" in poetry, and do so by understanding where relics of the classical tradition assert their immortality. In my article, I support Eliot's claims by demonstrating two (previously undiscussed) occasions where Milton, via Paradise Lost, inserts Christianity into the classical world: Satan and Abdiel alluding to Virgil's Remulus and Ascanius, and then Eve and Adam with Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus. Ultimately it will be apparent that not only does Milton's poetry obtain Eliot's "significant emotion" and its associated immortality, …

The “Fruit” Of Success: Christina Rossetti’S “Goblin Market” As An Allegory Of The 19th Century Literary Marketplace, Priyodarshini Ghosh

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is probably her most critically acclaimed literary masterpiece. It has been accepted undoubtedly as an allegory of something, but critics have not been able to come to a unanimous conclusion as to what. Some have tried to establish it as a Christian allegory of Fall and Redemption, while others as an allegory of sexual temptation. Certain critics have hinted that this poem could be an allegory of the literary marketplace during the 19^th century, which was wholly dominated by men, women’s entry into that marketplace being either restricted or marked by insurmountable obstacles. Following the …

From "Pictures Of Perfection" To "No Ideal Expression": How Jane Austen Reimagines And Reinvents Eighteenth-Century Heroines, Gretchen Picklesimer Kinney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Cover And Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Gender And Orality In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Nessa Ordukhani

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay explores the intersection of postmodernism and multiculturalism in Toni Morrison's novel, Song of Solomon. It delves into the destabilization of historical metanarratives by postmodernism through the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, which challenges the notion of a singular truth and questions who constructs popular historical narratives. The essay discusses the role of the victors, particularly white males, in shaping history and the process of legitimation through which historical facts are determined. It examines how Morrison's novel offers an alternative history that highlights African American perspectives and challenges the dominant white narrative. Additionally, the essay explores the tension between multiculturalism …

The History Of -Eer In English: Suffix Competition Or Symbiosis?, Zachary Dukic, Chris C. Palmer

Faculty Articles

Ecological models of competition have provided great explanatory power regarding synonymy in derivational morphology. Competition models of this type have certainly shown their utility, as they have demonstrated, among other things, the relevance of frequency measures, productivity, compositionality and analyzability when comparing the development of morphological constructions. There has been less consideration of alternative models that could be used to describe the historical co-development of suffixes that produce words with sometimes similar forms or meanings but are not inevitably or solely in competition. The symbiotic model proposed in this article may help answer larger questions in linguistics, such as how …

You’Re Invited! Collaborating With Faculty And Students To Create A Successful Library Event, Laura Semrau

Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students

To celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the Baylor University Libraries hosted a three-day celebration; “Shakespeare 400” drew faculty members from six academic departments and leveraged the talents of both graduate and undergraduate students. The four main events drew a cumulative crowd of over 200 people. Graduate students contributed to the events through music performance, a dramatic reading, enthusiastic promotion, and engaged participation. This presentation will explore key take-aways for including graduate students in library events.

The success of Shakespeare 400 was largely due to collaborations between the library, faculty members, and graduate …

Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore (2023), Ivano Sassanelli

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Ivano Sassanelli, of Tolkien: Uomo, Professore, Autore (2023)

Tolkien And The Relation Between Sub-Creation And Reality (2023), Edited By Guiseppe Pezzini And Eden O'Brien, John Wm. Houghton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by John Wm. Houghton, of Tolkien and the Relation between Sub-Creation and Reality (2023), edited by Guiseppe Pezzini and Eden O'Brien

Engl110 Course Syllabus (Composition), James Andrew Grammer

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for Freshman Composition Course/Intro to Writing.

Sauron: Weirdly Sexy, Robert T. Tally Jr.

Journal of Tolkien Research

A popular meme depict Galadriel and Frodo admitting that Sauron is "weirdly sexy," a humorous allusion to The Rings of Power’s Halbrand. The show's controversial revelation of Halbrand as Sauron highlights the differences between Tolkien’s construction of Second and Third Age Sauron as an attractive or admirable leader compared to Peter Jackson’s portrayal of him as a monster or disembodied fiery eyeball. This, in turn, has implications for the geopolitical order of Middle-earth in which many people legitimately might wish to be on Sauron’s side. Acknowledging Sauron's "sexiness" may allow us to see Tolkien's world system in a new …