English Language and Literature Commons^™

Review: A Working Model For Contingent Faculty, Courtney L. Werner

The Writing Center Journal

In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

Across The Pond, Lisa Larrabee

Theses

"A collection of stories inspired by the author's father; from his earlier childhood in Italy, to his emigration to the US around age 10 and to his adjustment in finding a balance as an Italian-American teen in the 50s, it includes his meeting / falling in love with the author's American mother and the ensuing circumstances of the culture clash from their relationship. This collection includes 5 historical fiction stories that are based heavily on factual stories, which are chronologically connected by 9 non-fiction pieces."

Summer Critical Reading Initiative Helping Talent Search Students Redefine Their College Potential Through Literature, Tania Dominguez

Theses

Despite efforts to improve college access and develop college readiness skills, students are graduating high school unprepared for college. Each year, fewer students choose to enroll or drop out within their first semester of a post-secondary institution after high school graduation. The figures are even more dire for students who are from low-income and first-generation backgrounds. Furthermore, data shows that college-bound participants from federal pre-college TRIO programs are underserved in the most critical time of their high school journey. There is an educational gap in the services that pre-college programs, such as Talent Search, provide students. Educators and college counselors …

The Capacity Of An Unfaltering Duress: America's Lost Love Stories, Seth Shimmelfarb-Wells

English Honors Papers

This thesis interrogates the imbrication between negative subjectivity and the fiction writing of Gayl Jones. In doing so, this work reimagines conceptions of intimate and interpersonal love, community, and retributive violence in the face of conditional (anti)Blackness. Through an engagement with contemporary scholars of Black Studies and with the help of the abundant archive of Black music, this project aims to prioritize, reproduce, and heed to Black Artistic registers of feeling that embrace duress, destruction, and madness. Through her literary performance, Jones reproduces and fabulates moments of Black social life that expand and simultaneously shatter our conception of a given …

Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer

Comparative Woman

Madness in literature has a long and colourful history. While its representation varies significantly in different literary periods, madness is nonetheless a consistent theme responding to inherent conflicts of civilisation. Thus, in the eighteenth-century novel, madness is subdued and forced to express itself in the language of rationality, while in the nineteenth century the theme becomes increasingly subversive. In the form of the madwoman trope (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), madness is simultaneously a reaction to restrictive patriarchal norms, and a frame in which the gender conflicts of the time can be safely and effectively played out. In the twentieth century, …

Feminist Phenomenology And First-Person Narrative: Understanding Gender And Social Conflict In Anna Burns’ Milkman, Sushree Routray, Rashmi Gaur Professor

Comparative Woman

In her magnum opus Milkman (2018), Anna Burns employs a subversive and artfully crafted first-person narrative, deftly exposing the arduous and tumultuous struggles encountered by individuals who dare to defy the confines of traditional gender roles. Through a relentless and unflinching narrative, the novel fearlessly confronts the harrowing manifestations of psychological torment, the insidious spectre of relentless stalking, and the manipulative machinations of gaslighting, all the while fervently interrogating the notion of a fixed and immutable gender identity. In a relentless odyssey toward self-realization, the protagonist's journey unfurls against a backdrop of traumatic events and the unyielding pressures imposed by …

Cougars And Lambs, Lonna Adams

Theses

"Cougars and Lambs is an original novella written for my Master of Arts thesis in Creative Writing. The heroine of the story has escaped an abusive relationship and chooses to hide out in a small Northern Californian town. She opens a cafe and gets to know the locals in this tightly knot community. Unfortunately, her abuser tracks her down and is hell-bent on destroying her new life and possessing her once more. This story deals with crimes against women and the lives it affects.(This novella is actually 115 pages and just under 30,000 words. However, in order to fit the …

Ua94/6/18 Stephen Flora Student / Alumni Papers, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about Stephen Flora during his years as a student at Western Kentucky University.

Regarding The Lesbian Potluck, Kate Thomas

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

To Be A Woman Is To Perform: How Gender And Womanhood Are Discussed Through Shakespeare’S Use Of Mythology, Haley Kerner

Scripps Senior Theses

In an essay called ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid’, scholar Johnathan Bate wrote that “the first encounter between the English dramatist and the Roman poet probably occurred in the classroom of the grammar school at Stratford-upon-Avon” (Ovid, Golding, Bate, xli). Of course, the two would continue to meet many times in the concluding years. Shakespeare would have long conversations with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially through the voice of his characters as they jumped back and forth from his mind to the page. Shakespeare would invoke Ovid in most of his plays and many of his sonnets, guiding his readers and audience through the Roman …

Playing With Every Sense Of The Word : Lolita Through The Lens Of Jacques Derrida, Noelle Marie Florio

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This essay ties both the repetition and doubling found in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with the art of retelling to find a means of a center origin in Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” This essay argues how unreliable narration works to substitute and redefine a center origin of/for the novel, and in doing so, pulls the reader further from any reliable foundation from which to draw conclusions. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, employs what readers recognize as Derrida’s theory of deconstruction not only to disorient readers of Lolita, but to provide a sort of …

Exploring Instability In Dream-Based Narratives : A Comparative Analysis Of “Vanilla Sky” And "Inception", Sara Glemaud

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis aims to dissect the deliberate destabilization that emerges from Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. By stripping away stabilizing elements and weaving intricate dream sequences, Nolan and Crowe craft a cinematic experience that blurs the distinction between reality and imaginary. The means in which Nolan and Crowe execute this is through several ways. Firstly, through the exploration of the symbiotic relationship between the characters' bodies and minds within the dream narrative. Secondly, through the deliberate creation of spatial and temporal instability, which blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy or the imaginary. Lastly, both films deliberately …

Beyond Print : The Web Of Egan’S Narrative Universe, Cassandra Sardo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jennifer Egan’s website greatly rewards readers and literary critics interested in A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House. It hosts an interactive timeline filled with details like when and where she wrote each chapter of Goon Squad, a digital counterpart to her famous PowerPoint chapter, and excerpts from her handwritten first drafts of The Candy House. These digital epitexts, however, have been largely overlooked by critics, and a comprehensive analysis and close reading of Egan’s work in this important context remains uncharted territory. My thesis aims to bridge this gap by exploring the technological elements within Egan’s …

Transcending The Taboo: Using Literature To Explore Depictions Of Suicide With Adolescents In Secondary Classrooms, Elizabeth M. Williams

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines depictions of suicide in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597), Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) in the context of teaching literature in secondary classrooms during the developmental stage known as middle adolescence. Using an analysis of these literary works, this thesis advocates for incorporating self-regulation practices when addressing conceptually challenging and emotionally complex ideas. It proposes model lessons and emphasizes the responsibility of educators to facilitate discussions on weighty concepts. This thesis also emphasizes the need for an intersectional approach when examining trauma and suicide. Furthermore, it underscores the unique developmental and …

Ethics In Literature: A Case Study Of Hades And Persephone, Mckenzie A. Howard

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The increased ethical scrutiny on art in the modern era places an emphasis on how those art forms are being taught in the classroom. This thesis seeks to answer the question: how do we teach ethics, if we should at all, when we teach literature to a modern audience? This thesis explores this question by looking at how modern adaptations of an ancient text, the “Hymn to Demeter,” change the ethical issues in the original text, to show the relevance of these issues in the source text and the modern adaptations. Through an argument that the ethical concerns are often …

There And Back Again: Nick Adams' Masculine Journey From 'Indian Camp' To 'Fathers And Sons.', Michael F. Basista

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In the following paper, I discuss how Ernest Hemingway’s hyper-masculine persona influences how his male characters are interpreted by some readers. More specifically, I take the character of Nick Adams and look at him as being a representation of one of Hemingway’s male characters that diverges from the hyper-masculine persona that Hemingway had created for himself. To do so, I focus on eight of Hemingway’s short stories, with those being “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Ten Indians,” “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “The Battler,” “Cross-Country Snow,” and “Fathers and Sons.” The development of Nick Adams …

The Personality Profile Of Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck, Sophia Geng, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This paper presents the results of a psychodiagnostic case study of Nobel laureate Pearl Buck, 1938 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” Guided by the conceptual perspective of personologist Theodore Millon, psychodiagnostically relevant data about Buck were collected from biographical sources and media reports and synthesized into a personality profile using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC). Then, the personality profile yielded by the MIDC was analyzed in accordance with interpretive guidelines provided in the MIDC and Millon Index of Personality …

Los Angeles Miscellany Volume 72, 2024, Loyola Marymount University English Department

LA Miscellany

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Maclay

Editor-in-Chief: Madeleine Misner

Describing Dictee, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

The visual images in Dictee are famously captionless. They resist straightforward explanation. In writing image descriptions of the images in Dictee, I have tried to preserve the "captionlessness" of the original. The point here is not to explain the pictures—an image description is not identical to a caption—but to make Dictee more accessible to readers who are blind and visually impaired. I realize, of course, that in trying to make Dictee's captionless images more "legible," I have inevitably "mistranslated" Dictee as it was originally designed to be experienced. Its captionlessness is lost in translation despite my efforts to preserve it. …

Great Books: Everyone's Inheritance, Michael Gose

Faculty Books

This book explores the benefits of reading "Great Books," and is virtually unique in detailing what a series of Great Books classes has looked like over the past decades