English Language and Literature Commons^™

Shakespearean Constellations, Sarah Bradshaw

University Scholar Projects

Sarah Bradshaw’s thesis argues that Shakespeare's legacy is a fundamentally collaborative product. Rather than viewing Shakespeare’s legacy as the product of a single individual, what "Shakespeare" has come to mean over the past 400 years is altered by those who read, depict, and adapt these texts. Bradshaw presents Shakespeare, Romantic critics, and film adaptors as artists collaborating with their pasts and presents to adapt texts into new environments. By adopting Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of the constellation, Bradshaw theorizes Shakespeare’s legacy as a larger image in which each source, reading, and adaptation operates as a discrete object of study that together …

The Impact Of Social Media On The Publishing Industry: A Case Study Of Author Colleen Hoover, Chloe Foster

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Thanks to the BookTok community, adult romance author Colleen Hoover has taken the world by storm. Anyone that has had access to TikTok within the past year has probably had a Colleen Hoover book appear in video on their “For You Page,” the page on TikTok where users can scroll through content that follows an algorithm which learns about the user’s specific interests. However, Hoover has been writing and publishing novels since 2012. She had already published more than a dozen novels by 2020, yet her popularity has only grown since she made her appearance on social media. Her book …

Invoking La Llorona: Abjection As A Site Of Power In Jovita González, Cherrie Moraga, And Jayro Bustamante, Samantha Donoso

English Theses - Archive

This thesis seeks to analyze how La Llorona’s abjection allows her and those who call on her to exist as specters, haunting the space of their personal, cultural, or historical trauma to make sense of their abuses and gain power to combat the oppressive structures that allowed for abuse to occur. I include both Historical and Literary contexts to locate La Llorona as a transcultural and hemispheric conduit that provides a space for the feminine collective to find the familiar in the grotesque and carve out a space for themselves in a society that would otherwise force them into silence. …

An Unfaithful Feminist : Neoliberal Feminism, Identity, And Postmodernism In Jenny Offill’S Dept. Of Speculation, Anne Bobis

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jenny Offill’s novel Dept of Speculation explores the life of a female college professor who looks back on her marriage after her husband has an affair. Events are told through brief fragments. Much of the critical discourse surrounding the novel is concerned with its fragmentary form or postfeminism. In this essay, I assert that Dept. of Speculation is a reaction to neoliberal feminism because of the narrator’s multiple challenges throughout the novel. Some vocal figures within neoliberal feminism assume a woman can balance upward mobility in a career and life as a mother. The ability to maintain this work-life balance …

Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird And Queer Temporalities In Lovecraft Country And Detransition, Baby, Eurydice Dye

English (MA) Theses

By analyzing H. P. Lovecraft’s work through the lens of queer temporality, I offer a queer perspective on Lovecraft, reading the monstrous outside in his work as a queer figure and casting the temporal conflict common to Lovecraftian horror as a conflict between dominant time and outside time. I argue that, by placing queerly-temporal protagonists in conflict with dominant temporalities, queer fiction is essentially an inversion of Lovecraftian horror. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope of the novel, I develop a theory of the queer chronotope in fiction to align with the queer temporalities that queer characters inhabit. …

Narratives Of Feminist Resistance: Women's Bodily Autonomy And The Dystopian Mode, Grace J. Bromage

English Honors Theses

This undergraduate thesis examines how dystopian fiction has responded to the sociopolitical issue of restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy, a question that has become more timely since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in Summer 2022. Particularly, I aim to understand how readers can use dystopian novels to shape real-world dialogue and how authors can use narrative strategies to encourage readers to resist oppression. My first chapter takes a broad approach, tracing the development of dystopian fiction from a genre to a mode and using Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) as a case study of how …

Through Her Eyes: Learning And Teaching About Racism Through "To Kill A Mockingbird" And "The Bluest Eye", Sloane Larsen

English Honors Theses

This thesis argues that Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird both merit a place in te United States’ secondary education systems by using use them in the classroom to encourage students to recognize and challenge their biases, perspectives, and choices. One of the many complex questions this thesis addresses is the efficacy of teaching students about racism using such novels. Teaching these novels through Critical Race Theory could help create a new generation of students who are more likely to address and challenge their biases and privilege. At the same time, this approach requires …

Desert Body, Lauren Mckinnon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a collection of poems examining certain paradoxes of my body. As a survivor of sexual violence, my body relives trauma which makes it feel uninhabitable. I compare my experiences with the Southern Utah desert. The physical beauty, destruction and inhabitability of the desert teaches me to accept my body as both beautiful and full of grief. The poems move chronologically through my life, beginning with an abusive relationship at the age of sixteen, a move to Moab at nineteen, and becoming a mother at twenty-five. Ultimately, with the desert as my guide, I learn to accept my …

The Dreamwalker: A Novella In Progress, Camryn Johnson

Honors Scholar Theses

The DreamWalker is a fantasy novella based in the near future city of Nova where beings with extraordinary powers exist alongside "normal" humans. One night there was a mass raid on the homes of extras and they were thrown into the Centrum, a specially curated holding facility that keeps extras and their powers indefinitely imprisoned. Aybis, a Dreamwalker, is one of these beings, though she managed to escape this prison. Now she works for Marco, a handler of sorts, in the underground, using her ability to enter and sometimes manipulate dreams of the wealthy and elite clientele of Nova who …

War In Heaven: The Archdeacon's Embodiment Of Charles Williams' Coinherence, Germeen Tanas

Student Works

Charles Williams published War in Heaven in 1930, the first of his seven supernatural novels. In War in Heaven, Archdeacon Julian Davenant of Castra Parvulorum is the unlikely hero who embodies calm goodness. War in Heaven’s dramatic arc focuses on a struggle to control the legendary Holy Grail, the chalice that the characters believe Jesus used at the Last Supper, and brutal spiritual warfare. Amid a turning and twisting plot, Williams infuses the text with the theological concepts of coinherence, substitution, and exchange. In pivotal scenes, Williams imbues the Archdeacon’s words and actions with his theological framework. In …

How Political Aspirations Conceived A Dramatic Linguistic Shift, Sean Mcconnell

Student Works

The 1066 Norman Conquest presents a specific instance of how conflicting political ambitions stimulated a substantial historical and social shift. On the political front, King Harold II and William the Conqueror possessed differing motives in their quest for the English crown. The political conflict witnessed contention between two groups that spoke entirely different languages: the Anglo-Saxons speaking Old English and the Normans speaking Norman French. The Norman victory in 1066 would have long-lasting implications for England and the English language. After the Normans conquered, Old English lost its prominence in England, initiating a linguistic transitional period. As a consequence of …

Poem No. 129, May 2023, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Young Adult Novel: Historical Fiction Primer Inning, Ariel Orlando Moreno

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Novela histórica juvenil que usa el beisbol como vehículo principal para narrar algunos de los hechos acaecidos durante los primeros años de la construcción del canal de Panamá. La novela explora las interrelaciones personales al mismo tiempo que las interacciones entre Panamá y los Estados Unidos. Al mismo tiempo toca temas como desigualdad, racismo y prejuicios.

What's That Word . . . : The Real Reverse Dictionary, Giacomo Wholey

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

The Lingua Anglica, Liliana Kotval

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The term Lingua Franca can be dated back to the Middle Ages, where the “Frankish language” was a French-and-Italian-based jargon spoken between crusaders and traders in the Eastern Mediterranean to optimize communication through a common tongue. Today, English is the Lingua Franca of Europe and, just like the Lingua Franca of the Middle Ages, optimizes communication between those in a culturally and linguistically rich continent.

English- due to several historical reasons, including the internationalization of Europe following World War II, competitive economic world powers, such as the United States, the expansion of the internet, among others- has proven to be …

Faculty’S Experiences Teaching English Language Learners In Higher Education, Chedia A. Ayari

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Conducted in a large size four-year state university, the purpose of this qualitative study was to learn how faculty of multiple disciplines examined and made meaning of their instructional practices and decisions when teaching ELL students, how they modified their instruction to meet the needs of ELLs, and what they saw as areas of struggle when working with this student population. Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) was used as a theoretical framework to further investigate the complex nature of how higher education faculty make meaning of their instructional experiences when teaching ELLs within the hierarchical structures inherent in higher education and …

Racial Capitalism In Colson Whitehead’S The Underground Railroad, Daniel Paul Marx

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this thesis I examine how Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad attempts to denounce a system of racial capitalism, but the various tactics used to achieve this are often clouded in an inadvertent participation in this system regardless. I contend that this participation is indicative of a particular reading’s predominance in our current American social context that nevertheless reinforces the racial capitalism the novel attempts to denounce. This inescapable reading is explored in the sections devoted to the various states the protagonist Cora travels to on her journey toward supposed freedom from bondage, as each state represents various iterations of …

Comedy, Contagion, And Confinement In Bo Burnham’S Inside, Zoe Barclay

English

Bo Burnham’s Inside was filmed by the former YouTube star, stand-up comedian, and director entirely alone in his guest house during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and released on Netflix. The comedy special is a mixture of skits, songs, and monologues loosely stitched together that question the role of comedy, provide a critique of the current socio-cultural moment, and give the viewer a glimpse into Burnham’s mind. Inside and The Inside Outtakes both engage with the themes associated with outbreak narratives and explore current social questions regarding privilege, accountability, consumption, and capitalism. Like other works of comedy, Inside takes …

The Bard’S Precursors To Psychology: Exposing Dark Sides Of Human Nature, Rebecca Parsons '23

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

“Henrietta And Harriet:” Considering The Marginalized Best Friend In Burney’S Cecilia And Austen’S Emma, Elena Goodenberger

English (MA) Theses

Although much has been said about the authorial relationship between Frances Burney and Jane Austen generally, there is a gap in scholarship discussing Austen’s Emma in context with the Burney’s Cecilia. This paper argues that there are notable threads—heiresses with absent or inadequate father figures, charity-case best friends, and rushed endings—connecting Emma and Cecilia. Tracing these threads allows us to examine the possible influence of Burney’s writing on Austen and also calls attention to the author’s different approaches to female agency and minor character space. To accomplish this task, I look at the narrative space given to minor …