English Language and Literature Commons^™

Engl 211w: Intro To Nonfiction (Points Of Entry And/Or Exit Wounds), Heather Simon

Open Educational Resources

We will explore the notion of creativity as it pertains to new ways of engaging familiar topics and carving out frameworks for exploring uncharted territory. We will actively read and respond to works of creative nonfiction to enrich our understanding of structure, style, and language. Assigned readings will demonstrate how creative nonfiction can encompass a variety of forms (think: reportage, braided essay, erasure, visual essay) and draw from both research and experience to offer a unique perspective and elicit an emotional response. We will develop our own creative nonfiction toolbox through a series of reflections, creative exercise, and projects. We …

Bound To A Mast: Matelotage And The Queer Contract In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night And The Tempest, Agnese Palumbo

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Analyzing the language of a 1699 matelotage contract and locating that same terminology in Shakespeare’s maritime plays, this essay argues that there is a thematic and genealogical link between the contractual forms of homosocial union that existed during the premodern and early modern periods and the bonds shared by male characters in those plays where a “sea change” occurs. First, the essay delineates a history of matelotage and of contractual bonds; then, it establishes this homosocial dynamic as an additional point of inquiry for male relationships in Shakespeare. Critical attention has largely overlooked this queer contract, and prioritized a focus …

Joining A Conversation Research Project, Nicole Green, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.

Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of …

Building A Communication-Integrated Curriculum In Materials Science, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

With the need to meet ABET outcomes around professional skills, such as communication and teamwork, engineering programs have long explored approaches to ensure their graduates are able to participate in the workplace in ways that employers demand. While approaches vary and success depends on a number of factors, research demonstrates that an integrated approach to professional skill development is the most impactful for student learning. How can an engineering program build an integrated approach that provides meaningful communication education?

This paper shares the experiences from faculty in a material science and engineering program that has created an integrated approach to …

Interlanguage Of Functional Usages Of L2 English Present Continuous Tense By L1 Thai Learners, Pajaree Buasomboon

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study aimed at examining the functional use of English present continuous tense by L1 Thai learners, under the theoretical framework of the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Selinker 1974; Tarone 2006). The functions investigated included instant, continuing, temporary, habitual, and future (Eastwood, 1994). A Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT), aiming for perception, a Fill-in-the-Blank Test, focusing on production, and interviews were employed to elicit data from the subjects, i.e. 30 L1 Thai learners of the intermediate proficiency level. The results revealed the learners’ low accuracy rates in some functions, from both perception and production tasks. The accuracy rate in the production task was …

Carceral Form And Social Critique In Zadie Smith's Nw, Wesley Hackman

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Incurable Fanny Price: Disabled Perspective And Resistance To The Cure Narrative In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Aurora C. Soriano

Dissertations and Theses

Improvement and cure are frequently on the minds of the characters in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. However, what happens when you introduce a chronically ill character like Fanny, who can’t ever be fully cured, into these curative plots? In order to better understand the ways Austen complicates curative discourse, this paper focuses on Fanny’s own perspective and embodied experience of chronic illness, in which she fatigues easily and experiences headaches and pain. Despite clear evidence in the novel of Fanny’s ill health, scholarship analyzing Fanny’s character has historically been fraught with ableist assumptions and subjective opinions. Ignoring the way …

The Dissonant History Of Tristan And Isolde, Amanda Persaud

Dissertations and Theses

This essay traces the historical evolution of the story of Tristan and Isolde through three distinct phases, highlighting the transformation of the story from a feudal version to a post-feudal rendition infused with courtly love doctrines and notions of Christian love. It examines the early versions of the story by Béroul and Gottfried von Strassburg and discusses the shift in the portrayal of the relationship between Tristan and Isolde from one that decries disloyalty to one that is more sympathetic to their love. The essay also analyzes Richard Wagner's opera version of the story, which celebrates individual desire over duty …

Conceptual Metaphor Usage In Glenn Youngkin’S 2021 Gubernatorial Campaign, Sara Rose Hotaling

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

In “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language,” Lakoff and Johnson suggest that conceptual metaphors pervade everyday language and produce the reality of our world. Conceptual metaphors act similarly within the occupational register of political campaigns in that they both support and construct a set of beliefs that become the reality of politicians, political parties, and constituents. In this language research, the conceptual metaphors employed by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin during his 2021 gubernatorial campaign were identified, analyzed, and categorized. The corpus of this research consists of two gubernatorial debates, three campaign speeches, and one television interview. An example of conceptual metaphor …

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

A Tool For Digital Bibliotherapy: Fostering Emotional Resiliency Through A Visual Novel, Joy Cooper

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Suicide rates among children have risen over the last three years. In Clark County specifically, the numbers doubled between 2019 and 2021. The research for this project sought to find the benefits of bibliotherapy and create a tool to be used for early intervention in children displaying signs of developmental emotional and behavioral concerns. Additionally, the research focused on determining the benefits of bibliotherapy across various mediums with a particular aim on the accessibility of digital formats. The research concluded that bibliotherapy in a digital format is not only beneficial but has a tendency to produce higher engagement among children. …

Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity's Monsters, Madalynn Lee Madigar

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Petroleum, a primary global energy resource, serves as a foundation of our contemporary society. However, the pervasive influence of oil as substance, commodity, and industry in our petromodern lives often goes unrecognized. In the present moment of biogeocultural crisis surrounding fossil fuels, recognizing and understanding our multifaceted engagements with petroleum is critical. This thesis contributes to the growing field of Petrocultural Studies by considering the conceptualization of petroleum through the associated tropes and figure of the monster. Through the petromonstrous, a term that encapsulates the massive scale, haunting effects, and human-other entanglements of petroleum, cultural attitudes and anxieties about oil …

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

Process Interviews, Joe Anson

The Utah English Journal

In an attempt to have the students care more about how they could improve their writing, I decided to focus on the writing process as opposed to the final product. And because students start with varying shades of writing aptitude, I felt it important that all the writers in my classroom be given the chance to earn a high grade as we focused on improving writing, not writing perfectly.

Using Inquiry To Drive Revision, Mercedes Allen

The Utah English Journal

When an object needs motion, it needs something to cause movement, to drive it. A car needs gasoline. A kite needs wind. A runner needs nutrient rich food and plenty of water. Just like these things need a substance or force to keep them going, students need something to fuel them as they go through the writing process. While it would be much simpler for us to give students crackers or suckers to fix a student with writer's block, there is something else we can implement into our classrooms daily to give our students the power to continue to move …

Book Review: Ain't Burned All The Bright, Rachel Billings

The Utah English Journal

Ain't Burned All the Bright captures the anxieties, fears, and tensions of 2020 clearly and vividly even though it consists of only three long sentences. Jason Reynolds tells the story of a Black boy and his family during the Covid-19 quarantine and pandemic. Through the prose of Reynolds and illustrations of Jason Griffin, the reader learns what the pandemic was like from the point of view of a typical teenager.

An Incomplete Success, Elva Shule Escobedo

The Utah English Journal

Once, I wrote a letter to my US senator, a request from my older brother who had left the country voluntarily just a few months before. In the letter, I explained my brother's complicated situation with his legal status and pleaded for his case. This letter became the catalyst for a writing assignment in my classroom. Students wanted to write their own letters and pleas to government officials, too, explaining their different family members' situations in hopes that their letters would make a difference. And so, they set out to write. They wrote like I had never seen them write. …

Playing With Poetry, Jessica Ashurst

The Utah English Journal

In my experience, the average student claims that they hate poetry. But, what if we try to get them to experience poetry by trying it in various forms instead of just digging for meaning in obscure poetry? This poetry unit encourages them to play with words and author's craft choices. Each poem becomes part of the poetry portfolio they tum in at the end of the unit.

Fascism In Sci-Fi: "Mobilizing Passions" In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Alton C. Ayers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis responds to criticism of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a “fascist” novel by further investigating the claim through a close reading of the novel that applies political theory scholarship on fascism. Chapters I and II introduce the novel along with its general reception and controversy. These chapters consider the accusations of “fascism” given to the novel while at the same time understanding that a clear, exact definition of “fascism” has long been grappled with by scholars since the rise of the regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Chapters III and IV apply political theory to …

Nonhuman Animals And Hope: Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go And Philip K. Dick’S Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, David P. Rando

English Faculty Research

What can critical animal studies learn by temporarily directing attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature? Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allow readers to experience the hopes of engineered or artificial nonhuman creatures. Without presuming to know the unknowable or to make the animal speak, these novels help to further animal liberation discourses by democratizing the ostensibly human concept of hope, opening new paths of empathy between nonhuman and human animals while making it harder to accept the instrumentalization of nonhuman animals under anthropocentric capitalism.