English Language and Literature Commons^™

Unit Plan For A Course On Banned Books For 11th And 12th Grade, Jonny Gherman

English and Creative Writing Capstone Projects

This lesson plan will teach high school students (11th-12th grade) what censorship is, why it is powerful, and what to do with it. Aligned with Pennsylvania State Standards, students will identify common themes between the two most popular genres of banned books (race & gender/sexuality). Through a series of activities, discussions, and a final project, students will practice close reading, critical thinking, and basic research skills.

Meeting The Next Generation: ​ A Cross-Campus Collaboration Via A Scholarship Workshop, Lora Winters, Ruth Monnier

Faculty Submissions

Reaching high school students before they set foot on campus would allow writing centers to increase awareness of services while also making personal connections to students, which has been proven to increase student retention. Targeting these students can be difficult and expensive, but our writing center collaborated with library services and our admissions office to create a program about finding scholarship opportunities/writing scholarship essays that was inexpensive, targeted local high schools, and initial results indicate that this program is beneficial to our university’s recruitment efforts. We will discuss our findings and how this program could be replicated by other institutions.

Henry James's "Poor Sensitive Gentlemen" And The Quest For Meaning (And Happiness) In Three Late Tales: "The Altar Of The Dead," "The Beast In The Jungle," And "The Jolly Corner", Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

“Happiness” is not an emotion we immediately associate with the life of Henry James or with the characters in his fiction. It is true that some of his characters comment on the idea of happiness, but not without persistent irony. The protagonists of James’s late tales express no explicit interest in happiness; however, their desire to understand their journeys results in an important insight into the complex, and perhaps contradictory, nature of personal fulfillment. It is an experience, I argue, that offers a moment of painful joy, and it is the closest thing to happiness possible for James’s characters, and …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2800 (Great Works Of Literature I), Joseph Riccio

Open Educational Resources

In this course, we’ll be exploring a wide range of texts from ancient, medieval, and early modern cultures; from oral and written literary traditions; in a variety of genres (epic, lyric, tales, and drama). We will trace the development of themes, ideas, and characters across time and space. Our conversations about these texts will be shaped loosely around the role of literature and storytelling in relation to empires and various formations of power. We will read each of these works in context, thinking about the cultures that produced them, and consider how they relate to our own present moment. And, …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2150t (Writing Ii), Cathryn Crosby Grundleger

Open Educational Resources

Writing II is an intensification of Writing I. This course encourages students to read, reflect on, write about, and synthesize ideas from a range of genres and literary forms. Students examine and learn how to employ different styles, various appropriate uses of evidence and counter-evidence, multiple methods of interpretations, close readings of texts, and, finally, literary-cultural contextualizations. As the course proceeds, students further develop competency in the use and evaluation of multiple external sources as they shape and express their own ideas and cast them into well organized, thoughtful, and persuasive argumentative essays. This course is required for all undergraduate …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol 31, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Real America: A Speech about Sinclair Lewis by Lion Feuchtwanger,” with an introduction and translation by Sean Nye, University of Southern California

“‘Good Morning, America!’: A Retrospective of the 2022 Sinclair Lewis Virtual Conference,” by Shaun F. Richards

“Opening Remarks for the 2022 Sinclair Lewis Conference,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre,” by Marcia Noe

“Robert L. McLaughlin’s Sinclair Lewis Scholarship”

“Play of Main Street Produced at University of Minnesota Duluth,” by George Killough, College of St. Scholastica

“Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal,” by …

Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the differences between dialects along racial, cultural, and ethnic lines with a specific focus on Black and Latine students inside the public secondary classrooms of America. The focus of the paper is on two linguistic tactics: “code-switching,” a linguistic practice which teaches students to separate their home language from the language they use in formal or professional settings, and “code-meshing,” a linguistic practice to teach students how to mesh together multiple dialects with which a student is familiar. Through the creation of a historical framework and an analysis of existing literature, theory, and pedagogical practices regarding the …

Transmuting Grief: More Than One “Feat Of Creation” In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Taylor Cripe '26

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

No abstract provided.

The Man Nobody Knows: George Babbitt And Religion, Sally E. Parry

Faculty Publications – English

No abstract provided.

Literature As A Monument: Uncle Tom’S Cabin Reflecting The Morality Of A Nation, Shalane Parcenue Conrads

Theses and Dissertations

This essay studies the critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by studying the novel’s critical reception from publication and into contemporary America to understand how the novel remains an institution of Civil War remembrance. In accepting the polemical status of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both a literary and historical document, I argue that the novel is a monument in American culture. In studying the wide spectrum of critical response to the novel since its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a social barometer that reflects the controversial race relations in the United States from the Civil …

Vox Populi Or News From Spain, Translated According To The Spanish Copy Which May Serve To Forewarn Both England And The United Provinces How Far To Trust To Spanish Pretenses, Imprinted In The Year 1620, Thomas Scott

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

Exploring Transnational Dimensions Of Activism In Contemporary Book Culture, Rachel Noorda, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Elizabeth Le Roux

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The board book A is for Activist is an ABC children’s title written and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara, an Indonesian social justice graphic designer living in the United States. The title started out as a self-published book crowdfunded on Kickstarter for his own child in 2012, was then picked up by independent publisher Seven Stories Press, and has since achieved bestselling sales status. While originally published in English, it has been translated and sold all over the world, including by Seven Stories’ Spanish-language imprint Siete Cuentos, in an edition with Martha Gonzalez’s translation and an audio version from guitarist and …

“Nothing To Do But Be Borne And Steered”: Unpacking Feminist Scripts In Elana Arnold’S Damsel, Jenna Spiering, Nicole Ann Amato

Faculty Publications

Feminism in novels marketed for young adults often reflects the values of a popular feminism that relies on individual and personal means of empowerment, rather than critiquing or seeking to dismantle systems of domination. In this paper, we illumminate frameworks and methods for engaging students in careful readings and evaluations of texts marketed as feminist, through an analysis of Elana Arnold’s feminist fairy tale, Damsel (2018). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of popular feminism, feral feminism, and theories of becoming, the authors use Critical Content Anlaysis to explore several tenets in contemporary feminist thought in order to analyze Arnold’s text and …

Speculative Pasts: American Historical Fiction In An Age Of Empire, Gregory William Deinert

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies a new generic form termed here the “Speculative Historical Novel” within contemporary American fiction. The works that Speculative Pasts collect all agonize over the erasure of the past, and question how we can incorporate history into the present while accepting that full recuperation may be impossible. In their emphasis on the erasure of the past, these novels trace the manifold silences created by the imperial conquest of the New World and articulate how this past continues to structure the lived experiences of everyone on this continent.

This speculation is, on the one hand, necessarily suppositional. When faced …

Embodied Participation In Digital Publics: Somnambulance, Surveillance, And The Construction Of Identity, Adam S. Padgett

Theses and Dissertations

In our current information landscape, routine surveillance has changed the nature of rhetorical engagement in public spheres. Scholarship in publics theory have done productive work to map out the complex field of discursive participation. Michael Warner has demonstrated how, through the circulation of common texts, people no longer have to be in public in order to participate in publics. However, in the wake of ubiquitous surveillance, this focus on publicness has offered little attention to privacy in publics theory. I argue that legal and postmodern theories of bodies-as-texts is problematic for reading and writing bodies online. Intersecting with embodiment and …

“The Time Has Not Been Wasted”: The Accounting Diaries Of Marian Evans And Louisa May Alcott, Ashley A. Alvarado

Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, the Victorian desire for utility, respectability, and self-improvement became deeply ingrained in daily life, and consequently, the diary grew to be a popular tool to measure and evaluate time management and personal development. Accounting diaries, in particular, set out to provide a record of activity and achievement (or conversely, inactivity and failure). This thesis performs a case study of the accounting diaries of Marian Evans (George Eliot) and Louisa May Alcott, exploring how they document progress towards their personal goals of utility, morality, and productivity. Specific diary-writing techniques—such as an efficient style, income tracking, illness recording, …

The Divine Consumptive: The Depiction Of Tuberculosis In Jane Eyre, Haley Highfield

Theses and Dissertations

Disease was a constant and unavoidable facet of life in British society during the Victorian Era. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of disease, the true cause of these illnesses remained mysterious until the turn of the century. With the origins of many of these diseases being either unknown or ascribed to mistaken sources, effective treatment was an impossibility. Tuberculosis is a prime example of this conundrum. Even with an estimated twenty-five percent of the British population dying from this particular disease during the nineteenth century, the actual provenance for infection was not discovered until 1882 with Robert Koch’s identification of the …

"A Kind Of Insanity In My Spirits": Frankenstein, Childhood, And Criminal Intent, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

Criminal responsibility in England underwent an important shift between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before this period, jurists focused less on whether a person meant to commit an act and more on whether the individual committed it. English law thus made little distinction between children and adults. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, criminal responsibility became linked to new ideas about human understanding. Jurists such as Matthew Hale and William Blackstone maintained that individuals could not be guilty of crimes unless they fully understood and intended the consequences of their actions. In this essay, I argue …

Review Of Reading English Verse In Manuscript, C. 1350-C. 1500, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Critical Insights: The Lord Of The Rings (2022), Edited By Robert C. Evans, Mariana Rios Maldonado

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Mariana Rios Maldonado, of Critical Insights: The Lord of the Rings (2022), edited by Robert C. Evans