English Language and Literature Commons^™

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 10, Fall 2022, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.

Examining The Prevalence And Representation Of Diverse Populations In Children's Literature Found In Elementary Classroom Libraries, Trishell M. Matthews

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to (1) examine the prevalence of diverse populations in the pieces of children’s literature found in three Title I third grade classrooms, and (2) to examine if the diverse populations are authentically and relevantly represented. Researchers have emphasized the impact and importance of children’s literature that represent student’s diverse backgrounds authentically and relevantly, as they have the potential to affect students’ motivations, aspirations, and how they view themselves and the world at large. Particularly, Bishop (1990) suggested that students need books that act as “mirrors” that allow them to see themselves, their experiences, and …

Jemimas, Jockeys, And Jolly Banks: The Racial Discourse Of Black Collectibles, Conrad Pruitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Over the last thirty years, an industry in black racist memorabilia has resurged. Bolstered by online commerce, social media trade, and a robust reproduction market, racist collectibles continue to circulate despite their functional obsolescence or presumed incongruity with current views of race. Many of these objects originated in the late nineteenth century, where the emergence of black citizenship was seen as a threat to a racial caste structure that ensured white supremacy. Following the impetus for supremacy that defined the Jim Crow era, the collectibles sought to crystallize conceptions of inherent black inferiority. The presumption that these originary conditions and …

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism And The University, Andy Hines

Staff Scholarship

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in …

Men Who Conquered & The Women Who Mov'd Them, Nikita Chinamanthur

Scripps Senior Theses

Considering John Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, this thesis examines how drama shaped popular ideas of the Indian subcontinent in Renaissance England. This thesis engages in a comparative analysis of formal choices such as doubling, tripling, and etymology to assess the efficacy of two incomplete portrayals of South Asia configured as women.

The Funeral's The Thing: Unification Through The Burial Rite In Hamlet, Ferrell J. Mowell

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The funeral service is an ancient custom that is deeply cultural, and Shakespeare uses it prominently in Hamlet. The play's ending with Fortinbras commanding a military-like tribute for Hamlet is somewhat surprising because Hamlet was never a soldier, and he has breached the etiquette of funeral rites in the cases of Polonius, by withholding the remains immediately after the death, and Ophelia by making a spectacle with Laertes in her grave. Additionally, he has arranged for the execution before the observance of confessional rites in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet's dead march is an example of how …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

Confined In (Patri)Architecture: How Gothic And Horror Literature Exposes Ongoing Violence And Oppression Against Women, Clara A. Macilravie Cañas

Dissertations and Theses

This project focuses on the intersections of space, power, gender, religion, and the architecture of institutions that confine and repress women. I argue that these texts focus on how patriarchal and domestic ideologies lock women into gendered expectations through oppressive gender politics. Chapter one demonstrates how early gothic female writers used representations of physical structures, such as abbeys and castles, to expose the eighteenth-century woman’s experiences of abuse and confinement by repressive patriarchal and monarchal rule. This chapter connects themes and arguments within Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) to reveal the metaphors that …

Origin Of The Term 'Dude', Gerald Leonard Cohen, Barry A. Popik, Peter J. Reitan

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

The book (261 pages, soft-covered) is intended as a scholarly study and therefore contains more detail than would appear in a book intended for a broad readership.

The Best Children's Picture Books Of The Year In Spanish [2022 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee

The Center for Children's Literature

An annotated list of the best children's books in Spanish published or translated in 2021. In English and Spanish.

Spanish title: Los mejores libros infantiles en Español.

Practices For Professional Learning When Composing Teaching Materials, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

The Utah English Journal

As teachers, we know that reflection is essential for professional learning. However, it can be challenging to find time to engage in reflective experiences that prompt meaningful learning, especially in this historical moment. For many of us, time has become increasingly scarce during the past two years as we have navigated new and uncertain teaching conditions. Like many teachers, I had to spend additional time creating teaching materials and learning experiences for delivery in new and multiple contexts. I spent the early months of the pandemic just keeping up with daily teaching demands-even though I value the activity of reflection. …

Scary Character And Setting Vignettes, Melissa Heaton

The Utah English Journal

Most students know how to write stories, but their stories are often void of description and life. Instead of my students writing whole narratives, I have them focus their mental binoculars by writing snippets of stories that I call Scary Character and Setting Vignettes.

Book Review: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World, Leah Day

The Utah English Journal

Decades ago, Jeff Goldblum delivered some of the greatest wisdom of our time in his iconic role as Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park. Chastising the myopic man responsible for bringing back dinosaurs, he explains, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, that you didn't stop to think if they should." As our schools race toward 1: 1 student/ device ratios and parents give tablets and smartphones to their kids at younger and younger ages, it's hard to deny that we might be as reckless as those darn dino lovers. Maryanne Wolf is not a doomsdayer or a luddite, …

Book Review: Where I End And You Begin, Michelle Ritter

The Utah English Journal

Ezra Slevin is a typical teenager who has crushing insomnia, an identity crisis, and a crush on Imogen - a girl who barely knows he exists. Wynonna Jones is Imogen's overprotective best friend who has a crush on his best friend, Holden, and who has made it her mission to torment Ezra for as long as he can remember. To ramp up the teenage angst, Ezra has been working up the courage to ask Imogen to prom but can't even seem to talk in her presence.

When Mentor Texts Fail, Build More Bridges, Deborah Dean

The Utah English Journal

I was teaching a writing class and students were writing research-based papers, an expectation of the course and one that met several learning standards. I understood the course expectations, but I wanted to move away from the traditional, school-based "research paper," a genre I disliked reading and students disliked writing, to a genre I was willing to read and one that exists in the real world: TED talks. I thought that if we focused on informational TED talks, we would meet the expectations for the course but also create a more interesting and transferable learning experience for them and-I hoped-one …

Little Sun: A Poetry Collection, Lillian Aff

Scripps Senior Theses

N/A

Tropical Faustian: Nick Joaquin’S Spenglerian Imagining Of Colonial History In The Post-Authoritarian Philippines, Hidde Van Der Wall

Fine Arts Department Faculty Publications

This article discusses how Philippine writer Nick Joaquin applied the ideas of Oswald Spengler in his historiography; notably the collection Culture and History (1988); his contribution to the post- authoritarian renegotiation of a national history fraught with colonial conflict and loss. This article argues that Joaquin adapted Spengler’s ideas; proposing the presence of a “Faustian” Filipino soul formed during the Spanish-colonial period; to a contradictory effect. It allowed him to assert a national identity that challenged the dichotomous ways in which Philippine history was conventionally conceived; but it also reintroduced Eurocentric and homogenizing schemes; reinforcing existing hegemonies in the postcolony.

Music: Modernist Remediation And Technologies Of Listening, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excerpt:
Ludwig van Beethoven, if not exactly a modernist, offers ample fodder for modern artists looking to defend – or expand – their turf. While producing City Lights (1928), Charlie Chaplin responded to the newly popular ‘talkies’ by proclaiming that ‘Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics’ (qtd. in Crafton 1999: 296).

Hope Without Assurance: The Eucatastrophic Nature Of Tolkien's Arda, Grant Glavin

Honors Undergraduate Theses

J.R.R. Tolkien’s massive body of work represents decades of effort from a man who, burdened by the suffering and grief of a world he considered to be fallen, wished to combine his love of fairy-stories and mythology with the otherworldly hope of eucatastrophe, Tolkien’s word for unexpected divine joy amid suffering, present at the heart of his strong Catholic beliefs. Tolkien’s world of Arda is consequently full of suffering; it is written as a dark and dangerous place, where dyscatastrophe, the prerequisite suffering before eucatastrophe, exists within the world from its conception and Eden has never been obtainable …

Contained Identities: Forms Of Resistance In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee And Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Zohra Qazi

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis analyzes groundbreaking experimental texts by Asian American writers that employ genre-bending formal innovations to resist the uneasy containment of social hierarchies and aesthetic categories. After a brief discussion of Monica Youn’s 2019 poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado),” I trace such experimentation back to the late twentieth century, focusing on two other texts that explore similar strategies of literary experimentation and that present themselves as novels but, as Youn does with poetry, resist that classification at the same time. The experimental expansions of form in both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) and Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel …