English Language and Literature Commons^™

Claiming A Piece Of Tradition: Community Discourse In Russian Mennonite Community Cookbooks, Amy Harris-Aber

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Russian Mennonite immigrants who settled south central Kansas in the late 19th century and their descendants naturally developed a discourse community that differentiates them from the dominant culture in which they reside. Changing regional dynamics regarding diversity along with continued acculturation impacts this ethnoreligious community in a kind of dual displacement; the descendants of these Russian Mennonites not only live in the shadow of their ancestors’ collected memories and traumas related to migration but have and are currently witnessing further shifts away from the once agricultural lifestyle they previously observed. Therefore, heritage preservation is increasingly vital for stakeholders engaged with …

Lack Of Resources In Classrooms, Juliana Maffea

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The lack of resources in classrooms are evident around the world, but in this poster, the focus is on the state of Virginia. Teachers are struggling to teach with barely any resources or money, and the students are attempting to learn with little to no supplies. If schools continue to under supply teachers, the students and teachers are going to fall behind. Teachers will not be in the best moods, and the students will suffer. In this poster, it is evident there are some things that can be done to help, but it will take time and effort.

Emily Dickinson: 19th Century Poet In A 21st Century World, Stephanie Merrigan

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone will discuss what channels mediate public access to literary content in the case of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. The discussion continues with how this was a problem for Dickinson while she was alive due to her reclusiveness and unorthodox punctuation. The capstone then looks at the other aspects of this in the roles that editors, the merchandise now made with lines from Dickinson’s work, and digital technologies play in that circulation, but also how they have played a role in making Dickinson a pop culture icon in the 21^st century.

A Final Portfolio, David Chapman

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio includes an example of English/Language Arts research, literary analysis, technical writing, and syllabi for teaching high school seniors.

Mixed Messages: Reading Contemporary U.S. Literature Of Biracial Girlhood, Candice Nicole Hale

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The tragic mulatta character is no longer an accurate representation of biracial female characters in literature. This dissertation considers the vast history of the tragic mulatto genre and its tragic and mired representations of biracial women and how they are often portrayed in literature. Within a historical, legal, and political analysis, I highlight the ways perceptions, attitudes, and representations about biracial individuals have changed, so those same shifts should change in the literature. Because of the bourgeoning field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS), both scholars and authors are recasting and rewriting the narratives and discourses of mixed-race in the …

Tolkien And The Age Of Forgery: Improving Antiquarian Practices In Arda, Will Sherwood

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article situates J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium as a literary descendent of the antiquarian projects from the 'Age of Forgery' in the 1760s. It argues that Tolkien's motivation to create a national mythology echoed those of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton. Drawing on previously unpublished folios from Tolkien's undergraduate notebooks, it showcases his familiarity with the two forgers, their feigned literary heritages, and British antiquarian practices in the eighteenth century. It further argues that Tolkien improved on Macpherson's and Chatterton's antiquarian methodologies by marrying the oral tradition with the written word in The Book of Lost Tales, The Hobbit, and The …

Educational Progress‐Time And The Proliferation Of Dual Enrollment, Brice Nordquist, Amy J. Lueck

English

In this commentary, we use the occasion of the proliferation of dual enrollment to examine the discursive construction of difference between high school and college literacies, and its effects on teachers and students. This discursive divide has real, material consequences. It informs (and constrains) literacy practices and pedagogies, becomes a barrier to access (particularly when operationalized in testing procedures), contributes to dropout and attrition, exacerbates unequal power and resources in communities, and justifies hierarchical relations between high school and college faculty and staff. By deconstructing the definitions of high school and college and the metaphors of containment they rely on, …

The Culturally Capitalised Graduate: Toward A Wider Reading Experience For Undergraduate Students, Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

This essay considers higher education policy in Ireland that, in limited optional ways, is diversifying the undergraduate curriculum to incorporate wider reading across disciplines. Such policies, now gaining traction, aim to foster greater graduate employability, understood as the resilience and resourcefulness to secure positions in the workplace over time, and in fluctuating periods of supply and demand; they also support graduates to live more meaningfully in society. This essay’s three sections draw upon several sources including a business consultancy website, journal articles, and academic papers and reports. It extrapolates in particular from the research of Julia Preece and Anne-Marie Houghton …

Orts: The George Macdonald Society Newsletter, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Violet Is One Letter Off From Violent, Audrey E. Spina

Master’s Theses and Projects

The poems in this creative collection, Violet is one letter off from violent, aim to add to the critical conversation in contemporary poetry about violence, women’s anger, patriarchal oppression, and physical and sexual assault, specifically drawing on analyses from the poetry of Rachel McKibbens, Tarfia Faizullah, Emily Skaja, Erika L. Sánchez, Tracy K. Smith, Safiya Sinclair, and Paisley Rekdal. My myriad speakers, who take both first and third person points of narrative view, reclaim and reproduce their own stories in ways that are complex, vulnerable, and angry as a result of living under and through traumatic experiences in domestic and …

Cold Snap, Skylar Beauregard

Master’s Theses and Projects

For my Master’s Thesis project, I will be writing an original piece of realistic fiction inspired by the “dirty realism” literary movement of the 20th century. This piece of fiction, at the end of these two semesters, will resemble a novella in length and style while focusing on execution and maintenance of profluence as an element of narrative craft. My first semester will be spent conducting topical research on female urban youth and modern sex work in the form of short interviews and field research, closely reading some relevant contemporary “dirty realism” pieces of fiction, and using craft-based handbooks to …

Cultivating Classroom Libraries That Promote Multicultural Literature: Helping Our Students See Themselves In The Books That They Read, Kori Krafick

Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) in Literacy

The purpose of this study, focusing on diversity in children’s literature, was to assist teachers in choosing quality multicultural literature for students. Quality multicultural literature lacks bias, avoids discrimination, racism, prejudice and sexism, and accurately portrays social issues, historical details, and dialects in both the words and the illustrations. The goal of this project was to provide teachers with criteria to use when evaluating multicultural literature. Howlett and Young’s (2019) instrument for evaluating multicultural literature, Literary Criticism and the Absence of Bias, was used to assess multicultural literature. The survey included questions pertaining to inherent racism, bias, prejudice, and discrimination, …

How Apocalypse Now Adapts Heart Of Darkness’S Imperialist Critique To A New Medium And A Different Culture, Samuel Battle

Undergraduate Projects

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now affirms the key message of its source material, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, to suggest that the imperialist mindset continues to significantly affect international interactions even in modern times. While the original novella reflects and criticizes contemporary British imperialism in Africa, the adaptation shifts the setting to Vietnam in 1968 and primarily satirizes the American army’s actions during the war. While the subject of the story’s critique is different, Coppola preserves the core message of the novella – that all humans are capable of falling into their inner darkness and …

Stronger Than Fiction: Literary And Cultural Merit Of Contemporary African American Christian Fiction, Shewanda Larue Riley

English Dissertations - Archive

My primary goals with this dissertation are to take a close look at how contemporary African American Christian fiction performs important literary and cultural functions and explore how these works reinforce or subvert perceptions of the contemporary African American Christian woman. The specific texts that I analyze are chosen from 1997-2007, the earliest time period of publication of contemporary African American Christian fiction as they set the tone for African American Christian fiction literary works that have been published since that time. The primary research question driving this project is whether contemporary African American Christian fiction has literary and cultural …

Billion-Dollar Bride: Book 1—Godric's Academy For Young Ladies, Kaylin N. Stickley

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis contains the first five chapters of a young adult romance novel featuring a young woman named Theadosia Lee. The plot is heavily influenced by Cinderella, and the biblical braiding technique is heavily influenced by that of Kiera Cass and C. S. Lewis. The piece was inspired by my desire to create more young adult romance novels that contain the biblical values that are sorely lacking in most modern young adult literature. I seek to write a love story that is based on mutual respect, a strong foundation of friendship, and an intentional decision to avoid sexual activities …

Global Englishes: Variations Of A Single Language In All English Classrooms, Amanda Leigh Faulkenberry

Masters Theses

This study was conducted in order to develop a procedure for creating a globally recognized curriculum for teaching students and teachers about global variations of English. The study first sought to discover attitudes towards global variations of English of speakers in each of Kachru’s three-circles model of World Englishes. Once there was an understanding of the negative attitudes that exist towards variations that fall within all three circles, the next goal was to determine what was being done to change this negative attitude. This meant analyzing curriculum and studies to determine how students and teachers are being educated on the …

When Ice Isn’T Slippery, Alyssa Witbeck Alexander

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is the start of what I envision to be a full-length memoir that addresses themes of perfectionism and sacrifice. I begin with an introductory chapter, then move into three chapters that highlight different elements of my life that are affected by these themes. I begin exploring childhood, passion for figure skating, perfectionism, Mormonism, and my first romantic relationship. The next chapter shows ways in which this commitment to perfectionism and sacrifice results in a severe eating disorder, and the ways in which that affects me, my family, and my relationship with figure skating. The final chapter chronologically covers …

Gods Among Men, Christian Burgos

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract Gods Among Men is a creative text that functions critically to dissect the genre of superhero fiction and bring forth critiques of our culture of worshipping celebrities and political figures. I cite Woody Evans’ work in my critical introduction as being central to my project. Evans puts forth the idea that superheroes are inherently conservative because they are reactive agents that do not proactively change anything. They instead maintain the status quo. Villains, on the other hand, try to effect change for a different end, one they deem better for society. Through the use of characters, this text demonstrates …

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

Leveraging Machine Learning To Identify Quality Issues In The Medicaid Claim Adjudication Process, Cyrus Hoseini

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Medicaid is the largest health insurance in the U.S. It provides health coverage to over 68 million individuals, costs the nation over $600 billion a year, and subject to improper payments (fraud, waste, and abuse) or inaccurate payments (claim processed erroneously). Medicaid programs partially use Fee-For-Services (FFS) to provide coverage to beneficiaries by adjudicating claims and leveraging traditional inferential statistics to verify the quality of adjudicated claims. These quality methods only provide an interval estimate of the quality errors and are incapable of detecting most claim adjudication errors, potentially millions of dollar opportunity costs. This dissertation studied a method of …