English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Battle Of The Sexes: Montagu V. Swift, Madison Savoie

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Two of the most interesting “guardians” of eighteenth-century sociocultural standards were the satirists Jonathan Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Swift is remembered by scholars as one of the “greatest prose satirists in the history of English Literature,” but Montagu, until recent decades, has been less well-known. This thesis will look at the satirical poetic dialogue between the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift and the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and provide insights into the sociocultural dynamics of gender in eighteenth-century British print life as revealed by the individual texts.

Mythcon 50 - Moving Forward, Looking Back, The Mythopoeic Society

Mythcon Programs

Mythcon 50: Moving Forward, Looking Back

To give its far-flung membership a chance to meet, and to present papers orally with audience response, The Mythopoeic Society has been holding conferences since its early days. These began with a one-day Narnia Conference in 1969, and the first annual Mythopoeic Conference was held at the Claremont Colleges (near Los Angeles) in September, 1970. This year’s conference is the third in a series of golden anniversaries for the Society, celebrating our 50th Mythcon.

Teaching English Language Arts: Implementing A Project-Based Learning Approach, Nashwa Elkoshairi

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Teaching English Language Arts: Implementing a Project-Based Learning Approach

Abstract

This portfolio includes four projects that are woven together to explore topics in teaching literature and composition using a project-based learning pedagogy. The first project, “Literature & Social Cognition: Why Read Fiction?” sets the groundwork for the importance of literature in academia through a brief analysis of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The second project, “Grappling with Consumerism by Tapping into Freud’s Uncanny: Using Coraline for a PBL Approach” explores Coraline through the critical lenses of the uncanny and Marxism to guide students through a variety of texts including …

Setting The Stage And Building Homes: Architecture Metaphors And Space In Donne's First Caroline Sermon, Alexander S. Laws

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through his use of "foundation" and "house" metaphors in his "First Sermon Preached to King Charles at St. James, 3 April 1625," John Donne discreetly presents his ideologies and principles before the new king, while simultaneously criticizing his contemporaries' misguided bickering over religio-political factions. This essay seeks to unpack the history surrounding, as well as the casuistical logic found within Donne's first sermon preached during the Caroline period, which both explicitly and implicitly addresses the foremost anxieties of the people of the changing age.

James Plath And "100 Greatest Literary Characters", Laura Kennedy

Interviews for WGLT

Professor of English James Plath discusses his latest book, The 100 Greatest Literary Characters, with WGLT Radio's Laura Kennedy.

The Gen Z Zombie: Ya Takes On The Undead, Jason Mccormick

Theses and Dissertations

After the terror attacks of 9/11, zombie stories experienced an unprecedented boom, or for some critics, a renaissance. Fears of mass death, infiltration by the Other, and life before and after the apocalyptic moment were played out through zombie stories. The longevity of the boom also saw the zombie myth move into strange new places including Young Adult novels, resulting in what I refer to as the “Gen Z zombie.”

In his discussion of the sympathetic zombie, Kyle William Bishop mentions YA zombie texts including Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies but groups …

Mythlore: Preserving The Past And Moving Into The Future, Phillip Fitzsimmons, Janet Brennan Croft, Benjamin Dressler

Faculty Articles & Research

We will show you how to find and read or download articles or whole issues of the journal, as well as show other features of the repository. We will demonstrate how authors submit articles and reviews using the Digital Commons platform, and discuss how author’s accounts can be used for corresponding with the editor and receiving usage reports that show the download frequency and world-wide distribution of readers of published articles.

Once Upon A Time On Mango Street, Drake Deornellis

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

This paper examines how the use of fairytale allusions in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street critiques and recreates standard constructions of female identity. Narrated by the young main character Esperanza, the novel explores the experiences of a variety of Latina women living on Mango Street. As Esperanza retells these stories, she frequently compares these women to fairytale characters, such as Cinderella and Rapunzel. These fairytales often define women as either “angels” or “monsters”: either they are perfect, or they are evil. Furthermore, this perfection for women is associated with dependence and passivity. As the women in the novel …

Material Intimacy: Bearing Witness, Listening, And Wandering The Ruins, Miriam R. Rowntree

English Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation, I consider the rhetorical ecology of architectural ruins, specifically those of natural disaster, as actors in a system of human and nonhuman intra-action that has rhetorical potential for material intimacy. I argue that ruins address the human in ways that elicit a response. The human response enacts a paratactic praxis, which I explore in my first chapter as a practice that creates series or lists that call on the reader or the listener to fill the gaps between entities and make meaning out of the resulting juxtaposition of words, phrases, or collections. In the second, third, and …

The Core Four: An Examination Of Contemporary Black Women's Writing In "The Norton Anthology Of African American Literature", Jade M. Harrison

English Theses - Archive

In recent years, only a select number of literary scholars have conducted studies on the contents of literary anthologies and the circulations of texts over various publications, especially African American collections. “The Core Four: An Examination of Contemporary Black Women’s Writing in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature” focuses on four women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, and Harryette Mullen. The critical recognition these four women garnered during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, including the critical durability of their literary works, induced Norton editors to frame them as anchoring figures of the contemporary era through frequent and …

The Domestic Bible: William Tyndale's Vernacular Translation, Joul Layne Smith

English Dissertations - Archive

This translation study of William Tyndale’s revised New Testament of 1534 identifies the translator’s motivations and strategies then explores the effect of the translation on the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) and Shakespeare’s plays. Tyndale’s primary motivation was to create a text for his would-be congregants during the Reformation and his strategy was largely one of domestication. However, his unique concern for his mother-tongue coupled with an insistence on his preferential theological material extends his domestication activity into an idiosyncratic attention to his lingua mater (English), resulting in a personalized translation project, a Tyndalian effect that influenced the …

Salem Belles, Succubi, And The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft And Gothic Erotic Affect, Sylvia Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized …

The Scientific Romances Of Jules Verne And H.G. Wells: Imperialism Disguised As Progress In The Early Days Of Science Fiction, Timothy Ferris

Theses and Dissertations

Frequently in their respective oeuvres, Verne and Wells write in a rhetoric of conquest that almost always translates to discovering a more efficient means of taming wild, non-European environments. These goals extend not only to the lands that their protagonists explore, but also to human beings and other life that may populate them. Indeed, the underlying focus—the one that is masked behind the thrill and adventure of both Wells and Verne—is none other than the march of progress as understood by middle-class Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Progress can produce positivistic optimism, and it can also …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2150 (Writing Ii), Elizabeth Mannion

Open Educational Resources

In this class, the second of a two-course sequence in the Pathways Required Core, we’ll explore how language and other meaning-making symbols reflect the Gramercy neighborhood, home to Baruch College, particularly during the Gilded Age (1870s-1914). We’ll read literature of the period by authors with ties to this neighborhood, and study the 1913 Armory Show (which was held across the street at the 69th Regiment Armory), which blurred, challenged, and disrupted the social lines of Gilded Age New York.

A Sense Of Unending: Apocalypse And Post-Apocalypse In Novels Of Late Capitalism, Brent Linsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Frank Kermode to Norman Cohn to John Hall, scholars agree that apocalypse historically has represented times of radical change to social and political systems as older orders are wiped away and replaced by a realignment of respective norms. This paradigm is predicated upon an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes the rebuilding of communities after catastrophe has occurred. However, in the last half-century, narratives that emphasize the destruction of human civilization without this restorative component have begun to overshadow the more historically popular post-apocalyptic models that were particularly abundant during the early days of the Cold War. In light of …

English In France - Linguistic Dominance And Ambivalence, Chloe Kampf

Honors Projects

Whenever English is perceived as a threat to a nation’s language, English proficiency suffers, and France is guilty as charged. Many people know France as a nation with exceptional cuisine, famous artists, and breathtaking countrysides. What many are not aware of, on the other hand, is that France has the least proficient English speakers out of any EU country. Through in-depth research, literature reviews, interviews with French citizens, and analyzations of personal experiences, I attempt to expose the underlining truth behind this intriguing phenomenon.

Gender In Apocalyptic California: The Ecological Frontier, Marykate Eileen Messimer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is the consequence of ideologies that promote human reproduction and resource consumption by sacrificing human justice, nonhuman species, and the land. Both biology and queer ecologies resist this notion of human separation and supremacy by showing that no body is a singular, impermeable entity, that all beings are biologically and inexorably connected. My dissertation demonstrates that fiction writers use this knowledge to locate a utopian vision that can counteract the dystopian impotence of living within climate change. This argument is founded on novels written by women and set in California, a state that uniquely inhabits a utopian and …

Job Satisfaction And Turnover Intention In Higher Education: A Study Of Information Technology Professionals In The California State University System, Brooke Ferrier Banks

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to survey perceived job satisfaction and turnover intention of information technology professionals in the California State University (CSU) system. Employee satisfaction facets (work, pay, opportunities for promotion, supervision, and co-workers), overall satisfaction, and turnover intention were measured. Further, the study identified whether there was a significant difference in perceived job satisfaction or turnover intention based on years of service in the CSU system, gender, or campus in the CSU system. The study also examined the uniqueness of information technology professionals at campuses in the CSU system. This study utilized a mixed-methods methodology with two …

The Perversion Of Dignity In Tsitsi Dangarembga’S Nervous Conditions, Lilian Nyanchama Mayaka

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The goal of this thesis is to study Tsitsi Dangarembga’s allegory of aid which exploits the recipient’s precarity in her first novel Nervous Conditions. More specifically, I would like to explore how such aid dehumanizes the recipients it purports to help by imposing the giver’s goals and agenda on the recipient. I argue that because aid is after all underwritten by an ethics of power, the recipient’s helplessness in the acceptance of this gift, i.e., the precarious socioeconomic conditions which necessitate the acceptance of such aid, subject the recipient to the giver’s will, up to and even in the pursuit …

Jerusalem’S Song: William Blake As Forerunner To Jung’S Feminist Psychology, Trudy D. Eblen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

William Blake's final epic poem, The Song of Jerusalem, consists of two textual narratives: the verbal (let me call it the conscious state) and the visual (the unconscious). I primarily focus on the visual, where the eponymous heroine psychically matures along the trajectory of a Jungian process of individuation (somewhat similar to the ancient universal initiation rite of maturation, as most famously described by Joseph Campbell). Preceding in Blake's corpus is a succession of his other female poetic characters, who represent various stages of successful and failed individuation—Thel, Lyca, Oothoon, and Ahania; these culminate in Jerusalem, Blake’s apotheotic female. …