English Language and Literature Commons^™

Book Review Of The Squad By Christina Soontornvat And Joanna Cacao, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

The Squad by Christina Soontornvat and illustrator Joanna Cacao is a follow-up to the indie bestseller The Tryout (2022). The graphic memoir is written for educators, parents, and students in K-12. The illustrations are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is humorous, and the facial expressions describe how the characters are feeling. The main character, Christina, is now an 8^th grader in Texas. Set in the 1990s and the cover page shows her friends lifting her up as she strikes a cheerleading pose. Christina tries out for cheer again, encounter’s identity conflict, and grapples with her parents’ divorce. This review discusses …

Oms 4 Early List Of Papers, Tim Lenz

OMS Early List of Papers

The June 10th list for OMS 4, compiled by Tim Lenz.

Bilbo's Boethian Heroism, Wendy Marie Hoofnagle

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien’s Boethian heritage has been amply explored, particularly for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, but little scholarly attention has been paid to his development of Boethian ideals in The Hobbit, especially in regard to Bilbo’s heroic arc and the importance of luck on his journey. I argue that Tolkien develops Bilbo’s heroic identity and his famous “luck” as the actions of Fortune on behalf of Fate and divine Providence, interpreting the influential theology from Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy as a new kind of heroism that fulfills the teachings of Lady Philosophy.

My Mind In Middlemarch, Margaret A. Fisher

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

“My Mind in Middlemarch” is a creative-critical essay and personal narrative of self-diagnosis. It was modeled in length and (somewhat) in style on Rebecca Mead’s essay, “Middlemarch and Me,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2011 and was later expanded into her book, My Life in Middlemarch (2014). This personal essay narrates my journey to self-diagnosis and the initial discovery of my autism— a realization sparked by the resonance I found between my life and that of Dorothea Brooke, the central heroine of George Eliot’s classic British novel.

Beyond The Meadow: Exploring The Violence And Dynamics Of Power In Watership Down Through Critical Animal Studies And Cinematographic Lens, Marwa Hussein Abdelfattah

Arts and Design

This paper aims to analyze the 2018 Netflix miniseries adaptation of Richard Adams's classic novel, Watership Down, using Critical Animal Studies and a Cinematographic lens. The analysis focuses on its visual storytelling through the camera angles, lighting, and character representation. Adams’ novel was adapted three times. The first two animated versions were horrifying to the extent that one of them was banned. The most recent version used Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) technology to be more friendly. The CGI version toned down explicit brutality while maintaining the novel's darker themes. Unlike the two previous versions, the CGI focused on inferred violence and …

The Map Of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections On Tolkien’S Myth Of Wilderness (2022) By Amber Lehning, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien’s Myth of Wilderness (2022) by Amber Lehning

Introduction, Dominic Davies, Candida Rifkind

WLU Press Books

This is the introductory chapter of Graphic Refuge Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind.

Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.

Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, …

Review Of The Medici Curse, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Interactive Walkthrough Of Richard Kostelanetz’S Library, Martin Glick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My project utilizes the visual novel game engine Ren’Py to create an embodied virtual walkthrough of Richard Kostelanetz’s personal library. Kostelanetz is a pioneering avante-garde artist, critic, and anthologist whose work spans multiple decades and artistic practices. This interactive experience introduces users to the astounding collection of 25,000 books that Kostelanetz has amassed in Ridgewood, Queens over his decades of publishing avant-garde literature. While scholars might be familiar with his anthologies such as Scenarios: Scripts to Perform (1980) and Texts-Sound Texts (1980), my project allows users to browse through sample pages of his original “Book Art”.

This New Media Object …

Transmedial Econarratology: Environment And The Subject Of Science Fiction, Joseph R. Boisvere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that narrators are constructed by their interactions with diegetic space and time in an ecological relationship. This argument draws upon Erin James’s work on econarratology, particularly her book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, putting her theories of narrating time and place in dialogue with contemporary “unnatural” narratology as theorized by scholars such as Jan Alber and Brian Richardson. Science fiction (SF) offers a rich complement to these theoretical stances. I also focus much of my dissertation on how narratology works across and is influenced by specific media, featuring literary, audiovisual, and digital media, including novels, …

An Erotics Manifesto: Developing Critical Feminist Theory Through Erotic Fiction, Cairn Des Lions

University Honors Theses

Erotic literature provides a unique lens through which feminists can develop theory because it reveals the natures of our gendered relations in the contexts of our desires. By either writing or critically reading erotic literature, feminists can explore questions about what and why we desire, how we act upon our desires, and what our desires and actions reveal about our relationships to each other. This thesis uses feminist theory to analyze the potential of fiction focused on eroticism to aid in rethinking gender and sexuality norms.

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

A Teacher, A Tutor, A Friend: Chatgpt And The High School Experience, Saisha Gupta, Vivek Mehta, Rebecca Kam, Caroline Ehmann, Alma Orgad, Emily Kuang, Alejandro Castro Barrantes, Matthew Posada, Samay Shah, Nikhita Prasad, Tara Pai, Eileen Ho, Shirley Xi, Tianyi Zhou, Elaina Li, Stephanie Wan, Shreya Paranjape, Zoe Dearling, Siqi (Grace) Peng, Aanya Kaveti, Gwendolyn Lowrance, Angela Ziyi Xie, Mira Xu, Adhiti Hariram, Alexa Muse

The Qualitative Report

Given the increasing emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, high school students' perspectives on ChatGPT are underrepresented in current research literature. As high school student researchers in an English Language Arts course, we approached this gap in literature by asking the question: In what ways do pressures within high school communities influence students’ perspectives on justifying or rejecting the use of ChatGPT? We interviewed 24 secondary students and conducted a thematic and discourse analysis, coding the interviews through the lenses of social goods (Gee, 2014), Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998), and positioning theory (Holland et al., 1998; Ingram …

A Teacher, A Supervisor, An Undefined Self, Alexa Muse

The Qualitative Report

This article follows the experiences and reflections of an American high school English teacher while evolving a single tenth grade memoir and grammar unit into a published student-led research project over the span of 3 years. As a partner piece, this article supplements my students’ published project, titled “A Teacher, a Tutor, a Friend,” that explores ChatGPT and student perspectives through a thematic discourse analysis under the framework of Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998); as their teacher-turned-supervisor, I found that preparing 10th grade students—now called the Lexington Student Research and Publication Collaborative—to grapple with such complex material was a …

The Power Of Storytelling: Creatively Facilitating Conceptual Change In The Classroom, Mackenzie S. Rose, Marcus Johnson

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

Conceptual knowledge encompasses understanding the interrelationships among multiple pieces of information. Misconceptions of these interrelationships illustrate the need for effective educational strategies to facilitate conceptual change, with the goal of facilitating changes in learner understanding to appropriate, accurate, and complete concepts. Strategies, such as refutation texts, have proven effective in addressing science misconceptions, yet there is a prominent gap in research on conceptual change in nonscience subjects and the use of storytelling to facilitate such change. Storytelling, presented in a range of educational subjects, invites learners to engage in social discourses and problem-solving exercises. Prompted by classroom storytelling practices, creativity, …

Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing The Value And Function Of The Popular Romance Genre, Mckenzie Chan

Honors Projects

Amidst the increasing popularity of the romance genre, as evidenced by notable growth on online platforms such as TikTok, this project interrogates the perceived value and function of contemporary romance fiction. Drawing on the existing field of romance scholarship, this paper synthesizes key arguments pertaining to romance’s content, readers, form, and market, respectively. Such analysis is grounded in a reading of Ana Huang’s 2021 novel Twisted Love. Furthermore, given the highly gendered nature of popular romance, lenses of feminist critique are used to unpack the cultural significance of these narratives, exploring both the dangers and the merits that they …

Lost In Transition: An Examination Of The Burden Of Choice In Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Works, Sam Parrish

English Theses

Samuel Beckett's plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, provide ample room for applying existential and speech act theories to examine the goals of the characters. In analyzing the exchanges between these characters, the audience becomes aware of the phenomenon of miscommunication and how it alienates the characters. This thesis furthers the discussion of Beckett's intentions regarding the human experience as embodied on stage by examining the text of the plays, rather than any specific performances. Specifically, I develop a framework that identifies a main character within each of the plays discussed, and how the interactions between that main character and …

A Reconstruction Of The Homeric Tradition In Early Greece, Aidan F. Hoey

Student Theses

This thesis discusses the centuries-long historiographical debate that is known to us as the Homeric Question. The identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the dating from when the Homeric epic poems were composed, the Homeric diction, and the historicity of the Trojan War has puzzled scholars since Antiquity. Only by the twentieth century, scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord proved that the Iliad and Odyssey were orally composed. How the written form of the Homeric epic poems came about has become even more of a historiographic puzzle than it has been previously. Building off the …

Like Lady Godiva: Godiva's Fandom From Fiction To Activism, Elizabeth Reid Boyd

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The legend of Lady Godiva, who famously rode naked through the streets of Coventry, veiled only by her long, flowing hair, has endured for centuries as a symbol of protest, sacrifice, and spectacle. According to the most popular version of the tale, Godiva pleaded with her husband, Lord Leofric of Mercia, to lift an oppressive tax that threatened to impoverish the people of Coventry. In response, Leofric issued a provocative challenge: he would revoke the tax only if she rode unclothed through the town. Godiva accepted, and in a gesture of defiance and compassion, undertook the ride. The townspeople, out …

Bellyache, Valerie Braylovskiy

Canterbury Scholars

My manuscript of poems, called "Bellyache," speaks to my experience with endometriosis and how it intersects with both womanhood, and the pain we inherit from our ancestors that becomes stored in our bodies over time. This project gave me the permission to write poems that grapple with both escaping and recreating what it’s like to be a woman inside the medical system which continues to equate pain with hysteria, and inside a world that either says you’re sick, or you aren’t.