English Language and Literature Commons^™

“The New Geography,” Material Science, And Narratology’S Space-Time Dichotomy: Notes Toward A Geographical Narratology, Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

This essay places narratology’s emphasis on space-time within the emergence of the discipline of geography and the rise of a materialist, hard science orientation in US institutions after WWII, ultimately arguing that a nascent geographical narratology should aspire to the broad intellectual scope of geography’s origins. “The new geography,” which emerged in 1887 and focused comprehensively on the relation of humans to the earth’s surface, subsequently contracted and fragmented with the post-war emphasis on material science. Likewise expanding in the rationalist post-war climate, classical narratology emphasized logical categories, especially the space-time dichotomy, divorced from human meanings. Today, cognitive research suggests …

A Case Study: Incorporating Young Adult Literature Into General Education To Improve Intellectual And Emotional Intelligence, Katherine Ann Irion

Theses and Dissertations

Institutions of higher learning have required students to take general education courses since such they were conceived and implemented in the 1940s. Requirements vary widely across institutions, but there is a broad consensus that a literature course be required in order to graduate. While these courses feature many types of literature, one literary field is overwhelmingly overlooked: young adult literature. Brigham Young University has recently implemented a young adult literature course that will fulfill a general education requirement. This case study examines the question, "What might be the rationale for including a course in young adult literature as part of …

Book Review: You’Re Welcome, Universe, Al Ricci

The Utah English Journal

Gr 9 Up—For Julia, the very complex protagonist of Whitney Gardner’s novel, You’re Welcome, Universe, nothing has ever been straightforward. When Julia finds a slur about her best friend scrawled across the back of the Kingston School for the Deaf, she covers it up with a beautiful graffiti mural. Her supposed best friend snitches, the principal expels her, and her two mothers set Julia up with a oneway ticket to a “mainstream” school in the suburbs, where she’s treated like an outcast as the only deaf student. The last thing she has left is her art. Out in the …

Book Review: Posted, Ethan Dunn

The Utah English Journal

It isn’t a stretch for someone in our modern society to ask: “What kind of power do words have?” With modern technology allowing the mass spread of a variety of opinions, this is a question more important than ever. Posted, written by John David Anderson, is a wonderfully clever book recommended for 8-12 year olds. It dives into the question of how words affect our relationships with one another as well as define our future. Posted depicts the story of Eric, nicknamed “Frost.” After winning a poetry competition, he and his friends wrestle the difficult social sphere of middle …

Book Review: The Poet X, Erika Larsen

The Utah English Journal

For Xiomara Batista, a young Harlem teenager and the protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel, poetry has a way of vivifying ideas and awakening new possibilities. Words tend to burrow deep into her heart, and while she may seem silent to those around her, Xiomara’s mind is constantly wrestling with new poems.

Book Review: Neverworld Wake, Maddison Driggs

The Utah English Journal

Neverworld Wake lives between life and death, which is where five estranged friends find themselves one rainy evening the summer after their first year of college. This novel closely follows Bee as she navigates the trauma of the past, the pain of the present, and the fear of the future while she and her old friends try to find a way to survive Neverworld Wake. By uncovering the secrets of the past—a tragedy in which they all hold a small part of the truth—Bee and her four friends find answers in unexpected ways as they ultimately face the reality of …

How Public College Students Experience Biblically-Informed Literature Taught As Cultural Documents: A Transcendental Phenomenology, De'lara Khalili Stephens

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This transcendental phenomenology describes the experience of public college students who study biblical or biblically-informed literary texts that are taught merely as cultural documents in literature and humanities courses. Two primary theories informed this study: transformation theory in adult learning and the theory of literary apologetics. Furthermore, qualitative methodologies of data collection included journaling, individual interviews with 13 public college students, and focus groups. Data analysis included epoche, member checks, and horizonalization. Three research questions guided the study: (1) How do public college students describe their experiences with biblical or biblically-informed literary texts when they are taught simply as cultural …

Material For The Study Of Food Terminology, Primarily From Barry Popik’S Research, Part 1, Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

"Master Chef" With Chan And Mann

St. Norbert Times

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The Importance Of Devoting Attention To Students’ Introductory Paragraphs, Andrea Bresee

Tutor's Column

In Writing Center tutoring sessions, many tutors devote their time and attention to helping students with their papers’ body rather than the introductory paragraph. While the body of a paper is certainly important, the weight an introduction carries should not be overlooked. Studies show that the quality of an introduction can determine the overall quality of the paper. Furthermore, students who receive instruction and assistance with writing and improving their opening paragraphs perform better on their papers than students who do not. Tutors should dedicate a portion of their tutoring session to working with students on their introductory paragraphs to …

Supporting First-Generation Students’ Adjustment To College With High-Impact Practices, Theresa Conefrey

English

This qualitative case study describes some of the issues faced by incoming first-generation college students at a private, 4-year institution in the northwest. Using constructs drawn from social cognitive theory and social cognitive career theory, it explores how high-impact practices such as learning communities, writing-intensive courses, and ePortfolios might impact first-generation students’ adjustment during their first year of college. The findings of the research on students’ writing in their first-year composition course suggest that the cumulative impact of engaging in multiple high-impact practices improves students’ literacy and study skills. In addition, these educational practices appear to increase students’ self-appraisal of …

The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism In Romantic And Victorian Literature, Timothy M. Curran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature posits religious medievalism as one among many critical paradigms through which we might better understand literary efforts to bring notions of sanctity back into the modern world. As a cultural and artistic practice, medievalism processes the loss of medieval forms of understanding in the modern imagination and resuscitates these lost forms in new and imaginative ways to serve the purposes of the present. My dissertation proposes religious medievalism as a critical method that decodes modern texts’ lamentations over a perceived loss of the sacred. My project locates textual moments in …

The Agency Aesthetics Of Biofiction In The Age Of Postmodern Confusion, Michael Lackey

English Publications

Olga Tokarczuk, Rosa Montero, Laurent Binet, Anchee Min, Colm Toibin, Colum McCann, Stephanus Muller, Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, Chika Unigwe, and Hannah Kent are just some of the global luminaries whose interviews are contained in this new book of conversations with contemporary biographical novelists, which Bloomsbury released on October 18th. Here is the introduction to the book, which should give a clear sense of the interviews.

Danny Postel Analyzing Conflict

St. Norbert Times

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That Suggestion: Catholic Casuistry, Complexity, And Macbeth, John E. Curran Jr.

English Faculty Research and Publications

In a keeping with the view that Shakespeare harbored a sympathetic attitude to Catholic ways of seeing, this essay argues that Macbeth is a study in the dangers of oversimplification and certainty. In contradistinction to how Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight escapes the Cave of Despaire, Macbeth would benefit greatly from probing, questioning, nuancing, and sifting through ambiguity. He needs to examine the particular attenuation of his own moral thinking, and needs to engage equivocation, in the forms of both amphibology and mental reservation.

The Process Of Salvation In Pearl And The Great Divorce, Amber Dunai

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Analyzes the structural, aesthetic, and thematic parallels between C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and the Middle English dream vision Pearl. By exploring the tension between worldly and heavenly conceptions of justice, value, and possession in The Great Divorce and Pearl, this study demonstrates Lewis’s skill at utilizing and updating medieval source material in order to respond to twentieth-century problems.

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

"No Pagan Ever Loved His God": Tolkien, Thompson, And The Beautification Of The Gods, M. Fontenot

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Alexei Kondratiev award for best student paper, Mythcon 49. Many scholars have commented on the influence of Catholic mystic Francis Thompson’s poetry on J.R.R. Tolkien’s early forays into creative writing. However, few critical studies have addressed possible connections between Tolkien and Thompson’s prose work. This paper suggests that if anything is comparable between Tolkien and Thompson, it is their respective understandings of art, creation, and the significance of artists, regardless of the form of poetic (or prosaic) expression these sentiments induced. Thompson’s essays on art, paganism, and the immortality of beauty come together to form backdrop against which we might …

Turning Back The Tides: The Anglo-Saxon Vice Of Ofermod In Tolkien's Fall Of Arthur, Colin J. Cutler

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien’s Fall of Arthur has at its heart the theme of ofermod, a theme which appears throughout Tolkien’s criticism and creative work. In his essay “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” he argues that the Anglo-Saxon word ofermod in the poem The Battle of Maldon condemns the warband’s leader for an over-reaching pride which places his men in desperate straits. This paper conducts a study of the word and its derivatives in various Anglo-Saxon texts, taking the Microfiche Concordance to Old English as its starting point, and traces Tolkien’s creative use of the theme in both his tales of Middle-earth …

Neil Gaiman's American Gods: A Postmodern Epic For America, Susan Gorman

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

American Gods presents a postmodern view on America and its people and engages with the epic genre both in terms of form and content. This engagement with epic does not present a coherent view of the nation, as other epics do, but instead highlights multidimensionality and irony, demonstrating potential new ways in which the epic can remain important to literary work. Evaluates Gaiman’s use of formal elements of epic such as the use of the national past and national tradition as well as content components such as the presentation of the epic storyteller and the epic hero as it evaluates …