English Language and Literature Commons^™

Postmodern Puzzles: Creating Versions Of The Truth And Identity In Margaret Atwood’S The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, And The Blind Assassin, Maggie Raymond

English Department Theses

Although difficult to universally characterize Margaret Atwood as a feminist postmodern writer, three of Atwood’s novels (The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin) use postmodern techniques to build a conversation with readers about how female identity is created by having readers co-create meaning, consider the influence of intertexts, and question discourses. By emphasizing the role of the reader and the construction of text through storytelling, the traditional roles of author and reader are questioned, and Atwood develops a conversation with readers over their respective roles in creating and interpreting text. In The Robber Bride, Tony, Charis, …

Precarious Positions Of Femininity In Contemporary Literature: A College Course Creation, Ireland Atkinson

Honors Theses

In an effort to understand college instruction, I created a collegiate literature course and its logistical materials. This process manifested in the creation of a syllabus, schedules, assignments, and a teaching philosophy statement. With the title “Precarious Positions of Femininity in Contemporary Literature,” the course is in an interdisciplinary format that explores gender and women’s studies with literary scholarship as its medium. All of the texts are not only written by female authors, but also address women’s issues and the precarious positions their femininity puts them in. With a focus on the intersectionality and the diversity of the female experience, …

Subjective Retelling: The Influence Of External And Individual Factors On The Folktales Of The Brothers Grimm, Katherine R. Woodhouse

Young Historians Conference

Since a first edition of Children’s and Household Tales was published in 1812, the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm has been read, told, watched, and referenced all over the world. When the Grimms initially set out to construct the famous anthology, they intended to objectively uncover a breadth of traditional German folktales, preserving them in their purest possible forms. These stories, the brothers believed, held the essence of the nation’s declining culture and collective identity. However, the assumption that the stories of Children’s and Household Tales holistically represent the genuine German history and dialogue of oral storytelling is inaccurate. …

Harold Pinter’S Other Places (Staged Reading), Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

ETSU Patchwork Players will perform a staged reading of Other Places – 3 Plays by Harold Pinter in Studio 205 of Campus Center Building at 7:30 p.m. free of charge. The reading is under the direction of Theatre & Dance faculty member Melissa Shafer and advising of Department of Literature & Language Chair Dr. Katherine Weiss, acting as dramaturg.

Wendy's Story In J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Jessica Hedrick

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

Although known today as simply Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie’s classic children’s novel was originally titled Peter and Wendy. This paper explores the famous children’s story from Wendy Darling’s perspective, taking particular interest in the narrator’s contradictory stance on Wendy her agency in the original novelized text. Peter Pan may be the most well known of Barrie’s characters, but the novel’s story is Wendy’s. The relationship between a mother and her children forms the crux of the novel; without Wendy, without her relationship with her own mother and her desire to play grown-up, there is no story. Peter Pan …

Beauty In The Beast: A Book Review Of Marie Darrieussecq’S Truismes, Ruby Kite

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

No abstract provided.

Everyday Magic: A Linguistic Analysis Of Sarah Addison Allen’S “Just So You Know”, Hannah Tumlinson, Jessie Sams

Undergraduate Research Conference

This project diagrams and analyzes Sarah Addison Allen’s magical realism essay, “Just So You Know,” which informs readers that, just as they fall in love with books, books fall in love with them, too. I focus on two defining features: (1) second person point of view (2) grammatical features from sentence structure and vocabulary

Literary Pedagogies At Umsl: Combining Case Study With Personal Narrative, Elizabeth Miller

Theses

Through traditional scholarship and an analysis of survey data collected from undergraduate literature students at the university, I investigate the ways in which pedagogies of composition and disability studies can be incorporated into the teaching of literature. Historically, literary scholarship has not focused on issues of pedagogy to the degree that other divisions within English Studies have done, and it is therefore necessary to determine what gaps exist, if any, and how they might be bridged. For example, composition pedagogies often emphasize active, student-based teaching paradigms that are rooted in students’ personal experiences and the kind of writing that interests …

Silver And Gold: The Markers Of Goodness, Greed And Vanity In Chaucer's Travelers, Samantha G. Strickland

Georgia College Student Research Events

In this presentation, I will argue that in the “General Prologue” to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chaucer refers to silver and gold in three different ways in and analyze how these methods reflect on the travelers as well as reflect Chaucer’s own musings on morality and wealth: through description of their attire or looks, through reference to the literal exchange, and through metaphor. All three types of references allow for both negative, like the Pardoner and Miller, and positive, like the Parson, evaluations of the specific traveler’s character, and through this Chaucer reminds the reader that wealth is not inherently good …

Something To Step Up To S.C. And The Neh, Susanna Ashton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Hentzi Looks At Literature And Its Circumstances., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

English is a well-known subject, but what most

people don’t know is that English scholars do a lot

of different things. One of these scholars is Dr. Gary

Hentzi, whose interest in culture dates from a very

early age. “I guess I always knew that I was interested

in the arts and culture. I started out more interested in

music than anything else, but it quickly branched out

into an interest in literature,” he says.

As a young professor, he specialized in one of the

founders of the novel as a literary genre in the early

18th century: Daniel Defoe. …

From The Ineluctable Wave To The Realization Of Imagined Wonder: Tolkien's Transformation Of Psychic Pain Into Art, John Rosegrant

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

Desire, in the form of the yearning and compelling urge to create, is the topic of this speculative but compelling reading of Tolkien’s recurring “Atlantis-complex” dream, his “exorcising” of it through its use as a recurring theme in his writing, and the underlying tangle of hubris, loss, and father/son issues that might well be the source of this vision. Events in Tolkien’s personal life are aligned with events in his creative life.

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

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

No abstract provided.

To Grow Together, Or To Grow Apart: The Long Sorrow Of The Ents And Marriage In The Lord Of The Rings, Nicole Duplessis

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

Explores Tolkien’s thoughts on love and marriage as expressed through the Ents and Entwives. Our understanding of their relationship and long sundering is enriched by considering Lewis’s thoughts in The Four Loves on philia and eros, yet in the end both Tolkien’s lived experience of marriage and parenthood and his Catholic background enhance his picture of the Ents with more realism than Lewis’s somewhat (pre-Joy) theoretical approach.

"Time To Prepare A Face": Mythology Comes Of Age, Andrew Lazo

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

Guest of Honor address from Mythcon 47. A study of the place of mythology in ancient, medieval, and modern literature, the responses of Lewis and Tolkien to Modernity, and a meditation on Lewis’s thoughts on joy and the varieties of love in Surprised by Joy, the Narnia books, The Four Loves, and especially Till We Have Faces, for which Lazo offers an insightful reading of the concluding pages.

"Enough About Whores": Sexual Characterization In A Song Of Ice And Fire, Joseph Young

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

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is replete with characters who engage in sexual misconduct and violence. Yet there are subtleties in the intents and effects of their conduct that grant us, as readers, more than mere titillation: increased insight into his characters and themes. Young considers the characteristics of viewpoint characters in Gothic literature and how they engage the sympathies of the reader.

"It Had Been His Virtue, And Therefore Also The Cause Of His Fall": Seduction As A Mythopoeic Accounting For Evil In Tolkien's Work, Maria Alberto

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

Seduction is often connected to eros, but Tolkien generally uses the term in a broader fashion. A theoretical underpinning based on medieval sources, Baudrillard, and Catholic thought provides a basis for understanding how characters may be led astray from their proper paths, and how Tolkien’s critique of the domination of other wills is demonstrated in these cases.

Tolkien's Allusive Backstory: Immortality And Belief In The Fantasy Frame, Wayne A. Chandler, Carrol L. Fry

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

Mortality and immortality underlie the “emotional truth” (95) of Tolkien’s backstory, a truth which draws us as readers into a world in which longing and loss, death and deathlessness, are the foundation of a sub-created world that we as readers desire. The fantasy frame in Tolkien’s legendarium is extremely deep, and has been highly influential on other creators.

Utopia In Deep Heaven: Thomas More And C.S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy, Benjamin C. Parker

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

Teases out parallels to Thomas More’s Utopia the solar system of Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, to show how Lewis’s scholarly engagement with this text informs his depictions of Malacandra, Perelandra, and the smaller world of the N.I.C.E. Particularly emphasized are the similarities in the overall structures and the narrators and protagonists.

A Common Language Of Desire: The Magicians, Narnia, And Contemporary Fantasy, Kelly Kramer

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

Grossman’s trilogy, and particularly the first novel, is centered around the theme of unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire—the depressed main character Quentin’s inability to find anything that will ease his disillusionment and grant him lasting happiness. Grossman’s revisioning of Narnia as Fillory is examined closely.