English Language and Literature Commons^™

Memory, History, And Forgetting In The Sandra Allen Collection Of Papers On Mormonism: A Feminist Rhetorical Historiography Of Institutional Intervention In The Equal Rights Amendment, Valerie Kinsey

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation leverages archival theory, public memory theory, feminist historiography, and rhetorical theory to argue that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reinterpreted the Mormon past to engender identification and foster political action during the Equal Rights Amendment ratification period (1976-1981). Chapter One provides readers with an orientation to the Sandra Allen Collection of Papers on Mormonism and argues that its creator, Sandra Allen, marshaled her understanding of archiving, history writing, and institutional archives to make her history public. Chapter Two: On Memory uses theories of public memory to explain why the Mormon Church built the Nauvoo Monument …

Getting On The Same Page: The Hermeneutics Of Peer Feedback In Composition Classrooms, Mellisa Huffman

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation reconceptualizes print-based and virtual peer feedback (peer review, peer editing, and peer response) within composition classrooms as hermeneutic or interpretive acts. Grounding peer feedback within philosophical hermeneutics explains why empirical research and anecdotal evidence illustrate contradictions regarding peer feedbacks benefits to students. Students' interpretations of what is happening/supposed to happen within peer feedback contexts impacts their performances in these contexts, and these interpretations occur through complex interplays of rhetorical, cultural, linguistic, and contextual interpretive fields. Enacting a hermeneutic pedagogy, which consists of engaging students in a series of scaffolded preparatory and reflective activities, collaborating with students in determining …

More Than A Feeling: The Transmission Of Affect And Group Identity, Lauren Fine, Brian Jackson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

We’ve all experienced moments where we walk in and feel the tension in the room. Even before our minds can process what’s happening, we start to mirror the emotions of the people we’re around. Instances like this, where the emotion (or affect) one person is feeling subconsciously triggers a similar affect in someone else, are possible through what neuroscientists refer to as the transmission of affect. The physiological shift that influences the receiver’s emotions is triggered through visual, auditory, and olfactory cues (pheromones).

Portraits Of An Immigrant Population: A Look Into The Life Of Mexican Migrant Workers In Florida, Jenna Carson, Patrick Madden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

I wrote creative non-fiction essays about my experiences with Mexican migrant workers living in Florida. Originally, I planned to focus primarily on their stories of survival in order to increase awareness among U.S. citizens; I wanted readers to understand many of the complications of illegal immigration, and therefore, better understand the Mexican “Other.” Surprisingly, I focused more on my own experiences with migrant workers and how my life has been changed by them (rather than simply record their life stories). I realized that my own experiences and meditations could foster compassion, understanding, and tolerance.

God's Chosen: The Cults Of Virgin Martyrs In Anglo-Saxon England, Colleen Dunn

English Language and Literature ETDs

At the center of Anglo-Saxon life was a thriving religious culture, which—in one of its most vibrant forms—was expressed in the cult of saints. The virgin martyr became one of the most popular forms of sanctity, yet with hundreds of possible martyrs who could have been venerated, the question becomes which ones ultimately thrived in Anglo-Saxon England and why? Moreover, the very need for these two questions reveals a troubling fact: when writing about female virgin martyrs, the hagiographers never chose a native Anglo-Saxon woman as the focus of their passiones. In exploring both the reasons for and the implications …

Big Humanities, Big Data: Genre Analysis Of Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, Brittany Strobelt, Kylan Rice

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The continual digitalization of society has not only permeated research in the Humanities, but is constantly revealing just how crucial it is to the Humanities’ future. Whereas research in the Humanities is normally limited to a very narrow dataset, digital humanities tools allow for macroanalitic research—research that can analyze vast amounts of texts all at once. The database produced by our project can do just that. Because scholars’ such as Ted Underwood, Matthew Jockers, Franco Moretti, and others at the Stanford Literary Lab have focused extensively on macroanalysis of novels, we envisioned and designed a project focused specifically on poetry—a …

The College Writing Experience For At-Risk High School Students, Caroline Howard, Dawan Coombs

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Recently, studies have been conducted to measure the effects of mentored writing experiences on people struggling with low self-efficacy. Some studies intervene in high security prisons, where people with low self-perception reside. Writing has proven to help restore a sense of dignity in prison inmates because of its expressive nature. When people are encouraged and praised for their writing by mentors, especially when the writing is personal, they begin to have an increased sense of self-efficacy. Other studies have been conducted in middle schools, seeking to intervene with struggling writers before they get to high school. These studies are done …

Dialogical Interspecies Ethics: Ataraxia, Desire And Hope In The Post-Human World Of Anne Carson's Pastoral, Thomas Bristow Dr

The Goose

This review essay implicitly revisits human and non-human power relations within a critical animal studies context that understands the affective conjunction between the manipulation of our worlds (action, partly through knowledge) and degrees of involvement with these others that live in our worlds (comportment via emotions). I take Louise Westling’s new study as the platform for an analysis of two book-length poems, The Autobiography of Red (1998) and red doc> (2013), which centre on the life of a shepherd, Geryon. Rather than revisit classical pastoral, these texts extract power-relations that classical myth and pastoral spatialise. In so doing, I argue, …

Christian Lady Rhetorica: Americanization Of Marian Rhetoric In Early American Sentimental And Seduction Novels, Stephanie Laszik

English Department Theses

In the larger scope of religious feminine iconography, the Virgin Mary stands out as a vessel of cultural rhetoric. As medieval studies in religion, culture, and language indicate, the Virgin Mary's biblical speeches, combined with her image as a mother and follower of God, create a unique opportunity for authors of fiction to explore the Marian manifestations in their characters. This project illuminates the occurrences of Marian Rhetoric as they are found in American sentimental and seduction novels as tools for cultural change. The American sentimental and seduction novels discussed in this project, show a need for the cultural commentary …

Ophelia And The Feminine Construct, Lilly E. Romestant

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

In Shakespeare's celebrated tragic masterpiece, Hamlet, one of the most controversial and seminal characters, Ophelia, continues to have a heavy influence on contemporary culture today in some unexpected ways. Her prevalence in mainstream media––including film, literature, drama, and music homages––validates not only her importance now but also reimagines and reinforces her parallel importance at the time of her debut in 1603. Her association with global teenage culture, suicide, and mental illness, puts her in the unique position of being heralded, generation after generation, as an icon of depression in female youth. This can be both positive and negative, as …

Where Do They Go: Christian Faith And Belonging In Gay Literature, Samuel D. J. Ernest

Honors Projects

This exploration of Christianity, family, homosexuality, and running away in twentieth-century literature is divided into two essays. In the first essay, G. K. Chesterton’s “twitch upon a thread” provides a way of understanding the flight of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and Jeanette in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. After they escape their mothers and home communities, Sebastian’s and Jeanette’s searches for a vocation eventually bring them back to where they started, in one sense or another. Sebastian finds his place within the Church, at a monastery; Jeanette travels back to her parents’ house …

Appropriating The Restoration: Fictional Place And Time In Rose Tremain’S Restoration: A Novel Of Seventeenth-Century England, Judith Bailey Slagle

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: It was the sixties—albeit the 1660s—a time for tricksters, rakes, subversive women and sexual energy on the stage. It was a time of fun for those with the means to partake of it. The “good old days” are, of course, always better from a distance, but writers on through the twentieth century found the Restoration an apt setting for their fictions about prostitution, political intrigue, and tragic or comic historical events, especially for the cinema.

Hybrid, Subversive, And Skeptical Performances Of Gender, Power, And Space In The Postcolonial Avant-Garde, Alyson T. Inouye

Honors Projects

In her one-woman play, Iraqi-American playwright and actress Heather Raffo performs the testimonies of nine resilient Iraqi women, emphasizing their diverse experiences of the American occupation and life under the Baathist regime. Near the end of the play, one of the soliloquies breaks down into incoherence: an instance of poetic rupture. There is revolutionary potential latent in this avant-garde technique, and by applying it to her urgent and immediate postcolonial context Raffo simultaneously enacts and demands a response of justice to the injustices attested to throughout. Through the poetic rupture of Layal’s textual/psychological breakdown, Raffo undermines the system that, by …

There Will Be Violence: A Critical Analysis Of Violence In The Works Of Cormac Mccarthy, Matthew L. Robinson

Honors Projects

This discussion of McCarthy’s use of violence in his western novels will focus primarily on the books Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and No Country for Old Men.

Both novels feature antagonists who use war and violence to impose a new societal order. They fail in the end – they cannot succeed so long as there are individuals who refuse to conform to a widespread acceptance of violence that follows Judge Holden’s doctrine of war. In McCarthy’s novels, violence is used to impose a new order of existence. The opposition of individuals cause these imposed …

Jane Austen's Liminal Heroines: Rituals Of Personal And Social Growth, Allison V. Juda

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Jane Austen’s six novels all follow a liminal heroine through her journey of personal growth, ultimately concluding with the success of the heroine and her society. In my project I examine how this liminal plot structure works, combining anthropological theories of liminality (most prominently those of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner) with the narrative structure of Austen’s novels. The growth of the heroine through the phases of liminality and eventual reintegration into society is marked by several challenges to the morality of the heroine. Yet, these challenges are, in fact, tests for the society just as much as they …

Gender, Family, And Morality In Ben Jonson’S Volpone, Shanelle Kim

Posters, Presentations, and Papers

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, the transformation in categories of value resulting from a money economy clashed with older forms of institutionalized values. Ben Jonson’s dramatic satire Volpone (1606) diagnoses social ills arising from the emerging proto-capitalist culture of his time. Though Jonson critiques the corrosive impact of a money culture, the two distinct embodiments of moral good in Jonson’s play, Celia and Bonario, prove ineffective in battling the creeping value transformations associated with money. In part, their failure derives from systemic fissures in Early Modern understandings of the family unit and gendered roles within such a …

Isolation Of The Individual In The Novels Of Carson Mccullers, Adam Hutchinson

Honors Projects

A southern novelist of the mid twentieth century, Carson McCullers is often labeled as a Southern Gothic author, and her novels reflect the violence, grotesque characters, and dilapidated settings of the genre. However, while early interpretations of her work focused on the depravity of doomed characters, more recent analysis has opened up her work to a productive understanding of social change. Her characters are isolated from the rest of society, whether by race, religion, or sexuality, but rather than highlighting their own shortcomings, these isolating factors underscore a limitation within the social structures and the need for change. This essay …

The Dystopian Dickens: Expectant Of Hard Times, Micaela L. Hamid

Senior Honors Theses

As part of this thesis, the novel Expectant will parody different elements of two of Charles Dickens’ novels with their dystopian, futuristic setting. Expectant replicates the themes of disappointment and emotional deprivation from Great Expectations (1860-61), and dehumanization and the struggle between fancy and reason from Hard Times (1854). The parody will draw parallels from the plotlines, characters, and symbols of these novels to further cement the similarities of the themes employed with themes popularized more recently by novels of the dystopian genre.

The mission of the project is to sell the novel, Expectant, to publishers on the basis …

The Palantíri Stones In J.R.R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings As Sauron’S Social Media: How To Avoid Getting Poked By The Dark Lord, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Eric Shanower And The Visual Mythography Of Age Of Bronze, Michael R. Hale

English Department Theses

Eric Shanower's groundbreaking comic series Age of Bronze is examined as a new kind of text, a mythographic text. By merging the classical Greek stories surrounding the Trojan War into a concise and linear graphic narrative, Shanower crafts a new kind of mythography through visual and textual media. This work aims to explore how mythography and comics intersect within Shanower's work.