Digital Commons Network^™

Contributors’ Biographies, David Aguilar, A.D. Beason-Manes, Jenn Jennings Davis, Sarah Dierlam, Fathima E.V, Alison D. Ligon, Cindy Lutenbacher, Angelic Rodgers, Ronald Dean Straight

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

2014 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Eliza Haywood And The Narratological Tropes Of Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

Eliza Haywood’s novels and political writings are often considered in isolation from each other; however, there is a discursive thread that links her fictional and political works: her engagement with secret history. Across her career, in her novels as well as her political pamphlets and periodicals, Haywood deploys two important narratological tropes of the secret historian: the tendency to reveal the secrets of public figures while concealing the author’s own political position and the tendency to muse self-reflexively about the author’s own role as a writer of history. Haywood’s facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession …

Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In his article "Race, Slavery, and the Revaluation of the T'ang Canon" Gregory E. Rutledge re-evaluates—from the purview of African Diaspora literary studies—historiography that considers the place of East African slave lore in T'ang Dynasty fiction. Julie Wilensky's "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves': Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500" (2002), a revision of Chang Hsing-lang's "The Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618- 907)" (1930), is pivotal since it occupies the nexus between European-American, East-Asian, and African-Diasporic canons and policies. Rutledge situates Wilensky's and Chang's works in the context of Edward …

Brave New Forms: Adaptation, Remediation, And Intertextuality In The Multimodal World Of Hugo Cabret, Chelsea Marie Bromley

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Digital technologies have changed the way readers approach, experience, and respond to texts. In our hyper-mediated culture, images and texts converge and disseminate across multiple media platforms, changing once-passive readers and spectators into active agents in the intellectual and creative process of interpretation. This thesis examines the multimodal world of Hugo Cabret—the hybrid graphic novel, the film adaptation, and the novel’s official website—in an effort to better understand how intertextuality, convergence culture, and remediation play with media forms, represent an ideological shift toward participatory culture, and rework older, traditional media in the creation of new media and new media users. …

Transformative Pedagogy For Social Justice Education: Teaching Technical Communication Students To Bridge Anzalduan Theories Of Social Change, Carlos Munoz

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This thesis discusses the growing challenge facing teachers of technical communication in preparing educators with the knowledge, skills, and perspectives to effectively work with an increasing diverse student population, especially with those students whose cultural, racial, language, professional, and ethnic backgrounds are different from the educator’s background. Therefore, Anzaldúan theory offers another productive way of bringing together theory and practice to address the challenge of seeing and practicing technical communication’s critical and civic aspects within diverse communities. This essay provides insight into how Anzaldúa theories for social change might fulfill civic objectives.

Creating Domestic Dependents: Indian Removal, Cherokee Sovereignty And Women’S Rights, Jesslyn R. Collins-Frohlich

Theses and Dissertations--English

What, this project asks, are the impacts of the alliance between women and Native Americans in the nineteenth century debate over Indian Removal? How might groups similarly excluded from patriarchal systems of government by race and gender turn exclusion into arguments for inclusion? In what ways might this alliance change interpretations of the women’s right and Native American rights movements? While arguments made by women and Native Americans during Indian Removal receive considerable scholarly attention, most studies-especially those concerned with women’s involvement- subordinate Indian Removal to abolition or create significant omissions in the narratives of both movements by adopting a …

Strong Angels Of Comfort: Middle Class Managing Daughters In Victorian Literature, Emily A. Dotson

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the social sciences about the challenging nature of care labor as well as feminist discussions about the role of the daughter in Victorian culture.

It explores the literary presence of the middle class managing daughter in the Victorian home.

Collectively, the novels in this study articulate social anxieties about the unclear and unstable role of daughters in the family, the physically and emotionally challenging work they, and all women, do, and the struggle for daughters to find a place in a family hierarchy, which is often structured not by effort or affection, but …

Crossing Borders Toward Young Transnational Lives, G. Sue Kasun, Cinthya M. Saavedra

Mexican American Studies Faculty Publications

Young immigrant youth often live their lives across borders, either by physically crossing them for return visits and/or by metaphorically crossing them through social media and cultural identification. The authors argue these students are better understood as transnational, shifting the focus for educators away from imagining their immigrant students on a straight, one-way path to assimilation in the U.S. to understanding these youths’ abilities to cross borders. Specifically, they call for a redesignation of English Language Learners (ELLs) as Transnational English Learners (TELs). Highlighting examples of educators’ successful border-crossing work, the authors call for educators to cross borders as well …

Review Of Women As Translators In Early Modern England, By Deborah Uman, Judith Bailey Slagle

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of Deborah Uman. Women as Translators in Early Modern England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. 166 pages. $65.00.

Theorizing Audience And Spectatorial Agency, Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter analyses Georgian audiences and spectatorial agency through several lenses: psychoanalytic film theory, theories of the public sphere and of mass publicity, and media studies of cultural convergence. The first section reads Georgian theatre’s heterogeneous playbills as a syntactical rendering of the audience, the imaginary community of the nation in process of negotiation. The second section shows theatrical paratexts blurring the boundary between theatre and coffee house, creating a theatrical public sphere in which the audience exercises daily public agency in saving or damning the play. The third section highlights the mingling of vulnerability and charisma in the celebrity …

Teaching Australian Literature In A Class About Literatures Of Social Reform, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Sally Morgan’s My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a class examining literature as an agent of social change. Indeed, its response to the question, “How does the Australian production of My Place influence its American reception?” will surprise many people. Students more readily demonstrate empathy with characters and are prepared to ascribe their unenviable life circumstances to social structures that propagate oppression when reading literature about cultural groups …

Cultural Discourse In Taiwan. Ed. Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, And Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek., Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

The collected volume Cultural Discourse in Taiwan — edited by Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and published by National Sun Yat-sen Uiniversity Press in 2009 — is intended as an addition to scholarship in the field of Taiwan Studies. The articles in the volume are in many aspects comparative and the topics discussed are in the context of literary and culture scholarship. At the same time, the volume is interdisciplinary as the articles cover historical perspectives, analyses of texts by Taiwan authors, and cultural discourse as related to Taiwan consciousness, language, and linguistic issues. Copyright release …

Clcweb Best Practices, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Mapping The World, Culture, And Border-Crossing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb Library

Authors in the collected volume Mapping the World, Culture, and Border-crossing — edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and I-Chun Wang and published by National Sun Yat-sen University Press in 2010— begin with exploring theoretical premises about the processes and ramifications of cultural crossings to establish a clearly defined theoretical context for the case studies which follow. The case studies range from the creation of identity through patriotic songs in Taiwan under martial law, to nationality and Japanese identity, cultural autonomy in contemporary North America, Asian migration to Latin America, ethnic identity in the writings of Tan, Naipaul, Eliot, and …

A Pedagogical Heartbeat: The Integration Of Critical And Contemplative Pedagogies For Transformative Education, Juan Mah Y Busch

English Faculty Works

With so many figurative references to the heart, the heart has become an overextended metaphor and threatens to become less meaningful. Widely circulated books on Critical Pedagogies and Contemplative Pedagogies refer to the heart. Though they may share a sense of learning as transformation, each has a very different method, which I identify as dialectical or dialogical.  And, each one defines its liberatory transformation in a very different way, one with “third space” and the other in relational and holistic space, which is considered transcendent. This essay describes two forms of heartfelt awareness, first-order heart-based knowledge and the heart’s second-order …

Humanistic Psychology In Selected Plays By Lorraine Hansberry: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

Psychoanalysis has long been a breakthrough in the field of literary criticism. This book celebrates the intermarriage between two fields: psychology and literature. It provides a thorough analysis of selected dramatic texts authored by the Afro-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Such analysis is achieved through employing the humanistic psychology theories of the leading humanistic psychologists: Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May to emphasize that features of humanistic psychology are detected in Hansberry's plays. The interdisciplinary nature of the book calls for psychology and literature readers who have a passion for deduction & induction and a desire to navigate through different …

Secondhand City: Stolen Stories From La Limonada, Byron José Sun

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Roboton, Jupa and Calicas have just been drafted by the city of La Limonada to petrol, to rob, to intimidate, to extort, to kill and when necessary to protect those citizens that need it; as their crime spree progresses their tactics and abilities improve shaping them into criminal machines. The three new criminals will be tasked with the reality of destroying people's lives in order to insure La Limonada maintains its dominion over every citizen by controlling every aspect of their past, present and future. Many of those citizens are clueless on how they are controlled; it isn't until their …

Critique And Theory In The History Of The Modern Humanities, Paul Jay

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

What role has poststructuralist literary, critical, and cultural theory played in the making of the humanities, particularly in the period between 1968 and the present, and what role should theory have going forward as we come to terms with the corporatization of higher education, with its stress on practical skills, vocational training, and on measuring concrete learning outcomes? Exploring these questions requires confronting - and linking - two key issues currently at the core of sometimes-fierce debates about the humanities in the West, and particularly in t he US. T he first issue has to do with whether or not …

Response: “Unsafe Politics And Risky Connections”, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Diversity, Jodi Melamed

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Bringing Down The Island: Rebellion, Colonial Hierarchy, And Individualized Leadership In Nuñez’S Novel Prospero’S Daughter, Kristin M.S. Bezio

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

“Bringing Down the Island: Rebellion, Colonial Hierarchy, and Individualized Leadership in Nuñez’s novel Prospero’s Daughter” offers an analysis of Elizabeth Nuñez’s (2006) novel Prospero’s Daughter and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), both of which draw upon multicultural tradition of European and Caribbean literatures, retelling Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The paper is concerned with the ways in which leadership has been transformed from the original story, through Césaire’s text, and into Nuñez’s. Each work acts as an agent of leadership in literary and social terms, attempting to enact paradigmatic shifts away from hierarchy and classification and toward individualized transformational leadership.

Thrillology: Affective Intensities And The Everyday-Spectacular In American Literature And Culture, Peter James Pappas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Liberalism And The Dilemma Of Cultures, Ali Rezaie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, through a closer examination of the controversies over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), I seek to identify the elements of a defensible postcolonial vision. While postcolonialism is afflicted with many problematic assumptions, the exclusively liberal perspective which these authors seek to reaffirm in its place has its own plethora of defects. Ali, Hosseini and Nafisi merit a closer attention not only for their exposing some of the flawed views underlying postcolonialism but also for their demonstrating why an unqualified reversion to liberalism may …

Queer Emplotment: Lesbian Caretaking In North American Canonical Fiction From 1980 – 2011., Penelope Gay Dane

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation argues that lesbian caretaking in late 20th century and early 21th century North American fiction disrupts normative temporalities while repairing damage protagonists sustain from intra-familial trauma. Aligned with queer studies’ growing interest in representations of time, my project explores this paradox of lesbian representation. How can lesbian characters be both reparative and disruptive? Lesbian characters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1980); Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992); and Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) are reparative as they clean up the psychological and physical damage caused male violence, sexual abuse, and neglectful mothers. Yet their caregiving disrupts …

Creating Female Space: The Feminine Sublime In The Awakening And The House Of Mirth, Emily F. Faison

Selected Honors Theses

This thesis examines the Edna Pontellier and Lily Bart, the respective protagonists of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, integrating the theoretical concept of the sublime, particularly engaging Barbara Freemans’s idea of a feminine sublime, as discussed in her book, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction. In three chapters, the thesis provides an overview and brief history of the theory of the sublime, contextualizing Freeman’s argument, and measures the success of both Edna’s and Lily’s attempts to engage the sublime as they each struggle to find their place as women …

Matters Of Fact In Jane Austen: History, Location, And Celebrity, By Janine Barchas, Laura E. Thomason

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Paradox Of The Book: The Chaos Of The Internet Makes Reading Easier, Thomas L. Jeffers

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Unruly Catholics From Dante To Madonna: Faith, Heresy, And Politics In Cultural Studies, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"During the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church went through a period of liberal reform under the stewardship of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. Successive popes sharply reversed course, enforcing conservative ideological values and silencing progressive voices in the Church. Consequently, those Catholics who had embraced the spirit of Vatican II were left feeling adrift and betrayed. In Unruly Catholics from Dante to Madonna, scholars of literature, film, religion, history, and sociology delve into this conflict–and historically similar ones–through the examination of narratives by and about rebellious Catholics.

Essays in Unruly Catholics explore how renowned Catholic literary figures …