Digital Commons Network^™

Emma Adapted: Jane Austen’S Heroine From Book To Film, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"This work of literary and film criticism examines all eight filmed adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma produced between 1948 and 1996 as vastly different interpretations of the source novel. Instead of condemning the movies and television specials as being «not as good as the book,» Marc DiPaolo considers how each adaptation might be understood as a valid «reading» of Austen’s text. For example, he demonstrates how the Gwyneth Paltrow film Emma is both a romance and a female coming-of-age story, the 1972 BBC miniseries dramatizes Emma’s world as claustrophobic and Emma herself as suffering from depression, and the modern-day teen …

Nation Building: Bede’S Historia Ecclesiastica And The Use Of Old Testament Tradition, Greg Laing

Faculty Research and Publications

The paper addresses how Bede's history regarding the use of Roman walls is influenced by his work as a biblical exegete. The major contention is that Bede uses the Old Testament religious tradition of Nehemiah and Ezra, regarding the rebuilding of Jerusalem's fortifications, as a template for his comments regarding British and Anglo-Saxon defences in the Historia Ecclesiastica. Through an examination of Bede's exegetical work In Esdram et Nehemiam the military passages of the Historia Ecclesiastica are given even greater religious significance. This understanding of the history links Bede's comments regarding the decline of British military strength more closely …

Beyond Fidelity: Teaching Film Adaptations In Secondary Schools, Nathan C. Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

Although nearly every secondary school English teacher includes film as part of the English/language arts curriculum, there is, to this point, nothing published about effectively studying the relationship between film adaptations and their print source texts in secondary school. There are several important works that inform film study in secondary English classrooms. These include Alan Teasley and Ann Wilder's Reel Conversations; William Costanzo's Reading the Movies and his updated version, Great Films and How to Teach Them; and John Golden's Reading in the Dark. However, each of these mention adaptation briefly if at all. Rather, they approach film as a …

“The Passeggiata And Popular Culture In An Italian Town: Folklore And The Performance Of Modernity” By Giovanna P. Del Negro, Lisa Gabbert

English Faculty Publications

The Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town by Giovanna P. Del Negro examines the relationship between the practices of everyday life and the negotiation of modernity in a town (to which Del Negro assigns the pseudonym "Sasso") in the Abruzzo province of central Italy. In her study, Del Negro examines a range of expressive culture from face-to-face events like the evening passeggiata (or promenade) and festive games to mass-mediated forms such as a popular soap opera, televised court proceedings, postcards, and reactions to local and national news stories. The result is a clear, accessible, and well-written work that …

Selected Bibliography Of Work On Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asma Sayed, Domenic A. Beneventi

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

A Record Of The Struggle : Chinua Achebe’S Anthills Of The Savannah, Fruita Louise Diaz-Jenkins

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In Anthills of the Savannah Chinua Achebe presents the struggle of a formerly colonized African nation, Kangan, a substitute for Nigeria, to become a post-colonial nation. Achebe’s three main characters, members of the elite, who are personally and politically involved with the nation’s ruler, narrate their version of events. Their separate but intertwined journeys from the center of power to the margins where the majority of the country’s population resides illuminate the elements necessary for an inclusive postcolonial nation to rise from the neocolonial ruins of a traditional society.

Achebe uses narrative strategies that illuminate the collapse of the neocolonial …

Eng 5502-001: Mentored Teaching, Robin Murray

Spring 2007

No abstract provided.

Charles Brockden Brown's Place Within The Gothic And The Influence Of Early America's Social Issues On Brown's Writing, Shirley Ann Regis

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis is to show that Charles Brockden Brown was influenced by the American Revolution and the incidents that come after it. It is suggested that Brown created a gothic fiction that was intended to be a critique on the American Revolution by using murder narrratives present during the time to create his characters. Gothic fiction consists of many elements such as setting arechetypal characters, terror, emotion, psychological turmoil and language use.

Visual Communication And The Map: How Maps As Visual Objects Convey Meaning In Specific Contexts, Amy Propen

English

This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Scatology And The Sacred In Milton's Paradise Lost, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

In his classic study, "The Dialectics of Creation," Michael Lieb foregrounds the myriad ways in which Milton uses scatology throughout "Paradise Lost" to describe the depravity of the devil. But Satan is not the only character in the epic to be associated with excretion. Milton's angels and Milton's God are also implicated in the operations of the lower bodily stratum. In these instances, however, allusions to the evacuative functions attest to an exalted divinity rather than a disgusting diabolism. Evacuation in "Paradise Lost" is thus a highly complex signifier. Not simply a pejorative pointing inevitably at a damnable degradation, scatology …

2007 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The Salteaters realized that her survival depended on learning "the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent." The lesson of similar folk wisdom is the subject of Meredith M. Gasby's Sucking Salt, where she propses as a new framework for the examination of Caribbean women's writing the survival techiniques implied in "sucking salt," techiniques suggested in her aunt's reflections on people she knew. Tantie expounded: "Little salt won't kill …

Racial Impersonation On The Elizabethan Stage: The Case Of Shakespeare Playing Aaron, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The article focuses on the implications of playwright William Shakespeare performing racial roles himself, such as Aaron in "Titus Andronicus." Several plays are discussed, including "Titus Andronicus," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Othello." The SHAXICON database, which compiles the text of Shakespeare's plays, is the primary source of evidence to suggest Shakespeare acted in his plays. Information about race relations in Great Britain's society during Shakespeare's time is also given.

Gender Portrayal In J.K. Rowling's “Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix”: A Feminist Rhetorical Criticism, Nicole Ackman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined J.K. Rowling’s (2003) novel entitled, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Although this novel has not yet been classified as a fairy tale, it does contain fairy tale elements. This study reviewed literature in the field of folklore, fairy tales, and feminism. Foss’ (2004) four-step feminist criticism model was employed to analyze gender portrayals in the novel. According to Foss’ model, the novel was analyzed for masculine or feminine perspectives of the world, effects on the audience, improvement of women’s lives, and impact on rhetorical theory. Although Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix …

Soliciting Desire: The Ad-Man As Narrative Negotiation Between Art, Desire, And Consumer Capitalism In Twentieth-Century Novels, Jessica Mckelvie Kemp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation identifies ways in which novelists have used an ad-man protagonist as means to investigate the social and psychological implications of advertising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Soliciting Desire takes as its primary subjects H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, Theodore Dresier’s The “Genius,” Frederick Wakeman’s The Hucksters, Jonathan Dee’s Palladio, and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and demonstrates that the ad-man character’s particular constellation of traits provides a rich vehicle for fictional explorations of desire and subjectivity as they are formed in relation to ideologies of consumer capitalism and art. Guided by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s theories of cultural/ capitalist …

Book Review - Hart, W. (2002) Never Fade Away, James Kent Knaack

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

No abstract provided.

Review Of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics Of Genius In The United States, 1840-1890 By Gustavus Stadler, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though the title suggests it is, this book is not a cultural history of genius in the 19th-century US. Working in a high cultural-studies mode, Stadler (Haverford College) addresses questions like those addressed in a special issue of American Literature, "Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies" (ed. by Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, v. 76, no. 3, September 2004). He uses an oddly assorted group of figures to map out a grand narrative of how the genius works to accommodate ordinary individuals to "the troubling, potentially shattering phenomena associated with modernity." In the first three chapters Stadler focuses …

Review [Of Writing Across Borders], Beth Godbee, Kate Vieira

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Versions Of America: Reading American Literature For Identity And Difference, Raj G. Chetty

Theses and Dissertations

My paper examines how American authors of the South Asian Diaspora (Indian-American or South Asian American) can be read 1) as simply American and 2) without regard to ethnicity. I develop this argument using American authors Jhumpa Lahiri, a first generation American of Bengali-Indian descent, and Bharati Mukherjee, an American of Bengali-Indian origin. I borrow from Deepika Bahri's materialist aesthetics in postcolonialism (in turn borrowed from members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and include theoretical insights from Rey Chow, Graham Huggan, and R. Radhakrishnan regarding multiculturalism, identity politics, and diaspora studies. Huggan and Radhakrishnan's insights are especially useful …

Review Of Lorna Jowett’S Sex And The Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer For The Buffy Fan, Terri A. Fredrick

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Theorizing The Diaspora, John C. Hawley

English

In his provocative essay on the place of the committed writer in contemporary western society (“Inside the Whale”), George Orwell makes a passing observation about the effects of exile, self-imposed or otherwise, on the scope of a writer’s subject and purpose: “[L]eaving your native land,” he suggests, “[. . .] means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow down his range to the street, the cafJ, the church, the brothel …

Influence And Its Opposite: Presence And Absence In The Work Of Harold Bloom, Joshua Henderson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In the years since he formulated and expanded on it in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Kaballah and Criticism (1975), Harold Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" has engendered more ambivalence than serious investigation into his theory and its influences. In part, the ambivalence is due to Bloom's persona, which irritates the academic "left" and "right" alike. Surprisingly, it is not Bloom's defense of canonicity against post-structural Marxism, feminism, and New Historical criticism that generates the most resistance; instead, Bloom's dissenters more often come from the ranks of conservative traditionalists who might be …

Digital Romanticism In The Age Of Neo-Luddism: The Romantic Circles Experiment, Steven Jones

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Romantic Circles Website, along with a number of other major projects in digital Romanticism, came online around 1995, a historical moment that also saw the emergence of neo-Luddism, in part as a reaction to the techno-hype of the Internet boom. At the time. neo-Luddites often claimed as a precedent the original historical Luddism of 1811-16, but they usually also Romanticized that collective labor subculture to fit their own late-twentieth-century ideas of “technology.” This essay looks back at the interlinked assumptions in the air around 1995–neo-Luddite and Romantic–as the context out of which Romantic Circles defined its own engaged experiment …

Implicit Response : Instructor Values And Social Class In The Literacy Narrative Assignment., Kara Poe Alexander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines instructor responses to a popular personal writing assignment, the literacy narrative. Previous studies have shown this assignment to be popular with instructors because of the reflection it is thought to generate; however, nobody has yet looked at what instructors really mean by reflection. This study investigates what features of student texts instructors recognize as reflection. I collected literacy narratives and demographic questionnaires from students and surveys, assignments, think-alouds, and follow-up interviews from instructors. Personal writing, and the literacy narrative assignment in particular, can best be taught by highlighting the rhetorical capabilities of this genre. The results of …

From Caricature To Character: The Intellectually Disabled In Dickens's Novels (Part 1), Paul Marchbanks

English

No abstract provided.

Eng 5000-001: Introduction To Methods And Issues In English Studies, Jad Smith

Spring 2006

No abstract provided.

Eng 5502-001: Mentored Teaching, Robin L. Murray

Spring 2006

No abstract provided.

Situating The Cetacean: Science And Storytelling In Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider, Lee Elton Dionne

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis analyzes two major discourses that intersect and inform one another in Witi Ihimaera's The whale rider: storytelling and modern science.

The Example Of Barbara Johnson, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

"Buffy Vs. Dracula"'S Use Of Count Famous (Not Drawing "Crazy Conclusions About The Unholy Prince"), Tara Elliott

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.