Digital Commons Network^™

Communicating Shakespeare: How High School Educators Should Approach The Great Playwright, Samantha Defilippe

Honors Program Theses and Projects

This study is being done to show how relating Shakespeare’s plays, specifically the characters, themes, and events in his plays, to high school students can increase their appreciation and understanding of the famous writer. It discusses better methods for teaching Shakespeare than line-by-line interpretation so that students may see the valuable insight his works have to offer, rather than skimming the readings and using unreliable online resources, such as Sparknotes, because they are uninterested. Previous research has shown the importance of trying to relate readings to students so they are able to form a connection with the characters and main …

The Women Of Shakespeare’S Hamlet In Modern Film Adaptations, Meredith Will

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Modern Female Tricksters : Satirists Or Satiric Objects?, Shawn Mcdonald

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The trickster figure is an archetypal character that can be found in the oral traditions of Native Americans, Greek and Roman mythologies and stories from Polynesia, Africa, the Bible, African American tradition and even in modem literature. This essay examines the female protagonists of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm as ideal prototypes of tricksters. In Loos’ story, Lorelei jet sets around Europe tricking men into buying her diamonds and offering up engagement proposals throughout her journey. In Gibbons’ story, Flora leaves her sophisticated urban world to enter another more primitive rural one in which …

Ideology And Subversion: Linguistic Registers In Barbara Kingsolver’S The Poisonwood Bible, Natalie Wallace

English

Effective colonial regimes have employed language to control and incapacitate their colonial subjects. However, anti-colonialist and Africanist authors have conversely used language as a significantly powerful tool in resisting colonial and neo-colonial discourses. Despite this subversive sentiment in contemporary literature about Africa, many scholars criticize Western authors, in particular, for their works about African nations, peoples, and struggles, noting their tendencies to generalize about a diverse continent, to project Western paradigms onto African contexts, and to disregard their own associations with colonial governments. Barbara Kingsolver’s 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible has received much critical attention as a work that deplores …

The Evolution Of The Legend Of King Arthur, Krista Dayle Staropoli

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In all versions of Arthurian legend, the content, while encompassing adventure, magic and politics, is mainly focused on the nature of human relationships. These relationships are nearly always complex and emotional, intended to elicit certain reactions from the audience. The reactions to Arthurian legend depend on the relationship being explored; for example, when explaining a story about knighthood, the author hopes to impress upon the audience the importance and admiration of chivalry, duty and honor. Whereas, when explaining a story about the love triangle of Guinevere, Arthur and Lancelot, the intent is not only to tell a captivating and enthralling …

Middle-Earth's War On Terror: A Post-9/11 Reception Study On The Works Of J.R.R. Tolkien, James William Peebles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how Americans can and do interpret Tolkien's works in light of 9/11 and its proximity to Peter Jackson's film adaptations hitting theaters.

Connecting To The Community: Service-Learning Methods In An Esl Classroom, Chelsey Sara Funk

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

High school English as a Second Language (ESL) students often feel separated from their schools and communities. These feelings of separation can lead to low engagement and low achievement despite the students' desire to do well in school. One method used to counter low engagement in mainstream classes is service learning, but there is little research on service learning with ESL students. In this study, an existing group of 9th grade ESL students was taught and observed to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of using service-learning methods. The project endeavored to tie academic work to community involvement and therefore increase …

Measuring The Effects Of An American Physiological Society’S Phun Week Activity On 2nd Grade Students, James Edelman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the last few years the United States has been on the decline in the fields of science and technology. The American Physiological Society (APS) has developed a program to engage young minds with scientists. Physiology Understanding Week (PhUn) is the APS initiative to use interactive experiments to engage school-age children with science and physiology. Even though PhUn Week has been going on since 2005, systematic assessment of the activities effects is rare. Here, we sought to assess if an APS PhUn Week activity enhances physiology understanding and interest in science in second grade children form a rural area. The …

A Posture Of Removal: Mary Rowlandson’S Location, Position, And Displacement, Aaron Cloyd

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Drawing on work from autobiographical studies that distinguishes between but correlates position and location, this paper examines Mary Rowlandson’s situatedness in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and argues that she is a figure of removal and displacement. Although Rowlandson seeks to position herself through voice, actions, and text, such expressions of agency occur within the locating structures of culture, expectation, and memory. The resultant tension between self- positioning and other-locating leaves Rowlandson perpetually removed as she is unable to fully reposition herself within any significant site.

From Children’S Book To Epic Prequel: Peter Jackson’S Transformation Of Tolkien’S The Hobbit, Frank P. Riga, Maureen Thum, Judith Kollmann

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

Makes the case that Jackson’s sometimes controversial screenwriting decisions actually echo Tolkien’s own abortive attempt to revise and change The Hobbit to bring it into line with the mood and milieu of The Lord of the Rings.

The Enchantments Of Circe: Translation Studies And The English Renaissance, Joshua S. Reid

ETSU Faculty Works

Book review of:

Barker, S. K. and Brenda M. Hosington, eds. Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473-1640. Boston: Brill, 2013. xxix + 253 pp. ISBN 978-9004241848. $146.00 cloth.

Braden, Gordon, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie, eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2: 1550-1660. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. xiii + 599 pp. ISBN 978-0199246212. $250.00 cloth.

Hosington, Brenda et al. Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalog: An Analytical and Annotated Catalogue of Translations, 1473-1640. ISBN 978-0955787652.

Reynolds, Matthew. The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue. Oxford: Oxford UP, …

On Man, On Nature, And On Human Life: William Knight's Life Of William Wordsworth And The Invention Of "Home At Grasmere", Patria Isabel Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Victorian scholar William Knight remains one of the most prolific Wordsworth scholars of the nineteenth century. His many publications helped establish Wordsworth's positive Victorian reputation that twentieth and twenty-first century scholars inherited. My particular focus is how Knight's 1889 inclusion of "Home at Grasmere" in his Life of William Wordsworth, rather than in his chronological sequencing of the poems, establishes a way to read the poem as a biographical artifact for his late-Victorian audience. Knight's detailed account of the poet's life, often told through letters and journal accounts, provides more contexts-including Dorothy's journal entries and correspondence of the early 1800s-to …

“Hewing Against The Grain”: John Haines’S Critique Of Robinson Jeffers

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

That American poet John Haines was in some way influenced by Robinson Jeffers is difficult to dispute. Literary critics have especially noted the similarity between Haines’s and Jeffers’s biographies. And yet, while a number of distinct parallels join these poets, perhaps more interesting are the ways in which Haines’s poetics differ from Jeffers’s. In particular, Haines utilizes Jeffers’s concept of the “inhuman” for his own purpose—namely, that is, to investigate the protean border between human artifice and the natural world. Haines utilizes a unique, often elegiac, voice to do so, ultimately arriving at a decidedly generous tone.

Common Knowledge: The Epistemology Of American Realism, Mark Sussman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Common Knowledge: The Epistemology of American Realism, focuses on realist fiction (primarily the novel) at the end of the nineteenth century. Its motivating claim is that the central descriptive and thematic imperative of realism--to depict life "as it is" rather than in some idealized form--emerged in response to crises in the status of knowledge that resulted from an attempt by writers and readers to come to a common understanding of the relationship between private experience and an increasingly fragmented social world. While William Dean Howells's definition of realism as a form of writing that displays "fidelity to experience …

Tales Of Wonder [Supplemental Material], Bridget Kapler

Gothic Archive Supplemental Materials for Chapbooks

No abstract provided.

Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St.

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I t is a tragedy for the investigating intellect to have both its own resilience and the power to lift itself to something higher chained when it attempts to track the progress of human knowledge in the annals of the world, the shaping of the intellect, and the refinement of morals. The scholar is fettered in his desire to collect data, which contributed to the enlightenment of nations and which, so to speak, fermented the human mind so that it was able to lift itself up into higher regions and throw off prejudices. He is hindered in his work when …

Ships That Do Not Sail: Antinauticalism, Antitheatricalism, And Irrationality In Stephen Gosson, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Stephen Gosson's similes, particularly in 1579's The Schoole of Abuse, commend affective restraint, value stasis over motion, and idealize immobility. Combined with his Platonic mistrust of emotion and his dislike of stage plays for the emotional response they provoke, his criticisms can be seen to express a desire to slow cultural change and social mobility. The effect of this in The Schoole of Abuse is that it deprives objects and agents of their essential identify by removing the action that best defines them, implying that to become our best selves, we must give up the very qualities that define us.

Decay And Perversion In Jacksonian America: George Lippard’S The Quaker City, Keith Lydon

Undergraduate Review

In the United States, the period between the termination of the 18th century and the commencement of the 19th century is characterized by the struggle to forge a national identity that was uniquely American in its independence from European influence. American writers of this period understood that the creation of an American literature distinct from the influence of Europe and shaped by the social, political, and natural environment of the United States would provide the country with the first vestiges of the autonomous cultural identity it so desperately desired. However, this work proved to be problematic, as with little financial …

Chasing The Writer, Joyce Wexler

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

"Why does the writing make us chase the writer?" Julian Barnes asks in Flaubert's Parrot. In the past, the answer was easy-we studied the writer to understand the writing. But Barnes suggests that now we study the writing to understand the writer. Barnes's interest in the writer marks a new direction in fiction and criticism.

People Of The Apokalis’: Spatial Disability And The Bhopal Disaster, Jina B. Kim

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

This paper considers Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), a fictional re-telling of the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, as a productive site of mutual engagement between postcolonial studies and disability studies, two fields rarely in dialogue. Dominant models of disability, I argue, do not translate to formerly colonial sites and/or sites that bear the burden of global capitalism. The uneven processes of globalization—which produce disabling environments—necessitate that we revise established conceptions of disability, which are derived largely from US/UK contexts. I explore a socio-spatial model that emphasizes the necessity of specific locational axes in figurations of disability. This enables more flexible …

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Kid, Joseph Harrison

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 81-82

Review: The Routledge Concise History Of Latino/A Literature, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Locating Early America., Thomas Hallock

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I f one were to undertake a genealogy of how Western Europe established a concept of otherness, the eighteenth century would be one of the most rewarding "information hubs" for such a study. Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology, and other new knowledge fields exploring global populations and environs were founded in this century, analyzing and systematizing the waves of travel reports that had been flooding Europe since the time of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Stories and images of paradisiacal and terrorizing spaces, peculiar humans, and wondrous animals and plants had taken root in the Western imagination beginning in the sixteenth century. …

Implementing Renaissance Literature And Close Reading Into Gifted And Talented High School Curriculums, Ashley Thibodeau

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Emergence Of The New Woman In Victorian Children's And Family Literature, Geneva Korykowski

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

In the Victorian era, the first wave of feminism surfaced in several influential family novels that modeled the "New Woman" instead of reinstating the "Old Girl." Characters from the novels Little Women, Villette, Jane Eyre, and The Little Lychetts as they modernize the Victorian women in the fin de siecle. Now we see a trend similar to first wave feminism beginning to happen with biology, The Hunger Games and Will Grayson, Will Grayson show examples of how a "New Man" is defined in contemporary society.

Dictating A Zafa: The Power Of Narrative Form In Junot Dı´Az’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Jennifer Harford Vargas

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preyer, Mack Rivkin

Honors Projects

One of the most difficult obstacles I faced while working on this collection of writings was articulating exactly what this project is. It is, on the surface, a Research Honors Project, defined by Illinois Wesleyan University as "an opportunity for qualified seniors to engage in a significant research project under the guidance of a faculty advisor" ("Office of the Provost"). In my preliminary Research Honors proposal, I declared my intention to concoct a capstone project which, through ecopoetics, would honor my four years of study in the fields of Environmental Studies and English. I wanted to utilize my skills in …

Clarissa's Suffering: Theorizing Sympathy And Physical Pain In The Eighteenth Century, Audrey Hungerpiller

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines theories of pain in the eighteenth century, and what it meant to sympathize with the pain of another. I begin briefly with the theories of Descartes and his adherents before focusing on David Hartley and John Locke. Physicians and natural philosophers of the period understood pain as a pure mechanism of the nervous system, confined to the tubelike fibers that run through the body. Naturally everyone feels pain by some means, whether illness or injury, so men ought to be able to sympathize with the afflictions of others. Yet, according to Adam Smith in The Theory of …