Digital Commons Network^™

Owning Your Story: Agency, Power, And Freedom In Greta Gerwig’S Faithful And Radical Little Women Adaptation, Siobhan Cooney

Honors Program Theses

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) has an extensive lineage of film adaptations. The classic novel’s most recent film adaptation was written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig (2019). This thesis employs adaptation theory as well as visual and verbal close reading and critical analysis of the film, source novel, and popular film reviews. Gerwig’s adaptation looks, sounds, and feels like the Little Women that has been cherished for decades. The director fulfills these aesthetic expectations to subvert our understandings of sentimentalism, domesticity, individuality, and the relinquishment of childhood. An examination of art’s imitation of life, the epistolary …

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, …

Writing In Film Studies: Poetics And Pedagogy, Bryan Mead

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is writing instruction inside undergraduate film courses. While the existence of textbooks devoted to teaching students how to write about film highlights the need for such instruction, evidence suggests many courses underuse or neglect such texts. Instead, most instructors focus their efforts on content instruction, expecting students to translate an increased content knowledge into written argumentation. Yet, as is the case across the disciplines, students struggle to write successfully in these disciplinary courses. One of the main reasons for this disparity between instructor expectation and student success is the notion of disciplinarity, and how influential …

David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus: An Anti-Fantasy, Bryan Wysopal

Masters Theses

This is a study of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) in which I argue that the novel is an anti-fantasy, that is, a fantasy that negates certain tropes common to the genre as part of the author’s wider intentions for writing. I contextualize Lindsay by comparing him to several authors of his time who also worked in the mode of fantasy, then explain how the generic traits of the novel are handled unconventionally to promote Lindsay’s personal philosophy. I explore Lindsay’s treatment of the basic generic traits of the hero and his quest, the imaginary world, and …

Viruses, Vaccines, And The Erotics Of Risk In Latinx Hiv Stories And Covid-19, Dr. Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2019, I published Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism (University of Illinois Press), in which I discuss contagion as a metaphor for embracing our shared materiality with others. Six months later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, neighbors were crossing streets to avoid each other. Social distancing is, counterintuitively, asking us to view separation and seclusion as forms of solidarity. But how can we be solid if we are oriented against each other? Isolation itself has become contagious: sharing repulsion and rejection, measuring six feet of “social” distance from others. These spaces are made up of a variety …

Digital Reading On Eil Materials For Thai Undergraduate Students, Nopphanan Adungdejjaroon

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This exploratory study had two research objectives. First, it aimed to investigate digital reading on EIL materials for Thai undergraduate students and, second, explore students' perceptions towards digital reading on EIL materials. The study involved two hundred and ninety-nine undergraduate students enrolled in an aviation business management program. The EIL Digital Reading Questionnaire is to collect quantitative data, while the semi-structured interview is to collect qualitative data. The result from descriptive statistics of the questionnaire and thematic analysis of the semi-interview reported that Thai undergraduate students tended to encounter, engage, and evaluate EIL materials frequently. Most of the participants strongly …

Navigating The Labyrinth Of House Of Leaves Through A Postmodern Archetypal Literary Theory, Samuel K. Hval

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Approaching An Untamed Poetry: Arab North American Poetry In The Classroom, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay by Rachel Norman originally appeared in the edited volume, Teaching Asian North American Texts.

Music: Modernist Remediation And Technologies Of Listening, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excerpt:
Ludwig van Beethoven, if not exactly a modernist, offers ample fodder for modern artists looking to defend – or expand – their turf. While producing City Lights (1928), Charlie Chaplin responded to the newly popular ‘talkies’ by proclaiming that ‘Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics’ (qtd. in Crafton 1999: 296).

‘Co-Ainm Na Taca Seo An-Uiridh’: Dugald Macnicol’S Caribbean Lament For Argyll, Nigel Leask, Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh

Studies in Scottish Literature

This article examines a Gaelic song written in 1816 in St. Lucia by a Scottish Gaelic-speaking army officer from Argyll, Dugald MacNicol (1791-1844), sketching MacNicol's life and military career in the Caribbean, in the Royal West Indian Rangers and later in the 1st Royals (Royal Scots Regiment), placing the song in relation to other Gaelic poems of emigration and exile, and printing a newly-edited text of MacNicol's song alongside the authors' English translation.

The Role Of The Principle Of Historism In Ethnogenetic Investigations, Akram Kuldashev

Philology Matters

This article deals with the relationship between the ancient Germanic and ancient Turkic tribes, that is illustrated in historical sources. Interaction between peoples requires contacts between their languages. The events mentioned in the article took place in Europe in the II-IX centuries AD. The historical process, known as the Great Migration of Nations, changed the ethnic and, of course, the linguistic map of Europe.
Scandinavian sources claim that most of the central and North Germanic peoples migrated from Eastern Europe and Asia in the 5th -10th centuries AD.
The process of the great migration of peoples is one of the …

Race And Racism In Austen Spaces: Notes On A Scandal: Sanditon Fandom’S Ongoing Racism And The Danger Of Ignoring Austen Discourse On Social Media, Amanda-Rae Prescott

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

Sanditon fans have used social media more than many other past Jane Austen adaptations to discuss the series and to share news developments about the series. This was partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic preventing in-person marketing and fandom gatherings, but also due to some traditional Austen discussion platforms ignoring or banning pro-Sanditon discussions. White women from the UK and Europe dominated these online communities and set the tone for discussions of the plot as well as news about the series. BIPOC fans repeatedly clashed with white fans because the promises of an “inclusive” community were frequently dashed as soon …

Remapping A Feminist Classroom: Talking Circles And The Space For Agency, Amy Dunham Strand Ph.D.

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

"These Jests Of God": Arrowsmith And Tropical Medicine’S Racial Ecology, James Fitz Gerald

English and Media Studies Faculty Publications

This essay examines Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) through the ethical and ecological contingencies of U.S. tropical medicine in the early twentieth century. With an eye kept on the novel's well-known "St. Hubert " chapters, the essay elaborates the dangerous compromises that even the most well-intentioned medical professionals make in the name of scientific progress. The novel, I argue, summons and yet moves beyond the traditional outbreak narrative to unravel the various political, economic, and cultural strands of U.S. imperial medicine. The novel's platform for applied sanitary science helps me revisit famed public health campaigns, particularly those from Cuba and Panama, …

Front Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Front matter and editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 39:1–2 (2021).

Trauma Before The Name : Impersonal Violence In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Carolin Alice Hofmann

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dissertation studies the pre-history of trauma in US American fiction, examining how experiences of large-scale adversity are represented before the concept of psychological trauma emerges in the late nineteenth century. Distinctly modern forms of violence—diffuse, systemic, lacking direction and intent—bring forth less individual and personal experiences of grief and suffering than those imagined by twentieth-century trauma theory. Studying forms of feeling and of genre that make trauma legible historicizes the way a Western idea of modern subjectivity, as white, self-possessed, agential, and split, has shaped out understanding of how a person processes crisis. The dissertation visits three spaces that …

Memetic Rhetorical Theory: An Analytic Model For The Spread Of Information Online, Carleigh J. Davis

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

Modern discourse is often characterized by such extreme polarization that participants operate from entirely different sets of facts. These alternative facts represent a new line of inquiry for rhetoricians, who must determine how false facts gain credibility. This article outlines Memetic Rhetorical Theory (MRT), a model for understanding how information evolves to become credible in a given environment.

Adapting Animals: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Science, And Media, Kristen Layne Figgins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theory provided a theoretical framework for discussing the question of humanity’s place in the world. These nascent theories emphasized the shared animal nature of humans and the nonhuman creatures who had once occupied a distinctly lower place on the chain of being. My dissertation addresses the question of how nineteenth-century scientific attitudes about animals were reflected in the literature of the period. By examining culture-texts from the nineteenth century, it is clear that literature was an active participant in extending scientific knowledge, often by playing with the blending categorical …

Out Of A Darkness: A Collection Of Ramblings, Short Stories, And Poetry, Valerie Anthony

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A Collection of Poetry, Short Stories and Ramblings

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …

Mirrors To The Underworld: Reflective Portals Between Life And Death In The Harry Potter Series, Thea Juneau

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

This article argues that reflective surfaces throughout all seven Harry Potter novels symbolize thresholds between discrete worlds. By displaying Harry’s dead parents on ‘the other side’ of the Mirror of Erised, the text draws on the Myth of Narcissus and various other mythological death-mirrors to create the impression of an inverse afterlife realm where the dead live again, supporting the central themes of death and grief in the series. By drawing upon Lori M. Campbell’s theory of object ‘porters,’ the article shows how the gradual transformation of this framework through more abstract reflections (eyes, creatures, lakes) reveals a deep symbolic …

The Orientation Of Professionally Teaching Of Foreign Languages In Pedagogical Higher Education Institutions, Gulchexra Xudoyberdiyeva

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

This article is about the effectiveness of using descriptive methods in English classes and professional-oriented teaching foreign language at a non-language university. It analyses the peculiarities of descriptive method, comparative-historical method and the role of linguodidactics in teaching foreign language at a non-linguistic university. The introduction of the concept of competence in the educational process eliminates the gap between the theoretical knowledge that has hitherto been used in teaching practice and its practical application, that is, when the student has theoretical knowledge, it is difficult to use it in problematic situations. So, Great attention is paid to the teaching of …

Toponyms Of Tashkent Region In “Boburnoma”, Akmal Abdullaev

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

In this article, the king and poet Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur's work "Boburnoma" contains information on linguistics onomastics, in particular, toponymy, including the names of places in the Tashkent region, their memoirs in the context of the events of Babur's life. The reasons for naming place names with these names, the historical and etymological meaning of toponyms, the fact that today the term of place names given in the "Boburnoma" in the Tashkent region has undergone some changes are described on the basis of scientific sources.

Linguacultural Pecularities Of Incantations Of The Uzbek Language, Gulrukh Norbekova

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

The words of the incantations are considered as the object of both linguistic and cultural research, as either of them complete each other while doing the following investigation. Regarding to this point, phonetic, morphological, lexical features of the words of incantations have been described and analyzed in this article. The use of the comparative historical method, the methods of structural- morphological, contextual and historical-etymological analyses contribute to the achievement of the objective of the research. It has been revealed that at the phonetic and grammatical levels, the features inherent in the ancient Turkic literary tradition are preserved. Thematic groups of …

Integrative Approach In The Efl Classes, Tursinoy Ravshanova, Nazira Isanova

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

In the article it was given about a learning process on an integrative basis, integrative-educational activities and integrated didactic approaches. This approach does not neglect, either, the home languages of the learners, especially when they explicitly taught. One can therefore have two (or even three or four) languages that are being “tackled” simultaneously. Despite the great potential and effectiveness of the integrative skills approach many teachers, especially in EFL contexts still implement the segregated skills teaching by presenting one skill separately from the others. In many EFL programs, courses on speaking are isolated from writing or listening learning activities are …

The Nature Of Middle-Earth (2021) By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Carl F. Hostetter, Douglas C. Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas C. Kane, of The Nature of Middle-earth (2021), by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Carl F. Hostetter

Friends Of Musselman Library Newsletter Fall 2021 - Special Supplement, Musselman Library

Friends of Musselman Library Newsletter

What’s Special about Special Collections? (Robin Wagner)

Rare Books: Cooper Fund Supports First Editions (Carolyn Sautter)

Manuscripts and Letters: Letter-Writing Seminar Draws from Many Eras (Magdalena Sánchez)

Almanacs: Colonial America Comes Alive with Poor Richard’s (Timothy Shannon)

Maps: Geography Sparks Discussion

Asian Art: Students Get Hands-on Curatorial Experience

Photographs: Photographs Transport Students to Another Time (Shannon Egan)

Posters: Wartime Attitudes Revealed through Propaganda Posters (Jill Titus)

Artifacts: Monsters Break the Ice

• Policing the Boundaries of the Possible (Mercedes Valmisa Oviedo)

Bookmaking: Old Technology Blends with Digital Humanities

Conservation: Pennsylvania College Class of 1854 Gets a Facelift (Mary Wootton)