Digital Commons Network^™

Puellic: A Constructed Language, Taylor Zovko

English Department: Linguistics ENG 334

This is a document outlining the conlang of Puellic, which is a language that exists in a world where the government has decided to keep the genders totally separate in order to maintain gender roles and stereotypes. This language outlines the female line of communication.

Cockney Dialect Group Report, Trent Garlin

English Department: Linguistics ENG 334

When many people think of a British accent two distinct types typically come to mind, an overly posh royal family type accent, or an Oliver Twist Cockney accent. However, the Cockney dialect is a lot more complicated and interesting than simply dropping the ‘h’ and ‘t’ from the English language, and this report will explore the history of the dialect as well as the phonology, the morphology and its syntax.

Teaching Tolerance Through English Language Arts, Samantha Casarella

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio examines the ways in which tolerance can be taught and reinforced through English Language Arts. Substantive research is presented justifying the urgency of teaching tolerance at the high school level and the role that English Language Arts teachers play in the process. Methods of practical application are presented through three separate unit plans, each focused on elevating students’ social consciousness.

Attending To Conditions That Facilitate Intercultural Competence: A Reciprocal Service-Learning Approach, Rachel M. B. Collopy, Sharon Tjaden-Glass, Novea A. Mcintosh

Teacher Education Faculty Publications

Although service-learning can support the development of intercultural competence, it has also maintained power differentials, reinforced privileged perspectives, and strengthened deficit thinking. Recent research has investigated the conditions within service-learning associated with positive change in diversity-related attitudes. We extend that work, conceptualizing a reciprocal service-learning (RSL) approach that integrates conditions posited by contact theory and the process model of intercultural competence into service-learning’s core features of reflection and reciprocity. In an RSL approach, transformational reciprocity at the participant level supports cultural awareness, interdependence, and parity between participant groups. We created an RSL experience and measured change in three attitudes fundamental …

Designing A Translingual Global Literature Course: Valuing Student Repertoires & Personal Experience, Carolyn J. Salazar

Theses and Dissertations

moving them forward together in translingual global literature courses through valuing the repertoires and personal experiences students bring into the classroom. The semester-long mixed method study reported includes both survey respondents (N=134) and interview participants (N=7) and foregrounds student voices to argue that a translingual orientation is an optimal response to the needs of the global literature classroom. In the first chapter I review global/world literature theory discussing the purpose and content of global/world literature courses in higher education. In a chapter overviewing translingual theory, I present the main tenets of the theory including negotiation, fluidity and valuing difference and …

Intrusive Beauty, Shannon K W Winston

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 226-228

Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies In Early Modern England, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

This essay tracks the emergence of ‘debt letters’, an epistolary sub-genre in seventeenth-century letter-writing manuals. Debt letters ask for money, offer funds and excuse the inability to make (or repay) loans. The rhetorical strategies evident in sample debt letters point to a cultural emphasis on friendship as a site of financial stability through reciprocal lending. Moreover, these rhetorical strategies serve multiple goals, which at times conflict: the short-term goal of navigating particular debt arrangements, and the long-term goal of maintaining an amicable bond over time.

Ua37/44 Faculty Personal Papers Gordon Wilson, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Personal papers of Gordon Wilson.

Milton's Plant Eyes: Minimal Cognition, Similitude, And Sexuality In The Garden, Perry Guevara

English and Creative Writing | Faculty Scholarship

This essay turns to minimal cognition, a theoretical extension of embodied cognition, to argue for plant sentience in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton imagines plants as minimally cognitive beings within an affective ecosystem, where they readily enter into the epic poem’s complex circuits of desire with appetites of their own. Specifically, the essay claims that botanical cognition arises at the convergence of two seventeenth-century philosophical systems: the first, Milton’s materialist monism, and the second, Paracelsian medicine, which avers a plant’s therapeutic effect on a human body part sharing morphological resemblance. The essay concludes that Milton’s eroticization of similitude enables a …

When Wuxia Met Romance: The Pleasures And Politics Of Transculturalism In Sherry Thomas’S My Beautiful Enemy, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

A case study of Sherry Thomas’s Qing-era My Beautiful Enemy (and its prequel, The Hidden Blade) allows for a fruitful discussion of changing representations of diversity in romance fiction and its appeal to readers. MBE’s heroine is Anglo-Chinese, and the novel’s plot draws on wuxia, a literary and cinematic genre that has a long history in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is also associated with immigration and exile, perhaps resonating with Thomas’s own move from China to the U.S. Readers might find its infusion in romance appealing for two reasons: one, it features a warrior heroine (a …

A Transnational Look At The Modern Women, Isabella Hardesty

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Spanning forty years apart, the short story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (1926) by Ding Ling and The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath can speak to one another in revealing the position of women in a revolutionary new era. The two stories may be generationally and geographically distant, yet both hold a collective female consciousness in the context of the emerging modernist epoch. By examining these two pieces of literature in relation to one another, similar attitudes and stylistic trends emerge regarding the treatment of women. The common archetypes, for each respective time and country, imprinted onto women are at some …

Filming Reconciliation: Indigenous Screen Cultures In An Age Of Redress, Kyle L. Killebrew

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines Indigenous cinematic cultures in the United States and Canada since 1998 in the context of international reconciliation movements between settler and Indigenous states. This project examines the contested intersections of twenty-first century Indigenism and multiculturalism, exploring the ways in which Native voices in media navigate international cultural marketplaces. I focus on Georgina Lightning’s Older than America, Igloolik Isuma’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ A Red Girl’s Reasoning. Specifically, I am concerned with Indigenous cinemas and media that envision and enact models of reconciliation, healing, and social justice using …

The Effects Of A Project-Based Blended Learning With Communication Strategy Instruction On English Oral Communication Ability And Learner Autonomy Of Undergraduate Engineering Students, Pichai Pinphet

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Thai undergraduate engineering students seem to have difficulty mastering English oral communication ability and learner autonomy. This study investigated the effects of a project-based blended learning with communication strategy instruction model to develop English oral communication ability and learner autonomy of undergraduate engineering students. Four communication strategies, namely asking for clarification, asking for confirmation, circumlocution, and use of fillers and hesitation devices, and the ways to conduct the independent project, were taught to 20 undergraduate Engineering students in a face-to-face environment. The students carried out their online tasks and an independent project via social platforms (e.g., Facebook, Skype, etc.). Quantitative …

Translingualism: Breaking The Language Policies And Politics In Composition Pedagogy And Protecting Cultural Identities Of International Students, Md Fahad Hossain

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the debates and conversations relating to a translingual pedagogical approach that helps preserve the cultural and ethnic identities of international students who take college composition courses in universities across the United States of America. Since domination of English in teaching, learning, and research in the United States of America is prevalent, this thesis explores much talked pedagogical approach – a translingual approach – in college composition that intends to protect the cultural and ethnic identities of international students studying in universities across the country. The translingual orientation in composition pedagogy is constantly adding new conversations to teaching …

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

Audre Lorde & The Ontology Of Desire, Lauren Koenig

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis advances an understanding of the ontological impact of Western conceptions of sexuality guided by a model of reparative reading as outlined by Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick. Rather than multiply and magnify anti-patriarchal invective, I use deconstructive techniques as a means of analyzing selections from the poetry of Audre Lorde (including “Bloodbirth,” “Making it,” “Pirouette,” and “Therapy”) in order to explore how a consideration of lesbian sexuality can inform an understanding of the more widespread conflation between writing, creation, and birth of the self.

The investigation centers on a variety of paradoxes encountered in the felt sense-oriented language of desire …

The Method In The Madwoman : Functions Of Female Madness And Feminized Liminality In Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, And "The Yellow Wallpaper", Ivy Elizabeth Poitras

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This critical thesis explores how three literary portrayals of “madness” in female characters of the mid-to-late 19th century written by women writers (Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and the Narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper”) operate as instruments within their work to provide commentary on the anxieties, fears, and ideological stereotypes of women and femininity of the era, as well as contradictions and concepts pertaining to confinement, the female body, gendered Gothic tropes, and societal oppression. The significance of this analysis lies in the consistency and endurance of these issues as they withstand modern development, making …

Roald Dahl And The Construction Of Childhood: Writing The Child As Other, Madeline Spivey

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

On The Rhetorical Grotesque: A Mode For Strange Times, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

This essay argues that the successful political careers of certain populist leaders rhetorically enact what scholars have long recognized in art, literature, and entertainment as the grotesque. The grotesque provides a theoretically rich means for describing the vulgar and chaotic public behaviors that take strong hold among anti-elite audiences at certain points in history. By closely reading comments from political leaders cast in the grotesque mold, including Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chavez, and Donald Trump, this essay explains not only what the grotesque is, but also when and how it is likely to find traction in a political culture ripe for …

Reforming Sensory Disability In Early Modern England, Mary Lutze

Dissertations

Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England traces early modern literary depictions of blindness and deafness during the Reformation. the project proposes an inherently dynamic early modern religious model of disabilities: first characterized by its initial rejection of England's prior faith tradition, then by doctrinal negotiation among reformed dissenters. It analyzes the shift in disability representation in popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century before culminating in an examination of seventeenth-century deaf education. Finally, the project proposes that the seventeenth-century advent of deaf education should be read as a concrete ideological shift in English society's perception of the disabled.

"'In A Distant Unknown Country': A New Historicist Look At James Joyce’S “Eveline,” Argentina, And The Zwi Migdal In The Early 1900s.", M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This article analyzes James Joyce’s story “Eveline” (1904) looking at the moral panic about “white slavery” in Europe and the new continent, especially focusing on Argentina, the foremost recipient of trafficked women between 1880 and 1930 (and, of course, Joyce’s destination of choice for Eveline). It was precisely at the turn of the twentieth century that, along with the popularity of transatlantic migration, sex trafficking went fully global and news about international “dangers” for single white women reached the general public, provoking all kinds of repressive reactions through what became known as the “social purity” movement.

Dracula As Inter-American Film Icon: Universal Pictures And Cinematográfica Absa, Antonio Barrenechea

English & Linguistics Articles

My essay explores the vampire cinema of Hollywood and Mexico. In particular, I trace the relationship between Universal Pictures as the progenitor of horror during the Great Depression and Cinematográfica ABSA's "mexploitation" practices. The latter resulted in the first vampire film in Latin America--"El vampiro" (1957). Rather than strengthening separatist national cinemas, the unintended consequences of genre film production make this a case of inter-American scope.

"And All Were Welcome": An Analysis Of The Transgender Child In Contemporary Picture Books, Isaac Prestwich

Pomona Senior Theses

This paper constitutes an interrogation of children’s picture books that feature trans and gender non-conforming child protagonists. In these books, the audience, presumed to be a child, whose experience of the narrative is mediated through the adult or older figure reading the picture book, is brought to empathize and identify with the book’s characters, whether they be the protagonist themselves, or those auxiliary figures who surround the main character. My goal is to identify consistent themes across the genre, as well as within the field of critical childhood studies, particularly as they pertain to the rhetorical value of the Child, …

Crying In The Novel, Noor Dhingra

Pomona Senior Theses

What happens when characters cry in novels? And what does that tell us about the Victorian novel?

The Grizzled Wolf And The Mauled Lamb: An Interpretation Of Animal Language In Melville’S Translation Of Ovid's "Tereus, Procne, And Philomela", Dylan Rossin

Capstone Showcase

An analysis of animal language in Ovids's "Tereus, Procne, and Philomela" shows that the women have power in this story despite what an initial reading might show.

Shape, Space And Typeface: Mapping Black Subjectivity Through Caribbean Aesthetics, Samantha Stephens

Master’s Theses

The Caribbean is frequently imagined and aestheticized by the image of the basin, which limits the way the region is confined in geographic and historic terms. By conceptualizing the poets as mapmakers, the collections by Kei Miller, Olive Senior, and M. NourbeSe Phillip reference the container of the basin but remediate it in poetic terms. The movement towards a distinctive lack of containment illustrates the dynamic literary and geographical operations of the Caribbean, linking typography and topography. Reading with a new lens, including digital resources that re-spatialize these poems, demonstrates the complexities that characterize the formation of these texts and …

Perspectives On Lynching In William Faulkner's Fiction And Nonfiction, Tabitha Fisher

Master’s Theses

This thesis analyzes William Faulkner's "Mob Sometimes Right" (1931), Light in August (1932), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and "Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race" (1953) alongside recent critical perspectives for their depictions of lynching and black empowerment to determine Faulkner's racial narrative regarding racial violence and civil rights.

Pitfalls Of Ambiguity In Contexts Of Islamophobia: Mohsin Hamid’S The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Ambreen Hai

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

This article examines the implications of particular representational and narrative strategies that postcolonial writers, especially from Muslim-majority nations, can utilize to respond to 9/11 and its aftermath. Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been hailed as the paradigmatic counter-discursive, antiimperialist, non-Western Muslim response. Literary scholars of various stripes have tended to regard its sustained ambiguities and deliberately incomplete ending as a sign of its richness. However, this article intervenes to offer instead a nuanced critique of Hamid's uses of ambiguity, based on postcolonial feminist literary analysis and a reading of actual readers' readings. Drawing on Hamid's own stated goals …

The Reluctant Fundamentalist's Depiction Of The Postmodern, Kathryn Nicolai

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I examine postmodern fiction in the wake of 9/11. Specifically, I investigate initial predictions of how postmodernity would end after 9/11, Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality, 9/11 as a semiotic-saturated event, 9/11-novels’ representations of hyperreality and postcolonial intersections with postmodern texts. These focuses are analyzed in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The novel chronicles the protagonist, Changez’s life before, during and after 9/11 and how his perspective on America’s capitalist-centered society and his own identity shifts in the wake of the attacks. After 9/11, Changez undergoes a demystification with America’s nostalgia-based regression and returns to Pakistan. Similar …

Wholeness And Belonging In Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split: An Eco-Politics Of Resilience And Resistance, Mary Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations--English

Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split illuminates an urgent and radical eco-political project: the creation of whole, resilient, co-species communities capable of surviving interlocking political, social, and ecological crises. Finney foregrounds the strategic practice of belonging as a method of survival within contexts of systemic oppression and climate chaos. “Belonging,” in these terms, is not a “natural” ontological state, but a mode of co-being that is continually (re)created and (re)enacted through daily world-making practices: foodways, spatial habitation, migration and movement. Belonging is a collection of reciprocal, adaptive, situated praxes that make and sustain beings and worlds. They rely on and …