Digital Commons Network^™

Writing Workshop In Prose, Kylee C. Pastore

Open Educational Resources

The Prose Workshop (Fall 2025) is a zero-textbook-cost (ZTC) course at The City College of New York that integrates open educational resources (OER) to develop students’ skills as writers, readers, and critics. Structured in two major parts, the course begins with cultural criticism, guiding students to produce a polished 750–1000 word essay that combines close observation, analysis, and creative voice. The second half focuses on longform narrative nonfiction, culminating in a 3,000-word editorial essay intended for submission to a real-world publication. Alongside these core projects, students engage in weekly homework blogs, annotated course readers, and a final creative experiment in …

Love Amid The Rage: Feminist Affect In Women's Life-Writing, Genesis Siverio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to show the ways women’s emotions or affect, particularly rage and love, are described by women writers in their most intimate stories. I discuss the way emotion has been demeaned, and how feminist scholars have instead viewed the body as a place of insight, reclaiming a knowledge from the senses. In the midst of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, women give voice to their affectual experiences and cultivate the feelings they have so often been denied. Focusing on the particular ways women’s anger manifests in their lives and in their bodies, I zoom in on …

Structured Discussions About Linguistic Diversity: Student Voices And Campus-Based Cultural Mapping, Adrienne Jankens, Nicole Guinot Varty, Anna Elise Lindner, Linda Jimenez, Marni Lorenz, K. M. Begian-Lewis, Colleen Hart, Anita Mixon, Ma'idah Shiekh, Lena Hakim

English Faculty Research Publications

The study presented in this chapter foregrounds student voice research and students as participants in identifying locations on our urban research campus where linguistic diversity can be acknowledged and developed as a tool for knowledge-making. Beyond acknowledging the presence of diverse languages and linguistic practices on our urban campus, this study takes steps toward ensuring that linguistic diversity is recognized by faculty and administrators as a rich and active feature of campus life that crosses academic boundaries.

The study asks the following questions:

● How do Wayne State University (WSU) students experience diversity on campus?

● How do they experience …

Interspecies Responsivity In Early Modern Drama And Animal Performances, Taylor C. Culbert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an expansive, interspecies definition of performance that uses behavior rather than cognition as the decisive feature and illustrates how such a definition can reshape our approach to theatre and performance history. Using the concept of responsivity, which refers to the embodied and affective ways that humans and non-human animals acknowledge and react to one another, I trace human–animal interactions across a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance genres, from the aristocratic stag hunt and entertainments involving trained animals to the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Drawing on my experience training animals, I offer a new perspective on …

From Homeland To Hostland: Language Ownership Of Heritage Dialect And Narratives Of Third Culture Kids Of The Gulf, Maryam Aref

Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of this study is to examine Arab Adult Third Culture Kids’ sense of heritage language ownership and their identity constructions in relation to their transnational Arab Gulf context. The present study has three main aims: to ascertain their sense of ownership towards their heritage dialects, to understand the basis for their claimed or denied ownership, and to investigate the positions they ascribed to themselves and others in relation to their belonging and transnational and linguistic experiences. The study aims to fill the gap where there is a scarcity of sociolinguistic research around Arab Third Culture Kids in …

Contributors

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Mythic Circle #47

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

She Chose Her Fate: The Genderqueer Women Of Tolkien And Freedom Beyond The Patriarchal Binary, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Grace Moone, Leah Hagan

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

“The Gift Which Was Withheld I Take”: The Rape Of The Sun Maiden In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Kristine Larsen

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

“Her Hair Was Held A Marvel Unmatched”: The Significance Of Long, Blonde Hair In Tolkien’S Imagination, Sara Brown

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

No abstract provided.

"Things That Were, Things That Are, And Things That Yet May Be": The Matter Of Time In The Faërie Realms Of Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Noelia Ramos

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien’s feelings and relationship to Celtic themes are more nuanced than a simple binary of aversion versus passion. As he professed to Stanley Unwin—"Needless to say they are not Celtic!" (Letters #19)—his stance encompassed both resistance and fascination. His essay On Fairy-Stories, originally delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939, can be seen as an early foundation for concepts later developed in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). In this context, the concept of fiction and the secondary world—particularly regarding the nature of time—is notably prominent, drawing parallels to the Celtic Otherworld.

This study aims to analyze …

My Achilles Years., Ash William Bittner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a historically and rhetorically grounded creative project exploring the traumas of war. This project is divided into three broad chapters, each using a different (and relevant) approach to cover the content contained within that chapter. The first chapter relies on that historical grounding, exploring the history of PTSD as it is currently understood, before exploring ancient Greek poetry and theater and both the historical and military contexts for each, before finally discussing modern warfare and the “Forever War” of the American War on Terror that lasted for nineteen years. With the historical grounding set, it moves into …

Teaching With The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4, Rui Torres, Kathi Inman Berens, Maria C. Zamora, Lyle Skains, John Murray

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article surveys the four ELCs – Electronic Literature Collections (2006- 2022), reviews pedagogical approaches to teaching ELCs, and situates ELCs and electronic literature pedagogy into higher education’s course management systems. ELCs’ increasing accessibility serves its global audience and centers the ethical values of diversity, equality, and inclusion. The ELC4’s user experience design manifests these values. The article discusses the history of the Collections’ experience design. Volume Four (2022) expanded reader accessibility and linguistic diversity by including video playthroughs and collecting 132 works from 42 author nationalities in 31 languages. This article surveys those evolving design changes. It engages a …

Literary Study In The Era Of Artificial Intelligence In China, Fen Gao, Pengfei Zhang

Kritika Kultura

In view of the salient characteristics of technological innovation and human-machine symbiosis in the era of artificial intelligence, Chinese literary circles have purveyed a productive exploration of “literary study in the era of artificial intelligence.” Chinese scholars’ innovation of literary theory consists of three characteristics. First, they have established the original theory of “brain text,” systematically analyzed the definition, formation mechanism, and relationship between “brain text” and literature, language, text, and cognition, and applied this theory to literary criticism. Second, on the basis of sorting out and summarizing the core viewpoints of Western digital humanities theory, Chinese scholars have carried …

Immersed In The Fantastical: Creating Timeless Fantasy Realms And Stories, Kirk Kraft

Masters Theses

The first section of the thesis, my artist statement, discusses my purpose as a writer, what drives me to improve, how I hope to create lasting stories that will outlive me and how this will contribute to becoming a Christian scholar. The introduction will include when I discovered my love for writing and what inspired me to become a storyteller. I’ll briefly discuss my writing process, ideas, imagination and the power of feedback. The discussion will move to my desire to create memorable stories with staying power, similar to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, deep diving into my …

The Radical Potential Of Ecopoetics: Ecological Intimacy In Forrest Gander’S Twice Alive, Thomas Storey

Critical Humanities

Ecopoetics is a contested term, one defined by its capaciousness. Through its focus on deep ecology, it draws together the world system and the individual, the collective and the singular, and the global and the placed-based within its dialectical framework, without resolving any of these oppositions. Instead, the apparent contradictions underlying ecopoetics offer productive material for a poetic praxis that aims to foreground the complex connections that string together nature, culture, politics, and society. Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive engages with these contradictions in an attempt to foreground the intimacy of ecological thinking, and its basis in personal connections that are …

Interdisciplinary Comparison Of Verb Complementation Patterns In Selected Nigerian University Course Textbooks: Insights From Humanities And Natural Sciences, Scholastica Chinyere Amadi

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

This paper describes the variation in the distributions and use of verb complementation types and patterns in selected academic textbooks. The theoretical framework is Chomsky’s phrase structure grammar. The data, obtained from the first chapters, titled, ‘General introduction’ and ‘Atom and its structure’ of purposively selected English Studies and Physics textbooks, comprising 473 transitive verb phrases are manually analyzed. The findings reveal that three verb complementation types, mono-transitive, intensive, and complex-transitive, vary in patterns across the two textbooks with the mono-transitive V+NP and intensive V+NP patterns being dominant in English while the complex-transitive V+PP pattern dominates in Physics. The findings …

Using Digital Storytelling As A Tool To Enhance Vocabulary For Young Learners, Suresh Banoth, Udaya Muthyala

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Digital storytelling (DST) represents an innovative pedagogical approach aimed at enhancing vocabulary acquisition among young learners. This study investigates how effective Digital Storytelling (DST) is in enhancing English vocabulary skills among 32 sixth-grade students at Government Model School in Hyderabad, Telangana State, India. By integrating visual, auditory, and textual elements, DST facilitates a deeper understanding of vocabulary within context, which supports better retention and accessibility. The study employs the VSS (Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy) serves as an effective tool to promote student involvement and responsibility in vocabulary learning by encouraging learners to actively discover and gather unfamiliar words, The use of …

Endings Of Half-Lines In The Middle English Alliterative Joseph Of Arimathea, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Middle English alliterative poem Joseph of Arimathea survives in a single copy, lacking verse lineation and the regular alliteration expected of this form. Several explanations have been advanced, but the poem has been treated with reserve: scholars and critics have been reluctant, perhaps, to attend closely to a text that has seemed unfinished, careless, or corrupt. The present study counters these impressions with a narrow metrical test. Joseph agrees very well with one of the ‘finer rules’ described in recent scholarship on alliterative metrics, namely the requirement that lines end with a trochaic constituent. Regular line endings support the …

Exploring Students’ Word Stress In Speaking: Does Ethnicity Matter?, Kardi Nurhadi, Diyenti Rusdin, Indah Werdiningsih, Nunung Suryati

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

In recent years, many studies have examined the impact of word stress on speaking, but few have looked into how multiethnic students handle word stress in pronunciation. This gap is particularly noticeable in Indonesia, where the rich diversity of ethnicities and local dialects presents both unique challenges and opportunities for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners. This study aims to fill that gap by examining how the ethnic backgrounds of Indonesian students from Sulawesi influence their word stress. Twelve students (6 males, 6 females, aged 19–21) from four different ethnic groups were recruited as participants. Data were gathered through interviews, read-aloud recordings, lecturer …

The Communal Lyric: Poetry In Devotional And Oppressed Communities, Michael N. Yacoub

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the interaction between lyric and community; it asks what a communal lyric is, how it functions, and to what ends. In Chapter One, I compare Jonathan Culler’s performative model of lyric with the theory of Takhyīl as expounded by Arab philosopher-critics al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Qartajanni to argue that a communal lyric is a form of audience-oriented public discourse distinguished by formal features that prompt the poem’s (re-)iteration and establish an interpersonal relationship with the audience in order to influence them and make shareable value claims about the world. In Chapters Two and Three I provide close-reading …

Paradise Lost Thrice: Exile And The Abrahamic Religions In Aciman, Werfel, And Ashour, Malak K. Hosny

Theses and Dissertations

Exile is an integral part of the history of all three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This thesis compares between literary narratives of the exile of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It explores the notion that having been exiled from Eden with the fall of Adam and Eve, and having each religion’s prophet’s story intrinsically tied with exile, the believers’ exile is then the third in a layered cycle of exile. Having lost the paradise, believers tend to search for earthly paradises that they attach themselves to, and then tragically lose those as well. The thesis’ three primary literary texts …

Mindful Marcelo: The Process Of Writing And Illustrating A Culturally-Specific Children's Book For Early Psychoeducation, Liz Romero-Herrera

University Honors Theses

Socio-emotional learning (SEL) is imperative for young children to learn prosocial skills and how to identify and regulate their emotions. Most children begin to develop these skills in early childhood and depend on caregivers and teachers to model them. However, caregiver and teacher biases related to child gender and race can limit equitable access to high-quality SEL, placing male students of color at higher risk for maladaptive coping strategies. To address this gap, this thesis documents the creation of a culturally sensitive children's book focused on SEL concepts for young Latino boys. Throughout this thesis, I documented the process of …

“Eyes Can Be Blinded”: A Narratological Analysis Of Focalization In Sarah J. Maas’S A Court Of Thorns And Roses And A Court Of Silver Flames, Georga Mae Feek

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the complex relationship between Feyre and Nesta, two prominent characters in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) and A Court of Silver Flames (ACOSF). My analysis uses narratological concepts from three significant scholars in narrative theory: Gérard Genette, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and Mieke Bal. I begin with a theoretical synthesis of narration and focalization and outline the various categories of types of narrators and focalizers. Then, I analyze Feyre’s focalization in ACOTAR and Nesta’s focalization in ACOSF. Through this process, I have developed rich character studies of Feyre and Nesta. My investigation of the …

The Shōnen Apocalypse: An Analysis Of The Shōnen Power System And Its Narrative Functions, Mario Da Silva Melo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis has two primary goals. First, it provides an overview of the history of manga as a medium, and manga studies as a field. In doing so, I observe a lack of terminological and methodological specificity. As a result, I provide a formalist approach to thematic criticism in order to address the above issues. Second, my thesis primarily centers on shōnen power systems and their narrative functions. Power systems are "magic rules" that determine how superhuman abilities mechanically function. I identify two main power systems in shōnen manga: spiritual manipulation and transformations. My thesis posits that shōnen manga authors …

The Narratological Maus, Isla Lader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Complete Maus, a memoir graphic novel surrounding the events of character Art Spiegelman as he collects, records, and illustrates his father’s life pre-the Holocaust in Europe, his time in Auschwitz, and then life in the United States has been one of the focal Holocaust survivor testimonies and has redefined the genre it exists in as both a graphic novel, but also as a form of testimony. Like many popularized works dealing with the Holocaust, though, cultural preconceptions of Jewish people, genocide, and audiences’ desire to find morals within the work have made it so often audiences come to …

Utilizing Creative Writing Techniques In First-Year Composition, Brett Moss

Student Theses and Dissertations

One common issue found in first-year composition courses is a lack of emphasis on creative style and writing about writing (WAW) concerns. This thesis is concerned primarily with explaining how creative writing skills can benefit students in first-year composition courses, as well as advocating for more WAW ideas. I argue that by allowing students the chance to write with a more creative mindset in an environment which consciously considers writing as a skill, not just in the English department but across disciplines, a greater understanding of the importance of writing can be gained, along with more transfer skills.

The Hitching Post: American Poetry And Chinese Mythology, Xiamara Elena Hohman

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which Chinese mythology has figured in American poetry, focusing particularly on the ways Chinese mythologies have served—and continue to serve—as “hitching posts,” quasi-material sites from which meaning can be created and explored. As I am defining it, a myth is a narrative that gives meaning to a lived experience. It explains what we commemorate and worship and renders meaningful both celebration and life. In the first three chapters of this study, I discuss the ways in which Chinese myths and cultural practices have been both used as hitching posts and appropriated by …

Bilbo's Boethian Heroism, Wendy Marie Hoofnagle

Journal of Tolkien Research

Tolkien’s Boethian heritage has been amply explored, particularly for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, but little scholarly attention has been paid to his development of Boethian ideals in The Hobbit, especially in regard to Bilbo’s heroic arc and the importance of luck on his journey. I argue that Tolkien develops Bilbo’s heroic identity and his famous “luck” as the actions of Fortune on behalf of Fate and divine Providence, interpreting the influential theology from Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy as a new kind of heroism that fulfills the teachings of Lady Philosophy.

Introduction, Dominic Davies, Candida Rifkind

WLU Press Books

This is the introductory chapter of Graphic Refuge Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind.

Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.

Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, …