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Knowing, Loving, And Being Through Excess: Creation Of Subject In Bertha Harris’S Lover, Kristin S. Bruckner

English Department Theses

This article is a psychoanalytic and feminist reading of Bertha Harris’s novel Lover, a text that deserves wider critical scrutiny and close reading for the theoretical implications it initiates. The novel presents an understanding of what it means to be both a woman and a lover, and it indicates the ways that these two ideas are intertwined. Although it was written in 1976, Lover portrays innovative feminist performances of subject which remain relevant to contemporary feminist readers. The subject this novel envisions is one who is able to enact a seduction that was unavailable to traditional conceptions of self under …

On The Shoulders Of Gi(E)Nts: The Joys Of Bibliographic Scholarship And Fanzines In Tolkien Studies, Robin Anne Reid

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

I would like to thank the Council of Stewards for their kind invitation to speak at this year’s conference, with special thanks to Janet Brennan Croft, Leslie Donovan, Alicia Fox-Lenz, and Lynn Maudlin. I was thrilled when Alicia sent me the invitation to attend as guest scholar, especially when she said my recent bibliographic scholarship was a reason. I am happy to be able to join you all this year to celebrate one of The Mythopoeic Society’s series of 50th anniversary events, specifically, the launch of Mythlore. The journal, due to its longevity and focus on mythopoeic literature, is …

The Great Tower Of Elfland: The Mythopoeic Worldview Of J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, And George Macdonald By Zachary A. Rhone, Foreword By Colin Duriez, Felicia Jean Steele

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

Zachary A. Rhone argues that G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and J. R. R. Tolkien share a Christian worldview that is the foundation of their uniquely Christian mythopoesis.

Mythlore At 50, Janet Brennan Croft

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

A plan to publish a joural representing the interests of the members of The Mythopoeic Society was announced in 1968 by the late Glen GoodKnight, who founded the society in 1967. Mythlore published its first issue on 3 January 1969, timed for J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday. One early announcement of the journal appeared in Locus in late 1968:

It was inevitable that the Mythopoeic Society would start its own journal or fanzine. The name of this fanzine will be MYTHLORE. Glen Goodnight [sic] is editor, yours truly [Bernie Zuber] associate editor and art editor, and Tim Kirk associate art editor. Deadline …

Lying Or Belying: Dreams In "The Tempest", Brandon Schultz

Helene Lafrance Library Undergraduate Research Award

This article investigates the relationship between dreams and lies in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Building on the contradictory definitions of the word "dream" as it was understood in Shakespeare's time, the article highlights several instances in the play where Shakespeare draws attention to the artifice of his theatrical dreams, making the argument that these meta-theater tricks ultimately serve to celebrate audiences' imaginative processes. Consequently, this argument hinges on the historical reality of Jacobean theatrical productions, such as Gwilym Jones's description of the Blackfriars Theater's special effects in "Shakespeare's Storms" and Plato's critique of false poets in Book X of "The …

Binding Them All (2017), Ed. By Monika Kirner-Ludwig, Stephan Köser, And Sebastian Streitberger, Anna Smol

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review by Anna Smol of Binding Them All (2017), ed. by Monika Kirner-Ludwig, Stephan Köser and Sebastian Streitberger

“Poor Creature:” Class Subjugation In Samuel Richardson’S Pamela, Rhonda Fowler

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Rhonda Fowler

ENGL 447K 01

Dr. Marie McAllister

12 April 2019

“Poor Creature:” Class Subjugation in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela

In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, the

struggles of the novel’s heroine, Pamela, reveal significant marginalization due to her

class status as a servant. A linguistic and literary analysis reveals a peculiarity, the

excessive use of the word “creature,” which I believe Richardson intentionally employs

to reveal the source of Pamela’s feelings of marginalization. In Richardson’s text, the

word “creature” is used one hundred fifty-nine times. Of those one hundred fifty-nine

times, one hundred twenty- six are …

Exalted And Debased: Psychological/Sexual Conflict As Bildungsroman In Half Of A Yellow Sun, Anne Lance

Scholars Week

While many still view the Bildungsroman, novels of formation or coming of age stories, as the purview of stuffy formation novels like Dickens’ Great Expectations or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there is significant scholarship that suggests a recent revolution in the genre that centers women, people of color, and males in post-colonial or war-torn spaces.

My paper examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun as an example of a Bildungsroman through the focalization of one of the main characters, Ugwu, as he endures two psychologically conflicting sexual experiences, one …

A New Literacy Coach And Two English Language Arts Teachers Learn Together: A Narrative Inquiry, Christiana C. Succar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Literacy coaching is not new to education. Since the 2001 shift in the United States (U.S.) educational policy towards high-quality teacher training, accountability, and student achievement, literacy or reading coach positions have been a core part of the educational institution (U. S. Department of Education, 2003). However, with undefined coaching roles and inadequate coach training early in the initiative, minimal impact on effective teacher development and instructional shifts towards closing the achievement gap occurred (Dole, 2003; International Reading Association, 2004).

In the past ten years, more understanding of literacy coaches’ roles and responsibilities has occurred with the publication of numerous …

North Sea Poems: Birds Of The North Sea, Caa'in, Summer Ferry, Lesley Harrison

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

These poems reflect the practical, human, immersive processes of self-orientation and self-location within the coastal and island landscapes round the North Sea. In both recording and bringing about this process, the poet maps herself onto her surroundings and brings her surroundings to bear on herself. The interplay of graphic, linguistic and other forms of description are destabilised by the contingency of their usefulness, and by their meaningless to each other. In the end, the generative poetic voice is the principle by which the 'map' is made.

Administration, Emotional Labor, And Gendered Discourses Of Power: A Feminist Chair’S Mission To Make Service Matter, Michelle Payne

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Michelle Masse’ and Katie Hogan’s edited collection, Over Ten Million Served (2010), argues that “complaining about service is not the same as critically analyzing service as a significant dimension of academic labor” (15). Nor, as Phillips and Heinert argue, is the admonition to “just say no” an ethical solution to the gendered inequity of academic labor. In this essay, I not only illustrate the consequences of saying yes to service and analyze its significance, but I illustrate the ways that service positioned me to advocate for change at my own institution. More specifically, I focus on the unique administrative role …

Stand-Up Comedy And The Clash Of Gendered Cultural Norms, Marlee O'Keefe

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

This paper examines the use of gender roles and norms in stand-up comedy, specifically in Western culture. Western culture has constructed social norms and ideas about gender through a binary way of thinking. Culturally constructed gender norms influence stereotypes and expectations for how people should act, think, or appear. Many within this culture become uncomfortable when those expectations are not met in either of the two binaries. Comedians have plenty of material to turn into humor when they focus on the ironies created when behavior, institutions, or ideas do not fit neatly into a binary. This will be exemplified through …

Writing And Sentence Style Analysis In The Alchemist By Paulo Coelho, Jui Chen, Phil Rudd

Posters

In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho inspired people how to follow their dreams by telling a Shepherd’s brave and mystical story. The novel attracts readers and brings them into the shepherd’s journey to figure out what treasure he is looking for. What this book portrays just what an alchemist does, transforming “lead to goad”. Page after page makes readers understand that every great thing starts from a simple thing, and finally it “leads” readers to their true personal “goal” in life. Similarly, every great book is built on every single word and grammar struc­ture, thus this study focuses on analysis the …

Milton, Jerome, And Apocalyptic Virginity, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

Milton’s youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady’s movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton’s understanding of virginity’s poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise …

Language Attitudes Of Writing Center Consultants: Perception And Expectation, Benjamin John Sparks

Masters Theses

This master’s thesis explores the results of research into the language attitudes of peer consultants working in a writing center at a large regional public university in the American Midwest. A survey was administered to writing center staff in which they were asked to evaluate the sociopolitical relationship between standard and nonstandard English dialects, the perceived relative grammaticality of these dialects, and the traditional concept of appropriateness in academic writing. Also included were questions pertaining to how consultants manage the practical responsibilities of their positions and the expectations of students and professors with the writing center’s stated policy of linguistic …

Writing On Demand In College, Career, And Community Writing: Preparing Students To Participate In The Pop-Up Parlor, Kelly J. Sassi, Hannah Stevens

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

The Writing on Demand Unit is an important part of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program. In this article, we review the literature on C3WP; contextualize the writing on demand unit in relation to the other instructional resources in C3WP; explore five big ideas about writing on demand; and describe an approach to teaching this unit that includes some preliminary results of teaching this unit in a rural, Native American high school. The five big ideas that inform its use are the following: 1) emotions matter, 2) everyone does it, so provide reasons for writing on demand, 3) time …

“Thanks To ‘X’ For Beta-Ing!”: Fan Fiction Beta Readers In The Writing Center, Regan Levitte

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, I pose the question: what can we learn from fan fiction beta reading practices that can be applied to the writing center? Through interviews of writing center consultants who have had beta reading experiences, I consider what collaborative practices they have transferred into their writing center consultant skill sets. This project records how their affinity groups supported their literacy habits, and which dynamics of power and embodiment meant the most to them in these two discourse communities.

Combining historic texts on what ideal writing center pedagogy looks like, I explore how writers could interact with acknowledgement of …

Why Do You Want To Teach? Interpreting Stem Pre-Service Teachers' Motivations Through A Semantic Lens, Delaney Holt

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This qualitative study sought to examine the relationship between the motivational profiles that pushed undergraduate STEM pre-service teachers (N = 181) to enter the teaching profession and the word choice used to articulate those motivations. Through the application of a semantically-analytical lens, this study aimed to uncover preliminary patterns that could predict STEM pre-service teachers’ overall commitment levels to the completion of the STEM education major and overall certification. Written responses to the question “Why did you want to become a teacher?” were gathered from a longitudinal survey administered from spring 2011 to fall 2016 as part of the Knowing …

The Power Of Positivity In The #Conservewater Movement On Twitter, Sarah Kubik

English Undergraduate

This poster looks into how authors on social media uses rhetoric to affect the perception and promotion of the #conservewater movement. This study used content analysis and analyzed 100 tweets from the 2018 year looking at who the author of each tweet was, what the tone of the tweet was, the function of the tweet, if there were any attachments and more. The findings gathered were overwhelmingly positive.

Troll-In-Chief: Donald Trump, Antinomic Rhetoric, And The Short-Circuiting Of Civic Discourse, Joseph Wayne Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. No aspect of the campaign was more remarkable than Trump’s rhetoric, which ranged from the candid and unexpected to the crude and incendiary. Now, two years later, his rhetoric—and the reasons for its widespread appeal—remain largely opaque, even under examination from proto-fascist or populist lenses. I seek for a partial account of Trump’s rhetoric using the concept of antinomic rhetoric coupled with the widespread popular perception of him as similar to an internet troll. In short, I believe it is his violation of the conventional standards (nomoi) …

Misreading The Hybrid Face: The Alienation Of Performed And Authentic Self In Danzy Senna’S Caucasia And Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, William E. Landers

Honors Theses

Race is epistemological. It shapes worldviews, conceptions of self, and interactions with society. It defines who belongs in the national community and who counts as fully human. The myth of whiteness as a homogenizing and nativist identity creates false personas around and within racialized others. These personas define non-white populations according to exclusionary stereotypes. These stereotypes, in turn, separate populations based on appearance and cultural practice. This thesis applies Critical Race Theory and comparative racialization tools to examine the historical implications of race on the conception of an authentic, or internally true, identity. These implications are illustrated by the dynamics …

The Discourse And Value Of Being An Independent Publisher, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Publishing did not have independents enter self-discourse until the 1960s when media conglomeration created a need to distinguish other publishers from this network of corporate giants. But rather than decimating the independent publishing landscape, the corporate conglomeration of book publishing has opened a space for independent publishers to thrive (Simon and McCarthy, 2009; Schiffrin, 2001; Hawthorne, 2014, 2016; Kogan 2007, 2010), in part because of the social currency that positioning themselves as independent in discourse affords. In order to analyze the use, purpose, and meaning of independent in publisher discourse, this article conducts a content analysis on mission statements of …

Reading Multicultural Novels Melancholically: Racial Grief And Grievance In The Joy Luck Club, Beloved, And Anil's Ghost, Jennifer Arias Sweeney

Dissertations (1934 -)

The teaching of multicultural literature in English classrooms has focused on a liberal rather than critical approach. The liberal multicultural approach focuses on pluralism, which is actually a form of assimilationism that denies ethnic difference and silences racial conflict. This silencing produces a new kind of racial grief where ethnic and racial identities are ignored and the expectation is for racialized figures to get over their losses. I believe we should focus on a critical multiculturalism that critiques assimilationism and recognizes racial grief. I assert that English instructors should teach an interpretive strategy called reading melancholically. I am defining melancholia …

Decolonial Potential In A Multilingual Fyc, Cruz Medina

English

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have questioned to what extent the field can be decolonial because of the gatekeeping role that writing plays in the university. This article examines the decolonial potential of implementing multilingual practices in first-year composition (fyc), enacting what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience” by complicating the primacy of English as the language of knowledge-building. I describe a Spanish-English “bilingual” fyc course offered at a private university with a Jesuit Catholic heritage. The course is characterized by a translanguaging approach in which Spanish is presented as a valid language for academic writing. The students’ writing highlights the …

Memory And Narrative In The Traumatic Mode: Interlocuting Trauma In William Faulkner And Toni Morrison, Peper Langhout 19

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Women’S Writing And The Poetics Of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740, Rachel Mann

Theses and Dissertations

Women’s Writing and the Poetics of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740 probes the porous boundary between science and literature, revealing that the methodologies undergirding scientific experimentation were developed communally and through a confluence of interdisciplinary and cultural concerns. Ultimately, it shows that our contemporary understanding of the natural world and the scientific method have a history that is largely one of fragments. Secondly, and more importantly, it demonstrates the value of reading imaginative writing alongside scientific developments of the day.

Focusing on women’s imaginative writing in particular reveals the power and limits that ostensibly liminal voices have. As such, Women’s Writing and …

Russian Roots In Southern Soil, James Preston Edge

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the profound influence that 19th-century Russian authors had on 20th-century Southern writers. Recent analyses of the American South have looked to the fluid nature of this region’s borders, often spreading into the Caribbean, South America, and American West, but there has not yet been any book- length study of the ways in which several Russian literary masters, including Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, influenced Southern authors, particularly Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. In particular, these Southern authors, in interviews and essays, have repeatedly extolled these Russian figures for their elevation of communal folklore, …

Divine Absence, Divine Presence: The Theological Arguments Of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’S The History Of Joseph, Laura Macgowan

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Biblical epic The History of Joseph (1736), which dramatizes the events of Genesis 37-45, stands out in her oeuvre not only generically—it is her only long narrative poem—but because of how rarely God appears as an intervening agent or subject of narrative attention. Rather than highlight God’s splendor by imbuing Scripture with poetic embellishment, as is her wont, Rowe’s language downplays God’s hand in a famously Providential story (Genesis 50.20). While God shows up most often as an entity to beseech or a cultural token to reference, pagan deities govern the plot’s action; Rowe relishes in …

The Warped One: Nationalist Adaptations Of The Cuchulain Myth, Martha J. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I trace the use of the mythic Irish hero Cuchulain by early Irish nationalists. From 1878 to 1939, Standish James O’Grady, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats employed this figure for specific political and cultural agendas. Cuchulain makes a fitting symbol for the “poet warrior” stereotype that was purposely and incidentally cultivated during the cultural nationalist phase of the Irish Literary Revival, when writers were beginning to explore the Cuchulain myth to demonstrate cultural and linguistic ideals. Nationalists found in Cuchulain a symbol that could tie the cultural to the political and the political to the …

A Portrait Of Freedom: A Bakhtinian Interpretation Of Henry James' The Portrait Of A Lady, Bryan J. Richardson

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Few issues in the Jamesian corpus have been more controversial than Isabel Archer’s decision to return to her cruel husband Gilbert Osmond at the end of The Portrait of a Lady. While critics have often thought of Isabel’s decision as either unrealistic, unjustifiable, or misguided, her choice becomes more rational when viewed within the context of a Bakhtinian polyphonic novel. By seeing the novel as a free-flowing novel of voices about the nature of freedom, Isabel’s choice can be explained as holding true to her belief that “freedom” means holding steadfast to one’s responsibilities, a conclusion she reaches by synthesizing …