Digital Commons Network^™

Engl 21007: Writing For Engineers, Danielle Carr

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

The Poststructuralist Broom Of Wallace’S System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein And Derrida, Vernon W. Cisney

Philosophy Faculty Publications

David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.’ This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novel’s constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broom’s protagonist, Lenore Beadsmen – in search of her eponymous great-grandmother – is preoccupied with the dread that ‘all that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,’ that is to say, that reality is entirely coextensive with language. …

Stories To The Remote Reader: Shaping Cultural Narratives In "Do Not Say We Have Nothing" And "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Hannah Perry

English Senior Capstone

The events of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston depict characters who, through subversive approaches to storytelling and meaning-making, refute the stereotypes attributed to them by oppressive sociopolitical systems. Whether the story extends through families and generations in China or simply from one friend to another on a porch in Eatonville, Florida, the story complicates listeners’ initial assumptions about individual and cultural mechanisms.

Review Of "Milton, Materialism, And Embodiment: One First Matter All" Edited By K. J. Donovan And T. Festa, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

An Existentialist Approach To Teaching Writing: Anguish, Bad Faith, And Seriousness In Composition, Andreas Peter Herzog

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims at developing a model concept for the teaching of ethics in the composition classroom through the use of existentialism in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Overall, the gap I am trying to fill with my dissertation is a lack of awareness of how much Sartre actually fits rhetorical theory and composition. Ultimately, this dissertation is the attempt to develop an ethic that is universally applicable in the teaching of composition, without the need for a service learning environment or additional resources outside the university itself. To provide an overview of the project, the approach will be illustrated …

Living In The Future, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Translators And Their Prologues In Medieval England By Elizabeth Dearnley, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Missionary Linguistics And Indigenous Disruptions In North America: Review Of Sarah Rivett, "Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages And The Origins Of A Literary Nation", Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.

Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …

Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu

The Goose

Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.

Perscriptivist Rules By Type Finding The Values In English Usage Manuals, Delaney Barney, Don Chapman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The popular view of usage manuals like Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) and Garner’s Modern American Usage (2003) is that they contain a well-established set of rules. We expect to find the same language rules we’ve been practicing since elementary school: say may I instead of can I when asking for permission, spell with “I” before “E,” and don’t split infinitives. Because most people only have one or two usage guides that they consult regularly, it’s easy to believe that they all have the same rules. I was interested in finding out how much variation there is from book to …

The Missing “X” In Ethnic And Cultural Acceptance, Sofia Michelle Sandoval Larco

Pop Culture Intersections

In our modern world of heightened wall building, we are confident more separates us than brings us together. Added to our intrinsic differences, we find distinctions amongst people of our same gender, ethnicity, and race. These separations, in the long run, can turn into acts of miscommunication, create discomfort and animosity; and thus begins a tragic cycle of thinking in binaries. In this article I will argue that by reclaiming rhetoric traditions Latinx creators have continued a hesitant social move to refashion the aggregate memory of bondage and discrimination that began in colonial times. These creators are not blaming a …

Adam Scriveyn In Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, And Infrastructure In Interoperable Reuse Of Digital Manuscript Metadata, Bridget Whearty

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric Faculty Scholarship

This chapter seeks to demystify invisible work at the heart of manuscript digitization. Descriptive metadata and its curation are the unseen elements upon which image discoverability—and later reuse—depends. Seeing and taking seriously that labor, I contend, is fundamental to developing a more rigorous understanding of medieval manuscripts in our increasingly digital age.

The chapter begins by connecting major challenges facing manuscript interoperability to the deeper disciplinary histories of codicology, library studies, and digital humanities. Next, it progresses through three case studies, each of which illustrates different challenges in digital manuscript studies. Studying the Walters Art Museum metadata, I emphasize how …

Revulsion, Restlessness, And Rage Through The Body In Pain: Radical Affects And Political Consciousness In The Ariel Poems, Erin P. Beach

Theses and Dissertations

The affective path to radicalism unfolds in Plath's Ariel in three stages. Revulsion identifies a shared source of conflict with a clear patriarchal enemy. Restlessness mimics the context and pace of rebellion, including the acute crises that give way to a societal awakening. Rage connotes incipient action and a commitment to upheaval as an act of restorative justice. The associated “ugly feelings” that facilitate such affects are a reflection of how, historically, progress has come at the cost of suffering. Plath’s language and its capacity for commanding this perverse sense of the sublime – particularly its ability to control …

Vectorial Realities: Foucault And The Politics Of The Literary Address, Jiyoung Ryu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the politics of contemporary literature via addressing the theoretical problem at the heart of Foucault studies. The Kantian problem of articulating the “origin” of knowledge was also at the core of Foucault’s oeuvre. The dissertation derives a concept, here-elsewhere, from its analysis of The Order of Things to argue that here-elsewhere addresses the problem at hand via articulating the difference and the sameness that spans the Kantian continuum of I-Other. It denotes the continuum as a relative spatio-temporality with a vector, which reflects Foucault’s interest in the modern physics. As a realist and critical concept, …

Toward A Posthuman Ecology: Evolutionary Aesthetics In Transatlantic Romanticism, Kaitlin Mondello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation traces the vibrant interchange between Romantic literature and science in the nineteenth century that necessitated new forms of aesthetics. I argue that Romantic writers and scientists co-created a new way of understanding nature that moved away from hierarchical anthropocentrism toward what I call “posthuman ecology.” This work explores shared scientific, literary, and philosophical sources for Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Mary and Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson. I connect aesthetic innovation to ethics to ask more broadly how literature can provide an affective and effective space to represent and engage scientific discourse. I conclude that understanding …

Resonant Texts: The Politics Of Nineteenth-Century African American Music And Print Culture, Paul Fess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Resonant Texts: the Politics of Nineteenth-Century African American Music and Print Culture, investigates musical sound as a discursive tool African American writers and activists deployed to contest enslavement before the Civil War and claim citizenship after Emancipation. Traditionally, scholars have debated the degree to which nineteenth-century African American music constituted evidence of black culture and marked a persistent African orality that still abides within African American textual production. While these trends inform this project, my inquiry focuses on the ways that writers placed elements of musical sound—such as rhythm, melody, choral singing, and harmony—at the center of their …

Writing For The Social Sciences, Maria L. Plochocki

Open Educational Resources

The attached syllabus was used in the course, ENGL 21002 - R: Writing for the Social Sciences. It serves as a schedule and guide to the course, covering reading assignments, deadlines, course policies, and other essential information.

Self-Destructive Educationin Tsitsi Dangarembga’S Nervous Conditions, Sarah Miller

Best Integrated Writing

In this essay, Sarah examines Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, set during the colonial period in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She argues that the novel portrays education in an ambivalent light: while it serves as a vehicle of liberation and progress for the black Rhodesian characters, it also reveals to them the injustices of colonial occupation. The essay uses excellent textual examples and good support from secondary sources to convincingly advance this thesis. I believe that Sarah makes us rethink the function of education in a critical light; when viewed in the African colonial context, education becomes a tool for …

Best Integrated Writing 2018 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Storm Clouds On The Horizon: Feminist Ontologies And The Problem Of Gender, Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou, Rebecca Parker

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Feminist digital humanities is no longer focused primarily on recovering and preserving works by women authors. Feminist scholars are currently engaged in changing information design and data visualizations. However, as feminists seek to create new ontologies of gender, they face difficulties posed not only by current encoding standards, but by changing concepts of gender. Can ontologies ever capture the complex, multi-layered, dynamic nature of gender identities? This question is especially challenging when dealing with modernist works that represent gender and sexual identities at the very moment of their emergence as such. Our work on a digital edition and archive of …

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism And The Posthumous By Erin E. Edwards, A. Irene Mangoutas

The Goose

Review of Erin E. Edwards' The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous.

Jennifer Collins Bloomquist, Associate Provost For Faculty Development And Dean Of Social Sciences And Interdisciplinary Programs, Musselman Library, Jennifer Bloomquist

Next Page

In this first Next Page column of the new academic year, Jennifer Collins Bloomquist, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Dean of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Programs, shares what she would ask Zora Neale Hurston if she had the chance, which food-related books she likes to give as gifts, why she can’t have anything fun to read at her house when she has a deadline looming, and her go-to campus sources for great recommendations on what to read next.

Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possibilities, Sarah Alice Shelton

English Dissertations - Archive

Following the material and ontological turns and working within the recent conversation applying posthumanist theory to education and educational research, this dissertation argues that professors can materialize immediate, critical differences for our students—open up different possibilities for their knowing-in-being than the ones imposed on us by a humanist education system—by “teaching elsewhere” even while staying within the college classroom spaces (designed to be “anywhere”) we’re assigned. Such a posthumanist praxis or pedagogy relies on Karen Barad’s agential realism to see “the classroom” as the entire spacetimemattering of a particular phenomenon brought together through a mixture of choices and impositions into …

No Tv For Woodpeckers By Gary Barwin, If Pressed By Andrew Mcewan, And Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics For A Toxic World By Christine L. Marran, Michael D. Sloane

The Goose

Review of Gary Barwin's No TV for Woodpeckers, Andrew McEwan's If Pressed, and Christine L. Marran's Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World.

Using The Rhetoric Of Video Games To Teach The Praxis Of Critical Analysis, Jeffrey B. Doyle

Theses and Dissertations

Research has shown that video games can be successful at teaching concepts and skills to students at various grade levels. To explain how this might work, theoretical work is done to connect the concept of flow from psychology to procedural rhetoric. With the inclusion of Foucault’s theories of power, video games are shown to not be isolated experiences but connected to the power dynamics of society. In video games, these dynamics can be seen through the problematic portrayals of marginalized peoples as well as the hostile community that has developed online surrounding video games. To account for these issues, but …

Panopticism In A Digital Age: An Examination Of Transmedia Reimagining Jane Eyre, April L. Gonzales

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine how content creators, Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall have reinterpreted the original character Jane Eyre in a modern and social media era. The main struggle emphasized is that between an ideal self and societies expectations. Societies expectations and the expression of self are both more influenced by economics and business. The creators of The Autobiography of Jane Eyre heavily emphasize the motivations behind appearances. The creators shift Jane’s character so she is able to navigate within these expectations and the influence present in a digital world.

Refusing To Be Made Whole: Disability In Contemporary Black Women's Writing, Anna Hinton

English Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation argues that disability profoundly shapes the thematic and aesthetic choices of black women writing in the post-Brown era, despite arguments that suggest the contrary. For instance, Gayl Jone’s Corregidora is told from the first-person perspective of a black woman diagnosed as insane and incarcerated in a psychiatric prison for murder. The use of the first-person results in what I argue, building on Michael Berube’s work, is a disabled text. Moreover, a through the protagonist’s story, a stark critique of misogynoir and ableism emerges. Thus, while taking seriously disability studies scholars’ arguments that African American writers and activists …

“[Taking] Responsibility For The Community”: Women Claiming Power And Legitimacy In Technical And Professional Communication In India, 1999-2016, Breeanne Matheson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Though the field of technical and professional communication has long been saturated with the narratives of Euro-Western males, technical and professional communication as a field has a responsibility to expand the lens of study to include the experiences of global and nontraditional practitioners. This study examines the experiences of Indian women working as practitioners, building power and legitimacy in a globalized economy. Drawing from interviews with 49 practitioners as well as an analysis of historical documents, this study examines the methods that Indian practitioners have used to build power and legitimacy by founding professional organizations, leveraging their educational opportunities, and …