Digital Commons Network^™

Linguistics In Secondary Education: Teachers' Perceptions Of Linguistics In The Classroom, Ayla Aizza Galvan

Theses and Dissertations

Theoretical linguistics is an area of English study focusing on the abstract components of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. By 11th and 12th grade, students in the United States have been tested on linguistic concepts, as per state examination standards. English Language Arts teachers can introduce theoretical linguistic investigation and terms to their students, but this is not happening. The paper reviews why theoretical linguistic analysis is not thoroughly implemented in classrooms, successful classroom linguistic investigation in other countries and some U.S., and how linguistic investigation can be part of classroom curriculum. The research incorporates survey data from …

The Witch, The Blonde, And The Cultural "Other": Applying Cluster Criticism To Grimm And Disney Princess Stories, Valerie F. Garza

Theses and Dissertations

The Brothers Grimm and the Walt Disney Company have produced popular fairy tales for large audiences. In this work, cluster criticism—a rhetorical criticism that involves identifying key terms and charting word clusters around those terms—is applied to four Grimm fairy tales and four Disney princess films. This study aims to reveal the worldview of the rhetors and explore how values present in Grimm tales manifest in contemporary Disney films. Disney princess films in this study have been categorized as “White/European” and “Non-White/Cultural ‘Other.’” Because film is a form of non-discursive rhetoric, an adaptation of cluster criticism designed for film was …

Final Ma Portfolio, James Lamb

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is the portfolio submission for my Master's in English with a specialization in English Teaching.

Mythcon 49 - On The Shoulders Of Giants, The Mythopoeic Society

Mythcon Programs

The Mythopoeic Society has launched into a series of 50th anniversaries: the founding of the Society in 2017, the conception and launch of our scholarly journal Mythlore in 2018, and the establishment of our Mythopoeic Conference in 2019. Our theme is suggested by the ways in which Inklings scholarship has built on such good foundations.

We will celebrate these foundations and fifty years of building "On the Shoulders of Giants" at Mythcon 49.

Elizabeth I, The Subversion Of Flattery, And John Lyly's Court Plays And Entertainments, Theodora A. Jankowski

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study considers how John Lyly's characters who are allegorical representations of Elizabeth validate the queen, but at the same time raise troubling issues as to her true nature. Theodora Jankowski looks at both the light and the dark side of the Elizabeth character in each of Lyly's court plays, while at the same time considering how that allegory works in terms of the various issues Lyly debates within the plays. She reveals the fraught nature of John Lyly's relationship to Queen Elizabeth. He was not the first creative artist to introduce subversive undercurrents in entertainments designed to flatter the …

Material Culture In The Religious Narratives Of The Old English Exeter Book, Justin J. Larsen

English Language and Literature ETDs

The term “material culture” represents many different approaches and schools of thought across multiple academic disciplines, but its place in the study of medieval literature is particularly difficult to ascertain. The long tradition of simply using the archaeological record to “fill in” gaps left in the textual historical record does little to expand our understanding of the place that these objects actually occupied in the users’ daily lives, nor does it allow us to make greater connections between the texts, their audiences, and their broader environment. Likewise, the role of the text and its reception has a great deal to …

“Enough Of Thought, Philosopher!”: Emily Brontë’S Interrogations Of Death, Katherine Marie Alexander

English Language and Literature ETDs

The year 1847 marked the appearance of Wuthering Heights on the literary scene. Writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë soon became known as the “Sphynx (sic) of Literature” following the publication of the culminating masterpiece of her literary career. Although she was not a trained philosopher, her drawings, poems, letters, devoirs, and only novel offer an organic approach to philosophical matters, particularly in her engagements with the meanings of time and space and her interrogations of death.

Surrounded by the pervasive presence of death from her earliest years and beyond, Brontë moved to rigorous interrogations of the …

Break Us Beautiful, Elizabeth Upshur

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The problem addressed in this thesis is cultivating an answer to the question: what creates or comprises the sum total of my Blackness as a modern American woman living in our current political climate? I primarily use a read/call and response methodology, responding to both lived and hypothetical experiences that explore or demonstrate the ways that identity, race, gender, sexuality, regionality, religion, and the historical thumbprint intersect. The results are this collection of poems that is at times mythological, at times irreverent, both abstract and formal as it seeks to fit these pieces into a singular mosaic. The conclusion drawn …

A ;-) At The Past And Future Of English, Tiffany Li

Faculty Scholarship

It is always with a certain amount of wry, knowing amusement that we turn to the thoughts of people from the past remarking on the future (that is, our present). It is similar to how slightly older children view slightly younger children. They were so innocent then, those thinkers of the past! Look at what they thought computers could do, what language could be! How adorably naïve! Not like us, we who have put away our childish things.

Of course, the science fiction of our present may someday seem as pathetically misconceived as that of the past. So, too, will …

Review: Milton And The Politics Of Speech, Helen Lynch, Jameela A. Lares

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Compassion And Benignytee”: A Reassessment Of The Relationship Between Canacee And The Falcon In Chaucer’S “Squire’S Tale”, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Among its many elements, Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” includes an emotionally-charged dialogue between two aristocratic female figures: the human daughter of a king, Canacee, and the wounded falcon she meets in the wood. Scholars have debated the nature of this relationship in interspecial, gendered, and specifically feminist and ecofeminist terms. This essay provides a brief retrospective on some of the most recent scholarship examining their relationship—van Dyke (2005); Kordecki (2011); Crane (2012); and Schotland (2012 and 2015)—leading into a reassessment in two parts: first, that the affinity- and experience-driven bond these female figures develop supports a reading of this scene that …

Belligerent Mothers And The Power Of Feminine Speech In _The Owl And The Nightingale_, Wendy A. Matlock

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale famously records the dispute between a hostile Nightingale and a bellicose Owl. Within that dialogue the birds reproduce themselves in word and egg, in rhetoric and body. Their digressions on bodies and scatology and on childbearing and childrearing become fertilizer that expands maternal authority into public, intellectual discourse. In addition to calling forth their own communicative powers, both characters aggressively recount narratives best known from the work of Marie de France, a voice feminist scholars have successfully restored to the canon, to condemn their foe. In this light, I argue, The …

"How Delineate The Wretch": Dismantling The Othered Figure Through The Voice Of Mary Shelley's Scientific Monster, Adele Hannon

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

Expanding To The Edges: Central Numic Dual Number, John Mclaughlin

English Faculty Publications

The Central Numic (Uto-Aztecan) dual number marking system on nouns and pronouns is of interest because even though most of the component morphemes involved in the system are reconstructible to Proto-Numic, the system itself is not. Indeed, while the reconstructible Proto-Numic system is rudimentary, the Central Numic system is robust and has expanded to the point that there are few environments where dual is not marked on equal footing with singular and plural. The Central Numic system is of further interest because it involves cycles of grammaticalization and not just a single diachronic event. This contrasts with the other two …

From Borderlands To Border Islands: Intersections Between Anzaldúa's Chicana Feminist Theory And U.S. Latina Literature From The Hispanic Caribbean, Cristina Gonzalez Martin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies three texts by three U.S. Latina authors from the Hispanic Caribbean through the lens of Chicana feminist border theory. The works analyzed are How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by Dominican author Julia Alvarez, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cuban-American novelist Cristina García, and the memoir Almost a Woman (1998) by Puerto Rican author Esmeralda Santiago. The theoretical framework used is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The objective is to show how these texts manifest the formation of a hybrid, diasporic, in-between identity that corresponds with Anzaldúa’s definition of mestiza consciousness or la …

Something Rotten: Space, Place, And The Nation In Hamlet And As You Like It, Mikaela Lafave

English MA Theses

Ecocriticism has been defined as literature that concretely concerns the environment, which can be obviously applied to those of Shakespeare’s that directly depict natural disaster. This creates a prototype of a Shakespearean Ecocritical canon. My thesis addresses the limitation of this initial definition, and applies ecocritical theory to other works by Shakespeare. Ecocriticism is no longer confined to only the natural as critics expand the field through examinations of built environments and urban interaction with the natural. This widening of the field encourages the addition of further Ecocritical Shakespeare. How can audiences see the unnatural as natural, and conversely the …

Romantic Ramblings, Revisited: Eco-Logics Of Mobility In Sina Queyra's Expressway, Jenny Kerber

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Complete Issue

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

The complete issue 1 of volume 8, Landscapes Journal.

An Investigation Of Performance In National English Language Examinations In Tanzania: A Curriculum Processes Perspective, Gastor Mapunda

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper is a result of observations of teachers, employers and language researchers that many Tanzanian students who are at the ordinary level of secondary education have not been doing well in their national English language examinations. The results became worse in the 2012 examinations. The current study focused on curricula processes, namely syllabus preparation, teacher preparedness for handling syllabus demands, examination processes, and how all these are coordinated. Using semi-structured interview, questionnaire, and documentary review methods, the findings reveal that there are inefficiencies when it comes to engaging some important stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and learners. Additionally, the …

Eng 5091a-600: Studies In Language Linguistics And Literacy, Tim Taylor

Summer 2018

No abstract provided.

(Un)Welcome To America: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric In Trump’S Speeches And Conservative Mainstream Media, Erika Sabrina Quinonez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project makes the empirical assertion that U.S. President Donald Trump and conservative news media outlets contribute to a national narrative of xenophobia that frames immigrants, particularly those of color, as parasitic and dangerous to the American way of life. Through this study, I assert that the use of demagogic and dehumanizing language along with more subtle discursive strategies, such as positive representation of ‘us’, negative representation of ‘them,’ and metaphorical constructions are being used to stoke fear and anti-immigrant sentiment and to strip individuals of their humanity for the purpose of rendering them unworthy of dignity and of the …

2018 Printed Program

Colloquium Schedules

No abstract provided.

Obscure, Unclassed And Undefinable: Social Immobility For Mixed Races In The Nineteenth Century Presented In Jude The Obscure And Of One Blood, Kendall Geed

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This paper examines the problematic nature of western reliance on class-based societies through looking at postbellum United States and Victorian England through a transatlantic lens. I prove how the classification system produces a group of “unclassed” peoples based on a racial and intellectual status, by looking at Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood. These two nineteenth-century novels expose the production of unclassifiable who are outcast based on what I call a “class-race-intellect disagreement.” By revealing the life and struggles of the mixed-raced individual, I will show how the class systems used by western nations not …

I Can't Hear You: Queering And Hearing In The Wife Of Bath's Prologue And Tale, Miranda Lynn Hajduk

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis project attempts to prove that the Wife of Bath’s deafness is the key to understanding her text, and the ways in which both her Prologue and Tale play with the constructions of gender and normativity. The Wife of Bath’s deafness is one of her most prominent characteristics. Not only is it the first thing which Chaucer describes about her in the General Prologue, but the whole of the Wife’s own prologue builds toward and ultimately concludes with the Wife’s story of how she was struck deaf by her husband Jankyn. As a result of this act of violence, …

Eomer Gets Poetic: Tolkien's Alliterative Versecraft, James Shelton

Journal of Tolkien Research

Throughout Tolkien's professional career he dealt with a great number of texts that had varying views on the heroic, the romantic, the everyday world, and the role of Faerie. One consistent tendency among them, though, is to treat the past, and particularly Anglo-Saxon heritage, with a great deal of respect while trying to find ways to incorporate themes or ideas from that time into his own imaginative subcreations. Tolkien's use of alliterative verse serves to re-contextualize an ancient heroic ethos in a way that shows how heroism has changed, and must change, for the modern world. This paper examines Tolkien’s …

Envisioning Shadows In Romantic Ekphrasis And Early Photography, Joseph Kevin Tuvera Sebastian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis seeks to investigate ekphrasis as a mode of description and as a rhetorical strategy that produces literary affect. In particular, it considers the Romantic poet John Keats’s ekphrastic works to argue that he employs visual strategies of obscurity, which are rooted in

Edmund Burke’s concept of the Sublime, in order to register the formation of Poetic Consciousness. These visual strategies are observed in literal obscurity, which is expressed in shadows as a poetic conceit; they are also demonstrated in what this thesis terms notional or poetic obscurity, which involves mental abstractions that engage the imagination by challenging it …

"Swallowing A World": Globalization And The Maximalist Novel, Benjamin S. Bergholtz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the maximalist novel is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. To support this claim, I analyze the ways in which four maximalist novels—William Gaddis’s J R (1975), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014)—both map and formally mimic different elements of globalization. Each of these novels, I argue, is organized around a significant feature or, to put it simply, “effect” of globalization. This organization is so extensive that not only the vast majority …

A Review Of Silence In Modern Irish Literature, Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

International Yeats Studies

No abstract provided.

India In Yeats’S Early Imagination: Mohini Chatterjee And Kālidāsa, Ashim Dutta

International Yeats Studies

W. B. Yeats’s interest in India persisted throughout his variegated life and career, starting in the late nineteenth century and lasting through the final decade of his life. This article concentrates on his early years when he first came to terms with Indian philosophy, religion, and literature via the Vedāntist-Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee and the work of the fifth-century Sanskrit playwright Kālidāsa. With a view to examining critically Yeats’s creative engagement with, and appropriation of, these disparate materials, this article closely reads a discarded 1880s poem on Chatterjee’s teaching and its later 1929 version, “Mohini Chatterjee,” as well as his early …

American Myth And Ideologies Of Straight White Masculinity In Men's Literary Self-Representations, Mary Parish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines three autobiographical texts written in post-World War II America (1959-1973) that take as their subject a straight white man’s reflection on and engagement with the exercise of male power and the forces, both internal and external, that shape the degree to which he is “self-made,” i.e., an autonomous agent able to exert his will within a life domain (domestic, public, and war). Each of these writers engages in surveillance not solely of their own power, but also of the men who influence their experience, using their observations to critique, assert, and question the gendered realities and expectations …