Digital Commons Network^™

Challenging Society In Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist And Bleak House, Adrienne Oliver

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The purpose of this honors project is to explore the challenging social system of Dickens’s Victorian London, specifically through the perspective of Dickens’s social philosophy characterized by the need for reformative action in the fractured society represented in both Oliver Twist and Bleak House. Divided into two documents, the first component, an annotated bibliography, focuses on the scholarly discussion of negligent and criminal institutions in Oliver Twist. The second section, an analytical paper, concentrates on Bleak House and Dickens’s representation of the city as a divided space between the gentility and isolated, vulnerable groups demonstrated by at risk …

The Phenomenological Beat: Allen Ginsberg's Many Multitudes, Joseph Karwin

English Department Theses

A considerable amount of critical commentary about Allen Ginsberg has focused on his public persona and on his relationship with the Beat Generation. This focus runs counter to Ginsberg’s own wishes, as he wished to be studied as a poet first, a serious poet, and a poet speaking for a new American voice. By focusing on the poetry and on Ginsberg’s extensive amount of self-analysis, this paper details the main strategies and techniques Ginsberg employed in his poetics, and how he used those techniques to form a modern American voice in poetry.

The paper specifically looks at Ginsberg’s relationship to …

Enemy Life: Theorizing Exile Through Milton, Shelley And Byron, Robert L. Berger

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation investigates the contemporary discourse and conceptions of exile as it is presented by Milton, Shelley and Byron. Utilizing biopolitical theory as a lens, it posits that the Satanic iteration or narrative of exile embodies the reality of worldly exile. As such the dissertation explores the complex framing and subsequent deconstruction of Satanic and human subjectivities found in Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound, Manfred and Don Juan. The dissertation examines Paradise Lost for its competing narratives of exile, Adam and Satan, and explores notions of home, transgression, the purification rituals which are the origin of sovereign Power and the …

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …

Final Ma Portfolio, Stacey Magri

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A Final Portfolio Submitted to the English Department of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of English with a specialization in English Teaching. An identity focused research and pedagogy portfolio that explores the concept of and creation of identity through self-conscious thought, as well as through gender and familial relations.

The Impact Of Morphological Awareness On The Reading Development Of Children With Developmental Dyslexia, Christina Bloom

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The effects of phonological awareness on reading development have been widely researched and are understood and recognized by both educators and linguists. The effects of morphological awareness on reading, though, have been comparatively under-researched until the past fifteen to twenty years. Recent studies have shown that morphological awareness plays a significant role in children’s reading development, and an awareness of morphology makes a significant impact on the spelling, vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension skills of typically-developing children that is independent of the contribution made by phonological awareness. Children with developmental dyslexia struggle with a morphological deficit. These children do not …

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Ramsays: Gender Politics In To The Lighthouse, Ashley Riggleson

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In my essay, I seek to complicate typical ideas surrounding gender politics in Virginia Woolf’s Modernist novel, To the Lighthouse. To do this, I first consider the portraits of Mr. Ramsay and his son, James, to show that Woolf, contrary to popular opinion shies away from simplistic portraits of masculine power. That is, rather than creating two typically masculine gentlemen, as most critics posit that she does, Woolf instead creates two characters who fail to conform to masculine norms. This discrepancy suggests that, Woolf captures a shifting cultural landscape in language and portrays the birth of a more “Modern …

Of The Silmarils And The Ring: J. R. R. Tolkien's Fiction And The Importance Of Creation And Art, Michael Hartinger

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

J. R. R. Tolkien embodies the opposing ideals of Enchantment and the Machine in the Silmarils and the One Ring respectively. These created objects oppose each other just as Tolkien’s ideals of art do. Enchantment is art’s ideal, it's purpose is to glorify and enrich the beauty of reality through subcreation. The Silmarils exhibit the delight of making and perceiving beauty. Whereas the Machine is art’s shadowy reflection that utilizes apparatuses or devices rather than personal talent in order to coerce others and reality itself. Overall Tolkien's aesthetic theories reflect many fears surrounding modern attitudes toward weaponizing art. Tolkien supplies …

Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau

Theses and Dissertations

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.

James Baldwin's Soundscape And Grain Of The Racialized Body, Vallerie M. Matos

Theses and Dissertations

I will investigate the language around, and in direct relation to, the musicality of James Baldwin’s work. The interdependence of music and literature compose the majority, if not all, of his literary corpus. However, at some point both art forms bifurcate and we are confronted by the difficulties of writing about music and sound, and about music in text. I confront Roland Barthes’s disdain for the adjective and his theory of the “Grain of the Voice” in order to argue that attention to Black expressive musical narrative forms make audible and allow readers to witness to the grain of the …

Remembrances Reconsidered: Site-Specific Affective Retellings, Melanie W. Lozier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the ways in which strong affective feelings, trauma, and memories are written about by women through diverse narrative forms. Through storytelling, writers engage with the relationship between deep feelings, significant places, and language, such as the frequent employment of words containing the prefix "re."

The Renaissance Woman's Guide To Divorce: Exploring Marriage In Arden Of Faversham And The Tragedy Of Mariam, Briana Tyler

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The societies in the Arden of Faversham (1592) and The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) reflect the patriarchal values of Renaissance England. Alice Arden, Arden’s female lead, and Salome, the antagonist in Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam, defy the social and legal parameters placed on early modern women by killing their husbands in order to marry their lovers. While Alice and Salome succeed in carrying out the respective murders, Alice is killed for her crimes and Salome remains unpunished.

In this paper, I argue that Alice’s lack of access to legal power means that she must act outside the law; however, her reliance …

Humanity's Unlikely Heroine: Examining Eve In John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' And "Paradise Regained", Alyssa V. White

The Criterion

This essay explores the biblical world of John Milton’s poetry through the eyes of the only woman given dialogue in his most famous works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Eve has often been read with scrutiny and judgment, with many readers and scholars dismissing her character as weak and uninteresting. The paper draws on sources from several scholars, but it works primarily with the actual text of Milton’s epics themselves. The argument of this paper seeks to counter those beliefs and provide a thorough analysis of Eve’s character and development throughout Paradise Lost, as well as her impact on the …

The Restricted Agency Of Women In Arden Of Faversham And The Spanish Tragedy, Amanda Howar

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The Restricted Agency of Women in Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy

Amanda Howar

ENGL 447N: Renaissance Drama Seminar Sponsoring Faculty: Dr. Maya Mathur

This project looks at the restrictions placed on two early modern female characters: Alice Arden in Arden of Faversham (1592) and Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy (1589). In the paper, it argues that the female characters combat these restrictions through rhetorical and sexual manipulation, which gives them agency for a limited period of time. Alice Arden gains agency through rhetorical manipulation that pits people against her husband, Arden, and gives them opportunities to kill …

Reclaiming Independence: Comparing The Daughters In King Lear And A Thousand Acres, Zachary Caldwell

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In William Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear, Lear’s three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, betray their father at different points in the play and die as a result. Jane Smiley reimagines the story of King Lear in her novel, A Thousand Acres, by combining new plot material with material from the original text.

Smiley’s novel is narrated by Larry’s eldest daughter, Ginny, whose voice reorients Shakespeare’s patriarchal narrative and transforms it into a feminist text. Smiley changes the overarching plot to create a more sympathetic link between the daughters and the reader by granting them a level of redemption. Ginny …

Review Of Stephen Mitchell, Beowulf, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions Of The Island Story In The Twentieth Century, Ann Marie Fallon

Arts and Sciences Administration Publications

In lieu of an abstract, here are the chapter's first two paragraphs:

Everyone thinks they know the plot of Robinson Crusoe. The story of the man who is shipwrecked on an island alone is ubiquitous and feels deeply familiar, even for those who have not read it. Robinson Crusoe has been plagiarized, cannibalized, and serialized almost since the moment it hit the streets of London in 1719. Here is a passage from an Argentinean novel by Victoria Slavuski published in 1993 that captures the sense of familiarity and also the distance twentieth-century readers have in their relationship to Robinson …

Language: The Amicable Monster In Arrival By Denis Villeneuve, Nicolas Franco-Roldan

Emerging Writers

Second-place winner in the Academic Category of the 2018 Emerging Writers Contest. The essay analyzes the use of language and its depiction as monstrous in Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival.

Who Died: Redefining The Elegy Through Affect And Trauma, Brittney La Noire

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This project introduces the claim that death literature, specifically elegies and epitaphs, do not rely on set structure or content, but rather are poetic effects of trauma and affect. Both have been defined and redefined by critical scholars, but there is still a division about their use. The beginning of the project will pull together Paul De Man, Cathy Caruth, Theresa Brennan, and Diana Fuss to apply the theoretical principle of trauma and affect transhistorically through Theocritus, John Milton, and Percy Shelley. The final portion will be an original creative collection of elegies combined with epitaphs as ending couplets about …

Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino …

New Criticism—Not So New To Tennessee’S High School English Teachers, Seth Grindstaff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Tennessee Department of Education adopted Common Core in 2010, Tennessee implemented New Critical ideas associated with the college classroom, but did not present this connection to English teachers. Comparing high school education reforms like A Nation at Risk (1983) and TNCore to the New Critical works of Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, reveals that New Criticism is the literary method grounding current ELA education reform. Referencing Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), Diana Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), and …

The Bard And The Word: The Influence Of The Bible On The Writings Of William Shakespeare, Emily Gray

Honors Theses

Widely hailed as the single greatest writer and poet of the English language, William Shakespeare is not only revered for the sheer quantity and wide-ranging genres of his writing, but also the exceptional written quality, well-executed thematic diversity, and ability to explore the timelessness of the human experience. With the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible occurring in 2011 and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death following in 2016, scholarship on Shakespeare’s use of biblical material underwent a significant resurgence. The focus of much of this scholarship has been on simply identifying the numerous references rather …

Resisting Borders, Resisting Control: Examining The Multiplicity Of Identities In A Map Of Home And The Girl In The Tangerine Scarf, Zainab Abdali

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this project I examine identities as they are expressed through the use of language in the novels A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf. Both novels are coming-of-age narratives of two Arab and Muslim-American female protagonists that depict their exploration of identity as they undergo experiences of war, migration, displacement, and racism in their respective contexts. I explore the protagonists’ negotiation of identity in the face of familial and societal pressure to conform to clearly demarcated categorizations of identity, arguing that the protagonists recognize clear borders between identities as …

Gothic Voids: Nineteenth-Century Reader Experience And Participation, Garrett Chapman Jeter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Characterization of nineteenth-century literary Gothic is usually confined to affective response. This project argues that literary Gothic works constitute an intellectual, empirical endeavor. Because authors of literary Gothic intentionally left voids in their narratives, they invited their readers to participate in making narrative through speculation and conjecture about missing information. The practice of Gothic reading makes the reader an active partaker in filling those voids with rational conclusions. Reading is not just textual encounter. Rather, it incorporates making meaning of one’s surroundings. In their experiences, literary works’ characters “read” their environments: people, objects, events, etc. Chapter 1 characterizes Gothic reading …

They Say It Where I’M From: Using The Language Of Idioms To Compare The Characteristics Of Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Marissa Wiese

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Idioms, proverbs and other metaphorical language are a base component to how people communicate that has to be mutually understood. Slang and common sayings are a fundamental part of language. With language being such a large factor of culture, it’s natural to assume that it would mimic cultural ideals and norms. This study focuses on the cultural dimension Individualism/Collectivism and if the orientation correlates to language usage. The goal of this research is to conduct an analysis of the use of idiomatic expressions in comparison to Individualistic or Collectivistic orientation and setting.

Research of expressions and phrases has been done …

Resisting Borders, Resisting Control Examining The Multiplicity Of Identities In A Map Of Home And The Girl In The Tangerine Scarf, Zainab Abdali

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this project I examine identities as they are expressed through the use of language in the novels A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf. Both novels are coming-of-age narratives of two Arab and Muslim-American female protagonists that depict their exploration of identity as they undergo experiences of war, migration, displacement, and racism in their respective contexts. I explore the protagonists’ negotiation of identity in the face of familial and societal pressure to conform to clearly demarcated categorizations of identity, arguing that the protagonists recognize clear borders between identities as …

Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining And The Reaches Of Sociability In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Andrew Forrester

English Theses and Dissertations

Literature in the nineteenth century often featured highly structured scenes of domestic entertaining. Party Politics makes a case for these parties as both literary devices and cultural touchstones, at once practices indicative of the period’s commitment to strict standards of etiquette and capacious arenas in which to test the already blurred boundary between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, this project contends that parties are staples of Victorian sociability and its depiction in literature; they therefore allow authors and their characters to register social, moral, economic, political, and even international developments of the period in the lives of middle- and …

Misrepresented And Unheard: The "Latino Rebels", Blanca V. Guzman

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In today’s political climate, immigration, undocumented immigrants, and the Latinx identity have been pushed to the forefront of the news cycle, political campaigns, and social justice movements. The social justice movement associated with the undocumented will be explored through one alternative news source, "Latino Rebels." Through close textual analysis, it will become evident how "Latino Rebels" holds these identities of Latinx, undocumented, and immigrant very close to its own voice, and often amplifies a clear message for awareness and policy change, which goes beyond the traditional scope of objectivity in reporting.

An Examination Of The Queer, The Macho, And The Ambiguous Male In Arturo Islas's The Rain God, Delilah Marie Farias

Theses and Dissertations

Mexican-American males are shaped by their cultural values, history, religion, and family values. They are measured by the standard set forth in machismo and are expected to act accordingly. Machismo is a concept that is deeply rooted in Catholicism, the Aztec culture, the Mexican-American nuclear family, and it is handed down in the upbringing of men and women. In Arturo Islas’s novel, The Rain God, he creates a representation of the three different identities that men are subjugated to. He creates the machista within the patriarchal character of Miguel Grande, the ambiguous male in his son Miguel Chico, and …

T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", And Yoga Philosophy, Jessica Cloud

Master's Theses

While pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, T.S. Eliot put a year into deep study of the Yoga Sutras with renowned scholar James Haughton Woods. Yoga, defined in the Sutras as the practice of stopping “the fluctuations of the mind-stuff” (Patañjali 8), provides the possibility of hope and equanimity in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which depicts a world seemingly devoid of meaning. Not only can the influence of the Yoga Sutras be seen in the poetic form, style, and voice of The Waste Land and in the explanatory notes to the poem provided by Eliot, but classical yoga …