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Reflections In Passion And Progress: Blending Vision, Resilience, And Evolution As A Writer And Scholar Of The English Language, Elizabeth Scoville

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following is a final master's degree portfolio of revised graduate work in English composition. Consisting of four projects, this portfolio highlights research, theory, and applications in multidisciplinary writing, visual argumentation, linguistics pedagogy, and professional editing. The pieces within reflect significant growth and adaptation in the field of English comprehension and writing, where successful compositions walk hand-in-hand with innovation, audience acknowledgement, and the willingness to change as language ebbs and flows with the passage of time.

Everyday Magic: A Linguistic Analysis Of Sarah Addison Allen’S “Just So You Know”, Hannah Tumlinson, Jessie Sams

Undergraduate Research Conference

This project diagrams and analyzes Sarah Addison Allen’s magical realism essay, “Just So You Know,” which informs readers that, just as they fall in love with books, books fall in love with them, too. I focus on two defining features: (1) second person point of view (2) grammatical features from sentence structure and vocabulary

The Name Of The Ring; Or, There And Back Again, Janet Brennan Croft

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

Deals with the decline in power of evil through the ages of Arda, and how this is connected with phases of the development of language (metaphoric, metonymic, and demotic) as described by Northrop Frye and Owen Barfield.

"It Had Been His Virtue, And Therefore Also The Cause Of His Fall": Seduction As A Mythopoeic Accounting For Evil In Tolkien's Work, Maria Alberto

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

Seduction is often connected to eros, but Tolkien generally uses the term in a broader fashion. A theoretical underpinning based on medieval sources, Baudrillard, and Catholic thought provides a basis for understanding how characters may be led astray from their proper paths, and how Tolkien’s critique of the domination of other wills is demonstrated in these cases.

Cross Crossings Cautiously: Uses Of African American Vernacular English In American Literature, Emily Crnkovich

English Honors Projects

This project uses sociolinguistics to theorize the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in literature across three time periods: the Antebellum era, the post-bellum/Reconstruction era, and the Harlem Renaissance. Different dialects of English encode different power structures, and in order to interrogate those power structures I track how white and black authors represent the language of African American characters on the page and how audiences interpret that language. I find that African American authors tend to embrace the variability and diversity of natural language better than their white counterparts, whose use of literary dialect often falls into essentialist clichés.

“The Nations Of The Field And Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology Of Animals In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, J. Kevin Jordan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between important intellectual discourses of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and the ontological status of non-human animals. The Enlightenment marks a distinct change in the ways in which humans gather knowledge and interact with the world, a change that forms the foundation for modern relationships between human and non-human animals. Through a theoretical framework that draws from animal studies and ecofeminism, I analyze the ways in which the status of non-human animals is shaped by the intersection of multiple anthropocentric concerns. In doing so, this dissertation probes the foundation of what defines the animal apart …

Embracing Diversity In Dialect: Incorporating Informal Language Into The Classroom, Stephanie R. Jackson

Student Scholar Showcase

Long-standing myths about language have often affected teacher instruction in the classroom. Particularly in minority communities, teachers have faced difficulties educating students whose dialect varies greatly from Standard American English (SAE). In linguistics, dialect is defined as a variety of language associated with a particular social group. Many of the difficulties faced in education have arisen from misconceptions that certain dialects of English, and by extension, certain social groups, are inferior to others. All languages have one dialect that is considered the ‘standard’ or the most prestigious, so that factor cannot be changed. However, the way in which non-standard dialects …

The Ease Of Iconicity, Azaria Brown

Student Scholar Showcase

To the untrained eye, sign language looks like an unconnected group of gestures, because it is a language that is separate from the spoken language that dominates its country of origin. Even with this in mind, there are several signs that may be universally understood by people who do not know that particular sign language. For example, though they are not completely the same, the signer touching their fingers to their mouth is similar to the act of eating food, and onlookers may determine that this sign means ‘eat’. Signed words can be related to their meanings through hand shape, …

"Our Attachments Are Our Temples": Addiction, Recovery, And The Metamodernist Movement, Ashlie M. Contos

English Department Theses

There is currently a profound debate occurring across the globe regarding the nature of addiction: whether or not addiction is a disease. Within the last decade, addiction research and publications have flooded the market, which challenge the disease model for understanding addiction. This new research suggests that addiction is a learned behavior thus addiction begins as a habit that, if continued, becomes an ingrained behavior, but it is not a disease, like diabetes or heart disease.

Concurrently, there is much discussion within academia as to what is presently occurring in literary and critical theory trends. Although there is still much …

The Horse And The Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators Of Morality In Lancelot, Don Quixote, And Tolkien, Kirsten G. Rodning

English MA Theses

There is a strong connection in Don Quixote and the works of Chretièn de Troyes and J.R.R. Tolkien between a character’s moral decisions and the way that said character treats his horse or horses. The Horse and the Heroic Quest: Equestrian Indicators of Morality in Lancelot, Don Quixote, and Tolkien studies the moral factors that affect the way heroic characters are revealed to readers and how these morals relate to the ways in which characters interact with horses. This ecocritical study focuses on the protagonists in Chretièn’s Lancelot, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and …

Singular They: The Best Epicene Pronoun, Brittney Grubber

Student Research Conference Select Presentations

The English language does not possess a third person epicene pronoun, and speakers must fill the gap, which they do most commonly with "they". Scholars understand the implications of a gender neutral pronoun for non-binary persons, but besides linguists, they do not thoroughly examine grammatical reasons for the resistance to new pronouns. This paper addresses the grammatical issues and options available to the language, including the strengths and weaknesses of "they." Even with minor faults, "they" is widely used in both spoken and written English and should be adopted by Standard English.

Return To The Typewriter, Bruce Ballenger

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

My return to the typewriter began with a feverish compulsion to acquire not just one but a handful, beginning with the machines I used in college—a Hermes 3000 and a Royal desktop. But I didn't stop there. I became obsessed with earlier typewriters, especially those with glass keys, and purchased a 1940s-era Smith Corona Sterling portable and a Royal Arrow. The touch of a fingertip on that Sterling's black keys gave me a sensual thrill. A few weeks later, a West German Olympia SM₃ portable arrived from an eBay seller, and I left it on my desk—to write on, …

Aave Be-Deletion In Quotative Be Like, Hayley Franklin

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Aiscrima E Checchi Italian-American Dialect And Development In The New Millennium, Elizabeth Loyacano Pedrotti

Honors Theses

The Italian-American identity is inextricably linked with language. Italian immigrants and their descendants have formed a culture in the United states with a dynamic history, particularly when it comes to language use and perceptions. This study examined multigenerational Italian Americans’ perceptions of English, Italian, and the unique Italian-American dialect; it aimed to discover changes in the usage of Italian-American dialect over time. Italian Americans in the Dayton area were interviewed and presented with surveys to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. Results indicate that while overall usage and recognition of Italian-American lexical items has decreased dramatically since the 1980s, younger …

Chinese Origin Of The Term Pagoda: Liang Sicheng's Proposed Etymology, David Robbins Tien, Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

Western reference works regard the architectural term pagoda as being of uncertain origin, but an overlooked etymology proposed by Liang Sicheng convincingly solves the mystery: The word is Chinese, with the literal meaning “eight” (pa) “cornered” (ko) “tower” (La). Liang Sicheng, who pioneered the serious study of classical Chinese architecture, pointed out:

‘The octagonal pagoda, which first appeared in the Tomb Pagoda of Ching-tsang in 746, was the first “pa-go-da” in the real sense of the term.’

This 746 date is of course centuries before the first appearance of pagoda in a European language, viz. 1516 in Portuguese, so the …

Bilingual Children’S Literature: Bridging The Gap Between Language And Identity = Literatura Infantil Bilingüe: Cerrando La Brecha Entre El Idioma Y La Identidad, Amanda Weber 17

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Upping The Anti: Tracing The Literary Antihero From Its Edifying Roots To Its Potent Threat Upon The Behavior Of American Youth, Sarah E. Dunlap

Selected Honors Theses

The literary antihero is continually increasing in potency, emerging today in its most morally egregious form; thus, while the chasm between the antiheroes’ edifying ethical roots and present state of criminal agency expands rapidly, the threat of the antiheroes’ morally ambiguous plots become mimetically transferential to contemporary American youth. This thesis explores the rise in potency in three literary periods. Outlining one foundational novel for each respective era, through Roland Barthes’ structuralism, reveals, on the one hand, the underlying cultural causalities of aberrant behavior and, on the other hand, each character’s unique mental conditions. In Model A, the tenets of …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 25, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Sinclair Lewis Conference 2017: Lewis in Business and Politics”

“Sinclair Lewis’s Romantic Role-Playing: Reading the Lewis Correspondence to Marcella Powers (1939-1947),” by Constance M. Perry, St. Cloud State University

“Lewis’s Problems Are Still Our Problems,” A Review of Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy by Steven Michels,” by Ralph Goldstein, California State University-Los Angeles

“‘Publicist in Fiction’: Sinclair Lewis’s Use of Rhetorical and Newspaper Style Forms in Babbitt,” by Narine Zakaryan and Ann Yeganyan, Yerevan State University, Armenia

“Roger Forseth, Acclaimed Lewis Scholar, Dies”

“The Many Lives of Floyd Dell,” by Ted Fleener, Waterloo Community Schools (retired)

“It Can’t …

Name It And Claim It: Cross-Campus Collaborations For Community-Based Learning, Beth Godbee, Elizabeth Andrejasich Gibes

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article describes the value of cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning. We argue that community-based learning both provides unique opportunities for breaking academic silos and invites campus partnerships to make ambitious projects possible. To illustrate, we describe a course "Writing for Social Justice" that involved created videos for our local YWCA's Racial Justice Program. We begin by discussing the shared value of collaboration across writing studies and librarianship (our disciplinary orientations). We identify four forms of cross-campus collaboration, which engaged us in working with each other, with our community partner, and with other partners across campus. From there, we visualize …

Writing Language : Composition, The Academy, And Work., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper argues that while college composition courses are commonly charged with remediating students by providing them with the literacy skills they lack, they may instead be redefined as providing the occasion for rewriting language and knowledge. By bringing to the fore the dependence of language and knowledge on the labor of writing, a pedagogy of recursion, mediation, and translation of knowledge through writing and revision counters neoliberalism’s commodification of knowledge and language, and offers an alternative justification for continuing education as the occasion for students to remediate language and knowledge through writing.

Simulations Of The Androgynous Society: Shattering Gender Stereotypes In George Eliot’S Silas Marner, Jessica L. Wall

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

This paper examines George Eliot's novel Silas Marner and the compelling argument it asserts against Victorian gender stereotypes. Through the contradictory successes of characters that fail to conform to their expected niches, Eliot presents her revolutionary vision for an androgynous society. Most notably, Silas’s accidental motherhood redeems his purpose while saving Eppie's life, Priscilla's ability to protect the well-being of her family stems from her avoidance of a husband and assumption of a “masculine” managerial position, and Eppie’s idyllic life with Silas is preserved by her refusal to be treated as a possession by male authority figures. Through the experiences …

She Wanted It? : Examining Young Adult Literature And Its Portrayals Of Rape Culture, Katy Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

At a time when discussions about rape culture appear throughout social media and the news, our ability to consider how literature addresses these social issues is critical. The recent work of scholars discussing rape culture emphasizes the crucial need to consider what many understand (though many also continue to dismiss or diminish) as a serious social issue. While these cultural critiques are worthwhile, my focus shifts these critiques from general (American) culture or society to a particular expression of culture: the young adult novel. In this thesis, I examine how this cultural discourse surrounding rape culture and its related myths …

March 16, 2017: Scholarly Speakers Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Trans*+ing Classrooms and Schools: The Pedagogy of Refusal as Mediator for Learning Under a Trump Regime

Putting Gender Revolution into Practice: A Workshop with sj Miller

Society, Scientific Authority, And Linguistics: The Need For Epistemic Justification, Libby C. Chernouski

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Many have considered Linguistics a science for decades, though linguists themselves have debated the accuracy of this characterization of the study of language. These conversations about linguistics as a science reveal a discipline intent on securing scientific status, often through rigorous methodology and theoretical frameworks mirroring the traditional sciences. If successful, however, linguistics inherits the authority of modern science, which maintains an epistemically hierarchical relationship with non-scientists. By examining and representing the epistemic relationships between expertise, authority, and science, I ask us to think of all linguistics not as a socially neutral endeavor, but as perpetuating the juxtaposition of scientific …

The Role Of Language In Anatomy And Physiology Instruction, Angela M. Chapman, Hsuying C. Ward, Ashwini Tiwari, Amy Weimer, Jaime B. Duran, Federico R. Guerra, Robert Paul Sale

Teaching and Learning Faculty Publications

Research indicates that student learning of science, student attitudes toward science, and their motivation to learn science and pursue science-related careers is related to classroom instruction. This study examined anatomy and physiology (A&P) classes in a south Texas high school where 97 percent of students are Hispanic bilingual learners. Classes were assigned to control or treatment groups, with the treatment group receiving instruction designed to help students develop a deeper understanding of anatomy vocabulary related to brain structures by making connections to these words in everyday life as well as to their understanding of Spanish. Main effects between group and …

"A Poem Containing History": Pound As A Poet Of Deep Time, Newell Scott Porter

Theses and Dissertations

There has been an emergent trend in literary studies that challenges the tendency to categorize our approach to literature. This new investment in the idea of "world literature," while exciting, is also both theoretically and pragmatically problematic. While theorists can usually articulate a defense of a wider approach to literature, they struggle to develop a tangible approach to such an ideal. By examining Ezra Pound's critical approach to poetry, especially in The Cantos, an applicable visualization of a global approach to literature becomes more transparent.

Zamyatin's Reception Of Wells's Fiction, Natalia Aksenova, Marina Khatyamova

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Zamyatin's Reception of Well's Fiction," Natalia Aksenova and Marina Albertovna Khatyamova examine several essays written by Yevgeny Zamyatin on Herbert Wells's texts and analyse Zamyatin's reception of Wells's work. Wells's ironic mindset, plot-driven writings, and attraction to parody drew Zamyatin's attention. Zamyatin felt a rapport with the central role of plot dynamics, unorthodox socialist politics, and dystopian tendencies in Wells's fiction. Discussions of the artistic qualities of Wells's writings allow Zamyatin to expound upon his own aesthetic program, known as "synthetism." In these discussions Zamyatin interprets Wells's work as a complex interpretation of technological modernity where the …

Mobility And Academic Literacies : An Epistolary Conversation., Jan Blommaert, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In what follows, we explore the implications of a mobilities perspective for the conceptualization, teaching, and study of academic literacies. Mobility has come to serve as a catalyst for rethinking scholarly work in a variety of fields – most provocatively, the assumed stability as well as uniformity of what is studied and the location and products of acts and actors of study. The concept of academic literacies aligns with a mobilities perspective in its challenge to a still-dominant conception of ‘literacy’ as singular, universal, uniform, and stable. However, in recognition that any attempt to define mobility, academic literacies, or ‘mobility …

February 27, 2017: Ellis Series Scholar Sj Miller Lecture And Workshop, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series: sj Miller

February 26, 2017: New Film Premiere For Department Alumni Chuck Bentley, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.