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Perceval's Sister And Juliet Capulet As Disruptive Guides In Spiritual Quests, Joanna Benskin

Open Access Dissertations

Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.

Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the …

Sounding Sacred: The Adoption Of Biblical Archaisms In The Book Of Mormon And Other 19th Century Texts, Gregory A. Bowen

Open Access Dissertations

The Book of Mormon is a text published in 1830 and considered a sacred work of scripture by adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement. Although written 200 years later, it exhibits many linguistic features of the King James translation of the Bible. Such stylistic imitation has been little studied, though a notable exception is Sigelman & Jacoby (1996).

Three hypotheses are considered: that this is a feature of 19th century religious texts, and the Book of Mormon adopts the style of its genre as a religious text; that this is a feature of translations of ancient texts, and the Book …

The Power Fantastic: How Genre Expectations Mediate Authority, Angela Rose Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reconciles academic and popular uses of the term genre, concluding that genre is a transmedial, mutable, associative, recognized system regulated through tacit understandings of prestige and power in a given Social space. The study employs a digital humanities method (dependent on digitally facilitated data analysis), conducting descriptive discourse analysis on collected online discussions from fan spaces concerning the fantasy genre and matters related to fantasy. In this way, I construct an image of the fantasy genre, and genre in general, as a multimodal space in which material freely passes between traditional and new media and participants actively negotiate …

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

"Our Door Is Always Open": Aligning Literacy Learningpractices In Writing Programs And Residential Learningcommunities, Julia Voss

English

Writing studies has considered college students' literacy development as a chronological progression and as influenced by their off-campus connections to various cultural and professional communities. This project considers students' literacy development across disciplines and university activity systems in which they're simultaneously involved to look at the (missed) opportunities for fostering transfer across writing courses and residential learning communities as parallel—but rarely coordinated—high-impact practices. Rather than calling for the development of additional programs, I argue for building/strengthening connections between these existing programs by highlighting shared learning outcomes focused on literacy skills development and learning how to learn.

The Broadsheet- Issue 18, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• BookTube
• Two New English Courses
• A Day in the Mind of an English Major
• O’Brien Center Professional Development Retreat
• Discovering the Goodreads App
• The NaNoWriMo
• Challenge Career Night Reflections

The Ontology Of Immanence: Arriving At Being In Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, Rachel R. Gilman

Theses and Dissertations

In response to the economic and political upheaval of World War I, Scottish Modernism explored the cultural and linguistic changes of a nation trying to identify itself amidst a world-wide conflict. Scholars and critics have considered Nan Shepherd's fiction in this context—focusing on issues of gender, female identity, language, and land—but have yet to look seriously at her work The Living Mountain and its contributions to the Modernist movement. More recently, critics like Louisa Gairn and Robert MacFarlane have called attention to Shepherd's small but powerful text in an ecocritical and philosophical light, reframing her contribution to issues of Scottish …

Assessment As A Learning Tool In A Flipped English Language Classroom In Higher Education, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Flipped teaching is a pedagogical model in which the roles of the instructor and the students in a flipped context are redefined. Within this unique pedagogical context, researchers suggest that, in order to maximize the learning process for students, assessment should follow a student-centered approach (Talbert, 2015; Honeycutt & Garrett, 2014).Utilising assessment as a learning tool through layering and scaffolding in the flipped context engages students in the learning process, encourages continuous assessment of student learning, creates opportunities for implementing critical thinking, helps students gain a deeper understanding of concepts, allows formative feedback and eventually yields improved outcomes. This formative …

Ecological Approaches To Modernism, The U.S. South, And 20th Century American Literature, Justin Ford Tinsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, …

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Immigrant and Irish Identities in Hand in the Fire and Hamilton's Writing between 2003 and 2014" Dervila Cooke discusses the intertwining of Irish and immigrant identities. Cooke examines the connection between openness to memory and embracing migrant identities in Hamilton's writing both in the 2010 novel and as a whole. The empathetic and inclusive character of Helen in Hand in the Fire is analyzed in contrast to characters who have repressed memory including the Serbian Vid. Helen's ties to elsewhere, her openness to new influence, and her willingness to engage with traumatic elements of the past (Irish …

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant And The Welsh And Scottish Tour (1760-1820), Alex Deans, Nigel Leask

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the digital mapping element in a collaborative AHRC-funded project Curious Travellers, that combines the editing and critical interpretation of early Romantic-period travel writing with cartographical work involving digitized historic maps, especially in the correspondence and manuscript and published travel journals of the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and provides examples of the issues involved in matching texts and maps, particularly for Gaelic place-names.

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.

English Literature And Scottish University Reform: David Masson's State Of Learning In Scotland, Jack M. Downs

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the role of the Victorian critic David Masson, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, in the mid-Victorian reform of the Scottish university curriculum, as mandated by the Scottish Universities Act (1858), in light of the late George Elder Davie's influential study The Democratic Intellect and subsequent scholarship, and examines Masson's two inaugural lectures, particularly his State of Learning in Scotland (1866), and his inclusion in his Edinburgh lectures of Scottish literature within a British teaching canon.

Authority And The Narrative Voice In Stevenson's Weir Of Hermiston, Gillian Hughes

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses and analyzes Robert Louis Stevenson's use of the narrator's voice in his short, unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, comparing his narrative strategies with those of Walter Scott, George Moore, George Douglas Brown, D.H. Lawrence, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, concluding that "Stevenson’s fictions are experimental works," that "respond ingeniously to the dominant and quasi-official formulae and assumptions of writers of classic Victorian novels, and in turn establish an important model from which subsequent British novelists ... could learn."

Writing Scotland's Future: Speculative Fiction And The National Imagination, Timothy C. Baker

Studies in Scottish Literature

Explores the fictional treatment of future Scotlands in the wake of the 2014 Referendum, through discussion of varied speculative novels or stories by Graham Dunstan, Paul Johnston, Ken Macleod, Matthew Fitt, Julie Bertagna, Momus, Andrew Crumey, A.L.Kennedy, Michael Faber, and Sarah Hall, arguing that "the relation between Scottish literature and Scottish politics is more complex than is often thought," that "rather than simply commenting on current political situations, much contemporary Scottish fiction offers a rethinking of politics entirely," and that "Scotland’s future is not, and cannot be, confined to a single narrative."

Books Noted And Received, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Short reviews or brief notices of seventeen books published or received since publication of Studies in Scottish Literature, 42:1 (Spring 2016).

October 28, 2016: Elizabeth Wardle Next Visiting Speaker In Ellis Speaker Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Elizabeth Wardle

Responding To Modern Flooding: Old English Place-Names As A Repository Of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Richard L.C. Jones

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

Place-names are used to communicate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by all indigenous, aboriginal and First Nations people. Here and for the first time, English place-names are examined through a TEK lens. Specifically, place-names formed in Old English—the language of the Anglo-Saxon—and coined between c. 550 and c. 1100 A.D., are explored. This naming horizon provides the basic name stock for the majority of English towns and villages still occupied today. While modern English place-names now simply function as convenient geographical tags Old English toponymy is shown here to exhibit close semantic parallels with many other indigenous place-names around the world. …

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

Reviews, Alana Joli Abbott, Sharon L. Bolding, David Bratman, Rebekah Choat, Janet Brennan Croft, Jason Fisher, Mike Foster, Melody Green, Crystal Hurd, Cody Jarman, Daniel Lüthi, Tiffany Brooke Martin, Paul R. Rovang, Kris Swank, Dennis Wilson Wise

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

The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. Jamie Williamson. Reviewed by David Bratman.

Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. Diana Pavlac Glyer, Illustrated by James A. Owen.. Reviewed by Tiffany Brooke Martin.

The Inklings Coloring Book. James A. Owen. Reviewed by Alana Joli Abbott.

High Towers and Strong Places: A Political History of Middle-earth. Timothy R. Furnish. Illustrated by Anke Eißmann. Maps and diagrams by Aaron Siddall. Reviewed by Mike Foster.

Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth. Joseph Campbell. Edited and introduced by …

October 6, 2016: "Gunpowder Percy" Reading In Ann Arbor, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Grace Tiffany will be reading from her novel, Gunpowder Percy, on Wed., October 19th, 7 p.m., at the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, 124 E. Washington St.

October 6, 2016: Melody Graulich Visit Next Event In Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Melody Graulich

Impossible Reconciliations: The Postcolonial Paradoxes Of Journeys In Maryse Condé’S Heremakhonon, Melissa Sande

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

Cummings, Abbott And Costello: How "Who's On First?" Can Help Students Understand "Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town", Jeff Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Listening to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First? ” can provide a helpful introduction to E.E. Cummings’s special use of pronouns in “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Like Cummings, Abbott and Costello convert pronouns, other parts of speech, or short phrases into proper nouns. After students wrestle with this context in relation to the poem, they will be ready to think about other contexts, such as the legacy of Emersonian individualism or the Romantic idea of the child’s closeness to God. Finally, the role of gender in the love story is also worth exploring, and the romance between …

The Howl - Fall 2016, Yang Chen, Haruho Yamada, Yume Ozaki, Hisoka Matsumura, Kaho Soga, Tomoya Hiroe, Eunjin Jang, Haruna Ogasawara, Anna Kato, Salah Athamnah, Malek Aldumman, Na Kyung Kim, Yu-Ling Tsao, Young Joo Kwon, Eunjin Jung, Nana Kim, Jihye Park, Gwendolyn Derosa

The Howl

The Howl is a magazine that is planned, researched, written, photographed and designed by Otterbein University's ESL and international students. The magazine serves to give them a safe space in which to use their voice to share their cultures, experiences and lives. If you are interested in submitting to The Howl, please email your writing or photography to [email protected].

Virginia Woolf And Illness, Cheryl Hindrichs

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

On Being Ill. “Is that a user’s guide?” This question, or a clever variation on it, became a familiar refrain when the elegant Paris Press edition’s cover, conspicuously abandoned on my bed table, caught the eye of one of the many nurses or phlebotomists who rotated through my ward over four weeks—weeks coinciding with what should have been my rereading of Woolf’s 1926 On Being Ill (OBI) as well as the impressive range of essays which you may now also read at your leisure in the second section of this double issue of the Miscellany, whether “in the army …

Contributor Biographies, "Journeys", Natalie Garza

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.