Digital Commons Network^™

Training African Refugee Interpreters For Health Related Research, Terri Soelberg, Michal Temkin-Martínez, Mikal Smith, Pamela Springer

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes an approach to training African refugee interpreters for their role in health-related research. A study was proposed to evaluate the self-reported health of African Refugees in Boise, Idaho. Collaboration with a community advisory board revealed that targeted communities had members who spoke at least one of five main languages, many of whom had limited access to formal education. Interpreters were recruited from the refugee communities, and had either worked for and/or received training through one of two local hospitals. Few of the interpreters had experience serving in that role in the context of a research study. A …

Health Conditions Of Post-Resettlement African Refugees In Boise, Idaho, Mikal Smith, Pamela Springer, Terri Soelberg, Pat Lazare, Michal Temkin-Martinez

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study describes the health conditions of African refugees in Boise, Idaho obtained through self-report interviews and medical chart review. Comparisons between self-report data and data obtained through the medical chart review are described. This paper also describes the challenges and successes of collecting health data from African refugees in a health fair setting, the use of interpreters and DVDs with participants who speak seven different languages, and collaborative research with different African refugee groups utilizing community based participatory research. Findings include descriptive statistics related to the health conditions of the population. Comparison of the self-report and medical chart review …

Book Notes: "Language Policy" David Cassels Johnson,New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 291 Pp.; $36 (Soft Cover); Isbn: 9780230251700 (Soft Cover), Alexandre Couture Gagnon

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

Superiority In Humor Theory, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I consider the standard interpretation of the superiority theory of humor attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, according to which the theory allegedly places feelings of superiority at the center of humor and comic amusement. The view that feelings of superiority are at the heart of all comic amusement is wildly implausible. Therefore textual evidence for the interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, or Hobbes as offering the superiority theory as an essentialist theory of humor is worth careful consideration. Through textual analysis I argue that not one of these three philosophers defends an essentialist theory of comic amusement. …

What Is Really Funny: Humor Ahead Of Its Time In The Twentieth Century American Novel, Timothy Baffoe

All Student Theses and Dissertations

This thesis sets out to examine a specific function that humor has played in twentieth century American literature and that is reflective of American culture today—that being a constant testing of boundaries of who and what are allowed to be considered funny. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) gives readers a woman whose struggle for a Black female voice lands her on an informal standup comedy stage. Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov walks a tightrope of taboo subject matter, encouraging readers to appropriately—though maybe uncomfortably—laugh at the inappropriate, and this decades before such routines like that of …

‘Mony Prowde Wordez’: Pronominal Speech Acts, Identity And Community In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Katharine Jager

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper examines distinctions between Middle English second person pronouns thou and you and argues that such distinctions provide an important measure by which to understand late medieval chivalric masculinity.

Dialogic Faiths: Multi-Genre Expression In Religious Narrative, Rosemary L. Demos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As persuasive or expository texts, religious conversion narratives tend towards monologic language, and texts that advocate one particular creed or institution often reflect the unity of faith through linguistically totalizing methods. This study, however, examines the dialogic interactions found in certain religious narratives. The texts included in this analysis recount unusual conversion outcomes: not to formally established church institutions, but rather to a heightened religious experience and in some cases a call to leadership in establishing new social orders. In these texts, the dynamic between personal and communal religious experience is tense, sometimes precarious; the difficulties of engaging in social …

Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications And The Poetics Of Altered States, Jason Ciaccio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intoxication as a poetic principle is often identified with the romantic imagination. The literature of the intoxicated reverie is commonly thought of as synonymous with works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” DeQuincey’s accounts of numerous nightmares and reveries, a number of Keats’ odes, Novalis’ hymns, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, and Poe’s oneiric Gothic tales. Each of these, in part through their opiation or the incorporation of various other draughts, evokes a realm of dreams and visions of various sorts that are commonly associated with romantic poetic practices. The ecstatic trance, the sense of passing into another domain that is …

‘Open, And Always, Opening’: Trans- Poetics As A Methodology For (Re)Articulating Gender, The Body, And The Self ‘Beyond Language’, Lizzy Tricano Kaval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poetry is a useful medium for exploring the fluidity and possibilities in language beyond the everyday terms of normative language. For trans- and genderqueer subjects, whose identities cannot be articulated within the linguistic boundaries of binary gender, and whose outward appearance challenges the cultural logic of gendered visibility, poetry becomes a valuable and necessary tool for survival, disruption, activism, and personal and public empowerment. Through syntax, word choice, semantic and non-semantic qualities of language, poetry helps articulate the inexpressible, complex, and unstable gender identities and subject positions, even as they change or multiply. It gives names to felt ideas, which …

Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …

Radical Interiorities, Aesthetic Selves: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Miciah Hussey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Virginia Woolf writes “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others…There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown.” My dissertation explores how the novel’s attempts to represent this inherently intimate and estranging “virgin forest” also test its formal limitations. From free indirect discourse to stream of consciousness, the development of the novel is marked by different modes of reproducing inner life that push beyond the boundaries of historical, social, and physiognomic indices. I argue that these narrative and …

Christy Mahon Comes To Athens, Tennessee: The Playboy Of The Western World In Appalachia, C. Austin Hill

Irish Studies South (Archived)

No abstract provided.

North And South: Photographic Mediation In The Work Of Seamus Heaney And Natasha Trethewey, Amanda Sperry, Jill Goad

Irish Studies South (Archived)

No abstract provided.

Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In my essay entitled “Speaking and Mourning: Working Through Identity and Language in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” I argue that the novel’s protagonist Henry Park finds himself at a critical juncture in his life at the novel’s beginning. I analyze the protagonist’s relationship to language acquisition and identity, which have been developed by Lee to be associated as traumas. Furthermore, these topics are complicated by the death of his son, Mitt. This loss is a trauma of the heart and of the self for the main character who sees a successful navigation of language and immigration lost by his …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

September 24, 2016: Ellis Series Opens With Roundtable On History & Literature, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring History's Fictions: A Roundtable

Tolkien And Sanskrit (2016) By Mark T. Hooker, Nelson Goering

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review of Tolkien and Sanskrit (2016) by Mark T. Hooker

Science Fiction In The Spanish University: The Boundaries That Need To Be Broken, Sara Martín

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

The aim of this article is to trace what Rosi Braidotti calls an ‘accurate cartography’ as regards the limited space that science-fiction occupies in the Spanish university. SF has not yet overcome in Spain what Brian Baker has called its ‘crisis of legitimation’. Teaching this genre and doing research on it is, hence, still conditioned within our national borders by boundaries broken in the Anglo-American university many decades ago. Here I examine these boundaries, paying special attention to the institutional limitations preventing scholars from introducing innovations in teaching and research. Another main barrier, as I argue here, is the lack …

September 7, 2016: Nagle Abop Essay Reviews New Austen Musical, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Chris Nagle recently attended the regional premiere of the award-winning musical Austen's Pride: A New Musical of Pride and Prejudice, featured at this year's Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival in Rochester, NY.

"The Distemper Of A Gentleman": Grotesque Visual And Literary Depictions Of Gout In Great Britain 1744-1826, Calinda Shely

English Language and Literature ETDs

In this dissertation I explore the way in which visual and literary representations of gout in British literature and popular culture during the period 1744-1826 evince anxieties regarding over-consumption, particularly in relation to imperial expansion. I argue that the prevalence of gout in graphic satire indicates a common cultural understanding and perception of upper-class over-consumption of food, alcohol, material goods, and sex that threatens the health of the entire British body politic. These depictions provide a way through which the interests of those outside of the ruling classes can begin to develop a sense of community and subtly articulate a …

The Book Of Feral Flora By Amanda Ackerman & Skeena By Sarah De Leeuw, Emily Mcgiffin

The Goose

Review of Amanda Ackerman's The Book of Feral Flora. Review of Sarah de Leeuw's Skeena.

A Study Of The Intelligibility, Comprehensibility And Interpretability Of Standard Marine Communication Phrases As Perceived By Chinese Mariners, Lillian Christine Holland

Dissertations and Theses

Worldwide, mariners use a variety of English as an International Language known as Maritime English regardless of the first language spoken by the crew or port in which they enter. English knowledge and ability is therefore critical to a mariner's livelihood at sea and is also mandated by the International Maritime Organization. The ability to understand and be understood is paramount to safety at sea. This study investigated which accents of English a subset of Chinese mariners found easy or difficult to understand. The data from 39 Chinese mariners who listened to 8 Standard Marine Communications phrases was analyzed. The …

Mythcon 47 - Faces Of Mythology: Ancient, Medieval, And Modern, The Mythopoeic Society

Mythcon Programs

Inspired by the 60th anniversary of C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces and The Last Battle, this year's theme focuses on the mythology that has shaped and "given faces" to so many of our beloved characters, ranging from the myths of the Ancient Greeks to the legends of the Middle Ages and even to the modern mythology of the American Southwest. Similarly, this mythological influence is also evident in the works of many of our favorite mythopoeic authors, from J.R.R. Tolkien to J.K. Rowling, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Alan Garner, and many, many more.

Counterfeit Letters And Fictional Trials: Thomas More’S Utopia As Cultural Brand, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Utilizing marketing theory on iconic brands, this article provides a focused study of surviving English editions of Thomas More's Utopia (1551) and the different ways in which the publication was adapted by its print agents, who eventually turned it into an iconic, English brand-name. By drawing a connection between the popularity and versatility of More’s text and the rapidly developing genre of utopian fiction, this article sheds light on the speed with which the press both reacted to and played a role in creating popular taste.

'Those Who Cling In Queer Corners To The Forgotten Tongues And Memories Of An Elder Day': J.R.R. Tolkien, Finns And Elves, Andrew Scott Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract

Those Who Cling in Queer Corners To The Forgotten Tongues and Memories of an Elder Day' J.R.R. Tolkien, Finns and Elves

Dr. Andrew Higgins

In this paper I will explore how several historic, literary and mythic associations of the Finnish people with elements of magic, the supernatural and the 'other' influenced J.R.R. Tolkien in imbuing the character and language of his own Elves with a similar quality of magic and 'arresting strangeness'.I will explore several characterisations of the Finns, the People of Kalevala, Tolkien would have encountered in his early study of the Kalevala, several Old Norse and …

Harken Not To Wild Beasts: Between Rage And Eloquence In Saruman And Thrasymachus, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

One of the giant gaps in Tolkien scholarship has been to miss how deeply Saruman answers the age-old antagonism between rhetoric and philosophy. Like John Milton, Tolkien cannot bring himself to trust rhetoric. It threatens the unitary truth of a divinely-revealed moral order and, ironically, Tolkien applies great rhetorical skill to convince his reader of rhetoric’s illusionary nature. In this matter Tolkien has been largely successful, since few readers (if any) question the de-privileging of Saruman’s perspective. In the process, though, I suggest that Tolkien has developed in his master rhetorician a new relationship between rhetoric (eloquence) and rage ( …

Toward A More Loving Framework For Literacy Education, Clio Stearns

Occasional Paper Series

In this provocative and moving essay, Clio Stearns, a Bank Street educated teacher, toggles back and forth between moments with her young daughter who daily grows more attached to books and moments with her fifth grade students who remain disconnected from her carefully chosen texts. Refracted through a psychoanalytic lens and a deeply caring heart, Stearns’ description of her classroom practices offers a canny account of all that she must give up in order to see through and past her students’ resistance. In a surprising turn of events she learns to join with her students as they become curious …

A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre

MA in English Theses

The objective of this thesis was to analyze the progression of a woman’s voice in literature looking particularly at three American women writers spanning the 20th and into the 21st century—Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. In conjunction, these three novels show a progression through the history of American women’s literature, demonstrating the successes and failures of voice and silence in their works and the ways in which creating an identity through voice is necessary, even if one must create it complexly. Ultimately, the authors establish a voice in their works that lays the foundation for writers who …

Pop, Hip Hop, And Empire, Study Of A New Pedagogical Approach In A Developmental Reading And English Class, Karen Denise Taylor

MA in English Theses

This thesis focuses on the impact of studying students’ identities after using the television show, Empire as a Hip Hop studies based text in a developmental reading and English class. I frame the pedagogical approach to reading and writing by using the television show as a doorway into the varied language practices of the Hip Hop culture as opposed to Standard American English (SAE). This research uses James Paul Gee’s discourse analysis as a method for coding and analysis of the responses of the interviewees to survey questions. The questions were designed to determine from the students’ responses their attitudes …