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Robert Frost’S New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’S England, And Seamus Heaney’S Ireland: Non-Urban Place And Democratic Poetry, Faisal I. Rawashdeh Dec 2015

Robert Frost’S New Hampshire, Philip Larkin’S England, And Seamus Heaney’S Ireland: Non-Urban Place And Democratic Poetry, Faisal I. Rawashdeh

Dissertations

In Anglo-American Modernist poetry, place is reduced to an analogue for the cultural degradation brought forth by the disruptive experience of modernity. This demotion stands in sharp contrast to the representation of place as a center of value in the poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. In this dissertation, I shall explain this value in terms of its connection to a particular cultural substance which Frost, Larkin, and Heaney deem foundational for their non-ideological terms of belonging to place. Frost embraces New England vernacularism first as the basis for his egalitarianism and second as the core substance …

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Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith Dec 2015

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English and Creative Writing Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …

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Finding Deaf Gain: Changing Languages, Changing Lenses, Changing Society, Edward Henry Bart Dec 2015

Finding Deaf Gain: Changing Languages, Changing Lenses, Changing Society, Edward Henry Bart

English Theses - Archive

Most literature is analyzed through various lenses, or more accurately, schools of thought informed by life experience and cultural knowledge. Literature created in American Sign is no different than any other literature in spite of it being a visual-spatial language rather than a sound-based language. It requires scholars able to access the Deaf Lens, cognizant of the linguistic and historical context that informed Deaf artists in the creation of their work. This context is embedded in their ASL literature, and often requires scholars to approach their work as the product of a colonized group. Though the Deaf Community does not …

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Becomes A Woman Best: Female Prophetic Figures In Shakespeare's Plays, Alan Morris Cochrum Dec 2015

Becomes A Woman Best: Female Prophetic Figures In Shakespeare's Plays, Alan Morris Cochrum

English Theses - Archive

This dissertation argues that female characters in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, Richard III, Macbeth, and 1 Henry VI function as prophets in the style of the Old Testament. In a culture that venerates Holy Writ but also devalues women, a dramatic exemplar wrapped in the mantle of a biblical prophet becomes a potential model for playgoers as well as an embodied critique. Paulina, Katherine of Aragon, and Margaret of Anjou condemn injustice, uphold the cause of the vulnerable, challenge the abuse of royal and spiritual authority, and frequently echo aspects of biblical figures such as Moses, Isaiah, and …

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To The Contrary, Beth Daniell Dec 2015

To The Contrary, Beth Daniell

Faculty Articles

Author of one of the most important volumes on literacy and spiritual practice finds that four key insights have guided her work, all of them consonant with AEPL members’ practices.

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The Fictionality Of Topic Modeling: Machine Reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Series, Rachel Sagner Buurma Dec 2015

The Fictionality Of Topic Modeling: Machine Reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Series, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstruction of the topics out of which a given set of novels have been created allows for a denaturalizing and unfamiliar (though crucially not “objective” or “unbiased”) view. In other words, topic models are fictions, and scholars of literature should consider …

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“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard Dec 2015

“I Take--No Less Than Skies”: Emily Dickinson And Nineteenth-Century Meteorology, Kjerstin Evans Ballard

Theses and Dissertations

Emily Dickinson's poetry functions where scientific attention to the physical world and abstract theorizing about the ineffable intersect. Critics who emphasize the poet's dedication to the scientific often take for granted how deeply the uncertainty that underlies all of Dickinson's poetry opposes scientific discussion of the day. Meteorology is an exceptional nineteenth-century science because it takes as its subject complex systems which are inexplicable in Newtonian terms. As such, meteorology can articulate the ways that Dickinson bridges the divide between the unknown and the known, particularly as she relates to the interplay of nature and culture, the role of careful …

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Mack Thomas: The Total Beat, James B. Welton Dec 2015

Mack Thomas: The Total Beat, James B. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Mack Thomas enjoyed both an audience seat and a role in the Beat Generation. He lives the life that fits one of his mottos, “if at first you don’t succeed, quit”. Thomas was the author of two autobiographical novels Gumbo and The Total Beast, a jazz and literature columnist for Grove Press in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas was also a jazz musician worthy to share the stage with Miles Davis, inventor, and entrepreneur among numerous other interests. His friendship with William S. Burroughs was forged by their Texas ties while they were neighbors living in Paris, France and offered …

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Evidences Of Critical Thinking In The Writing Of First-Year College Students, Shannon Bryn Soper Dec 2015

Evidences Of Critical Thinking In The Writing Of First-Year College Students, Shannon Bryn Soper

Theses and Dissertations

A healthy civil society depends on citizens who have mature critical thinking skills and a willingness to entertain opposing points of view. The development of critical thinking in young adults has long been studied, but there has been little agreement on what the attributes of critical thinking are and how to reliably assess them. While many studies have attempted to assess the critical thinking abilities of college students, none have yet measured critical thinking through using the Critical Thinking Analytic Rubric (CTAR) to assess first-year college students' writing. This study used a modified version of the CTAR rubric to investigate …

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Tobacco And Tar Babies: The Trickster As A Cultural Hero In Winnebago And African American Myth, Catherine Squibb Dec 2015

Tobacco And Tar Babies: The Trickster As A Cultural Hero In Winnebago And African American Myth, Catherine Squibb

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the trickster character through the lens of his role as a cultural hero. The two characters that I chose to examine are from North American myth, specifically Winnebago Hare and Brer Rabbit. These two characters represent the duality of the trickster while simultaneously embodying the lauded abilities of the hero. Through their actions these two characters shape culture through the very action of disrupting societal norms.

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At Home In Exile: Ezra Pound And The Poetics Of Banishment, Andy Kay Trevathan Dec 2015

At Home In Exile: Ezra Pound And The Poetics Of Banishment, Andy Kay Trevathan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ezra Pound is one of the most important poets, critics, and writers of the 20th century. Through his literary efforts, and his work on behalf of many other writers, Pound changed the way we read and write poetry today. His cultivation and support of other writers and poets like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, etc. created the basis for what we refer to as Imagism, Modernism, and other important literary movements of the early 20th century. Pound’s use of fragmentation, pastiche, and bricolage laid the foundation for post-modern writers of the latter half of the 20th century, …

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Re: Publics: Woman Of Color Feminist Rhetorical Process Shaping Safe Spaces For A Rehumanizing Discourse, Eloisa E. Moreno Dec 2015

Re: Publics: Woman Of Color Feminist Rhetorical Process Shaping Safe Spaces For A Rehumanizing Discourse, Eloisa E. Moreno

Theses and Dissertations

The discourse of women of color feminists over the last thirty years follows what I refer to as woman of color feminist rhetorical process in three recursive phases: location, deliberation, and restoration. The process is a significant contribution to rhetorical theory in the form of woman of color consciousness. This way of knowing considers complex identities at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual identity. The woman of color feminist rhetorician asks us to view self, community, and our notions of love as political constructs. By doing so, we are able to move beyond identity politics and build new …

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Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist Nov 2015

Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist

English Faculty Publications

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, …

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How Does Poetry Confess? Zhai Yongming's Poems And The Landscape Of "Confession", Xin Xu Nov 2015

How Does Poetry Confess? Zhai Yongming's Poems And The Landscape Of "Confession", Xin Xu

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In the 1980s, a Chinese poet, Zhai Yongming (翟永明), published a linked suite of nineteen poems. Zhai entitled this sequence “Women” (Nǚren女人) and claimed that her poems were largely influenced by American confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath. Chinese critics suggest that Zhai inaugurates the trend of confessional poetry in China. This paper will first contextualize the Chinese translation of American confessional poetry in the Mao and post-Mao age, and then problematize the concept of “confession” in Chinese poetry criticism by making American confessional poetry a counter point. Under the term of confessional poetry it is “the illusion of a …

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“Carried In The Arms Of Standing Waves:" The Transmotional Aesthetics Of Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Billy J. Stratton Nov 2015

“Carried In The Arms Of Standing Waves:" The Transmotional Aesthetics Of Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, Native, Indigenous, First Nations, and Aboriginal scholars and writers have forged alliances to initiate and support decolonization efforts and the reassertion of native survivance. Native and non-Native scholars have responded to modern challenges by reconceptualizing notions of peoplehood, identity, and nationalism. Following these intellectual contours, rather than conceiving of native culture as totalizing, static, and/or incommensurable—as always already foreign—responsive readings informed by the critical work of Gerald Vizenor can support more sophisticated understandings of native literary production while revealing sites of native transmotion. Through a thusly informed examination of the work of the Tlingit poet, Nora Marks …

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Narratology, Fr. P. Boyle Nov 2015

Narratology, Fr. P. Boyle

The ITB Journal

The following is a very brief summary of Narratology. Narratology is an evolving, multifaceted method of studying the various forms of narrative or storytelling from the earliest linguistic and literary forms

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November 6, 2015: Carol Symes Lecture, Department Of English Nov 2015

November 6, 2015: Carol Symes Lecture, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Carol Symes

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The Muslim Mystique: The Use Of Rushdie’S Imaginary Homeland To Combat Prejudice Against Muslim Peoples Explored In Three Semi-Autobiographical Works Of Popular Fiction By Muslim Authors Of An American Immigrant Background, Lauren E. Nadolski Nov 2015

The Muslim Mystique: The Use Of Rushdie’S Imaginary Homeland To Combat Prejudice Against Muslim Peoples Explored In Three Semi-Autobiographical Works Of Popular Fiction By Muslim Authors Of An American Immigrant Background, Lauren E. Nadolski

Selected Honors Theses

There is a largely unexplored trend in recent popular fiction that regards the semi-autobiographical work of authors of an immigrant or refugee background. These works seldom fall into the trap exposed by Said’s Orientalism, but instead present the author’s native country and culture through a lens similar what Salman Rushdie described as “imaginary homelands.” This thesis examines three primary texts that fit that description: The Kite Runner by Kahled Hosseni, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid, and Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye for their inclusion of the Islamic faith and their portrayal of America. The texts are analyzed and recommended …

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Capital As Artificial Intelligence, Gerry Canavan Nov 2015

Capital As Artificial Intelligence, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005), and the short stories of Philip K. Dick. The final section of the article discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) within the contemporary political context of accelerationist anticapitalism, whose advocates propose working with “the machines” rather than against them.

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Conventional Wisdom In The Writing Classroom: A Short Defence Of Grammar Instruction, Sue Norton Nov 2015

Conventional Wisdom In The Writing Classroom: A Short Defence Of Grammar Instruction, Sue Norton

Articles

This article considers whether instructors of writing in higher education ought prescriptively to involve students in the mechanics of standard written English or, rather, encourage them to prioritise ideas and content. Recognizing the reluctance of many practitioners to distract learner-writers with rules, and thereby alienate them from their creativity, it nevertheless recommends judicious delivery of lessons in conventional grammar, syntax, and punctuation. Taking standard written English as a variant that continues to hold sway in general, academic, and professional readerships, the article concludes with a selection of language components relevant to undergraduate writing and commonly addressed by readily available resource …

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Chawton Novels Online, Women’S Writing 1751-1834 And Computer-Aided Textual Analysis, Anne Bandry-Scubbi Oct 2015

Chawton Novels Online, Women’S Writing 1751-1834 And Computer-Aided Textual Analysis, Anne Bandry-Scubbi

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

Using Chawton House Library’s “Novels Online,” several corpora have been set up for a computer-aided textual analysis of the use of vocabulary by women writing “domestic novels” from 1752 to 1834. This corpus stylistics approach makes it possible to map texts according to their word usage and to identify quantitative keywords which provide vocabulary profiles through comparison and contrast with contemporary male and female canonical texts. Items identified include pronouns, markers of dialogue and of intensity; others can be grouped into specific lexical fields such as feelings. One text from the collection then forms the object of a …

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Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft Oct 2015

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

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

No abstract provided.

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Notes, Seona Ford, Joe R. Christopher Oct 2015

Notes, Seona Ford, Joe R. Christopher

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

An obituary of long-time Mythlore advisory board member and Sayers scholar Barbara Reynolds, who was closely associated with Dorothy L. Sayers. An anniversary appreciation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; attempts to analyze its literary staying power.

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Tolkien's Philological Philosophy In His Fiction, Sherrylyn Branchaw Oct 2015

Tolkien's Philological Philosophy In His Fiction, Sherrylyn Branchaw

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

Reading of several key passages in Tolkien’s works that tie back to and illustrate his deepest-held philosophical beliefs about philology. Among other examples, pays particular attention to Gimli’s speech about the Glittering Caves of Aglarond and to Faramir’s failure to understand the warning implicit in the place-name Cirith Ungol due to the drift of linguistic meaning over time.

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Hearkening To The Other: A Certeauvian Reading Of The Ainulindale, Cami Agan Oct 2015

Hearkening To The Other: A Certeauvian Reading Of The Ainulindale, Cami Agan

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

Applying literary theory to authors whose works interest us is “a kind of play that attunes us to the interior movements, voices, and processes” of their work. Analyzes the Ainulindalë using the literary-historical theoretical framework of Michel de Certeau as a way of understanding how the inhabitants of Arda, not just the readers outside the world, comprehend how they are situated in their history, and what this says about Tolkien’s understanding of history.

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Fan The Flames Of Discontent: Contemporary Labor Literature And Social Movements, Ericka Rae Wills Oct 2015

Fan The Flames Of Discontent: Contemporary Labor Literature And Social Movements, Ericka Rae Wills

Theses and Dissertations

Fan the Flames of Discontent: Contemporary Labor Literature and Social Movements balances a literary approach to textual analysis with socially grounded reflections on diverse worker organizations. Chapters analyze Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day alongside worker-writers' texts and testimonies, such as Fran Leeper Buss and María Elena Lucas's Forged under the Sun / Forjada bajo el sol and The Heat: Steelworker Lives and Legends, a collection of United Steelworkers' Institute for Career Development writings. In each of five chapters, this dissertation respectively discusses how literature …

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A Companion To J.R.R. Tolkien, Ed. Stuart D. Lee, Reviewed By Andrew Higgins, Andrew Higgins Oct 2015

A Companion To J.R.R. Tolkien, Ed. Stuart D. Lee, Reviewed By Andrew Higgins, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review of A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien (2014), edited by Stuart D. Lee

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Caribou, Petroleum, And The Limits Of Locality In The Canada–Us Borderlands, Jenny Kerber Oct 2015

Caribou, Petroleum, And The Limits Of Locality In The Canada–Us Borderlands, Jenny Kerber

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

his article discusses Karsten Heuer’s 2006 book Being Caribou in light of debates in ecocriticism and border studies about how to define the local in the context of environmental problems of vast range and uncertain temporality. It explores how Heuer’s book about following the Porcupine Caribou herd’s migration engages in multiple forms of boundary crossing—between countries, between hemispheric locations, and between species—and shows how insights from Indigenous storytelling complicate the book’s appeal to environmentalist readers by asserting a prior, transnational Indigenous presence in the transboundary landscapes of present-day Alaska and the Yukon.

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October 5, 2015: David Bleich Lecture, Department Of English Oct 2015

October 5, 2015: David Bleich Lecture, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring David Bleich

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Interpretations Of Herman Melville’S Moby-Dick In The Field Of Visual Arts, Madeline Kudlata Oct 2015

Interpretations Of Herman Melville’S Moby-Dick In The Field Of Visual Arts, Madeline Kudlata

4997 English: Capstone

Artistic adaptations of literary classics allow readers to visualize and contextualize some of the most important themes, motifs, scenes, and images in a story that may be difficult to grasp through verbal text alone. From these adaptations, one can analyze the stylistic and thematic similarities or differences in the way an artist portrays elements of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Through their varying artistic styles and media, abstract impressionist Frank Stella, self-taught artist Matt Kish, and award-winning children’s book illustrator Allan Drummond express how Melville’s novel can manifest itself in a multitude of contexts: emotional, literal, and theoretical. By analyzing the way …

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