Digital Commons Network^™

The Unicorn Newsletter Fall 2015, Stephanie Nunley

English Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Grace Paley’S Urban Jewish Voice: Identity, History, And "The Tune Of The Language", Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

Dans ses nouvelles minimalistes et expérimentales, Grace Paley construit un monde urbain d’après-guerre typiquement juif américain. C’est avant tout par le dialogue qu’elle donne vie à ses personnages qui sont toujours décrits dans des lieux de convivialité et de rencontre (perrons, cours d’école, rues ou squares du quartier) et dont la place dans l’histoire est définie par le langage. L’intrigue pour Paley est purement secondaire : c’est par le langage et la transmission des histoires qui les définissent que les personnages déterminent leur rapport à eux-mêmes et au monde. Diverse, compacte, nuancée et éloquente dans sa simplicité même, la langue …

"Fire And Water Imagery" In Jane Eyre 2015, Shannon O'Loughlin

Master's Theses

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a study in contrasts. Critics have argued the implausibility of the novel, that an orphaned governess who marries her dashing employer is too far-fetched to be believed. However, a proper understanding of Jane Eyre must be based not on a sequence of events, but on the thematic form of the novel in which the signifiers relate to each other and shift throughout. Ferdinand de Saussure explains in his "Course in General Linguistics," that the mental concept one has of a word is its "signifier" (62). Charlotte Bronte relies not simply upon a sequence of events …

The Heir And The Treasure: The Grammatical Construction Of Aragorn And Arwen, Rachel Landsem

4610 English: Individual Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien

No abstract provided.

October 1, 2015: Safe On Campus Training, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Learn to be a better advocate and ally to lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender people. Participants receive information on practical strategies for addressing homophobia, learn ways to support students who are coming out, and gain an understanding of respectful language use.

Review Essay: Mhra Tudor & Stuart Translations, Joshua S. Reid

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of Hadfield, Andrew and Neil Rhodes, Gen ed. MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations. 23 vols. London: Modern Humanities Research Association 2011-2017.

Introduction To Forum: The Hemispheric French Atlantic, Michelle Burnham

English

“The Hemispheric French Atlantic” begins to suture a transatlantic to a hemispheric spatiality by tracing out the movement of texts, figures, and traditions within a complex and kinetic circulatory system that moves beyond the geometric model imagined by studies of the French Atlantic triangle. In tracking the discourses of politics, literature, and anthropology through a hemispheric French Atlantic space complicated by race and slavery, these five literary critical essays focus on the legacies of violence and promise that radiate through time and space from the Haitian revolutionary moment, spiraling across and beyond the long nineteenth century while circling across and …

Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards A Social Ecocriticism, Matthew Rowney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards a Social Ecocriticism is an attempt to offer a new way of thinking about ecological approaches to literature. Rather than separate ecology from the movement of history, or support an anthropocentric historicism, my approach aims to merge the interests of both environmental and historical criticism in order to provide a more interdisciplinary view of conceptions of the natural and the social. The process of history owes much more to the non-human than has been generally allowed, especially in the face of contemporary ecocrisis.

In the more than two hundred years since the advent of Romanticism in …

Gender And Trauma From World War I To The War In Iraq: Narrative In The Aftermath Of Loss, Jenny Young Kijowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trauma Studies is predicated on the idea of unspeakability: events that are experienced as deep psychic wounds break the frameworks for understanding, resulting in an inability to translate the experience into language. Scholars who study the literature of trauma are thus faced with this central paradox: how do writers speak the unspeakable? Trauma literature is generally regarded as texts that not only are thematically centered on a traumatic event or series of traumatic events, but also structurally reflect the symptoms of trauma. Thus the formal qualities of trauma narratives include fragmentation, contradiction, repetition, circularity, and intrusion, such that these texts …

Theater Matters: Female Theatricality In Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, And James, Keiko Miyajima

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the ways the novelists on both sides of the Atlantic use the figure of the theatrical woman to advance claims about the nature and role of women. Theater is a deeply paradoxical art form: Seen at once as socially constitutive and promoting mass conformity, it is also criticized as denaturalizing, decentering, etiolating, queering, feminizing. These anxieties coalesce around the image of the actress. In nineteenth century fiction, the image of a woman performing on stage is a powerful one, suggestive of ideal femininity, but also of negative traits including deception, artificiality and an unfeminine appetite for public …

September 24, 2015: Cfp: 2016 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Call for Papers: 2016 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Living Between Dialectics: A Bakhtinian And Lacanian Reading Of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter And Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Xiaojun Luo

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation creates a dialogic web encompassing the sociocultural and psychological aspects of Jade Snow Wong's and Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographies Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Woman Warrior. The American mainstream society and Chinese patriarchal community have conceived insurmountable ethnic and gender differences that are inherent in Wong's and Kingston's growing-up environment. The dissertation argues that how the two authors perceive the way of how these differences have been conceived is central to our understanding of their representations of ethnic female consciousness when they are writing as both subjects and writers. The dissertation notes, to be more specific, Wong's and …

September 13, 2015: Ellis Series Kick-Off Event: New Discussion Forum, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring The New Discussion Forum

The Opening Chapters Of: Only A Game, Andrew Crown-Weber

Kaleidoscope

These are what may turn out to be the first chapters of a novel tentatively called “Only A Game,” which could possibly be finished some time in the future, maybe. At present this book-to-be deals with the life of a young man who is addicted to one of the few new drugs to be discovered this century: massively multiplayer online role-playing games. If you are unfamiliar with this digital scourge, have some time on your hands, and haven’t eaten recently, I recommend Googling the term for an eye-opening experience. I won’t spoil all the many surprises and twists and intrigues …

"The Fact Of God": Form And Belief In British Modernist Poetry, Annarose Fitzgerald

English Language and Literature ETDs

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between the concept of metaphysical belief and the poetic innovations enlisted to articulate this belief in the works of British modernist poets W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting, Philip Larkin, and Thom Gunn. Moving from Celtic mythos to Buddhist philosophy, Anglo-Catholic prayer to ancient Greek burial rites, I argue that spirituality and poetic experimentation were reciprocal influences: modernist experimentations in poetic form had a direct impact on how poets represented and articulated metaphysical beliefs and practices, and these metaphysical concepts themselves significantly affected these poets development of their craft, prompting …

The Phenomenology Of Second Language Acquisition: Poiesis And The Emergence Of The Multilingual Subject, Courtney E. Scarborough

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This study explores relationships between second language acquisition (SLA), poetic language, and embodied cognition and its connection to second language speakers’ linguistic self-formation, or their distinct ways of speaking and thinking. In particular, this study examines processes by which second language (L2) learners’ subjective realities are constructed and demonstrates that these processes are inherently poetic, emerging from a combination of the constraining structures of the language system and second language speakers’ phenomenological experiences. The context of the study is a poetry-making activity the researcher designed and took place in the English Department Writing Center at California State University, San Bernardino. …

Rulers And The Wolf: Archbishop Wulfstan, Anglo-Saxon Kings, And The Problems Of His Present, Nicholas Schwartz

English Language and Literature ETDs

Until now, Wulfstan, Archbishop of Yorks relationship to and view of Anglo-Saxon kingship has never been comprehensively examined. The lack of attention this topic has received is a glaring omission in Wulfstan scholarship. Wulfstan worked under two kings, \xc6thelred and Cnut, and he had an interest in Edgar that has long been recognized. In response to Wulfstan's career under these kings and his interest in Edgar, scholars have been far too ready to assume that the archbishop's view of kingship was straightforward. It has too long been taken for granted that Wulfstan operated under Cnut in the same manner as …

Eng 5000-001: Intro To Methods In English Studies, Angela Vietto

Fall 2015

No abstract provided.

Eng 1105-001: English Forum, Dagni Bredesen, Jeannie Ludlow

Fall 2015

No abstract provided.

Eng 1105-001: English Forum, Jeannie Ludlow, Dagni Bredesen

Fall 2015

No abstract provided.

Perilous And Fair: Women In The Works And Life Of J.R.R. Tolkien (2015) Ed. Janet Brennan Croft And Leslie A. Donovan, Deidre A. Dawson

Journal of Tolkien Research

Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien (2015), ed. by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan

The Oxford Handbook Of Ecocriticism Edited By Greg Garrard, Camilla Nelson Dr

The Goose

Camilla Nelson reviews The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard

Adolescent Street Literacy: The Art Of The Hustle, Regina L. Welch

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of street youths, runaways and foster children. It focuses on the rhetorical and literacy practices that serve as a foundation for an underground community. Very little research, within the English field or from a literacy perspective, has been done on this demographic. This study includes data from interviews conducted with eight individuals who were “homeless” between the ages of 12 and 18 years old. Homeless is being defined as any duration spent absent of a stable living situation, including, but not limited to, foster homes, sleeping on the streets or in temporary settings, with …

The Being Of Art And The Art Of Being : Hermeneutic Ontology In Gadamer And Woolf., Adam Noland,

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Overall, the point of this project is to plumb the affinities between Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic ontology and Virginia Woolf’s novels—how these affinities illuminate and contribute to an improved understanding of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Woolf’s novels. For their part, Gadamer and Woolf belong to a similar cultural and historical milieu, each, in one way or another, a participant in the intellectual and artistic movement known as Modernism. This movement arose in response to the encroaching impersonality of scientific objectivity: both Woolf and Gadamer recognized the pitfalls of this objectivity, as it necessarily discounts the interpretive opportunity and responsibility of …

It-Clefts And Their Processing, Elisabeth S. Johnson

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Morehead State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Elisabeth S. Johnson on July 21, 2015.

July 16, 2015: New Issues 20th Anniversary, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

A special gathering of the Kalamazoo community, writers, and Creative Writing and English alumni to celebrate 20 years of New Issues Poetry & Prose. Featuring music, readings, and an art sale.

Perfecting Pamela: Samuel Richardson's Final Revisions To His Earliest Novel, Jennifer S. Elliott

Theses & Honors Papers

This author details Richardson’s revision process as he edits his first novel Pamela as the last thing he does before dying. There are three chapters detailing Richardson’s motives behind revising his first novel and his actual revision process, which included three main techniques—substitution, addition, and deletion. Motives considered and argued were: moral purpose and criticism received from others—especially analyzing Shamela, a satire of Pamela—which undermines the morality that Richardson had hoped Pamela accomplished. At the end of the essay, there is an extensive chart complied by the author, spanning a total of 55 pages, of all of Richardson’s …

Global Chaucers: Reflections On Collaboration And Digital Futures, Candace Barrington, Jonathan Hsy

Accessus

Global Chaucers, our multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-year project, intends to locate, catalog, translate, archive, and analyze non-Anglophone appropriations and translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Since its founding in 2012, this project has rapidly changed in response to scholars’ diverse interests and our expanding discoveries. Almost all these changes were prompted and made possible by our online presence (including a blog and Facebook group), and digital media comprises our primary means for gathering information, disseminating our findings, advertising conferences and events, and promoting the resource to other scholars. Because digital media can help disparate people traverse geographical and linguistic barriers, …

Confessions Of An American Ginseng Addict, Addison Davis James

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Confessions of an American Ginseng Addict uses the Lazy Branch Holler in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky as a setting for a creative nonfiction work, which uses history, confession, remembrances, and digressions to tell the story of a man dealing with loss, mental health issues, environmental sustainability, and the power of ginseng. In the style of Desert Solitaire and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrative is a discursive work of raw unadulterated gonzo writing.

The Orientalism Of Edgar Allan Poe: The Allure Of The Middle East In Al-Aaraaf, Sohaib Kamal Al-Kamal

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores the Orientalist discourse in four of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and two of his prose essays. The major aspects of Orientalism examined in Poe's works rely on the theoretical ideas of Edward Said's Orientalism and other ideas developed by important Arab writers. Said and other Arab writers agree that Islam is the locus of any study of Orientalism. This thesis focuses on the major role of Oriental imagery that it plays in Poe's early poems. It also examines two of his prose essays to help understand central aspects of Poe's orientalia which are also reflected in his …