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Graphic Novels In The English Language Arts: Teacher Use Of Multiple Texts And Literacies In The Classroom, Emmy Talian , '15

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis examines the how and why of use of graphic texts in the teaching practice of six secondary English teachers. Through a semi-structured interview study, I investigated how they discussed their use of graphic texts, focusing on how they taught the visual portions, why they chose the texts they did, as well as how these texts fit into their larger curriculum. I found that teachers' attention to visual and multimodal potential in graphic texts exists on a spectrum, ranging from a lack of focus to primary focus in the course. Their reasons behind using these texts included the importance …

Writing The Nation: A Concise Introduction To American Literature 1865 To Present, Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

English Open Textbooks

Writing the Nation: A Concise Guide to American Literature 1865 to Present is a text that surveys key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature.

Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.

The Deconstruction Of (Para)Text In Alasdair Gray’S Poor Things, Lila Ibrahim

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Bringing Survivor Discourse Into The Dominant Discourse, Erin R. Kelley

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Saving The Grotesque: The Grotesque System Of Liberation In British Modernism (1922-1932), Matthew Henningsen

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation re-situates the grotesque in a critical tradition that emphasizes its function as a liberating force, rather than its traditional role as an arouser of terror and amusement. I then apply the grotesque liberation to the High Modern literary environment of Britain in order to reveal the grotesque dimensions of this period. To accomplish these goals of re-situating the grotesque, and applying the grotesque to High Modernism, I create a so-called "Grotesque System of Liberation." This system consists of three stages (the Symbolic, Real, and Non-Symbolic Symbolic) that trace a specific text's progress from a state of illusory stability …

Julian Of Norwich: Voicing The Vernacular, Therese Elaine Novotny

Dissertations (1934 -)

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), the subject of my dissertation, was a Christian mystic whose writings, Revelation of Love and A Book of Showings, are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars is how could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and literary language? The reason scholars have puzzled over this for centuries is that women had been denied access to traditional education. Some scholars have answered this problem through close textual comparisons linking her text to those in the patristic tradition or through modern …

Stopping At Stoppard: Decompositional Linguistic Models And Deconstructionism In Stoppard’S The Real Inspector Hound And Arcadia, Erin Gough

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This thesis will develop connections between the decomposition of binaries in the cognitive linguistic model of prototype theory and the deconstructionism of binaries in the literary critical theory of deconstructionism, focusing on Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound to show the operation of the theory in literature and using on Stoppard’s Arcadia as an example of an application of prototype theory as a critical lens. Prototype theory is a linguistically and psychologically-based theory of categorization which rejects the definition of categorization found in classical theory. Deconstructionism is a reaction to and a partial rejection of structuralism, and teaches that language …

Body + Power + Justice: Movement-Based Workshops For Critical Tutor Education, Beth Godbee, Moira Ozias, Jasmine Kar Tang

English Faculty Research and Publications

In this participatory article (with suggested activities, check-ins with the body, and freewriting), we use collaborative narrative inquiry to unpack considerations that underlie the planning, facilitation, and processing of a series of movement-based workshops. Critiquing liberal multiculturalist approaches in writing centers, we argue against the all-too-common flattening of differences and think through how embodiment helps us "work the hyphens" (Fine, 1998) or find "third ways" (Soja, 1996) that break open new possibilities for working and learning together toward equity and racial justice. In contrast to role-playing scenarios that characterize many tutor education practices, we suggest that centering the body through …

Signifier, Signified, And The Nature Of Madness In The Winter's Tale, Adam Anderson

BYU English Symposium

This paper explores, through the careful marriage of psychoanalytic and linguistic literary theories, the nature and cause of Leontes’ madness in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Analysis of textual clues through a psychoanalytic lens coupled with the signifier-signified theory of linguistic sign construction reveal nuance - and cause - in the madness of Shakespeare’s timeless character.

“My Wonderful And Less Than”: The Inadequacy And Necessity Of Metaphor In Szybist’S Incarnadine, Katherine Nelson

BYU English Symposium

Mary Szybist’s 2013 National Book Award–winning poetry collection, Incarnadine, re-envisions the encounter between Mary and the angel Gabriel, entering the same thematic space that early Annunciation artwork traditionally has in order to portray the human encountering the alien. In these poems, symbol systems—particularly metaphor and sometimes language itself—allow the speaker to approach understanding without full comprehension. In reexamining, rupturing, and recombining traditional elements of Annunciation representations and the respective tenets of Marian theology they signified, the poems in Incarnadine point to the persistent inadequacy but inescapable necessity of metaphor in the process of meaning-making. After briefly describing the history of …

Wild Tongues In Education: Anzaldúa, Linguistic Oppression, And Power Culture, Alexandra Harker

BYU English Symposium

The issue of educating immigrants who do not speak English as their first language has been an extremely heated topic for decades. The American education system has chosen to deal with this issue in various ways, including the controversial English Only movement that has been implemented for some time in Arizona as well as other states. This research paper explores how linguistic oppression has occurred and continues to occur in the American education system using Gloria Anzaldúa's piece "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" as a primary resource. Anzaldúa's firsthand experiences with the American education system as well as the …

Alive And Human: Situating Wallace, Lethem, And Russell In Contemporary Fiction, Carissa Kampmeier

Theses and Dissertations

This project will attempt to provide an outline of some of the most salient constructions of present-day literary fiction, where those constructions might overlap or conflict, and how various contemporary authors and their works might usefully fit within those constructions. This project will argue that fiction-writers following postmodernism are presented with a unique problem of how to write fiction in a way that acknowledges the problems of using language as a primary meaning-making structure without falling down a linguistic rabbit hole where a text ceases to be about anything other than itself. Beginning with David Foster Wallace, this project will …

Kenneth Burke's Poetic Metaphor And Obama As Poet, Devon S. Cook

BYU English Symposium

This essay connects Kenneth Burke’s briefly used poetic metaphor with his theories on the use of “poetic” language in the essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning.” What results from this synthesis is a critical tool for rhetorical analysis which allows for the discussion of style as a vehicle for communication about ethics and morals in public discourse. Obama’s The Audacity of Hope is used as the example of a text which uses “poetic” language in order to discuss moral and ethical issues in a national arena. Obama ultimately dramatizes his own synthesis of values, putting himself in the position of a …

Empathic Encounters: Negotiating Identity In 9/11 Fiction And Translation, Kirsty A. Hemsworth

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Dominated by the polarized strategies of domestication and foreignization, conventional literary translation approaches tend to operate on the assumption that source and target cultures, and, by extension, their literary works, are fundamentally irreconcilable on the basis of linguistic, stylistic and ideological differences. Dislocated by the traumatic force of the event, only to be further uprooted by the translation process itself, the identities at stake in American works of 9/11 fiction cannot be so clearly differentiated and securely defined. Moreover, any attempt to fictionalize and translate this real-world trauma inevitably encounters the event as a visual singularity, whereby the image supersedes …

Contextualizing The Writings Of J.R.R. Tolkien On Literary Criticism, Sherrylyn Branchaw

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay offers a reinterpretation of Tolkien's writings about literary criticism, which are focused on Beowulf, fairy stories, and his own works. Whereas his writings have often been taken to mean that analytic scholarship is not valid and should not be pursued, my essay takes the intellectual climate of the time into consideration and offers an alternative interpretation, according to which he did not mean to forbid these studies outright and indeed intended that scholars should continue writing them. The essay ends with a call to academics not to be discouraged by his strong language from producing analytic studies.

Slenderize Me: Youth's Infatuation With Images In The Media, Madeline W. Collins

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I began to compose this research paper based on an assignment in my English 200H Writing Seminar. The assignment was to use original and unoriginal research to argue and prove an opinion about a gender-related issue. I began the process by researching online articles about the effects of the images in the media on young adults. Being a young woman in the era of technology made me very interested in how the increased media exposure of today negatively affects the confidence levels and body images of myself and other girls my age. After gathering baseline information from online academic articles, …

Navigating Collective Activity Systems: An Approach Towards Rhetorical Inquiry, Katherine Jesse Royce

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this formative intervention was to design a professional and technical communications course around rhetorical inquiry. The participants, undergraduate health sciences majors (N=22 for section A, N=20 section B), were observed throughout the fall semester of the 2014-2015 academic year. A rhetorical inquiry framework was applied via activity systems, and data were collected using several methodologies including participant observations, research questionnaires, as well as participant deliverables, and were transcribed using Daisy Mwanza's Eight-Step Model. Results demonstrated students successfully used activity systems as a means of approaching rhetorical inquiry. Furthermore, students indicated a high level of engagement in the …

The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2016 Edition], Bank Street College Of Education. Children's Book Committee

The Center for Children's Literature

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2015. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.

P-14 Discourse And Narrative: Creating Gender Control In Junot Diaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Charles Lee

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-Winning 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores Dominican masculinity through narrator Yunior de Las Casas’s portrayal of protagonist Oscar de León’s family history. Yunior’s perceived virility shapes his understanding of masculinity, which he stresses through the novel’s plot and structure. This analysis considers how Yunior constructs Dominican masculinity through his narrative by marginalizing and emasculating passive characters such as Oscar. I argue that Yunior’s narrative closely links definitions of masculinity and power as he strives to dominate passive characters in order to assert his virility as the “best” method for being a Dominican man.

P-20 “The Story Which He Never Stops Telling Himself”: Autobiography, Narrative Community, And The Deconstruction Of Selfhood In Virginia Woolf’S The Waves, Melodie Roschman

Honors Scholars & Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium Programs

This paper examines narrative, biography, and selfhood in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). The novel, a “play-poem,” follows six friends’ monologues from childhood to death. I analyze aspiring writer Bernard from his childhood of telling stories about companions to his inability to narrate his autobiography, arguing that he fails because he has no self to narrate. Referencing Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology’s (1974) theory of the deconstructed self identifiable only in conversation, I argue that Bernard destroys his identity by silencing his friends and becoming the sole speaker; Woolf’s biographical theory thereby establishes the communal self, prefiguring tenets of postmodern …

Remediating The Past: Doing “Periodical Studies” In The Digital Era, Maria Dicenzo

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Variation Theory And The Reception Of Chinese Literature In The English-Speaking World, Shunqing Cao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Variation Theory and Reception of Chinese Literature in the English-Speaking World" Shunqing Cao introduces "variation theory" he developed and suggests that the framework can be applied in studying the dissemination and reception of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world. Cao argues that cultural and literary differences produce variations in literary exchanges among different cultures and variation theory concentrates on these variations. With unique perspectives on variation in translation, cultural misreading, and domestication, variation theory is a useful theoretical framework and methodology for the study of the reception of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world.

Review Of Social Class In Applied Linguistics By David Block, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As Block writes in the prologue and the epilogue, the book is primarily about erasure; his motivation for writing the book is to highlight “the substantial and sometimes complete erasure of social class in applied linguistics research due to the ways in which applied linguists frame their discussions of issues such as identity, inequality, disadvantage and exclusion” (pp. ix–x). Overall, Block achieves his goal of illustrating the widespread absence of social class in applied linguistics; however, the book itself makes some missteps in exploring the very construct it claims as its focus.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter …

Shakespeare's Art And Artifice: Passing For Real In As You Like It, Kristen Nicole Cardon

Theses and Dissertations

Gender performativity, detailed by Judith Butler and accepted by most contemporary queer theorists, rests on an agentive model of gender wherein “genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done” (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 716). This academic orthodoxy is challenged, however, by the increasing presence of transgender persons joining the theoretical discourse, many of whom experience an essential gender as a central facet of their identity. I respond to Katie R. Horowitz’s recent modification of Butler’s theories—a theory of omniperformance to dissolve the distinction between performance and performativity, and thereby between artifice and “real life.” I argue that gender-as-art, a schema that …

Burke's Poetic Metaphor And Obama As Poet, Devon S. Cook

Theses and Dissertations

At the end of Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke calls for a new orientation toward life and social action which he refers to as “the poetic metaphor” (261). This essay connects Burke's briefly used poetic metaphor with his theories on the use of “poetic” language in the essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning.” What results from this synthesis is a critical tool for rhetorical analysis which allows for the discussion of style as a vehicle for communication about ethics and morals in public discourse. Obama's The Audacity of Hope is used as the example of a text which uses “poetic” …

Sacred Things, Sacred Bodies: The Ethics Of Materiality And Female Spirituality In Purple Hibiscus, Kylie Mcquarrie

Theses and Dissertations

Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that “the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” This article examines the subject-object relation between African things and African bodies in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While the main character, Kambili, eventually learns to assimilate Western Catholicism into her Nigerian reality, her Christian fundamentalist father, Eugene, uses Catholicism to justify his self-hating destruction of African things and bodies. This article argues that both reactions are rooted in the characters' ability or inability to see African material things, including both objects and bodies, as autonomous subjects. Adichie's …

Developing An Image-Based Classifier For Detecting Poetic Content In Historic Newspaper Collections, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Maanas Varma Datla, Spencer Kulwicki

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

"Developing an Image-Based Classifier for Detecting Poetic Content in Historic Newspaper Collections" details and analyzes the first stage of work of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery project team. Our team is is investigating the use of image analysis to identify poetic content in historic newspapers. The project seeks both to augment the study of literary history by drawing attention to the magnitude of poetry published in newspapers and by making the poetry more readily available for study, as well as to advance work on the use of digital images in facilitating discovery in digital libraries and other digitized collections. …

Shopping Cart Pastorals And A Nature Poem, Gary Barwin

The Goose

Poetry by Gary Barwin

Indigenous Poetics In Canada Edited By Neal Mcleod, Kelly Shepherd

The Goose

Review of Neal McLeod's Indigenous Poetics in Canada.

The Liberation Of The Heroine In Red Riding Hood : A Study On Feminist And Postfeminist Discourses, Hiu Yan Cheng

Lingnan Theses

Fairy tales’ magic is powerful because it has the potential to enter different cultures at different times. They teleport readers and displace them in alternative realities to shock them with a profoundly different world where there are possibilities they have not seen and impossibilities to be accepted. However, despite the clichéd opening of most fairy tales— “once upon a time”, the lack of a traceable origin and the arbitrariness of the tales’ contextualization, they are not ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’. These tales have a history. They evolve with new plots, characterizations and morals in response to the dominant discourses in different …