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Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham Jan 2015

Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham

English

What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?1 Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, …

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Shakespeare's Dictionary: One Playwright's Influence On The Modern English Lanugage, Jennifer Walton Jan 2015

Shakespeare's Dictionary: One Playwright's Influence On The Modern English Lanugage, Jennifer Walton

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

William Shakespeare is considered to the be the father of Modern English, but what most people do not realize is that he influenced much more in English than just the language. The number of phrases and words he created is over-exaggerated, he borrowed from many other languages, and he was one of the first people to document modern medical disorders. Not to mention Shakespeare was writing during one of the most lexically innovative time periods, so he helped aid in the transition from using “thee” to using “you” when addressing another person. Moving away from language specifically, Shakespeare’s writing has …

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Can Bình Speak?: Marginalization, Subversion, And Representation Of The Subaltern In Monique Truong’S The Book Of Salt, Joanne Eun Jung Lee Jan 2015

Can Bình Speak?: Marginalization, Subversion, And Representation Of The Subaltern In Monique Truong’S The Book Of Salt, Joanne Eun Jung Lee

Honors Papers

This paper examines The Book of Salt as a subaltern project. Binh, the protagonist of the novel, is a figure whose story has been recovered from the margins of history. The first part of the paper examines the oppressive conditions that marginalize him and how he negotiates and subverts those conditions. The second part explores the limits of such subaltern subversion and representation. Through such an examination, I raise critical questions about representing the subaltern subject in the fields of literature and Asian American studies. How can we represent the subaltern, when we cannot represent the subaltern? How do we …

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Lost Voices Of Ancient Israel Reclaiming Eden: An Ecocritical Exegesis, Nazeer Bacchus Jan 2015

Lost Voices Of Ancient Israel Reclaiming Eden: An Ecocritical Exegesis, Nazeer Bacchus

HIM 1990-2015

This work addresses the historically-read despotism Genesis 1.28 has often received in its subordination of nature for the interests of human enterprise and counters the notion of reading the entire Bible as an anti-environmental, anthropocentric text. In using a combined literary lens of eco-criticism and new historicism, this work examines the Hebrew Bible with particular attention to the books of Genesis and Exodus, offering within the Torah’s oldest literary tradition (the J source) an environmental connection between humanity and the divine that promotes a reverence of natural world and, conversely, a rejection of rampant urbanization and its cultural departure from …

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The Early Modern Space: (Cartographic) Literature And The Author In Place, Michael C. Myers Jan 2015

The Early Modern Space: (Cartographic) Literature And The Author In Place, Michael C. Myers

HIM 1990-2015

In geography, maps are a tool of placement which locate both the cartographer and the territory made cartographic. In order to place objects in space, the cartographer inserts his own judgment into the scheme of his design. During the Early Modern period, maps were no longer suspicious icons as they were in the Middle Ages and not yet products of science, but subjects of discourse and works of art. The image of a cartographer’s territory depended on his vision—both the nature and placement of his gaze—and the product reflected that author’s judgment. This is not a study of maps as …

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Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields Jan 2015

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

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Origin Of The Term "Jazz", Gerald Leonard Cohen Jan 2015

Origin Of The Term "Jazz", Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

The book (193 pages, soft-covered) is intended as a scholarly study and therefore contains more detail than would appear in a book intended for a broad readership.

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Writing The Nation, Amy Berke, Robert R. Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis Jan 2015

Writing The Nation, Amy Berke, Robert R. Bleil, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis

OER Main

A concise introduction to American Literature from 1865 to present. The book is broken into chapters based on time period and writing style from Late Romanticism to recent post-modernism.

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A Taste For Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond The Human, Justine Beatrice Wells Jan 2015

A Taste For Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond The Human, Justine Beatrice Wells

Theses and Dissertations

Amidst rising agricultural pollution, poor conditions for livestock animals, and disparity between “high” and “low” food cultures, gustatory taste has entered contemporary public rhetoric as a significant modality of intervention. This dissertation considers the environmentalist and social potential of this public embrace of sensory rhetoric. To do so, I build a rhetorical theory of sensation through a sensory re-engagement of the rhetorical tradition. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, I argue, embraced aesthetic taste as a site where rhetoric and ethics mingle, and yet in promoting its cultivation, they fell into elitism. The subsequent, Marxist discourse on sensory emancipation developed rhetoric’s sensory and …

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Tactical Encounters:Material Rhetoric And The Politics Of Tactical Media, Anthony Michael Stagliano Jan 2015

Tactical Encounters:Material Rhetoric And The Politics Of Tactical Media, Anthony Michael Stagliano

Theses and Dissertations

Tactical Encounters: Material Rhetoric and the Politics of Tactical Media articulates the concept of material rhetorical tactics, discrete rhetorical moves effecting political and social change, however ephemeral. I argue that material rhetorical tactics do not necessarily originate or conclude with a human subject, and that to understand this, we must reorient our conceptions of rhetorical action, agency, and, ultimately, its relationship to the demos, to include actions, actors, agents, and events that are not, in themselves, human. I build on recent work in rhetorical theory that has conceptualized the function and nature of rhetoric as involving agents human and nonhuman, …

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Anarchic Wills: De Factoism And Its Discontents In Shakespeare And Milton, William Dean Clement Jan 2015

Anarchic Wills: De Factoism And Its Discontents In Shakespeare And Milton, William Dean Clement

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores the literary origins of de factoism – the political philosophy which considers any “right” to rule inconsequential to political legitimacy. My work introduces the concept of the “anarchic will,” my term for a literary character that recognizes the growing distance between an authority’s claim to power and the material fact of that power. I locate these figures in early modern drama and epic to demonstrate how their existence threatens the traditional power structures, both on the stage and in the streets of London. I argue that anarchic wills jeopardize political order at the most basic level, in …

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And Have Not Mercy, I Am Waiting: Conscious Inaction As Postcolonial Resistance In Patrick Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger" And Derek Walcott's "The Fortunate Traveller", Christopher Lowell Stuck Jan 2015

And Have Not Mercy, I Am Waiting: Conscious Inaction As Postcolonial Resistance In Patrick Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger" And Derek Walcott's "The Fortunate Traveller", Christopher Lowell Stuck

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” and Derek Walcott’s “The Fortunate Traveller” as sites of postcolonial resistance. As presented in these poems, the main characters are caught between the memories of the colonial and anti-colonial pasts and the faltering promises of postcolonial independence. Instead of choosing between being defined solely by the past or accepting an independence under contrived terms, or attempting to reconcile the two, Walcott’s and Kavanagh’s poems propose conscious inaction in order to resist the apparent inevitability of the choice. Written at similar moments in their respective postcolonial regions, placing these two poems together for …

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The King’S Cabinet Splintered: The Impact Of Digital Mediation On The Kings Cabinet Opened, Travis A. Mullen Jan 2015

The King’S Cabinet Splintered: The Impact Of Digital Mediation On The Kings Cabinet Opened, Travis A. Mullen

Theses and Dissertations

In June of 1645, the Parliamentarian New Model Army seized a packet of King Charles I’s private correspondence at the battle of Naseby. This seizure was a crucial propagandistic victory that enabled the Parliamentarians to do irreparable damage to Charles’ public image and, in contrast, to ingratiate themselves to the public. The Parliamentarians carefully selected, decoded, and arranged the letters in an effort to reveal Charles as a duplicitous ruler that cared more for his wife, Henrietta Maria, than his people. The collection is increasingly seen by critics as a case study in mediation through print—not just of private correspondence, …

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Revival Of The Fittest: A Return To Writer Subjectivity In Composition, Ashley Mcclary Jan 2015

Revival Of The Fittest: A Return To Writer Subjectivity In Composition, Ashley Mcclary

Theses and Dissertations

Writing can be unpleasant. And most examples of good writing start from early attempts to identify a partial understanding of complex, complicated concepts that emanated from a willingness to be honest and open and smart about the surrounding world. The inception of a good text—especially when paired with the strength to fulfill an incessant, ridiculous desire to tell a truth—can produce an affected writing sample, one of purpose and presence. In the field of Composition, when instructors ask students to write and suggest they do it well, it is easy to overlook the demand that students take new risks in …

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Mourning, Melancholia, And The Need For Grace In Sherwood Anderson's "Godliness", Victoria Chandler Jan 2015

Mourning, Melancholia, And The Need For Grace In Sherwood Anderson's "Godliness", Victoria Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

Published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio engages in the modernist project of collective grieving for social losses. This thesis looks specifically to Seth Moglen’s Mourning Modernity, in which he articulates the various grieving strategies, mourning and melancholia, employed by modernists in order to process their rapidly changing world. I explore the various ways that “Godliness,” one of Anderson’s stories in Winesburg, engages in both mourning and melancholia, and I draw on Ruth Levitas’ notion of secular grace, from her book Utopia as Method, in order to suggest that modernist subjects need a form of secular grace in …

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Tropes Of Blood, Body And The Ground Of The Law: Becoming, Being And Beyond Wife On The Early Modern Stage, Emily Faye Murray Jan 2015

Tropes Of Blood, Body And The Ground Of The Law: Becoming, Being And Beyond Wife On The Early Modern Stage, Emily Faye Murray

Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses on the representation of women on the early modern stage in three exemplary texts: the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, and two city comedies, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. Whether playing the role of adulterous wife, performing the role socially striving wife, or resisting the role of laboring wife, these female characters were on stage not only for entertainment, but also for examination and scrutiny by an early modern audience. Playwrights used characterizations of women and wives and their relationships to the economy as vehicles through …

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Finding Unifying Texts: Make Lemonade And The Book Thief As Tools Of Differentiated Instruction For English Language Learners, Dane Spencer Jan 2015

Finding Unifying Texts: Make Lemonade And The Book Thief As Tools Of Differentiated Instruction For English Language Learners, Dane Spencer

The Utah English Journal

Standing in front of a high school classroom with deeply variant levels of English proficiency is a daunting experience for almost any teacher. Last year, as I looked out over my sophomore class of students, I saw five students raised in the United States (including three second-generation Americans) mingled with five international, English language learner (ELL) students. Three of the international students hailed from China, while the other two were from Vietnam. A few months into the year, the equation became even more complex as another non-international student joined the class, along with another international student from war-torn Ukraine (the …

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The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson Jan 2015

The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson

Dissertations

The historian Samuel Hynes has observed that World War I was not only the greatest military and political event of its time but also the greatest imaginative event. Soldiers and civilians struggled to comprehend the war’s devastation and the changes it produced while medical practitioners and artists examined the war as a site of extraordinary trauma. My project explores two of the many archives of trauma: the medical discourse through which trauma was defined; and representations of trauma in a variety of English language novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. I begin with a historical survey of the medical …

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Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung Jan 2015

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …

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The Modernist Novel In Its Contemporaneity, Pamela L. Caughie Jan 2015

The Modernist Novel In Its Contemporaneity, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Through the writings of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen, this chapter considers the temporality of the now, the modernist novel in its contemporaneity, to show how the ambient environment of daily life takes shape in, and shapes, the modernist novel.

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Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier Jan 2015

Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …

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Translinguality, Transmodality, And Difference : Exploring Dispositions And Change In Language And Learning., Bruce Horner, Cynthia Selfe, Tim Lockridge Jan 2015

Translinguality, Transmodality, And Difference : Exploring Dispositions And Change In Language And Learning., Bruce Horner, Cynthia Selfe, Tim Lockridge

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This collaborative piece explores the potential synergy arising from the confluence of two growing areas of research, teaching, and practice in composition (broadly defined): multi- (or trans-)modality, and trans- (or multi-) linguality.

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You Think You Know The Story: Novelty, Repetition, And Lovecraft In Whedon And Goddard’S The Cabin In The Woods, Gerry Canavan Jan 2015

You Think You Know The Story: Novelty, Repetition, And Lovecraft In Whedon And Goddard’S The Cabin In The Woods, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

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Teaching The Biography Of Laura Ingalls Wilder: Fostering A Media Literacy Approach For Multilingual Writers, Kelly G. Hansen Jan 2015

Teaching The Biography Of Laura Ingalls Wilder: Fostering A Media Literacy Approach For Multilingual Writers, Kelly G. Hansen

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"In creating this thesis, the culmination of writings from teaching English composition to multilingual writers, contributed to my research. This action research study focuses on how to foster a media literacy approach when teaching multilingual writers. The literature focus unit was based on the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder using the book, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Photographic Story of a Life (Stone, 2009). The research conducted for this study took place during the winter quarter of 2015 within English 112, which is a composition class offered at Eastern Washington University (EWU) for multilingual writers. During this time, questionnaires, journal responses, …

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"Academia, Here I Come!" : Plain Language And Academese In The Postsecondary Academy, Heather Lockhart Jan 2015

"Academia, Here I Come!" : Plain Language And Academese In The Postsecondary Academy, Heather Lockhart

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Since the birth of the plain language movement forty years ago, proponents of plain language have seen a considerable uptick in plain language advocacy, use, legislation, and regulation within government, legal, and business organizations. Those who have adopted this style believe that its most important benefits include increased clarity, ease of both reading and writing, and accessibility. In spite of these benefits, one field that has not yet embraced plain language is academia—a field that, as many have argued, could benefit from adopting a plainer writing style in order to make academic texts more accessible. The uncertainty about plain language’s …

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A Study Of Vowels /Ɛ/ And /Ɪ/ In African American English And Standard American English, Lindsay Stefanski Jan 2015

A Study Of Vowels /Ɛ/ And /Ɪ/ In African American English And Standard American English, Lindsay Stefanski

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the vowels /ɪ/ as in tin and /ɛ/ as in ten in African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) spoken in the Detroit, Michigan area. I first analyzed the acoustic properties of a number of speech samples to determine vowel quality and duration measurements. I then performed speech perception tests using the same speech samples. My analyses support and contradict claims about AAE and SAE, particularly with respect to speaker participation in vowel shifts such as the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), Southern Shift (SS), and pin-pen merger. My investigation of AAE and SAE vowels also …

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Metadiscourse In The Academic Writing Of Efl And Esl Arabic-Speaking Iraqi Graduate Students, Mohammed Hamdi Kareem Al-Rubaye Jan 2015

Metadiscourse In The Academic Writing Of Efl And Esl Arabic-Speaking Iraqi Graduate Students, Mohammed Hamdi Kareem Al-Rubaye

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Metadiscourse is a universal rhetorical aspect of languages embodying the notion that the purpose of writing is not only informative; rather, it is a social act enhancing a writer-reader interaction and building effective communicative relationships, thereby creating a reader-friendly text. This thesis examines metadiscourse in L2 academic writing of Arabic-speaking advanced English learners. It investigates the effect of different environments, English as a foreign language (EFL) versus English as a second language (ESL), as well as the effect of time in the development of writers’ metadiscourse. Results were mixed. Quantitatively, the EFL group was closer to the Control group of …

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The Odds And The Ends: What To Do With Some Letters Of Catharine Macaulay, Olivera Jokic Jan 2015

The Odds And The Ends: What To Do With Some Letters Of Catharine Macaulay, Olivera Jokic

Publications and Research

Biographers of Catharine Macaulay (1731–91), much like her contemporaries, often agreed that the woman’s reputation was shaped by the peculiar company she kept: prominent, intellectual, political, radical, revolutionary, and occasion- ally “foolish.”3 This essay examines why it matters what company a writer keeps, especially when that writer is a woman and her reputation is tied to the status of her letters and her correspondents.

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Not The Whole Story: Narrative Responses To Contemporary Globalization, Sean Patrick O'Brien Jan 2015

Not The Whole Story: Narrative Responses To Contemporary Globalization, Sean Patrick O'Brien

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes contemporary global fiction in English (and, in one chapter, new media literatures such as videogame-based narratives) to examine how individuals, communities, and globalized networks manage differences among historical interpretations, ideologies, lived experiences, and cultural and national traditions making competing demands. Cultural and media theorists like John Tomlinson, Anthony Giddens, Arjun Appadurai, Lev Manovich, and Ian Bogost have demonstrated the overwhelming complexity of life in an age of accelerating globalization. Building on their work and the narrative theory of Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, I explore how literary narratives employ newly prominent composite narrative structures to represent and …

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Morphing Myths And Shedding Skins: Interconnectivity And The Subversion Of The Isolated Female Self In Angela Carter’S “The Tiger’S Bride” And Margaret Atwood’S Surfacing, Sara M. Laskoski Jan 2015

Morphing Myths And Shedding Skins: Interconnectivity And The Subversion Of The Isolated Female Self In Angela Carter’S “The Tiger’S Bride” And Margaret Atwood’S Surfacing, Sara M. Laskoski

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project is an analysis of the utilization of mythmaking and human-animal relationships reflected in Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Carter and Atwood show how societal restrictions can devalue the connections between the body, the mind, and the natural world. Through the theoretical lenses of primarily post-structuralism and ecofeminism, this project seeks to show how these two authors subvert isolated female identities through the use of the fairy tale element of the human-animal transformation. This subversion rejects dualistic tendencies of the dominant, patriarchal society, opening new ways of identifying the self through interconnections otherwise rejected or …

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