Digital Commons Network^™

Oral Presentations: Humanities, Jacob Dunahue, Faith Langford, Kathryn Scharwath

Mississippi Undergraduate Honors Conference

Video is provided of Faith Langford's presentation.

Online Midwinter Seminar (Oms) #1 Report, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Articles & Research

A report on the Mythopoeic Society's first annual Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS) by Phillip Fitzsimmons.

Review: Comics And The Body, Chase Gregory

Other Faculty Research and Publications

Comics and the body: drawing, reading, and vulnerability. Studies in comics and cartoons by Szép, Eszter, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5772-2.

Link to original version published in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, volume 14 issue 1

Exploring Shakespearean Influence On Executive Leadership In Finance: A Qualitative Narrative Inquiry, Erik Decicco

All Theses And Dissertations

This qualitative narrative inquiry sought to investigate perceptions of executive leaders in finance about how Shakespeare can influence leadership performance. It employed a conceptual framework in dramaturgical analyses (Goffman, 1959) and a theoretical framework in reflective leadership (Schon, 1983). Separate semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants to gather data, which was coded in vivo. Codes were then analyzed and sorted into themes. The study was driven by two major research questions and a sub-question: The two major research questions and sub-question guiding this study were as follows: (1) What are perceptions of executive leaders in the financial industry about …

My Favorite Thing Is Monster Theory: Horror Comics And Demonstrating Difference In Emil Ferris’S "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters", Jennifer Rossberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017) by Emil Ferris opens with the same etymological analysis of the word monster as Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s landmark disability studies article, “From Wonder to Error: A Discourse on Freak Genealogy” (1991). The protagonist of Ferris’s swirling, sketchbook-style thriller, Karen Reyes, is a mixed-race queer adolescent growing up in noirish 1960’s Chicago who longs to be a werewolf so she can bite and save her cancer-afflicted mother. After fleeing an imaginary, pitchfork-wielding M.O.B.—an acronym for “mean, ordinary, & boring” people—Karen explains that, “The dictionary says the word monster comes from the Latin word ‘monstrum’ which …

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

A Publication History Of The Complete Guide To Middle-Earth By Robert Foster, Kevin P. Edgecomb

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Complete Guide to Middle-earth by Robert Foster has been a popular and helpful resource for readers of the Middle-earth fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien for over five decades now. This article presents a publication history of US and UK editions of this work, leading from its beginninings in 1966—the writings of a teenager in a fanzine—to the latest , lavishly illustrated edition of 2003.

Hyperrationality And Rhetorical Constellations In Digital Climate Change Denial: A Multi-Methodological Analysis Of The Discourse Of Watts Up With That, Denise Tillery, Emma Frances Bloomfield

English Faculty Research

Using a multi-methodological approach, we analyze member comments in Watts Up With That (WUWT), a climate skeptical Facebook group. Quantitative topic modeling revealed that members claim hyperrationality to undermine climate science. Science-based terms were often connected to other topics, such as immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, creating rhetorical constellations that shifted rhetoric from technical spaces into political and ideological ones. These findings have implications for dealing with the challenge of misinformation’s circulation on social media.

"Nothing ‘Personal’ To Lose": Alice Notley’S “I” And The Poetics Of Encounter In Disobedience, Christina T. Baulch

Theses and Dissertations

Though the lyric-I has often been perceived as an isolated ego, Alice Notley's "I" in her long poem Disobedience (2001) necessitates plurality through what I call a "poetics of encounter." In response to the 1978 Language poetry manifesto "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry," and to the larger well-rehearsed debate about vocal homogeneity and persona centrism in poetry, this paper argues that Notley's poetics of encounter brings the "I" of Disobedience into continual and complex conversation with material history, politics, and mass culture, thus situating it within, and not sequestered from, the world and its mediation.

Gloria Naylor’S Conversation With The Tempest, Kelly Mcavoy-Giarrusso

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on how Gloria Naylor used Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest as inspiration for her character George, and how her evolution of the character reveals issues within the literary and academic community at the time of her writing. George fulfills Caliban’s limitations in that he has more power and autonomy than Caliban, but the tragedy of his death reveals that he has lost part of himself in order to gain that power. This idea that education and society can cause a loss of self is personal for Naylor, who encountered only white male authors in school and struggled …

Why Narrative Poetry Still Matters In Stylistics, Rachid Acim

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

In Morocco, debates over English language instruction have marginalized poetry as a distinct literary genre. The shortage of poetry events arguably makes poetry teaching both daunting and intimidating. Besides fostering trust, memorization, and empathy, helping students develop a penchant for English language, as well as humanity, poetry, and narrative poetry, in particular, proffers teachers ample opportunities to fully engage students in the learning process. Not only does it awaken their senses and make them establish connections but leads them to think in a critical way about the world around them. In this paper, the teaching of narrative poetry through the …

Contexts And Implications Of Charles Dickens's Depictions Of Suicide In Bleak House, Olivia Sutton

Copley Library Undergraduate Research Awards

“I passed on to the gate, and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother, cold and dead”

(Esther’s Narrative, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, pg. 701).

The death of Esther Sommerson’s mother, Lady Dedlock, is one of the more simplistic and cold renderings of suicide in Charles Dickens’s oeuvre. The results of Esther and Mr. Bucket’s tireless search are given in three short sentences with a count of five adjectives. And yet, Charles Dickens was writing in the tradition of literary sentimentalism, a genre that …

More Than Midnight Feasts?: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Enid Blyton’S Malory Towers, St. Clare’S And The Naughtiest Girl In The School Series, Rebecca Broomfield

Dissertations

Food is fundamental to life. It is also fundamental to culture; through our production, manipulation and consumption of foodstuffs, the way in which we eat has amassed a range of rituals and rules. This suggests that food can be used to indicate more than mere biological need. Food and foodways are a common occurrence throughout literature, not least children’s literature. This thesis applies gastrocriticism as a paradigm to investigate the use of food and foodways in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, St. Clare’s and The Naughtiest Girl school series. Gastrocriticism is an emerging form of literary criticism that considers the complex …

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 9, 2022, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.

Legacy 2022, Southern Adventist University

Legacy

The Legacy 2022 edition features both poetry and short stories written by Southern Adventist University students. Short Stories are written by Jamie Henderson, Colton Davis, Mile Pinero, Logan Enoh Fatumi, Michaela Hounslow, Aimee Hunt, Violet Petrikas, Madison Wilcox, Paula Macena, and Kelly Sandel. Poetry is written by Madison Wilcox, Aimee Hunt, Paula Macena, Christina Cannon, Jamie Jansen, and Kelly Sandel.

Adorno, Beckett…Wagner, Artaud: Reflections On Stefan Sorgner’S Philosophy Of Posthuman Art, Russell Kilbourn

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

This essay reflects on the question of posthuman(ist) art by way of Stefan Sorgner’s book, Philosophy of Posthuman Art, which makes an important initial contribution to the nascent investigation of the significance of creative and imaginative expression from a critical posthumanist perspective. From the understanding that we cannot (yet) do without the subject as ground of the self, I elaborate a theory of the dynamic ‘subjective trinity’ (self, other, and transcendent subject) underpinning the occidental aesthetic experience construed in visual-spatial terms, exemplified in the cinema. From this basis I explore two possible avenues of posthumanist aesthetic expression: First, the secular …

Film Review: È Stata La Mano Di Dio / The Hand Of God By Paolo Sorrentino, Russell J A Kilbourn

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Eng 300: How Can Writers Use Aural Media Distractions To Their Advantage?, Madeline Miller

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Eng 300: Trying To Make The Words Flow: Flow Interactions With Environment & Behavior In Writing & Studying Contexts, Connor Flick

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Race, Environment, Culture: Custome Into Nature' In The Early Modern Atlantic World, Jean Feerick

2022 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Rhetoric Of Collaboration: Using Ethics Of Social Justice And Activism Through Writing Communities, Tina M. Iemma

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines emerging writing community collectives that seek to challenge the normative hierarchy of higher education in both composition and curricula. I conduct empirical research to explore the ways activist writers, those with exposure to social justice literacies from across and outside academic communities, influence an ethics of collaboration and overall expansion of more public-facing, engaged and inclusive research pedagogy and scholarship. The act of writing in collectives is needed if a move toward advocacy and opportunity for equity is to be upheld within and beyond academia. By examining social justice literacies occurring both in and out of the …

El Laboratorio Cinegráfico De Pedro Pietri, Rojo Robles Mejias

Publications and Research

En su relato “Lost in the Museum of Natural History” Pedro Pietri se inserta en la narración como personaje y como fuente de historias inspiradas en la violencia de los géneros del western, los biker films y los melodramas. Esta aproximación a la experimentación literaria, la alteración sensorial y fílmica escenifica una crisis en la enunciación y la representación que hecha luces sobre las relaciones entre las desigualdades sociales, la violencia y la subjetividad.

Note To Self: Don't Forget To Title Your Project!, Abby Wilson

English Senior Capstone

Note to Self: Don’t Forget to Title Your Project! is a collection of creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art reflecting on the author’s ADHD diagnosis. With an approachable and direct tone, I become a tour guide for my readers as they explore the landscape of my neurodivergent brain. These readers will discover aspects of ADHD that can be strengths or drawbacks, such as executive dysfunction, outside-the-box thinking, emotional dysregulation, and hyperfixation. They will also briefly peek into the way that ADHD intersects with aspects of my identity, such as other neurodivergencies, gender, and spirituality.

Nelle 5 (Front Matter), Nelle Staff

Nelle (literary magazine)

No abstract provided.

Kids, Culture, And Queerness: The Progression Of Lgbtq+ Representation In Children's Media, Sarah Stevens

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Historically, popular media has functioned as a window into society’s ever evolving idea of normalcy. Children’s popular media, which contains elements of both entertainment and didacticism, is further burdened with the responsibility of influencing the perspectives of upcoming generations. This truth is particularly salient for the LGBTQ+ community, who have faced consistent misrepresentation or utter erasure from children’s media in the recent past. While there have been marked improvements in both the quality and quantity of queer representation in children’s media since 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges case, there is still a significant need to acknowledge intersectional queerness and queer gender …

Zephyrus, Western Kentucky University

Student Creative Writing

The fine arts magazine of Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green.

Voices Of Usu: An Anthology Of Student Writing, Vol. 15, Utah State University Department Of English

Voices of USU

This collection of student writing represents the voices of over 2,000 students who enroll each academic year in Utah State University’s second-year composition course, Intermediate Writing: Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode. Voices of USU celebrates excellence in writing by providing undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and disciplines the opportunity to have their work published.

Title Pages, Vol. 24, 2022

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Vol. 24, 2022

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.