Digital Commons Network^™

Humanities In The Open: The Challenges Of Creating An Open Literature Anthology, Christian Beck, Lily Dubach, Sarah A. Norris, John Venecek

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This book chapter was a part of the publication, "Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations." It highlights a case study from the University of Central Florida of creating an open literature anthology.

Lexical Borrowings In The Use Of Singlish By Bloggers, K. Panneerselvam Vilashiiney

Student Works (2020-2029)

Singapore English is among the many new Englishes which have emerged across the world. It is divided into two forms; Standard Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English also known as Singlish. The colloquial variety of this English is viewed as crippling the Standard English and has led to the initiation of the Speak Good English Movement by the Singapore government. Recently, linguists such as Wee (2014) have stated that Singlish should be allowed to be used as it reflects the true cultural identity of Singaporeans and this has led to the initiation of the Speak Good Singlish Movement. Singapore’s bilingual …

Minor Subjects: Power And Inequity In Children's And Adolescent Literature, Wesley Jacques

Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I examine theoretical parameters of what has historically been considered American children’s and adolescent literature to further complicate its subject matter. The importance of reconsidering subjects is upheld here as key to challenging longstanding cultural and political inequities in the reading and teaching of literature broadly. Nonetheless, as this project contends, children’s and adolescent literature as a discipline is uniquely positioned to examine political power and challenge major power structures, not in spite of its presumed minor position in academic and literary discourse, but largely because of it. Thus, what follows is an inquiry into contemporary theories …

The Specific Features Of Documentary Novel Genre In The Modern American Literature, Mukhlisa Khidirova Master Student

Philology Matters

The article is devoted to the study of the specific features of documentary novel in Modern American literature. The characteristics and evolution of a documentary novel are emphasized through the initial works of American authors. A documentary novel differs from other genres because of the factual and appropriate information. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote are considered to be the pioneering documentary novel writers in the Modern American literature. The initial establishments of documentary genre novel are considered to be the notes, religious laws, chronicles, political pamphlets, diaries, letters and others. Mostly, in documentary novels, the harshness of reality and difficulties of …

The Notion Of Advertising Discourse In Modern Uzbek Linguistics, Aziza Kholboboeva Phd Student

Philology Matters

This article presents a theoretical interpretation of advertising discourse in modern Uzbek linguistics. In linguistics, discussion and the concept of a text are considered as one of the topical issues. The article discusses the features of advertising the text language in the context of parameters. Recently, along with the continuing interest in advertising practice, more and more attention is paid to the theoretical aspects of advertising, including from such sciences as linguistics, psychology, sociology, psycho and sociolinguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, and art history. The theoretical basis of the research was the fundamental works on the theory of discourse and communicative …

Issues Of Media Text And Language In Recreational Tv Programs, Amrullo Karimov Associate Professor, Phd

Philology Matters

Today, the media is divided into two major types: print and electronic. Text written for print media is significantly different from text written for radio, television, internet media. Accordingly, media texts cover several forms in terms of their specific features, ideological and technological aspects. Since reality in television language is usually expressed through images, a great deal of attention is paid to the power of the image. However, given the impossibility of achieving absolute efficiency with a dry image, there is a need for analysis of media texts.
The issue of language and style of the anchorperson (author) has a …

Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” …

Review Of Women Talking—Miriam Toews, Sabrina Völz

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Women Talking is Canadian writer Miriam Toews’ seventh novel. She has also written a memoir about her father and starred in the 2007 art house film about Old Colony Mennonites in Mexico, Silent Light, written and directed by Mexican filmmaker, Carlos Reygada. Toews has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Governor General’s Award for her novel, A Complicated Kindness in 2004. [First paragraph]

A New Oral Poetry: Improvisation And Performance In Robert Lowell's Poetry Readings, Madelyn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines elements of improvisation and performance in the poetry readings of Robert Lowell from 1955 to 1977 by analyzing audio recordings of Lowell’s readings and comparing them to his early drafts and published work. As a poet known for incessantly editing his poetry, Robert Lowell uses poetry readings as a venue for experimenting with his poetry before publication, for catering his work to specific audiences, and for memorializing his life in prose. The time period this thesis is concerned with correlates with a rise in New Oral Poetry in the U.S., which created popular new venues for poetry …

Index To The Journal Of Tolkien Research Volume 1 Through Volume 9 Issue 1, Douglas A. Anderson

Journal of Tolkien Research

An Index to The Journal of Tolkien Research from Volume 1 through Volume 9 issue 1

Noir Affect [Table Of Contents], Christopher Breu, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

Literature

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period (the mid-twentieth century) or national tradition (the U.S.). Instead the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts (from the U.S. to Mexico, France and Japan) manifests in a range of different media (films, novels, video games, and manga). The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: these are narratives centered …

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

Impacts Of Positioning, Power, And Resistance On Efl Learners’ Identity Construction Through Classroom Interaction: A Perspective From Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis, Wenwen Tian, Remart Padua Dumlao

The Qualitative Report

In this study, we explored how positioning, power, and resistance might have possible impacts on learners’ identity construction. We conducted this study in a 6-month language and culture program from August 2018 to January 2019 involving one teacher and 24 English major undergraduate students at a public university in Thailand. Using Kumaravadivelu’s (1999) Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis (CCDA) as an analytical framework and Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis approach to analysing data , we found three themes that illustrate how participants demonstrated positioning, power, and resistance: (a) learners’ choice of code as passive resistance, (b) circulating power in interaction …

Returning To Imaginative Literary Texts In The Composition Classroom: A Case Study Of Greek Literature And Their Potential In First-Year Writing, Esther M. Gabay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The basis for the argument—a return to literature in first-year college composition—stems from a composition debate that emerged in the 90s that suggested instructors of composition refrain from using literature in their writing courses. The thesis proposes that literature, specifically Greek literature, be re-purposed and integrated back into first-year writing college courses. Chapter one contextualizes the historical debate and proposes imaginative literary texts return to first-year writing. The second chapter presents cross-disciplinary advantages, looking closely at the value of teaching literature in composition classes as a tool for building prior knowledge, developing cross-disciplinary insights and access into other disciplinary conversations, …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …

Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the last twenty years, specifically with the summer 2002 issue of Social Text edited by Dr. Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism has become a serious focus for academic inquiry. For people familiar with the term, Afrofuturism is presented as a movement borne of our contemporary moment. However, this dissertation explores the ways in which Afrofuturism is actually a cornerstone for both African American literature and the struggle for civil/human rights. I do this by exploring the following questions: How does the enslavement of African/ African Americans and its aftermath play out in early African American literature? How do African Americans writers …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

"Strong Female Characters"? An Analysis Of Six Female Fantasy Characters From Novel To Film, Valari Westeren

Honors Projects

This project is twofold. The first section analyzes six female fantasy characters in their literary and filmic incarnations—Dorothy Gale (The Wizard of Oz), Susan Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), Arwen Evenstar (The Lord of the Rings), Princess Buttercup (The Princess Bride), Hermione Granger (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), and Annabeth Chase (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief)—noting adaptational changes made to each and placing the twelve incarnations in conversation with each other. This conversation centers around the concept of the “strong female character,” …

( Dis ) Ability Discourse And The Mediation Of Disabled Identity In Young Adult Literature And Television, Daniel Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

The primary aim of literary (and media) disability studies scholarship has been to examine the rhetorical effects of the various representations of disability that are found throughout literature, television, and other cultural sites of inquiry. The Internet has helped to facilitate this aim, opening these types of discussions to the general public. Social media has given individuals the power, agency, and voice to assert their ideas about disability identity, and (dis)ability (as a system; see Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined) more broadly to the world, and in doing so, has radically altered the author-text-audience relationship. My project examines the authorial choices of …

Waiting For Autistic Superman: On Autistic Representation In Superhero Comics, Robert Rozema

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Climate activist Greta Thunberg recently likened her autism to a “superpower,” invoking a term first used in the American Golden Age comic Supersnipe in 1945. Thunberg’s use of the term superpower, however, is complicated by the way in which superhero comics have historically represented disability in general--and autism in particular. Over the past 30 years, representations of autistic characters in superhero comics have been very rare and mostly wrong, even as autistic presence has increased dramatically in film, television, popular fiction, and other media. This article examines the representation of autistic superheroes, who appear only rarely in superhero comics. As …

More Human Than Human: Artificial People In Literature And Media, Taylor P. Amalfitano

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein over two hundred years ago, many of the main themes of alienation and revenge featured in Shelley’s novel reappear in HBO’s Westworld in 2016. This thesis establishes a genealogy for the stories of artificial people and analyzes the relationship between human beings and artificial life, as it is portrayed in speculative fiction and popular media. The popularity of robots and cyborgs is associated with people’s fear of technology, but their stories are often used as an allegory to explain aspects of the human experience that are unknown or difficult to understand. As artificial intelligence becomes …

An Anthology Of Irish Nationalism: Music, Verse, Speeches, And Interviews Regarding The Betterment Of The State Of Ireland, From The Sixth Century Until The Liberation Of Ireland, Sofia J. Gilmore-Montero

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

When I started this project because in my extensive amount of research into Irish literature, I found that the common theme in many of the works was nationalism and the desire to have a free state. I could not find any books that focused on nationalistic literature over the lengthy history of Ireland, only collections that pertained to a specific time period. This thesis project proposes introductory material and a potential table of contents to an anthology that would be centered around the theme of Irish nationalism in literature between the ninth century and the liberation of Ireland. It covers …

A Story-Centered Approach To Ap English Literature, Curriculum, And Assessment, Christopher L. Mccurry

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Advanced Placement and Literature and Composition is the pinnacle of literary studies in the secondary school classroom. However, the content of the course and its primary mode of assessment equally damage the reputation of literary analysis as a purposeful academic field and threaten to further stigmatize the humanities in a moment when their usefulness is under scrutiny. Students should be shown how stories, and not literature, can be better appreciated in the AP literature classroom through a biocultural, and evolutionary approach to fiction and storytelling.

De-Stigmatizing Mental Health Through First Person Narration In Young Adult Literature, Tatum E. Francis

University Honors Theses

This thesis project includes a written short story titled "Quiet Dissonance" that explicitly depicts anxiety and depression within the genre of Young Adult literature. The purpose of this story is to consciously de-stigmatize the mental health issues by depicting these mental disorders as authentically as possible with both research and my own real-life experience of being diagnosed with both anxiety and depression, rather than relying upon stereotypes and the influence of the media. This story is consciously written through the point of view of first person narration, allowing for further exploration into the interiority of the thoughts of the protagonist …

Trauma, Violence, And Deathly Consequences: Female Justice In Contemporary Literature And Television Adaptations, Allie Owens

English MA Theses

Over the past decade, a familiar villainous character has begun to arise in television adaptation: the mentally-fractured heroine who turns to villainy: women who have been attacked, raped, or lost loved ones to villains. These attacks and losses trigger murderous rampages and other violence that often leads to their descent into villainy. Netflix’s Jessica Jones, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, feature heroines that turn to violence to get revenge. However, the violent heroines in these texts and television adaptations do not just become villains; some …

"Written By The Finger Of God": C.S. Lewis And Historical Judgement, Phillip Irving Mitchell

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

Lewis’s distrust of scientific laws for history, rather than undercutting his practice of literary history, existed alongside a basic, cautionary trust in representing the past. His methods of history writing included offering an overall plot, developing characters and corporate quasi-characters, and making analogies with the present to increase readerly sympathy (or antipathy) with long-gone cultures. Despite his strong rhetorical tendency to generalize, Lewis did not place absolute faith in his historical narratives. They were made to be argued with, supplemented, and even over-turned. The article pays particular attention to three documents from Lewis’s career as a literary historian: 1) his …

An Annotated List Of Fantasy Novels Incorporating Tarot (1990-2005), Emily E. Auger

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

This annotated list of books from 1990 through 2005 continues the bibliography in Mythlore 36.2 (Spring-Summer 2018) and includes abstracts for each novel or series and some card layout diagrams.