Digital Commons Network^™

Branding The Writing Center, Courtney Akagi

Tutor's Column

Brand identity affects student’s perceptions of the writing center. Referencing an article on the seven key elements of brand identity design, this article goes through a step-by-step analysis of how writing centers can create a brand to establish trust between students and tutors.

Questioning Our Questions, Makenzie Vance

Tutor's Column

A tutor’s effectiveness relies heavily on the questions they ask. Being able to properly address a student’s concerns is almost exclusively done through effective questioning. Looking into how folklorists interview provides a wealth of tactics commonly used to gather information from informants. Transitioning these tactics into tutoring can help tutors ask questions more intentionally.

The Best Children's Books Of The Year [2020 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 2019. 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.

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Teaching The Power Of Pictures, Rachel Speranza

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

Though choosing sources that have specific copyright that allows for the reuse, modification, and redistribution of pictures is an important lesson for all students of all grade levels, what’s even a more important lesson is that of the power of social media. The perfect picture can spread like a wildfire across all social media platforms. Pictures have the power to change someone’s mood, political opinion, and even advocate for change on the other side of the world.

Ted Cohen On Sharing The World, Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

Reimagining Reflection In First-Year Composition: A Freirean-Jesuit Perspective, Adrianna Deptula

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Ivy Leaves, Volume 95, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2020 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Emma Morris, Sarah Grace Hoover, Lucy Kirkpatrick, Alli Kennedy, Genevieve Rice, Hayden Dutschke, Cameron Mason, Larisa Crowder, Kristopher Sutherland, Emily Britton, Savannah Smith, Megan Adams, Terra Baughn, Carson Long, David Stancil, Allie Thompson, Taylor Harrison, Meredith Guio, Austin Rusher, Taylor Smith, Ashley Stone, Abigail Timms, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker.

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 6, 2020, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.

Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger

English Honors Projects

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a …

How Cypress Tress Become Mangroves: An Analysis Of The Works Of Amitav Ghosh And Climate Change, Alyssa D. Dobson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Metaphors Of Mental Illness: How Emily Dickinson And Vincent Van Gogh Understood And Expressed Their Personal Battles With Depression, Samantha Moss

English Senior Capstone

Both the poet Emily Dickinson and the artist Vincent van Gogh wrestled with mental illness in their adult lives. There are indications that both suffered from major depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder. Both lived in a time when there was no real understanding of mental illness and there was no language through which people could interpret and explain their pain. Dickinson used her poetry to create metaphors, metaphors centered around death and winter. Van Gogh created nature metaphors – and some centered around dying like Dickinson’s – in his paintings and in letters to his brother. These metaphors …

Learning Or Not Learning To Overcome Trauma: Jane Eyre And A Farewell To Arms, Jessica Cutter

English Senior Capstone

In the novels Jane Eyre and A Farewell to Arms, Charlotte Brontë and Ernest Hemingway both display characters that have experienced devastating trauma. In both novels, female characters demonstrate strength and mental support that their male counterparts are unable to reciprocate because they cannot move on from their past. Jane learns that letting go of past trauma will lead to her growth and success in life, which ultimately influences Mr. Rochester to be like Jane, and the novel ends with them happy and mentally healthier. On the other hand, Henry can’t let go of his past traumas and leans heavily …

Anne Frank In Translation, Emily Cluff

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Wadadɨka’A (Burns Paiute Reservation, Oregon), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Harney Valley, or tibidzi yipɨ (the True Valley), region of southeastern Oregon is a rich and varied landscape consisting of all the extremes one expects to find in the Great Basin—vast marshlands, high-elevation grasslands, alkali basins, pine forest, and ephemeral lakebeds and rivers. This high desert area attracts hundreds of thousands of water and other fowl (as well as birdwatchers) on their seasonal migration. Water has been, and remains, a source of tension in the region, as does the management of federal land more generally, including, in particular, the allocation of grazing rights. The occupation of the headquarters of …

The Myth Of Neutrality: Linguistic Influence In The Integration Of Nonbinary Identities In English And German, Zoe A. Philippou

Student Publications

Grammatical structures that differ among languages can affect the way people of different cultures think, speak, and behave. Because of its close ties with identity, language also has the ability to manipulate the way people view themselves and others. Ethnographic research among English and German speakers shows that these differing grammatical structures affect the integration into society of nonbinary, intersex, and agender individuals through a grammatical predisposition for gender neutral language. As such, the means of increasing social integration of these groups also differs between linguistic and cultural borders.

Full Issue Winter 2020

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Innocent No More: How Child Vampires Challenge The Social Narrative Of Childhood, Ashley Quinn

Masters Theses

The inclusion of children within Gothic and horror fiction has always been regarded as untoward because children are vulnerable to misrepresentation. However, excluding children from transgressive genres eliminates a space where childhood can be critically analyzed. Fortunately, authors such as Stephen King, Anne Rice, and John Ajvide Lindqvist break the taboo through the inclusion of children in vampiric narratives. These narratives encourage readers to question the social narrative of childhood within the context of vampire stories. Through an examination of ‘Salem’s Lot (King, 1975), “Popsy” (King, 1987), Interview with the Vampire (Rice, 1976), and Let the Right One In (Lindqvist, …

2020 Greenleaf Review (No. 33), Sigma Tau Delta

The Greenleaf Review

No abstract provided.

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities In Elizabeth Gaskell’S Social Problem Novels, Hunter Nicole Duncan

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation rewrites the representations of disability, impairment, and illness throughout Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction. The project’s four chapters examine blindness in Mary Barton, pregnancy, deformity, and typhus fever in Ruth, tuberculosis and hysteria in North and South, and hysteria and disfigurement in Sylvia’s Lovers, in order to intervene with disability in its literary, historical, medical, and social contexts by uniting methodologies ranging from Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, feminist theory, and Victorian studies. By looking at the novel and rethinking it through Disability Studies, this dissertation joins contemporary theory with historical context, refreshing scholarly attention toward under-represented bodies and minds. This …

Friend Or Foe: Chaucer’S Depiction Of Women In Troilus And Criseyde, Vanessa Balis 20

Honor Scholar Theses

Often considered the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340s-1400 CE) produced a number of famous poems during his lifetime, the most famous arguably being The Canterbury Tales. But another of his works, Troilus and Criseyde, is often considered the best example of both his poetic ability and his creative use of sources.1 In this thesis, I will be considering whether Chaucer supports or subverts a patriarchal social structure, specifically by looking at his representation of women in Troilus and Criseyde in comparison to his source Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. Instead of resorting to the assumptive rhetoric of …

A Return To Turtle Island: Eco-Cosmopolitics In American Indian Literature, 1880-1920, Kristen Brown

Theses and Dissertations

During opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the Lakota words mni wičoni, “water is life,” came to define the ongoing movement at Standing Rock and serve as a reminder of not only humans’ dependence on interconnected ecological communities, but also of the vitality and sentience in more-than-human beings. Looking to Indigenous author-activists producing texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— when colonial ideologies of land exploitation and Indigenous dispossession were codified by federal policy—provides valuable insight into the tensions between these land-ascommodity and land-as-community worldviews. While scholars like literary and cultural theorist Joni Adamson and anthropologist Marisol …

Text Mining Contemporary Popular Fiction: Natural Language Processing-Derived Themes Across Over 1,000 New York Times Bestsellers And Genre Fiction Novels, Morgan Lundy

Theses and Dissertations

This study endeavors to apply computational methods to a large dataset of popular fictional material, to see what topics emerge when viewed across genre lines and from a new, “machine” perspective. The dataset consists of 1,136 popular and commercially successful novels published between 2005 and 2016, including New York Times bestsellers and “genre fiction,” including science fiction, young adult, romance and mystery novels. Methods are discussed, including dataset preparation, LDA topic modeling and topic number optimization, qualitative topic interpretation, data analysis and visualization. The experiment was conducted in two parts, with the "document" or unit of analysis as each full …

Curing Beauty's Stockholm Syndrome, Erin Lee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Daenerys Targaryen: Mad Or Madly Ended? A Feminist Analysis Of Her Downfall, Barbara Yauss

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The release of the final episodes of Game of Thrones was met with uproar, particularly in response to David Benioff and Weiss’s ending for the beloved Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke. Her descent into madness has sparked controversy over whether she deserved this fate, with the unexplained slaughter of Kings Landing being yet another example of the showrunners rushing through the eighth and final season. Popular belief agrees either way that Dany’s downfall is attributed to the madness that runs through Targaryen bloodlines. I argue, however, that it is patriarchal impositions that lead to her demise. Jon Snow, as …

Hamlet As Music: A Study In The Semantics Of Symphonic Poetry, Mckenzie C. Alons

Selected Honors Theses

Symphonic poetry, a widely overlooked genre in musico-literary scholarship, provides a unique focal point into the relationship between music and extramusical texts. Invented by Franz Liszt in the mid-19th century, symphonic poems (or ‘tone poems’) interpret literary texts or ideas through short orchestral works. Thus, the symphonic poem invites close analysis of the semiotic relationship between music and literature. Using Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Liszt’s Symphonic Poem No. 10 (“Hamlet”), this thesis examines the relationship between the Shakespearean tragedy and Lisztian symphonic poetry. This focus is a microcosm for the musico-literary relationship and, henceforth, an undiscovered niche that involves disciplines as …

Entertainment Media Perceptions Of Minorities In Young Adult Adaptations, Kynnadie Bennett

Honors College Theses

This is an exploration of stereotypical and racist portrayals of minorities, specifically African-American, Latinx, and Native American communities, in film and television in the past and how that has affected representation in film adaptations of young adult literature. Young adult literature is one of the highest-selling genres in literature, purchased by both young adults and actual adults. In recent years, young adult literature has been adapted into film and television series and while representation has improved since the early years of entertainment history, there are still problems in the industry: many of the stereotypes remain, some minorities lack representation, and …

The Art Of The Game: Issues In Adapting Video Games, Sydney K. Baty

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

On the face of things, movies and video games are similar mediums. Both engage extensively in visuals and audio, both can indulge in speculative fiction, and there is a healthy amount of sharing of inspiration and content. However, this does not guarantee successful adaptations from one form to another. Movies adapted from video games are notorious for being simply terrible, but little academic attention has been paid as to why these adaptations in particular seem so unsuccessful in every way, from audience reception, critical response, and monetary returns. This issue is based on fundamental differences in the medium. Games are, …