Digital Commons Network^™

Reflections On Teaching And Host Mothering Chinese Secondary Students: A Novice Esl Teacher’S Diary Study And Autoethnography, Diane Thames

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

In the summer of 2012, 29 students ages 12-17 came from China to Spokane with a special three-week teaching program for intensive English language instruction and community field trips. Since they were middle and high school students, they had been studying English from four to 13 years in their home country. A mixed methodology of retrospective diary study, case study, and critical and autoethnography helped me to refine my teaching for this population and to prepare others to teach English to Chinese adolescents in the United States. The purpose of the present study, therefore, was to (1) describe the experience …

Pen Pal, By Francesca Forrest. Reviewed By Susan Dorman., Susan Dorman

Mythprint Book Reviews

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly O. Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

English Faculty Publications

Information about the 79th annual meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) organized by Jennifer Cramer at the University of Kentucky on April 2012 in Lexington, Kentucky. Topics discussed at the meeting includes current state of research studies on linguistic processes in Appalachia, traditional dialectological and ethnographic. The meeting also featured panel experts including Bridget L. Anderson, Michael Montgomery and Walt Wolfram.

Considering The Human And Nonhuman In Literary Studies: Notes For A Biographic Network Approach For The Study Of Literary Objects, Edward L. Bullock

Theses and Dissertations--English

In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of …

Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Subversive Storytelling From The Bunchgrass Edge Of The World, Elizabeth P. Tyson

Scripps Senior Theses

Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming short story collections, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, tell regional stories that push against the myths surrounding the American West. Elements of Naturalism in her work reverse the paradigm of man’s dominance over the frontier. The cyclical nature of time in her stories shows the unfulfilling nature of nostalgia. She uses folk storytelling techniques to take an insider’s perspective and to utilize the subversive nature of dark humor.

Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction As Literary Critique, Melody Strmel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects …

The Royal Review: 2013-2014, Kathleen Conway

The Royal Review from the English Department

No abstract provided.

Mapping A Geography Of Hell: Evil, Neoliberalism, And The Femicides In Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Juan Velasco, Tanya Schmidt

English

In his posthumously published novel 2666, Bolaño addresses the consequences of economic neoliberalism in the U.S.-Mexico border through the fictional city of Santa Teresa. Santa Teresa represents Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the location of over 500 femicides between 1993 and 2008 and a place named both the "murder capital of the world" and a "model of globalization." Santa Teresa is at the core of the novel's conception of evil. This paper analyzes the influences of Charles Baudelaire and Marquis de Sade in Bolaño's representation of Santa Teresa. This paper also argues that, rather than ending the novel with a solution, Bolaño's …

Crossing Borders Toward Young Transnational Lives, G. Sue Kasun, Cinthya M. Saavedra

Mexican American Studies Faculty Publications

Young immigrant youth often live their lives across borders, either by physically crossing them for return visits and/or by metaphorically crossing them through social media and cultural identification. The authors argue these students are better understood as transnational, shifting the focus for educators away from imagining their immigrant students on a straight, one-way path to assimilation in the U.S. to understanding these youths’ abilities to cross borders. Specifically, they call for a redesignation of English Language Learners (ELLs) as Transnational English Learners (TELs). Highlighting examples of educators’ successful border-crossing work, the authors call for educators to cross borders as well …

Restoring, Rewriting, Reimagining: Asian American Science Fiction Writers And The Time Travel Narrative, Joanne Chern

Scripps Senior Theses

Asian American literature has continued to evolve since the emergence of first generation Asian American writers in 1975. Authors have continued to interact not only with Asian American content, but also with different forms to express that content – one of these forms is genre writing. Genre writing allows Asian American writers to interact with genre conventions, using them to inform Asian American tropes and vice versa. This thesis focuses on the genre of science fiction, specifically in the subgenre of time travel. Using three literary case studies – Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History,” Charles Yu’s How …

Theorizing Audience And Spectatorial Agency, Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter analyses Georgian audiences and spectatorial agency through several lenses: psychoanalytic film theory, theories of the public sphere and of mass publicity, and media studies of cultural convergence. The first section reads Georgian theatre’s heterogeneous playbills as a syntactical rendering of the audience, the imaginary community of the nation in process of negotiation. The second section shows theatrical paratexts blurring the boundary between theatre and coffee house, creating a theatrical public sphere in which the audience exercises daily public agency in saving or damning the play. The third section highlights the mingling of vulnerability and charisma in the celebrity …

Emily Dickinson’S Teenage Fanclub, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay explores the 1882 publication of “Success is counted sweetest” in the Amateur Journal, a newspaper edited by eighteen-year-old Albert E. Barker of Judsonia, Arkansas. The Amateur Journal was part of a fad that swept the United States after the Civil War, when thousands of teenage boys began publishing their own newspapers on diminutive printing presses. At its height in the 1880s, amateur journalism linked boys across the country into tightly knit virtual communities with their own distribution methods, literary conventions, social customs, and vernaculars. Barker likely reprinted “Success is counted sweetest” from the anonymous anthology A Masque of …

The Perils Of Authorship: Literary Property And Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Lara Langer Cohen, M. L. Mcgill

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter examines the perils associated with American authorship during the early nineteenth century, with particular reference to issue of intellectual property and copyright. It begins with an analysis of the impact of intellectual property rights on publishing and the culture of reprinting, along with the influence of copyright on the American novel. It then considers the problem concerning the definition of “American authorship” and how the unstable nature of American authorship subjected writers who wished to promote it to charges of fraudulence. It also explores the question of originality among writers before concluding with a discussion of the radical …

The Mechanical Aspirations Of Written Things In Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Maxwell Harrison Cohn

Honors Papers

Of the many devices and doodads Laurence Sterne describes in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), the most surprising remains the machinery of Tristram Shandy itself. I use Sterne's frequent descriptions of Tristram Shandy as a machine to question how texts behave as (faulty and outdated) technologies in this eighteenth-century text. I look at Agostino Ramelli's book wheel--a sixteenth century device which allows its user to quickly cross-reference various texts--to illustrate the latent challenges in Sterne's book-machine metaphor. My essay suggests that Sterne's various registers of literary allusion signal moments in which the book realizes its potential, but also its limitations, as a …

Hearing Beyond The Veil: Benjy Compson And The Acousmatic Experience, Adam Hirsch

Honors Papers

The purpose of this project is to examine the perceptive systems and listening practices of Benjy Compson, the first narrator in William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," through the lens of acousmatic theory. I will consider Faulkner 's writing and Pierre Schaeffer's theories of sound as critical analogs for one another, in that our engagement with acousmatics opens channels of investigation into sound and aurality in the Benjy section that wouldn't be available otherwise, and vice versa. My main goal is to prove that 1) Benjy's consciousness; 2) Faulkner's structuring of the first section of the novel; and 3) …

Flying In Place: Black Superheroes And Their Origin Stories, Kolton Harris

English Honors Papers

In recent years, the black superhero has received more attention from scholars. With this surge of interest, comes a wealth of uncharted territory. My paper examined the origin stories of black superheroes, some of which have not yet been critically analyzed. The basis for my analysis is the overwhelming repetition of an urban black narrative that serves as the template for black superhero origin stories. It has proven to be narratively restricting and highly dependent on stereotypes.

Throughout this paper, I offer close readings of black superheroes that are informed by criticism of black masculinity. While the superhero narrative is …

The Use Of The World, Shelly Cato

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 160-163

Lights And Shadows - 2014, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Veteran Literacy: A Case For Veteran Identity Theory In Composition And Literature, Devin Whitaker

Anthós

In this paper I will outline a selection of texts to demonstrate the diverse literacies brought to higher learning institutions by veterans and discuss many of the challenges veterans face when translating these literacies to an in-class instructional setting. I will also identify social disconnections when interpreting the veteran experience through a deficit-based model and offer a preliminary, veteran-centric mode of re-interpretation. By drawing on some key experiences as a Hospital Corpsman having served with the Marine Corps Infantry, I will also attempt to construct a preliminary model for studying the experience of Post 9/11 veterans from an experienced, asset-based …

Situating Digital Archives, Michelle R. Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

This essay is the introduction to an essay collection about the Middle English Prose Brut manuscript purchased by Dartmouth College in 2006. I consider how the competing pressures of access and preservation condition scholarship in medieval studies. I suggest several analogies between the digital humanities in general, digital philology in medieval studies, and the historical practices of medieval writers: hacking, dark archive, and prosthesis.

2014 Greenleaf Review (No. 27), Sigma Tau Delta

The Greenleaf Review

No abstract provided.

Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris

Theses and Dissertations--English

When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must …

Image/Text And Text/Image: Reimagining Multimodal Relationships Through Dissociation, Amy K. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations--English

W.J.T. Mitchell has famously noted that we are in the midst of a “pictorial turn,” and images are playing an increasingly important role in digital and multimodal communication. My dissertation addresses the question of how meaning is made when texts and images are united in multimodal arguments. Visual rhetoricians have often attempted to understand text-image arguments by privileging one medium over the other, either using text-based rhetorical principles or developing new image-based theories. I argue that the relationship between the two media is more dynamic, and can be better understood by applying The New Rhetoric’s concept of dissociation, which …

Apparitional Economies: Spectral Imagery In The Antebellum Imaginaton, Holly F. Osborn

Theses and Dissertations--English

Apparitional Economies is invested in both a historical consideration of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an examination of how spectral representations depict the effects of such conditions on local publics and individual persons. From this perspective, the project demonstrates how extensively the period’s literature is entangled in the economic: in financial devastation, in the boundaries of seemingly limitless progress, and in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities and the persons who can trade for them.

I argue that the space of the specter is a force of representation, an invisible site in which the …

Knowing And Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, And Adolescent Girlhood In Midcentury American Film, Michael Todd Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of …

Cultural Discourse In Taiwan. Ed. Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, And Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek., Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

The collected volume Cultural Discourse in Taiwan — edited by Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and published by National Sun Yat-sen Uiniversity Press in 2009 — is intended as an addition to scholarship in the field of Taiwan Studies. The articles in the volume are in many aspects comparative and the topics discussed are in the context of literary and culture scholarship. At the same time, the volume is interdisciplinary as the articles cover historical perspectives, analyses of texts by Taiwan authors, and cultural discourse as related to Taiwan consciousness, language, and linguistic issues. Copyright release …

Mapping The World, Culture, And Border-Crossing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb Library

Authors in the collected volume Mapping the World, Culture, and Border-crossing — edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and I-Chun Wang and published by National Sun Yat-sen University Press in 2010— begin with exploring theoretical premises about the processes and ramifications of cultural crossings to establish a clearly defined theoretical context for the case studies which follow. The case studies range from the creation of identity through patriotic songs in Taiwan under martial law, to nationality and Japanese identity, cultural autonomy in contemporary North America, Asian migration to Latin America, ethnic identity in the writings of Tan, Naipaul, Eliot, and …

A Foray Into Library Digital Publishing: The British Virginia Project At Virginia Commonwealth University, Kevin Farley

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The British Virginia project involves a collaboration between Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries and faculty members in the departments of English and History at VCU, with the project led by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt (English). As of April 25, 2013, the project has published its first title: an online edition of a sermon preached to the Virginia Company by William Symonds. To ensure the success of this project, a number of details required careful planning, including library outreach, IT involvement, and digital publishing protocols. Our example has deepened a move toward a dynamic and creative digital environment for researchers across campus. …

Questing The Beast: From Malory To Milton, Malorie A. Sponseller

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The Questing Beast is a Medieval creature that has received little scholarly attention. Because of her labile nature, she is difficult to identify and therefore challenging to study. When previously analyzed, she has been considered only in her Medieval context. By comparing the Questing Beast from Perlesvaus, the Post-Vulgate Cycle, and the Prose Tristan, four identifying characteristics can be found: she is symbolic, she is multi-formed, she is a mother that gives birth, and she produces a barking noise most often made by her unborn young. Of these four signs, the last is the most prevalent and identifiable. …

Educative Metafiction; The Interplay Of Learning, Literacy And Language In Shakespearean Drama And Modern Metafiction, Stacie Burrough

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.