Digital Commons Network^™

Of Spiders And Elves, Joyce Tally Lionarons

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

A stimulating look at the parallels and contrasts between imagery associated with spiders and Elves, especially female elves, in Tolkien’s legendarium, and how this imagery of light and shadow, spinning and weaving, climbing and descending, also underpins themes of sexuality and fertility in Middle-earth.

The New Science And Women’S Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, Ed. By Judy A. Hayden, Laura Miller

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, And The Emergence Of Virtual Reality, By Peter Otto, Stacey Kikendall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Living In A Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, And Open Access, Sheila Cavanagh

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Lady Isabella’S Library; Or, A Question Of Access, Patricia L. Hamilton

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Digitally Reconstructing The Reynolds Retrospective Attended By Jane Austen In 1813: A Report On E-Work-In-Progress, Janine Barchas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Gender & Genre, Sharon Harrow

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Steinbeck And Covici: The Men Behind The Gropes Of Wrath, Jessica F. Clark

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

The Grapes of Wrath, written during the Great Depression, became one of the most well-known and well-read novels in American Literature. Its publication helped create an awareness, or social consciousness, of the issues the American public was facing at that period in time. The Grapes of Wrath was written in 1938, published in 1939, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1941. Despite its acclaim, the novel could not have been properly conceptualized or released without the influence of Pascal Covici, John Steinbeck's editor.

The two men's relationship began when Covici-Friede Publishers released Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck's second novel, in …

Orlando: Women's Writing In The British Isles From The Beginnings To The Present, Edited By Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, And Isobel Grundy, Melanie Bigold

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Interactive Aphra: Skyping Behn Into Your Classroom, Cheryl Wanko

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Beginning by asking how teachers manage the presence of the author in their literature classrooms, this article describes the classroom experiment of interviewing Karen Eterovich, an actor who portrays Aphra Behn, using Skype. It describes the planning and scripting processes, explains the particular interests of this group of students, and assesses the final activity. Questions arose about topics for the interview, appropriate ways for Behn to respond, and the need for a script. The pedagogical opportunities for preparing students as interviewers and of expanding their understanding of performance, historical reenactment, and the construct of the author are discussed. Possible extensions …

April 4, 2013: Jill M. Hebert Publishes Her First Book, Morgan Le Fay, Shapeshifter By Palgrave Macmillan, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Hard Times: Women Scholars And The Dynamics Of Economic Recession, Julie Candler Hayes

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Too Little, Too Late: How The Government Could Have Prevented The Fall Of Arthur Andersen, Justin Miller

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

In lieu of an abstract, below is the first paragraph of the paper.

Arthur Andersen's accounting fraud, later costing investors and corporations billions in losses, could have been stopped had adequate governmental regulations been in place to uphold the quality auditing of corporations. Auditing is the outside accountant's main responsibility: double checking financial statements to verify a company's status. Any failure to uphold quality accounting warrants a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation, and legislation should be enacted to stop repeated examples of accounting malevolence.

The Parchment Of Kashmir (Review), Alpana Sharma

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

The Parchment of Kashmir gathers together a wide range of essays on the subject of Kashmir. It is a compelling and stimulating book for a number of reasons. First, it interrelates a range of disciplines from political science and sociology to history, philosophy, and English. Second, it is produced by academics, all of whom are based in Jammu and Kashmir. Third, because these essays are written by scholars who are intimate with Kashmir, yet have not had an opportunity to be read outside of local circles, the book gives them a readership that they otherwise wouldn’t have; but readers themselves …

Satori 2013, Winona State University

Satori Literary Magazine

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970.

When Students Write Literary History: Regionalism, Populism, And Literary Value In A Gold Rush Magazine, Tara Penry

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

At my urban university in the Intermountain West, English majors enter a course called Literature of the American West with expectations formed from a global media culture of genre paperbacks and Hollywood films. They are skeptical about the literary value of popular forms such as westerns. Some fear that anything written for wide distribution and money must violate what Henry James called the artist's "conscience." James well knew his own answer when he asked about the nineteenth century Western writer Bret Harte some thirty years after the westerner's first success, "Has he continued to distil and dilute the wild West …

“Under The Seams Runs The Pain”: Four Greek Sources And Analogues For The Modern Monster In Anne Carson’S Autobiography Of Red, Joshua M. Carmel

Student Publications

This work seeks to explore the monster figure in its evolution from the Classical to the contemporary literary canons. Using Geryon, a three-headed and red-hued monster, as the central figure and Carson’s 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, it evaluates the underpinnings of the alienated “other” and attempts to shed light on its role in modern society.

Response: An Invitation To A Too-Long Postponed Conversation: Race And Composition By Octavio Pimentel, Cruz Medina

English

Octavio Pimentel’s “Racism and Composition: Redesigning the Composition Classroom to be more Culturally Inclusive” critically provokes pedagogical and programmatic questions by focusing on pressing issues of race and language within a historical context relevant to the field of rhetoric and composition.

Placed People: Rootedness In G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, And Wendell Berry, David Harden

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines how G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry answer one of the central questions of modernity: "What are people for?" Their answers are crucial to a humanities that is increasingly individualistic and fragmented. Charles Taylor and other virtue and communitarian philosophers are used to help explain the connections between these three authors. Examining how the writings of Chesterton, Lewis, and Berry confront the increasingly commercial, materialist, utilitarian, ends-justify-the-means culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will help underscore the relevance of such literature to our current humanities. The authors deserve to be considered because they …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 21, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“In Defense of Gopher Prairie: Main Street as a Critique of Urban Culture,” by James Nixon, Glasgow University

“Red in Retrospect”: A Review of Sinclair Lewis Remembered, edited by Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer, by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“You Should Remember This”: A Review of The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman, by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“Cass: Anatomy of a Moniker,” by Charles Pankenier

“Twin Farms Today,” by Susan O’Brien

“Sarcastic but Sympathetic, Babbitt is Premier Middle-Class Novel,” by Mark Roth

“Barnaby Conrad, Lewis’s Secretary, Dies …

Godly Heretics: Essays On Alternative Christianity In Literature And Popular Culture, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"When computers freeze, they are "rebooted" and soon working properly again. Similarly, legendary thinkers throughout history have argued that Christianity should start fresh by recapturing the humanitarian spirit of Jesus' original message. These include such disparate individuals as Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, and the religious leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Surprisingly enough, even classic television shows and films meant to be entertaining--Lost, Battlestar Galactica, It's a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, Decalogue, and A Charlie Brown Christmas--are attempts to apply the basic principles of Christianity to modern times. …

“I Am Trayvon Martin”: Visual Culture, Trauma, And The Incarceration Crisis, Amy Abugo Ongiri

Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events

Political scientist Cathy Cohen has characterized the post-Reagan era African American community as caught in “a period of contradictions and advanced marginalization.” Cohen notes that while African American participation in electoral politics has grown exponentially since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans are increasingly marginalized economically as well as socially. One of the major factors in social marginalization is what African American Studies scholar Richard Iton has characterized as “hyperincarceration.” This presentation will explore the apparently contradictory conditions in the U.S. that created the possibility of both Trayvon Martin’s murder and the triumph of Black …

Windows And Mirrors: Selecting Multiethnic Young Adult Fiction To Increase Adolescent Engagement With Academic And Cultural Literacy, Caryn Joan Lefaga Lesuma

Theses and Dissertations

Current scholarship in literacy education underscores the inefficacy of standardized education in public schools, particularly for minority students. At the same time, a longstanding lack of understanding between the various culture groups that live in the United States often results in minority groups that are either stereotyped, misunderstood, or viewed as Other. Both of these issues can be traced to the literature that students read in school, which focuses on "classic" literature—often synonymous with "white" literature—that excludes minority narratives. While minorities struggle more with "academic literacy" (the ability to read and write in an active, reflective manner), there is also …

Baumrind's Authoritative Parenting Style: A Model For Creating Autonomous Writers, Rachel Page Payne

Theses and Dissertations

Though Quintilian introduced the term in loco parentis in his Institutio Oratoria by suggesting that teachers think of themselves as parents of a student's mind, composition scholars have let parenting as a metaphor for teaching fall by the wayside in recent discussions of classroom authority. Podis and Podis have recently revived the term, though, and investigated the ways writing teachers enact Lakoff's "Strict Father" and "Nurturing Mother" authority models. Unfortunately, their treatment of these two opposite authority styles reduces classroom authority styles to a mutually exclusive binary of two less than satisfactory options. I propose clinical and developmental psychologist Diana …

Towards A Consummated Life: Kenneth Burke's Concept Of Consummation As Critical Conversation And Catharsis, Cherise Marie Bacalski

Theses and Dissertations

Consummation was the one term about which Kenneth Burke wasn't particularly long-winded - odd considering his claim that it was the apex of his theory of form. Perhaps Burke never explained exactly what consummation was because he himself was never clear on the subject, as he told John Woodcock in an interview toward the end of his career. Burke began conceptualizing his theory of form early on - in his 20s - and published it in his first critical book, Counter-Statement, in 1931. At that time, Burke's theory of form had already taken one evolutionary step - from self-expression, with …

Nostalgia: Movement And Stasis In Contemporary American Poetry, Rebecca Cecilia Hay

Theses and Dissertations

A remarkable amount of award-winning contemporary American poetry incorporates nostalgia as a prominent idea discussed. This poetry appears to use nostalgia as means to a greater end. In other words, nostalgia, while a dominant theme within different works, is more a way to treat concepts such as representation and memory, more so than the work being an actual commentary on nostalgia itself. Given the poetry's predominant concept, it seems poets such as Carl Dennis, Natasha Trethewey and Ted Kooser could be representative of a literary historical moment. This moment is one which comments heavily on the past's presence within the …

70'S "Miscegenation" And Blaxploitation: Fran Ross's Interracial Oreo, And The Super Bad Blaxploitation Hero, Corrine Esther Collins

Theses and Dissertations

Fran Ross's only novel, Oreo, explores the nature of multiethnic American identities through an empowered female character that embarks on a Theseus-like journey. Ross devotes significant portions of the novel to the introduction of Oreo's family and individual character, in order to carefully outline her interracial and multiethnic upbringing as an African-Jewish American girl. In order to understand Oreo's political and aesthetic sensibilities, this thesis explores the cinematic representations of interracial relationships during the time that Oreo was written, and argues that Fran Ross's main character is in direct conversation with the predominant 70s black movie and political culture of …

March 13, 2013: 2013 Frostic Creative Writing Awards, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

We Know Better And It's Time To Act Like It: Ending Written Feedback, Jacob S. Rees

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have tried to demonstrate the effectiveness of written teacher feedback over the course of the last sixty years, and the results are inconclusive. Many studies point to improvement on subsequent drafts as evidence of student improvement; however, this only indicates students' abilities to follow directions. It is not an indication of autonomous writing ability. This study demonstrates that with proper curriculum support high school students can develop intentional transferability (the autonomous, intentional transferring of writing skills to varied rhetorical situations) throughout the course of one academic year without receiving any teacher written feedback.

Rae, Baby, Whitney Marissa Call

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a young adult fictional novel from the perspective of Rachel Jackson, or Rae, a seventeen year-old girl with Williams Syndrome, a rare developmental disorder caused by missing genes on chromosome 7 that causes those with it to lack logical connections, yet possess very gregarious, social, and musical personalities. Think of it as an inverted form of autism. At the genesis of the novel, Rae becomes pregnant. Upon misunderstanding her mother's sugar-coated reasoning for giving the baby up for adoption, Rae spends the novel trying to find a man to marry so that, in her understanding, she may …