Digital Commons Network^™

Eng 1001-043: Composition And Language, Ashley Tellis

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 1091-095: Composition And Language: Honors, Zahlan

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 3504-001: Film And Literature: Film And Roman Noir And The Femme Fatale, Robin Murray

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 4764-001: Advanced Playwriting, David Radavich

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 2091-099: Literature, The Self, And The World-Fiction (Honors), Zahlan

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 3009-002-007: Myth And Culture, Michael Leddy

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 1091-099: Language And Composition, Angela Vietto

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Eng 3706-001: American Regional Literature, Zahlan

Fall 2005

No abstract provided.

Tolkien 2005: The Ring Goes Ever On, The Tolkien Society

Mythcon Souvenirs

The idea to organise an event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Lord of the Rings was mooted several years ago. I can remember it being discussed at The Plough & Harrow hotel, the location for the 1998 annual general meeting. We felt that this event should be held in Birmingham and subsequently, Trevor Reynolds and myself visited both Aston and Birmingham Universities. Aston was chosen due to the fact that it was more centrally placed for attendees to get to and far more compact that the Birmingham campus. In time the 2005 organising committee started …

Educating For Democracy: Reviving Rhetoric In The General Education Curriculum, David M. Stock

Theses and Dissertations

This study is, in part, a response to arguments that claim higher education fails to prepare students with fundamental communication skills necessary for everyday life and indicative of "educated" persons. Though the validity of such arguments is contestable, they nonetheless reflect fundamental inadequacies in current educational theories and practices that have evolved over centuries of curricular, cultural, and socioeconomic change. Current theories and practices in higher education, specifically general education, reflect a misunderstanding of both the purpose of education in a democracy and the role of the liberal arts, specifically rhetoric, in accomplishing that purpose. The consequences of rhetorically-impoverished general …

Imitation, Not Limitation: Fan Fiction In The Classroom, Molly Wright

Theses and Dissertations

There is a dizzying array of syllabi for various advanced exposition courses. Many of these syllabi address student writing development issues such as clarity, style, logic, and organization. They also address traditional focuses as description, narration, information, and argument. They can include anything from grammar texts to cable news web sites as required reading, and they usually include reassuring terms such as "improvement" to remind the student that s/he already has the basic skills necessary to compose a quality essay. Assignments might include reading a model text for guidance in writing. Some syllabi encourage imitating those models in the form …

Sandra Cisneros As Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (Hi)Stories In Caramelo, Sally Marie Giles

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis discusses the ways in which Sandra Cisneros makes historical claims from a Chicana perspective by telling fictional family stories in Caramelo. Not only have Chicanas traditionally been marginalized ethnically by the Anglo mainstream, they have also suffered disenfranchisement as women in their own male-dominated cultural community. Both elements have contributed to the cultural silencing of Chicanas outside of domestic spaces, and particularly in historical discourse. Cisneros introduces storytelling as a means of empowering Chicanas through language that allows them to speak historically and still signify culturally. By telling stories from the site of the family, she ingeniously utilizes …

Keeping Gardens: Poetry And Essay, Deja Anne Earley

Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis includes two creative non-fiction essays and twenty-two poems, introduced by a critical essay that examines my work. The poems and essays share an origin in personal experience as well as an interest in language. Specifically, the poems and essays explore issues of family, relationships, spirituality, and observations of the natural world. The introductory essay discusses my interest in re-fashioning individual vision through the act of writing, relating to Helene Cixous's idea of creating a "portrait of God" through the act of art. The essay also examines the connections between the genres of creative non-fiction and poetry, in …

Perry Smith And Josef Kavalier: Historical And Literary Victimized Victimizers, Noella Jeo

Theses and Dissertations

In literary trauma theory, victimized victimizers represent an ambiguous area. In my thesis, I show how Perry Smith, a historical figure in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and Josef Kavalier, a fictional character in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, represent these ambiguities. Both men become murderers acting out violence that was inflicted upon them as children. However, only Kavalier seems to work through the trauma.

Such A Deal Of Wonder: Structures Of Feeling And Performances Of The Winter's Tale From 1981 To 2002, Elizabeth Marie Burt

Theses and Dissertations

Structures of feeling represent the interaction between personal lived experience and fixed social values and meanings, which are found in interpretations of works of art. Studying various interpretations of any play in performance can provide a point of access into a culture because the choices made in the production can be compared to each other and to the written text and then reveal how the theatrical company views particular issues within their own time period. This study looks at productions of The Winter's Tale between 1981 and 2002 at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Using numerous versions …

The Rhetoric Of Newspaper Rivalry In The Face Of Image Restoration And Transformation, Andrea Ludlow Christensen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a study of the rhetoric of newspaper rivalry, particularly under the pressures of image restoration and transformation. I use methods of critical discourse analysis to look at newspaper articles in Utah's two dominant newspapers, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret Morning News. I compare a sample of news articles from each paper in 2002 to a sample in 2003, when the Tribune was working to restore its image after a scandal involving two of its reporters, and the News was working to transform its image as it transitioned from an afternoon newspaper to a morning newspaper. …

Saturday Nights Alone, Daniel C. Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

This novel blends first-person narrative prose with conventions of screenwriting to create a voice consistent with its main character, Rick Morgan, who's trying to escape his life as a real estate agent by becoming a screenwriter. As Rick struggles to write a new screenplay he finds it difficult to divorce his creative mind from the troubles of his personal life. As a result his preoccupations with destroying his boss and taking back the girl the boss stole from him, work their way into Rick's new project. The motif of art imitating life imitating art forces Rick to question long held …

Tauser Killed Both Dogs And Other Suburban American Family Folklore, Kristina Whitley Gashler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to answer the questions "What purposes do family pets and the narratives we tell about them serve in modern American society?" and "What do these stories tell us about what Americans value and about where we locate our ‘value center’?" In Chapter 1, I discuss how Americans define loyalty in our pets now that our animals generally no longer help us work. I conclude that since the shift from agricultural to suburban settings, animals prove their loyalty individually and in human-like ways, rather than as "good" members of their own species, but at the same time because …

Fortune Personified And The Fall (And Rise) Of Women In Chaucer's Monk's Tale And The Autobiographical Writings Of Christine De Pizan, Leona C. Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will posit that a query of the medieval trope, Fortune, can be read as a query into femininity. Fortune is depicted with many quintessentially medieval feminine traits, and women in texts that discuss Fortune often have Fortune's traits. While texts that link Fortune and femininity usually do so to censure women, some writers turned the trope to their advantage for just the opposite purpose. Both Chaucer in the "Monk's Tale" and Christine de Pizan personify Fortune to subtly point out the flaws in antifeminist medieval view of women. This thesis explores the ways in which these writers cleverly …

The Wit And Wisdom In The Novels Of Diana Wynne Jones, Elizabeth A. Crowe

Theses and Dissertations

British speculative fiction writer, Diana Wynne Jones, has published over forty books for middle school to adult readers, and her work continues to receive many awards for its creativity and high quality. Jones is a prolific and talented writer who has contributed to and influenced speculative fiction. She uses magical contexts to comment on social situations in what she sees as an essentially non-magical world. Whether she is being humorous, drawing upon myths and legends, or using fantasy or science fiction, Jones reflects the contemporary unpredictable adolescent mind. Jones's unusual childhood has influenced her writing, and a brief biography of …

Copyrighting American History: International Copyright And The Periodization Of The Nineteenth Century, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

With the publication in 1930 of the third and final volume of his Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Parrington gave singular shape and force to an already established paradigm of the American nineteenth century as two discrete eras, hinged politically and culturally by the Civil War. After 1865, goes the familiar narrative, the Boston Brahmins and their ‘‘love of standards’’ were unseated by itinerant, gritty, self-made writers based in New York. For Parrington, this literary restaging of the American Revolution, in which Old World aristocratic power fell at the hands of an American populism, was best exemplified by …

"Whither?" Some Thoughts On The Genre Of Literature In An Electronic Age, James C. Schaap

Pro Rege

This article was originally presented as a lecture for the MacLaurin Institute, a Christian study center at the University of Minnesota, on January 19, 2005.

Revealing The Myths : Jeanette Winterson's New Space Of Body, Love And Narrative In Written On The Body, Bonnie Cara Glasser

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis derives from my interest in the way in which we read and understand novels. We may not consciously realize that we are socially conditioned to read and translate texts in certain ways. Until I started writing this paper, I did not realize the influence that social conditioning had on me when I read. Now that I am more aware of this influence, I am more careful about how I read. I realize that I should not read certain issues within texts as natural, but to think of them as constructions created to serve a specific purpose.

The focus …

Film Noir, Hard-Boiled Fiction, And Working Women : Depression And Post-War America, Andrew S. Wiecek

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The writer examines the connections between the femme fatale in film noir and 1930s hard-boiled fiction, claiming that noir critics are misguided in their claim that the femme fatale has historical specificity to postwar America. The writer summarizes criticism on the femme fatale in film noir and proceeds to underscore the significant contributions to made by the hard-boiled tradition to noir. He believes that these contributions point to a pre-war male anxiety about female independence that he traces to the economic instability of the Depression. From this anxiety during the Depression, the author claims, came the femme fatale of hard-boiled …

The Town Hall Is Filling With Boulders, Christopher Miller

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

When I first decided that I wanted to endeavor the realization and composition of a book-length collection of poetry, I had no theme or binding conceptual idea in mind. I saw the thesis project as a chance to create an anthology of work, one that would both map my personal growth as a writer and the distillation of my craft and technique. I knew the poems were going to reach over a period of about two-and-a-half years, so it was clear to me right away that I had no idea where writing would take me, or what iterations my imagination …

Talking About Virtue: Paisiello’S "Nina," Paër’S "Agnese," And The Sentimental Ethos, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay will examine how sentimentality and its valorization of virtue spread through one particular intersection of opera and literature; that is, the seduced maiden narrative is enacted in these operas, once as a comedy of sorts, once as a tragedy. Giovanni Paisiello's "Nina" (1789) was clearly influenced by the works of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, while Fernando Paër's "Agnese" (1809) is a direct adaptation of Amelia Opie's popular novella "The Father and Daughter" (1801). Furthermore, both of the operas spin in and out of ideological orbit with Richardson's novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740-41), which in turn was …

Foundation Stones Of Prydain: A Web-Based Bridge Between Welsh Mythology And Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, Benjamin Tyler Minson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

My career at Utah State University and particularly in the Professional and Technical Writing emphasis in the English Department has shown me a vast spectrum of areas within the field of technical communication. Several of the various types of work within technical communication came together for my final Honors Thesis and Project, including Web design, information architecture, and usability testing. The planning, creation, testing, and analysis of the website Foundation Stones of Prydain (http://cc.usu.edu/~bminson/foundation) constitute the culmination of my work at Utah State University.

Ua68/6/1 Cherry Hall Bulletin, Wku English

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter created by the English Department. This issue highlights the Robert Penn Warren Centennial, Kentucky Writers Conference and Book Fest, faculty achievements and student activities.

The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 14, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Introducing Sinclair Lewis’s Novels to Adults,” by Patrick and Mary Killough

“PR Campaign Cycle Enforces Middle Class Message,” by Laurie Fumea, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

“A Citizen of the Mirage,” by Sinclair Lewis, part 1., Introduction by Todd Stanley

“Sinclair Lewis Conference 2005: A Journal,” by Jacqueline Koenig

Becoming The Bridge: Border-Crossing, Intersectionality, And Wave Theory In Contemporary Feminist Movement, Meagan Lynn Weatherby

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The self-proclaimed “third wave” ofUnited Statesfeminism, which rose from the abyss of “postfeminist” 1980s conservatism in the early 1990s, is a vibrant movement that is quickly picking up the pace of feminist organizing in the new millennium. Third wave feminists envision themselves as taking up the torch of the 1960-1970s “second wave” of feminism, but expanding upon it by emphasizing intersectionality (the complex interaction of multiple oppressions, e.g. sexism, racism, classism) and making room for sexiness, joy, and fun in feminist organizing and theorizing. It is a discourse that strives toward and privileges intersectional analyses that create space in which …