Digital Commons Network^™

Electronic Literacy: Teaching Literary Reading Through The Digital Medium, Robert Adams Rozema

Dissertations

Over the last decade, digital technology has become an increasingly important part of education. In the discipline of English language arts, digital technology has been enlisted to teach writing, as the word processor and more recently, the World Wide Web, have provided new tools and new publishing opportunities for student writers. The presence of digital technology is less pronounced, however, in literature instruction in secondary schools. In both theoretical and practical discussions of digital technology and literature, the two mediums have been conceived as radically different. This dissertation argues that the digital medium, and more specifically the World Wide Web, …

At The Edge Of The Circle: Willa Cather And American Arts Communities, Andrew W. Jewell

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

During the pivotal years of Willa Cather's artistic development, she regularly engaged a variety of American arts communities that encouraged, challenged, and influenced her work and professional growth. Her interactions with these communities were an effort to locate a sustainable, meaningful relationship to her fellow artists. This dissertation explores her efforts by analyzing the character of the communities, chronicling Cather’s involvement within them, and interpreting the impact on Cather’s life and work.

After the Introduction, the chapters are organized to follow Cather as she experimented with various communal forms and developed her own relationship to the literary scene. Chapter one …

Eng 3009g-051: Myth And Culture, Carol Stevens

Summer 2004

No abstract provided.

Casuistical Connections From Dunton To Defoe, John E. Fossum

Theses and Dissertations

This master's thesis is primarily concerned with the philosophical conditions of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England that encouraged the emergence of periodical literature and perpetuated the birth of the novel. While most connections between periodical literature and the novel are made on how the former created the readership that ensured the latter's success, I focus on how the epistemology unique to the advent of empirical science together with the growing prominence of casuistic thought created a space in which periodical literature could emerge and the early novel could flourish. I investigate the underlying assertion of a particular philosophical amalgam …

The Valuation Of Literature: Triangulating The Rhetorical With The Economic Metaphor, Melissa Brown Gustafson

Theses and Dissertations

Several theorists, including the Marxist theorists Trevor Ross, Walter Benjamin, and M.H. Abrams, have proposed theories to explain the eighteenth-century shift from functional to aesthetic conceptions of literature. Their explanations attribute the change to an increasingly consumer-based society (and the resulting commoditization of books), the development of the press, the rise of the middle class, and increased access to books. When we apply the cause-effect relationships which these theorists propose to the contexts of nineteenth-century America, Communist East Germany, WWII America, and 9/11 America, however, the causes don't correlate with the effects they theoretically predict. This disjunction suggests a re-examination …

Advanced Placement English And The College Curriculum: Evaluating And Contextualizing Policy, Jennifer Dawn Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the context in which Advanced Placement (AP) English policies are made, examining the political and economic realities that impact policy decisions as well as the discipline-based critiques of the AP English program which have led many writing program administrators (WPAs) and faculty to question existing credit and placement policies. Recent efforts to dramatically expand the AP program have left many questioning whether the AP English experience actually fulfills the promises suggested by the program. After reviewing current literature relating to AP English, this thesis examines the findings of an empirical study conducted at BYU. The study evaluates …

Learning To Create: A Collection Of Personal Essays, Naomi Lund Christiansen

Theses and Dissertations

This is a creative thesis that focuses on the infertility experiences of the author. The introduction examines the author's justification for choosing personal essay as a genre and French feminism as the guiding theory in writing the essays. Six personal essays center on the author's attempts to have a child and the discoveries and failures along the way. Throughout literary history, women's bodies have traditionally been viewed from the outside looking in, as objects to be reified and preserved or exploited and used. Using the writing the body critics as a theoretical framework, the essays discuss the comforts and discomforts …

A Mediatic Pedagogy: Rhetoricizing Images Within Composition Curriculum, Brenda M. Helmbrecht

English

My dissertation explores how students’ interactions with visual media inform their subject positions as students, writers, and rhetoricians. I use a cross-disciplinary approach that intertwines Composition and Rhetoric scholarship with work from Media Studies to understand how visual media affect the way students write, read, and use language. Throughout my dissertation, I work with the theory of “remediation” to demonstrate how new media, such as the Internet, have been conceptualized, revised, and reformed as a result of their relationship to preexisting, or “old”, media like film and television. I predict that remediation can encourage students to position the texts they …

After The Flames A New Andrews University/Benton Harbor Partnership, Joseph Warren

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Writer's Journey Into Solitude : Self-Discovery In Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Robinson Crusoe And Friday, Rabia Abdul Salim Madhi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The idea of physical solitude often implies metaphysical solitude, and it is this spiritual state of detachment or self-enclosure that usually arouses the widest range of moral responses. Physical solitude is a metaphorical focus for an attitude that relates to self and society. In my thesis, however, I am primarily interested in the concept of solitude as a vehicle facilitating a journey of inward exploration into the mystifying labyrinth of the self in search of truth. In this sense, solitude becomes a condition enabling consciousness to achieve spiritual insight and truth with respect to the nature of self and world.

Margaret Cavendish And Scientific Discourse In Seventeenth-Century England, Alisa Curtis Bolander

Theses and Dissertations

Although the natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish is eclectic and uncustomary, it offers an important critique of contemporary scientific methods, especially mechanism and experimentalism. As presented in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Blazing World, Cavendish's natural philosophy incorporates rationalistic and subjective elements, urging contemporary natural philosophers to recognize that pure objectivity is unattainable through any method of inquiry and that reason is essential in making sense and use of scientific observation.

In addition to its scientific implications, Cavendish's three-tiered model of matter presents interesting sociopolitical associations. Through her own use of metaphor and her theoretical fusion of matter and motion, …

Power And Perfection In Karen Finley's The Constant State Of Desire: Creating A New Discourse., Melissa D. Greenwood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Karen Finley's The Constant State of Desire merits attention because it acknowledges modern language's inability to represent the suffering of victims and creates awareness of our personal involvement in constructing gendered identities. Finley expresses her abhorrence of the desire for power and perfection by asserting that power is secured in American culture through physical and economic domination. In addition, the pursuit of perfection is engrained in one's psyche through media images and habituated behaviors. Finley does not offer a new language through which to communicate suffering, but she draws the reader's attention to the inadequacies of psychological and cultural rhetoric, …

Amazonian Women: A Multi-Voiced Narrative On Surviving Breast Cancer, Melissa Bowles

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in May of 2003, I immediately turned to journal writing and to reading to try and make sense of what was happening in my family. I searched websites for causes of breast cancer and ways to prevent it, I read literary women's memoirs, and I wrote a great deal about the way that I was feeling: scared, guilty, angry, broken. As a reader and a writer I needed to somehow intellectualize all of the things I was feeling. This writing project is a product of that initial response and of my subsequent …

Global Wars And Writing Warrior Culture: Disclosure Interviews Anthony Swofford, Anna Froula, Danny Mayer, Jonathan Vincent, Keith Woodward

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Globalization, Or The Vanishing Present Of Postcolonialism? (And The Figuration Of The Comprador-Intellectuai), Saikat Majumdar

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Automitografías: The Border Paradigm And Chicana/O Autobiography, Juan Velasco

English

For Chicana/o cultural critics, the border paradigm has defined the boundaries of writing and experience in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography, and has constituted a valuable contribution to American Studies. In fact, the unique voices coming from Chicana/o autobiography are expressed through a network of cultural codes involving liminality and hybridity, the rewriting of borders, and the challenging of boundaries created by mainstream cultures and official truth. Based on this deep relationship of border paradigm, Chicana/o experience, and the writing and representation of that experience, in this article I will discuss the possibility of building an organic and systematic methodology for studying …

Honors, Inc., Kelly Younger

English Faculty Works

Academics across the country are having an allergic reaction to the corporate model of operation being adopted by many universities. Terms like branding, collateral materials, budget controls, marketing strategies, and outcomes are causing a panic among faculty who believe that a customer satisfaction approach to higher education is anti-intellectual and that it leads to grade inflation, teaching toward evaluations, and learning as product, not process.

Honors programs in particular, often the standard bearers of undergraduate academic standards, are being asked to market themselves not only to the top prospective students, but also to the university administration at large. Honors is …

Satire's Liminal Space: The Conservative Function Of Eighteenth-Century Satiric Drama, Sheila Ann Morton

Theses and Dissertations

The eighteenth century is famous for producing literary satire, primarily in verse (and later prose) form. However, during this period, a new dramatic form also arose of which satire was the controlling element. And like the writers of prose and verse satires, playwrights of dramatic satire claimed that their primary aim was the correction of moral faults and failings. Of course, they did not always succeed in this aim. History has shown a few, however, to have had a significant impact on the ideas and lives of their audiences. This thesis is an attempt to demonstrate how these satiric dramas …

Review Of The Dramatic Art Of Athol Fugard: From South Africa To The World, Jeanne M. Colleran

English

No abstract provided.

C.S. Lewis As Plagiarist: Some Grey Areas In The Grey Town, Thom Satterlee

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Reading Lewis Reading: Oral Narrative And Literate Pedagogy In The Chronicles Of Narnia, Nicole Duplessis

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

No abstract provided.

Epileptic's Song: Poems By Bob Zordani, Robert A. Zordani

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Eng 4801-001: Integrating The English Language Arts, Jerie Weasmer

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 5500-001: Practicum In Teaching And Tutoring Writing, Linda Coleman, Daiva Markelis, Fern Kory

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eiu 4192-098-099: Constructions Of Youth In Contemporary Cinema, Tim Engles

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 2099g-099: Literature And Human Values (Honors): Love, Hate, Obsession, Zahlan

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 3808-001: Twentieth-Century British Literature, Zahlan

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 4903-001: Young Adult Literature, Fern Kory

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 1002-053: Composition And Literature, Anne Zahlan

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.

Eng 3009g-006: Myth And Culture, Carol Stevens

Spring 2004

No abstract provided.