Digital Commons Network^™

A Shift In Perspective: Temptress Witch To Realistic Woman, Caroline Conroy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In mid-20th century Anglo-American translations of The Odyssey, Odysseus is painted as a courageous, clever king while the briefly-featured Circe is portrayed as a temptress witch. This dichotomy changes, however, by the time these characters are featured in early 21st-century adaptations of Homer’s work; both released in 2018, Madeline Miller’s Circe and Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing reclaim Circe’s depiction by portraying a Circe-like character as a powerful protagonist, aware of her strengths and weaknesses. By analyzing the archetype of the witch and how it is reflective of patriarchal society’s efforts to reduce and isolate women’s power, I argue …

Eng 200: The Approaches To Grief By Robert Frost & Joy Harjo, Heaven Howard

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Eng 100: Things That Belong In The Garden, Ellen Sego

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Eng 300: How Can Writers Use Aural Media Distractions To Their Advantage?, Madeline Miller

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Eng 300: Trying To Make The Words Flow: Flow Interactions With Environment & Behavior In Writing & Studying Contexts, Connor Flick

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

History, Cognition And Nostromo: Conrad’S Explorations Of Torture, Trauma, And The Human Rage For Order, Richard Ruppel

English Faculty Articles and Research

Focusing on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, this essay historicizes the treatment of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, demonstrating how Conrad anticipated our current understanding and treatment of the illness. The second part of the essay addresses Nostromo’s treatment of historiography. Part three is concerned with epistemology and the relationship between neurological discoveries concerning the gap between perception and consciousness, relating those discoveries to Conrad’s use of delayed decoding.

Voices Of Usu: An Anthology Of Student Writing, Vol. 15, Utah State University Department Of English

Voices of USU

This collection of student writing represents the voices of over 2,000 students who enroll each academic year in Utah State University’s second-year composition course, Intermediate Writing: Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode. Voices of USU celebrates excellence in writing by providing undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and disciplines the opportunity to have their work published.

The Regendering Of Van Helsing: Sister Agatha's Unique Approach To Investigating Dracula's Methods And Mental Processes, Taylor Holden

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

The Securitate Versus Dracula, Tourism And Ideology In Communist Romania, Valentin Gheonea

Journal of Dracula Studies

The present study focuses on the methods by which the Romanian Securitate intervened in the management of a tourist activity – the Dracula itineraries – considered to threaten the country image of communist Romania.

Infectious Queers: Hiv/Aids And The Vampiric Body In Interview With The Vampire (1994), Ian Clark

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

O’Neill’S Long Day’S Journey Into Night In Action, Darcie Billena, Hoaka Hashimoto

Suffolk University Archives OERs and Assignments

This student essay was completed as part of Professor Quentin Miller's course, ENG 120: From Ireland to America (and Back Again). Students researched and wrote about themes related to Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Boston's school desegregation crisis using collections from Suffolk University's Moakley Archive.

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Patriarchal Colonization Of The Female Body In Machinal And Clit Notes, Saide Harb-Ranero

The Graduate Review

Machinal written by Sophie Treadwell in 1928 and Clit Notes written by Holly Hughes in 1996 are two plays half a century apart yet bring forth the female body upstage and center. I see Machinal bringing attention to the societal machine that takes control of the focal character, Helen, from the first act. Clit Notes shows how a woman’s body could be removed from its first society, her parental home, simply for existing in a body that refuses to fit in a patriarchal box that is designed according to its perception of what that body should be doing. Regarding the …

Jemimas, Jockeys, And Jolly Banks: The Racial Discourse Of Black Collectibles, Conrad Pruitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Over the last thirty years, an industry in black racist memorabilia has resurged. Bolstered by online commerce, social media trade, and a robust reproduction market, racist collectibles continue to circulate despite their functional obsolescence or presumed incongruity with current views of race. Many of these objects originated in the late nineteenth century, where the emergence of black citizenship was seen as a threat to a racial caste structure that ensured white supremacy. Following the impetus for supremacy that defined the Jim Crow era, the collectibles sought to crystallize conceptions of inherent black inferiority. The presumption that these originary conditions and …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

Confined In (Patri)Architecture: How Gothic And Horror Literature Exposes Ongoing Violence And Oppression Against Women, Clara A. Macilravie Cañas

Dissertations and Theses

This project focuses on the intersections of space, power, gender, religion, and the architecture of institutions that confine and repress women. I argue that these texts focus on how patriarchal and domestic ideologies lock women into gendered expectations through oppressive gender politics. Chapter one demonstrates how early gothic female writers used representations of physical structures, such as abbeys and castles, to expose the eighteenth-century woman’s experiences of abuse and confinement by repressive patriarchal and monarchal rule. This chapter connects themes and arguments within Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) to reveal the metaphors that …

Contesting Imagined Communities: Minor Feelings, Opacity, And Spectrality In Ling Ma’S Severance, Christine Marks

Publications and Research

This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian pandemic novel Severance (2018). Emphasizing fiction’s capacity for symbolic intervention in a pandemic era, I argue that the text undermines tropes of nation-building through strategic employment of minor feelings, opacity, and spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on the Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged in the conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places her at odds with unifying ideological responses to the catastrophic upheaval of the pandemic. At the intersection of pandemic and diasporic literature, Ma’s novel constitutes a …

“You Should Pray I Choose The Latter”: Rioting, Violence, & Jouissance, Gautam Basu Thakur

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the climactic scene from the film The Great Debaters (2007), James L. Framer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), speaking for the motion “Resolved: Civil Disobedience is a Moral weapon in the fight for Justice,” rebuts the opponent team from Harvard University and clinches a win for his team, Wiley College, with the following words:

St. Augustine said an unjust law is no law at all, which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

(1:52:20 – 1:55:45)

Farmer Jr.’s words receive a standing ovation from the predominantly …

“’We Know What We Are, But Not What We May Be’: Student Transformation Through Commentary Blogs", Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This chapter discusses how, when students follow the online discussion practices of Sheridan Blau's Commentary Project, they can learn to embrace confusion, value questions, recognize that uncertainty is part of the learning process, and accept that what they don’t understand is often more important for them as a learner than what they do.

Full Edition, Keb Editorial Board

Kentucky English Bulletin

No abstract provided.

Fanboys, Pow, & Mount Plot: Mnemonic Devices Used In Teaching Writing, Sarah Anderson, Alexa Bills, Kaitlyn Conlin, Eve Crawford, Natalie Eggli, Jenae Grant, Lilly Hammer, Andrew Isaacson, Kassandra Jimenez, Ryan Mansfield, Brindley Rowley, Samantha Stringham, Meghan Waldenberg, Brady Wallis, Joyce Kinkead

The Utah English Journal

Cicero ( 106-43 BCE) was renowned during his lifetime and influential long after as an extraordinary orator and writer, able to recall long speeches from memory. A technique termed the memory palace, which associates memory with locations-also called method of loci-enabled ancient rhetoricians to deliver stimulating speeches. Retention of information was essential for delivering speeches not just because it was impressive but also due to the paucity of writing materials. Writers and orators relied on wax tablets that could be inscribed with a stylus but could not archive the text; as a result, the information had to be memorized, part …

Uncovering Ophelia: The Reclamation Of Women's Madness Through Feminist Disability Studies, Amy Crawford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe proclaims that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world," and this sentiment remains curiously persistent within the literary world. Artists have looked towards their beautiful muses for centuries as a source of inspiration and introspection, and the faces that these muses wear were often swooning, longing, or even dead. Nineteenth-century British aesthetics solidified a gendered ideology that remains prevalent to this day; in particular, one subculture of Victorian aesthetics that emerged during this period was the Cult of Ophelia: a collection of …

"She Had A Bok To Print, And It Was Her Own Case": Elizabeth Cellier's Malice Defeated As A Critical Contribution To 17th-Century Political Discourse And Postwar Pamphlet Culture, Serena Desai

Honors Theses

Born in London, England during the 1640s-- the peak of the English Civil War-- Elizabeth Cellier was no stranger to political and religious conflict. Rumors flooded the seventeenth-century newsstands: not only was King Charles II a Catholic-apologist who favored the tiny "Jesuitical" faction over the Protestant majority, but he refused to allow Parliament to check his monarchical power. By 1680, the legislature was actively attempting to disrupt his line of succession by preventing the heir presumptive, the Duke of York, from ascending the throne. Ignited by this Exclusion Crisis, several known Protestant "tricksters"--Thomas Dangerfield, William Bedloe, and Israel Tonge, and …

All Scientists Should Write Poetry: Creative Writing As Essential Academic Practice, Mariya Deykute

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Creative writing in undergraduate academics has often been regarded as an elective practice that has benefits primarily for students who plan to pursue creative or literary majors. However, poetic inquiry specifically offers crucial benefits to STEM students, owing both to the transformative nature of poetic process and to the way poetic inquiry can stimulate innovative, ethical, multilingual and interdisciplinary growth. The author frames the issue through individual experience of teaching poetry to STEM undergraduates in the context of a rich multilingual environment, in which many students are fluent or proficient in several languages. The author argues that due to the …

Front Matter - Jaepl Volume 27, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Front Matter

Spring Break In Chernobyl: Urbex, Apocalypse, And Materiality In Writing Classrooms, K Shannon Howard

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The practice of urban exploration, or urbex—an activity in which we confront and document landscapes of ruin and make meaning from them—acts as a focal point through which students may investigate and write about the world surrounding them by gaining new perspectives of physical spaces and objects that often go ignored in daily living. More importantly, urbex inspires writing that responds to existing problems in our world (resource scarcity, lack of sustainability, and environmental trauma) while also helping students to conceptualize a better one.

Toward A Decolonial Creative Writing Workshop: Mbari As A Case Study In Examining Intercultural Models For Arts Education, James W. Ryan, Steve Westbrook

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The creative writing workshop has been the subject of sustained critique for its tendency to reproduce dominant cultural norms, especially in spaces where admissions to the workshop do not reflect local ethnic and cultural diversity. In an effort to aid the search for alternate models/foundations for creative writing instructions, the authors turn to the history of mbari, a cultural practice among the Owerri Igbo of Nigeria, which was briefly adapted into the pedagogical foundation for a visual arts workshop conducted between the time of Nigeria’s independence and the onset of its civil war. In its original form, mbari was a …

Jaepl Vol 27 Table Of Contents, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

TOC

A Meditation: Why Teach?, Joonna Smitherman Trapp

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

What makes teaching a vocation that continues to draw smart and talented people even though the pay can be less-than-great, the workload damaging, and the rewards from societal and political opinion currently nonexistent? Frederick Buechner, a presbyterian minister, talks about the notion of vocation in his well-known book, Wishful Thinking. Our English word “vocation” comes from vocare, a Latin word meaning “to call,” and Buechner further defines the word as signifying “the work” we are “called to do” (118). I’m always amazed at my university that teachers haven’t heard about this idea. To them, vocation smacks of career-mindedness and doesn’t …

Introduction: Finding Meaning On The Road To Hell, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

SPECIAL SECTION: CREATIVE WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: WHERE ARE WE GOING? WHERE HAVE WE BEEN? Introduction: Finding Meaning on the Road to Hell