Digital Commons Network^™

Volume 15 Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal, published in Fall 2000, is a compelling collection of short fiction and poetry, featuring diverse storytelling styles, psychological depth, and experimental narrative forms. Originally archived as Volume 15, Issue 1, this issue includes fiction and poetry from emerging and established writers, offering unique perspectives on identity, relationships, surrealism, and cultural observation. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue showcases a range of literary …

Volume 14 Issue 2

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal features a diverse and engaging selection of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, with a strong focus on identity, artistic transformation, and cultural reflection. Originally archived as Volume 14, Issue 2, this issue is actually Volume 18, Issue 2, covering Spring 2000. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

The fiction selections include "BREEEAANGGGHHHAAANNGHHHEEEANGHHH" by Matt McNair, a surrealist take on modern anxieties, and "Paroled!" by Sharon Baker …

Volume 13 Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal showcases a rich collection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, reflecting on themes of self-discovery, relationships, surrealism, feminist literature, and cultural critique. Originally archived as Volume 13, Issue 1, this issue is actually Volume 17, Issue 2, covering Spring 1999. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue features narrative experimentation and character-driven stories that engage deeply with memory, relationships, and social critique. Highlights …

Volume 12 Issue 2

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal is a heartfelt tribute to mentorship, education, and the transformative role of teachers, exploring the profound impact educators have on students and the literary world. Originally archived as Volume 12, Issue 2, this issue is actually Volume 17, Issue 1, covering Fall 1998. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

Many of the works in this issue reflect on the legacy of learning, with poetry, fiction, and …

Volume 12 Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal offers a powerful and diverse selection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, featuring works that engage deeply with historical memory, identity, artistic expression, and social commentary. Originally archived as Volume 12, Issue 1, this issue is actually Volume 16, Issue 2, covering Spring 1998. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

A standout feature of this issue is its literary experimentation, showcasing works that blend …

Volume 11 Issue 2

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal, titled "Welcoming in the Millennium," explores the cultural, philosophical, and personal reflections surrounding the approaching year 2000. Originally archived as Volume 11, Issue 2, this issue is actually Volume 16, Issue 1, covering Fall 1997. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue is an introspective and creative response to the millennial transition, featuring poetry, fiction, and essays that grapple with the future, nostalgia, historical reflections, …

Volume 11 Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal, uniquely titled "Cafe Nebo," captures the essence of a vibrant and eclectic literary café, where poetry, fiction, and nonfiction converge in a dynamic and thought-provoking collection. Originally archived as Volume 11, Issue 1, this issue is actually Volume 15, Issue 2, covering Spring 1997. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue is dedicated to Dr. Joyce Dempsey, a distinguished Arkansas Tech University professor of English …

Volume 10 Issue 2

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal presents a unique collection of "Pop Icon Poetry and Fiction," a thematic exploration of celebrity culture, mythology, and its impact on literature and identity. Originally archived as Volume 10, Issue 2, this issue is actually Volume 15, Issue 1, covering Fall 1996. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue takes a satirical and reflective approach to celebrity worship, Hollywood myths, and pop culture’s influence on artistic expression …

Volume 10 Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal offers a compelling collection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, highlighting a variety of literary styles and themes. Originally archived as Volume 10, Issue 1, this issue is actually Volume 14, Issue 2, covering Spring 1996. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue explores themes of memory, identity, relationships, humor, and the role of storytelling in literature. It features an engaging blend of narrative poetry, …

Volume 9, Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

This issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal presents a compelling collection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, offering a diverse and thought-provoking exploration of contemporary literature. Originally archived as Volume 9, Issue 1, this issue is actually Volume 13, Issue 2, covering Spring 1995. Due to necessary metadata adjustments in the digital archiving process, some volume and issue numbers in the online collection may not match those printed in the original journals.

This issue features a remarkable selection of Arkansas Tech Writers, showcasing student contributions alongside established literary voices. Themes of family, identity, war, and …

Reading The Players: Developing Critical Consumers Of Sports Media, Katie Dredger, Katherin Garland, Crystal L. Beach

Virginia English Journal

Sports media is ubiquitous, and English Language Arts (ELA) teachers can use topics around current sporting activities and events in the classroom to engage readers and to teach skills of critical media literacy. Serving as a primer on critical media literacy, this article, grounded in educational theory, gives practical and easily accessible texts and creative lesson ideas to spark engagement, build community, encourage collaboration and foster achievement in secondary ELA classrooms.

Wizard, Demon, Cat; Reformer, Satanist, Bureaucrat: A Diachronic Analysis Of Three Modes Of Sauron In The Legendarium In Light Of The Book Of Lost Tales, Cameron Bourquein

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper argues that Sauron is a metatextual shape-shifter. Through diachronic analysis it identifies and charts three distinct “modes” of Sauron coexisting in Tolkien’s legendarium. While Sauron’s most robust First Age appearance (in the tale of Beren and Lúthien) remained relatively unchanged from his introduction in the 1920s until Tolkien’s death, Sauron’s role in the Legendarium expanded significantly across Tolkien’s lifetime as Sauron became the primary antagonist of two additional Ages of Middle-earth. Some of the evolutions that accompanied this expansion are not retroactively reflected in the tales already written, hence these “modes” of Sauron could be said to remain …

“Walk No More In The Shadows, But Awake!”: Faramir’S Journey From Family Dysfunction And Grief To The Intimate Space In J.R.R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Rachel Crane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Examines Faramir's relationships--namely with Denethor, Boromir, and Éowyn--and role in Gondor via Yi-Fu Tuan's intimate space lens.

Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) (1741-1821) An Annotated Bibliography Of Her Published Works Together With Biography, Criticism, And Appearances In Fiction (Third Edition), Lisa Berglund Ph.D.

English Department Faculty Publications

There is no such field as “Piozzi Studies”—at least, not yet. For 250 years, scholarship on Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) has been desultory at best and at worst non-existent. Scholars who first undertook to analyze her life or edit her works were generally interested only in her relations with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Once feminist scholars began to champion the Bluestocking Circle, of which Mrs. Thrale was a peripheral member, Piozzi’s life and writings came to be taken more seriously. A significant milestone was reached in 2021 with the conference Celebrating Hester Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821). Still, while …

The Monday Manure, Zachary David Berston

Journalism

For my senior project, I wanted to create a new section of Mustang News that includes satire and cartoons. The section is called the Monday Manure to fit with the horse themed titles of other sections. This idea began as a project in the Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship class. While I initially had the idea to have a section that included games, I realized that it was a bit too ambitious after discussing that with the team at Mustang news. Over the course of this project, I have created several satire articles and cartoons, as well as organizing a team …

Celebrating Tolkien’S Legacy: Essays (2024), By Nancy Bunting, Seamus Hamill-Keays, And Toby Widdicombe, Douglas Charles Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas Charles Kane, of Celebrating Tolkien’s Legacy: Essays (2024), by Nancy Bunting, Seamus Hamill-Keays, and Toby Widdicombe

Reading The Rainbow: Exploring Themes And Identities In Lgbtqia+ Picture Books, Amanda Melilli, Alicia G. Vaandering, James W. Rosenzweig

Library Faculty Presentations

This presentation shares an analysis of over 275 picture books featuring LGBTQIA+ identities, providing evidence that the depiction of queerness in children’s literature is complex and varied. Tools for defining narrative themes and LGBTQIA+ identities will be shared as well as data on queer characters with intersecting identities. By exploring the nuances of LGBTQIA+ representation in picture books, attendees will gain a better understanding of novel research inquiries into representation.

“Where War Is God And God Is War:” Women’S Religious Great War Poetry And Homefront Lines, Faith Ellington

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project seeks to redefine war’s poetic landscape. Through a focus on women’s Great War poetry, I argue against a dichotomous home front | front line poetic barrier and instead explore the intermingling of wartime spaces. Women’s WWI poetry, I argue, exists within a space I call the homefront lines, a space in which women produce writing from their full experiences of war regardless of combatant status. The homefront lines must be included in World War I literary canons in order to fully recognize the humanity of women during wartime and to fully grasp the war’s impact on poetry …

Navigating Trauma: A Linguistic Exploration Of Bilingual Trauma Expressions, Amira Mahmoud Othman

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the relationship between language, trauma, and emotional expression among bilingual Arabic-English speakers, focusing on code-switching patterns and euphemisms, and more broadly the emotional roles of native and non-native languages in trauma narratives. Through qualitative interviews with 20 Egyptian participants, the research reveals that code-switching serves as both a linguistic and emotional tool, allowing speakers to navigate trauma by creating distance or engaging more intimately. Such codeswitching patterns include the integration of English content words within Arabic structures, morphosyntactic innovations, and gender agreement applications, reflecting the creative adaptability of bilingual speakers in emotionally charged contexts, in line with …

Returning To The Beginning Place: Le Guin’S Forgotten Anti-Fantasy Four Decades On, Timothy S. Miller

UKL: The Journal of Ursula K. Le Guin Studies

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1980 portal fantasy The Beginning Place has received a fraction of the critical attention that most of her other novels have attracted over the years. This short book's many enigmas, often structured by self-consciously Jungian symbolism, are best understood as operating in service not to a strict Jungian framework, but rather to a broader metafictional evaluation of fantasy and an articulation of Le Guin's own preferred approach to the reading and interpretation of fantasy. At times, The Beginning Place moves beyond meta-fantasy to become an anti-fantasy that does not shy from critiquing some dimensions of both …

How Do Literary And Cinematic Monsters Reveal The Fear Of The Instability Or Distortion Of Human Identity?, Arya Kc

CAFE Symposium 2025

Throughout history, monsters have both disturbed and captivated humanity. Initially defined by their grotesque physical forms, monsters have evolved to symbolize deeper psychological fears, often reflecting the instability or distortion of human identity. This project examines the shifting portrayal of monstrosity in literature and film, focusing on works like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Alien. By blurring the line between human and monstrous, these stories reveal the fragility of human identity and expose our profound fears of psychological and existential instability, challenging us to confront what it truly means to be human.

Writing Prompts In The Healing-Centered Classroom, Elizabeth Hancock

The Utah English Journal

As I began the 2013-14 school year, I encountered students with a full range of life experiences. My students’ lives ran the gamut from having the 1950s version of traditional middle- class families to being part of the Utah foster care system. Their challenges included depression over not making the school dance team, dyslexia or other learning disabilities, and responding to trauma with self-harm by using a heated curling iron. I wondered what I could do to help struggling students make it through the minefields in their lives, and remembered the character of Ponyboy, who writes about his friends’ traumatic …

Sentence Detective: Investigating Sentence Structure To Support Reading Comprehension, Rachel Knecht

The Utah English Journal

Jacob was honest about his usual reading strategies. Like Jacob, readers with a history of reading difficulties may deal with challenging, long, or unfamiliar sentences by skipping or stumbling over them (Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2020; Vaughn et al., 2022). But, Jacob offered another strategy— Sentence Detective. Over the past six weeks, Jacob had learned how to use Sentence Detective, a strategy for breaking sentences down into meaningful, more manageable parts. Although skipping or skimming may have been his go-to strategy for sentence-level comprehension, he now had another tool to try out.

The Utah English Journal, Volume 53, 2025: Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

Facilitating Dialogue: Leveraging Classroom Literature To Navigate Critical Conversations With High School Students, Kaylee Smedley

The Utah English Journal

The quotation refers to the Contemporary American Thought (CAT) class, a high school course in Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, where Moby and his classmates navigate complex and controversial issues under Ms. Lemry’s guidance. Encouraged to discuss meaningful topics like children’s rights, war, social class, abortion, and religion, they research, debate, and explore nuances, ultimately drawing scrutiny from parents, the community, and the administration (Crutcher, 1993).

Advancing Literary Interpretation Via Critical Reading Proficiency: A Sustainable Efl Framework For Generation Z, Wesam Khairy Morsi, Walid Abdallah Rezk

English Language and Literature

Abstract—This research investigates the transformative potential of literary analysis in advancing English proficiency among Egyptian EFL learners, particularly those in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. The study focuses on the linguistic and analytical challenges encountered by recent public-school graduates in the Suez Governorate, where English instruction is limited to simplified texts and lacks critical engagement. Unlike their counterparts from language schools in Cairo, these students enter university without placement tests, relying solely on their high school grades, which results in underdeveloped critical reading and thinking skills. Sixty Egyptian students participated in this experimental quantitative research design. Drawing on the …

The 2024 Whippoorwill Award: Gathering Stories Of Indigeneity, Connection, And Belonging, Erika L. Bass, Michael J. Young, Alan Hoffman, Jacqueline Yahn, Monica Roe, Devon Brenner, Chea Parton

The Rural Educator

No abstract provided.

Thinking And Writing With Ai As A Dialogue Partner, Jon Ostenson, Johnny Allred

The Utah English Journal

When generative AI burst onto the public stage in late 2022, it took many of us by surprise. After we had time to see what chatbots like ChatGPT were capable of, they filled many writing teachers with a sense of dread. Some of us realized that assignments we had relied on for years would no longer work because they could easily be completed by a chatbot. All of us worried about how this new technology would influence our students’ writing and the way we taught writing.

Deeper Magic: Theology Of The Body In C. S. Lewis And John Paul Ii, George French

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

C. S. Lewis tells us that science and magic are “twins.” “They were born,” he says “of the same impulse”3 of man to master the natural world. We think of them very differently because science has succeeded where magic has failed, but that should not make us blind to their “strong family likeness.”4 Science and magic are intertwined for much of their history, and it is in the Enlightenment that the two begin to separate. While magic died and science survived, Lewis thinks that modern applied science still retains much of the “family likeness.” Unfortunately, not all of the family …

One Dominant Age: The Technological Singularity In The Abolition Of Man, Christopher Tissell

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of the third part of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Much ink has been spilled analyzing Lewis’s thoughts on the dangers of subjectivism as outlined in the first two parts of the book, but less so on the endpoint to which Lewis thinks subjectivism leads when whole societies succumb to it. Yet Lewis himself, or at least his editor, thought the final part important enough to name the lecture series after it, and dramatize it in a novel afterward. If Lewis saw the train leaving the station over …