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Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Adventures Of Kody A Children's Visual Storybook And Interactive Web Site, Matthew L. Walsh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In order to experience unconditional love, prejudices must be exposed and overcome. People often meet others with a disability or handicap and unknowingly treat these individuals negatively. As a middle school teacher, I have often witnessed students behaving cruelly towards those that are different. When my dog became a paraplegic I was inspired to develop a project to assist young readers in the development of conscientious actions towards individuals with disabilities. This document chronicles the development, procedures, and outcomes of the process behind that artistic endeavor. The artistic elements of this thesis project are a written children's storybook and an …

The Moderating Roles Of Gender And Anti-Gay Prejudice In Explaining Stigma By Association In Male Dyads, Stephen D. Jefferson, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Using a convenience sample of 157 undergraduates, this study explored the likeability ratings of target characters from selected film clips who were described as gay or heterosexual as they associated with a gay-described foil character (i.e., a character against which the target is compared). As predicted, male respondents who strongly endorsed anti-gay prejudice viewed gay-described targets more favorably than heterosexual-described targets when each target was paired with a gay foil. Further, this pattern of biased ratings by high-prejudice male participants against our heterosexual target differentiated these participants from both low-prejudice male and high-prejudice female respondents. In contrast, but as hypothesized, …

Tragic Pleasure In Shakespeare's King Lear And Othello, Luella Fu

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis is an examination of reader or audience response to Shakespeare’s tragedies. Primarily, it identifies key pleasures that Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello offer. The complementary nature of these two plays is such that the analysis of their various pleasures allows for an in-depth treatment of the topic and also reflects the diversity of emotional response elicited by Shakespeare’s tragedies. The kinds of pleasure addressed in this study are catharsis as explained by Aristotle, the delight of violent passion as advocated by DuBos, pleasure from details in the work, satisfaction from the coherence of the tragedy, and pleasure in …

La Vilaine, Cordelia Solomon

CMC Senior Theses

When her sister goes missing, Kattel Macé must fly to France to find her. While the police are cooperating, they have no leads to go off of forcing Kattel to start her own investigation. In her search, Kattel stumbles across evidence that implicates her own family members in her sisters mysterious disappearance.

Adrift In The Wake Of Modernism: Music, Mind, And Meaning In The Works Of James Joyce, April E. Cook

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Since Joyce's rise to critical prominence over the course of the twentieth century, a diverse corpus of scholarship has emerged around the Joyce canon that is nearly as vast and as multifaceted as the works themselves. While many have explored Joyce's affinity for music and his unprecedented synthesis of musical and literary modes, relatively few have examined his works' musical properties in the context of the contemporaneous musical developments of the early avant-garde and jazz movements. This study explores the trajectory of Joyce's engagement with musical forms and techniques, ranging from the primarily allusive relations of his early works to …

Trauma And The Representation Of The Unsayable In Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Katina Rogers

Publications and Research

This dissertation explores the ways in which several fiction writers from France, the U.S., and Latin America experiment with the form of their works in writing about traumatic experience, as they navigate the tension between a propulsion toward expression and toward silence. Some of these traumas are vast, as in Edmond Jabès’ Le livre des questions (1963-1973), which addresses not only the Holocaust, but also questions of exile and identity. Others are on a smaller scale, such as Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir (1986), Julio Cortázar's Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983), and Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la Novela de …

The Portrayal Of Grandparents As Caregivers In Young Adult Fiction, Susan Christine Bunch

Graduate Research Papers

The number of children and young adults being raised primarily by their grandparents continues to increase (Landry-Meyer & Newman, 2004). If either the grandchild or grandparent is suddenly thrust into a different family structure it can create challenges. Some young adults turn to the characters in literature as models for how to cope with life challenges (Hughes-Hassell & Rodge, 2007). It was the purpose of this quantitative study to explore physical health, mental and emotional health, and lifestyle and social challenges faced by grandparents and grandchildren when the grandparents are the primary caregivers, and how those challenges are portrayed in …

A Need For Picture Books Showing Girls Playing Organized Team Sports, Lisa A. Heiden

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this project was to create a children's picture storybook depicting female characters participating in competitive team athletics. The book shows a young girl learning about the game of basketball and sharing the experience with her older sister. The researcher has a long history of athletic participation and a deep passion for sports. These experiences allowed the researcher to capture the essence of the sport of basketball and create a picture book for children that engages the reader and possibly encourages participation in athletics for children of various ages. The book gives young, athletic girls an early experience …

Laughter And Tears: A Qualitative Content Analysis, Apra Loomis

Graduate Research Papers

Young adult literature often focuses on different problems associated with adolescence. Humor may provide a strategy for alleviating the tension associated with such problems in realistic fiction. The purpose of this study was to describe the use of humor in current, positively reviewed young adult literature in dark topics such as depression, death and suicide. Themes that emerged included humor as a coping device, self-defeating humor, and affiliative humor. Humor as a coping device was shown to increase with age as a way to deal with stressful situations in a study by Fuhr (2002). In a study by Erickson & …

Lights And Shadows - 2010, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Introduction To A New History Of The Sermon : The Nineteenth Century, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the introduction to A New History of the Sermon:The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It discusses the concept and history of "rhetorical criticism," and seeks to lay a foundation for the rhetorical study of the Anglo-American pulpit.

William Plomer, Transnational Modernism And The Hogarth Press, John K. Young

English Faculty Research

William Plomer (1903–73), a self-described Anglo-Afro-Asian novelist, poet, editor and librettist, spent only the early years of his lengthy career as a Hogarth Press author but still ranks as one of the Woolfs’ most prolific writers, with a total of nine titles issued during his seven years with the Press. Like Katherine Mansfield, Plomer made his mark with Hogarth before signing with a more established firm, but the depth and breadth of Plomer’s career with the Woolfs is significantly greater: his five volumes of fiction presented Hogarth’s readers with groundbreaking portraits of South African, Japanese and (British) working class cultures. …

Identity, Language Practices And Ideologies Among Nepali-Bhutanese In West Michigan, Trevor Dewaard, Kathryn Remlinger

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

The languages that we use are a result of our identities and the social contexts and related roles in which we participate. The language practices of one small community of ethnic Nepali-Bhutanese who were revoked citizenship in Bhutan, expelled into refugee camps in Nepal for nearly twenty years, and who now reside in Grand Haven, Michigan were of interest here. Identity, Language Practices and Ideologies among Nepali-Bhutanese in West Michigan builds on previous research that examines the relationship between language choice and socio-cultural factors such gender, age, language proficiency, education, citizenship, and context among multi-lingual speakers (Baquedano-López 2009, Booth 2009, …

Bewitching The Stage: Elizabethan And Jacobean Witch-Lore And Witch-Hunt, Kyoung H. Lee

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project hypothesizes that the early modern stage witch's grotesque femininity and her masculine presumption of agency were the effective signifiers of the feminine covert, what men fantasized about the reproductive secrets of womanhood and their control over the feminine activities. My investigation of late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama indicates that the fictional witch is postulated as the negative example of female fertility and feminine nurture: the witch not only interferes in the natural process of fertility in humans as well as in nature but she also contaminates maids and mistresses with her mismanagement and overconsumption of household resources. I …

A Screen Of One's Own The Tpec And Feminist Technological Textuality In The 21st Century, Amy J. Barnickel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyze the 20th century text, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (2005), and I engage with Woolf's concept of a woman's need for a room of her own in which she can be free to think for herself, study, write, or pursue other interests away from the oppression of patriarchal societal expectations and demands. Through library-based research, I identify four screens in Woolf's work through which she viewed and critiqued culture, and I use these screens to reconceptualize "a room of one's own" in 21st Century terms. I determine that the new "room" is …

The Fiends That Plague Thee Thus: An Examination Of Gender And The Role It Plays In Coleridge’S Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Kathleen Tyer

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was, and remains today, one of the most important literary figures in history, and his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner continues to be one of the most widely read pieces of literature in schools across the world. When it was first published, the poem was ahead of its time and was widely misinterpreted. For the past two hundred years, even, critical examinations of the poem have tended to reveal discrepancies rather than attempt to explain them. This work examines the poem through the lens of queer theory in an attempt to explain those apparent inconsistencies. …

The Colonizing Impulse Of Postcolonial Theory, John C. Hawley

English

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses …

Creating Units For Second Grade Learners Of English As A Foreign Language, Laura Elizabeth Messerly

Honors Program Theses

Teaching English as a Foreign Language is becoming more popular as English is in high demand in countries throughout the world because of globalization (Niklov, 2006). The chief difference between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) is that the language is being learned in a non-English speaking community (.EFL) versus an English speaking community (ESL). These non-English speaking communities are being affected by multinational corporations. As businesses grow and globalize, flourishing across continents, factories and branches are sprouting up in places all over the world. Technology, too, has contributed to the spread of …

You're Not Really Black Unless You've Been Shot-- Or So Says Black Urban Fiction, Erin A. Talley

Masters Theses

This essay seeks to identify the injurious and hedonistic patterns that emerge from contemporary black urban fiction, reinforcing negative stereotypes. This essay comments on codes that establish a sense of authenticity as well as trends of isolationism and essentialist narratives published as the unsuccessful progeny of didactic novels written to highlight conditions in underrepresented minority communities. Through a critical examination of earlier literary movements, this essay proposes that contemporary black urban literature grows less culturally conscious and less aesthetically aware in its pursuit of commercial success than the African American canonical texts that grounded cultural realism and literary experimentation.

Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must …

A Comparison Between The Verbal Interruptions By Speakers Of English As A Lingua Franca (Elf) And Speakers Of English As A Native Language (Enl), Yue Yuan Li

Lingnan Theses

Previous research focused primarily on how interruptions vary according to social factors in situations where English is the native language for all speakers (see Menz and Al-Roubaie, 2008; O‟Reilly, 2008; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Zimmerman and West, 1975). Little has been done on interruptions in situations where English is used as a lingua franca. The purpose of this research is to 1) provide conversational evidence on how experienced ELF speakers make interruptions, 2) explore functions of interruptions in ELF communication; 3) compare the types and functions of interruptions in ELF communication with those in ENL communication; 4) compare the types …

Katherine Anne Porter And The Problem Of Critical Assessment Across Borders, Max O. Johnson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Calvinism And Military Justice In American Literature, Nadia Hamilton Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores judicial process in the military as revealed in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny and Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. The purpose of my project was to conduct an in depth study of Essentialism in military justice that is indicative of a culturally specific form of information management, as revealed in these texts. Essentialism is a form of information management that relies upon classification qualified through intuitive knowledge and superficial signification. This signification is used to certify the existence of self-contained states that function as a metaphorical metonymy for multiple unknowns. Moreover, …

All The Things I'Ve Been, Richard Helmling

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard identifies narrative as a distinct type of knowledge created and reshaped by individuals as nodal points. The novel All the Things I've Been explores this paradigm in Postmodern thought by following a narrator disconnected from ostensible reality as he attempts to create a new explanatory narrative to excuse his own misdeeds. Living in a subterranean hole, he draws on elements of the literature he hoards about him to construct a plot that will account for a past he is unwilling or unable to confront.

Passing, Segregation, And Assimilation: How Nella Larsen Changed The Passing Novel, Vivian Maguire

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The two had lost touch when Clare's father died and Clare was forced to move in with her two white and racist aunts. When they meet again, Irene is living in Harlem with her two children and her husband, who practices medicine. Clare has married a successful businessman, John Bellew. Clare's husband however, is a white racist who is unaware that Clare is in fact black. …

In The Margins: Thresholds Of Text And Identity In U.S.-Mexico Border Literature, Allison E. Fagan

Dissertations

My project links discussions of U.S.-Mexico border literature's emphasis on marginalized identity with the growing textual studies interest in the marginal, often-invisible processes which aid the production and shape the reception of books. The dissertation not only calls attention to textual instability, or the places where the differing and even opposing intentions of authors, publishers, and editors often become strikingly clear, but also focuses on the political, racial, ethnic, and social instabilities inherent in publishing the work of borderlands writers. It advocates and advances a sustained attentiveness to the conditions under which border literature can and does get produced. Authors …

Uncommon Sense In Renaissance English Literature, Eric Byville

Dissertations

My project explores the distinctive union of Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan satire in Renaissance English drama, particularly the works of John Marston and William Shakespeare. Unlike Ben Jonson, who incorporated both Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan satire in his drama but did so in different plays (Catiline, Every Man Out), Marston and Shakespeare combined the two traditions in one and the same play, such as the former's Antonio's Revenge (1600) and The Malcontent (c. 1603) and the latter's Troilus and Cressida (1601) and Timon of Athens (c. 1606). They recognized and exploited a deep compatibility between the two traditions, a compatibility …

Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity In Early Modern Literature, Tripthi Pillai

Dissertations

A study of Renaissance literature's engagement with temporality, my project is a critical evaluation of the concept of early modern futurity, of which I propose three categories: "Material futurity"; "Biological futurity"; and "Political futurity." In the moments that I identify in texts composed during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns in England, I demonstrate that the future--as an idea--structures individuals' actions and ruptures social formations. Futurity, which I define as a play of multiple desires that exist simultaneously within our present beings, is a volatile agent of imagination in early modern literature. Futurity collides with the cultural sites of memory …

Katelyn's Story: Using Fiction To Combat High School Dropout, Cecilia La France

Graduate Research Papers

High school dropout continues to be a problem for schools, communities, and the individuals who leave an academic high school program. High school dropouts suffer in greater health problems, economic struggles, and legal issues than those who complete a high school program. Despite the persistence of the high school problem in American culture, young adult literature doesn't keep pace in representation of the subject. Additionally, among the limited number of books addressing the topic of high school dropout, female protagonists lack representation reflecting their percentage of the dropout rates.

Young adult literature provides readers a learning and reflection opportunity in …