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Ballads And The Supernatural: Spells, Channs, Curses And Enchantments, Sheila Douglas

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

Plain Style, Or The High Fashion Of Empire: Colonialism, Resistance And Assimilation In Adam Smith's Lectures On Rhetoric And Belles Lettres, Lori Branch

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

Engaging Reluctant Readers: Let's Try Nonfiction, Kathryn Fitzgerald

The Utah English Journal

"If it's not fiction, it's not reading." Starkly put, that was my concept of worthwhile literature until recently with, I think, good reason. Not only do we English teachers love reading good fiction, but we know that valuable lessons are taught through literature: students learn about themselves and their own life choices through reading about recognizable fictional characters; they experience cultures and times other than their own by reading diverse current and classical fiction; they learn to think critically about the beliefs and values they are exposed to through fiction (and to reflect on their own beliefs); they learn empathy …

Using Young Adult Literature : A Classic Way To Teach English, Matt B. Pries

Graduate Research Papers

Students are reading less, and enjoying reading less. Sticking to the same curriculum year after year in the hope that student attitude will suddenly change, that there will be an awakening in the classroom, and students will read the classics with enthusiasm cannot be done. It is a false hope. But there can be an awakening.

Using young adult literature in the high school English classroom is the solution. It will give new hope to teachers that as students come to enjoy reading, they will be more apt to, not only read more, but eventually come to read the classics. …

Storytelling From The Margins: The Healing Narratives Of J. California Cooper, Cynthia Downing Bryant

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the therapeutic qualities of selected short stories and novels by contemporary African American woman writer, J. California Cooper. Specifically, I examine the manner in which Cooper's texts can be appreciated as "healing narratives." Healing narratives, as defined in this study, are those texts in which the author consciously creates fictitious representations of reality, while employing the concept of hope as a central and guiding factor. Those aspects of the narrative that have the ability to heal or "lay hands on" a reader vary because the effectiveness of the story depends upon how well the reader can identify …

Against Biopoetics: On The Use And Misuse Of The Concept Of Evolution In Contemporary Literary Theory, Bradley Bankston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a critical assessment of "biopoetics:" a new literary theory that attempts to import ideas from evolutionary science to the study of literature. Borrowing from the field of evolutionary psychology, the biopoeticists argue that some literary forms and themes are particularly valuable because they result from our innate and evolved cognitive structure; they also attempt to create a normative aesthetic from the idea that evolution is progressive. In its first half, this study examines the claims of evolutionary psychology and their application by the biopoeticists; in the second half, it examines the idea that evolution is progressive, and …

Mothering Modes: Analyzing Mother Roles In Novels By Twentieth-Century United States Women Writers, Preselfannie Whitfield Mcdaniels

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For this dissertation, the following novels have been chosen as examples of the many issues that are involved in mothering in United States society: Chapter 1: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Chapter 2: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Dorothy West’s The Wedding, Chapter 3: Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Chapter 4: Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. For this study, the term “mothering” is specifically related to the rearing of children by the female parent. Rearing is defined as …

William Faulkner And The Oral Text, Gregory Alan Borse

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The disjunction between the oral and the literate in the works of William Faulkner reveals the different ways these distinct modes of organization combine to structure a text. The oral in Faulkner's fiction makes its presence known not only as offset speech but also as a mode of action and narrative whose logic is conjunctive rather than disjunctive. According to the literate mode, a form organizes novelistic matter. According to the oral mode, forces that function as signs rather than organizers of their form rule the action and narrative. When the disjunction between the oral and the literate is so …

When The Carnival Is Over : Peter Barnes' Red Noses And The Theories Of Mikhail Bakhtin, Duncan A. Sharp

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Peter Barnes, acknowledged as one of Britain's most important contemporary playwrights, writes plays that are of an enormous scale, both physically and intellectually. Red Noses is one such play. Like Barnes' other works, Red Noses makes great technical demands on directors, designers, actors and audiences. As with all of Barnes' plays, Red Noses is, moreover, informed by a wide variety of theatrical styles. As Bernard Dukore (1990, p. 65) states, actors may be required to quickly "switch from intellectual discourse, to period argot, to poetry, to modern slang, to rhetoric, to musical comedy, to ritual, to dance, to opera, to …

Pan African Narratives: Sites Of Resistance In The Black Diaspora, Anita Louise Harris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Africa as a point of reference for Africans dispersed from her shores and their descendants in the Diaspora has perpetuated discourse of longing and ambivalence. For centuries these various sentiments have emerged in Black literary expressions. The quest of this study is to advance Black narrative tradition by proposing a theoretical framework informed by these constructs and predicaments to establish a genre of literature referred to here as Pan African narratives. This work looks at Black response to the dilemma of dispersal and dislocation in the Diaspora from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. More specifically, it examines the emergence …

Routes Of Freedom: Slave Resistance And The Politics Of Literary Geography, Judith Louise Kemerait

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation integrates rhetorical, historical, and spatial analysis in an effort to expand our understanding of the cultural work performed by antebellum narratives that take slavery in the United States as their subject matter. Specifically, it focuses on the complicated relationship between place and human praxis as revealed in five texts: The Confessions of Nat Turner, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Martin R. Delany’s Blake, Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In my attention to literary geographies, I trace spatial patterns in which considerations of organized resistance and slave rebellion are repeatedly placed in “wild-spaces” such as …

Translating Modern Short Story: Drying Out Joyce's "Clay", M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Cambridge Companion To Gothic Fiction, Edited By Jerrold E. Hogle; European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960, Edited By Avril Horner; Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography By David Lorne Macdonald; Gothic Writers: A Critical And Bibliographical Guide, Edited By Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, And Frederick S. Frank; British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, And The Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 By Toni Wein; And Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, The Uncanny And Literature By Julian Wolfreys, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Fantasies Of (Re)Collection: Collecting And Imagination In A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, John J. Su

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Threshold, Clifford Lavelle Blodgett

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Clifford L. Blodgett mixes the worlds of Psychological Realism, Technology and Humor. His ingenious blend of modern prose and cinematic techniques makes this piece a page turning adventure. With the swagger representing the new generation of authors, Blodgett's first attempt at longer fiction is in one word, riveting. In Threshold a young Midwestern man, obsessed with the new trends of technology, finds a job in New York City. Worlds collide as the man attempts to extract revenge against his now former employer and the greatest figurehead ever, West-Coast rapping sensation C Ryder G.

Morbidity: Poetry And Prose, Robert P. Hansen

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The Freudian concept of thanatos, the death instinct, plays a pivotal role in the following collection of fiction and poetry, and also in the nonfictional introductory chapter. In the tradition of Poe, unreliable narrators of questionable morality are used to explore, through fiction, the psychological characteristics of this death instinct, while in the poetry, the subject matter and perspective has been strongly influenced by Ai's work. Each story reflects in some way death, destruction, or criminal activity, and, as might be expected, dead bodies tend to show up in various and sundry places, sometimes where they would be expected, and …

The Shifting Frontiers Of Belonging In The Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee, Dawn Grieve

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis is an examination of the fictional works of J.M. Coetzee to date. There are two aspects to my argument. First I posit that Coetzee adumbrates the prevailing crisis of belonging in the world and the universal yearning for a sense of connectedness. Secondly, I maintain that Coetzee prompts a review of the demarcation lines that divide and alienate in two ways. He installs boundaries that are shifting and. unstable. He also represents numerous frontier transgressions that expose the permeability of these finite conceptual constructions and reveals their potential for revision. It is my contention that Coetzee exploits the …

Re-Examining Vonnegut: Existential And Naturalistic Influences On The Author's Work, Marybeth Davis

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis looks at several Vonnegut novels through both the lenses of existentialism and naturalism, claiming that each is just as important and present in his work as the other. It examines his life, as well, and how his experiences and observations on life tie into his writing.

Midwife And Mother: Maternal Metaphors In The Composition Classroom, Cynthia Britt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examines the maternal metaphors of midwife and mother used to describe instructors and teaching practices in the composition classroom. In the introduction the author describes her interest in the topic based on her own experiences as a mother and as a beginning composition instructor. The paper explains the initiation of the metaphors, what the metaphors and maternal pedagogy mean in terms of classroom practices and philosophies, criticisms of maternal practices, and the relevancy and legitimacy of the metaphors and maternal pedagogy in classrooms today. Section one explores the development of the metaphors to describe composition teachers related to …

Breaking The Bonds Of Silence: The Immigrant Experience In Magical Realist Novels Of Katherine Vaz And Chitra Divakaruni., Hillary Dawn Hester

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The genre of Magical Realism is normally explored on the sole basis of its identification with and fantastic expression of Latin-American cultural identity. However, the genre, when employed by non-American immigrant women, takes on new characteristics. It not only highlights the mystical underpinnings of everyday life but instructs in a subliminally didactic manner by opening the reader to new possibilities through delightful imagery and a plot woven around transposed myth and folklore.

In examining how two female Magical Realists translate their narratives of immigrant life in twentieth-century United States, the instructive nature of the genre is laid bare. Both use …

To Glory Or To Ruin : Guinevere And Vivien In Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls Of The King, And Edwin Arlington Robinson's Merlin And Lancelot, Eunice W. Carwile

English & Modern Languages: Theses, Dissertations & Student Publications

From Malory's Morte Darthur, through Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and through Robinson's Merlin and Lancelot, Guinevere and Vivien evolve from mere servants of a masculine plot and theme to well-rounded characters who struggle with the same problems that confront their male counterparts. Malory's world is about knights, warfare, and a holy quest, with women acting or reacting in certain ways only to move the plot along. While Tennyson develops female characters more fully than Malory, the great Victorian pays no homage to Arthurian womankind, bringing to his work a philosophy of sin-weakness-destruction that makes Vivien an evil seductress and …

John Milton, Blackfriars Spectator?: "Elegia Prima" And Ben Jonson's The Staple Of News, Timothy J. Burbery

English Faculty Research

In the spring of 1626 John Milton was temporarily expelled from Cambridge University, perhaps over a quarrel with his tutor William Chappell, and sent home to London, where he remained for at least several weeks. There, the seventeen-year-old poet composed his first elegy, a Latin verse-letter to his closest friend, Charles Diodati. In it, Milton claims to be enjoying his unexpected holiday by reading, girl watching, and attending the theater. Milton scholars have never reached consensus about his alleged playgoing, for while the young man speaks as a spectator, the plots and characters he mentions-these include comic types such as …

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Body Of Her Own: Cultural Constructions Of The Female Body In A.S. Byatt's Strange Stories, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Byatt's short fiction, from her first collection Sugar and Other Stories (1987) to Elementals (1998) is marked by a continuous preoccupation with the body: the body as the product of social signifying practices, the body as the site of desires, fears, and anxieties, the body as the source of experience, the body as creator and created. In brief, the body is treated as the centre of existence, consciousness and identity. Yet, these are constantly called into doubt in Byatt's stories, which depict heroines trapped between asserting their identity and submitting to cultural dictates of beauty and behavior. In …

Ravers At The Bush: Generation Ecstasy Goes To The Theatre, William C. Boles

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Determining that seminal moment when a new theatrical movement comes to life has been one of the points of debate surrounding the challenging new plays and their talented, twenty something authors that have appeared on the British stage since the mid-1990s. Plays and authors like: Mojo (1995) by Jez Butterworth; Blasted (1995) by Sarah Kane; Closer (1997) by Patrick Marber; The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) by Martin McDonagh; Butterfly Kiss (1994) by Phyllis Nagy; Love and Understanding (1997) by Joe Penhall; Essex Girls (1994) by Rebecca Prichard; Shopping and Fucking (1996) by Mark Ravenhill; and Ashes and …

The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 12, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Main Street at the Great American History Theatre in St. Paul: A Review,” by George Killough, College of St. Scholastica

“Main Street Revisited,” by Robert L. McLaughlin, Illinois State University

“Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on Sinclair Lewis: Glimpses Too Brief,” by Rodger L. Tarr, Illinois State University

“The Lewis-Hemingway Connection-Again,” by Martin Bucco, Colorado State University

“More on the Thoreau Connection,” by George Killough, College of St. Scholastica

“Main Street Invites Interpretations: Theater Review,” by Carolyn Petrie, St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Lewis as Pornography,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

Pivotal Transformations: The Changing Voice In Anne Sexton's Poetry, Lara L. Plate

Theses & Honors Papers

Critics such as Ralph Mills, Suzanne Juhasz, and Jane McCabe have generally focused on the confessional or feminist aspects of Anne Sexton's poetry, most especially in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1966), and Love Poems (1969). Those who have examined Transformations (1971)-and its fairy-tale world-have also paid particular attention either to its feminist approach or its confessional connections. These critics suggest that Sexton exists in her poetry as a confessional poet striving to move beyond parental restrictions and childhood experiences or they reveal Sexton as either "Madonna or Witch." These …

Eng 3800-001: Medieval English Literature, F Mcgregor

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.

Eng 3405-001: Children's Literature, John David Moore

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.

Eng 5006-001: Modern Sexualities, Ruth Hoberman

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.