Digital Commons Network^™

Device Design Factors For Enhancing The Functionality Of Chronic Intracortical Microelectrodes, Heui Chang Lee

Open Access Dissertations

Intracortical microelectrodes are devices used in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to help regain lost motor, sensory, and cognitive functions of individuals with neurological disorders. However, the long-term performance of microelectrode arrays is hampered by a series of inflammatory tissue responses. The consequence of the inflammatory response is the formation of a dense astroglial sheath around the vicinity of the electrode, impeding the electrical conduction between the electrode and neurons. Furthermore, due to the cascade of neuroinflammatory events, the number of neurons is significantly reduced near the electrode, manifested by decrease in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the yield of electrodes. Over time, …

Poetry Matters: Radical Politics In Postmodern American Poetry, Christopher J. Padgett

Open Access Dissertations

Directly or indirectly, poetry produced in the postmodern era is implicated in the politics of the time. Postmodern American poetry, then, is not reducible to a single poetic mode or to a specific set of stylistic features. In other words, a more comprehensive understanding of postmodern American poetry can be made by employing a flexible version of Raymond Williams’ notion of uneven development, a theory that insists on the synchronic existence of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements. As the stylistically and politically diverse work of the six poets—Susan Howe, Robert Grenier, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Sherman Alexie, and Kenneth …

Multi-Perspective Interview Of Video Streaming Featuring: Leandra Preston-Sidler, University Of Central Florida; Kiren Shoman, Sage Publishing; And Michael Arthur, The University Of Alabama, Katina Strauch, Tom Gilson

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Minor Transnational Writing In Ireland, Borbála Faragó

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Minor Transnational Writing in Ireland" Borbála Faragó investigates the poetic work of some of Ireland's migrant writers through the lens of minor transnationalism. Ireland's peculiar migration history where there are two quite distinct groups of inward migrants, requires careful rethinking of terminology. Faragó proposes to circumnavigate the binary approach of investigating center versus periphery and instead look for lateral connections between marginalized groups. Reading the works of Ireland's internal others brings to the fore issues of authenticity, ethics, and identity that can foreground some of the ambiguities inherent in transnational studies today. Interpreting the oeuvre of these …

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Traversing The Borders Of Écriture Migrante And Transnational Writing In Québec, Catherine Khordoc

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Traversing the Borders of écriture migrante and Transnational Writing in Québec" Catherine Khordoc questions the relevance of the term écriture migrante, which has become a type of ghetto for writers who have immigrated, creating an implicit expectation that immigrant writers write exclusively about experiences of immigration and exile. She proposes a transnational approach as an alternative way of considering contemporary Québécois writing, examining works written by immigrants alongside works by non-immigrants. She discusses four novels, two by authors who have immigrated to Québec (Émile Ollivier and Dany Laferrière), and two by authors who were born and raised in …

Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Immigrant and Irish Identities in Hand in the Fire and Hamilton's Writing between 2003 and 2014" Dervila Cooke discusses the intertwining of Irish and immigrant identities. Cooke examines the connection between openness to memory and embracing migrant identities in Hamilton's writing both in the 2010 novel and as a whole. The empathetic and inclusive character of Helen in Hand in the Fire is analyzed in contrast to characters who have repressed memory including the Serbian Vid. Helen's ties to elsewhere, her openness to new influence, and her willingness to engage with traumatic elements of the past (Irish …

Competing Visions And Current Debates In Interculturalism In Québec, Marie Mcandrew

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Competing Visions and Current Debates in Interculturalism in Québec" Marie McAndrew posits that interculturalism is the quest for a middle path between Canadian multiculturalism (criticized for essentializing and isolating cultures) and French Jacobinism (which relegates diversity to the private sphere). The theoretical underpinnings of the three approaches are first compared using major works in political philosophy, sociology of ethnic relations, and social psychology. The polysemic nature of actual policies is then explored through the example of Québec's immigration society where two versions of interculturalism developed since the late 1970s and are still competing. McAndrew analyzes four recent …

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

Postcolonial Writing In France Before And Beyond The 2007 Littérature-Monde Manifesto, Myriam Louviot

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Postcolonial Writing in France before and beyond the 2007 Littérature-monde Manifesto" Myriam Louviot discusses the evolution of postcolonial writing in France. She argues that postcolonial writers often face great difficulty in achieving recognition as legitimate French authors. Louviot suggests that restrictive boundaries of categorization have started to become blurred but that it is still too early to rejoice, partly due to the continuing cultural ghettoization of many of these writers and the traditional differentiation of their work from French literature. Louviot discusses in detail the 2007 Pour une "littérature-monde" en français initiated by Michel Le Bris and …

Young People's Literature Of Algerian Immigration In France, Anne Schneider

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young People's Literature of Algerian Immigration in France" Anne Schneider discusses questions of language, hybridity, and heritage in some works for young people published in France about Algeria and/or Algerian-French identity, by Leïla Sebbar, Jean-Paul Nozière, Azouz Begag, and Michel Piquemal. She argues for the need for an intercultural education at primary school that uses literature about immigration to highlight questions of place, belonging, exile and language. Schneider's focus is on Begag's Un train pour chez nous (2001) and Piquemal's Mon miel, ma douceur (2004). These texts use linguistic hybridity and an emphasis on common human experiences …

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

And They Were There--Reports Of Meetings, Ramune K. Kubilius

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Decoder Ring--Ala Takeaways And Fall Follow-Ups, Jerry Spiller

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

Book Reviewed By Ezekiel Joubert Iii: Lam, K. D. (2015). Youth Gangs, Racism, And Schooling: Vietnamese American Youth In A Postcolonial Context. New York, Ny: Springer. 179 Pp. $47.45 (Hardcover). Isbn: 978-1-137-47558-9., Ezekiel Joubert Iii

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Book Reviewed by Ezekiel Joubert III: Lam, K. D. (2015). Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling: Vietnamese American Youth in a Postcolonial Context. New York, NY: Springer

The Ecological Posthuman In Lee's Tarboy And Tan And Ruhemann's The Lost Thing, Başak Ağın

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Ecological Posthuman in Lee's [BA1] Tarboy and Tan and Ruhemann's The Lost Thing" Başak Ağın analyzes the posthumanist and ecological elements in two animated short films, James Lee's Tarboy (2009) and Shaun Tan's and Andrew Ruhemann's The Lost Thing (2010). Ağın posits that the two animated short films display a disanthropocentric worldview through the enmeshed relations between humans, techno-sentient beings, and naturalcultural hybrid bodies. The intermingled fusions of these biotic and abiotic forms are inherently characterized by a sense of posthuman ecocriticism. Basing her arguments on the notions of agential realism and new materialisms, Ağın …

The Evolution Of The Vampire From Stoker's Dracula To Meyer's Twilight Saga, Dijana Vučković, Ljiljana Pajović Dujović

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Evolution of the Vampire from Stoker's Dracula to Meyer's Twilight Saga" Dijana Vučković and Ljiljana Pajović Dujović analyze the metamorphosis of the vampire character from the Victorian fin de siècle to the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer. Vučković and Pajović Dujović consider the evolution of the vampire in the context of several important changes: emergence of the vampire from the dark/death in the light/life and separation from the home soil; improving the vampire species through crossbreeding, i.e., hybridization with people; bringing the characteristics of vampires closer to very desirable human characteristics and losing those properties …

Circus As Idée Fixe And Hunger, Anna-Sophie Jürgens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Circus as idée fixe and Hunger" Anna-Sophie Jürgens discusses circus fiction in which characters often display extreme, intense psychological traits. They are for example irascible, pyromaniac, sadistic, or megalomaniac. Particularly striking are protagonists with alternative psychological attitudes in fictional circus texts of the twentieth century such as Franz Kafka's hunger artist, Michael Raleigh's ringmaster Lewis Tully or Richard Schmitt's aerialist Garry, who can be seen as incubators of circus-related idées fixes. These literary circus characters develop fixations on circus that manifest themselves as a physical sensation of desiring circus like food, in other words: in circus …

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

Delillo's Falling Man And The Trouble With Sympathy In Narratives Of Terrorism, Jessica Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "DeLillo's Falling Man and the Trouble with Sympathy in Narratives of Terrorism" Jessica McDonald discusses the ways Don DeLillo's characterization of a 9/11 terrorist elicits reader sympathy in his 2007 novel Falling Man. McDonald argues that introducing sympathy into narratives of terrorism undermines attempts to understand the contextual issues out of which terrorism arises even if the rhetoric of sympathy may seem to foster a sense of "fellow-feeling" that makes acts of political protest and resistance more accessible to broader publics.

All Pbl Starts Here: The Problem, Woei Hung

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

One essential piece of implementing of PBL is the problem. There have been calls from practitioners in the PBL field for a systematic process for designing effective PBL problems. Yet, the research efforts to explore, develop, and test PBL problem design methods or processes are still sparse. From an instructional designer and researcher’s perspective, I deem problem design to be the first step to ensure not only the proper affordance of the learning goal but also the students’ overall learning process in PBL implementation. PBL problem design is the area I have studied most consistently and passionately. In this paper, …

Superheroes And Social Action: Reproduction, Recurrence, And Recognition In The Superhero Genre, Max M. Renner

Open Access Theses

Rhetorical genre analysis examines genre as social action and is primarily concerned with the experiences of individual users (Miller, 1984). The genres that rhetorical genre scholarship takes up are typically functional genres or genres in which individuals have direct means of utilizing and modifying a genre. This focus on functional genres makes sense in terms of the tradition’s interest in user experience and reciprocity. This project seeks to examine the potential implications rhetorical genre analysis has for vernacular genres which, for the most part, have remained the domain of literary scholarship due to their focus on structural, formal elements.

This …

Help-Seeking Intention Among College Students: Cross-Cultural Study Between East Asian International Students And Domestic Students In The Unites States, Ji Yun Kang

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to understand East Asian international student’s underutilization of counseling services (versus U.S. domestic students) by applying Theory of Reasoned Action/Planned Behavior (TRA/PB) and Ludwikowski, Vogel, and Armstrong (2009)’s stigma model to help-seeking. Participants were 146 East Asian international students and 210 domestic college students at Purdue University. AMOS 23.0 for Structural Equation Modeling was used to conduct a Latent Mean Analysis (LMA) and a multigroup analysis. The multigroup analysis results found that help-seeking intention was explained by the same hypothesized model in both groups, which was based on the TRA/PB (Ajzen, 2012) and the …

Pedagogy And Profit: Multiethnic Literature, Gender And Young Adult Publishing, Allison S. Layfield

Open Access Dissertations

This project argues that the adult/young adult division has the effect of maintaining social difference—especially along the lines of race and gender—while simultaneously ignoring the process of maintaining social hierarchies that occurs during the publication, reviewing and educational selection processes. Chapter One brings together the history of YAL as a pedagogical tool with its publishing history in order to show that both forces have redefined the genre in response to changing notions of social responsibility tied to American citizenship. There were five major eras within the history of young adult literature, each of which responded to changing notions of citizenship. …

Knitting Rebellion: Elizabeth Zimmermann, Identity, And Craftsmanship In Post War America, Maureen Lilly Marsh

Open Access Dissertations

At mid 20th century, hand knitting in the United States was practiced as a minor and fading chore of the domestic economy, with decreasing pattern publications in national women’s magazines, and the demise of Vogue Knitting Book by the late nineteen-sixties. By 1990, it had rebounded into major new publications in periodicals and books, new and revived artisanship practices, gallery exhibitions and major international conferences and gatherings. A driving figure in this resurgence was the knitter, writer, teacher, designer, and publisher Elizabeth Zimmermann. With her initial publication in 1955 up to her retirement in 1989, Elizabeth’s philosophy of knitting stressed …

About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In his article "About the Concept of 'Gnosticism' in Fiction Studies" Fryderyk Kwiatkowski notices that in the twentieth-century humanities the concept of Gnosticism has become a popular term for labelling tendencies in modernity and postmodernity. Kwiatkowski argues that the majority of scholars in fiction studies base their research on outdated methodologies. In consequence, Kwiatkowski presents an overview of contemporary approaches in Gnostic studies and discusses how they can be adapted in studies of literature, film, video games, comic books, etc. By outlining advantages and disadvantages of methodological approaches, Kwiatkowski posits that in studies of fiction with Gnostic components it …

Democracy And The Industrial Imagination In American Education, Steven Fesmire

Education and Culture

Educational politics in the United States is entangled in the notion that the foremost mission of education is, in the infamous words of Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed revision of the University of Wisconsin’s mission, “to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs.” This general outlook is not an outlier. It is typical of those who approach education primarily as a way to fuel industry with skilled labor. This outlook is premised on an increasingly dominant educational model that is miseducative, antidemocratic, and incompatible with values of mutual respect and individual dignity. It is helpful to analyze the industrial …

Systematic Review Of The Funds Of Knowledge Framework In Stem Education, Dina Verdin, Allison Godwin, Brenda Capobianco

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

This theory paper examines literature on the construct, funds of knowledge, as it has been applied in STEM education, with an emphasis on engineering and explores if and how funds of knowledge has been used to understand first-generation college students in engineering. Using a systematic literature review, we describe how the framework of funds of knowledge has been adopted in the engineering education literature. Funds of knowledge is a conceptual framework that has been concerned with social justice issues around validity and impacts of deficit theorizing (a theory that points to the underachievement of minority groups on perceived deficiencies related …

Young Adults In Sweden On Reading Literary Fiction In Print And Electronic Media, Skans Kersti Nilsson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young Adults in Sweden on Reading Literary Fiction in Print and Electronic Media" Skans Kersti Nilsson analyses 16-25 year old young adults' reflections on the reading of fiction in printed books versus electronic media. In Nilsson's study focus group interviews were conducted to gauge how conversations on the importance of reading literary fiction develop inside and outside the learning environment of school. The results suggest that young adults derive benefit from reading fiction and that they think this activity yields more benefits than reading fiction on electronic media or viewing filmed literature. Results also suggest that participants …