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Around The World In 80 Days: Navigating Culturally Diverse Texts In Secondary English Education, Abby Boyer

Honors Theses

In the secondary English classroom, the inclusion of diverse texts holds importance in fostering a rich and inclusive learning environment that reflects the realities and complexities of our diverse world. Diverse texts encompass a wide range of voices, perspectives, and experiences that represent various cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. By incorporating such texts into the curriculum, educators not only honor the diversity of their students but also provide them with opportunities to engage critically with different narratives, develop empathy, and cultivate a deeper understanding of the complexities of the human experience.
Moreover, diverse texts offer …

Wordflight, Joey Gonnella

Theses and Dissertations

Exploring subjects revolving around the nature of images, language and their subsequent disseminationn through time, this paper weaves together seemingly unrelated topics from the hot air balloons of the Franco-Prussian war to the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson.

Painted As Political: The Cultural Significance Within Zitkala-Ša’S Boarding School Narratives, Toni Aguiar

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Zitkala-Ša was a Dakota writer, educator, and political activist who was and is widely influential within and outside of Native American communities during the twentieth century. As a child, Zitkala-Ša was sent to school at White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute, which spurred her writings in “School Days of an Indian Girl” recounting her experiences at the school and the struggles she faced. Though many scholars debate the activist choices she made in her later life as either pro or anti assimilation, some also extend this political criticism into her childhood experiences. My paper argues an alternative reading of these boarding …

Posthumanism In Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, And Reality/Ies Through Fiction, Eileen Kelley Pierce

English (MA) Theses

While fictional novels are often seen as a way to escape reality, their relation to reality and the ways in which they distort or reinforce our understandings of reality can provide significant insights into our cultural values and beliefs. Using posthumanist theory, I examine how understandings of selfhood and its relations to time and reality are complicated within three works of fiction and how those complications represent and articulate a societal shift in meaning and knowledge that is supported by posthumanist ideologies. The three works, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Wolf in White Van by John …

Book Review: Afternoons With Harper Lee, Lindsay G. Wong

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Victim Or Villain: Female Resilience And Agency In The Face Of Trauma In Chimamanda Adichie’S, Purple Hibiscus (2003) And Tsitsi Dangarembga’S, Nervous Conditions (1988), Adaobi Juliet Chukwuma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As long as disparities persist in the way women are treated as compared to their male counterparts, the issue of gender will continue to call forth literary productions. For this reason, female writers are on a mission to dismantle the stereotypes that keep women confined to societal roles. Grounded in a feminist framework, this study focuses on the gender disparity theme in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. The aim is to examine how these writers represent the trauma of women living in an African patriarchal system. The traumatic experiences of the female characters in both texts …

Obscured To Outspoken: Buchi Emecheta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, And Akwaeke Emezi As Case Studies In Nigerian Feminism, Ava Chuppe

Honors College Theses

Though about two decades separate their ascents to global renown, Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie represent two figureheads of the women’s literary tradition in Nigeria. While Adichie has embraced the “feminist” label to describe her work, Emecheta has proven more reluctant, divulging issues with the Western variety of the movement—namely, its deconstruction of the family. Nevertheless, Emecheta and Adichie engage with issues such as maternity, familial turmoil, and political unrest in the contexts of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria, respectively. In doing so, both writers demonstrate the unique manifestations of patriarchy brought about by colonial rule. In Emecheta’s novel The …

With Great Power: Using Comics To Facilitate Discussion Of Systemic Oppression In Higher Education Literature Classes, Keri Crist-Wagner

All Dissertations

Undergraduate student participation in general education classes constitutes a point of struggle for many educators, especially when it comes to lessons centered around systems of oppression like racism, sexism, or heterosexism. Using both constructivism and counter storytelling as theoretical frameworks, this multi-method phenomenological case study explored the experiences of undergraduate honors students in a semester long general education literature class. The purpose of this study was to 1) explore how comics can be used as a pedagogical tool in higher education classrooms to facilitate discussion of systems of oppression, 2) assess the ways in which students interacted with comics, and …

Our Author Is Crazy, Zani A. Meaders

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis delves into the realm of young adult (YA) fantasy literature, exploring how its meta-narrative elements, fast-paced story beats, and relatable characters can facilitate the acquisition of healthy coping mechanisms among its readers. In the preface, I discuss the importance of providing YA audiences with narratives that not only entertain but also serve as tools for navigating the complexities of adolescence. Drawing upon psychological theories and literary analysis, I argue that meta-awareness in YA fantasy can offer readers a unique perspective on their own struggles and encourage them to develop resilience and coping skills.

The accompanying YA Fantasy story …

Killdeer, Elizabeth Muscari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project investigates, through poetry, how women and nature intersect. Formal decisions depict themes of inheritance and the body through couplets, tercets, quatrains, contrapuntal, sonnets, among other free-verse forms.

Cultivating Awareness And The Importance Of Engaging High School Students In Food Justice Through Literary Exploration, Yeymi Rivera

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

To address social justice concerns, this essay explores the relationship between literature and food justice. Primarily, concentrating on utilizing literature as a teaching tool in the high school curriculum to focus on food inequalities. The main goal is to educate students and spread awareness of social injustice, encourage critical thinking, and help them to comprehend the concepts of food security and food access. Comparative narratives are expressed through literary works that captivate a large audience and make people think about difficult issues like food access, food security, food insecurity, and food deserts. In addition, I will design a lesson plan …

Homemade Language, Conservative Fro-Yo, And Sci-Fi Sloths: How Speculative Migration Fiction Confronts The Ends Of Worlds By Challenging The Nation-State, Zoe R. Scheuerman

English Honors Projects

This English literature thesis project explores an emerging, genre-defying body of fiction which I call “speculative migration fiction.” Speculative migration fiction imagines how ongoing global developments like climate change, technological development, and war may shape future migrations. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s conception of national culture, Wendy Brown’s theory of the border, and Caroline Levine’s understanding of literary form, as well as close readings from Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and 2 A.M. in Little America by Ken Kalfus, I argue that transnational migrations move toward becoming postnational migrations as migrants evade border …

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Rewrite The Past And Remember The Future: How Expatriates Built An Independent Ireland, Morgan Grabowski

English and Creative Writing Honors Papers

This paper seeks to answer the question “How did Ireland create a unique identity after gaining independence from England?” In order to answer that question, I analyzed five different Irish authors who wrote in a timeframe spanning the first half of the twentieth century. These authors are W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. These authors, at one point or another, wrote texts which are considered Irish, while living abroad. Because of this, this paper focuses on their status as expatriates, and how that influenced their contributions to the Irish Literary Revival, which is the literary …

Media Portrayals Of Mathematics And Mathematicians: An Annotated Bibliography Of Published Journal Articles, Sarah O'Connor '26

Education Student Scholarship

Sarah O'Connor ’26, Mathematics major
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kevin O’Conner, Secondary Education and Dr. Olga Limnios, English

Memory In Literature: Power & The Literary Canon, Chloe Alice Rattee

The Hugemanities Project Big Contest

In my project I explored how cultural memory applied to literature can open up the discussion to talk about how power is wielded by those that create a canon, literary or religious. I used William Blake's work to discuss how few educated, powerful people's interpretation of something so difficult and massive at The Bible can cut out perspectives or opinions that they don't want included in their teachings.

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this final portfolio, I examine anti-racist pedagogy in English Language Arts Education.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …

Trauma Is A Wound: Demonstrating The Use Of Character Analysis To Practice Clinical Analysis, Madisyn Beare

Honors Projects

Evidence-based treatments of trauma require clinicians to base their treatments on the client’s specific and individual needs, experiences, cognitions, and place in recovery. Essentially, each new client is a new and unique case, and the practice of understanding how trauma may affect an individual only comes from clinical exposure.Literature provides the public with somewhat of an aid in these circumstances: fictional characters are not real people, and therefore can undergo limitless character analyses. Analyzing a fictional character allows clinicians the ability to practice their exploration of various behavioral indicators of mental health concerns while honoring the ethical code of non-maleficence, …

The Reading Rooms: Reading For Pleasure In The Literature Classroom, Kalila Bohsali

English Language and Literature ETDs

The act of reading is the primary thing the literature classroom is concerned with and that is what this project seeks to claim and to understand, specifically the practice and process of reading for pleasure. This dissertation seeks to understand reading as a process, and reading for pleasure and to propose that students and instructors would benefit from paying more attention to reading for pleasure in the literature classroom, and being more transparent in how reading for pleasure is communicated as a shared value. Through a grounded theory interview project and an in-depth exploration of the different "rooms" in which …

Unraveling Paradise, Olivia Arslanian, Sydney King, Augustine Muller, Camryn Burns, Giana Napolitano

Development of Western Civilization Student Scholarship

The colloquium marks the culminating semester of the DWC experience. Over four semesters, students have achieved a grounding in major texts of the western tradition, engaged in deep reading and reflection, improved their communication skills, and are ready to make connections with their majors and careers. The colloquium allows them to utilize these skills and make the transition to their future academic work. In light of this, the Development of Western Civilization Program Committee has selected 5 DWC colloquium culminating projects that demonstrate excellence in communication and critical thinking skills. We are grateful to these students for their hard work …

Ideas Of Judaism In The Jew Of Malta And The Merchant Of Venice, Matthew Wilson

Development of Western Civilization Student Scholarship

The colloquium marks the culminating semester of the DWC experience. Over four semesters, students have achieved a grounding in major texts of the western tradition, engaged in deep reading and reflection, improved their communication skills, and are ready to make connections with their majors and careers. The colloquium allows them to utilize these skills and make the transition to their future academic work. In light of this, the Development of Western Civilization Program Committee has selected 5 DWC colloquium culminating projects that demonstrate excellence in communication and critical thinking skills. We are grateful to these students for their hard work …

“The Geopoetics Of An Undiscovered Continent: Eurasianism As A Writing Practice”, John Anthony Stachelski

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Drawing on extensive archival research and a comprehensive body of scholarship, this dissertation offers a critical reimagining of early 20th-century Eurasianism through the prism of literature and art. Beginning with the proto-Eurasianist schema introduced by Konstantin Leontiev in the 19th century, I argue that the influence of his deeply aestheticized combination of politics and religious thought is essential to understanding the work of Eurasianism’s founders Petr Savitsky and Petr Suvchinsky, the figures around whom the ideology’s major split occurred. This dissertation challenges the way Eurasianism has often been understood and portrayed in scholarship, and simultaneously presents an original argument about …

Poetics Of The Letter: Translation And Correspondence In Augusto De Campos And Ana Cristina Cesar, Craig Osterbrock

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation examines the poetics of translation of Augusto de Campos (1931- ) and Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983), two of Brazil’s most important poet-translators of the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that their respective poetics of translation can be interpreted as a form of correspondence in which the translator corresponds with the author of the source text and with the potential reader of the target text. The focus of Augusto’s response to the demands of this double correspondence is the “letter” understood as the materiality of the source and target text. His response to the source text …

La Traducción Política: El Silenciamiento Narrativo Y La Traducción Inglés-Español Bajo Francisco Franco, Avery Austin

World Languages and Cultures Student Papers and Posters

We tend to live under the assumption that translations will always attempt to be faithful to their original texts, blindly believing in the infallibility of the translator. However, in doing so, we ignore how translation can be used to take advantage of the reader – how can one know that a change has occurred in a translated work if they have no knowledge of the text’s original language? This paper studies the power dynamics of translation, and how it can be used as a tool to aid censorship. By focusing on translated literary works under the Franco regime, this work …

Adam Kucharski: Placing Poland At The Heart Of Irishness, John A. Merchant

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Adam Kucharski: Placing Poland at the Heart of Irishness. Irish Political Elites in Relation to Poland and the Poles in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. (Polish Studies – Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Bd. 29.) Peter Lang. Berlin u. a. 2020. 274 S., Ill., Kt. ISBN 978-3-631-81817-6. (€ 59,95.)

In order for a field of studies to be accepted as legitimate or viable there first needs to exist a collective body of scholarly work that elevates it above that of a niche interest or passing trend. The work under review is the latest in what can be now called without …

The Myths Of Plato: Socratic Kenosis And The Call Of Beauty, Daniel Edward Shirley

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

The myths of Plato have been inordinately subordinated to the “intellect” of Plato since the eighteen-thirties. The ancient Christian tradition of interpreting stories and scriptures with symbolic understanding serves as a potentially primary hermeneutical pattern that could correct the modern tendency of subconscious materialism. To restore the Platonic myths, there are two foundational arguments to be made about the myths. The first is that these myths are kenotic in function. Observing the Socratic call to self-emptying, especially in the cosmological image of the World Axis, challenges modern assumptions concerning the second goodness of Platonic myth. The second argument is the …

Analyzing The Cynical Perspective Of Death In The Book Thief, Dorothy Elizabeth Hollar

Masters Theses

In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, death is used as a theme and a character to convey the plot of the story. The character of death is used as a device to show the life of a young girl living in Nazi Germany through the eyes of something more sinister and pessimistic. The story explores trauma, friendship, and the power of words when it seems all hope is lost. This thesis will explore the aspect of death as a character and will examine how it works in the story. The creative portion of my thesis will examine the themes …

Oxford Conference For The Book Turns 30, Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Blog Posts

The storied Oxford Conference for the Book returns to the University of Mississippi and downtown Oxford venues April 3-5 for its 30th anniversary edition. A group of authors, including Willie Morris, Barry Hannah and Kaye Gibbons, convened April 2, 1993 for the first Oxford Conference for the Book to discuss the dependence of literary arts

Westview: Vol. 38, Iss. 1 (Spring 2024), Westview Staff

Westview

No abstract provided.