Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Student Expectations And Motivation In Spanish For Heritage Speakers Programs, Sergio A. Guzman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The changing demographics in the United States and the growing need for multilingual individuals originated by globalization, among other reasons, have contributed to the emergence of a new field within the area of Applied Linguistics: The Teaching and Learning of Heritage Languages. Due to historical and geographic causes, Spanish for Heritage Speakers (SHS) is currently the largest and most established of these programs. However, the curricula, like those of most college courses, has been developed from professors’ perspectives, largely ignoring what students want to learn and/or their motives for enrolling in these classes. The lack of student input is especially …

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …

Pink Is The New Bull: The Feminization Of Pit Bulls In Visual And Literary Discourses As A Rescue Tactic, Stephanie Hogue

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Since the 1980s, pit bulls have been portrayed in a raced, classed, and gendered national discourse that has associated them with minority males of color in low-income urban areas. This discourse has led to a villianization of the breed that has resulted in restrictions on pit bulls and their owners. This project seeks to explore the raced, classed, and gendered representations of pit bulls in cultural productions and the nuanced ways in which the intersectional identities ascribed to pit bulls have impacted their status as acceptable pets in the United States.

I aim to demonstrate that through visual and literary …

Only The Earth Remains: Exploring The Machine In Selected Lyric Poetry Of Robinson Jeffers, Mark Hutton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, Leo Marx “evaluates the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience” (Marx 4). While Marx explores ways that pastoralism has been impacted by factors such as industrialism, it is the purpose of this project to explore Marx’s assertion regarding the presence of the figurative and literal machine within the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers’ poetry is generally located within the landscapes of California. His lyric poetry has a distinct connection to the land and is driven by inhumanism, which works to shift …

The Relationship Between African- American Male Education And Employment Opportunities Through The Lenses Of Critical Race Theory And Stereotype Threat In The Historical Context Of The 1965 Moynihan Report, Robert Paul Walker

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to examine the connection between education and employment outcomes for African American males through the dual lenses of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Stereotype Threat (ST) in the historical context of the 1965 Moynihan Report. A qualitative case study design allowed for the collection of rich data through in-depth interviews designed to elicit the Black male participants’ perspectives and lived experience of education and employment. For more than fifty years, the trajectory of African American male education and employment has been a negative one. This study documented, in their own voice, the African American …

Black Australia ‘Writes Back’ To The Literary Traditions Of Empire, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In her article "Black Australia 'Writes Back' to the Literary Traditions of Empire" Danica Čerče discusses the verse of Australian Indigenous authors Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor, notable for the overt objection to the institutional and historical processes. These have enabled and maintained the dominant position of those identified as white on the one hand, and the concomitant political, economic, and cultural subordination of Indigenous Australians on the other. Focused on strategies and poetic devices used by the two poets to engage non-Indigenous readers in the experience of their writing, the article examines how the rhetoric of their critique …

The Postmodern Novel In Saudi Arabia And America, Mohammed Lafi Alshammari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the early twenty-first century, Saudi Arabia is a global economic power that stands as an equal among the other members of the most powerful economic organizations, including as the Group of Twenty and The World Trade Organization. As a result of this economic status and of Saudi Arabia never having been colonized, recent Saudi novels (especially those published after 2001) can usefully be read postmodern, rather than as postcolonial—the usual paradigm in readings of contemporary Arab novels. To establish a reference point, a comparative approach that engages Saudi and American postmodern novels is applied in this dissertation through the …

Allowing The Untellable To Visit: Investigating Digital Folklore, Ptsd And Stigma, Geneva Harline

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the introduction of 2012 issue of The Journal of Folklore Research, Diane Goldstein and Amy Shuman issue a “call to arms for folklorists … to concentrate on the vernacular experience of the stigmatized.” (Goldstein and Shuman, 2012:116). Drawing on this call to arms, this thesis investigates how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is portrayed in social media through memes and captioned images. I argue that the genres of memes and captioned images in digital folklore work to help mitigate the stigma of PTSD because the veneer of anonymity in the digital world allows people with PTSD to be willing …

From Eden To Dystopia: An Ecocritical Examination Of Emergent Mythologies In Early Los Angeles Literary Texts, Jaquelin Pelzer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In From Eden to Dystopia: An Ecocritical Examination of Emergent Mythologies in Early Los Angeles Literary Texts, ecocriticism and critical regionalism were utilized alongside other American Studies practices to analyze nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century depictions of nature in Los Angeles. Specifically, these tools were applied to travel guides and narratives of the 1870s and 1880s, the turn-of-the-century magazine The Land of Sunshine, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1926) and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), and other non-fiction publications of the 1920s and ’30s to track an evolving narrative of Los Angeles as a paradise and later as a place perched …

(Dis)Appearing Subjects: Managing Violence Through The Discourse Of Bullying, Rachel E. Levitt

American Studies ETDs

In the early 2000’s, “bullying” became the new center of LGBTQ justice organizing. As part of this development a bullied subject emerged. This bullied person on whose behalf liberation was being sought took various forms from the bullied school shooter, to the cyberbullying victim, to the bullied suicidal queer. As the subtitle of my dissertation suggests, I focus on “managing violence through the discourse of bullying.” This marks a two part process: how the discourse of bullying manages to do violence and how it manages populations biopolitically. This study tackles one of the core paradoxes that inform the formation of …

American Made (Movie Review), Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Seal is the subject of the new quasi-biopic 'American Made,' a man whose story by itself ought to destroy all sanctity and high-mindedness about America’s War on Drugs."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the movie American Made from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/american-made/

Our History Is The Future: Mni Wiconi And The Struggle For Native Liberation, Nick Estes

American Studies ETDs

From April 2016 to February 2017, Indigenous women and youth led a historic struggle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing Mni Sose, the Missouri River, and threatening the drinking water of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and millions downstream. Rallied under the banner Mni Wiconi, a Lakota assertion meaning “water is life,” centuries of history converged during the protests. It was about more than an oil pipeline. It was struggle over the meaning of history, the defense of land and water, and the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own future. When land and …

Pigs, Pastures, Pepper Pickers, Pitchforks: Carl Sandburg’S Rootabaga Stories And The Tall Tale, Michael Heyman

Faculty Works

Past studies of American nonsense literature have tended to lump it together with the British, for many good reasons. This article, however, distinguishes American nonsense from the British by way of its folk origins and cultural context. One of the least-recognized writers of nonsense is Carl Sandburg, who is famous for his iconic American poetry, but his Rootabaga Stories (1922–30) are some of the best and most distinctive representatives of the genre. Sandburg’s nonsense short stories are lyrical and strange, but their value lies also in their distinctive American origins. They are distinguished in having particularly American themes, cultural tendencies, …

Transnational Abolitionist Rhetoric To End Modern Slavery, Laura Barrio-Vilar

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In his 1998 autobiography, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, Jean-Robert Cadet denounces the horrors of modern child slavery as he narrates his life journey. Emotionally, physically, and sexually abused under the restavek system, Cadet migrates with his “masters” to the United States, where he pursues a formal education, joins the army, and acquires a middle-class status.

Today, Cadet has his own organization, dedicated to ending child slavery in Haiti through education and advocacy. In this presentation, I analyze how Cadet adopts conventional genre characteristics of slave narratives and U.S. migration literature in order to enter the …

Arresting Narratives: Incommensurability, Policing, And Settler Security, Darcy H. Brazen

American Studies ETDs

Settler colonialism is interrogated through the practice of arrest. Case studies of arrests at Standing Rock validate the historical salience of settler colonialism as a structure enabling Indigenous elimination and settler replacement that is dependent upon arrest to maintain and enhance settler lives and the settler project through unfettered access to Native land and resources for capital accumulation. Arrest is analyzed in relationship to statehood initiatives, the procuring of settler security, frontier feminism, and road signage in the masculine zones of travel in 1930s North Dakota. Contemporaneous reports from Standing Rock, the memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman and newspaper articles …

Book Review Of Emma Creedon, Sam Shepard And The Aesthetics Of Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Katherine Weiss

ETSU Faculty Works

Review of Emma Creedon, Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xi + 199 pp., $90.00.

Collins, Gary & Tammy Pickering (Fa 346), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 346. Paper titled "Hog Killing in Western Kentucky" in which Gary Collins and Tammie Pickering discuss the cultural significance of farm-raising hogs and the foodways traditions that result from the slaughtering process. Using slides and interviews, Collins and Pickering document a hog killing that took place in January 1986 on a farm in Trigg County, Kentucky.

Pickering, Tammie & Gary Collins (Fa 348), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 348. Student paper titled “Trees in Folk Crafts” in which Tammie Pickering and Gary Collins explore the connection between trees and traditional folkways. Paper details the medicinal properties of sassafras tea, which is made from tree roots, the production of maple syrup, and the expressive crafts of wood-carving and carpentry. Data collected from three working-class residents of Caldwell County. Paper also includes field journals, recorded interviews, and transcripts.

Hensley, Jennifer Lynn (Fa 351), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 351. Paper titled "The Music Barn" in which Lynn Hensley discusses the founding of The Music Barn, a local music venue in Warren County, Kentucky. Hensley's main informant is Joe Marshall, a country music artist, community organizer, and owner of The Music Barn.

Fox, Randy (Fa 350), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

FFinding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 350. Paper titled "Fiddle About: Ed Carnes-Contest Fiddler" in which Randy Fox charts the history of fiddle playing and the rise of "contest fiddling" during the traditional music revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fox's main informant is Ed Carnes, an old-time fiddler who won the Kentucky State Fiddle Championship in 1981. Carnes details his beginnings as a fiddler, the recording of his fiddle-tunes album, and his travels across the country to different fiddling contests.

November 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Calendar 2017

Asking The Tough Questions: Teaching Literature And Nonfiction Through Critical Literacy To Recapture Our Voices, Agency, And Mission, Elsie L. Olan, Wendy Farkas, Kia Jane Richmond

Conference Presentations

Exploding the Myth of Mental Illness

Disrupting Notions Of Stigma While Empowering Voices: Examining Language Identity, Mental Illness, And Disability Through Young Adult Literature, Elsie L. Olan, Wendy Farkas, Kia Jane Richmond

Conference Presentations

Presenter Two will share new research on young adult literature which features characters with mental illness. She will describe strategies for using texts such as Your Voice is All I Hear (2015), Thirteen Reasons Why (2007), and The Impossible Knife of Memory (2014) to analyze and critique representations of mental illness in young adult literature. Drawing on research by Koss & Teale (2009) and Richmond (2014), this presenter will help session attendees interrogate “the power of language choices” and “become empowered to confront the stigma associated with mental illness and confront bullying” (p. 24).

Young Adult Literature: The Reality On The Page, Chelsea Elmore

Selected Honors Theses

The genre of young adult literature has grown from a didactic category made of problem novels and taboo themes into a mimetic vision of modern life by way of dystopian fiction. In my thesis, I will discuss the ways in which young adult literature has changed over time and what those changes will mean for its readers and its future as a genre. The first section will analyze three groundbreaking novels that have disrupted the previously established didactic mindset of young adult literature. The publication of such novels (The Catcher in the Rye, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret …

Review: Swimming In Hong Kong, Stephanie Chan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A review of Swimming in Hong Kong (2016), a short story collection by Stephanie Han.

“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Tropic Of Orange,”, Cristina M. Rodriguez

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the …

Why Are The Children Dying?: Mixed-Race Children In Chang-Rae Lee’S First Five Novels, Holly E. Martin

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The mixed-race children in each of Lee’s first five novels constitute an overarching set of symbols, reflecting, at first, society’s intolerance of miscegenation and its resulting mixed offspring, as demonstrated in the dysfunctional behaviors of the parent(s) (or society) and the death or disappearance of the mixed-race child. Then, later in the novel, a second mixed-race child’s birth, or its impending birth, signifies an acquired racial awareness on the part of the parent(s) and an overcoming of trauma that leads to hope for a more tolerant and understanding social environment for the mixed-race child.

An Unfinished Conversation: An Interview With Yiyun Li, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview of fiction writer and memoirist Yiyun LI.

Introduction To Volume Eight: Wins And Losses, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

"I Am Your Father", Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Star Wars is supposed to be a generic mythological story with archetypes and narrative structures that transcend all cultures, both in space and in time."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the influence of movies on our culture from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/i-am-your-father/