Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Tool For Digital Bibliotherapy: Fostering Emotional Resiliency Through A Visual Novel, Joy Cooper

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Suicide rates among children have risen over the last three years. In Clark County specifically, the numbers doubled between 2019 and 2021. The research for this project sought to find the benefits of bibliotherapy and create a tool to be used for early intervention in children displaying signs of developmental emotional and behavioral concerns. Additionally, the research focused on determining the benefits of bibliotherapy across various mediums with a particular aim on the accessibility of digital formats. The research concluded that bibliotherapy in a digital format is not only beneficial but has a tendency to produce higher engagement among children. …

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

Imagination And Environmental Political Thought: The Aftermath Of Thoreau, James Altman

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

An Analysis On English Comprehension, Samuel Black, Jerry Rylance, Matthew Sielaff, Aaron Gorman

Math 365 Class Projects

Books and Buddies is a program run by Spread the Word Nevada (StWN) designed to help students who struggle with reading. As part of the program, students are given pre and post tests which measure comprehension, accuracy, and words correct per minute (WCPM).

A data set was provided that included students' scores on the pre and post test, as well as some general demographic information. A Python program was created to perform linear regressions on subsets of the data, measured on the three attributes listed above. The data was also divided into various categories for the sake of the regressions. …

"Bring Out Your Dead!": Cashing In On Shakespeare In The First Folio, John M. Bowers

Special Collections Events

William Shakespeare wrote his plays for box-office profits at the theater, not for a reading public. When his old colleagues John Hemings and Henry Condell published his plays seven years after his death, they too were looking for financial profit and "packaged" the dramas -- as well as the dramatist himself -- to boost income by appealing to a new market of readers, thus making Shakespeare the subject of literary studies ever since.

21st Century Shakespeare, Evelyn Gajowski

Special Collections Events

Why do Shakespeare's texts resonate so powerfully for us at the outset of the twenty-first century? Why is Shakespeare more popular today than ever before? What are the various ways in which we consume Shakespeare's texts 400 years after he produced them? Professor Gajowski aims to suggest answers to these questions by elucidating the current state of the art of analyzing Shakespeare

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Review Of Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, And The Reconfiguration Of The Victorian Body By Peter J. Capuano, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Mcnair Research Journal - Summer 2015, Kelly Abuali, Starr Bailey, Krystal Courtney D. Belmonte, Brittaney Benson-Townsend, Jennifer Bolick, Mihaela A. Ciulei, Ashley Crisp, Daniel N. Erosa, Richard V. Foster, Gisele Braga Goertz, Michael A. Langhardt, Kara Osborne, Julienne Jochel Paraiso, Shawn M. Rosen, Bella V. Smith, Jeevake Attapattu, Ernesto H. Bedoy, Michael G. Curtis, Wanda Inthavong, Marielle Leo, Primrose Martin, Tamieka Meadows, Rosa Perez, Jessica Recarey, Shea Silver, Linda Tompkins

McNair Journal

Journal articles based on research conducted by undergraduate students in the McNair Scholars Program

Table of Contents

Biography of Dr. Ronald E. McNair

Statements:

Dr. Neal J. Smatresk, UNLV President

Dr. Juanita P. Fain, Vice President of Student Affairs

Dr. William W. Sullivan, Associate Vice President for Retention and Outreach

Mr. Keith Rogers, Deputy Executive Director of the Center for Academic Enrichment and Outreach

McNair Scholars Institute Staff

Margaret Atwood And The Implications Of The Word Love, Manuela Bowles

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

This paper discusses ideal romantic love as it appears in Western literature and how women are portrayed in works containing idealistic romantic plots. It also explores how Canadian author Margaret Atwood rejects the traditional love plot in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as in her book of poetry Power Politics and the poem “A Woman’s Issue.” The first section of this paper gives a brief history of the ideal romantic love plot in Western literature, beginning with courtly love in Medieval literature, and its influences on later works such as Madame Bovary and The Awakening. The section …

Plotting Devices: Literary Darwinism In The Laboratory, John Hay

English Faculty Research

Critics of literary Darwinism like to point out the weaknesses of its scientific scaffolding, but the real flaw in this research program is its neglect of literary history and stylistic evolution. A full-fledged scientific approach to literary criticism should incorporate the kind of work being done by Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab—a quantitative analysis of the history of literary form. While Moretti and the literary Darwinists are almost never mentioned together, I contend that their work is not only compatible but also necessarily so for a more consilient literary criticism. The Darwinian aesthetics promoted by Denis Dutton can …

Review Of Walden's Shore: Henry David Thoreau And Nineteenth-Century Science, By Robert M. Thorson, John Hay

English Faculty Research

With the rise of ecocriticism, many recent studies of Thoreau’s writings have favorably reconsidered the author’s strong relationship with science; this trend received much of its impetus from Laura Dassow Walls’s Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century NaturalScience (Madison, WI, 1995). Similarly subtitled, Walden’s Shore begins by explaining that such scholarship still lacks an engagement with hard science and that a solid understanding of Thoreau’s work, and especially of Walden (1854), requires more intimate knowledge of geological phenomena. Robert Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut whose last book, Beyond Walden: The Hidden History …

To Txt, Or Not To Txt: Shkspr.Mobi And Academia, Bella Victoria Smith, Ed Nagelhout

McNair Poster Presentations

This essay combats elitist academic attitudes assuming that all online content is not reputable and that online com­munication, specifically txtspk, defiles English. By exploring the tenants of open source and open access, particularly the benefits of free redistribution, online editions of Shakespeare’s plays prove to promote intellectual excellence and trans­parency, benefitting academics most. Similarly, the belief that txtspk is destroying the English language is a myth because modernizing and shortening words exist in all languages, including the first printed editions of Shakespeare’s canon. Finally, this essay addresses future concerns for online editions such as the copyright barriers over intellectual and …

Moving Through Fear: A Conversation With Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Jennifer L. Fabbi, Amy L. Johnson

Library Faculty Publications

Prior to its release in August 2010, Susan Campbell Bartoletti's newest book, They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (2010), received an incredibly positive response in the form of starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Publisher's Weekly, Horn Book, and Kirkus Reviews. Through her impeccable research and ability to weave a compelling story out of the place "where darkness and light smack up against each other" (Bartoletti & Zusak, 2008), she has made it possible for children and young adults to access and understand the horror of the Third Reich …

Jack Kerouac: Le Sel De La Semaine, Thomas A. Ipri

Library Faculty Publications

In 1967, Jack Kerouac appeared on the French service of the Canadian Broadcasting Service on the program Le Sel de la a Semaine. This Icarus Films release takes a fascinating look at Kerouac’s connection to Quebec where his parents are from. This interview by Fernand Seguin took place just 2 years before Kerouac’s death, making the program all the more poignant.

To The Instruction Cave, Librarian!: Graphic Novels And Information Literacy, Steven Hoover

Library Faculty Publications

Information literacy librarians have been known to troll the waters of popular culture for phenomena that are capable of teaching information literacy skills and simultaneously engaging student interest. For these librarians, graphic novels have reached a point where they are too big to ignore.

Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction And Literary Forgery In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Anne H. Stevens

English Faculty Research

In this essay, I wish to explore a similar dialectic of historical positivism and skepticism in eighteenth-century Britain. Over the course of the century, but particularly in the second half, new and more scientific standards of historical investigation developed, with practitioners expressing a greater confidence about their ability to know the past. During these years, a series of monumental achievements in historiography appeared: David Hume’s History of England (1754–62), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), and William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759), to name just three of the most celebrated. As part of this increased interest …

The Footnote, In Theory, Anne H. Stevens, Jay Williams

English Faculty Research

And, so, when Richard Stern published his private dialogue with himself about the physical appearance of certain writers at the 1986 International PEN conference, Joyce Carol Oates insisted on not only an angry rebuttal-punctuated by constant page referencing to Stern's "pig-souled sexism"-but photographic evidence-a kind of footnote in itself-dismissing his physical characterization of her. When Susan Gubar published "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" her essay provoked an immediate, critical, and heavily documented response from Robyn Weigman, several letters to the editor, and Gubar's own footnoted rejoinder. Jane Gallop's defense of a sexual act she engaged in with one of her students …

Tales Of Other Times: A Survey Of British Historical Fiction 1770-1812, Anne H. Stevens

English Faculty Research

The years 1760–1820 mark a turning point in the history of historiography. Methods for studying the past changed rapidly during this period, as did the forms in which historical knowledge was displayed. Hume famously called these years ‘the historical age’, while Foucault’s Order of Things contends that an epistemic shift from ‘order’ to ‘history’ took place around the year 1800. The historical novel, possibly the most important generic innovation of Romantic-era fiction, is also the most important and underexplored historiographic innovation of these years. Its importance has not often been recognised, however, since, following the nineteenth-century establishment of an autonomous …

Romancing Visual Women: From Canon To Console, Roberta Sabbath

English Faculty Research

This dissertation juxtaposes the romantic modal treatment of powerful, admired women which canonical male authors and feminist authors and critics construct with those constructed by contemporary women for the visual mass media of video, broadcast television, and computer. The discourse of the former produces the figure of a fragmented woman who is rare, supernatural, marginalized, and impossible. The discourse of the latter produces the figure of a psychologized woman who is typical, natural, mainstream, and possible. To examine the discourse of impossibility, I use three canonical works: Augustine's Confessions; Chretien de Troyes' Perceval; and Dante's Divine Comedy. I also survey …