Arts and Humanities Commons^™

'Disembodied Bones': Recovering The Poetry And Prose Of Elinor Wylie 2021, Sarah R. Bullock

Master's Theses

Picking a book to read is like diving for a pearl, writes Elinor Wylie, a 20th Century American poet, novelist, essayist and prominent magazine literary editor. In her essay "The Pearl Diver", she writes that it is the diver that risks the unknown- unaided by diving equipment in the form of library indexes-who gains the greatest joy, Wylie states (Fugitive Prose, 869). Wylie explains:

I venture to perceive an analogy between the rebellious pearl diver and myself, in my slight experience with public libraries...how much more delightful, how much more stimulating, to abandon the paraphernalia of card indexes and mahogany …

Thomas Middleton And The Plural Politics Of Jacobean Drama, Mark Kaethler

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton's dramatic works as responses to James I's governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of …

Taoist Principles In Walt Whitman's "Song Of Myself", Annika Cerini

English and Creative Writing | Senior Theses

One of the most influential and well recognized writers of the 19th century is Walt Whitman. He created works that changed the way that individuals saw the world around them and themselves. Walt Whitman was vocal about the absolut originality of his work and that he never took ideas from outside influence, but regardless of his own claims, his work presents a clear allusion to Eastern thought that particularly resembles that of the Tao te Ching. Some of the concepts that he underlines in his own work include but are not limited to simplicity, compassion, and patience. These aren’t the …

Remaking Divinity In Aldous Huxley’S Brave New World 2021, Sebastian Vignone

Master's Theses

Humanity is an experience. Shaped through both individual and collective encounters, we understand the self and the world around us as an amalgamation of interactions over the course of our lives. Arguably, one of the most common experiential archetypes is religion, and more specifically the relationship one has with a divine being as it has been framed by a religious institution. While the United States does not have an official religion, there is a host of people who refer to the U.S. as a “Christian nation,” and it is therefore irresponsible to elide the panoply of inequities that run through …

Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison And Contrast Of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby And Azuela's The Underdogs, Sarah N. Valadez

English (MA) Theses

This work is an assessment of themes, ideas, and structure between two iconic novels published during the nineteen-twenties: The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela (originally published in 1915, re-written and redistributed in the 1920s, and then given a final version in 1925 that was translated into many languages). Both novels were written during times of great change, cultural innovation, and revolution. Many characters from both works also comment, observe, or partake in the politics and the seemingly accepted or tolerated social interactions of their daily lives. For the sake of cross-cultural understanding …

Effective In The Affective: Cultivating An Emotionally Intelligent Writing Center, Camille Bassett

Tutor's Column

Academic contexts emphasize the cognitive component of writing. However, for tutors to effectively meet students’ needs they must also give attention to the affective, or emotional, component. At times, anxieties about session productivity or a perceived inability to meet students’ needs cause tutors to fall into a defensive mindset in which they attempt to address students’ emotional states as quickly as possible. Rather than allowing this mindset to dominate the session, tutors should practice the empathetic mindset, giving students the space and support to express their emotional needs. Emphatic listening facilitates the empathetic mindset, positioning tutors to act as a …

Tutoring Ell Students In The Digital Age Of Zoom: An Abundance Of Resources, Hannah Lee

Tutor's Column

Tutoring during Covid has been a challenging adjustment, but it has brought a flood of new resources for ELL tutoring. These resources are what ELL students need to succeed and break previous patterns of ELL struggles. Nontraditional students are now able to attend the writing center more easily than before. Asynchronous tutoring is a powerful resource for language learners who struggle with grammatical concepts and errors.

Changing The Narrative: Proofreading At The Writing Center, Claire Atwood

Tutor's Column

Writing Centers have a golden rule against proofreading. It gives student’s the impression that they can send their paper in to a tutor and they’ll correct all the grammar and semantics errors for them. This does not facilitate learning on the part of the student, and diminishes a tutor’s purpose, to tutor on writing. There needs to be a switch in how we approach a proofreading request, so we don’t refuse services to any students. Tutors can find grammatical errors and use them to teach basic principles.

A Trip Through The Divine Comedy: An Allegory For Depression And Its Role In Bibliotherapy, Matthew Curry

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Dante the Pilgrim, the main character of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, has his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven recorded by Dante the Poet in poetic form. In the literal sense of things, readers follow Dante the Pilgrim’s journey downward into the infernal hellscape, upward onto a mountain of purgation and atonement, and into the metaphysical world of the divine. Allegorically, however, readers can also choose to view Dante the Pilgrim’s journey through The Divine Comedy as that of a person experiencing the hopelessness of depression, the challenging climb upward and outward of healing after spiraling deeply inward …

The Impact Of Booktube On Book Publishing: A Study Of John Green's Looking For Alaska, Amanda Mitchell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Around 2010, a group of online content creators, commonly referred to as "Youtubers" or "BookTubers," began to emerge on YouTube.com. This community's content revolves around many topics under the realm of literature including book discussions, reviews, genre discussions, and many more. While the group started off small, it has grown significantly over the past decade; some of the most prominent creators have several hundred thousand subscribers. In the ten years since its emergence, the creators and content have transformed, where many in the beginning made video discussions just for fun, and now many of them have grown their channel into …

Decentering White Space In The Two-Year College English Classroom: A Perspective Through Crt, Tribalcrit, And Latcrit, Kassandra Angela Ramirez Buck

English Dissertations - Archive

White space in the educational system is an attitude, environment, ideology dominated by the white dominant voice and creed. This white space intimidates and oppresses Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students, not only physically but mentally and emotionally. This research provides solutions to help instructors decenter white space. In order to begin to decenter white space, instructors need to modify their curriculum and classroom policies, presence and environment, and execution. Using Latina/o Critical Theory, Tribal Critical Race Theory, and Critical Race Theory in Education, this research addresses structural facets of systemic racism BIPOC students in the two-year college English …

Sermonic Fugues Evaluated In A Thematic Collection Of African-American Homiletical Responses To The 9/11 Tragedy Using Distant Reading Analytics, Terrance Andrew Ford

English Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation project introduces and evaluates the coined rhetorical/homiletical concept of the sermonic fugue. The term is an expanded adaptation of the musico-literary fugue principally in the context of thematic collections and homiletical analytics. It defines recurring—common or contrasting—rhetorical patterns presenting themselves particularly within multiple sermons. This research critiques the sermonic fugue against a select collection of African-American homiletical responses to the 9/11 tragedy. The evaluation is further conducted using distant reading and topic modeling analytics to identify the presence and notable patterns of sermonic fugues within the collection. The methodology of the research is performed in phases which involved …

Old Industries, Old Conflicts: The Significance Of American Epic Novels, Arturo Alcazar

Honors Projects

This essay focuses on three American epic novels: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and Underworld by Don DeLillo. More specifically, the essay examines the themes of ambiguity, redemption, good and evil, isolation, and violence as they are depicted in these three novels and what they indicate about America and its people and society.

To Read Or Not To Read: Navigating Young Adult Literature In The Classroom In The Age Of Trigger Warnings And Banned Books, Ashley Sell

Honors Projects

Most public school libraries or English classrooms celebrate Banned Books Week during the school year, featuring dozens of Young Adult novels that have been challenged or banned in public schools across the country. However, books aimed towards young readers are typically not optimized for educational use in the classroom. In this project, I will explore the benefits of using Young Adult literature in the classroom, while also investigating the obstacles that one might face in order to do so, i.e. censorship, sensitive subject matter. I also want to summarize and respond to an argument for the retainment of classic literature …

Race And Social Injustice: The Representations In Children's Picture Books, 2016-2020, Brittany Boisvert

English Theses - Archive

This project is an examination of race and representations of social injustice in children’s picture books from 2016-2020 and is informed by black feminist theory and children’s literary criticism. The objective is to examine through a critical race theory lens how these texts reflect concerns related to race and racism that surfaced during the Trump Administration, specifically police brutality. As these texts form and inform an accurate portrayal of the human experience (childhood to adulthood), the analysis will examine why there is a dearth of these kinds of representations in the Obama era, and the sudden influx of picture books …

Justice For The Fallen Woman, Terri Weaver

English Theses - Archive

By analyzing the experiences of four different incidents of shaming women—Dallas police officers photographing partially nude prostitutes during booking, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinksky, and Christine Blasey-Ford—in contemporary American History in the same way as one would analyze literature, there becomes similarities between the archetype of the fallen woman and the treatment of the women. Each situation is paired with literary texts including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. This pairing helps to reveal that the archetype of the fallen woman may influence social praxis, …

Reopening The Temple School: Reforming Contemporary Education With The Transcendentalists, Richard Evan Miller

English Theses - Archive

A conversation surrounding reform in American education has been in play for two centuries. In 1834, Bronson Alcott’s Temple School challenged traditional modes of education with his conversational approach in the classroom. His methods encouraged students to self-reflect on their relationship to nature, rather than conform to a standardized knowledge system common in public schools. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, his Transcendentalist contemporary and teaching assistant, published her Record of a School in 1835 to record Alcott’s interactions with students and display to the public the effectiveness of their reformed approach to education. Fast-forward to the current climate in America, and one …

In A Victorian Fog: Constructing Identities In Female Gothic Novels., Hayley Salo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on feminist criticism and postcolonial theory, this study analyzes conversations about female identity within and around Victorian female gothic novels and how they contribute to the genre’s appeal to modern readers. In particular, it is a case study of how the discourse develops through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Each novel presents the challenges women face when their sense of self is based on the expectations of others, and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre further explore the potential for women to create their own, unique identity while still remaining …

Organizational Role Conflict: The Lived Experience Of The Long-Term Department Chairperson In Higher Education, Susan M. Frey

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study is a hermeneutic investigation into the phenomenon of organizational role conflict as experienced by five long-term department chairpersons, four long-term department heads, and two former long-term department chairpersons working at universities and colleges located in Indiana, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Organizational role conflict for department chairpersons and department heads is a byproduct of their frontline manager position. By occupying a position between the collegiate and administrative branches of their institution, these managers serve as an important link in the chain of command, but suffer from ambiguous, contradictory, and competing expectations placed on them because of their hybrid status as …

The Case Of Nemo Nobody: A Lacanian Study Of The Traumatic And Neurotic Relationships Of The Man Who Doesn't Exist, Brittany N. Sanders

English Theses - Archive

Jaco Van Dormael’s 2009 film Mr. Nobody introduces us to Nemo Nobody, “the man who doesn’t exist.” Nemo is born with the impossible gift of omniscience and exercises this ability to know several of his possible lives before they occur. His childhood is characterized by ontological questions concerning time, existence, choices, and chance. Nemo’s inability to answer unanswerable questions sources the trauma that stems from the moment his life literally splits in two. Nemo’s parents separate when he is nine, and they leave it up to him to decide if he wants to leave with his mother or stay with …

Subversion Of Form: Mixing Poetry And Prose, Darby Alexandria Brown

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

My honors thesis project is called Subversion of Form: Mixing Poetry and Prose. The purpose has been to research how writers have interwoven poetry and prose, to write a creative nonfiction piece that uses both genres, and to improve as a writer through committing myself to this piece and solidifying writing as a daily practice. In my introduction, I outline the research I conducted on poetry and prose and my takeaways from the writers I read. I conclude that the purpose of prose is to tell, while the purpose of poetry is to search.

The piece that I have worked …

Burying The Body: Pandemic And Public Health In Hawthorne's The House Of The Seven Gables, Tom J. Hillard

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article discusses Hawthorne's engagement with discourses of public health, disease, and burial practices in The House of the Seven Gables. The recurring descriptions of the decayed house and its stifling air, coupled with the frequent imagery of bodies/corpses within it, evoke contemporary historical concerns related to “miasma,” disease, and public health, as well as changing burial practices during the first half of the nineteenth century. These issues were made even more pressing, especially in urban centers, by the devastating 1832 and 1849 cholera pandemics, and Hawthorne's experiences with these events make their way into his writing. The fearful …

Poem No. 125, May 2021, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Marital And Maternal Mourning : Gravesite Domesticity In Sylvia Townsend Warner’S “Epitaphs”, Alexis Grainger

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Modernist writer Sylvia Townsend Warner satirically immortalizes fictive English subjects, most of whom are female, in her epitaph poetry. Writing in the voices of the deceased, their survivors, and, in some cases, the omniscient third person, Townsend Warner places each buried body back into the heterosexual domestic paradigm, thus critiquing earthly gender roles and expectations in these eternal etchings on the metaphoric gravestone. Rather than escaping their material conditions, the deceased are re-homed by Townsend Warner, though not in any romantic way. In these pithy epitaphs, the burial site mirrors the domestic site as it assumes the politics of marriage, …

Wound And Weight : “Cumbrous Flesh” And Pain In Paradise Lost And Paradise Regain’D, John Robert Jenkins

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The seventeenth-century poet, civil servant, and prose polemicist John Milton is well- known for his renditions of Satan and Jesus in his poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd. While scholars maintain a clear difference between Satan and Jesus, there is a surprising and unnoticed relationship between the fallen angel and the Son of God. While Milton shies away from explicitly illustrating Jesus’ crucifixion, the pain and weight of Jesus’ body hanging from the cross cannot go unillustrated. Left in the void and searching for a vessel to signify this touchstone of Christian theology, Milton employs Satan as a perfect candidate. …

Freudian Melancholy And Bodily Mutilation In “Little Snow White” And “The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood”, Valmira Kaba

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

What is left to say about fairy tales that has not already been said before? In this essay, I answer this question by approaching two famous fairy tales, The Grimm Brothers’ “Little Snow White” (1812) and Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (1897) with two theoretical frameworks in mind: Freudian psychoanalysis and disability studies. Both Freudian psychology and disability studies are mainstays in critical discourse of fairy tales, but neither Freud nor contemporary critics have combined the two in a way that addresses the pathological condition known as melancholia and its relationship to the perception of disabilities. My …

Reflections Of A Broken Mirror : An Analysis Of The Mirror Motif In The Famished Road, Mama Day, And Us, Samira Pigford

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

According to Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory, the mirror is one device in which infants begin to develop an ego through self-identification. The mirror works as a double tool; it serves as a being’s introduction into selfhood but also creates a false interpretation of being. Lacan argues that paradoxically, the mirror helps people discover who they are while also creating feelings of self-alienation (as the infant does not recognize the being in the mirror as themselves). Furthermore, Lacan’s study of psychoanalysis suggests that when people see visions of themselves, through dreams or hallucinations, it further helps reveal aspects of the …

The Island Remembers : Land Memory, Collective Memory & Trauma In Gloria Naylor’S Mama Day, Justine Prusiensky

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The purpose of this project is to define the concept of land memory in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, considering it in relation to scholarship by Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Paula Gallant Eckard, Patricia San José Rico, and others. This exploration of the relationship between land and memory alongside the magical realistic novel, Mama Day, reveals how the island’s memory constructs, preserves, and coveys the past while influencing the present. The island of Willow Springs retains and remembers the events that transpired there in 1823, which tethers the past to the present and exposes a ripple of consequences felt by Naylor’s characters. …

“True Darkness And True Womanness” : A Study Of Sisterhood In Marlon James’ The Book Of Night Women, Jessica Schwartz

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper focuses on the obstacles to building sisterhood and community in Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women (2009). I examine the acts of violence that the enslaved women at Montpelier Estate perform against one another and consider the influence the plantation environment has on these relationships. The violence that takes place among the enslaved women is especially prevalent within the group of “night women,” which consists of Lilith, Homer, Pallas, Iphigenia, Hippolyta, Callisto, and Gorgon. Despite the biological and symbolic sisterhood between these women, they more frequently express feelings of enmity than ones of community. By highlighting …

The Impact Of The Translation Of The Quran On Shakespeare’S Plays, Rania Shair

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the religion of Islam was gaining notoriety in the western world. Islamophobic propaganda was spreading. There was a growing fear in Europe of forced conversion, and this fear was sparked by controversial new translations of the Quran. This fear inspired works of literature during that time period. One of the greatest playwrights in history to be influenced by the Islamophobic propaganda is William Shakespeare.

To understand how Islamophobia influenced Shakespeare’s plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one must understand the magnitude of how controversial it was to translate the Quran from Arabic to …