English Language and Literature Commons^™

La Falta De Los Supermercados En El Oeste De Dayton: Cómo Obtienen Los Estudiantes Comida Fresca En Los Desiertos Alimentarios (Un Ensayo Expositivo-Argumentativo, Catherine Iacobacci

Best Integrated Writing

After having learned about how poverty can affect children’s educational outcomes in one of her classes, Iacobacci wanted to learn more about how the issue affected the area where she lived and went to school. What she found out was incredibly shocking, and only furthered the idea that students are struggling with opportunity gaps, not achievement ones. Unfortunately, due to discriminatory loan practices from long ago, children from the 21st century are suffering physically, emotionally, and academically.

The Journey Within: My Travel Journel, Devonique Jones

Best Integrated Writing

This project is a multigenre research exploration that delves into Jones's personal journey of self discovery and growth during her first solo trip.

Investigation Of Ndv In Southern African Waterfowl Reveal Insightful Geographic And Biodiversity Trends To Help Contain The Virus, Lauren Goodwill

Best Integrated Writing

This study assesses the infection rates and trends of Newcastle disease in southern African waterfowl, a project carried out by Emily Murphy in Dr. Jeffrey Peters’ laboratory

Analysis Of The Integration Of Race And Cultural Concordant Doulas Into The Birth Experience Of African American Women, Cherissa Garcia

Best Integrated Writing

Garcia's study looks at how integrating race and cultural-concordant doulas into the birth experience of African American women would impact outcomes. She found similar studies that provided strong evidence to support doula integration. However, most did not select study populations that appropriately reflected the African American women at increased risk of poor outcomes. As a result, Garcia designed a study that looked at race and cultural concordance between doulas and patients from a wide range of SES backgrounds and varying degrees of pregnancy risk.

The Foreigner In Our Midst: Jewish Rights Debates In Revolutionary France, William Evans

Best Integrated Writing

The debates surrounding Jewish rights during the French Revolution concerned many of the same subjects that divide the Western world today. The fear of the other, immigration as a political tool, and the disagreements over assimilation are all subjects which feature prominently today. In this essay Evans sets out to explore these debates while fairly assessing the historical informants.

Junebug In January: A Novel Excerpt, Hannah Carson

Best Integrated Writing

This section of Junebug in January is the beginning of a much longer story that follows eighteen-year-old June and her small family as she attempts to survive the harsh reality of living in the era of the Great Depression and her attempts to survive her Papa’s tasks for her. This story challenges the boundaries of family loyalty, investigates the concept of “saving yourself,” and explores the limits of redemption.

Best Integrated Writing Fall 2024 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Kristie Mckiernan, Tracy Smith

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University.

Revisiting Paradise Lost Through K-Pop: A Global Approach To Teaching Writing, Nayoung Bishoff

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The short film series Wings (2016) by the Korean musical group BTS (Beyond the Scene) revisits John Milton’s Paradise Lost. BTS reinterprets Adam and Eve’s leaving of Eden as youths’ self-discovery process, overcoming a binary mindset. BTS emphasizes how experiences—trials, pains, and the struggle of youths to walk out of black-and-white perspectives—turn out to be “all so beautiful” as resources to grow. Wings demonstrates how the themes and elements in Paradise Lost can be used as a tool not only to explore Biblical concepts, but also to understand what pedagogical environments youths need to fully express themselves as writers. …

Experimental Forms And Identity Politics In 21st Century American Poetry, Ronnie Stephens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

“Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry” explores the function of form in American poetry and its proximity to whiteness. Through an analysis of experimental and nontraditional forms I argue that poets Fatimah Asghar, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Ilya Kaminsky, and Danez Smith challenge traditional notions of what a poem is; these authors use graphics and co-opt familiar text objects to challenge larger assumptions about gender identity, ableism, and the immigrant experience. These experimental forms are grounded in a larger poetic tradition that alters traditional forms, such as the sonnet, to disrupt and further dialogue …

The Monsters In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Illustrated Adaptation Of Beowulf For Children And Young Adults, Johanna Katharine Burton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I examine how some authors and illustrators of children’s and young adult literature adapt the old English Beowulf, how critics receive their works, and the functions these adaptations serve. My focus is on how the interplay between the visual and verbal text modifies or amplifies the overall story as well as how theories of translation/adaptation, monster, gender, and post-colonialism provide insight and aid in analysis. My ultimate objective is to demonstrate the significance of children’s and young adult adaptations of Beowulf and how these texts contribute to a rich and varied corpus. I argue that the adapter’s social/cultural context affected …

“High Culture As Entertainment”: Hybrid Reading Practices In A Live Book Club, Magnus Persson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The Bushwick Book Club (BBC) is a live book club in which invited pop musicians perform musical interpretations of a predetermined literary work in a nightclub environment. What can a typical BBC show, with its strong emphasis on popular music and performance, teach readers about the uses of literature? This case study will investigate which reading practices are at work and in what ways they challenge traditional ideas of the forms, functions, and values of reading. Another important aspect concerns how the borders between high and popular culture, and between the printed word and other media are renegotiated. Based on …

Applications In The Classroom: The Potential Of Scholarly Studies In Harry Potter In Higher Education, Anne Collins Smith

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Of what use is a book about the Harry Potter series that was published before the series was complete? Having taught an upper-division college course on Philosophy in Harry Potter multiple times, I believe that the early publication of Scholarly Studies in Harry Potter actually increases its potential utility in the classroom. Not only does this book include thoughtful and insightful scholarship, but it is also pedagogically valuable. It raises thought-provoking topics that can serve as the basis for research papers and class presentations, as well as providing important resources for students to use while conducting such research.

Reflections On Building A Popular Writing Course, Emily Howson, Chris Massenburg, Cecilia Shelton

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Composition pedagogy has typically employed traditional academic texts in the instruction of first-year writing courses. In this article, three first-year writing instructors reflect on their experiences employing popular culture artifacts in lieu of more traditional academic texts in writing classrooms at a small, private, historically black institution (HBCU). By retrospectively analyzing the intersections between theory and practice, the instructors’ autoethnographic reflections explore the utility of popular culture artifacts as tools for teaching and learning writing, with an emphasis on rhetorical knowledge and transfer. Though preliminary, their conclusions point to the potential of popular culture for integration into traditional best practices …

Applications In The Classroom: Hardly Elementary—Frontiers For Freshman Composition With Conan Doyle’S A Study In Scarlet, Kate M. Donley

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Three recent television and !lm adaptations testify to the continuing popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. The fast-paced novella that introduces detective duo Holmes and Watson, A Study in Scarlet involves some astonishing elements, and not just in the plot. With just a little probing, collegiate readers may wonder whether Conan Doyle plagiarized his most famous character, invented forensic science, despised Mormons, and accidentally wrote a Western.

The novel was adapted as A Study in Pink, the !rst episode of the BBC’s series Sherlock created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Their vision of Holmes set …

Reflection: The Twenty-Line Trap? Shakespeare Enacted By Young Women, Shannon Reed

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Professional actors assemble a toolkit of monologues with an obligatory “Shakespearean monologue” of around 20 lines. But female actors are at a disadvantage, with less than 150 women in a repertoire of over 1,100 characters in Shakespeare’s 37 or more plays. Young female actors (18-22 years old) are even more at a loss, if the powerful and complex older female roles are removed, leaving only a few dozen appropriate speeches. What effect does this limited canon have on such actors? Here, I reflect upon my own participant observer experience as a young woman actor, who received the bulk of my …

Friar Jack, The Science-Fiction Apologist: Exploring “The Friar Of Oxford” By William Lindsay Gresham, G. Connor Salter, Sørina Higgins

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Few Inklings scholars have explored William Lindsay Gresham’s life outside of the fact that he was married to Joy Davidman. His poem “The Friar of Oxford,” published here for the first time, shows a surprising level of engagement with C.S. Lewis’s ideas, combining war imagery with references to the Ransom Cycle and a “mushroom cloud” reference that may show he explored one of Lewis’s literary influences. The poem’s contents add to existing Gresham-Inklings scholarship, and show Gresham accomplishing the same goals that the Inklings and their associates like Dorothy L. Sayers accomplished in their “escapist” or mythopoeic works.

The Wizard Of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, And The Moral Imagination, By Camilo Peralta, G. Connor Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Camilo Peralta’s The Wizard of Mecosta gives the first detailed look at Russell Kirk’s fiction, from his ghost stories to his three gothic novels. While the work particularly emphasizes Kirk’s gothic influences, Peralta also explores references to T.S. Eliot and Charles Williams in his fiction, as well as comments in his nonfiction about Lewis and Williams writing “tales of the preternatural.” The discussion provides important material for seeing Kirk as an Inklings-influenced author.

Scene Transatlantiche: Eco Italiane Nella Beat Generation, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

Nella maldestra intervista con Fernanda Pivano trasmessa dalla RAI nel settembre del 1966, Jack Kerouac, interpellato riguardo le infuenze letterarie che avevano ispirato la sua produzione, rispose negando con forza l’impatto di autori italiani sulla sua poetica. Il rifuto di Kerouac – uno dei pochi esponenti della Beat Generation a poter vantare un radicamento nel territorio nordamericano da più di dieci generazioni (FamilySearch) – può essere letto come il tentativo di un autore aggrappatosi, nella parte fnale della sua vita, a un’ideologia conservatrice e nazionalista, di inscrivere la propria poetica all’interno di una tradizione letteraria puramente americana. Nella frase successiva …

“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …

Precarious Refugee: Self-Optimization And Neoliberal Rationality In Rawi Hage’S Cockroach, Shahab Nadimi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Precarious Refugee: Self-Optimization and Neoliberal Rationality in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach," Shahab Nadimi examines Rawi Hage’s Cockroach as an example of refugee literature in the light of current debates about neoliberal biopolitics and the idea of a new form of life. Refugees, who are neither identified as citizens nor totally as strangers, are forced to compete in unequal circumstances of economic mobility with other citizens, often leaving them in a condition of personal debts, unemployment, and mental distress. Nadimi investigates Cockroach’s depiction of psychological breakdown, suicidal attempts, and metamorphosis as symptomatic of and critical to the neoliberal …

Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick

All Theses

This project focuses on the negative affect of shame in Nella Larsen’s 1920s American novel, Passing. While shame is a universal feeling everyone feels, the project argues that Larsen’s two main characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, feel a specific type of invisible shame that pulls on them differently. For Irene, this shame is reactive and aggressive, but for Clare, this shame is passive and often ignored. The project details where and how the shame manifests for each character, particularly focusing on how shame can be seen visibly and invisibly in and on the body. Because no other character recognizes …

"I Will Write Mad Stories": The Hysterical "I" In The Diaries Of George Eliot, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Virginia Woolf, And Sylvia Plath, Jaclyn Marie Swiderski

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation focuses on the long history of hysteria and the ways in which it has been used to denigrate and silence disabled women. Women diagnosed as hysterical, by either the medical establishment or the court of public opinion, are denied the right to generate knowledge about and for themselves – they are epistemologically disabled. The author argues that hysterical women have unique ways of looking at and understanding the world which push back against their epistemological disablement. In order to uncover some of this history of hysterical women, this dissertation uses the diaries of four “hysterical” women over the …

The Making Of A Survivor: Chopin's Use Of Identity And Rebirth In The Awakening, Amber L. Budd

The Confluence

In recent research of American literature, many scholars have read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and construed the novel’s ambiguous ending as an indication that the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, commits suicide after the ending. Scholars have developed this hypothesis due to contextual evidence, societal expectations at the time Chopin wrote the novel, and Edna’s perceived development of identity over the course of the novel. In this paper, I analyze the popular theories arguing for Edna’s suicide or survival and then examine those articles in conjunction with my own analysis of The Awakening. By doing so, I aim to prove that, …

Reimagining The Single-Author Seminar: Teaching Wheatley Peters, Milton, And The Master’S Discourse, Kate Ozment

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article discusses a senior-level literature course that puts into dialogue Phillis Wheatley Peters and John Milton. Wheatley Peters’ poetry on tyranny and freedom during the American Revolution, especially “America,” is compared to Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost, which explore the same themes during the English Civil War. Students trace how Milton’s transformative but narrowed ideas of freedom for enfranchised subjects in England are powerfully reimagined by Wheatley Peters in double meanings of freedom for the colonies and enslaved subjects. Secondary sources allow students to engage in the canon-building of Milton as …

Shake Ya Ass, But Watch Yourself: An Intersectional And Decolonial Approach To Exploring The Sexualization Of Female Recording Artists And The Empowerment Of Women In The United States, H.B. Rebeka

Dissertations

This dissertation, titled Shake Ya Ass, But Watch Yourself: An Intersectional and Decolonial Approach to Exploring the Sexualization of Female Recording Artists and the Empowerment of Women in the United States, critically examines the phenomenon of sexualization of women in the music industry and its impact on female empowerment. Through an intersectional and decolonial feminist lens, the study delves into the historical and socio-cultural contexts that shape the portrayal and perception of female recording artists in the United States.

The research traces the roots of feminism and the commodification of racial stereotypes through music, exploring how female empowerment has been …

Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I …

Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments …

The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …

Marvelous Ordinariness: Re-Engaging With Realism’S Social Function, Miranda Ochoa Natera

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Against Romanticism, European literary realism of the 19th century aimed to provide an objective representation of reality through mimesis that could capture the truth in an objective way. Yet, its positivist approach severely narrowed down the complexity of truth, reality, and the mundane by wrongfully drawing the universal from the particular. A new way of engaging with realist literature from any time period, called Marvelous Ordinariness, rearranges this triad in ways that expand our understanding of our own and other realities portrayed. Using Alejo Carpentier’s description of “lo real maravilloso,” Marvelous Ordinariness unfolds in three layers that resemble Carl Jung’s …

Analyzing The Enduring White Reception Of Raisin In The Sun: Defining And Reexamining The “Universal” Label, Kayla J. Baur

Student Theses

Hansberry’s intent to centralize the Black American family while simultaneously addressing divisive topics of race and gender positioned Raisin as a prescient, continuously relevant work that is open for interpretation for years to come. With this intent in mind, critics acclaimed Raisin and hailed it as a universal play for every theatergoer to enjoy. However, this enduring sentiment of Raisin as “universal” is a construct created by the predominantly-white theater industry. This perceived universality is dependent on the audience’s ability to find entertainment value in the story, even if the idea of only deriving amusement from the story undermines Hansberry’s …