English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Persuasiveness Of Point Of View, John Brandon Keever

Masters Theses

An obsession with the point of view, POV, as a craft element, drove the impetus of this research. The artist's statement highlights a love affair with escapism through the written word in fiction. The critical paper reviews evidence of the persuasiveness of point of view, POV, as a critical craft element as seen in the nuances of POV in The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and A Time to Dance by Karen Kingsbury and in first-person testimony in journalism. While some research into POV exists for literary classics, like Pride and Prejudice, this …

A Collection Of Short Stories, Tryphena Lizzert Yeboah

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

The short stories in this collection offer diverse and expansive realities of the human condition, particularly around the lives of women—their identities, bodies, emotions, and how they live and navigate a social order that is often constructed to dominate and undermine them. How can we complicate marginalized portrayals of women shaped by the male gaze and interrogate the patriarchal presumption of the African woman? What different approaches should be employed in capturing different aspects of her domestic and social life, how she defines and expresses autonomy, how she subverts gender norms, and her experiences of emotional and physical violence? These …

Estranged Temporality: How Time Tells Stories In Science Fiction, Phillip H. Howells

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

According to Darko Suvin in his influential critical treatise, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, estrangement in Science Fiction (SF) gives authors the ability to build worlds related to but distant from our own using specific metaphors. This dissertation takes up this term and applies it to the fulcrum of time in SF as a method of creating possible futures and imaginative pasts in order to illuminate the realities of the present. The realities of the present are congruent with the material circumstances of the past, and this can be seen in the kinds of SF worlds built by members of …

Self And Tell: Exploring Identity Through Music, Logen Crandall

Honors Theses

My honors thesis is a five-song EP titled ‘self and tell’. It is considered an EP (Extended Play) because it is longer than one song but shorter than an album. As an English: Creative Writing major, I wanted to write something for my thesis that truly excited me. However, I was ignited by the thought of writing an essay, play, collection of poems, or work of fiction. As someone who has always had a passion for music and singing, I instead chose to use my knowledge of poetry and storytelling to write lyrics that followed a central theme from one …

If I Cannot Hear Us, How Do I Know We Are Here? A Journey Into Assyrian Storytelling, Nadine Koochou

Canterbury Scholars

In this collection of poetry and prose, Nadine Koochou explores her Assyrian-American identity, retracing family history and merging it with her own reflections. Through creative essays, she communicates the things she knows, to some degree of certainty. Through poetry, she communicates things she thinks she knows, or feelings she understands intrinsically, or things she does not know at all but wishes to know. Combining Assyrian history with intimate stories, she explores themes of generational trauma, language, love, war, and home.

Poem No. 131, June 2024, 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.

Memoriam, Mira Helena Darham

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The chasm between past and present is a constant reminder of the perilous journey one takes through the fissures of memory. While on this expedition the forms surrounding you, the memories themselves, are a constantly changing landscape that make navigation a difficult and dangerous task. Is a memory a recall or a remembrance, truth, or construction? Are all memories as they happened or are we the “rememberer,” the architect of their composition? This dilemma has been the impetus of my academic pursuits and creative endeavors. For Memoriam I have chosen an event in my past, a wildfire, as the catalyst …

Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18^th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19^th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …

Thesis Proposal And Project: The Christmas Fiddle, Tamara N. Canty

Masters Theses

The thesis discusses how Christian creatives can create art that glorifies God, while shining light into a dark world by highlighting the contributions of Christian creatives in the entertainment industry. The research heralds the testimonies of several notable Christian creatives and how they have successfully navigated their way through a largely secular industry.

Abcs: American Born Chinese Stories, Ethan Peng

English Honors Theses

Inspired by life as an Asian American in New York City, ABC and Other Stories explores family dynamics and perspectives, public perceptions, and emotions throughout twenty-six stories, one for every letter of the alphabet. Real memories and fantastical elements intertwine throughout the collection, all falling under the theme of “ABC,” representing both the English language and “American Born Chinese.” Many of the narrators, left nameless and genderless, recount their stories of growing up in an immigrant household. One recalls the last time their parents physically punished them. Another thinks of being unsettled by a stranger on the subway. Other narrators …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Unruly Play In Picture Books, Danielle Groak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay defines unruly and imaginative play based on a variety of interdisciplinary sources. The study examines a selection of children’s picture books that showcase a kind of play that defies normative narrative pacing, power dynamics, and narrative sequence. Future research is recommended to further interdisciplinary discourse on the complexity of imaginative play in children’s literature in a way that honors children’s agency as storytellers.

Anti-Thesis: When Your Worst Moments Become Your Best Work, Abigail Williamson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

My honors capstone project expands the creative work of a major writing assignment in English 3170: Successful Freelance Magazine Writing, which was modeled after Susan Shapiro’s “Humiliation Essay.” Shapiro’s signature assignment encourages students to write about an embarrassing or upsetting moment with the aim to force sincerity and humility. She writes, “It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.” The humiliation essay, she claims, often leads to publication because the conflict of the assignment inspires writers, and the narrator’s self-insight that occurs during the process of …

Creative Writing Pedagogy: Building Curriculum For High School Students, Elizabeth Lengel

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis serves as a rationale for the creative writing pedagogy I use and how it serves my high school creative writing class. As my school district made the decision to overhaul our English curriculum, the English department decided to add Creative Writing as an English class elective.

The work for planning these new classes was spread around the English Department, and I was assigned to design the curriculum for the new Creative Writing class. Designing an entire class from scratch leaves a lot of room for creativity and innovation. However, as excited for this new course as I was, …

I Wrote This Instead Of Being Productive, Timothy Hill

Honors Scholar Theses

"I Wrote This Instead of Being Productive" is a poetry chapbook focused on the mythos of productivity in our modern era, from the perspective of a college student. What does productivity mean at the end of an empire? In recent years, culture has become obsessed with new forms of productivity and time management. We optimize our schedules, compete against each other, and attempt to dissociate from the harsher realities of our lives. An omnipresent internet culture motivates us to generate more value from our time, even if it feels hollow. ‘Scientific’ explanations point towards dopamine deficits and cultural narratives emphasize …

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 …

I'M Calling 911!, David O'Connell

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Crazy Dog Lady Sees A Rat Snake In The Compost Bin, Renée Ashley

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Suburban Guerilla, E.H. Jacobs

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

The Swallows, Brenda Beardsley

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

In The Time Of Grunge I Was A Soft Queer Girl With Dreams Like A Neil Diamond Banger, Sarah Sorensen

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Givers, Anna Elkins

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

The Field Excerpt, Sara Slingerland Sheiner

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Black Cherry, Daria Rose

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Old Man, Joshua Kulseth

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Concrete, Joshua Kulseth

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

At The Stockyard, Joshua Kulseth

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Leftovers, James Magruder

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

The Crazy Dog Lady Tries To Say What She Feels, Renée Ashley

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.