English Language and Literature Commons^™

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …

Identifying Problems And Solutions In Changing State Legislation Regarding Licensed Clinical Social Workers Providing Private Independent Mental Health Services, Dianna Cooper-Bolinskey

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

State regulated social work practice began in the 1960s; by the mid-1990s, all of the states within the United States regulated the profession through licensure. The purpose of licensure was ostensibly to protect the public and the profession; however, legislation defining social work practice varied vastly from state to state. The variation existed not only between states, but also within licensure categories with regard to the scope of practice of the social work profession. Licensed clinical social workers in some states could practice relatively independently, as they had the ability to diagnose, provide psychotherapy, and bill Medicaid, Medicare, and third …

Operationalizing Humility: A Model Of Situational Humility For Christian College Student Leaders, Scott T. Barrett

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research study explored how college student leaders operationalize humility in their actions and what leads individuals to act with situational humility. There is a rise in narcissistic tendencies in college students (Twenge, Konrath, Campbell, & Bushman, 2008a, 2008b) and a decline in overall character traits (Burns, 2012; Hunter, 2000; Liddell & Cooper, 2012). Opposite the vice of narcissism sits the virtue of humility (Emmons, 2000; Exline & Geyer, 2004; Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Tangney, 2000). Using a grounded theory approach, the researcher looked to discover the process of humility development. Twenty six in depth interviews were conducted at three …

Adult Learning And The Effect Of Education And Gender Interaction On Type 2 Diabetics, Abdi H. Nur

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed methods research study was to investigate whether the relationships between education and medication and healthy exercise adherence were the same among female and male Type 2 diabetic adult learners. The purpose included also exploring whether registered nurses would alter their approach to diabetic adult learners’ education on medication and healthy exercise adherence considering patients’ gender and education levels. The study also investigated the correlation between diabetes duration and medication and healthy exercise adherence. The research investigation employed mixed methods sequential explanatory design using qualitative data to help explain the quantitative findings. The quantitative study was …

Distributed Computing In Internet Of Things (Iot) Using Mobile Ad Hoc Network (Manet): A Swarm Intelligence Based Approach, John Selvadurai

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing technological trend, which is expected to revolutionize the world by changing the way we do things. IoT is a concept that encourages all the electronic devices to connect to the internet and interact with each other. By connecting all these devices to the internet, new markets can be created, productivity can be improved, operating costs can be reduced and many other benefits can be obtained. In IoT architecture, often sensors and aggregators collect data and send to a cloud server for analyzing via the traditional cloud-server model. This client-server architecture is not adequate …

A Study Of The Material Inspection Record And Quality Systems: A Case In The United States Department Of The Navy, Larry W. Brown Jr.

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Defective products and services are a part of every industry, sector, and organization. Minimization of those defects is essential for business success. The later those defects are found, the more they cost the business and consumer. This study investigated the impact having an accredited Quality Management System (QMS) had on the acceptance of delivered product. The study focused on the products delivered to the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) organizations. This study investigated the statistical significance between the means of the groups within size and number of accreditation. The dependent variables were Material Inspection …

Incorporating Lean Non-Value Added Variants Into A Method Of Determining Stakeholder Salience For First-Line Manager Decision Making, Bruce H. Bader

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research brings together two streams of thought for first-line manager decision-making. The first is the quality system model, in particular, Lean operations. The second is Stakeholder Theory. Both streams have been identified as ways to improve value of the organization. Previous studies disagree regarding whether Lean and Stakeholder theory can work together. The potential problem of having a poor balance of Stakeholders and Lean waste is that exclusive focus on one may result in less awareness of the other, in which case value can be lost by the organization. This research investigates if both Lean waste and Stakeholder salience …

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 …

Reflections On A Lifetime Of Reading, Frederick W. Guyette Mr.

South Carolina Libraries

Here I give an account of my life as a reader. The first books I remember enjoying are those that were read aloud on Captain Kangaroo, such as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, The Story about Ping, and Stone Soup. When I was a little older, in school we learned about science and current events from the stories in Weekly Reader. This was followed by an interest in baseball and the sports page in the local newspaper. In high school, I was more interested in films than books, but “visual literacy” has it place in life, …

The Functionality Of Reboots, Dustin L. Shepherd

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to better understand how film reboots empower fans by offering unique insight as critiques of the original texts and by displacing hierarchies amongst audience, critic, and author. My hypothesis is that reboots, as an act of adaptation, allow audience members of the original franchise to become authors, in this case screenwriters. By extension these screenwriters become critics by highlighting, expanding, or even disregarding themes found in the original film series. This complicates the reboot beyond a simple capitalistic venture to make money and invites us to consider the way they position and displace interactants to better foster …

“On Soulless Feet We Cross The Floor...” The Illusion Of Control In Grim Fandango And Virtual Spaces, Christina Cicchetti

Theses and Dissertations

Even though users can choose what they do in virtual spaces, they are forced to operate within the confines of realms designed by the invisible authors of the game’s code. The illusion of choice blinds users to an assessment of the hidden structure supporting immersive virtual worlds.

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.

Building Imaginary Worlds (2012) By Mark J.P. Wolf And Revisiting Imaginary World (2016) Edited By Mark J.P. Wolf, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review of Building Imaginary Worlds (2012) by Mark J.P. Wolf and Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (2016), edited by Mark J.P. Wolf, reviewed by Andrew Higgins

Is Being Wicked The Same As Having Wickedness? A Dialogue On Human Nature Between Wicked, Frankenstein, And Rousseau’S Second Discourse, Emily R. Bezold

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis revolves around the characters of Elphaba, from the musical Wicked, and the Monster, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the comparison of these two verdant characters I seek to analyze their psychological development, starting from their conceptions, to their final moments in their respective stories. I will focus on the parallels between their relations with their fathers, other social connects they may or may not make, and their interaction within the wider social-political world of their stories. In this I seek to explain how Elphaba and the Monster come to represent two different types of man, according …

Selected Readings On Augmented Reality, Ekphrasis, And Michael Field, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

No abstract provided.

Blade Runner And The Divine Menace, Alexander W. Pickens

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

Following the decline of Christianity in mainstream Western culture, a void rose in the moral and societal code. Those writers that emerged presented alternate visions that worked their way into the literature of the 20th century. Karl Marx's interpretation of the structure of labor in capitalism presented a new societal hierarchy whose finer points have been worked out in the complex film Blade Runner. This dystopian nightmare, in which a Marxist interpretation of current society bogged down by the ennui of capitalist accumulation is confronted, describes a new religious order based upon this economic theory. Central to this reimagining …

Homosociality In Michael Radford’S "The Merchant Of Venice", Eric A. Pitz

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

To Kill A Mockingbird, The Help, And The Regendering Of The White Savior, Brett Seekford

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Filmmakers continue to use the “White Savior “ archetype to construct racialized messages in the post-Civil Rights era. These protagonists, who resolutely defend the rights of African Americans, ultimately focalize whiteness and marginalize black characters and voices. Though a white savior features prominently in both To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Help (2011), The Help’s regendering of the archetype invites viewers to imagine a world in which a white savior is no longer necessary. The Help’s update on the white savior trope from Atticus Finch to Skeeter Phelan allows for deeper development of black characters and a …

Sight And Song Augmented, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

This file is an Android application built in the Unity 3D game engine with the Vuforia Augmented Reality extension. It remediates Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), a collection of ekphrastic poetry about paintings by the Old Masters.

Recording Angels: Examining Female Narrators In Vampire Fiction And Film, Jacqueline T. Bashaw

College Honors Program

Authors of vampire fiction often grapple with the shifting gender norms of the late nineteenth century. They explore these shifting tensions through the creation of complex narrative structures, some of which incorporate female narrators. By making these women narrators, these authors carefully consider female perspectives and the authority women can wield, both as narrators in their respective texts, and as women in late nineteenth-century British society who were confined to rigid gender roles. The narrative tension that arises between the narrator and the text then allows these authors to use literature to explore and theorize about broader societal tensions.

This …

The Short Story And The Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In And Of The Americas, Lucienne Muller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. This analysis draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortazar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work.

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

Ageing In Action: Hollywood’S Ageing Ensemble Action Hero Series, Philippa Gates

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

This paper explores the treatment of ageing in the ensemble action hero series RED (2010 and 2013) starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren and The Expendables (2010, 2012, and 2014) starring Sylvester Stallone and other 1980s action stars. These two series combine action with comedy to thematize two sets of issues in relation ageing—first, about competence and usefulness and, second, about meaningful relationships. In the RED series, these two overarching concerns are linked explicitly to ageing whereas, in the Expendables films, these concerns replace those about ageing. In other words, the Expendables series mainly ignores ageing and presents its heroes …

Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments In Jim Lynch’S Border Songs, Jenny Kerber

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

This article applies an eco-critical approach to contemporary American fiction about the Canada-US border, examining Jim Lynch’s portrayal of the British Columbia-Washington borderlands in his 2009 novel Border Songs. It argues that studying transnational environmental actors in border texts—in this case, marijuana, human migrants, and migratory birds—helps illuminate the contingency of political boundaries, problems of scale, and discourses of risk and security in cross-border regions after 9/11. Further, it suggests that widening the analysis of trans-border activity to include environmental phenomena productively troubles concepts of nature and regional belonging in an era of climate change and economic globalization. Cet …

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page On How Comics And Videogames Intersect As Interactive, Digital Experiences, Joseph Austin Thurmond

MA in English Theses

Little attention has been given to how digital technologies have impacted the comic medium. Despite the astronomical impact this shift has had on all sorts of traditional media, it is common to believe that digital comics are simply electronic versions of print comics, but the implementation of audio, animation, three-dimensional effects, and interactivity with other kinds of digital comics reveal that they are hardly so simple. Analyzing and classifying them is essential for English studies, comics studies, and even game studies. Digital comics are a hybridized medium that challenge the essence and existing definitions of comics with disparate instances and …

Tears Of A Clown: Reexamination Of Disabled Narrators In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Alexandra Rose Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Darl Bundren of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Benjy Compson of The Sound and the Fury exhibit certain similarities, suggesting that, in relation to Donald M. Kartiganer's model from the introduction of The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels, they would be paired together better than his initial couplings. This argument proposes to discuss why Darl Bundren is the reincarnated version of Benjy Compson in terms of their internal discourses, narratorial skills, and disability within each novel. As both characters could easily be labeled "disabled," this endeavor will also speculate …

Crossing America’S Borders: Chinese Immigrants In The Southwesterns Of The 1920s And 1930s, Philippa Gates

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

Today, when we think of the film Western, we think of a genre dominated by Anglo-American heroes conquering the various struggles and obstacles that the nineteenth-century frontier presented to settlers and gunslingers alike—from the daunting terrain and inclement environment of deserts, mountains, and plains to the violent opposition posed by cattle ranchers and Native Americans. What we tend to forget, most likely because the most famous Westerns of the last seventy-five years also forgot, is that Chinese immigrants played an important role in that frontier history. As Edward Buscombe confirms, “[g]iven the importance of their contribution, particularly to the construction …

Melodrama, Masochism, And Biopolitical Encounters In The Fosters, Jaime Brunton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Since the television drama The Fosters, which centers on the daily struggles of two lesbian moms (Stef Foster and Lena Adams) and their multi-ethnic family of foster and adoptive children, debuted on ABC Family in 2013, the show has garnered numerous awards and nominations. . . . The Fosters has struck a chord with American television audiences and critics. While part of the show’s appeal no doubt rests in its representations of LGBTQ people and people of color (as its awards suggest) and its dealing with topical issues such as gay marriage and racial profiling, it also worth noting …

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …