English Language and Literature Commons^™

Abandon Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn: Why Bother?, Johnny Duan '12

2009 Fall Semester

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been an incendiary novel for decades; it has raised controversy in schools for at least half a century (Kim 1). Many have sought to remove it from literature classes, for various reasons, whether because of its racism, improper language, or alleged corrupting affects (Liechty). These arguments have not convinced the public to ban this book; none of the arguments used have been effective. There is no reason for us to break this trend.

Listen: A Close Reading Of Vonnegut, Elizabeth Zaretsky '10

2009 Fall Semester

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his death and birth many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. (Slaughterhouse-Five, pg 23)

Kurt Vonnegut has long been respected as a master of the written word. In this passage, he uses a specific tense, repetition, and clause arrangement to portray …

Interpreting Meteors, Weeds, And Sunshine: Acts Of God In The Scarlet Letter, Eleanor Cory '12

2009 Fall Semester

In recent years, many occurrences—from hurricanes to medical rarities to pictures on pieces of toast—have been labeled acts of God. Those who disagree attribute this association to the idea that people read what they want into a situation. Similar comparisons were made in the time of the Puritans, although theirs tended to be taken more seriously and often held authority in government or court. Still, the idea that these “messages from God” are subconsciously interpreted to fit personal beliefs can also be applied to those of Massachusetts Bay. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne shows that when events …

'Who Was It If It Wasn't Me?': The Problem Of Orientation In Alice Munro's 'Trespasses': A Cognitive Ecological Analysis, Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Website Compliance With Ethical Guidelines By Psychologists And Professional Counselors, Joseph Yazvac Iii

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is currently very little research investigating the ethical practice of etherapy, and none that distinguishes between types of therapists in terms of their compliance with ethical codes pertaining to e-therapy. The American Psychological Association does not have ethical standards specific to the provision of e-therapy but the American Counseling Association does. The purpose of this study was to assess differences in ethical compliance for e-therapy websites sponsored by psychologists and e-therapy websites sponsored by professional counselors. Specific ethics codes for the practice of e-therapy of the American Counseling Association were used to generate an assessment instrument, which served as …

Till, Jonathan Peter Moore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

till is a collection of poetry exclusively composed while the poet was a graduate student in the Creative Writing International Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The manuscript includes ekphrastic reflections on William Eggleston's Guide and confronts regionalism, religion and past/present subjectivity.

A Place, Near Water, Kaitlin Mcclanahan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My thesis represents the crux of my goal in coming to UNLV: to begin and successfully complete the first half of a novel that I have spent years developing. I attribute much of my success to the dedication I have learned in pushing through the MFA program with the help of my advisors, and will leave the program with enough vision to complete the novel I have begun.

My novel tells the story of a fictional Pacific Northwest town circa WWII. The novel begins with the discovery of a body.It then goes back in time and follows the lives of …

Cooper's Green World: Adapting Ecosemiotics To The Mythic Eastern Woodlands, Paul Siewers

Faculty Contributions to Books

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales situated in a Trans-Atlantic Green World tradition of Anglophone literature, related also to Native American culture.

Nathaniel Hawthorne And His Biblical Contexts, Conor Michael Walsh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The majority of criticism and scholarship devoted to the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne takes for granted the relationship between Hawthorne and the Bible, focusing instead upon theology and philosophy. This work proposes that the Bible was an important and pervasive influence in Hawthorne's fiction. The Bible provides Hawthorne with numerous resources for both his artistic and moral concerns. At a basic level the Bible provides a popular platform that allows Hawthorne to immediately connect with his contemporary audience who were intimately familiar with the Bible. More importantly, though, are the vast examples and perspectives of the human condition and human …

Wraith Walking, Jason Coley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With this work I wanted to explore the space between memory and imagination: namely, how much imagination fills the fissures that run though our knowledge of our past. The protagonist, Joshua, has been estranged from his family for nine years and learns of his father's death while in China. But without explanation, Joshua is awaken one morning by an old fabrication of his childhood imagination--a character now very real--who accompanies Joshua on his search for a fantastical object.

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing figures and faces in vague stimulus, such as clouds and wood grains. It is commonly believed …

"Divine William" And The Master: The Influence Of Shakespeare On The Novels Of Henry James, Amy M. Green

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Henry James's most sustained commentary on Shakespeare comes in the form of an introduction to an edition of The Tempest that was published in 1907. In it, he remarks that the play is a reflection of Shakespeare "consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression...to show him as unresistingly aware" (1207). This praise ties unerringly back to James's praise of the artist as one who views the world through open eyes and can capture the nuance of experience. James himself worked at the craft of fiction, and writes extensively in his notebooks and …

Circuit Rider, Kimberley Harris Idol

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An historical novel set at the end of the American Civil War focusing on the week between President Lincoln's assassination and John Wilkes Booth's death. The backdrop of the story is comprised of the historical events and political figures that shaped this period in time in America. The plot is also configured around the fictional histories of three young souls, the spirit of a murdered Chinese immigrant girl, and a brother and sister who's home in the Appalachians was destroyed during the war. All three are escaping the devastating consequences of the war and seeking a new start in the …

An Examination Of William Faulkner's Use Of Biblical Symbolism In Three Early Novels: The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, And Light In August, Richard North

Masters Theses

During the years 1928-1932, William Faulkner wrote and published three novels containing varying but significant amounts of Biblical content and symbolism: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932). In The Sound and the Fury, the characters of Benjy and Quentin Compson share some characteristics of Christ figures, but receive irony-laden treatment. The novel, however, presents the purest Christian character of this period of Faulkner's writing--the Compson family's Negro servant Dilsey. The Bible holds a similar influence over As I Lay Dying, specifically in the Old Testament. The Christian characters in this …

Artistic Liberty And Slave Imagery: "Mark Twain's Illustrator," E. W. Kemble, Turns To Harriet Beecher Stowe, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Present Giver And Other Stories On Human Connections, Erin B. Waggoner

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The Present Giver and Other Stories on Human Connections is a collection of seven short stories dealing with individuals that struggle to connect to another person. However, the stories also explore that these characters still feel the need to connect, stories very indicative of my own struggles with apathy and relationships. The critical analysis takes on a creative non-fiction approach as a way to show my development as a writer and how these stories relate to what I've learned through the years from my love of reading.

"A Long Wonder The World Can Bear & Be" : Narrative Strategies In The Dream Songs, Cooper Childers

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis examines the narrative development of The Dream Songs while viewing Henry as the locus and the impetus of the various narrative strategies deployed therein. Through the abundance of generic and literary allusions present in The Dream Songs, Berryman's sequence functions both to engage and to interact with the Western literary canon. The first chapter of this thesis locates The Dream Songs within Petrarchan sequences. The second chapter treats Henry's and the unnamed speaker's local language and shows how their competing speech genres inform the sequence's modes. The third chapter examines the role of epic codes in creating the …

Ballads As "Poetic" Rhetoric In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Norma Jeanne Peterson

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis explores the rhetorical effect ballads have had as a medium of argument for those who were "free of literary influences and fairly homogeneous in character." The ballad, speaks to us poetically and by tradition reveals human interests emerging from distress and frustration. Three men (John Lomax, Alan Lomax and Harry Smith) were instrumental in collecting and recording early ballads before they were lost; this effect has lingered from an early period in time to the 1960s, and beyond when the value of ballads was rediscovered.

Whitman, Elegy, And The Nineteenth Century Culture Of Death And Mourning, Susan Renee Nylander

Theses Digitization Project

In this thesis, the author offers a close reading and analysis of several of Walt Whitman's elegies and poems about death and mourning through the nineteenth century practices of mourning and death.

Lights And Shadows - 2009, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Language, Emotion, And Imagination: Constructing Human Identity Through Hemingway's Work, Gorka Diaz

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines how Hemingway’s use of language evokes emotions in his stories and how his particular way of evoking emotions affects readers. Hemingway’s style of providing vivid experiences for readers centers on the image as the dimension where emotions are offered, but also the dimension where the writer’s work converges with the reader’s reception of it. The reader reconstructs the text through the act of signifying emotions. This process of signification is made possible only through the use of the reader’s imagination. The study of the relation between emotion and imagination emphasizes that readers decode fiction as they decode …

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Recontextualizing Guy Endore’S Babouk In The Shadow Of Orientalism, Nathan Sacks

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 11 Fall 2009

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Saltwater Sacraments And Backwoods Sins: Contemporary Atlantic Canadian Literature And The Rise Of Literary Catholicism, Andrew Peter Atkinson

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In the 1990s, Canadian readers were offered a new literary trend: the Atlantic Canadian Catholic novel. In this dissertation, I examine works from six authors whose writing reflects the scope of this trend and I argue for a consideration of their collective impact on our social imaginary. The bulk of my argument is devoted to an examination of the Catholic religious content in the five novels and one memoir: David Adams Richards’ Bay of Love and Sorrows (1998); Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996); Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven (1996); Wayne Johnston’s Baltimore’s Mansion: A Memoir (1999); Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff …

Word~River Literary Review (2009), Jo Gibson, Lollie Ragana, Martin Dean Dupalo, Homeira Foth, Lily I. Mackenzie, Susan Ribner, Anne Stark, Mike Jaynes, Allan Johnston, Taylor Altman, Susan Nyikos, Lisa Konigsberg, Alex M. Frankel, Kristin Elsie Graef, Mari-Carmen Marin, Brian R. Young, Stacy Esch, Heather Trahan, Lee Casson, Rebecca Grace Williams, Kate Doughtery, Linda Maxwell, Mark Evan Davis, Erin Kelley, Rowan Johnson, Natalie Carter, John Shields, Kevin P. Keating, Renée E. D’Aoust, Anna Geyer, Heather Moymer, Algie Ray Smith, Adam Cushman, Margaret Finnegan, Alan Ramón Clinton, Thomas Sabel, Deborah Stark, Maggie Landess

word~river Literary Journal

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 11, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

Infectious Agents: Race And Environment In Nineteenth-Century America, Kristen Renee Egan

Dissertations

This dissertation critically examines the relationship between race and nature in nineteenth-century America by analyzing texts that attempt to discover, create, or preserve a pure national identity. Historical events in the nineteenth-century U.S. - such as mass immigration, Native American displacement, industrialization, westward expansion, and the rise of science - frustrated the quest for a unified American identity. While these events seem various, each one exacerbated a nation already bewildered by one central question. What is the traffic between body and space? Nineteenth-century American literature frequently portrays the American environment as an ideal space in need of preservation and at …

The Queer Work Of Fantasy: The Romance In Antebellum America, Zachary Neil Lamm

Dissertations

This project examines the ways in which antebellum writers of romances theorized the relationship between fantasy and queer desire. These writers produced vision of alternative forms of sociality that serve to criticize the heteronormativity of antebellum sexual culture and to promote fantasy as both a mode of critique and a strategy for cultural subversion. Antebellum romances thus represent both a deep dissatisfaction with their author's contemporary culture and a means of envisioning subversive socialities and intimacies that promote freedom of the expression of desire and allow for the queerness that might characterize such expressions if subjects were able to speak …