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English Language and Literature Commons

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Englishness Within: Navigating The Colonial And Patriarchal Motives In Prospero's Daughter And Wide Sargasso Sea , Zainab Saleh Apr 2021

Englishness Within: Navigating The Colonial And Patriarchal Motives In Prospero's Daughter And Wide Sargasso Sea , Zainab Saleh

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With the arrival of postcolonial theory and studies surrounding culture and identity, the increased awareness of English cultural identity found itself rooted in the attempts to set the narrative of how identity is a mere checklist of qualifications that presumably leads one to be deemed as one of the “English.” Fixating on the spaces formerly colonized by the British, Englishness has come around to define and establish a discourse of Otherness. From language and dress to food and environment, Englishness finds itself present in postcolonial retellings of colonial texts that set the tone for what is presumably and hegemonically filled …


Birth Family Search, Trauma, And Mel-Han-Cholia In Korean Adoptee Memoirs, Katelyn J. Hemmeke May 2016

Birth Family Search, Trauma, And Mel-Han-Cholia In Korean Adoptee Memoirs, Katelyn J. Hemmeke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Birth Family Search, Trauma, and Mel-han-cholia in Korean Adoptee Memoirs” analyzes the connections between adoption trauma and birth family search by examining three Korean-American adoptee memoirs: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea, both by Jane Jeong Trenka; and Ghost of Sangju by Soojung Jo. I draw links between their work and studies on trauma by critical scholars Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Margaret Homans, and Jennifer Cho. According to Caruth, the pathology of a traumatic experience lies in the victim’s inability to fully experience the traumatic event as it happens; only …


Dreaming Free From The Chains: Teaching The Rhetorical Sovereignty Of Gerald Vizenor Through Bearheart , Lydia R. Presley Apr 2016

Dreaming Free From The Chains: Teaching The Rhetorical Sovereignty Of Gerald Vizenor Through Bearheart , Lydia R. Presley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Gerald Vizenor’s novel Bearheart, through the lens of rhetorical sovereignty. What this means is that the crux of my understanding of Bearheart begins with the knowledge that the language, terminology, and style used by Vizenor are not only his choices, but also his inherent Native right to use. I argue that it is important to teach Vizenor’s theoretical ideas through Bearheart because each of its relatively short episodes, or series of episodes, deals with a key theoretical idea that can be explored not only in a Native American literature setting, but in …


Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson Apr 2010

Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops and Thumbprints in Black Coffee is a creative dissertation that examines the lives of Arab women living in Jordan and Arab immigrants living in the United States. The first portion of the dissertation, Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops is an excerpt from the early portion of the novel by the same name. These first 53 pages provide the background of the characters and highlights aspects that are culturally specific to the women of the stories. For example, issues of arranged marriages, funeral practices, women’s custody rights are all illustrated through these early stories. The early …


Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy Jan 2009

Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by …