English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Valley Lost To Time, Washington C. Pearce

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis delivers a playable and functional module for the 5 th Edition of the World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game. The Critical Introduction uses reader response and performance theory to create a framework for reading role-playing games as literature, explains some of the recent scholarship surrounding role-playing games, and details the creative process and work of the creative thesis.

In A Valley Lost to Time, Adventurers recruited by the Trellin Prime Minister are sent westward, over the Drazlin mountain range, with a mission to discover the fate of a decades-lost failed colony. The route is long and treacherous, passing through a …

"I Don't Believe One-Half Of It Myself": The Role Of Folk Groups In Supernatural Legend Interpretation, Melanie Kimball

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A range of interpretations can characterize supernatural legends as religious or non-religious—or somewhere in between. Religious audiences quickly categorize supernatural religious legends as such, but they hesitate when interpreting supernatural non-religious legends and supply multiple interpretations. Folk group paradigms influence these interpretations, and a variety of factors in turn influence which paradigms are used. The most important of these factors is a hierarchy of folk groups, which each individual has uniquely created and to which they refer when interpreting stories and experiences. When the most important of these folk groups fails to fully interpret a narrative, individuals will use folk …

“I—I Can’T Talk About Things”: The Tragedy Of Post-Wwii Civilian Masculinity In Agatha Christie’S Taken At The Flood, Rebekah Olsen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood serves to illustrate the fragility and ultimate destabilization of masculinity immediately following WWII. Christie illustrates this break by comparing two men, David Hunter and Rowley Cloade who represent types of men in Britain’s postwar landscape. Throughout the text, David Hunter is framed as a dangerous and dreadful young man, serving as a representation of post-war fears about demobbed soldiers attacking young women. However, the story really revolves around the civilian trauma that Rowley Cloade has sustained through his wartime role as a farmer, which comes from repression …

“The Only Story I’Ll Be Able To Tell”: An Analysis Of Shame And Queer Identity In Gothic American Campus Novels, Aubrey Dickens

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes shame and queerness in contemporary gothic American campus novels, also known as “dark academia” novels. The thesis looks specifically at the novels The Secret History by Donna Tartt, published in 1992 and considered to be the first dark academia novel, and Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, published in 2020 and a more modern adaptation on the subgenre. The two novels deal explicitly with how shame constitutes identity, specifically in regards to individuals who are depicted as queer or outside of heteronormative expectations of sexuality. Queerness in the context of this paper is defined as any portrayal of …

What Is Literary? Teaching Diverse, Literary Young Adult Novels In The Secondary Classroom, Kathryn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis defines what makes a novel literary and examines the benefits of introducing Young Adult literature into the English curriculum. The current classical canon that is taught in secondary classrooms consists almost entirely of books written by white, Eurocentric men with a few token novels from women, authors of color, or queer authors. While the books in the classical canon have earned their place there, the rapidly changing demographics in our secondary schools mean that the majority of our students no longer share the same characteristics as these authors. They have largely different life experiences and struggle to connect …

A Social Media Misinformation Label And The Postrhetorical Presidency, Ethan Mcginty

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In May 2020, presidential communication on social media was—for the first time—subject to a misinformation label applied by the social media site on which the communication originated. This development indicates a turning point in social media sites’ relationship with presidential communication and demands adaptation in the scholarly understanding of presidential rhetoric during the present era. Drawing from the theoretical framework of the postrhetorical presidency, I perform dual rhetorical analyses of this landmark artifact. The first round of analysis ignores the label and analyzes the presidential communication alone to understand its function, while the second analysis reveals the rhetorical impact of …

Censorship And The Satanic Verses: Policing Blasphemy In A Secular World, Alixa Brobbey

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Free speech is currently a hotly debated topic in the world of arts. This thesis traces the history and abolition of blasphemy law in England in light of its relationship with censorship in English literature. I examine the Rushdie Affair and its legacy, particularly in comparison to the Gay News trial. Building on previous scholarship, I examine the arguments that hate speech laws serve as a replacement for blasphemy law. I conclude with the suggestion that hate speech laws be amended to include a clause specifying that works of artistic merit cannot be prosecuted under such laws, mirroring the language …

Journey Into The Self: Essays On Biculturalism, Heidi Moe Graviet

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines what it means to exist as a bicultural being and how one approaches creating and negotiating a multicultural identity in terms of names, war, religion, belonging, and loss. In Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō embarks upon a journey of transcendence and self-discovery into the interior regions of Japan. In doing so, he establishes a Japanese writing tradition that centers around introspective journey-taking and writing oneself into truth and being. This thesis examines, participates in, and expands upon this writing tradition as it follows one Japanese American woman’s attempts to selfhood. Ultimately, it proposes the idea …

The Face Of God: Imaginary Space In Pickle Green, Taylor Flickinger

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A foundational premise of adaptation theory is that novels, films, theater, and any other storytelling medium can tell the same story but must do so differently. That is, each medium has its own distinct “language” with varying strengths and weaknesses inherent to its form. However, adaptation theorists have recently started pushing back on the idea that a film “can’t” do the same things as a novel, for example, arguing instead that the language of film and literature is more a result of “habits that are grounded in the history of fashion, taste, and analysis rather than in any specific technical …

The Legacy Of Jazz Poetry In Contemporary Rap: Langston Hughes, Gil Scott-Heron, And Kendrick Lamar, Madison Brasher

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Langston Hughes wrote in “Jazz as Communication that: “Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” In this paper I assert that the rap music of Kendrick Lamar contains the steady off-beat of jazz and carries out the rhetorical legacy of Hughes’ jazz poetry. By marking the key elements of jazz poetry and tracing their presence in rap music, I will show how these elements create a powerful aesthetic experience for audiences that primes them for the rhetorical messages of the artist. …

Seeking The Feminine Divine: Mormon Women's Religious Authority, Power, And Presence In Rachel Hunt Steenblik's Mother's Milk, Kaitlin Hoelzer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Literary theorists like Hélène Cixous and other French feminists have written about l’écriture feminine, a deconstructive force which allows female writers more freedom from male-dominated areas. Because Christianity has been historically male-dominated, Christian women have long used this idea to great effect, using their writing as a space in which they are free to assert power and authority. Mormonism, which arose in the 1830s during the Second Great Awakening, has grown to reinforce a patriarchal model for both family and church leadership, making Cixous’ separate space of writing necessary for Mormon women of the twenty-first century. The Mormon poet …

A New Oral Poetry: Improvisation And Performance In Robert Lowell's Poetry Readings, Madelyn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines elements of improvisation and performance in the poetry readings of Robert Lowell from 1955 to 1977 by analyzing audio recordings of Lowell’s readings and comparing them to his early drafts and published work. As a poet known for incessantly editing his poetry, Robert Lowell uses poetry readings as a venue for experimenting with his poetry before publication, for catering his work to specific audiences, and for memorializing his life in prose. The time period this thesis is concerned with correlates with a rise in New Oral Poetry in the U.S., which created popular new venues for poetry …

Power Struggles: Sovereignty And The Nonhuman In South Africa, Taelin Wilford

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis uses the theoretical backbone of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign to look at the theme of the nonhuman in connection with sovereignty in three novels representing three major time periods in South Africa. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness uses the nonhuman in the form of the supernatural to reveal the limits of sovereignty in Colonial South Africa. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace makes use of the nonhuman in the form of animals to talk about the transient nature of sovereignty in post-Apartheid South Africa. Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City is set in an alternate future South Africa and …

Who Owns The Bard?: P. T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, And The Shakespeare Birthplace Showdown Of 1847, Abigail Clayton

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the twenty-first century age of globalization, debates over global versus national ownership of cultural heritage remain at the forefront of public consciousness. The cultural ownership of William Shakespeare, who is idealized as both a distinctly British icon and a global literary influence, has become contested ground; but, in fact, as I argue, this tension first boiled to the surface in 1847. In the spring of that year, newspapers advertised that Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon would soon go up for public auction. Rumors immediately began circulating that the American showman P. T. Barnum, who had recently barnstormed through England with …

Adaptations: The Graphic Novel And Shakespeare's Hamlet, Candice Boren

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis covers three main ideas. First, there is a discussion of how an adaptation should be studied, using the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings in comparison to the books written by J. R. Tolkien. This establishes what relationship an adaptation has to its original text and the capability of achieving fidelity. The second section focuses on graphic novels and the unique characteristics they possess, looking specifically at two graphic novels, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and March by John Lewis. This section ends with an analysis of how the graphic novel could prove to be beneficial to …

Preserving The Trauma Narrative Of The Hunger Games: As Based In The Novels, The Films, And Morality, Rio Turnbull

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis discusses both the technical aspects and the moral aspects of preserving trauma when adapting a trauma novel to film, in specific relation to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. The thesis begins by arguing the Hunger Games story as a trauma narrative in its original form, but not so in its film adaptations, and supports this argument by defining the defining characteristics of the trauma narrative–which is voicelessness and an altered sense of self and society, embedded in the internal experience–and applying it to The Hunger Games trilogy, identifying where these occur in the novels and do not …

The Battle Of The Sexes: Montagu V. Swift, Madison Savoie

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Two of the most interesting “guardians” of eighteenth-century sociocultural standards were the satirists Jonathan Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Swift is remembered by scholars as one of the “greatest prose satirists in the history of English Literature,” but Montagu, until recent decades, has been less well-known. This thesis will look at the satirical poetic dialogue between the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift and the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and provide insights into the sociocultural dynamics of gender in eighteenth-century British print life as revealed by the individual texts.

Salem Belles, Succubi, And The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft And Gothic Erotic Affect, Sylvia Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized …

A Light In The Dark: A Case For Ya Literature Through The Lens Of Medical Dystopias, Thomas Jace Brown

Theses and Dissertations

By examining critical studies of the dystopian genre from Gregory Claeys, Fátima Vieira, and Keith Booker as well as the studies of young adult dystopian novels from Roberta Trites, Kenneth Donnelson, and Sean Connors, I argue that young adult literature (YAL) has literary merit and is worth studying. This literariness stems from a novel's ability to explore complex themes like religion, sacrifice, and societal contracts. I introduce and analyze a subgenre of YA dystopian literature, which I classify as the medical dystopia, a genre that is uniquely positioned to explore the complex moral questions that surround advancing medical technologies and …

Transfer In The Writing Center: Tutors Facilitating Students' Understanding Of Transfer, Shannon Nicole Tuttle

Theses and Dissertations

Transfer, a highly researched topic in composition studies, is a topic of increasing interest to those in writing center studies. Writing centers are an ideal location for the application of transfer because tutors can provide more opportunities for guided practice, application, reflection, and metacognition in a one-on-one setting; thus, students may learn more effectively, through application, the writing skills they may receive via instruction in their classrooms. Previous writing center studies have implemented transfer-focused curricula to help tutors better facilitate transfer in their tutorials. These curricula have focused on training tutors to understand and apply transfer to their tutorials, but …

Walt Before Leaves: Complicating Whitman's Authorship Through Jack Engle, Christopher Preston Burright

Theses and Dissertations

The rediscovery of a number of Walt Whitman's early fictions prompts a discussion of where they belong within the larger web of Whitman scholarship. Though we have been aware of the existence of these writings for quite some time, frequently these works return to obscurity soon after being discovered due to the lack of research regarding them. This thesis presents an alternative framework whereby these novels can be integrated into a hypertextual model centered on Leaves of Grass (1855) and Whitman's overall authorial identity. I build on Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price's work creating a hypertext archive incorporating Whitman's works, …

Troll-In-Chief: Donald Trump, Antinomic Rhetoric, And The Short-Circuiting Of Civic Discourse, Joseph Wayne Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. No aspect of the campaign was more remarkable than Trump’s rhetoric, which ranged from the candid and unexpected to the crude and incendiary. Now, two years later, his rhetoric—and the reasons for its widespread appeal—remain largely opaque, even under examination from proto-fascist or populist lenses. I seek for a partial account of Trump’s rhetoric using the concept of antinomic rhetoric coupled with the widespread popular perception of him as similar to an internet troll. In short, I believe it is his violation of the conventional standards (nomoi) …

“Chosen Instruments”: Tolkien’S Hobbits And The Rhetoric Of The Dispossessed, Samuel Bennett Watson

Theses and Dissertations

Tolkien’s hobbit characters are capable of a particular type of rhetorical persuasion, one which relies on their ability to leverage their status as outsiders among the other people of Middle-earth. The hobbits are uniquely suited to the task of bringing unity to Middle-earth’s people because of the simplicity of their rhetoric, which focuses on proving their own morality and presenting truths without elaboration. When compared with the text, the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings also help highlight the importance that Tolkien placed on the simplicity of hobbit rhetoric. These abilities of the hobbits become clear through a …

“The Right Use Of Reason”: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, And Moral Education In Peter Parley’S Annual, Taylor Topham

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis discusses the relationship between the start of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature and the educational policy and philosophy changes that took place in mid- to late-19^th century England. Some scholars have argued that the reasons for the rise in fantasy literature that characterized the Golden Age of Children’s Literature are primarily economic, while others find philosophical and cultural precedents for the movement toward fantasy. This paper presents the work of William Martin as an example of how fantasy literature emerged. Martin’s work reveals that he was proactively experimenting with the fantasy genre in response to debates …

"Yup, So-Jeer": Interlanguage And Ruptured Translation In Charles Dickens's The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners, Jacob Kurt Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

Co-authored by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is a tale of linguistic subversion in colonial spaces. Christian George King-a native "Sambo" that betrays the English colonists on Silver Store to a marauding band of pirates-demonstrates a linguistic phenomenon that scholars call interlanguage, or a quasi-language that partially resembles both English and his native language. Because of its status as a language between languages, King's interlanguage disrupts the linguistic hierarchy of the tale by opening possibilities for miscommunication. To combat this underlying tension, the colonists must rely on translation-specifically, on the mistaken belief that all …

Navigating Palimpsest’S Sea Garden: H.D.’S Spiritual Realism, Mari Anne Murdock

Theses and Dissertations

H.D.’s novel Palimpsest has often been analyzed using psychoanalytic theories due to her relationship with Sigmund Freud and his work. However, her own approach to the science of psychoanalysis reveals that she often complemented her scientific understanding with her syncretic religious beliefs, a perspective she referred to as “spiritual realism,” which suggests that analysis with a spiritual nuance may provide a deeper understanding of the novel’s intended purpose. Postsecular theory makes for a useful lens by which to analyze Palimpsest’s treatment of reintegrating spiritual knowledge into Freud’s secular understanding of the modern world by providing the benefits of such a …

The Effects Of Repeated Reading On The Fluency Of Intermediate-Level English-As-A-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Krista Carlene Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Most would agree that reading fluency is a concern of every L2 teacher. Repeated reading (RR) positively affects fluency development, supported by much research with L1 children. However, relatively little focus has been given to L2 RR. Most research on RR in L2 settings has focused on audio-assisted RR, used insufficient data collection methods prone to human error, and taken place in an EFL setting. In our experiment, we used eye–tracking as a direct mode of measurement of the effects that RR has on early and late reading measures. In this study, 30 intermediate-level English language learners studying in an …

The Uncanny Mind: Perpetrator Trauma In Poe’S “The Black Cat”, Bethanie Allyson Sonnefeld

Theses and Dissertations

Among the psychological interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” trauma theory has yet to make an appearance. However, the confessional nature of the story shifts—via a trauma reading—from an attempt by the narrator to ease his guilt to his attempt to understand what happened to him. The narrator’s murder of his wife traumatized him, causing erasures in the timeline and several forms of dissociation. These erasures and dissociations cause an uncanny effect within the story, which occurs as the past, present, and future are conflated and as the narrator’s mind is both known and hidden. The narrator’s tale …

"I Dare Not Venture A Judgement”: Spirituality And The Postsecular In Hogg’S Confessions, Conor Bruce Hilton

Theses and Dissertations

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious …

Kekuaokalani: An Historical Fiction Exploration Of The Hawaiian Iconoclasm, Alex Oldroyd

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis offers an exploration of the Hawaiian Iconoclasm of 1819 through the lens of an historical fiction novella. The thesis consists of two parts: a critical introduction outlining the theoretical background and writing process and the novella itself. 1819 was a year of incredible change on Hawaiian Islands. Kamehameha, the Great Uniter and first monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, had recently died, thousands of the indigenous population were dying, and foreign powers were arriving with increasing frequency, bringing with them change that could not be undone. With the death of Kamehameha, Hawaiʻi’s rulers faced the impossible of task …