English Language and Literature Commons^™

“The Most Fatal Thing A Man Can Do Is Try To Stand Alone”: Collective Individualism In Carson Mccullers’S The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Rebecca Peterson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Wittgenstein, Language, And Mathematics In Paul Auster's City Of Glass, Nichole Eck

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Cathedral Of Kairos: Rhetoric And Revelation In The “National House Of Prayer”, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Traditionally, kairos is defined by its transience. Scholars assume that in order to capitalize on the rhetorical power of kairos, a speaker must capture the “opportune moment” before it passes. his article makes the case that the kairic moment can be sustained indefinitely through the sacralization of physical space. Linking rhetorical theories of kairos as “God’s time” to Mircea Eliade’s discussion of “sacred hierophanies,” the article performs an analysis of the National Cathedral in Washington DC and concludes that rhetoric can circumvent traditional contingencies when deployed within kairic space.

Oath Rhetoric, Political Identity, And The Case Of Jon Huntsman, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Oath rhetoric took center stage during the 2011-2072 presidential campaign, particularly during the Republican primary races. Several conservative organizations invited candidates to sign pledges, vows, or, as I label them collectively, oaths in an effort to secure the candidates' allegiance to particular polices and communities. Through a close concept-oriented analysis of a representative artifact (the Pro-Life Presidential Leadership Pledge) and candidate Jon Huntsman's refusal to sign it, this essay concludes that oaths serve important rhetorical functions at the personal, cultural, and political level. Whereas traditional political argument in the democratic tradition is meant lo create openings for action, oath rhetoric …

Give Them Something To Talk About: The Role Of Dialogue In Mentoring Relationships, Dawan Coombs, Kate Goodwin

Faculty Publications

An effective mentor/protégé relationship is essentially dialogical. Given that the mentor learns as the beginner learns, the mentor needs to take a dialogical stance to promote open conversations and investigation. Journals, blogs, observations, and subsequent debriefings help both the mentor and the beginner to learn much about teaching and learning.

There Can Be No End Save Learning: Using Seminal U.S. Documents To Teach Fundamental Reading Skills, Michael Handy

The Utah English Journal

The skill-based Common Core, as well as its Utah adaptation, raises the level of rigor required of students. The core focuses on skills that apply to literature and nonfiction of all kinds. A few standards name specific authors (Shakespeare’s name appears several times, for example), but the standards in general impose no prescribed list of works on teachers.

Yet Standard 9 of the Reading Standards for Informational Text curiously lists not only authors worthy of study, but specific works: “Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., Washington’s Farewell Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, King’s …

Increasing Student Engagement, Decreasing Teacher Workload: Student Self-Assessment As A Writing Approach, David B. Lee

The Utah English Journal

I was recently introduced to a first-year English teacher and was asked what advice I would give this teacher about to embark on the journey of teaching. I half-jokingly said, “Be careful: Grading papers can take over your life.” We all kind of chuckled, but I knew that this new teacher was soon to find out that this statement is very real; every time I thumb through a mound of ungraded essays sitting on my desk, I am reminded of this reality.

The Common Core Standards (2010) suggest that students participate in several short and long-term writing projects. I agree, …

Engaging The Echoboomers: Creative Strategies For Teaching Analysis And Synthesis, Sirpa Grierson, Heather Wing

The Utah English Journal

The new Utah State Core Curriculum standards require English language arts teachers to better prepare students for career and college readiness using the skills of close reading complex texts (Appendix A, 3) and argument writing (W1, 51). Both of these processes involve the use of synthesis and analysis for problem solving (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, 2011). Yet if we want students to read deeply and learn to write persuasively, we must offer authentic instructional situations that allow our students to access new understandings along with these foundational skills of reading and writing. Helping students become …

Close Encounters Of The Best Kind, Shannon Butler

The Utah English Journal

Usually I slip into a student teacher’s class and pull my forms of checklist behaviors from my bag unnoticed. If I am introduced, students give an indifferent glance, then turn their attention back where it belongs. But this morning was different.

The Power Of Using Standards-Based Grading To Assess Student Writing, Whitney Weaver, Angela Hartley

The Utah English Journal

Each year, like many language arts teachers across the state of Utah, we set out to effectively teach our students how to be good writers. Each time we discover exciting and engaging ways to teach writing in our classrooms. However, we have also found that even the best writing practices fall short in the absence of effective writing assessment. Standards-based grading has been, for us, the most successful tool for such assessments.

Standards-based grading is when a teacher creates specific and measurable learning goals to guide the curriculum, conducts frequent formative assessments of the students’ proficiency on these goals, and …

Editors' Note, Brice Peterson, Joseph Post

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Artes That Been Curious”: Questions Of Magic And Morality In Chaucer’S “The Franklin’S Tale”, Kaitlin Coats

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Contributors, Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Reminiscing About Ken Donelson: Tar Coeditor (With Alleen Pace Nilsen) 1974-1979, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

I knew of Ken Donelson long before I ever met the man.

As a brand new high school English teacher in Tempe, Arizona, I had read some of his work in the Arizona English Bulletin and English Journal. In fact, one of his English Journal articles appeared in the September 1977 issue, right when I started my teaching career in Arizona. That article, “Some Responsibilities for English Teachers Who Already Face an Impossible Job,” made clear not just that he understood the myriad challenges my colleagues and I faced, but also that he was incredibly well read and that he …

Ball Don’T Lie: Connecting Adolescents, Sports, And Literature, Alan Brown, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

A few months ago, a group of middle and high school media specialists invited me to help them consider approaches for engaging reluctant male readers. I thought long and hard about my own experiences, both as a reluctant male reader and as a teacher of reluctant readers. To begin to respond to such a query, I suggested, meant that we must first ponder several equally important questions:

• What are students doing instead of reading?
• In what literary practices are they already engaged outside of school? 
• How can educators connect current extracurricular interests with ongoing curricular activities? 
• How can books further …

School Culture, Struggling Adolescent Readers, And The Dialogical Self, Dawan Coombs

Faculty Publications

Sociocultural perspectives of literacy emphasize the role of the larger environment in the shaping of literacy practices. As a result, some researchers theorize students don’t fail in school, but that schools fail students by denying them opportunities to practice literacy in personally meaningful ways. Evidence of such is manifest in the narrative identities of struggling adolescent readers. Identities result from the selective emplotment of events, signs, and symbols into narratives that help the individual make sense of the world and the self’s role in it. Narratives, and the identities that result, represent the coming together of the stories individuals tell, …

Mitt Romney’S Paralipsis: (Un)Veiling Jesus In “Faith In America”, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled “Faith in America.” This article argues that Romney’s use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture.

Review: "Of Africa", Aaron Eastley

Faculty Publications

“A truly illuminating exploration of Africa,” suggests Wole Soyinka in the preface of his new book, Of Africa, “has yet to take place.” Soyinka is not writing here of a physical exploration, of course, but of a humanistic or spiritual one. This, at the root, is what the eight essays that comprise Of Africa urge readers to consider: ways in which Africa can lead the world forward into “a deeply craved Age of Universal Understanding.” In Soyinka’s estimation Africa today is very nearly as misapprehended and undervalued by the world at large as ever it was in the past. But …

"The River Duddon" And William Wordsworth's Evolving Poetics Of Collection, Shannon Melee Stimpson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite its impact in generating a more positive reception toward Wordsworth's work among his contemporaries, The River Duddon volume has received comparatively little critical attention in recent scholarship. On some level, this is unsurprising given the relative unpopularity of Wordsworth's later work among modern readers, but I believe that the relative shortage of critical scholarship on The River Duddon is due, at least in part, to a symptomatic failure to read the volume in its entirety. This essay takes up the challenge of following Wordsworth's directive to read The River Duddon volume as a unified whole. While I cannot account …

Healing The Cartesian Split: Understanding And Renewing Pathos In Academic Writing, Travis Washburn

Theses and Dissertations

There have always been rogues who dared to go against the traditional "intellectual" writing style of science and academia, a style that seems bent on transcending the "merely personal." Those who take this risk are embracing the rhetorical tradition of pathos, one that goes as far back as Aristotle. Current academic trends support a genre devoid of pathos and lacking true ethos—a deviation from classic rhetoric, and one that supports the Cartesian split of mind-body dualism. Neurological studies done by Antonio Damasio and others suggest that a holistic view is a more accurate picture of how a human soul functions. …

Gilded Age Travelers: Transatlantic Marriages And The Anglophone Divide In Burnett's The Shuttle, Rebecca L. Peterson

Theses and Dissertations

Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1907 novel, The Shuttle, is an important contribution to turn-of-the-century transatlantic literature because it offers a unifying perspective on Anglo-American relations. Rather than a conventional emphasis on the problematic tensions between the U.S. and Britain, Burnett tells a second story of complementary national traits that highlights the dynamic aspect of transatlantic relations and affords each nation a share of their Anglophone heritage. Burnett employs transatlantic travel to advance her notion of a common heritage. As a tool for understanding the narrative logic of The Shuttle, Michel de Certeau's theory of narrative space explains how Burnett uses movement …

Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In real life we each experience the world separately through our individual bodies, which necessitates what Kenneth Burke calls "identification." In this paper, I assert that as artistic media have structured our aesthetic experience in a way that increasingly resembles our lived, embodied experiences, our identification with fictional characters requires less imaginative effort and is more automatic and powerful. I will show this by analyzing how we inhabit characters through sensory engagement, point of view, and narrative form in literature, film, and video games (specifically action/adventure games, RPGs, and MMORPGs). I will then build off of Burke's foundational theory to …

The Virgin's Kiss: Gender, Leprosy, And Romance In The Life Of St. Frideswide, Gary Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

The longer thirteenth-century Middle English verse life of Saint Frideswide found in the collection of saints' lives known as the South English Legendary (SEL) narrates an event unique to medieval hagiography. In the poem, a leper asks the virgin saint to kiss him with her "sweet mouth," which she does in spite of her feelings of considerable shame, and the leper is healed. The erotic nature of the leper's request, Frideswide's reluctance to grant it, and her shame throughout the incident represent a significant departure from the twelfth-century Latin texts on which the SEL version of the saint's …

De-Centering The Dictator: Trujillo Narratives And Articulating Resistance In Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee And Junot Díaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Kelsy Ann Mortensen

Theses and Dissertations

Narratives of resisting the Trujillo regime are so prevalent in Dominican-American literature that it seems Dominican-American authors must write about Trujillo to be deemed authentically Dominican-American. Within these Trujillo narratives there seems to be two main ways to talk about resistance. “The resistance,” an organized entity that actively and consciously opposes the Trujillo regime, can be seen in stories like those told about the Mirabal sisters. The other resistance narrates how characters capitalize on opportunities to disrupt business or political functions, thus disrupting the Trujillo machine. This resistance works much like Ben Highmore's explanation of de Certeau's resistance in that …

Seeing (The Other) Through A Terministic Screen Of Spirituality: Emotional Integrity As A Strategy For Facilitating Identification, Jarron Benjamin Slater

Theses and Dissertations

Although philosopher Robert Solomon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in isolation from one another, they discuss similar concepts and ideas. Since its introduction in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has always been important to rhetorical theory, and recent studies in emotion, such as Solomon's, provide new insight into modes of identification—that human beings can identify with one another on an emotional level. This paper places Solomon and Burke in conversation with one another, arguing that both terministic screens and emotions are ways of seeing, acting, engaging, and judging. Hence, terministic screens and emotions affect ethos, or character, both …

Frontier, Displacement, And Mobility In Joss Whedon's Firefly, Emma Leigh Boone Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Firefly, a television series created, written, and directed by Joss Whedon, premiered on the Fox network in 2002 and aired only eleven episodes before it was cancelled halfway through its first season. While it gained some on-air popularity, it was not until fans convinced Fox via online chatrooms to release the series on DVD that it gained posthumous acclaim. Whedon credits westerns as the inspiration for Firefly because frontier characters tend to be natural, flawed, complex human beings who question universal truths through widely recognized motifs of classic westerns. In a February 17, 2011 Entertainment Weekly interview, Firefly actor …

Composing 'An Experience': Experiential Aesthetics In First-Year Writing, Aimee E. Blau

Theses and Dissertations

Students often struggle to understand why the required writing course is important in their academic and non academic life. My project seeks to bring these two parts of students' lives together by urging writing teachers and students to consider a richer concept of the term "composition," one that includes the fundamental work of composing meaningful knowledge by assembling and reflecting on raw experiences. Dewey's term "an experience" clarifies how students constitute knowledge from their experiences, and Burke's methodological concept of form offers students a model for writing that accommodates that Deweyian sort of learning. Building off of these aesthetic …

Converting Ovid: Translation, Religion, And Allegory In Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses, Andrew Robert Wells

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have not adequately explained the disparity between Arthur Golding's career as a fervent Protestant translator of continental reformers like John Calvin and Theodore Beza with his most famous translation, Ovid's Metamorphoses. His motivations for completing the translation included a nationalistic desire to enrich the English language and the rewards of the courtly system of patronage. Considering the Protestant opposition to pagan and wanton literature, it is apparent that Golding was forced to carefully contain the dangerous material of his translation. Golding avoids Protestant criticism of traditional allegorical readings of pagan poetry by adjusting his translation to show that …

Indexing And Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke's Critical Method, David Erland Isaksen

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Burke has been described as arguably the most important rhetorician and critical theorist of the twentieth century, and yet an important part of his scholarship has been generally overlooked by the academic community. The pentad has become the most prominent "Burkean" framework for analyzing texts, yet Kenneth Burke himself preferred "a more direct" way of approaching texts which he named "indexing." This thesis recreates this method from the pieces found in his scholarly writing, personal correspondence, and the papers his students produced for the class he taught at Bennington College. Kenneth Burke believed indexing could uncover the "pattern of …

Rhetoric In Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Healing Minds Through Argumentation, Celeste Lloyd Zsembery

Theses and Dissertations

The fields of psychology and rhetoric share the goal of improving human mental health and behavior through persuasion. This thesis traces the history of rhetoric and psychology theory, focusing on the parallel theories of Nienkamp's internal rhetoric and Herman's dialogical self. Both theories model the human mind as having multiple psyches that actively interact to interpret human experience and project human behavior. I conclude with a case study of anorexic patients using ethos, pathos, and logos in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), arguing that principles of rhetoric can help patients with mental disorders cognitively realign their thinking more effectively than drug …