English Language and Literature Commons^™

Negotiating Identity: Culturally Situated Epideictic In The Victorian Travel Narratives Of Isabella Bird, Katherine Reilly Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Epideictic rhetoric, one of the classical modes of persuasion described by Aristotle, has faced some criticism concerning its value in the realm of rhetoric. Though attitudes have been shifting over the last several decades, there is still a tendency to undervalue epideictic, falling back on the Aristotelian system of ceremonial oratory. However, its “praise and blame” style of persuasion employs of the type of rhetor / audience identification described by Kenneth Burke. Epideictic rhetoric is a major component of virtually any communication, as the speaker or writer seeks to create a bond with that audience so as to persuade them …

Beyond Eden: Revising Myth, Revising Allegory In Steinbeck's "Big Book", Jeremy S. Leatham

Theses and Dissertations

Steinbeck's use of allegory in East of Eden has caused much critical resistance, but recent work in allegory theory offers ways of rereading the novel that help mediate much of this criticism. The approach to allegory forwarded here, which allows for multiple bodies of referents and fluidity between text and referents, empowers readers with greater autonomy and individual authorship. In the case of East of Eden such an approach moves the novel beyond a simple retelling of the Cain-Abel narrative to establish a flexible mythic framework for use in an ever-changing world. By challenging dualistic thinking, narrow vision, and cultural …

The Tractarian Penny Post'S Early Years (1851–1852): An Upper-Class Effort "To Triumph In The Working Man's Home", Kellyanne Ure

Theses and Dissertations

The Penny Post (1851–1896), a religious working-class magazine, was published following a critical time for the Oxford Movement, a High Church movement in the Church of England. The Oxford Movement's ideas were leaving the academic atmosphere of Oxford and traveling throughout the local parishes, where the ideals of Tractarian teachings met the harsh realities of practice and the motivations and beliefs of the working-class parishioners. The upper-class paternalistic ideologies of the Oxford Movement were not reflected in the parishes, and the working-classes felt distanced from their place in religious worship. The Penny Post was published and written by Tractarian clergymen …

The Culture Of Habits And Dispositions: Associationist Psychology And Unitarian Education In Gaskell's Wives And Daughters, Lori Ann Dickson

Theses and Dissertations

Although Victorian psychology has been the subject of much recent scholarship, Elizabeth Gaskell's work has not been considered in relation to nineteenth-century theories of mind. In this thesis, I argue that Gaskell's final novel, Wives and Daughters, deals with associationism, an early branch of psychology that played a key role in public debates over cognition that took place throughout the century. Gaskell was exposed to associationism through her Unitarian faith, and Unitarian educators in particular articulated associationist principles in their writings about cognitive development. Gaskell was preoccupied with a similar model of learning throughout her fiction, and I read …

Adjusting The Rearview Mirror: Higher Level Reflection Strategies In First-Year Composition, Jessica Ann Green

Theses and Dissertations

Part of the curriculum in many composition classrooms contains a reflection component where students are required to think back over their writing and discuss strengths and weaknesses. Yet many of the reflections that students write fall short of the purpose of reflection when students fail to analyze their writing practices or to make future goals for themselves, a problem that occurs when higher level reflection strategies are not taught and practiced in the classroom. When students are taught to use reflection as a way to critically evaluate their writing, to make connections between class assignments and course objectives, and to …

American Totalitarianism In Norman Mailer's The Naked And The Dead And The Armies Of The Night, Benjamin E. Onofrio

Theses and Dissertations

Norman Mailer's seminal works The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night both outline Mailers distaste for oppression. The Naked and the Dead's bleak reprisal of oppressive leadership tactics offers little in the way of a solution to fight this power. However, twenty years later, The Armies of the Night names personal expression of political views as the answer to oppressive force within the American government. Mailer met the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom abroad while oppressing one's own citizens by encouraging personal expression and flaunting the "rules" of the novel. In the end, Mailer surmises …

Standing In The Center Of The World: The Ethical Intentionality Of Autoethnography, Nicole Wilkes

Theses and Dissertations

Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ipseity and alterity has permeated Western thought for more than forty years. In the social sciences and the humanities, the recognition of the Other and focus on difference, alterity, has influenced the way we ethically approach peoples and arts from different cultures. Because focus on the ego, ipseity, limits our ethical obligations, focusing on the Other does, according to Levinas, bring us closer to an ethical life. Furthermore, the self maintains responsibility for the Other and must work within Levinas's ethical system to become truly responsible. Therefore, the interaction between self and Other is Levinas's …

Literary Case Histories And Medical Narratives In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Travis Wade Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Literature and medicine are not usually seen as related disciplines, but scholars have already begun producing fruitful scholarship regarding historical and aesthetic interactions between them. This thesis adds to that scholarship by examining medicine and literature in nineteenth-century Britain. More specifically, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both use nineteenth-century medical case conventions to tell their stories. Furthermore, because both works deal with addiction, divided selves, and the power that physical substances can have on morality and character, these two works provide an excellent comparison coming …

Shootin Up The Past: Terministic Frontiers In Angle Of Repose And High Noon, James C. Dalrymple

Theses and Dissertations

The West has long been an important geographic and symbolic space for the United States. In the 19th and 20th centuries that space became the subject of numerous popular works of fiction, first in print and later in the cinema. These texts eventually formed a specialized genre, the Western, which had its own conventions, styles, and themes. Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, both seminal western texts from the mid-twentieth century, seek to reinterpret those conventions. While the Western is often characterized as a genre of violent masculinity and rugged individualism, these two texts employ conventional …

A Poem, A Fervid Lyric, In An Unknown Tongue: Translation, Multilingualism, And Communication In Charlotte Brontë'S Shirley, Amanda Bishop Erdmann

Theses and Dissertations

In this essay, I will argue that looking at translation and multilingualism both as a mode of storytelling and as a theme of Brontë's second published novel Shirley can help to uncover previously untapped moments of connection and understanding in the novel. Brontë's exploration of translation and use of multilingualism reveals a sincere urge to connect in spite of tremendous difficulties—connect her characters to each other, connect her narrator to her readers. It is an ambitious, over-reaching goal, which Brontë did not ultimately attain. Yet, for Brontë, her (especially female) characters, and her narrator, translation in all its forms represents …

An Irresistible Invitation: Enhancing Academic Publication In Rhetoric And Composition By Inviting Online Peer Commentary, Sarah L. Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

In many ways the current publishing system in rhetoric and composition, which centers on the peer-reviewed journal, undermines core values we hold for ideal scholarly communication. These values include collaboration, dialogue, participation, and public engagement. Though the current system's methods of preserving, distributing, and maintaining quality control of scholarly work contradict our values, technological developments have made possible alternative publishing models that could better uphold our values. Developing a preprint archive where scholars develop and share ideas before submitting them for publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals would bring our publishing process closer to our ideals.

A Pilgrimage Through English History And Culture (A-E), Gary P. Gillum, Susan Wheelwright O'Connor, Alexa Hysi

Faculty Publications

An Annotated Bibliography of Books Printed in England before 1700 and housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Harold B. Lee Library.

A Pilgrimage Through English History And Culture (T-Addendum), Gary P. Gillum, Susan Wheelwright O'Connor, Alexa Hysi

Faculty Publications

An Annotated Bibliography of Books Printed in England before 1700 and housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Harold B. Lee Library.

A Pilgrimage Through English History And Culture (M-S), Gary P. Gillum, Susan Wheelwright O'Connor, Alexa Hysi

Faculty Publications

An Annotated Bibliography of Books Printed in England before 1700 and housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Harold B. Lee Library.

A Pilgrimage Through English History And Culture (F-L), Gary P. Gillum, Susan Wheelwright O'Connor, Alexa Hysi

Faculty Publications

An Annotated Bibliography of Books Printed in England before 1700 and housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Harold B. Lee Library.

Speaking Of Myself: Independence, Self-Representation, And The Speeches Of Rudyard Kipling, Jacob M. Wilkes

Theses and Dissertations

Rudyard Kipling is a man of immense diversity. He successfully managed to write for over half a century in a variety of genres: short story, travelogue, ballad, personal narrative, and news reporting, to name only a few. While doing so, Kipling readily interacted with a range of subjects and created a multitude of ideas. Likewise, on a personal level, Kipling led an immensely diverse life. He could easily claim four separate continents as home, living variously in India, the United States, England, and South Africa. By profession he was a writer, but as an observer he was so skilled that …

Theatrical Ideology: Toward A Rhetoric Theatricality, Jacob L. Robertson

Theses and Dissertations

When used in common vernacular, the terminology of the medium of theatre—"theatricality," "drama," "performance," "acting," "scene," etc."”form a vocabulary of "ideographs" as defined by Michael Calvin McGee. My analysis reveals that common usage of theatrical terms is more than merely metaphorical; the "theatre," rather, is a fundamental orienting concept for defining lived experience—it is ideology. By viewing the use of theatrical language as ideological, and analyzing how such terms define situations rhetorically, we begin to reveal the underlying ideology upon which the medium of theatre operates, and which it unconsciously conveys. I demonstrate this claim by analyzing the argument made …

Reinventing Virtue: Sensibility And Sentiment In The Works Of Maria Edgeworth, Octavia Cathryn Sawyer

Theses and Dissertations

While literary scholars have written extensively about sensibility in the past two decades, most of the studies have treated either the history of sensibility itself or how it interacted with a particular aspect of English culture and literature, such as sexuality or politics. My project instead examines how a single author, Maria Edgeworth, used sensibility in her writing over the course of her career. I analyze the use of sensibility in three of her novels: Belinda (1801), her first full-length novel; The Absentee (1812), her influential Irish national tale, written at the height of her popularity in the middle years …

Public Environmental Rhetoric: The Rhetorical Fashioning Of Civic Responsibility, Maggie Ngar Dik Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Environmental rhetoric has the capacity to render private citizens a concerned public. In doing so, it can prompt in individual practices of what, in classical rhetoric, was described as civic virtue and engage them in activities of responsible citizenship that work toward practical change. Within the recent tradition of environmental public discourse in the United States, Rachel Carson and Al Gore have each realized this capacity in their use of environmental rhetoric, by addressing, respectively, the issues of pesticide pollution and global warming in ways that galvanized citizens as an active public. This thesis examines the reasons behind this effectiveness. …

Using Blogs To Engage Students In Meaningful Thinking And Discussion, Jon Ostenson

The Utah English Journal

As an English teacher, I want my students to engage in meaningful thinking about the issues in the literature we explore. Discussion is a valuable way to encourage this engagement, especially as I push discussions beyond the teacher-led, traditional IRE (teacher initiation, student response, teacher evaluation) format (Cazden, 2001). As I try to encourage discussions where students ask more of the questions and listen and respond to—and even critique—each other’s ideas, I believe that we come closer to achieving more meaningful thinking. However, I still find classroom discussions to be one of the more challenging aspects of my job.

Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

A Companion To Hume: Book Review, Eva Dadlez

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Blackwell's fortieth Companion to Philosophy is a splendid and long-overdue Companion to Hume, expertly pulled together by Elizabeth Radcliffe, a former editor of the journal Hume Studies. Although the Blackwell Companions are promoted as a student reference series, this particular volume is clearly of considerable value to serious scholars as well and probably accessible only to advanced students with a strong philosophical background.

An Interview With Sara Zarr, Mary Rice

The Utah English Journal

Sara Zarr is a California native who currently resides in Utah. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Story of a Girl (a 2007 National Book Award finalist) and Sweethearts. Her third novel, Once Was Lost, will be published this fall. Mary Rice, current board member of the Utah Council of Teachers of English, recently interviewed her.

Persuasion At The Sentence Level: Teaching The Grammar Of Influence, Deborah Dean

The Utah English Journal

Why do we teach students to write persuasively, to craft arguments that assert a point, take a stand, propose a solution, or seek common ground? Isn’t part of it because the ability to formulate effective arguments is an “important literacy practice” (Beach & Doerr-Stevens, 2009, p.125), and our capacity to be persuasive is an essential part of our interactions with the world? It is also a kind of writing that is often found in state and district writing tests—another possible reason we might want to teach students to write for the purpose of persuading.

My Favorite Novel: A 7-Point Folkloric Reflection, Jacqueline S. Thursby

The Utah English Journal

This project, the 7-Point Folkloric Reflection Paper, has been successful and popular according to feedback from my English students in various folklore classes. It is based on a novel they have already read, and I suggest that they choose a novel they have enjoyed because they are going to spend a lot of time with it. This project is not a book report. It is a writing project that includes an introduction to the often misunderstood discipline of folkloristics. This assignment requires some groundwork by the teacher, but besides being interesting, it demonstrates that folklore is present in most of …

The Secret Realizations Of An Okay Teacher, Michelle Barney

The Utah English Journal

A Personal Narrative by Michelle Barney

As I collected the little writings we did every day, I realized something. These kids were good. These kids had style, voice, and something to say. And I was holding them back.

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Poetry Writing (Minus Twelve): Using Bad Poetry To Make Good Poetry Accessible, Sheila Benson

The Utah English Journal

This article presents my effort to move students past their belief that poetry is inaccessible by requiring them to write bad poetry. My original goal was to bring back the fun of poetry by letting students play with words and sounds rather than obsessing over rhyme schemes. I wanted my students to see that they knew more about poetry than they thought they did, that poetry and language play are a natural part of how we think. As students created bad poetry and discussed what they believed poetry was (and wasn’t), we discovered together that much of our fear of …

How Can I Know What I Think Until I See [And Hear] What I Say? - Getting Students To Start Taking Responsibility For Their Own Writing Through Oral Revision, Joseph Anson

The Utah English Journal

Peer conferences and PVC phones are but two methods I’ve found to get students up to their elbows in their own revising, and for the most part, enjoy it. Both can be used effectively to reinforce the effectiveness of oral revision. Once they can see and hear what they have to say, their thoughts and writing become clearer.

Ready To Read: Incorporating A Reading Workshop, Amy Lavin

The Utah English Journal

As Kelly Gallagher (2009), the author of Readicide, states on the English Companion Ning (an online network for English teachers) during a discussion about his book, “There are two kinds of teachers in the world: those who have taught twenty years, and those who have taught one year twenty times.” Trying to be more like the former teacher, I attempt to incorporate something different in my classes each school year. As I started my sixth year of teaching, I wondered, what would happen if I offered my students more freedom? Certainly, I didn’t mean a free-for-all where fun and games …

Inquiring Into Ivanhoe: A Study Of Student-Teacher Collaboration, Caleb Mcclellan, Mary Rice

The Utah English Journal

This paper traces the individual and collaborative history of a student and his teacher in terms of their writing experiences, particularly with feedback. After sharing their own perspectives about writing, reviewing the current literature on writing feedback and discussing the ways in which the inquiry was conducted, the revisions of an in-class assignment are analyzed, revealing a new way for both authors to think about writing feedback.