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Articles 931 - 960 of 1492

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

The Marginal Utility Of Student Writing, Seth Andrew Killingbeck, Dr. Kristine Hansen Oct 2013

The Marginal Utility Of Student Writing, Seth Andrew Killingbeck, Dr. Kristine Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Because of a widespread concern that students fail to genuinely comprehend the subject material they study, during the 1980s many American academics began to advocate simple British instructional tools emphasizing writing. Contemporary literature and conversations refer to these tools as Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing in the Disciplines (WID), and Writing to Learn. Each of these related initiatives seeks to improve the educational quality of students by encouraging them to write more about classroom topics. Underlying pedagogical theory and empirical evidence indicate that, when implemented properly, increased student writing benefits students not only in their own comprehension, but in …

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It’S A Sin To Kill A Mockingbird: The Depiction Of Law And Lawyers In Adolescent Literature, Shannon Johnson, Dr. Jesse Crisler Oct 2013

It’S A Sin To Kill A Mockingbird: The Depiction Of Law And Lawyers In Adolescent Literature, Shannon Johnson, Dr. Jesse Crisler

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Until a few years ago, scholars had done little research on legal themes in fiction, especially adolescent fiction. Lately, however, interest in the relationship between law and literature has increased. Law professors are starting to use works of literature in their teaching. English professors are sponsoring courses on legal themes in literature and the rhetoric of law. But in all the excitement of these new trends, little has been said about the relationship between law and adolescent literature.

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Greeks, Mormons, And Marginalization: A Case Study, Annie Peterson Green, Dr. Phillip Snyder Oct 2013

Greeks, Mormons, And Marginalization: A Case Study, Annie Peterson Green, Dr. Phillip Snyder

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the early twentieth century, throngs of male Greek immigrants came to Utah. They left their homeland seeking to save their families from impending poverty and to escape draft by the Greek and Turkish armies.1 The jobs they took in Utah mines, smelters, and rail yards were lowpaying and dangerous, but these were the least of the troubles waiting for Greeks in Utah. They found Mormons and other Utah residents to be inhospitable and strange, and they quickly learned to isolate themselves in all-Greek communities.

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A Journey Home: Transnational Dominican American Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Bethany A. Dolman, Dr. Trenton L. Hickman Oct 2013

A Journey Home: Transnational Dominican American Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Bethany A. Dolman, Dr. Trenton L. Hickman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Transnationalism is sociology’s relatively new model of national identity that explains and validates a phenomenon that most immigrants from the Dominican Republic to the United States experience: a simultaneous sense of connection to multiple countries, cultures and national identities. I examined Dominican American transnationalism from an interdisciplinary perspective, fusing sociological and literary theory by using Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents as a case study for the transnational Dominican American experience. I set out to analyze a very abstract and dynamic concept, somewhat unsure during the project’s early stages of how I was going to delimit …

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Are Guatemalan K’Ekchi Mormons Really Protestants? A Comparative Look At K’Ekchi Stories, Robert E. M. Spencer, Dr. John Hawkins Oct 2013

Are Guatemalan K’Ekchi Mormons Really Protestants? A Comparative Look At K’Ekchi Stories, Robert E. M. Spencer, Dr. John Hawkins

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With blackness surrounding us both, Oscar stumbled over the words. Here I was living in the highlands of northern Guatemala, in a dirt floor shack, sitting on my wooden board bed, listening to the struggles of a Mayan man trying to read by candlelight. He was the product of’ Mayan tradition, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Mormonism. With such a mixture I wondered what I would discover, what were the stories that shaped his and his family’s lives? Were they traditional stories? biblical? from a new source? or did his semi-literacy create a barrier to his learning of any stories?

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The Ring And Feminism At The National Pc/Aca Conference, Landon E. Cowan, Dr. Dennis Cutchins Oct 2013

The Ring And Feminism At The National Pc/Aca Conference, Landon E. Cowan, Dr. Dennis Cutchins

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My initial intent in researching horror films find out why horror films exist in American society, why they are enjoying a resurgence of popularity among contemporary audiences, and show possible detrimental affect on viewers, specifically children. For the purposes of my paper, I focused on the 2003 film The Ring.

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The Contributions Of Literary Study To The Clinical Practice Of Medicine, Tory Rob Peterson, Dr. Brandie Siegfried Sep 2013

The Contributions Of Literary Study To The Clinical Practice Of Medicine, Tory Rob Peterson, Dr. Brandie Siegfried

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In response to growing criticism that young doctors were insensitive to patient needs, many medical schools have now turned to literary studies to expose medical students to the thought processes necessary for evaluating and appreciating what it means to be a patient. For my research project I proposed 1) to determine the specific contributions of literary study to medicine consistently cited by pioneers in the field of medical humanities and 2) to provide a thoughtful analysis of the writings of Dr. William Carlos Williams and Dr. Richard Selzer in order to detect manifestations of these specific contributions in the clinical …

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The Diet Coke Of The Masses: A Thought Experiment In Addiction And Faith, A. Arwen Taylor, Dr. Bruce Jorgensen Sep 2013

The Diet Coke Of The Masses: A Thought Experiment In Addiction And Faith, A. Arwen Taylor, Dr. Bruce Jorgensen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Suppose a sociologist wants to conduct an inquiry into the relationship between addiction and religion. She has two options. She might collect information from addicted people of faith and faithful addicts, observe them and interview them, or she might – although no ethics board would approve this – attempt to instill both addiction and faith within a group of test subjects, and then observe the results. Kenneth Ketner, after C. S. Peirce and Walker Percy, proposes a third approach to such an inquiry, and it is this approach which I have taken.

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Discovering Eve Through The Eyes Of Jonathan Edwards, Zachary M. Hutchins, Dr. Steven C. Walker Sep 2013

Discovering Eve Through The Eyes Of Jonathan Edwards, Zachary M. Hutchins, Dr. Steven C. Walker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Eve’s name jumped out at me as I squinted on the fifth floor of the library. Hmm…I wonder what an Orthodox Calvinist preacher from New England has to say about Eve. I did not know at the time how remarkable my discovery was, that I had picked up the one volume of Jonathan Edwards’s twenty-two volume collected works which provides an in-depth commentary on Eve. Still, I was intrigued, so I checked out several of the ponderous tomes and rode my bicycle home.

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Distortions Of Perspective: The Literary Influence Of Edgar Allan Poe On Oscar Wilde, Brian Wall, Dr. Brandie Siegfriend Sep 2013

Distortions Of Perspective: The Literary Influence Of Edgar Allan Poe On Oscar Wilde, Brian Wall, Dr. Brandie Siegfriend

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Transatlanticism, or the study of the relationship of England and the United States through shared textual themes, is a developing literary movement on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Most researchers emphasize the influence of British authors on the development of the American literary canon. With this paradigm in mind, my proposed research centered on viewing Victorian authors and texts as historical harbingers of contemporary United States society. My findings, however, suggested the presence of a reverse relationship, and my focus shifted as I delved into the works of Oscar Wilde, my selected British Victorian author.

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“The Impulse Tragic” An Honors Capstone Creative Project, Stillman Wagstaff, Dr. Kimberly Johnson Sep 2013

“The Impulse Tragic” An Honors Capstone Creative Project, Stillman Wagstaff, Dr. Kimberly Johnson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My ORCA grant was given to fund a creative project of original poetry that would simultaneously fulfill the honors requirement. Since my funding, I have written nearly 40 new poems and been able to devote over 100 hours to the project with the financial independence the funding has given me. I have included two of the poems written since I have been funded below.

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“Permission To Be Real”: Elouise Bell And The Personal Narrative, Danille Christensen Lindquist, Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist Sep 2013

“Permission To Be Real”: Elouise Bell And The Personal Narrative, Danille Christensen Lindquist, Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist

Journal of Undergraduate Research

“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not? Of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”1 So Ralph Waldo Emerson champions the collection of ordinary stories. Others have stressed the importance of stories in general: author Leslie Marmon Silko believes that stories, while entertaining, are also “all we have . . . to fight off illness and …

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William Stafford: Memoir Of A National Poet In Prose And Poetry, Nathan Furr, Dr. Lance Larson Sep 2013

William Stafford: Memoir Of A National Poet In Prose And Poetry, Nathan Furr, Dr. Lance Larson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”– William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl

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Manuscript Variation In The Canterbury Tales, Melissa A. Gallup, Pual Thomas Sep 2013

Manuscript Variation In The Canterbury Tales, Melissa A. Gallup, Pual Thomas

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales before his death in 1400, producing his tales over the space of approximately 14 years. But even with over twenty thousand lines of poetry and prose, his work was still unfinished, for the plan was that each pilgrim would share two tales on the outward journey and two more on the homeward journey. When Chaucer died, he left only 23 tales (plus a prologue and retraction), with little direction as to their order and placement within the larger framework of the action, It was up to his literary executors and later editors to decide …

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Teaching Acceptance In Middle School: A Young Adult Literature Unit, Rachel Hoggan, Dr. Sirpa Grierson Sep 2013

Teaching Acceptance In Middle School: A Young Adult Literature Unit, Rachel Hoggan, Dr. Sirpa Grierson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Does contemporary young adult (YA) literature belong in the secondary education classroom? That is the question that has been on everyone’s tongues in the last several decades. In 1973, The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) was created as a subunit of the NCTE (National Council for Teachers of English). It was the beginning of a movement to promote adolescent literature in the classroom (Gill). It seems logical that “adolescent” literature should be taught to adolescents, and yet the topic has sparked serious debate. Many teachers are unsure how to work with adolescent literature and they still cling to the …

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H.P. Lovecraft’S Search For Truth And Meaning Through The Medium Of The Gothic Hero’S Quest, Jacob Hodgen, Dr. Dennis Perry Sep 2013

H.P. Lovecraft’S Search For Truth And Meaning Through The Medium Of The Gothic Hero’S Quest, Jacob Hodgen, Dr. Dennis Perry

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The intent of my project was to seek to better understand the structure and ideology of the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft. Through my research I discovered that nearly every one of his stories can be directly linked to the archetypal hero’s quest—as popularized and brought into Western culture through the tradition of the Arthurian Grail Romance. I began to trace the roots of Lovecraft’s style and structure through his idol Edgar Allan Poe and learned that both Lovecraft and Poe used the structure of the questing hero myth that they had undoubtedly read from the likes of Malory, Geoffrey …

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Rebirth, Individuation And Illumination, Mary E. Illions Wilde, Claudia Harris Sep 2013

Rebirth, Individuation And Illumination, Mary E. Illions Wilde, Claudia Harris

Journal of Undergraduate Research

For my project, I analyzed Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and D. H. Lawrence’s short story, The Horse Dealer’s Daughter, using the Mythic/Archetypal approach. First I identified the archetypes of water, light and mud in both works and intended to compare the way each author used them. As I proceeded with my research, however, I could not find any literary criticism that compared Hurston’s novel with Lawrence’s short story nor any criticism that focused on my topic in either of the works alone. I had stepped off an edge. The primary sources thus became …

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Exploring The Shaker Aesthetic At Sabbathday Lake, Elizabeth Pinborogh, Dr. Kimberly Johnson Sep 2013

Exploring The Shaker Aesthetic At Sabbathday Lake, Elizabeth Pinborogh, Dr. Kimberly Johnson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My goal was to study the Shaker aesthetic, the distinctive set of characteristics that define Shaker art and architecture. Through preliminary research, I had discovered that Shaker buildings where characterized by symmetry, straight lines, squareness, and simplicity, and I wanted to experience the aesthetic firsthand. The questions I was trying to answer were: Why is the Shaker aesthetic appealing to artists and to people from many different academic disciplines? What is my poetic interpretation of the Shaker aesthetic? I also wanted to read Shaker women’s autobiographical and spiritual writings that I could not get access to anywhere else.

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Gender Politics And Education In 1920s Ireland: Public And Private Editorializing In Tcd: A College Miscellany, Katherine Fisher, Dr. David Hatch Sep 2013

Gender Politics And Education In 1920s Ireland: Public And Private Editorializing In Tcd: A College Miscellany, Katherine Fisher, Dr. David Hatch

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When I began this project, I planned to investigate the ways in which Irish students engaged with and wrote about certain philosophical and literary tenets of modernism. As I conducted background research on the social and political climate in Ireland during the 1920s, however, my focus shifted somewhat to an exploration of the cultural, religious, and social tensions that informed Irish modernism generally and the writings of Trinity College students in particular. I traveled to Ireland and spent a week in the archives of Trinity College, Dublin, reading contemporary issues of a once-popular student-published newsletter, TCD: A College Miscellany. I …

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A Slice Of Pye: The Unique Position Of Henry James Pye In English Literature, Sean Johnson, Dr. Susan Howe Sep 2013

A Slice Of Pye: The Unique Position Of Henry James Pye In English Literature, Sean Johnson, Dr. Susan Howe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Henry James Pye, poet laureate from 1790 to 1813, occupies a unique position in English literature. In the half dozen or so published retrospectives of the lives and works of the poets laureate, he is consistently called the worst poet ever to hold the office. Had he not been ridiculed by so many of his famous contemporaries—with Lord Byron and Robert Southey among his detractors—his name would probably have been forgotten all together. Byron called Pye “eminently respectable in everything but his poetry” (Hamilton 203). Southey, in a moment of self-deprecation, proclaimed, “I have been rhyming as doggedly and dully …

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Reflections Of The English Tradition In James Henry’S Poetry, Ryan D. Stewart, Dr. John Talbot Sep 2013

Reflections Of The English Tradition In James Henry’S Poetry, Ryan D. Stewart, Dr. John Talbot

Journal of Undergraduate Research

James Henry (1798-1876) was an Irish classicist most well known for his long and eccentric commentary of Virgil’s Aeneid—Aeneidea, or Critical, Exegetical and Aesthetical Remarks on the Aeneis—and known to some extent for his work as a physician and his penchant for pamphleteering. In the mid-1980s, however, Christopher Ricks—a prominent Victorian scholar—discovered a privately printed volume of Henry’s poetry “‘unopened’, as the book dealers say,” (meaning the pages had not been cut) as he was browsing the stacks at the Cambridge Library. He included some of Henry’s poetry in the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), which he edited. …

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The Placenta In My Living Room And Other College Epiphanies, Joseph Franklin, Dr. Patrick Madden Sep 2013

The Placenta In My Living Room And Other College Epiphanies, Joseph Franklin, Dr. Patrick Madden

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Nothing was more important to me in creating this collection of essays than keeping a regular record of personal experience, reflection, and inquisition. From pre-writing, to drafting, to revising, my daily record has provided an indispensable source of material for this collection. Three of the essays, “The Proper School,” “Marriage in Pieces,” and “A Suitcase Full of Rations,” as well as many of the brief essays in “Selected Shorts,” all began as blog entries. When I wrote every day, the ideas flowed and the work progressed. When I wrote sporadically, the ideas sludged forward, usually as muddy as they were …

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Romantic-Era Drama And The Resurgence Of British Feminism, Jessie Leatham, Dr. Nicholas Mason Sep 2013

Romantic-Era Drama And The Resurgence Of British Feminism, Jessie Leatham, Dr. Nicholas Mason

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Mary Wollstonecraft is a complicated figure in the history of British feminism. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. One of the earliest proto-feminist treatises, Wollstonecraft’s work responded powerfully to “the woman question” that was burgeoning in her day and would surface again and again in the literature and politics of the nineteenth century. In the years following her 1797 death, however, Wollstonecraft’s work was not necessarily helpful to the women’s rights movement, as many tried to distance themselves from her ideas because of her allegedly scandalous life. Equally detrimental to the advancement …

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Two Civil Wars Of Words: Milton As An American Revolutionary, Megan Roeling Coplen, Dr. Brandie Siegfried Sep 2013

Two Civil Wars Of Words: Milton As An American Revolutionary, Megan Roeling Coplen, Dr. Brandie Siegfried

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Traditionally, scholars have labeled the American Revolution as a “creation,” but this project seeks to examine it as an extension and eventual reinvention of an English national identity established a century before the war. My goal was to find what influence the writers of the English Civil War had upon the leaders of the American Revolution, showing the extent to which the American colonists borrowed ideology from their English forbearers.

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Post-Ascension: Homelessness And The Humanitarians In Bucharest, Romania, Kelcie Gubler, Dr. Steven Walker Sep 2013

Post-Ascension: Homelessness And The Humanitarians In Bucharest, Romania, Kelcie Gubler, Dr. Steven Walker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As Romania recovers from the problems created by Communist rule, their economy is in a major upswing having joined the European Union in January 2007, unemployment among the middle class at a low 6.1% with a GDP continuing to stay above 4%. Over 25% of the population is reported as living below the poverty line while 27.4% of the population lives in the highest income bracket. These most recent numbers begin to show signs of an emergence of a middle class. Literacy among this middle class is estimated as 97.3% of the population being classified as literate. All of which …

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Summary Of Creative Research Grant Results And Thesis Summary, Lana Robinson, Dr. William A. Wilson Sep 2013

Summary Of Creative Research Grant Results And Thesis Summary, Lana Robinson, Dr. William A. Wilson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The results of being awarded this grant are: a collection of 600 minutes of tape recording personal narratives of under privileged urban black South African women; 58 pages of transcribed, typed and edited text of interviews with one black South African woman; and an honor’s thesis discussing the power of personal narratives in under-privileged women’s lives. The tapes I collected in South Africa will be placed in the archive’s of the Harold B. Lee Library and will be available to the public for use and research purposes.

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Milton’S Prose: Why Did He Do It?, Shawn D. Rossiter, Dr. O. Glade Hunsaker Sep 2013

Milton’S Prose: Why Did He Do It?, Shawn D. Rossiter, Dr. O. Glade Hunsaker

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My project came about as a result of a computer database of Yale’s edition of Milton’s Prose being constructed by the Brigham Young University English Department. The completion of the database has been delayed, however, and consequently I was compelled to shift the object and approach of my study. Originally, I had planned to make an analysis of the development of Milton’s religious thought over time by tracing his use of significant words. Instead, for the ORCA project I have completed a thorough reading of Milton’s prose with an attempt to formulate an informative hypothesis for why the prose was …

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The Technology Of Subjectivity: Modernist Machines And Racial Identity, Benjamin Bascom, Dr. Matthew Wickman Aug 2013

The Technology Of Subjectivity: Modernist Machines And Racial Identity, Benjamin Bascom, Dr. Matthew Wickman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Literary studies continually shape and reshape the study of historical time-periods. With a fascination on how aesthetic objects—specifically literature—becomes a vantage point through which to see a bygone age, I began my ORCA project with the hopes to better understand the relationship between eighteenth-century British poetry and the scientific paradigms of Newton and Leibniz. Wanting to explore how poets during this time distilled and also complicated the contemporary scientific views, I excitedly delved into the poetry of Alexander Pope and James Thomson. However, as I began this project I simultaneously began to narrow down my personal field of interests in …

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The Unobservable God: Faith, Hope, And Charity In Cormac Mccarthy’S The Crossing, Makayla Steiner, Dr. Phillip A. Snyder Aug 2013

The Unobservable God: Faith, Hope, And Charity In Cormac Mccarthy’S The Crossing, Makayla Steiner, Dr. Phillip A. Snyder

Journal of Undergraduate Research

A brief note to begin with: this project is not quite complete, and is therefore on hold until Fall of 2011. I will be presenting the final paper in a session focused on McCarthy scholarship at either the American Literature Association’s annual conference, or at a conference hosted by the Cormac McCarthy society. In the meantime I will be serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I will submit to a conference at the earliest possible date once I return. The paper is mostly complete—it needs only to be shaped and tweaked according to the …

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Report Of Grant Expenditure, Katie Mcney Aug 2013

Report Of Grant Expenditure, Katie Mcney

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Using my ORCA grant, I went to London from May 12 to May 20. While there, I uncovered connections and information that will contribute significantly to my research on Eleanor of Aquitaine and her relationship to later women in England.

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