English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Effect Of A Narrative Intervention On Preschoolers' Story Retelling And Personal Story Generation Skills, Trina D. Spencer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Narration, or storytelling, is an important aspect of language. Narrative skills have practical and social importance; for example, children who tell good stories receive attention and approval from their peers. When children accurately recount events surrounding an injury or dispute, vital information is passed to parents and teachers. Additionally, early childhood narrative skills are moderately correlated with reading comprehension in primary grades. Because narration is socially and academically valued, language interventionists often address it. The research literature on narrative intervention has most often included school-aged participants and those with language or learning difficulties. Only a small number of studies have …

Grounding To Place And Past: Motherhood In The Novels Of Native American Writers Louise Erdrich And Linda Hogan, Elise Doney

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The interconnectedness in both form and content ofNative American literature originates from the complex relationship between cultural and personal identity as inextricably intertwined with spiritual and natural realms. In Louise Erdrich's Tracks and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Power motherhoodliesatthecenter ofthisinterconnectedweb ofrelationships among identity, community, tradition, and landscape. Each novel centers on a protagonist who is, in some form, distanced from her primary mother/daughter relationship, consequently literally and figuratively displaced. The disrupted maternal relationship results in the child's displacement, functioning as a metaphor for the community's severance from tradition and the land. However, surrogate mother/daughter relationships develop in each novel …

Loss Translated: Saudade In The Poetry Of Elizabeth Bishop, Corey D. Clawson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

In 1954, former U.S. poet laureate Elizabeth Bishop wrote in a letter from Brazil to Robert Lowell, a dear friend and fellow poet: "With much love and saudades as they say here, a very nice word that seems to include all the sentiments of missing friends in one.” This insightful observation illuminates a concept central to Brazilian culture which has been designated one of the most difficult words to translate. Later, Bishop defined the idea as “the characteristic Brazilian longing or nostalgia,” which she “strongly associates with homesickness.” Bishop’s fascination with the concept, I argue, is more than that of …

Land In Fairyland: Edmund Spenser And Emerging Perceptions Of Ecology And Gender In The Faerie Queen, Megan Angela Sieverts

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is an eloquent text brimming with images of nature, flowers, and gardening. Nature is not simply what is in the outdoors of the text or a passive backdrop for action to upstage; she is a character who has an active role in influencing the plot and characters of the story. Plants come alive through Spenser in many ways as he makes the natural world of his text into an enchanted fairyland. The imagery of nature is not only personified, but also actually personifies characters. Flowers found in The Faerie Queen are both plants and actual …

Reinterpreting The Comedy Of Errors: Exploring "Madness" And The Need To Belong, William K. Smith

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Since The Comedy of Errors' rescue from the literary bargain bin where it was tossed by nineteenth and early twentieth-century critics, many modern scholars have provided insightful cultural, linguistic, and theatrical commentaries on a play that is clearly more complex than it first seems. One area these recent discussions frequently address is the play's portrayal of madness in early modern society. However, what many of these discussions fail to remember is that ultimately Errors is a comedy "performed for the Delight of the Beholders" and that no one in the play is actually mad. Therefore, this essay argues that The …

“Changes” In The Country Of The Mind: Seamus Heaney’S Revision Of William Wordsworth’S “Tintern Abbey”, Trenton B. Olsen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

For almost thirty years, critics have been interested in William Wordsworth’s influence on Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.

Zamyatin's We: Persuading The Individual To Sacrifice Self, Jeffrey Steven Carr

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The artistic aspects of the novel are excellent. Zamyatin has attained full maturity here—so much the worse, for all this has gone into the service of a malicious cause.

Disordered: A Tale Of The Body, Elizabeth M. Benson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

While a body of creative nonfiction writing exists regarding experiences with various psychological disorders, few personal accounts have been written about the physical complications of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Some memoirs tell a tale of serious illness in a straightforward narrative line. On the opposite end of this spectrum, other memoirs intentionally blur the lines of truth and heighten the confusion of a disorder. This thesis is as much a narrative of my experience with Generalized Anxiety Disorder as it is a response to the void in creative nonfiction surrounding this specific disorder and the narrative forms others have chosen to …

Storytelling Through Brushstrokes: Minerva Teichert's Visualization Of The Mormon Pioneer Experience And Messages To Her Audience, Amy L. Williamson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

"We must paint the great Mormon story of our pioneers in mural decorations so that 'he who runs may read,'" remarked Minerva Teichert. When she created her pioneer panorama, Teichert attempted to do something different; whereas other Mormon artists had drawn on their personal pioneer experiences or sought inspiration from Church-approved publications regarding the trek, her visual inspiration came from the oral narratives she heard as a child. Because she used these narratives, Teichert portrayed the Mormon pioneer experience from a woman's perspective and voiced their experiences to male and non-Mormon audiences. Not only did Teichert offer a counterpoint to …

Music From The Dead: The Tune-Making Of John Macdougall, Robert Macdonald

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia has been a stronghold of active and integrated community traditions of Scotch-Gaelic music and dance since it was settled by large numbers of Scottish emigrants in the nineteenth century. Though these emigrants brought with them an extensive store of tunes common to the Highlands of Scotland, the majority of them were carried in the collective oral memory. Consequently, the traditional Scottish repertoire of Cape Breton fiddlers steadily declined as generations of fiddlers who never learned to read or write music died. In the nearly two centuries that Scots have populated the island, there have been many …

Lee Oser. The Return Of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien And The Romance Of History, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

In The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History, Lee Oser, a professor of literature at Holy Cross College, follows Chesterton's lead in taking on the heretics, decadents, and aesthetes within the postmodernist critical establishment, extolling Chesterton, Eliot, and Tolkien as defenders of reason and romance and vilifying influential late twentieth-century critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, whose alleged attacks on the liberal humanist tradition Oser sees as having eroded not only literary scholarship but indeed the very underpinnings of democratic society. In his preface Oser asserts, "Without scruple or debate, our schools …

Gathering Leadership Momentum Across Great Distances: Creating An Online Community Of Practice, Erin Dini-Davis, Danielle Theiss-White

Library Faculty & Staff Publications

At the 2007 Mountain Plains Library Association Leadership (MPLA) Institute, held in New Mexico, USA, eight academic librarians formed an online multi-state, multigenerational community of practice. MPLA is a twelve-state library association within the United States. Using Google Groups™, the members formed an online environment called the MPLA Community of Practice for continuing development of the leadership skills presented at the Institute. These early-career librarians represent diverse educational backgrounds and work in libraries serving varied populations with differing disciplinary emphases. The group meets monthly with each member preparing and facilitating online discussions, complete with personal assessments, topical readings, and questions. …

Who Owns This Text?: Plagiarism, Authorship, And Disciplinary Cultures, Carol Petersen Haviland, Joan A. Mullin

All USU Press Publications

Carol Haviland, Joan Mullin, and their collaborators report on a three-year interdisciplinary interview project on the subject of plagiarism, authorship, and "property," and how these are conceived across different fields. The study investigated seven different academic fields to discover disciplinary conceptions of what types of scholarly production count as "owned." Less a research report than a conversation, the book offers a wide range of ideas, and the chapters here will provoke discussion on scholarly practice relating to intellectual property, plagiarism, and authorship---and to how these matters are conveyed to students. Although these authors find a good deal of consensus in …

Voices: On Stage And In Print, 2009, Utah State University Department Of English

Voices of USU

This collection of student writing represents the voices of over 2,000 students who enroll each academic year in Utah State University’s second-year composition course, Intermediate Writing: Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode. Voices of USU celebrates excellence in writing by providing undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and disciplines the opportunity to have their work published.

The Certainty Of Spinning, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Creativity In Technical Communication Curricula, Curtis Robert Newbold

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis addresses the need to claim creativity as an essential component to our technical communication curricula as we prepare students for what their managers want. While many technical communication programs at universities across the country have recognized a need to teach skills beyond "writing technically," few, if any, have addressed or "claimed" a concept such as creativity that helps build these skills. I argue that creativity is what managers are looking for and what technical communication programs are already implementing. Claiming this concept will help us further define a discipline that is becoming much richer and help students develop …

Rereading And Rewriting Women's History, Jacqueline Harris

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Atwood discusses the importance of the female writer’s responsibility, that to write as a woman or about women means that you take upon yourself the responsibility of writing as a form of negotiation with our female dead and with what these dead took with them—the truth about who they were. By rereading and rewriting our communal past, women writers pay tribute to our female ancestors by voicing their silent stories while also changing gender stereotypes, complicating who these women were, and acknowledging their accomplishments.

In her …

Lessons In Humanity: A Memoir, Chelsi Joy Sutton-Linderman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the opening pages of his work, Dog Years; A Memoir, Mark Doty explains: Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish. This is why I shouldn't be writing anything about the two dogs that have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter? (1)

In this thesis I argue that Doty, among other respected contemporary writers, is saying something that matters when he writes of …

Running Through The Dark, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Confluences, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Activist Wpa: Changing Stories About Writing And Writers, Linda Adler-Kassner

All USU Press Publications

One wonders if there is any academic field that doesn't suffer from the way it is portrayed by the media, by politicians, by pundits and other publics. How well scholars in a discipline articulate their own definition can influence not only issues of image but the very success of the discipline in serving students and its other constituencies. The Activist WPA is an effort to address this range of issues for the field of English composition in the aftermath of No Child Left Behind and the Spellings Commission. Drawing on recent developments in framing theory and the resurgent traditions of …

Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory And Practice For Composition Studies, Jonathan Alexander

All USU Press Publications

Despite its centrality to much of contemporary personal and public discourse, sexuality remains infrequently discussed in composition courses and in our discipline at large. Moreover, its complicated relationship to discourse, to the very language we use to describe and define our worlds, is woefully understudied in our discipline. Talk and writing about sexuality surround us. Not only does the discourse of sexuality surround us, but sexuality itself forms a core set of complex discourses through which we approach, make sense of, and construct a variety of meanings, politics, and identities. In Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy, Jonathan Alexander argues for the development …

'This Text Deletes Itself’: Traumatic Memory And Space-Time In Zoe Wicomb’S David’S Story, Shane Graham

English Faculty Publications

The group of cultural and literary theorists whom I would loosely categorize as practitioners of “trauma theory”–including, most notably, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Dominick LaCapra–share several assumptions. Their ideas all derive to a large extent from Freudian conceptions of memory and trauma, and they all emphasize the temporal aspects of psychic trauma: Caruth, for instance, describes the traumatic encounter as “a break in the mind’s experience of time” (61). Implicit in this conception of trauma, as well, is the assumption that trauma is an individual and private phenomenon. And they all suggest, moreover, that trauma manifests itself …

Review Of While They Slept By Kathryn Harrison, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Voices: On Stage And In Print, 2008-2009, Utah State University Department Of English

Voices of USU

This collection of student writing represents the voices of over 2,000 students who enroll each academic year in Utah State University’s second-year composition course, Intermediate Writing: Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode. Voices of USU celebrates excellence in writing by providing undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and disciplines the opportunity to have their work published.

Breaking Forms: The Shift To Performance In Late Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, Christie L. Fox

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents And Crosscurrents Since1960, Paul Crumbley, Fred D. White

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rhyme And Reason In Language Acquisition: Incorporating Poetry Into The Esl Classroom, Kimberly Call Gleason

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Utah is seeing a rapid increase in K-12 students whose native language is not English. With this increase, teachers face the challenge of finding new and effective teaching methods to reach their ESL (English as a Second Language) students. This research explores the study of poetry as an instrument to improve ESL students' pronunciation of English. When read out loud, poetry can be an exercise in pronouncing consonant sounds (from alliteration), decoding vowel sounds (from rhyme), and acquiring the natural speech rhythm of the English language (from meter). Poetry was selected not only because of its exaggerated sound elements (alliteration, …

The Sleepy Hero: Romantic & Spiritual Sleep In The Gawain-Poet, Erin Kathleen Turner Hepner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis examines two accepted styles of writing in the Middle Ages, the romance and religious genres, and what purpose they perform in the Gawain-poet’s religious poem, Patience, and his romance poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK). One recently popular line of research among medieval scholars is examining the way medieval authors, such as the Gawain-poet, combine elements of romance and spiritual writings. By funneling the Gawain-poet’s intermingling of the medieval romance and religious genres through the specific lens of sleep, which is represented differently in medieval romance texts than in medieval religious …

Review: Michael Chapman, Ed., "The Drum Decade: Stories From The 1950s" And Lindy Stiebel And Liz Gunner, Ed., "Still Beating The Drum: Critical Perspectives On Lewis Nkosi", Shane Graham

English Faculty Publications

The negritude movement had Présence Africaine; the Harlem Renaissance had Crisis and Opportunity; South African writers of the 1950s had Drum magazine. Paul Gready has written that Drum’s “flashy muck-raking journalistic style attempted to capture the vivid life of the townships. Drum became a symbol of a new urban South Africa” (146); for Rob Nixon, it “amplified the voices of a defiantly impure cosmopolitanism, projecting an urban look and ethos” (28). Lewis Nkosi, who went to work for the magazine in 1957, said that Drum “wasn’t so much a magazine as it was a symbol of the new African cut …