English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Heritage Arts Imperative, Barre Toelken

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A History And Cultural Resource Site Recordation Of Ogden Center And The Home Of Truth Cooperative Settlement, Heather M. Weymouth

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The purpose of this project was to complete an intensive level cultural resource inventory of the historic property known as Ogden Center and the Home of Truth Cooperative Settlement (Home of Truth). The goal of an intensive level inventory is to identify, record, and determine the extent and significance of a particular historic property. In order to meet these criteria, the site and associated individual features must be thoroughly documented through description, mapping, and photography. In addition to working with the on the ground, physical characteristics of the site, documentary research must be conducted in order to provide a historic …

Reading The Ordinary Diary, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Noise From The Writing Center, Elizabeth H. Boquet

All USU Press Publications

In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center. Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic …

Mapping And Quilting: Metaphors Of Montana, Sunni Brown

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Although the study of place-writing may be a relatively new voice in the conversation of literary analysis, it is not without significance. Eudora Welty believes that place-writing is not new in and of itself: "From the dawn of man's imagination, place has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where the god abided and spoke from if he ever spoke" (123). Welty suggests that the process of connecting oneself to a particular place is innate in all humankind. …

Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father Of Television, H. Bert Jenson

English Faculty Publications

DURING A RECENT TOUR of our nation's Capitol, with all its fine art, frescoes, and statuary, our guide explained that each state had been given permission to place in the Capitol two statue honoring famous person from that state. Being Utah born and raised, I glanced around Statuary Hall and quickly found the larger-than-life- sized statue of Brigham Young-who else? I wondered whom the other statue from Utah honored. What person besides Brigham Young did Utah feel to be that important? A we passed through the Hall of Columns and the Senate/ House corridor, the guide pointed out the bronze …

Review Of Susan Stern’S Film, Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour, Jeannie Thomas

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cooperative Learning: Implementing Student Input To Improve Use, Susan Palmer

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Meeting student needs, keeping students actively involved, and creating authentic learning are common goals of secondary education teachers. Although course content is often standardized or established, individual teachers can choose from instructional methods including lecture, paired learning, individual practice, cooperative learning, and whole class discussion. Of these methods, cooperative learning has recently received a great deal of attention¹. Educators almost unanimously praise the way that cooperative learning centers the classroom on students, creates interactions among students, and allows students to teach each other. This thesis reviews the value of cooperative learning as a teaching tool, and then explores …

Communities Of Practice: A Framework For Fostering Coherence In Virtual Learning Communities, Jim Rogers

English Faculty Publications

This paper presents a case study of an on-line workshop that was conducted via the WWW. Using the participant dialogues from the workshop bulletin boards, the author investigates whether Wenger’s (1998) Community of Practice framework can be applied to this educational setting. The results indicate that participants interactions in the workshop demonstrated the characteristics of mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. These three characteristics are what Wenger posits contribute to a cohesive community of practice. Using this framework, some principles are derived that educators can use to design more cohesive learning communities.

Shades Of Meaning: Perspectives On The Visual Rhetoric Of Film Noir, Jill Shepherd

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Alone in the kitchen now, Frank watches the hamburger on the grill. Distracted by a faint clunk - something has fallen - he turns, his gaze falling to the floor where a small white tube of lipstick rolls across angular shadows cast by the windows. His eye follows the path of the lipstick back to a white, open-toed pump, and up a pair of shapely legs, past a pair of white shorts and a midriff-baring top to the insolent lovely face of Cora. He picks up the lipstick and holds it in the palm of his hand; she looks at …

Minority Job-Seekers Don't Fare As Well, Ted Pease

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Self In ‘Fieldwork’: A Methodological Concern, Christie L. Fox, Beverly Stoeltje, Stephen Olbrys

English Faculty Publications

As concepts of reflexivity and postcolonial perspectives have advanced our understandings of the way we represent those we study, they have also introduced a consciousness of the role of the self in research. This article reviews the history of the field of folklore with regard to the method of obtaining data or texts and demonstrates that collecting material contrasts with the practice of conducting research in the field. Pointing to a moment of transition, it shows that theories of folklore had to undergo significant change before methods of research would acknowledge the identity of the fieldworker and its significance.

Coyote And The Strawberries: Cultural Drama And Intercultural Collaboration, Barre Toelken, Gorge Wasson

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Internet: Emergent Technologies In Two West African Countries, Jim Rogers

English Faculty Publications

Being connected for most Africans means something completely different from most of us in more (technologically) "developed" countries. Compared to those who have virtually unlimited and relatively cheap access to e-mail and the World Wide Web (WWW), most Africans have limited access to e-mail only. Outside of South Africa, which hosts 70 full Internet Service Providers (ISPs); Egypt, which hosts 25; and Morocco, which hosts 15, most African countries have well under 10 ISPs, the average being loser to 1 or 2 (Jensen, 1998). This example demonstrates the diversity of the African continent; one cannot simply typify the African example. …

Cut To The Quick: Lorena Bobbitt And America Gender Ideology, Jessica Staheli

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

On the morning of June 23rd, 1993, Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband's penis with a kitchen carving knife, literally enacting the old myth of women as castrators. America reacted to Lorena's and her husband John's situation first with horror and then with humor. Soon after the attack was made public, jokes and commentaries proliferated on television and in magazines, journals, and newspapers. Because Americans were so shocked by Lorena's action, they scrambled to represent and explain it in a manner that made the act morally comprehensible. Looking at interviews, jokes, commentaries, and John's subsequent career in pornography reveals the specific …

Ailing Hearts, Go Home: Ethnographic Storytelling And The Levels Of Experience, Bryan D. Tilt

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

I visited Primary Children's Medical Center on a fresh snow morning near the beginning of last winter. The hospital was not where it had been in my childhood, a quiet neighborhood in "the avenues" section of Salt Lake City; several years ago the hospital moved to a new location farther east on the Wasatch Mountain foothills, near the University of Utah Medical Center. The old brick building now sits sedate and empty at the top of a shaded hill. My memory of the old hospital is as a bright and oppressive place, full of the stuff of life and death. …

The Yellowman Tapes, Barre Toelken

English Faculty Publications

This article considers the final disposal of field-recorded tapes that are believed by the informant's family to embody certain dangers to researchers, to the natural world, and to themselves. Motives for keeping or destroying the tapes are discussed in the light of modern concerns such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Navajo worldview, scholarly interests, fieldwork ethics, and personal responsibilities of the fieldworker. I espouse the view that folklorists stand to learn more and do better work when scholarly decisions are guided by the culture we study, even when taking this course causes disruption in our academic …

"Unfair" Interactive Multimedia Cd-Rom, Adam Justin Creighton

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

My honors thesis project involved turning one of my short stories, "Unfair," into an interactive multimedia CD-ROM. In adapting the story to this new medium, I struggled with what could be included in the project (both original text and new, multimedia elements); what had to omitted; how the story was to be organized and other implications resulting from the shift in medium. My original goal for this project was to modify a traditional text story, creating a version that was enhanced; that is, better than the original. After dealing with the technical and conceptual issues inherent with a project like …

Distant Trails: A Multimedia Biography Of E. Dee Miller, Marty Ewer

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

My project is to author a multimedia presentation of my grandfather's biography. To undertake such a project as this requires a certain awareness of the task. Even as I sat down the first time to contemplate what I was trying to accomplish, I began to realize the implications of the overall project. I'm not just speaking of the research and labor required to put it all together but something that must precede that.

Artistic Truth, Jennifer Jones

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Since I began writing personal essays I have looked at others' writings differently. I analyze writing techniques and look for hidden how-to instructions from which I can learn more about the craft from the masters. One technique that has continually fascinated and challenged me as a writer is the weaving of fact and fiction into meaningful and colorful works of art. As I grew more serious about writing creative non-fiction my senior year, my interest in the shaping of truth in writing intensified and the idea for this study was born. Part One of the following is a compilation of …

The Cultural Perspective Of Albert Wendt's Novel Pouliuli, Fa'alafua L. Auva'a

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Wendt's accomplishments as an artist of Polynesia and positions he held at different universities are presented in Chapter I. This marks the significant contributions he has made in different genres in which he has written, like novels, short stories, and poetry, that make him a major influence in the Pacific.

Chapter II analyzes the theoretical framework within the fa'a-Samoa in which a matai (chief) is presented, a revered office filled by respectable individuals. To make this point clear, I present the theoretical groundwork in Appendix A of how an individual becomes a matai.

Chapter III explores how Faleasa Osovae, …

Review Of Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes Of Reading, Surfaces Of Writing, Paul Crumbley, Marta L. Werner

English Faculty Publications

In Emily Dickinson's Open Folios Marta L. Werner presents both an experimental edition of the forty holograph drafts and fragments known as the Lord correspondence and a highly suggestive analysis of this material. Werner's book proceeds from the simple seeming proposition that we must learn to see Dickinson's holographs before reading them. In this claim Werner aligns herself with Susan Howe, Martha Nell Smith, Sharon Cameron and a [End Page 111] growing list of scholars who believe that the visual complexities of Dickinson's holograph manuscripts significantly challenge generic categories such as poetry, prose, letters, and books. Werner's work most particularly …

Art’S Haunted House: Dickinson’S Sense Of Self, Paul Crumbley

English Faculty Publications

Writing to Dickinson in 1869, the year before he met the poet in Amherst, Thomas Wentworth Higginson describes the discomfort that Dickinson's haunting presence could inflict on a man fully at home in domesticated art: "Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write . . ." (L461, #330a). Dickinson's writing, Higginson continues, provides him no clear target for his words: "I should like to hear from you very often, but feel always timid lest what I write should be badly …

Articulation, Kendra Evans

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

As my major is Art with an emphasis in Graphic Design, and my minor is English, with Departmental Honors and a focus on poetry, my Honors Senior thesis, ARTiculation, exists as a link between these two arts. This collection of essays explores the similarities and relationships between painting and poetry, and the influences each has on the other. The format in which I have chosen to present my writing in is editorial layout of periodical publication, a medium of communication where the visual and written arts overlap in technique and style.

At The New Yorker, Therese Anderson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The following essays and letters grew from a notebook I kept while interning at The New Yorker last summer. Each night, in my room at the boardinghouse on 36th Street, I recorded the decorations of the day, like the conversation I had with a prominent writer in the lunchroom, or the sight of a startled shorebird on the front of the office building.

Going Back, To Begin, Ilena Starsun Coulbrooke

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis project explores. in poetry, the effects of atomic testing and unrestrained pesticide use on the people who lived in or near Utah in the fifties and sixties.

Nuclear testing began in Nevada in 1951, the year I was born in south-east Idaho, where my family lived under radiation tainted clouds for a decade along with the Utah downwinders. My father died of lung cancer caused from breathing pesticide-laden air in 1962, the year Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. These two dates stand out in my mind as important markers in my quest to discover why I think and …

Schaller And Matthiessen Journey Through The Himalayas: Two Contemporary Nature Writers Synthesize Science And Spirituality, Audrie Jane Turner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Long before Charles Darwin's time, members of Western civilization viewed the sciences and spirituality as antithetical approaches to life. In the last 150 years, the argument for superiority of one over the other has continued, and Darwin's theories merely intensified the debate. However, American nature writing has evolved in a way that often synthesizes science and spirituality. This thesis will discuss this synthesis, and how two contemporary nature writers have dealt with the combination of science and spirituality in the natural and literary world. The merging of these two seemingly opposed subjects may be one of the most instructive and …

Golliwogg, Alan Freer

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

When reading a poem, one often wonders what prompts the poet to use a certain word order, to break the line at a specific point, or to even use that particular topic as the subject of the poem. Although there are those literary critics who assert that a poem should be read entirely out of the context, there is much to be gained by looking at the poem with the additional background information about the author, particularly what the primary influences of the author are. Such is the intent with this essay in providing a behind-the-scenes look at what shaped …

Tioga, Charles Ford

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

A collection of short stories by Charles Ford.

Three Practices In Technical Writing: A Portfolio, Alyssa Jean Hambelton

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

My technical/professional writing courses and experiences at Utah State University have taught me the importance of clear accessible writing and layout. As a senior honors student, I wished to practice the readability and accessibility skills I have acquired by creating a portfolio of technical writing projects. This would serve as a helpful instrument of practice for my entry into the technical writing profession. The portfolio includes three different projects: a non-periodic publication (Boise State Classroom Technology Bulletin), a newsletter (EIMCO Carrousel System Operators' Newsletter) and a procedures manual (Petroglyph Magazine Procedures). The written narrative that accompanies this portfolio summarizes the …