English Language and Literature Commons^™

Legend: The Song Of The Family, The Voice Of A Woman, Kimberly Roth Shumway

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The Song of the Family

I do not believe that lives are lived in isolation, but rather are connected by ties of humanity and of family. For me because of this intimate human connection, every life experience, trivial or tremendous, is a poem. The poems blend into one--a great symphony of the human condition. An experience, even if left unverbalized, shapes the minds of both the one experiencing it and those connected to him or her by either close or distant ties.

In this collection I combine the poetic experiences most relevant in shaping me. They are the songs of …

The Making Of A Literary Map, Joyce Kinkead

English Faculty Publications

David Lee, fondly known in Utah as the "pig poet" for his collection The Porcine Canticles (1984), tells the story of his seventh-grade teacher's poetry assignment from a Texas childhood:

She sent us to the li-berry to find a pome. We were supposed to change some words to make it our pome. I came back with "Hell hath no fury like a sow with pigs." She gave me an F. (Magid 1993, 1)

Today, when David Lee reads one of his pig poems to audiences around the state, they chuckle and applaud.

A Linguistic Approach To Gender Bias In Student Evaluations Of Teachers, Paula H. Larsen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Few people would deny that discrimination occurs in American society today. In spite of extensive national and local legislation intended to safeguard the rights of every individual, discrimination still exists although, of necessity, it is more insidious, often to the point of invisibility to all but those directly affected by it. Many groups of people experience discrimination in their everyday lives--Blacks, Hispanics, Vietnamese, physically handicapped persons, and the elderly--to name just a few. Another segment of our society, women, also experience discrimination.

A Philosophical Investigation Of Sexual Jealousy And Jealousy In Shakespeare's Othello, Cymbeline, And The Winter's Tale, Greg P. Miner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Many poets, social scientists, and philosophers have tried to understand, explain, and define jealousy. The methods employed in their pursuits are as varied as the different conclusions they have given. Three of the difficulties involved in the pursuit of jealousy are: the complex nature of jealousy, the significant role jealousy plays in interpersonal relationships, and the labyrinth encountered when trying to distinguish between jealousy and envy. The most common questions asked about jealousy are: What is jealousy? and, How can jealousy be helped? This paper will focus on the question: What is jealousy? Specifically, the following questions will be answered. …

Smith Wells: Stagecoach Inn On The Nine Mile Road, H. Bert Jenson

English Faculty Publications

By THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the forging furnaces of western expansionism had wrought a tough breed of pioneers who were making their way into the Uintah Basin of eastern Utah. As early as October 3, 1861, the date President Lincoln established the Uintah Indian Reservation in that area, some white settlers were circumscribed by reservation boundaries. Other whites followed to establish trading posts among the Utes and to perform government service in connection with the newly named Indian lands.

Swift, Comedy, Evidentiality, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

Examines the relationship between the comedy of Swift's A Tale of a Tub, the role of the speaker and satire on modern literature. The point made is that speaker reliability depends directly on the sources of "evidence" h/s presents. To clarify what this entails the author uses the linguistic notion of "evidentiality."

The Siege, Chris Muffoletto

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

A short story written by Chris Muffoletto.

Dickinson's Dashes And The Limits Of Discourse, Paul Crumbley

English Faculty Publications

From their first publication in the 1890s until the present, Emily Dickinson's poems have been read and edited as though her stylistic innovations were imperfect attempts to convey the thoughts and feelings of speakers with fixed, unified identities. Because Dickinson's poetry consistently refuses to cooperate in this project, critics intent on imposing an aesthetics of coherence have tended to step back from Dickinson's work, blurring the details of individual poems while identifying familiar voices and dominant speaking selves in the corpus as a whole. As Margaret Dickie puts the critical situation in "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self," the apparent disjunction of …

J.D. Salinger, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Skirting The Light: Some Poems, Joe Pitkin

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

A collection of poems by Joe Pitkin.

Jack Kerouac's Pursuit Of The American West, Dan Fliegel

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Called alternately "the father of hip," "King of the Beats," "the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation," Jack Kerouac was less a thrill-seeking hipster than a serious author whose life and novels speak of our shared need to explore alternatives and renew ourselves, and of our frustration and regret for our movement away from tradition. Kerouac's life and literature can be viewed as an extended quest, an episodic series of explorations for meaning and for a way of life. He continually addressed the modernist question "How shall we live?," seeking answers in what one biographer calls an ongoing "pattern of …

A Harrogate Mystery, Laura Urness

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

A short story by Laura Urness.

Woman's Exponent: Cradle Of Literary Culture Among Early Mormon Women, Alfene Page

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this paper was to define and discuss the early Mormon women's newspaper, Woman's Exponent, and its editors in developing a literary culture among Mormon women. Woman's Exponent served as the primary source of research to show through its literature that the women of Utah were encouraged to express themselves freely, and present their way of life to a world that held a grossly distorted view of them. The Exponent provided the forum for skilled writers to polish their craft, and new writers to develop their talents. The literary influence of the Exponent encouraged the women writers …

The Esl-A/B Book Project, Alan Blackstock, Sharon Snyder

English Faculty Publications

For the past two years, the ESL ... A/B department Bataan has been providing our students with reading materials that are "predictable," that involve situations and stories familiar and interesting to the students. This effort is based on the findings of Current reading and writing research, which indicate that students learn language-both spoken and written faster when the language material is related to things they know about, care about, and are interested in. In other words, students learn to read faster when they are interested enough to try to predict what the language means, and they learn to write faster …

Wired: Computer Networks In The English Classroom, Joyce Kinkead

English Faculty Publications

Mail is seductive. I'm talking about the power that draws us inextricably to our mailboxes each evening to pore over letters, sweepstakes invitations, and yuppie catalogs. Imagine what happens when that power is integrated into a "hot" medium - the computer. The result? Electronic mail, casually known as e-mail.

Surfacing And The Diviners: A Comparative Study, Helen Beach Cannon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This paper explores religio-folkloric connections in two works of Canadian fiction--Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, and The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence. On several levels these books have striking parallels. They are here treated as novels of quest and in terms of elemental symbology.

Honoring The Farm: Identity And Meaning In Personal Narratives, Jeannie Banks Thomas

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis employs the literary folklorist methodology to explore personal narratives. Personal narratives told by Elizabeth (Beth) Wyatt Winn were analyzed. It was discovered that these narratives provide an eyewitness account of history, reveal world views, and encapsulate experiences into values and personal meanings. The depth of meaning found in Elizabeth (Beth) Wyatt Winn's personal narratives illustrates the importance of personal narratives in historical research and historical re-creation and simulation.

Appendices include several oral interviews containing personal narratives.

Recommended: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joyce Kinkead

English Faculty Publications

Move over Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is back. Actually, Gilman has been with us for a long time, just lying low until the time came when she was needed again. Although some readers may be saying "Charlotte who?" Gilman was a household word in the first part of this century, an early feminist whose works were not recognized as feminist writings until the 1970s. Gilman, however, would not have used the word feminist to describe herself; she was, instead, a humanist-concerned with the equality of both men and women. And this is the theme which …

Allegory And Nietzschean Values In Kafka, Camus, And Kazantzakis, Paul Kenneth Naylor

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this these is to explore Nietzschean values as they appear in three modern allegories: Franz Kafka's The Castle, Albert Camus' The Plague, and Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek. The intent is to illustrate Friedrich Nietzsche's three stages of the overman as they apply to Kafka, Camus, and Kazantzakis.

The Deseret Alphabet And Other American Spelling Reform Movements, Paula Goodfellow

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Everyone that uses the English language has trouble with spelling at one time of another; most people have trouble with it all the time. The may complain about the inconsistencies of English orthography (orthography is a fancy word for the art of spelling) as they reach for the dictionary, but not many people do anything about it. However, a few do try to do something. With some it may become an obsession. This paper is about the various attempts of some of these people to reform spelling.

It is traditional in papers about spelling reform to stop at this point …

I Heard The Old Fisherman Say: Folklore Of The Texas Gulf Coast, Patrick B. Mullen

All USU Press Publications

I Heard the Old Fishermen Say is both a lively collection of folk beliefs, magic belief legends, tall tales, buried treasure legends, and other folk narratives and a scholarly analysis of the context and function of these oral accounts from Texas Gulf fishermen. As such, it is an important contribution to the study if regional and occupational folklore.

An Otherwise Report, M. Q. Rice

Faculty Honor Lectures

In defense of myself and the Honors Committee I accept this assignment as a tribute for something, possibly for setting a new record as a hunger artist or for simply staying in town and reciting the penitential psalms daily for over 40 years. I have a sneaking suspicion that they may be exposing me for not being creative in the Greek sense of fulfilling the promise of one's birth. If I had got around to writing Pericles' funeral oration, Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor," or E. E. Cummings' "What if a Much of a Which of a Wind," as I fully intended …

English-Vietnamese Translation: An Internship, Blaine L. Hart

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The art of translation lies in a literary limbo, subservient to the creativity and expressions of others. Yet in attempting to bridge two different languages and cultures, it entails unique problems as difficult as those encountered in any other literary activity.

The following is the report of a project carried out with the Translation Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the fall of 1975 as a senior Honors project in fulfillment of requirements for graduation from the Honors Program at U.S.U. Since this internship itself formed the bulk of my project, the following is presented …

So Deep A Logos, Veneta Nielsen

Faculty Honor Lectures

CelVantes, almost as if he would at all costs avoid the incredible fireworks of Chaucer's Dame Prudence as she counsels Melibee on justice, from a vast cascade of learning and proverbial wisdom, in his Prologue to Don Quixote, says "I am, moreover, extremely lazy when it comes to hunting up authors who will say for me what I am unable to say for myself. And if I am in a state of suspense and my thoughts are woolgathering, you will find a sufficient explanation in what I have just told you." Then his clever friend advises the use of "scraps …

The Supreme Organ Of The Mind's Self-Ordering Growth, T. Y. Booth

Faculty Honor Lectures

As is true of other organs, when language is functioning well, we pay little or no attention to it or its complexities. Part of the difficulty, in fact, of doing justice to the problems of expression and interpretation that Richards asks us to deal with is that routine language experience occurs so effortlessly, so unconcernedly, so second-natured naturally, that when we do run into difficulties we do not always recognize them as difficulties of our developing language. Or, what can be even worse, we think of the language difficulties as if they were separable, as if the thought would be …

The French Influence On Eighteenth - Century English Literature, Linda Jane Grow

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The development of English literature in the eighteenth century was strongly influenced by France and French writers. Lately there has been an attempt to belittle the French influences. It is true that in the past the Gallic influence has been exaggerated, but it really cannot be overlooked.

Historically it is true to treat England and France as one country in respect to their literary activity between the middle of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roughly, there were about 100 years, between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the execution of Louis XIV in 1793, during which there was …

Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic": An Ecological Extension Of Albert Schweitzer's "Reverence For Life", John Lee Weaver

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

As a member of the world community, and in the process of becoming a professional ecologist, I have begun a search for a personal ecological ethic to guide my actions. Two of the paths I have taken in my search are Albert Schweitzer's Reverence for Life ethic and Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic. They are relevant because each has extended the scope of ethics beyond Homo Sapiens. Their thoughts, with similarities and dissimilarities, form herein my travels.

The Life And Poetry Of Francois Villon, Austin E. Fife

Faculty Honor Lectures

The highest hope of the teacher of literature is to illuminate life in the flame of experience : not in the sense th at hi story repeats itself, but rath er th at particul ar significance can be given to the here and now when it is experienced through minds with uniquely true sight.

One such mind is that of the fift eenth century French poet, Fran<;ois Villon. He sought out life with all his senses . He examined human experience with all his strength of vi sion, never once burying his head in the sands of wishful thinking because what he saw was beyond endurance. Though writing in the fourteen-hundreds he has been called "modern." We might say that he is great because his vi sion transcends time: th at he is "modern" because he is timeless . Perhaps this is because he pits the precious and fragile continuum of life again st the static nihili sm of death, than which even the most degraded life is preferable.

This lecture is not one for expert s on the fiftee nth-century with a special interest in Villon. R ather it is a literature teacher's effort to concentrate in one fifty-minute capsule the …

In Search Of The Elizabethan Woman, Melba Mcdonald Burrows

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The modern woman, who analyzes every detail of her existence by means of the written word, finds the Elizabethan woman an enigma that defies a satisfactory solution. She received the finest education available in her day, and she lived during some of the stirring events in English history; yet she has left us almost no written record of her personal life and her attitude toward the world she knew. We catch glimpses of her materialistic life in the detailed accounts in which she recorded the financial transactions affecting her husband’s properties, but we do not know how she regarded the …

Jack London: Master Craftsman Of The Short Story, King Hendricks

Faculty Honor Lectures

In November of 1898 Jack London, aged 22, sold his first short story, "To the Man on Trail," to Overland Monthly for the sum of $5. Three months later The Black Cat magazine paid him $40 for "A Thousand Deaths." This was the beginning of a writing career that in 17 years was to produce 149 short stories, not including his tramping experiences which he published under the title of The Road, 19 novels, and a number of essays. If all were accumulated and published, they would fill 50 volumes. Besides this, he wrote a number of newspaper articles (war …