English Language and Literature Commons^™

“Compassion And Benignytee”: A Reassessment Of The Relationship Between Canacee And The Falcon In Chaucer’S “Squire’S Tale”, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Among its many elements, Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” includes an emotionally-charged dialogue between two aristocratic female figures: the human daughter of a king, Canacee, and the wounded falcon she meets in the wood. Scholars have debated the nature of this relationship in interspecial, gendered, and specifically feminist and ecofeminist terms. This essay provides a brief retrospective on some of the most recent scholarship examining their relationship—van Dyke (2005); Kordecki (2011); Crane (2012); and Schotland (2012 and 2015)—leading into a reassessment in two parts: first, that the affinity- and experience-driven bond these female figures develop supports a reading of this scene that …

A Critical Inquiry Approach To Teaching Young Adult Literature, Steffany Comfort Maher

Dissertations

This dissertation presents a critical inquiry approach to teaching young adult literature in English language arts classrooms. Critical inquiry is derived from critical theory and critical pedagogy approaches, as well as pragmatic philosophies of inquiry. The author shows from convincing examples that a critical inquiry approach to teaching empowers students to ask meaningful questions about both what they are reading and the world they live in.

Chapter One: Methods of Teaching Young Adult Literature: Past, Present, and Future is an introduction to critical inquiry and the teaching of young adult literature. Chapter Two: Critical Inquiry in Teaching Young Adult Literature: …

17th Edition Of The Laureate, Jessie Fales

Honors Theses

The Laureate is an undergraduate literary journal sponsored by the Lee Honors College at Western Michigan University. As Editor in Chief of the 17^th Edition, I coordinated the journal’s publication over the course of an academic year. The editorial process follows methodical stages, which have become standard over The Laureate’s lifetime—recruiting submissions, selecting submissions, coordinating with the design center, and hosting a launch party, etc... Of course, every editor has a unique experience, but we must honor the journal’s entity as something larger than ourselves—this journal has existed long before my time, and I hope it keeps on …

Crafting Fear: The Horror Film Trailer, Courtney Dreyer

Honors Theses

My research project investigates horror film trailers in an effort to define the characteristics of this genre and discuss its ideological implications. Focusing on theatrical trailers for American wide-release horror films between 2013 and 2017, I closely viewed a sample of forty trailers to inform my investigation. Horror trailers create an intense emotional experience of both dread and fear, tending to follow a similar narrative structure and employ a common set of stylistic techniques to achieve this emotional intensity. The shared stylistic techniques include elements such as tight framing, innocent imagery, and genre misdirection. The repetition of these elements promotes …

Spenser’S Narrative Figuration Of Women In The Faerie Queene, Judith H. Anderson

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Concentrating on major figures of women in The Faerie Queene, together with the figures constellated around them, Anderson's Narrative Figuration explores the contribution of Spenser's epic romance to an appreciation of women's plights and possibilities in the age of Elizabeth. The figures she highlights encompass the idealization of Una, humanized by parody; the historicized fixation of Belphoebe; the cross-dressed complexity of Britomart; and the psychological misery of Serena, a throwback to Amoret. They range from cartoons to a fullness sharing numerous features with the Shakespearean women salient in recent debates about character. The critical lens most revealing for each …

The Third Gender And Ælfric's Lives Of Saints, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel

Richard Rawlinson Center Series

In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Ælfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism provided by the four Latin Doctors and illustrated in the early Latin Lives of Roman martyrs, revealing the importance of memory in the construction of the monastic "third gender." In the second section McDaniel turns to creating a historical and theological cultural …

The Gawain-Poet And The Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition, Ethan Campbell

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

In this fresh reading of the Gawain-poet's Middle English works (Cleanness, Patience, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Ethan Campbell argues that a central feature of their moral rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Written in an era when clerical corruption was a key concern for polemicists such as Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, as well as satirical poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poems feature an explicit attack on hypocritical priests in the opening lines of Cleanness as well as more subtle critiques embedded within depictions of …

Shakespeare, Antony And Cleopatra, And The Nature Of Fame, Robert A. Logan

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame is a characterological study, presenting new perspectives on Antony and Cleopatra, the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays. It offers fresh insights into Shakespeare's understanding of the attributes of fame, the process by which it occurs, and the significance of being famous—and into the origins and nature of the playwright's own imperishable fame. Inclusive and enlarging, the study considers a fresh method of dealing with the longstanding difficulties theater-goers and readers have had in responding to the characters of Shakespeare's plays, the seventeenth-century contexts of the play that the playwright …

Intersex And The Pardoner’S Body, Kim Zarins

Accessus

Most scholars today have retreated from reading into the Pardoner's body in favor of more figurative readings that emphasize his lack of masculinity, and such lack is then linked to his dejection and despair. Other, more affirming readings center the Pardoner's performance, which allows him to model any sort of body desired through figuration. While such positions dominate and older theories like Beryl Rowland's proposal of an intersex Pardoner are dismissed, in fact, an intersex reading might be a more life-affirming interpretation, not only in terms of reframing the Pardoner's body as manifesting variation as opposed to lack, but also …

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

The co-editors of Accessus are pleased to present "Intersex and the Pardoner's Body" by Kim Zarins.

Cross-Curricular Writing In Mathematics For Comprehension, Kirsten Stowell

Honors Theses

Even though the idea of implementing writing in a mathematics classroom is far from new and the benefits from doing so are hardly nonexistent, this concept is often not found in modern secondary mathematics classrooms. Writing about mathematics allows students to organize and communicate their thinking, gain a better conceptual understanding of mathematical topics, develop a stronger sense of mathematical procedure, move beyond surface-level thinking, and place abstract ideas into context. Writing can also be used by teachers as a formative assessment to explicitly determine if students are struggling conceptually or procedurally in a mathematics classroom to then adjust instruction …

16th Century Shakespeare And 21st Century Students, Sheridan Lynn Steelman

Dissertations

Drawing on examples from the author’s and colleagues classrooms, this dissertation shows how an historical approach to teaching Shakespeare, drawing on primary documents from the period, opens meaningful interpretations, issues and questions for secondary students. Chapter One reviews current pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare, close reading, reader response, and performance to set forth the rationale for teaching Shakespeare using primary documents. Chapter Two highlights ninth grade students studying Romeo and Juliet and includes classroom stories about engagement with documents about gender, sexuality, violence, and potions. Chapter Three describes two general English 11 classes and their successes and challenges with Hamlet …

Mechanized Identity: The Blood-Mill Of Richard Coer De Lyon, Andrew S. Thomas

The Hilltop Review

The seven-thousand-line Middle English romance, Richard Coer de Lyon, is not often read as a text fascinated with machinery. The semi-historical, superlative, titular character and his various marvelous and deeply disturbing deeds usually claim most attention, and not without reason. There is much to examine in the heroically cannibalistic Richard, who presents a complex and often troubling vision of the ways both Englishness and the Saracen Other can be constructed within romance. Alongside these well-studied qualities, however, is a strange attention within the text to sieges and siege engines. Richard’s army is accompanied by a large, named siege tower …

Experience And Authority: Knowledge, Gender, And The Creation Of The Self In The Book Of Margery Kempe And Late Medieval Travel Literature, Rebecca D. Fox

The Hilltop Review

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between written authority, experiential authority, travel, and gender in late medieval travel literature. By expanding Terrence M. Bowers’ discussion of travel as a masculine rite of passage beyond Margery Kempe to include Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, the relationships between the aims and experiences of each figure are clarified. Each figure claims that their travels have given them unique a experiential knowledge which allows them to both recreate themselves on their own terms and to assert their own authority in opposition to written authority. Variables such …

Glorious And Execrable: The Dead And Their Bodies In World War I Poetry, Rebecca E. Straple

The Hilltop Review

While many scholars of World War I poetry have identified aspects of soldier poets’ work that embody the change from enthusiastic support of the war to disillusioned criticism of it, in this paper I argue for an additional, and highly meaningful marker of this significant change: the use of the dead and their bodies in this poetry. The commonly held critical view of World War I poetry is that there is a clear divide between poetry of the early and late years of the war, usually located after the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where poetry moves from odes …

Invisible Injuries: The Salvific And Sacramental Roles Of Christina Mirabilis, Sarah Macmillan

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Life of Christina Mirabilis depicts a series of self-inflicted torments which are seemingly unique in medieval devotional literature in that they leave no outward evidence on her body. This essay examines the self-healing nature of Christina's wounds and the importance of their invisibility in a culture which typically emphasises the visibility of the broken body. It considers the ways in Christina’s resurrected body (in both the Latin (c. 1232) and English (c. 1420) versions of her Life) contributes to thirteenth and fifteenth-century purgatorial and Eucharistic theologies, and suggests a correlation between the bodies of Christina and Christ which …

Delving Into Multicultural Literature With Inquiry, Juan Gonzalez

Honors Theses

This paper argues for the use of multicultural literature in the classroom, and puts forth a unit plan that uses critical literacy in an English 11 classroom, though it can be readapted to fit other grade levels. Bishop (1990) describes multicultural literature as a set of windows, that people use to view the experiences of others, and mirrors, that reflect and validate peoples’ experience, a core principal in this paper. Critical literacy is comprised of four dimensions (Lewison, Flint, & Van Sluys, 2002) that allows for analyzing literature in a different and meaningful way. The final part of this paper …

A Scholarly Fictional Narrative Portraying The Stigma That Surrounds Mental Illness And Its Place In Literature, Adrianna Robinson

Honors Theses

The purpose of this scholarly fictional narrative is meant to reveal the struggles that individuals with mental illness go through, not only in their personal lives, but also with their place in society. I lay out research around the stigma that surrounds mental illness first, defining both public and self-stigma in relation to mental illness. I also briefly mention Girl, Interrupted and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to show how authors have addressed the stigma that surrounds mental illness in literature in the past. The research is an important part of understanding why I write the fictional narrative the way I do, …

Precarious Positions Of Femininity In Contemporary Literature: A College Course Creation, Ireland Atkinson

Honors Theses

In an effort to understand college instruction, I created a collegiate literature course and its logistical materials. This process manifested in the creation of a syllabus, schedules, assignments, and a teaching philosophy statement. With the title “Precarious Positions of Femininity in Contemporary Literature,” the course is in an interdisciplinary format that explores gender and women’s studies with literary scholarship as its medium. All of the texts are not only written by female authors, but also address women’s issues and the precarious positions their femininity puts them in. With a focus on the intersectionality and the diversity of the female experience, …

March 16, 2017: Scholarly Speakers Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Trans*+ing Classrooms and Schools: The Pedagogy of Refusal as Mediator for Learning Under a Trump Regime

Putting Gender Revolution into Practice: A Workshop with sj Miller

February 27, 2017: Ellis Series Scholar Sj Miller Lecture And Workshop, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series: sj Miller

February 26, 2017: New Film Premiere For Department Alumni Chuck Bentley, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

February 6, 2017: Buff Visit Next Ellis Series Event, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series, WMU Faculty Keynote Lecture: Allen Webb

January 7, 2017: Mlk Day Teach-In Event: A Day Of Learning And Action, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Addressing Threats to Justice, the Climate, and Civil Rights: A Day of Learning and Action

The Failure Of Counsel: Curial Corruption In Book Vi Of The Vox Clamantis, Robert J. Meindl

Accessus

The king's court is the final element in Gower's analysis of the law in Book VI of the Vox Clamantis prior to the speculum principis that is the book's climax. Having discussed the men of law, judges, sheriffs, jurors, and bailiffs in chapters one through six, the poet now finds fault in chapter seven with the various advisers who surround the king for the purpose of providing him useful counsel in governing the realm. They, too, are found wanting in an analysis of the current situation in England.

Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This foreword by Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury introduces Accessus volume 3, issue 2 to readers of the journal.

December 4, 2016: Kazoo Books Open House, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Local authors including Grace Tiffany and Andy Mozina will be hanging out at Kazoo Books on Sat., December 10th, 2:30 to 4:00.

October 28, 2016: Elizabeth Wardle Next Visiting Speaker In Ellis Speaker Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Elizabeth Wardle

October 6, 2016: "Gunpowder Percy" Reading In Ann Arbor, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Grace Tiffany will be reading from her novel, Gunpowder Percy, on Wed., October 19th, 7 p.m., at the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, 124 E. Washington St.

October 6, 2016: Melody Graulich Visit Next Event In Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Melody Graulich