English Language and Literature Commons^™

Composing Ourselves: Utilizing Literacy Narratives To Promote Knowledge And Reflection In Preservice Secondary English Teachers, Cheryl Henderson Almeda

Dissertations

My research entails examining and interrogating the literacy narratives written by six preservice secondary English teachers before their first semester of teaching. After writing their literacy narratives, these teachers worked together in two focus groups to consider, celebrate, and interrogate their memories they recorded in their narratives. They shared conversations which focused on their reflections, their teaching strategies, and the ideas they embraced as newly forming teachers.

This study considers claims made by Dewey (1933), Lortie (1975), Schulman (1986), and others, who emphasize the importance of learning through observation and the intuitive nature of reflective learning and teaching. It emphasizes …

Footnotes, Issue 7, Nov.-Dec. 2010, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

In Memoriam Karl Heinz Göller (May 13, 1924 - April 22, 2009), Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Eulogy on academic teacher, adviser, and mentor; founding dean of the College of Languages and Literatures at the University of Regensburg, Germany; and founder and honorary president of the German Medieval Academy (Mediävistenverband).

Footnotes, Issue 6, Fall 2010, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

Tongueless: Representation Of The Mentally Disabled And The Novel, Brent Walter Cline

Dissertations

This study examines the representation of the mentally disabled in the novel for two related outcomes. The first is to prove that the representation of the mentally disabled is not merely a subset of the representation of the disabled in general. This is intended less as a political statement as it is a literary one. Acknowledging and building off the work of writers in disability studies such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, and Tobin Siebers who concentrate on the body of the disabled, this study shows that attempts to represent the mentally disabled are fundamentally different than those who are …

2010 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Adoption And Integration Of Best Practice Methods In Secondary English Teaching, Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil

Dissertations

Commencing with a critical examination of the history and rhetorical force of the term "best practice," this dissertation undertakes a qualitative study of three secondary English teachers, considering their adoption and integration of best practice methods. The subjects, represented by urban, suburban and rural secondary schools, were National Writing Project participants identified as "exemplary teachers" by a NWP site director. "Best practice" methods analyzed included the process model for the teaching of writing and literature, student decision-making, and a low-risk writing environment. Factors that were found to influence the adoption of best practice methods included undergraduate and preservice experiences, intern …

Review Of Elisabeth Vavra, Ed. Der Wald Im Mittelalter, Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Footnotes, Issue 4, Fall 2009, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

Creative Metacriticism: The Portrayal Of Literary Theory In Contemporary Fiction, Zaydun Ali Al-Shara

Dissertations

Some modern creative writers have shown a talent not only in writing tales, but also in philosophy and theory as they examine questions and problems in fiction-making and the very act of reading. This dissertation examines the role the metafictive novel plays in the development of literary theory and fiction. I explore how writers of this type of novel emerge as creative metacritics who overtly and/or covertly, through their fiction, respond to and critique literary theory. The inquiry examines the reciprocal relationship between the fiction of creative metacritics and important movements in literary theory in the late 20th Century. All …

Mapping The Global Landscape In Women's Diasporic Writing, Martha Addante

Dissertations

As a contribution to the theory of cognitive mapping, the dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary novels by women writers of diasporic literature offer new conceptual maps of the present global space. This study argues there is a need for alternative mapping strategies that locate the female diasporic subject within the new global political economy. Fredric Jameson's theory of cognitive mapping and Arjun Appadurai's model of global flows provide a useful framework for mapping global space, yet each must be filtered through a feminist critique and modified by a feminist politics. Ultimately, the dissertation argues for a feminist theory …

From Picture To Word To The World: A Multimodal, Cultural Studies Approach To Teaching Graphic Novels In The English Classroom, Shannon Renee Mortimore

Dissertations

Sequential narratives such as comics, graphic novels and Manga (Japanese-style comics) have long been popular in youth culture. Recent attention has shifted to the potential of utilizing these alternative texts in the secondary classroom, yet very little information for English teachers exists regarding how to engage students in close, careful, and culturally informed analysis of these works. While there is a long tradition of thoughtful analytical teaching about literary texts, when it comes to the study of various media with strong image content, language arts teachers often may not know how to proceed. Indeed, preconceptions about the legitimacy of comics …

English Department Faculty Development Forum, Beth Bradburn

Academic Leadership Academy

This project consisted of the first ever English department retreat, where different disciplines in the field (Linguistics, Rhetoric and Writing, Literature, English Education, and Creative Writing) came together and shared their insights to the English language. This forum was called “What is a Difficult Text?”, and was followed by another forum, called “Authority.”

Footnotes, Issue 3, Spring 2009, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

2009 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Footnotes, Issue 2, Fall 2008, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

Between The City And The Bush: Suburbia In The Contemporary Australian Novel, Nathanael David O'Reilly

Dissertations

Australia's most important national narratives take place in the bush, the outback, and overseas. The dominant representations of Australia, both within the nation and abroad, focus on the outback, the bush and the cities. However, Australia is one of the most suburban societies in the world, and has been since the mid-nineteenth-century. Nevertheless, Australian novels are rarely set in suburbia. Between the City and the Bush examines representations of suburbia in contemporary Australian novels. Focusing on the relationship between colonialism, the physical development of suburbia and the anti-suburban intellectual tradition, my chapters address a number of issues, including immigration, environmental …

Footnotes, Issue 1, Spring 2008, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

2008 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Nude With Anything, James D'Agostino

Dissertations

Nude With Anything is a book-length manuscript of poetry that sources itself in a painterly world, one in which a visual vocabulary privileges the materiality of language in all its attempts to rival experience. Its teleos leans often toward velocity, a fevered stacking up of phrases, and so its range of poetic forms documents attempts at building calm into the rapids, intersecting verbal excess with contrasting silences, a kind of late-phase Henry James short through by haiku. With each syntactical tactic and shift in diction, Nude With Anything employs an abiding collage aesthetic, braiding different strands of discourse and seeking …

The Biographic And Poetic Dimensions In Gary Synder’S Green Buddhism Poetry: Cold Mountain, Mountains And Rivers Without End, And Danger On Peaks, Byoungkook Park

Dissertations

From the perspective of ecology, many scholars have examined works of Gary Synder, who is an environmental activist, a peasant-Buddhist, and one of the most beloved and significant poets in the East and West. While his poems have been widely read, they have been rarely articulated from the perspective of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism or, which I would call, Green Buddhism. Considering this, my dissertation focuses on Snyder's Green Buddhism poetry and delineates the concept of Green Buddhism and how it has emerged in his Green Buddhism poetry over the past fifty years. According to my research, his poetic dimensions …

Individual Autonomy And The Work Of Resistance: How Authors Of The 1950s Reject State Absorption Through Imagination And Reaffirmation Of The Body, Benjamin L. Boroughf

Honors Theses

The purpose of comparing two works of literature is to highlight similarities and differences that might provide a greater understanding of the works. When comparing the two works, one can emphasize various elements of the texts, including national or international conventions, periods, genres, themes, influences, culture, movements, or aesthetic choices. At the same time, however, this process may actually distort the way in which one views the works. A reader can easily seize upon surface similarities and identify some "deep" relationship between the works that may not in fact actually exist. Moreover, a reader can easily focus on surface similarities …

The Country Of The Blind, Thomas Martin

Dissertations

Steeped in the bedlam of Guatemala' s civil war, this novel is a story about Henry Foster, a seventeen-year-old boy from the United States who tries to hold his family together during a crisis in his father' s sabbatical year. Astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Milton Foster takes Henry and his family to Lake Atitlan, where he can research the celestial maps of the ancient Maya. The family arrives in 1978, before the presidential inauguration of General Lucas Garcia, whose administration would soon become a marker for the onset of widespread violence and repression. After Henry is accosted …

Marginalized Literature In The English Classroom Working With Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed, Noelle Carpenter

Honors Theses

Literature in the English classroom should give students the opportunity to explore the voices of a diverse range of people, especially in a school system that is becoming increasingly diverse itself. By exposing students to literature that engages them in important social issues, students become aware of a world beyond their own. Marginalized literature shows students different perspectives that exist in the world in which they live. Ehrenreich's autoethnography Nickel and Dimed is a window into the lives of the working poor based on her own personal experiences and research during a time when the views surrounding those in poverty …

2007 Complete Digest, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

“A Highly Ambiguous Condition”: The Transgender Subject, Experimental Narrative And Trans-Reading Identity In The Fiction Of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, And Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer A. Smith

Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the constantly evolving gender identity o f a text’s transgender subject relates to the text’s narrative structure and shapes the orientation o f the reader to the text. Accordingly, this project examines how these transgender narratives deploy experimental stylistic techniques that enhance the reader’s experience of ceaseless transitioning by revealing gender as a constant process that never solidifies onto a body and by highlighting the text’s own status as process rather than finalized product. Further, this project examines how a transgender subject and his/her relationship to the body, culture, and narrative is involved in the re-vision …

Doers Of The Living Word: Gospel Ideology And The African American Womanist Novel, Rebecca Erin Huskey

Dissertations

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison issues a charge and illuminates the challenge that she and other African American writers face in defining the self through a racially oppressive language:

Neither blackness nor "people of color" stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive "othering" of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and …

The Lost Journals Of Sylvia Plath, Kimberly Dawn Knutsen

Dissertations

Sylvia Plath is one of the few authors who has been posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Plath's exceptional literary career is not limited with that. When twentieth-century literary history is examined, it becomes patent that no writer has created such an enormous impact as Sylvia Plath. Furthermore, no writer or poet has been as misunderstood as in the case of Plath. In addition, no writer or poet has been labeled often as "schizophrenic" or "mad" by scholars or researchers who do not have the slightest education in psychology or psychopathology. Therefore, the works written on Plath, or the studies that …

Willa Cather: The Letters And Novels Of A Romantic Modernist, Lisa Bouma Garvelink

Dissertations

Willa Cather believed the primary goal of art was to simplify, but she never believed the world to be a simple place. Her letters reveal abundant conflicted feelings about her own place in the world, while also revealing a concomitant determination to succeed at any cost. From O Pioneers! (1913) to Sapphira andthe Slave Girl (1940), her novels vary vastly, evidencing a complex dialectic between romantic absolutes and modernist uncertainties. Even in the novelsmost critics would see as notably romantic--specifically her earlier works--the modernist temperament and techniques create recognizable tension. Just as significantly, in her later, darker novels the romantic …

Eclipse, Jennifer Hall

Honors Theses

A collection of poems.