English Language and Literature Commons^™

Otto Gründler: In Memoriam (1928-2004), Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Eulogy on Director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.

Electronic Literacy: Teaching Literary Reading Through The Digital Medium, Robert Adams Rozema

Dissertations

Over the last decade, digital technology has become an increasingly important part of education. In the discipline of English language arts, digital technology has been enlisted to teach writing, as the word processor and more recently, the World Wide Web, have provided new tools and new publishing opportunities for student writers. The presence of digital technology is less pronounced, however, in literature instruction in secondary schools. In both theoretical and practical discussions of digital technology and literature, the two mediums have been conceived as radically different. This dissertation argues that the digital medium, and more specifically the World Wide Web, …

Mothers Of Us All: When Does Political Message Take Precedence Over Art In Some Modern And Contemporary Women’S Poetry, Shanda Hansma Blue Easterday

Dissertations

This dissertation contains an essay with the above title, as well as two sections of poems. The first section of poems is entitled Maria Sibylla Merian, Artist and Naturalist , and is a collection of poems about, and in the voice of, Merian. Many of these are what are known as personna poems. The second section of poems is entitled The Beekeeper's Wife , and uses autobiography as a framework for communicating the humor in human relationships, and for illustrating the surrealism in the human race's relationships with the natural world.

My research for my essay entailed the study of …

Brothers And Sisters In Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And Absalom, Absalom!, Stephanie M. Kellogg

Honors Theses

In first reading The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, I soon came to realize how important it is to study the two novels in conjunction with one another. Although I read The Sound and the Fury first, after finishing Absalom, Absalom!, the books became inextricably linked. I also came to discover that Faulkner creates an unusual situation for his audience: while The Sound and the Fury (1929) certainly stands on its own, readers reach a much fuller understanding after reading Absalom, Absalom! (1936), so that, in brief, to interpret The Sound and the Fury, readers …

Medieval Nominalism And The Literary Questions: Selected Studies, Richard Utz, Terry Barakat

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Like few other topics in the academic study of medieval literature, the search for the possible parallels between philosophical and literary texts reveals the not always peaceful coexistence among the three basic approaches to the study of medieval literature and culture: While hard-core medieval philologists would not accept any claims for a “literary nominalism” unless direct textual dependence can be demonstrated, scholars in medieval studies and the comparative study of medieval literature have shown themselves more accepting of investigations which diagnose a certain nominalistic Zeitgeist, mentality, or milieu especially in late medieval culture; and scholars preferring presentist/postmodern approaches have wholeheartedly …

Chaucer And The Discourse Of German Philology: An Addendum, Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Contains several additions to the “Annotated Bibliography” of German and Austrian Chaucer criticism between 1793 and 1948 published in Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002)

Male And Female He Created Them: Ælfric’S Lives Of Saints And Patristic Theories Of Gender, Rhonda L. Mcdaniel

Dissertations

My dissertation researches the writings of the four Latin Doctors, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, in order to challenge the scholarly stereotype of misogyny and anxiety about women in the writings of these influential figures and, more importantly, to build the cultural foundation upon which to base an interpretation of Ælfric’s portrayals of male and female saints in the Lives of Saints.

Accordingly, in the first chapter I focus on the writings of the Latin Doctors concerning the practice of virginity and on their explications of the Trinity and the Creation and Fall of humankind. I then trace …

The Unfinished Woman: Images Of Single Women In Wharton, Parker, And Paley, Erin Wolverton

Honors Theses

Is the life of a single woman really worth living? The question permeates the culture of the post-feminist era. Women without children and without a committed relationship in their lives can be categorized in two ways: those who deliberately dismiss the idea of a spouse and those who have not found an acceptable one yet. Both categories carry their own social stigmas: a woman who can't trap a man is a failure, a woman who doesn't want one is unnatural. These prejudices have been a part of women's unconscious behavior since the earliest days of feminism.

How Does It Mean? Literary Theory As Metacognitive Reading Strategy In The High School English Classroom, Lisa J. Schade

Dissertations

In the last two decades, serious scholarly attention has been paid both to theories of teaching reading and to theories of literary interpretation. These potentially related fields have been treated as separate, focused either on teaching reading in the elementary grades or on teaching interpretation to advanced college literature students. Until very recently the relevance of either reading theory or literary theory to middle school or high school pedagogy has remained unexamined. My research, as a reflective practitioner, addresses this important gap. I focus on the teaching of literary theory in the high school English classroom as a strategy to …

The Early Drama, Art, And Music Project: Publications 1977-2002, Timothy Christiansen, Clifford Davidson

Early Drama, Art, and Music

A bibliography of publications of the Early Drama, Art, and Music project at Western Michigan University, originally compiled by Timothy Christiansen and updated in 2002 by Clifford Davidson. This digital reprint was created in 2014 for ScholarWorks at WMU, with an addendum, an update, and a few corrections to the formatting of the 2002 publication.

Review Of David Matthews, The Invention Of Middle English, Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

The Mentor Relationship In African American Adolescent Literature, Roynetta D. Douglas

Honors Theses

The mentor relationship in African-American adolescent literature underscores the idea that young people can benefit from the counsel of caring adults outside their immediate families. In this ethnic specific subgroup, families may often suffer from financial strain due to single parent households or lack of career options. For that reason, many African-American adolescents either seek or happen upon a non-familial adult who helps them navigate through adolescence. This type of relationship, with its success and its pain, is vividly apparent in many novels geared toward young African-American girls.

Ben Jonson And The Mirror: Folly Knows No Gender, Sherry Broadwell Niewoonder

Dissertations

Ben Jonson, Renaissance poet and playwright, has been the subject of renewed evaluation in recent scholarship, particularly new historicism and cultural materialism. The consensus among some current scholars is that Jonson overtly practices and advocates misogyny in his dramas. Such theorists suggest that Jonson both embodies and promulgates the antiwoman rhetoric of his time, basing their position on contemporary cultural material, religious tracts, and the writings of King James I. However, the external evidence cited by late twentieth-century writers as to the nature of women's position in seventeenth-century England is contradictory and speculative. A more productive method of determining misogyny …

"How Should One Love?": Alternative Love Plots And Their Ethical Implications In The Victorian Novel, Jennifer J. Carpentier

Dissertations

In reading Victorian fiction through an ethical lens, I am attentive to questions of what constitutes the good, loving, w ell-lived life. It is my contention that Victorian writers turned to fiction - specifically, the rapidly emerging novel form - to explore the ethical implications of being in love, and the problem s occasioned by erotic love. The writers I examine modify the basic Aristotelian search for a specification of the good life for human beings: they used novels as testing grounds for the ethical question, "How should one love?"

My study of 19th-century British fiction reveals a strain of …

The Sense Of Nonsense: An Annotated Edition Of Ring W. Lardner’S Short Plays, Scott A. Topping

Dissertations

This edition presents twenty-one short plays by Ring W. Lardner (1885-1933), most of which have previously been accessible only on microfilm and in special collections. No edition exclusively dedicated to Lardner’s plays has ever been published. Though Lardner is known primarily for his short stories and sports writing, he considered himself to be a playwright and lyricist. Throughout his career he wrote several full-length plays (collaborating with George Cohan and George Kaufman, among others) and hundreds of short plays and sketches from which my collection is derived. Lardner’s sensitive ear for American dialects, praised by H. L. Mencken, Carl Van …

Dark Side Of The Dream: The Social Gothic In Vietnam Era America, Greg Smith

Dissertations

Gothic horror narratives have been a mainstay of American literature since Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 novel Wieland, and also of our cinema since the celebrated Universal films Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931. Often considered tripe by professional literary and film critics, such tales—both in written and cinematic form—began to gamer intellectual attention during the 1970s as their general popularity soared and as academic interest in American popular culture increased significantly. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Gothic genre became one of the most discussed and debated aspects of American pop culture, with numerous critics weighing in on its potential implications, …

Studies In The Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, And Social Contexts Of British Library Ms Harley 2253, Susanna Fein

TEAMS Varia

Studies in the Harley Manuscript is the first comprehensive examination of a manuscript that is of supreme value to literary scholars of medieval English literature. In an Introduction and fifteen essays a team of scholars considers many aspects of the 140 folios of this trilingual miscellany that preserves 121 items (or 122 depending on how one counts) from which we get a strange and privileged glimpse into the rich literary heritage that existed in England prior to the flourishing of vernacular poetry in the Richardian era. As the Contents indicates, the history and composition of the manuscript are considered, as …

Spoke: A Short Collection Of Poetry, Margaret A. Von Steinen

Honors Theses

No abstract available.

Go And See The Band: Rock N' Roll As Art And How We Deal With It, Sebastian Blanco

Honors Theses

This is my ode to the curse of loving rock 'n' roll. The curse of always having to defend my love of power chords and high-energy bass lines. The curse of trying to describe to people the distinction my mind makes between Pearl Jam and Aerosmith, Ani DiFranco and Jewel. The curse of looking at someone as I explain how important rock 'n' roll is to me, and seeing they don't understand a word. I have devoted the last six years of my life to listening, understanding, learning about rock music, and I do not consider that time wasted. I …

Guidelines For Alternative Spring Break, Christopher A. Meyer

Honors Theses

According to the 1997 Statistical Abstract of the United States, some 93 million Americans - 48.8% of the nation's adults - volunteered an average of 4.2 hours a week in 1995, donating time and talents to benefit various worthy causes. These "causes" ranged from churches to museums to schools, from private arrangements to national (even international) organizations. And the work, from building houses to holding hands to cleaning homes to answering tax questions, covered every possible talent and ability that volunteers had to offer.

The Art Of The Novel: How Kundera Helps Us Read The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Matt Plavnick

Honors Theses

In all of Kundera's writing there is the search, the yearning, to understand more of the world around us~specifically around Kundera. His fiction deals both with the lives of people caught up in this world, some happily, some miserably, each undeniably held by human constraints, and also with how these people are affected by their natural constraints. His critical writing offers further examination and theory about these constraints: what they are, specifically, how they work, and how they affect people. With this comes a detailed assessment of our epoch, which he calls "The Modern Era," and the phenomena that characterize …

The Pain Of An Amputated Limb: Subjective Morality And Existentialism In Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire, Aaron J. Klamer

Honors Theses

Over the last century, perhaps no genre of literature has so enthralled, interested, and provoked the public's intellect as those pieces which fall under the somewhat ambiguous appellation, "existentialist" literature. Novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus spawned generations of followers, including Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and Franz Kafka. Today, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, and especially the first book Interview With the Vampire, exemplify the characteristics of an existential novel. No doubt much of the reason for the popularity of the existential novel has to do with empathy, we see ourselves reflected in the characters. In order …

Poetry And Emotion: With A Review From Frank Bidart's "Desire", William Olsen

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Toward A Theory Of Gendered Reading, Larry Edward Schoenholtz

Masters Theses

Sociolinguistic studies have long acknowledged that men and women sometimes read, write, speak, and view differently. This is often recognized as a cultural phenomenon, but there are increasing reasons to suppose that biology may play a larger role in these differences than was suspected two or three decades ago. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, in particular, evidence has continued to mount in that direction from studies in neurophysiology, endocrinology, and infant behavior. In addition, sociobiological perspectives first proposed in the 1970s seem to have met with large success in being confirmed by cross-cultural studies done in the 1980s. …

"That Reason Wonder May Diminish": As You Like It, Androgyny, And The Theater Wars, Grace C. Tiffany

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Poetry And Vision, William Olsen

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Collection Of Short Stories, Charlotte Miller

Honors Theses

Syncopation; The Color of Massasaguas; Minnows' Inlet; A Seahorse Made of Wire; Cleaning; A Concert in Autumn

Death Of The Blues, William Olsen

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lyric Detachment: Two New Books Of Poetry, William Olsen

English Faculty Publications

Review of "Region of Unlik" by Jorie Graham and "Perdido" by Chase Twichell.

The Small Crimes Of Arthur Payne, Franklin T. Young

Masters Theses

Prologue

People ask how I could love a man with Arthur Payne. They say he was cruel, he sold out, he never loved me, that he thought no more of killing a man than a housefly. They're right. All Arthur cared about was the message he was created to deliver. Our shared days--the September afternoons we walked alone the shore at Cape Ann with our pants rolled up, and the fringe of the Atlantic foamed between our bare toes, or the city hours when Arthur followed me as I took pictures of black kids in scuffed British Knights trying to …