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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Antisemitism & Vampires: The Surprising Roots Of A Popular Cultural Monster, Hannah Ross Jan 2024

Antisemitism & Vampires: The Surprising Roots Of A Popular Cultural Monster, Hannah Ross

English

This essay was for Justin Shaw’s fall 2023 English major capstone class. The essay examines antisemitism and vampires, specifically Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre; A Tale, and the episode “Monster Movie” from the TV show Supernatural through the lens of antisemitic stereotypes. By looking at the literary history of the vampire one can trace its physical antisemitic stereotypes and the influence of fear of the “other” with reverse-colonization by Jews. Starting with historically classic 19th century texts and ending with a modern day television show, it is evident that the antisemitic physical stereotypes …


Heard: Pondering Life's Soundscapes, Carolyn Albright, Adam Berger, Lily Brooks, Amanda Denney, Liam Drehkoff, Jack Fink, Emerson Fraser, Benjamin Galligan, Marta Insolia, Sam Kleid, Finn Krol, Morgan O'Halloran, Keya Shah, Kit Simpson, Elliott Zajac Dec 2023

Heard: Pondering Life's Soundscapes, Carolyn Albright, Adam Berger, Lily Brooks, Amanda Denney, Liam Drehkoff, Jack Fink, Emerson Fraser, Benjamin Galligan, Marta Insolia, Sam Kleid, Finn Krol, Morgan O'Halloran, Keya Shah, Kit Simpson, Elliott Zajac

English

This collection explores the relationship between music, culture, and personal experience. The product of a fall semester honors Expository Writing course, Heard traces the songs that have impacted students' lives. From folk and punk to Broadway and yacht rock, the music of the collection has shaped each author's life in both small and profound ways.


Immersion Vs. Engaged Interactivity In The Autobiography Of Jane Eyre’S Storyworld; Or What We Can Learn From Paratextual Traces, Kate Faber Oestreich Jun 2023

Immersion Vs. Engaged Interactivity In The Autobiography Of Jane Eyre’S Storyworld; Or What We Can Learn From Paratextual Traces, Kate Faber Oestreich

English

This paper uses The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall’s 2013–2014 transmedia adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, hereafter AoJE) to explore the impact of characters’ social media accounts on user interactivity and immersion. AoJE employs the powers of social media to create a modernized and fully-fledged storyworld, yet the users’ overall experience is undermined by the very strategies meant to facilitate engaged interactivity. When social media posts become sites where users not only actively seek additional content but also ‘read’ traces of other users’ interactions with the content, those traces function as paratextual commentary, creating dialogic …


Comedy, Contagion, And Confinement In Bo Burnham’S Inside, Zoe Barclay May 2023

Comedy, Contagion, And Confinement In Bo Burnham’S Inside, Zoe Barclay

English

Bo Burnham’s Inside was filmed by the former YouTube star, stand-up comedian, and director entirely alone in his guest house during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and released on Netflix. The comedy special is a mixture of skits, songs, and monologues loosely stitched together that question the role of comedy, provide a critique of the current socio-cultural moment, and give the viewer a glimpse into Burnham’s mind. Inside and The Inside Outtakes both engage with the themes associated with outbreak narratives and explore current social questions regarding privilege, accountability, consumption, and capitalism. Like other works of comedy, Inside takes …


The Malleability Of Home: A Genealogy Of Clark University's English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw Jul 2022

The Malleability Of Home: A Genealogy Of Clark University's English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw

English

This essay details the history of the land and structures that occupy the property currently located at the corner of Hawthorne and Woodland Streets in Worcester, Mass. Covering over 300 years, it begins with the legacies of the Nipmuc and the early English colonialist settlers before moving into a discussion of Worcester's 19th Century industrialists and 20th Century acquisition by the University. The essay builds on extensive archival research using materials from both physical and digital collections such as atlases, censuses, biographies, directories, criticism, and more. To further develop the story of the English Department and its home, the essay …


Archives And Literary History: English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw Apr 2022

Archives And Literary History: English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw

English

This presentation is part of a Directed Study project and was given at Clark FEST 2022. It is also associated with the longer paper, "The Malleability of Home: A Genealogy of Clark University's English House," composed collaboratively by the authors. It is about the history of Clark's English Department and, particularly, about the House it occupies. This presentation was presented orally by Christina Rose Walcott for a public audience as a culminating project in the Directed Study, and includes visual and interactive educational components. It also utilizes and showcases the project's extensive use of Open Access Resources from various digital …


Core Advanced Writing: Rhetoric Of Storytelling, Cruz Medina Jul 2021

Core Advanced Writing: Rhetoric Of Storytelling, Cruz Medina

English

On September 23, 2020, the New York Post reported that “President Trump had signed an executive order expanding a ban on government agencies receiving sensitivity training involving critical race theory to federal contractors” (Moore). By the time this executive order passed, I had already planned to teach a course titled “Rhetoric of Storytelling” that included a Critical Race Theory (CRT) reading from Aja Martinez advocating for counterstory. In response to the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests during the summer of 2020, my academic department, like many institutions nationwide, issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. In …


Educational Progress‐Time And The Proliferation Of Dual Enrollment, Brice Nordquist, Amy J. Lueck Dec 2020

Educational Progress‐Time And The Proliferation Of Dual Enrollment, Brice Nordquist, Amy J. Lueck

English

In this commentary, we use the occasion of the proliferation of dual enrollment to examine the discursive construction of difference between high school and college literacies, and its effects on teachers and students. This discursive divide has real, material consequences. It informs (and constrains) literacy practices and pedagogies, becomes a barrier to access (particularly when operationalized in testing procedures), contributes to dropout and attrition, exacerbates unequal power and resources in communities, and justifies hierarchical relations between high school and college faculty and staff. By deconstructing the definitions of high school and college and the metaphors of containment they rely on, …


“Publishing Is Mystical”: The Latinx Caucus Bibliography, Top-Tier Journals, And Minority Scholarship, Cruz Medina, Perla Luna Sep 2020

“Publishing Is Mystical”: The Latinx Caucus Bibliography, Top-Tier Journals, And Minority Scholarship, Cruz Medina, Perla Luna

English

In 2014, members of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus began contributing citations to a shared Google Document (GDoc) that suggested a relatively significant contribution of scholarship to the field of Rhetoric and Composition studies. Scholars of color have argued that rhetoric and composition scholarship fails to represent diversity in academic publications (Baca; Banks; Jones Royster; Pimentel; Ruíz). This study examines statistical data arrived at through analysis of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography, with survey and interview data from Latinx scholars providing important context about publishing for people of color.


The Pen As Your Sword: Writing Through The Lens Of Depression, Chris Lownie May 2020

The Pen As Your Sword: Writing Through The Lens Of Depression, Chris Lownie

English

Tragedy is one of writing’s earliest genres, and yet, why do we involve ourselves in the subject and write our own grief for the rest of the world? This thesis explores the act of tackling the subjects of mental illness and bereavement through the use of memoir, and simultaneously to analyze the use of such subject matter in contemporary fiction. Through creating a memoir of my own charting my journey through mental illness, familial death, and suicide, and analyzing the memoirs and works of those who have been through comparable experience, this thesis illuminates how grief is depicted in the …


Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott May 2020

Girls In Wonderland: The Male Gaze, Disordered Eating, And Bad Women In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland & Spirited Away, Arielle Westcott

English

This project aims to examine gender as perpetuated in the “Wonderland” trope, paying specific attention to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. At the surface level, these works seem like they don’t have much in common—they come from different cultures, different time periods, and different social contexts. However, to say that these stories are too dissimilar to compare is simply incorrect as both deal with the transitional periods of young girls who are approaching adolescence. Because both stories contain an alternate world in which the main little girl character wanders into and journeys through, …


“Who Wants To Live Forever?” Andrew Holleran, Garth Greenwell, And The Gayest Decade That Never Ended, John C. Hawley Jan 2020

“Who Wants To Live Forever?” Andrew Holleran, Garth Greenwell, And The Gayest Decade That Never Ended, John C. Hawley

English

James Baldwin’s remarkable second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956) influenced all subsequent gay writing—not only in its themes, but also in its tone. Paying frequent homage to that book, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and other fiction of the Eighties taught gay men how to be gay, and the melancholic tone these novels created persisted for decades to come, exemplified most recently in Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016). An unexpressed loss imbues the work of David Leavitt, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham, and Alan Hollinghurst, but the argument here is that more recent protagonists are, if anything, …


Revisiting Missions: Decolonizing Public Memories In California, Brenda M. Helmbrecht Nov 2019

Revisiting Missions: Decolonizing Public Memories In California, Brenda M. Helmbrecht

English

Living in California seems to require interaction with the state’s twenty-one historic Spanish missions, either by visiting them as a tourist, driving by a mission in one’s neighborhood, or learning about them as a schoolchild. While the missions ostensibly celebrate California’s history, many promote an anachronistic and dishonest re-telling of history that elides the devastating impact of the missions on Native communities (both historically and today). The missions operate as largely uncontested tourist attractions that promote self-serving collective memories about California’s founding narrative. Rhetorical analysis, I argue, can lead to a more honest engagement with the “hard truths” of their …


Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs May 2019

Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs

English

Julia Alvarez’s portrayal of the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies centers the novel around the sisters’ speech and humanity. This decenters the dictator, a figure who was often central to Latin American dictator novels. The first chapter will provide background on the dictator’s characteristics to demonstrate how the Mirabal sisters’ speech draws attention away from his power. The four times the sisters encounter the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the novel, their speech decenters him because Alvarez emphasizes their experience. In the second chapter, I examine the gaps between each encounter, focusing on Minerva’s speech development towards …


Beginning At The End: Reimagining The Dissertation Committee, Reimagining Careers, Amy J. Lueck, Beth Boehm Apr 2019

Beginning At The End: Reimagining The Dissertation Committee, Reimagining Careers, Amy J. Lueck, Beth Boehm

English

In this article, we forward a perspective on interdisciplinarity and diversity that reconsiders the notion of expertise in order to unstick discussions of graduate education reform that have been at an impasse for some fortyfive years. As research problems have become increasingly complex so has demand for scholars who specialize narrowly within a discipline and who understand the importance of contributions from other disciplines. In light of this, we reimagine the dissertation committee as a group of diverse participants from within and beyond the academy who contribute their knowledge and skills to train the next generation of scholars and researchers …


Decolonial Potential In A Multilingual Fyc, Cruz Medina Apr 2019

Decolonial Potential In A Multilingual Fyc, Cruz Medina

English

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have questioned to what extent the field can be decolonial because of the gatekeeping role that writing plays in the university. This article examines the decolonial potential of implementing multilingual practices in first-year composition (fyc), enacting what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience” by complicating the primacy of English as the language of knowledge-building. I describe a Spanish-English “bilingual” fyc course offered at a private university with a Jesuit Catholic heritage. The course is characterized by a translanguaging approach in which Spanish is presented as a valid language for academic writing. The students’ writing highlights the …


Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise In Action: A Case Study Of Collaborative Problem Solving As Transdisciplinary Practice, Tricia Serviss, Julia Voss Feb 2019

Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise In Action: A Case Study Of Collaborative Problem Solving As Transdisciplinary Practice, Tricia Serviss, Julia Voss

English

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.


The Spectrum Of Service: Refocusing Academic Work Through A Military Lens, Brenda M. Helmbrecht, Dan Reno Jan 2019

The Spectrum Of Service: Refocusing Academic Work Through A Military Lens, Brenda M. Helmbrecht, Dan Reno

English

In higher education, faculty, administrators, and students often use the term “work” casually: we go to work, we do our work, and we always have work left to finish. Thus, we appreciate the journal’s editors asking us to slow down and fully consider our work as instructors and scholars in the field of composition studies. Here we explore what it means to approach work through the lens of service. While service is an essential component of academic work, we seldom explore how the two concepts inform one another. As a WPA and an Army veteran, we decided to join our …


Han Shan’S Transparent Eyeball: The Asian Roots Of American Eco-Poetry, Tony Barnstone Jan 2019

Han Shan’S Transparent Eyeball: The Asian Roots Of American Eco-Poetry, Tony Barnstone

English

No abstract provided.


Inclusivity In The Archives: Expanding Undergraduate Pedagogies For Diversity And Inclusion, Amy J. Lueck, Beverlyn Law, Isabella Zhang Jan 2019

Inclusivity In The Archives: Expanding Undergraduate Pedagogies For Diversity And Inclusion, Amy J. Lueck, Beverlyn Law, Isabella Zhang

English

This chapter uses the experience of two undergraduate students conducting research in their university archives to consider the “hidden curriculum” entailed in archival research at some institutions. When diverse identities and experiences are not represented in our archives, we run the risk of communicating a lack of value for those identities, producing a feeling of marginalization and exclusion for some students and foreclosing an opportunity to build solidarity across difference for others. In light of the limited holdings at many university archives and the increased prevalence of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, the authors draw on research from writing …


Rewriting The Human-Animal Divide: Humanism And Octavia Butler's "Amborg", Aparajita Nanda Jan 2019

Rewriting The Human-Animal Divide: Humanism And Octavia Butler's "Amborg", Aparajita Nanda

English

The relationship of philosophy and the human-animal divide is a long one. One could begin with the anthropocentric assumptions of liberal humanism that go back to the Great Chain of Being, a concept of the nature of the universe that traces its lineage to antiquity. The term designates three defining features of the universe: maximal diversity of life, a serial communication within each group, and a hierarchical division of all living beings from God to the simplest forms of existence (Encyclopedia Britannica 2015). This essay challenges the liberal humanist emphasis on humans as being the central focus of the universe …


Supporting First-Generation Students’ Adjustment To College With High-Impact Practices, Theresa Conefrey Oct 2018

Supporting First-Generation Students’ Adjustment To College With High-Impact Practices, Theresa Conefrey

English

This qualitative case study describes some of the issues faced by incoming first-generation college students at a private, 4-year institution in the northwest. Using constructs drawn from social cognitive theory and social cognitive career theory, it explores how high-impact practices such as learning communities, writing-intensive courses, and ePortfolios might impact first-generation students’ adjustment during their first year of college. The findings of the research on students’ writing in their first-year composition course suggest that the cumulative impact of engaging in multiple high-impact practices improves students’ literacy and study skills. In addition, these educational practices appear to increase students’ self-appraisal of …


“Higher” School: Nineteenth-Century High Schools And The Secondary-College Divide, Amy J. Lueck Oct 2018

“Higher” School: Nineteenth-Century High Schools And The Secondary-College Divide, Amy J. Lueck

English

This article traces the emergence of nineteenth-century U.S. high schools in the landscape of higher education, attending to the gendered, raced, and classed distinctions at play in this development. Exploring differences in the conceptualization and status of high schools in Louisville, Kentucky, for white male, white female, and mixed-gender African American students, this article reminds us of how these institutional types have been situated, socially inflected, and structured in relation to broader political and power structures that transcend explicit pedagogical considerations. As a result, I argue for the recognition of high schools as historically significant sites in the history of …


A Response To Kim Hensley Owens’S “In Lak’Ech, The Chica No Clap, And Fear : A Partial Rhetorical Autopsy Of Tucson’S Now-Illegal Ethnic Studies Classes”, Aja Y. Martinez, Cruz Medina, Gloria J. Howerton Jul 2018

A Response To Kim Hensley Owens’S “In Lak’Ech, The Chica No Clap, And Fear : A Partial Rhetorical Autopsy Of Tucson’S Now-Illegal Ethnic Studies Classes”, Aja Y. Martinez, Cruz Medina, Gloria J. Howerton

English

A Necessary Caveat: What follows is a response in the form of ideological critique. As a collective, our intent is to provide a view from those the author is writing “for” or about. This response is less a correction of “facts” than an ideological perspective, a view from those of us who feel it necessary to respond to Owens’s rhetorical choices.


“We'll Make A Man Out Of You”: Steven Universe, The Bildungsroman, And The Redefinition Of The Male Hero., Ryan Badalamenti May 2018

“We'll Make A Man Out Of You”: Steven Universe, The Bildungsroman, And The Redefinition Of The Male Hero., Ryan Badalamenti

English

This paper explores how the various gendered characteristics of the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, interact with the formation of the titular character in the cartoon Steven Universe, the coming of age tale of a boy’s work to defend the Earth from magical threats. Traditional cartoon studies identify distinct gender identities between male and female characters. Similarly, Bildungsroman studies tend to analyze male heroes, with contemporary studies coining the term “female Bildungsroman” to talk about the formation of female protagonists. This paper argues that Steven, the protagonist of Steven Universe, incorporates aspects of both the Bildungsroman and the female Bildungsroman …


A House Divided, Christian Burgos May 2018

A House Divided, Christian Burgos

English

Abraham Lincoln coined the phrase, "A house divided cannot stand." So how he would feel about the current administration's stances against individuals in minority groups, whose identities are already heavily politicized? This collection of short stories I’ve written delves into the lives of those individuals as they have been targeted and continue to be affected by the rhetoric and policy threats of this administration. Each story follows an individual who deals with the effects of this rhetoric, both directly and indirectly. The experiences of the individuals in these stories are not universal; these experiences illustrate the potential circumstances and consequences …


Finding Nemo, Findng Dory, Finding Ourselves: How And Why We Teach Our Children To Think About Disability, Stacie Klinowski May 2018

Finding Nemo, Findng Dory, Finding Ourselves: How And Why We Teach Our Children To Think About Disability, Stacie Klinowski

English

My project, a critical thesis titled “Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, Finding Ourselves: How and Why We Teach Our Children to Think About Disability,” investigates how representations of disability within children’s media transcend these texts and contribute to our society’s construction of disabled subjects. By first looking at historical traits of children’s literature in Grimm's Fairy Tales and The Trumpet of the Swan, I establish that the didactic function of this genre reproduces the values of the cultures in which they are written while it also attempts to instill social ideals that will guarantee 'progress.' Representations of disability in these texts …


"Several Sigourneys": Circulation, Reprint Culture, And Sigourney’S Educational Prose, Amy J. Lueck May 2018

"Several Sigourneys": Circulation, Reprint Culture, And Sigourney’S Educational Prose, Amy J. Lueck

English

In her now-famous essay "Reinventing Lydia Sigourney," Nina Baym argued that Sigourney's literary range "inevitably allows for the construction of several Sigourneys who are unknown to modern criticism."1 Since 1990, when Baym revealed Sigourney as a student of history and a writer of historical prose, scholars have filled the gap she identified with a variety of Sigourneys, identifying her "generic plurality'' as a means to "achieve multi-positionality as a woman poet," as Paula Bernat Bennett writes, and noting that Sigourney's wide-ranging oeuvre does not readily lend itself to a reading of the author as a sentimental poetess. 2 Subsequently, …


Maiden Voyage (A Novel), Kyra Bauske Apr 2018

Maiden Voyage (A Novel), Kyra Bauske

English

Maiden Voyage is an adventure story. It didn’t start out that way, but that’s what it has become. The story follows a young woman who stumbles onto her father’s secrets. Alexandra feels trapped in an 18th century English settlement on Nassau. Under her father’s protection, Alexandra is expected to marry and remain on the island. When she discovers a letter in her father’s office naming her as an “asset” she finds herself asking who her father really is. Who is the business associate who comes every month? Why does he really want her married to Lord Dewhurst? When her best …


Who Learns From Collaborative Digital Projects? Cultivating Critical Consciousness And Metacognition To Democratize Digital Literacy Learning, Julia Voss Apr 2018

Who Learns From Collaborative Digital Projects? Cultivating Critical Consciousness And Metacognition To Democratize Digital Literacy Learning, Julia Voss

English

Collaborative group work is common in writing classrooms, especially ones assigning digital projects. While a wealth of scholarship theorizes collaboration and advocates for specific collaborative pedagogies, writing studies has yet to address the ways in which privilege tied to race, gender, class, and other identity characteristics replicates itself within student groups by shaping the responsibilities individual group members assume, thereby affecting students' opportunities for learning. Such concerns about equity are especially pressing where civically and professionally valuable twenty-first century digital literacies are concerned. This article uses theories of cultural capital and the participation gap to (1) analyze role uptake in …