English Language and Literature Commons^™

Noticing The Brush Strokes: Literary Markers In Hebrew Narratives, Shelbey Hunt

Masters Theses

As the people who set out to write, edit, and form the Bible may have used embellishments to enhance their narratives, could they also have left literary markers to help the reader chart a course between the historical and the enhanced? The purpose of this thesis is to find these literary markers. Exposing any potential grammatical or syntactical signpost can help the reader understand how they should view a given Biblical story and help reveal the messages the authors behind the scripture were sharing. The book of Jonah will be used as a case study to both discover and elaborate …

Unfairy Tales And Other Refugee Stories: Creating Relations Through The Humanitarian Imagination In Mohsin Hamid's Exit West And Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread, Gabriella Pishotti

Graduate Student Scholarship

Contrary to many analyses of refugee narratives that focus on how their subject matter becomes compromised by issues of authority, believability, and expectation, this article explores how refugee novels such as Mohsin Hamid's Exit West and Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread lean into such problems in a way that appeals to the humanitarian imagination. These novels recognize the incomprehensibility of the refugee experience and play upon this reality by intermixing their stories with fairy tale elements. In doing so, the tropes of fairy tales provide these stories with greater narrative flexibility while making the unfamiliar realities of refugees comprehensible through familiar narrative …

Whump, A+ Parenting And Fantasy Racism: Trauma Narratives In Marvel Fanfiction, Sadie Fick

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Fanfiction, especially fanfiction based on superhero stories like those from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is an important but often overlooked vehicle for analyzing how society understands trauma. Using genre analysis and narrative analysis, this project is a wide-reaching exploration of how fanfiction both reflects and shapes popular understandings of trauma. It describes the unique fanfiction medium-genre and breaks down topics like whump, savior narratives, and fanfic's love affair with emotionally broken men, as well as topics like post-traumatic growth and deficit framing. The project also explores the intersections of trauma, identity and representation, discussing topics like structural trauma and childhood …

'Across The Sea': The Narrative Function Of Medieval Bridal Sea Voyages In Marie De France’S “Guigemar” And “Eliduc", Rebekah Olsen

Student Works

This paper analyzes the common medieval trope of the sea voyage in Marie de France's medieval romances, "Guigemar" and "Eliduc." Through framing both texts through an ecocritical lens tied to the associated symbolism of water and feminity, the paper highlights the importance of the sea due to it's association with female passivity in the medieval era. However, this paper focuses primarily on the narrative tropes found in the two stories and shows that throughout the lais, Marie both implements and subverts the assumptions of the Medieval sea voyage trope, which is clearly defined in Albrecht Classen’s article “Sea Voyages in …

(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas

English Presentations

My goal with this project has been to deepen my understanding of why people play games, how to make games narratively compelling, and what technical methods are effective in play. This has allowed me to investigate both the technical, scholarly assessments of board game dynamics while also exploring their real-world applications, successes, and weaknesses. Building on my research, my project has culminated in a full prototype of an original board game that has both narrative structure and an engaging gameplay structure. I have also produced a reflection paper on the experience and an annotated bibliography of my research texts and …

An Architectural Reading Of Kristeva, Woolf, And Shakespeare, Bailey M. Graham

English Literature Student Projects and Publications

Julia Kristeva’s seminal theories of the signifying process and the abject illuminate texts that challenge readers’ expectations. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and linguistic ideas build analytic links between texts as seemingly disparate as Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and William Shakespeare’s late 1590s play Titus Andronicus. In this portfolio, I will apply Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic to elucidate the multiple meanings of nature in Woolf’s Orlando, as well as utilize Kristeva’s notion of the abject to analyze the narrative breakdown of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In doing so, I will trace the development of Kristeva’s ideas …

'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Keyan Shayegan , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. After completing the lesson plan, students should have an enhanced understanding of the following learning goals: the similarities between different types of internal and external migration, and the effects migration has on individuals and their senses of identity; why nativism is so prevalent, the negative impact it has on humanity, and how it can be overcome by shared experiences between people; how authorities such as governments and mass media corporations use technology to deter immigration, via both force and influencing the public, in ways that dehumanize immigrants; how …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Ruby Guerrero , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to high school grades 11-12, community college, and/or college and university students. This lesson is planned for three weeks and three times a week, but I recommend that teachers revise these plans as needed in order for the lesson to fit their class schedules. Learning Goals: students will be able to identify stereotypes of migrants and refuse to accept these as proper understandings of people; students will be able to reclaim their identities using the novel as a basis for this outcome; students will learn to identify the different types of narration, how …

Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes Chicana feminist texts to frame a discussion of survival as a theoretical concept. Using Emma Pérez’s historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I introduce the concept of survival narrative as a framework for analysis of Chicana literature, and briefly review Chicana feminist theory to support the argument. Examples from Perez’s novel illustrate the power of the survival narrative to advance a decolonial perspective. The novel reinscribes mainstream representations of gender violence that characterize the traditional Western by focusing on the empowerment that comes from solidarity amongst women and …

Nights In The City Beautiful, Veronica Suarez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley.

The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. …

Application Of Narrative Principles To Effectively Communicate Through Graphic Design, Joseph Wright

Masters Theses

From folk tradition to film, story has played a critical role in connecting one person to another. The principles that undergird the construction of exceptional stories may apply to other forms of communication, including visual mediums. Although studies show that storytelling communicates more effectively than simply stating information, the field visual arts has neglected to apply this tactic in its craft. What makes a great story, and why does it have the capability of emotionally moving a person? Why not use the same principles that connect a person to a narrative within the field of graphic design? Because of this …

A Frame More Beautiful Than The Picture: How The Frame Story Dominates The Narrative In “Habent Sua Fata Libelli.”, Matt Cowden

Modernist Short Story Project

A frame story is a popular literary technique used by modernist authors such as Joseph Conrad and P.G. Wodehouse. Despite this, there as been relatively little scholarly attention given to the function of the frame story on the narrative. Telling a story within a frame can completely change the emotion and themes of a story, and as such should be considered an any analysis of these stories. An example of a story where the frame completely changes the story is “Habent Sua Fata Libelli,” told by a man who claims to have been wrongfully accused of forging a Greek vase, …

Toward The Eco-Narrative: Rethinking The Role Of Conflict In Storytelling, Corinne Donly

Publications and Research

Offered as a response to the increasingly popular call within the eco-humanities for stories that will help humankind adapt to catastrophic planetary conditions, this article proposes “the eco-narrative”—an approach to storytelling that strives to compose with, not for, its nonhuman characters. An extension of eco-critical projects that analyze stories for their depictions of nonhumanity, the theoretical research herein brings ecological analysis of narrative to the level of structure. In particular, it problematizes the dominant plot model of conflict/climax/resolution, suggesting that stories motivated by conflict reinforce dualistic and anthropocentric habits for approaching the animal other. Evaluating two narratives concerning the human …

Balance In Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne Through Friedrich Schiller’S Eyes, Peter W. Rosenberger

Student Publications

Many critics of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy see the novel’s narrative elements and structure as a form of narrative play, which reject Enlightenment systems of understanding. In this paper, through the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, I will argue that the novel’s narrative structure is best understood as a balance of aesthetic impulses. For most scholars, to understand the narrative form, digressions, philosophy of knowledge, and/or history in Tristram Shandy, one must understand how the novel subverts the categorization and systematization of Enlightenment thinking. The patterns of subversion in the text lend themselves to arguments that characterize the novel as one …

Summer Sunlight And A Blackness Ten Times Black: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Problem Of Sin, Kaitlyn Lindgren

Religion: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Nathaniel Hawthorne has typically been understood as an anti-Puritan. However, much of his work suggests that he was not rejecting Puritanism. Rather, Hawthorne was using narrative to deconstruct the doctrinal dichotomies of Puritanism and Unitarianism, which were prevalent during his lifetime.

Voys Lessons: Whirling Words In Chaucer’S “House Of Rumour", Nicola Blake

Publications and Research

“Voys Lessons: Whirling Words in Chaucer’s ‘House of Rumour’” examines the lability of sound and its use in the dissemination, transposition, and authorship of stories within The House of Fame, a text exemplifying the mobility and flexibility of misused or unhinged words, as expressed through sound as opposed to text. By engaging the use and interpretation of sound in contrast to words, this new reading concentrates on the idea of narrative as material artifact with limited stasis. Geffrey’s pseudo-authorship, through his voyeuristic stance, engages the textuality of sounds and shows the related subtlety, elasticity, and democratic sociohistorical aspect of …

Eliza Haywood And The Narratological Tropes Of Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

Eliza Haywood’s novels and political writings are often considered in isolation from each other; however, there is a discursive thread that links her fictional and political works: her engagement with secret history. Across her career, in her novels as well as her political pamphlets and periodicals, Haywood deploys two important narratological tropes of the secret historian: the tendency to reveal the secrets of public figures while concealing the author’s own political position and the tendency to muse self-reflexively about the author’s own role as a writer of history. Haywood’s facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession …

Teaching Self: The Ambiguity Of Lived Experience In Classroom Discourse, Scott V. Gealy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Inspired by Paul Heilker’s notion of the essay as a form of exploration over argument, embodying an anti-scholastic and chrono-logical approach, and Candace Spigelman’s endorsement of experience as evidence in academic discourse, this thesis weaves memoir into more traditional scholarship in an effort to complicate the archetype of the effective teacher. Furthermore, the essay seeks to deconstruct conventional student, teacher, and cultural binaries with the help of the theoretical work of Deborah Britzman, Parker Palmer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Joy Ritchie and David Wilson and others, while using Scott Russell Sanders’ narrative essay “Under the Influence” as a mentor text for …

The Rise Of The Moral Tale: Children's Literature, The Novel, And The Governess, Patrick C. Fleming

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating The "Public" And The "Private" Dualism In Composition And Rhetoric, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as …

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part I Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In two separate posts on Pencil Panel Page, Qiana Whitted and Aaron Meskin have explored the way comics readers engage with images. (Click here to read Qiana’s post and click here to read Aaron’s.) Specifically, they engage Scott McCloud’s claim that readers identify with drawn images of human beings. To quote McCloud, “when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face–you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon–you see yourself” (36).

My question in this post has not to do with images but rather with narrative. When …

Remembering And Recording The Vietnam War, Margaret Brunk

English Honors Projects

In this project I consider the process of narrative construction in Vietnam War memoirs and oral histories, with special emphasis on Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and I examine the interaction between traditional narrative norms and the irregularities of the Vietnam War. Beginning with an exploration of the unique nature of war stories, I discuss the difficulty of communicating the war experience. I then explore the interplay of public accusation with authorial confession and justification, arguing that the desire to explain the particular conditions of the war informs not only the content but also the language and structure of the texts.

Women On The Ground: Bringing Theory And Activism Together Through Domestic Violence Narratives, Kacey J. Barrow

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis works toward bringing domestic violence activism and feminist theory together by refuting that these two approaches are necessarily in binary opposition. It is centered on changing the way we make sense of violence against women by addressing why the authors that include personal narrative in their writing should be help up as examples of theory. By analyzing literary domestic violence narratives, the author demonstrates that narrative is itself theory. In addition, this essay creates a third space where the author‘s own domestic violence narratives complement the literary narratives. The author shows how we can analyze victimized characters in …

Ethical Engagements Over Time: Reading And Rereading David Copperfield And Wuthering Heights, Marshall W. Gregory

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This is chapter 9 from Dr. Gregory's book, "Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives".

What It Is To Be A MéTis, Mike Evans, Marcelle Gareau, Lisa Krebs, Leona Neilson, Heidi Standeven

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

No abstract provided.

Beyond Irony: The Unnamable's Appropriation Of Its Critics In A Humorous Reading Of The Text, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

In traditional Beckett criticism, the most conventional interpretation of the narrator's activity in The Unnamable posits that the narrative is attempting to establish "his" own self-identity, but "[h]is search for self-knowledge has failed because it has produced only fiction" (Solomon 83). Another variety of this interpretation poses the Unnamable's dilemma in Existential language: "Existence affirms merely that something is; essence denotes what it is ... By the time we reach The Unnamable, the collapse of essence is virtually complete; the voice is a mere existence crying out that it exists" (Levy 104). As Dennis A. Foster argues in his Lacanian …

Feminist Fiction And The Uses Of Memory, Gayle Greene

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

All writers are concerned with memory, since all writing is a remembrance of things past; all writers draw on the past, mine it as a quarry. Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for forgetting dooms us to repetition;and it is of particular importance to feminists.