English Language and Literature Commons^™

Passage Through The Ocean: The Female Heroic Journey In The Novels Of Anita Desai, Jaime Pedigo Hendrix

Masters Theses

This study examines the female heroic journey in relation to the protagonists in three of Anita Desai's novels: Maya in Cry, the Peacock, Sita in Where Shall We Go This Summer, and Bim in Clear Light of Day. The elements of the heroic journey as described by Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces illuminate the journeys of Desai's characters, as certain of these elements appear in all three of the characters' journeys toward adulthood. The work of C. G. Jung is also central to this study, as his theories on psychological development are utilized to show the growth, …

Driven To Distraction, Carissa Renee Hayden

Masters Theses

This compilation of personal essays is centered on the topic of driving. Many of my stories do not take place in ordinary tourist locations. However, my emphasis in each essay is to highlight details of the traveling experience, regardless of the destination. I chose to structure my thesis as a series of essays because each story has its own particular focus. Together, the subjects of each story interlock as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle to form a unified and overarching theme of appearance vs. reality. Often the appearance, or how we envision the trip, is romanticized, whereas the reality is …

The Beauty Of Her Survival: Being Black And Female In Meridian, The Salt Eaters, Kindred, And The Bluest Eye, Loretta N. Ullrich-Ferguson

Masters Theses

Individuals have been responsible for advocating equality for marginalized American groups since colonial times. From the nation's second First Lady Abigail Adams through former slaves such as Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to the activists in the social movements of the 20th century, many have fought hard to try to make the wealthy white-male power structure aware of and sympathetic to the rights of all citizens. Throughout these struggles, racist and sexist ideology dictated who the public leaders of these movements would be. The abolitionist movement's prominent leaders were males, most often white. The suffragist movement was led by, and …

Lexical And Segmental Influences On Child And Adult Learners’ Production Of Second Language Vowels, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Pavel Trofimovich

Faculty Publications

This study examined how two segmental or sound-related factors (crosslanguage perceptual similarity, syllabic context) as well as two lexical or wordrelated factors (word frequency, subjective word familiarity) influenced the production of eight English vowels by 40 Korean children and adults exposed to English in the U.S. for an average of 1 and 7 years. Results of two experiments revealed that lexical factors affected adults’ second language (L2) production more than children’s and depended (at least for adults) on amount of L2 experience. Lexical influences on L2 production were obtained when segmental influences were particularly strong (for dissimilar L2 vowels or …

Representations Of Grief In Akhmatova’S Requiem And Pushkin’S The Bronze Horseman, Hillary R. Smith

Honors Theses

Anna Akhmatova composed Requiem largely before 1940, but it was not published until the mid 1960s – after her death. It is now known to be one of her best works. Requiem is a cycle comprised of fifteen poems, the entireties of which are introduced by a personal reflection written in prose. Alexander Pushkin wrote his lyric ballad The Bronze Horseman in 1833 about the tremendous flood of 1824 in St. Petersburg and the involvement of the bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Everything that the protagonist, Evgeny, cares for is destroyed, and he blames the Tsar for his …

Using Creative Writing Instruction In The Urban High School English Classroom To Promote Writing Skills In Remedial Level Students, Maureen Harrison

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The purpose of this research is to investigate the value of creative writing instruction for increasing the literacy of remedial students in urban High School English classes. Students who are placed in remedial level classes often have preconceived negative feelings concerning their ability to produce academic writing. As I later discuss through the research of Debra Holmes Matthews, John A. Daly and Michael D. Miller, these preconceived notions impact the motivation and educational experience of remedial level students. In my research I will examine the ability of creative writing to motivate struggling student writers and help to improve specific writing …

"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …

Elements Of Mythmaking In Witness Accounts Of Colonial Piracy, Plamen Ivanov Arnaudov

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Focusing on historical accounts (1684-1734) by English, French, and Spanish witnesses, this dissertation establishes a continuity in fictionalized representations of anti-heroic pirates from the buccaneering period to the Golden Age of Piracy. Informed by history, literary, myth, and performance theory, the analysis identifies significant distortions in reports by observers and participants. The distortions that pertain to mythmaking patterns are classified and analyzed further. Conflicting and ambivalent representations of the pirate as an anti-hero are resolved through the positing of a literary scapegoat hypothesis drawing from René Girard and Joseph Roach. While demonstrating mythical archetypes at work in the construction of …

Getting The Big Picture: Henry James On Film, Dennis Cutchins

Faculty Publications

Henry James's works do not particularly lend themselves to adaptation. They tend to be light on plot and action, heavy on things like characterization and internal monologue, and it's difficult to show the internal struggles of a character like Isabel Archer or Merton Densher on the screen. It might surprise many of us, then, to learn that there have been more than two-dozen film and television adaptations of James's texts, many of them produced in the last twenty years.

The Currency Of Visibility And The Paratext Of “Evelyn Lau”, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

The apparently deracinated nature of Evelyn Lau’s work has rendered her an ambivalent figure in Asian Canadian and Asian American literary studies. Lau’s characters, often racially unmarked, are instead scarred by their longing for human connection, and they drift in and out of generic spaces or cloistered back rooms that are untethered to the specificity of the world outside. Her stories of prostitution, sadomasochism, obsession, and unrequited love do not lend themselves easily to the interpretive frameworks that have characterized Asian American and Asian Canadian literary studies.

Lady Caroline Lamb’S Revisions To Her Novel Glenarvon: Some Observations, Paul Douglass

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

No abstract provided.

Replacing The Native American With The "New American" In Margaret Fuller's Summer On The Lakes, In 1843, Laura M. Reilly

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In the summer of 1843, New Englander Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) set off with friends on a westward journey that would take her through the areas of the Great Lakes, Illinois and Wisconsin. Fuller kept copious notes during her trip, and during the eight months after her return home, she revised and enhanced her text and published it as a book, entitled Summer on the Lakes, In 1843.

Fuller’s book reflects a myriad of influences, especially from those most known for their Romantic writings. Jacques Jean Rousseau’s ideas of “The Noble Savage,” Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s …

Blending Doctrine, Practice, And Purpose In Legal Education: The Case For An Integrated Pedagogy, Debra M. Schneider

Theses and Dissertations

Traditional legal education is sorely imbalanced. A law student receives rigorous training in legal doctrine and analytical skills—he learns to "think like a lawyer"—but is left with little training in practical skills or his ethical role in society. Moreover, law schools rely almost exclusively on the ineffectual pedagogy of the case-dialogue, or "Socratic," method. Several factors explain this entrenched imbalance, most notably the academy's top-down power structure and its budget constraints. Increasingly, however, the marketplace is demanding practice-ready lawyers who have strong training not only in doctrine but in practical skills and ethics. Law schools, responding to this market pressure, …

Making It Count: Mentoring As Cultural Currency, Tanya R. Cochran, Beth Godbee

English Faculty Research and Publications

Mentoring relationships, those meaningful and often affective connections that characterize our work with students and colleagues, by their very nature, defy quantification. Even as we use the banking metaphor to describe our “investment” in others, the “return” for our time, and the “credit” we deserve, many of us who value mentoring for its qualitative and interpersonal nature resist putting our work into numeric terms. Yet, in an academic culture that asks us to measure our contributions and quantify our merit, we must prove cultural capital: that we have the currency to back our reputation and contributions. Like business models that …

Nostalgia For The Present, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Poetry Is Poetry Is Poetry, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Songs Of Black (Women) Folk: Music, Politics, And Everyday Living, Rasheedah Quiett Jenkins

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The field of folklore in general, but specifically Africana folklore studies can be enriched by greater analyses of Black female contributions. In this study, I position folk music as the primary interest and chosen location to acknowledge Black women’s participation from beyond the margins. My inquiry reveals folk music as a lens into the myriad ways in which Black women have translated vernacular traditions into a means to deconstruct the master narrative as well as interrogate racist patriarchy. Specifically, this study examines how Nina Simone, Tracy Chapman, and Lauryn Hill have appropriated the folk aesthetic as a vehicle for social …

Reading Poe Reading Blackwood’S: The Palimpsestic Subtext In "The Fall Of The House Of Usher”, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Mentoring Toward Interdependency: "Keeping It Real", Krista Ratcliffe, Donna Decker Schuster

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

A Commitment To Excellence, Meredith Jones-Gray

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Mis-Education And The Crisis In Male Subjectivity: William Godwin’S Middle Novels, 1799–1817, Lisa-Marie Lynn Butler

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In the tumultuous period of the 1790s, the English anarchist philosopher William Godwin was a seminal figure whose 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness stood as a touchstone for the reform movement in Britain. Godwin is primarily known today as the author of Political Justice and Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a 1794 novel which many readers, past and present, have regarded as a fictionalized allegory of the philosophical claims outlined in Political Justice.

Although his fame as a novelist largely rests on this one popular novel, …

A Comparison Of The Portrayal Of Evil In Fairy Tales And Contemporary Fantasy Fiction, Donna Gwinnup

Graduate Research Papers

Writing and publishing literature for children and young adults has become a rhizomorphic entity. There are thousands of books published each year. When you compare that to the little over two hundred stories Perrault and the Grimm brothers recorded you can see how the market has substantially grown. With the use of literature as a teaching tool it is imperative we keep a close watch on trends. This study was designed to look at the changes from fairy tales to contemporary fiction in order to ascertain what changes have taken place in three particular areas: has the gender of the …

Children’S Web Site: History Of Elkader, Iowa… For Kids, Nancy Healy

Graduate Research Papers

Elkader, located in the hills of Northeast Iowa, along the banks of the Turkey River, is a community rich with history. There are no resources designed for children about the history of Elkader. The purpose of this project was to create an engaging informational web site for children that shares information about the history of Elkader, from its beginning years to present day. Research provided throughout this project makes it evident that not only is history education important and that young people are capable of understanding and appreciating the past; it also demonstrates how to best present the information online-with …

"Motionless As An Idol": The Roles Of Art, Modernism, And Religion In William Faulkner's Construction Of Gender, Chelsea Bullock

Theses and Dissertations

William Faulkner's body of work addresses many specific issues and conditions specific to the South, but this project focuses on the place of Southern women in society and Faulkner's exploration of their subjugation through the language and images of art. I will analyze three of his texts: "A Rose for Emily," As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury with a particular focus on the main female characters and the art metaphors they are presented in association with and. often, as encapsulated within. I chose these three texts because they are best representative of my argument. In the …