English Language and Literature Commons^™

Modernism En Vogue: Popular Periodicals And Their Engagement With Modernist Culture, Natalie Kalich

Dissertations

My project investigates commercial magazines from the 1920s, including, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue, and Vanity Fair to reveal the frequency with which modernist writers contributed to these periodicals and the extent to which editors of these magazines found modernist discourse marketable to larger audiences, thereby undermining the assumption that modernists only spoke to a coterie audience. Furthermore, by investigating the similarities present in discourse on modernism and developments in popular culture such as jazz and film in a commercial context, I expand and complicate constructions of modernist and popular culture from both sides of the cultural …

The Things That Remain: People, Objects, And Anxiety In Thirties British Fiction, Emily O'Keefe

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the appeal of things in thirties British literature. I argue that in a time in which a catastrophic and world-changing war seemed to be on the way, many writers saw seemingly unshakable material things as a source of comfort. Drawing on thing theory, I explore thirties writers' recognition of the duality of things, their alienness to human society even as people invest great significance in them. Therefore, I show that despite this frequent appeal to the material world as a place of stability and comfort, many of these writers also recognized conflicting aspects of things, knowing (and …

Desire And Agency In The Modern Women's Sonnet, Catherine Anne Ramsden

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways that women poets, from the late Renaissance to the postmodern age, have used the sonnet form both to critique and to re-envision the female experience, particularly in regard to the cultural value of love. In addition to its analysis of poetic form, this dissertation also engages a cultural/feminist critique based on an enduring theme in women's writing: the power of patriarchal constructs to prevent women's individuation within traditional, middle-class cultural norms.

Subversive Liminality And Ideological Warfare: The Zombie Mash-Up As Resistance To Hypermasculine Revenge Narratives Post-9/11, Veronica L. Cooper

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project plots the coincidence of the "zombie renaissance" and system-justifying nationalist rhetoric post-9/11. The project discusses this cultural cross-section with zombie mash-up fiction, using masculinity and trauma theories, in an attempt to illuminate the motives of "us vs. them" rhetoric and hypermasculine revenge narratives in the post-9/11 decade. First, I use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009) to examine liminality as subversive counter-discourse to the masculine hegemony post-9/11. Second, I use Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) to look at the effects of revenge culture and how non-emphasized femininity and hegemonic (hyper)masculinity co-construct each other.

Telling Stories: Discussions With Sidonie Smith, Keith Knapp, And Terry Castle

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

The Destroyer Of Souls: The Rhetoric Of Fear In Old English Literature, Thomas A. Tutt

English Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores representations of fear in Old English literature and examines their rhetorical purposes. Although Anglo-Saxon writers were often unconcerned with or even hostile to the use of rhetorical techniques, I argue that Anglo-Saxons, particularly in their vernacular texts, tailor their writing to appeal to their audiences in specific ways. As such, this writing should be read as highly rhetorical. Reference to fear and fearful imagery in these texts play an important rhetorical role. Fear places the Anglo-Saxon subject in a world defined along rigid lines between Christian and Pagan, legal subject and outlaw, human and monster, recorded and …

Deterritorialization, Pure War, And The Consequences Of Indian Captivity In Transnational Colonial Discourse, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

The genre of the captivity narrative has operated as a vital circuit for transnational colonial discourse since its inception. Throughout the age of discovery, accounts of the captivity became an indispensible means of connecting the European metropole to foreign lands in Asia and Africa, as well as North and South America. The development of the Indian captivity narrative within the Atlantic context functioned as an effective tool for the dissemination of knowledge concerning the New World and its Indigenous inhabitants. In this essay, I examine some of the ways in which the captivity narrative functions as a colonial apparatus vital …

Ideological Malady: Imprisoned Thoughts Versus Liberated Action In Transgressive Texts, Juanita A. Walton

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Artifacts & Illuminations: Critical Essays On Loren Eisley, Thomas Lynch, Susan M. Maher

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Acknowledged as one of the most important twentieth-century American nature writers, Loren Eiseley was a widely admired practitioner of creative nonfiction, a genre that, in part due to his example, has flourished in recent decades. Contemporary nature writers regularly cite Eiseley as an inspiration and model. General readers, as well, appreciate Eiseley's eloquent, complex, and informative essays; devoted readers have helped keep Eiseley continuously in print since his books first began appearing more than a half century ago. Clearly, Eiseley is a writer who matters. As many observers lament, current environmental and other problems require a public and media that …

John Rutherford Everett, Beth S. Harris

Articles about Hollins and Special Collections

Biographical article on Hollins University's fourth president, John "Jack" Everett (1950-1961).

An American Haunting: The Specter Of Memory In Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, Katherine Montwieler

Short Story

No abstract provided.

"It's Such A Cool Word!" Reflections On In-Dept Vocabulary Instruction In A Middle School Language Arts Classroom, Naomi Watkins

The Utah English Journal

After several years of teaching vocabulary in a very traditional manner—list of words, copy the definitions, memorize them, take a test—I had grown weary of spending my time on instruction that I knew (even from my own personal experience as a student) did not work. I wanted instruction that resulted in my students really using the words in their own speech and writing, rather than just having superficial knowledge or merely being able to recognize words. I knew that my students were capable of a deeper processing level and of acquiring more sophisticated “everyday” words and academic language. I really …

Bullies, Bystanders, And A Birthday, Janae Shepherd

The Utah English Journal

Kelly Jo… Kelly Jo Fransden, the bully of Forbes Elementary School. She was in my classroom and my neighborhood, and I had to see her at church. She wasn’t particularly pretty, although for some reason she seemed to think she was. She strutted around the classroom and anywhere else with an air about her that she was somehow better than everyone else. As some kids today would say, she thought she was “all that and a bag of chips.” I’m still not sure why she acted that way. Perhaps it was her own lack of self-confidence, her projection of what …

Word Ways: Revisiting Ancient Greco-Latin Myths To Build Vocabulary, Jacqueline S. Thursby

The Utah English Journal

I recently assigned an old children’s tale to my senior undergraduate students called “!e Story of the Cruel Giant Barbarico, the Good Giant Benefico, and the Little Pretty Dwarf, Mignon,” written by Sarah Fielding, who lived from 1710 to1768. It was an unfamiliar story to them and written in the archaic style of 18th century English. The primary characters in the story were the giants, Barbarico and Benefico, and the sweethearts, Fidus and Amata. The names clearly reflect characteristics of the players in the story. By using root Latinate forms, Sarah Fielding foreshadowed the characters’ primary personality attributes: Barbarico (barbarous: …

The Pitfalls Of Publishing: Unforseen Challenges When Students Write To Publish, Jill Muir

The Utah English Journal

Sitting at my desk, I read an email regarding grants for teachers. As I pondered the needs of my students that might be met with a grant, I thought about my English Language Learners. Over the course of the school year, I gradually learned their stories of why and how they came to the United States. Some students had stories I had predicted: Their families wanted them to come to school in the United States, so the students were living with relatives and planned to return to their native countries. Other students, however, had dramatic stories: stories of kidnapping, escape, …

All Work And No Play Makes Jack (Or Jill) A Dull Writer, Joseph Anson

The Utah English Journal

Yes, I am one of those geeky idealistic English teachers, who occasionally fantasize about being Robin Williams’ character Mr. Keating from the classic film Dead Poets Society. After twelve years of unsuccessfully convincing my students to call me “O Captain, My Captain,” I still hold to the belief that I can get my students to “savor words and language” (Haft, Henderson, Witt, Thomas, & Weir, 1989). Regardless of an individual’s ability or inherent wordsmithiness, I encourage all students to play with words on many different levels. On Fridays, we set aside time to play with words. Just play. But why? …

Book Review: Writing Across The Curriculum: A Critical Sourcebook, Thomas Henry

The Utah English Journal

The Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) movement provides some of the most substantial strategies for keeping our discipline relevant for students and for ourselves. More-over, the WAC movement allows us to put focus into our work by informing us of outside writing practices. In a sense, WAC reminds us that our work as teachers does not exist in isolation, but exists to support a much larger economic and pedagogical structure (at all levels). This edited collection, complied by Zawacki and Rogers, provides a wonderful insight into the WAC movement and its literature.

Teaching Textual Recycling, Thomas Henry, Jim Pettersson

The Utah English Journal

Linguist, Michael Lewis suggests that a “recycling” strategy should be at the heart of an approach to teaching English (especially to speakers of second languages). He calls this specific approach the “Lexical Approach.” This approach focuses on ways in which students can use pre-fabricated linguistic units and/or formulaic expressions to form new language. In addition to the Lexical Approach, a “Template Approach” endorsed by Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein, also advocates the “recycling” of chunks of language to form new discourse. Their text, They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, contains formulaic language used to promote …

Critical Pop Culture Consumers: Using Tupac And Music In The Classroom To Teach Critical Literary Analysis Of Pop Culture, Marilyn Miller

The Utah English Journal

Teaching critical analysis is a unit that I designed to get students to understand the elements in an increasingly complex world where language provides the vehicle to refine thought. Because students are imbued in the element, they are often persuaded, cajoled, and tricked into embracing messages and images that may negatively influence their lives. Teaching them to look at the music and the videos that influence them and critically analyze the persuasive techniques and the impact of these messages on their developing values empowers them to choose more carefully the music they embrace or at least understand the influence of …

Book Review: Out Of My Mind, Jenna Fitch

The Utah English Journal

Melody is one of the brightest students in her class, but no one knows. All of the words she wishes she could express are stuck inside—Melody has cerebral palsy and can’t talk. Only through the help of a new, special computer does Melody find her voice and correct many of her classmates’ misconceptions about people with disabilities. Unfortunately, neither Melody nor her family anticipates the additional stigmas and judgment that will arrive along with Melody’s new voice.

This 300+ page quick read says what many of the physically and mentally disabled students in our schools can’t: include me. Through Out …

Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

The Sacrament Of Violence: Myth And War In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Tanya Engelhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My primary aim for this study is to illuminate the Ransom trilogy's inherent psychological and spiritual themes, as well as demonstrate how these themes clarify Lewis's philosophical and political goals for the text. Specifically, by investigating Lewis's mythic imagery and suffering motifs in light of psychoanalytic and theological literary criticisms, I elucidate the reasoning behind Lewis's unique—and at times, horrific—portrayal of fear, violence, and death. I also investigate how Lewis integrates his theology with the horrors of personal and intrapersonal suffering, as well as how he utilizes imagination and myth to explicate the practical (or political) implications of his theodicy. …

The Best And The Brightest: The Overachievement Rhetoric During America's Polio Epidemics, Samantha Taryn Putman

English Theses - Archive

In 1985, Dr. Richard Bruno, a post polio syndrome specialist, conducted a study on the personality traits of polio survivors, ultimately concluding that polio survivors have a significantly higher incidence of reporting overachieving tendencies than both people who did not have polio and people who have other, even similar, disabilities. The idea that polio patients were overachievers, however, has been a common theme in a variety of works, from memoirs written by polio patients to medical journals, since the epidemic period. If polio survivors were more likely, as both Bruno's study and the great wealth of anecdotal evidence supports, to …

A Graduate English Major's Search For Meaning: Toward A Pedagogy Of Creative Rhetoric, Lindsey Gendke

English Theses - Archive

Building upon recent work by Gerald Graff, Tim Mayers, Douglas Hesse, and Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll, I propose a pedagogical approach that integrates creative writing with rhetoric, much as the emerging "creative writing studies" is integrating creative writing with literature. As I demonstrate through a fusion of personal, academic, and creative writing, composition pedagogies that have ignored creative writing have alienated writing-disposed students such as myself, as well as failed to prepare them for basic and necessary writing and teaching tasks outside the university. As an antidote to these problems, I suggest Creative Rhetoric, a pedagogy that champions authentic …

Blood Path: An Original Screenplay Based On The Life And Works Of John Rollin Ridge, Jennifer Chamberlain

English Theses - Archive

Blood Path is an original, feature-length screenplay based on the life of John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867), a mixed-blood Cherokee whose work of sensational fiction, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, is considered the first novel written in English by an American Indian author. A synopsis of the plot is as follows: After seeing his father murdered before his eyes at the age of 12, Ridge vows revenge on the rival faction responsible. As a young man, Ridge kills one of his rivals during an argument and is forced to flee to Gold Rush California, where he becomes obsessed with …

"What Shall We Use To Fill The Empty Spaces?": Displacement In Frank Norris's Mcteague, Jennifer Bugna Lambeth

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Author's abstract: McTeague, Frank Norris's Naturalistc text written in 1899, depicts the corruption of a California couple due to influences outside of their control. In positioning Trina McTeague as a woman unable to identify with either of the two major feminine ideologies of the day, the Angel in the House and the New Woman, this paper examines her identity as conflicted because of this lack of autonomy. Her failure to identify herself leads to a mental break that is reflected in the domestic spaces she inhabits. The places she lives each become smaller and dirtier reflecting her diminished mental capacity. …

Tree Rings: Post-Holocaust Memory And Representation, Rory Davidson

Undergraduate Student Research Awards

No abstract provided.

The Shamanic Archetype In Robinson Jeffers Poetry, Steven B. Herrmann

Jeffers Studies

This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista …

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Daniella Kostroun And Lisa Vollendorf, Editors Women, Religion, And The Atlantic World (1600-1800): Book Review, Robin Runia

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This recent collection of essays promises to transcend the Old vs. New World, Catholic vs. Protestant, and European vs. indigenous dichotomies that have dominated the emerging field of Atlantic studies. Edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf and drawing from a colloquium sponsored by UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600-1800)explores how religion and spirituality shaped local politics, economics, gender, and race in Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America. The alternative directions described and modeled in the volume all assume a women's and …