English Language and Literature Commons^™

Scholarship On Robert Burton's The Anatomy Of Melancholy, Matthew Bishop

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The history of scholarship on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy will be explored in this thesis, beginning with a biographical background of Robert Burton and a brief description of The Anatomy of Melancholy. The overall arc of scholarship on Burton’s text began with a wave of early popularity in the seventeenth century, followed by a period of critical neglect in the eighteenth century when no new editions of the book were published. A renewed interest in the Anatomy in the nineteenth century led to a flurry of Burton studies in the twentieth century. The major trend in Burton …

“Virtue Is As Much Debased As Our Money”: Generic And Economic Instability In Love’S Last Shift, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

In January 1696, Colley Cibber’s first comedy, Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion, debuted to great success at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The play was a hit and immediately entered the repertory, where it remained for decades. It inspired a sequel, John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), which debuted the following season and also became a stock play. Despite early audiences’ appreciation for Love’s Last Shift, however, modern critics have shown less enthusiasm. For scholars of British drama, the play is frequently a symbol of the shift from the rakish, witty, aristocratic comedies of the …

Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics With An Ethic Of Care, Jared Sterling Colton

English Faculty Publications

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment …

Sufficient For Herself: Women & Silence In Wilkie Collins's Novels, Shannon Branfield

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Wilkie Collins is a major sensation author of the Victorian period, known for introducing the form of the novel to detective fiction. His novels contain biting social critique and dynamic, multidimensional characters, the majority of whom are women, making his novels rich material for an examination of gender norms, power dynamics, and difference in Victorian society. His major works include The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), the two novels on which I focus. Previous critics have focused on the anxious male narrators in these novels and their attempts to establish positions of authority by taking control of …

Quilting In Children's Literature: An Analysis Of Stereotypes, Megan Egbert

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

For many people, exposure to folk art happens at a young age; however, we may not realize what it is, see its value, or be aware of the terminology used by scholars. The lack of understanding the importance of folk art is especially true for children’s books. This project focuses on the analysis of children’s books about quilts or quilting, primarily because quilts are often found in books and relatable to a wide audience. While the choice in genre and topic may limit the scope of folk art analysis, there are still hundreds of books solely based on quilts or …

The Slash Between, Tori Winslow Fica

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In this Plan B thesis, I wrote a braided essay accompanied by a critical introduction. The essay moves between three different topics: Salt Lake Comic Con; the journal of James Holmes, the shooter in the Aurora theatre massacre; and my father’s incarceration. Through the interaction among these three topics, or strands, I explore the lines we construct as human beings as a way of defining and controlling our world. I investigate such dichotomies as normal/abnormal, inside/outside, good/bad, and fantasy/reality. By the end, the strands reveal the fragility of the lines we draw and the futility of attempting to construct them. …

Rhetoric In Mormon Female Healing Rituals During The Nineteenth Century, Carrie Ann King Johnson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Using the minutes of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, journals and diaries kept by early Mormon women, and letters written about healing blessings, this thesis looks at how nineteenth-century Mormon women used rhetoric in healing rituals to build community, claim power, and comfort one another thorough illness, death, and birth. Claudia L. Bushman points out that “Mormon women were much like other American women of their day, but their allegiance to the faith led them in some new directions.” Instead of retreating to acceptable standards of femininity, Mormon women claimed and used godly power and authority.

The women who …

Under Cover: An Exploration Of Book Cover Design And Reader Perception Of The Text, Maria Williams

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

I am double majoring in graphic design and English and in doing so, am interested in studying the view of book cover design in both disciplines. This is partly a continuation of an Honors contract I did with Bob Winward in Fall 2015 when I designed multiple book covers. In this contract, a major aspect that determined whether a cover design was successful or not was whether the design was "true" to the text in the book. A literary critic, as opposed to a graphic designer who creates the cover, is given a book (and therefore a cover) and thus …

A Triangular Bargain: Narration And Power In Margaret Atwood’S The Blind Assassin And Alias Grace, Alyssa Michelle Quinn

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes reader-writer relationships in two novels by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace. The plots of both these novels revolve around scenes of storytelling, in which tensions arise between the narrator and her audience. In The Blind Assassin, the elderly protagonist tells her granddaughter the truth about their family's past in an effort to achieve redemption. In Alias Grace, a convicted murderess tells her story to a psychiatrist who hopes to prove either her guilt or innocence. In my thesis, I examine how each of these narrative relationships reflects the relative …

Graffiti Art And Professional Communication: Where Art And Communication Conventions Converge And Diverge, Rebekah Miner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis describes professionals in the areas of art and professional communication and their text and interview discussions of the professional presence of graffiti art influence in social media, marketing, and advertising. A review of these interviews coupled with field research creates a third space of professional communication where graffiti art becomes it's own genre of art and communication when used professionally. I will describe the contexts of art, professional communication, and graffiti art; their differences and discourse from professional interviewees on the subject, and the explanation of a new third space-or genre-of professional communication through graffiti art.

A Book Of Conversations: Trauma, Representation, And Reconstruction In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Rachel Telfer

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

For over 150 years, critics and readers have struggled to understand the meaning of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Through Alice, Carroll asserts that a focus on conversations in Wonderland will illuminate the use, or value, of his novel. The conversations between Alice and other characters reveal that Alice experiences a breakdown of her reality that mirrors the symptoms of trauma. Thus, looking through Alice's deconstructive process through the lens of trauma can provide insight into the value of Carroll's novel. Yet the novel does not describe a known source of trauma. Instead of emphasizing the traumatic event …

From Crisis To Crisis: A Big Data, Antenarrative Analysis Of How Social Media Users Make Meaning During And After Crisis Events, Adam R. Bair

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Crisis events are now common, ranging from computer errors, which might cause only minor inconvenience, to floods, which can cause loss of life and significant property damage. Such events can affect people’s ability to pay bills, trust food sources, or deal with events that could impact the environment and lives for decades. Understanding how crisis information is presented to audiences, how these audiences interpret and respond to a crisis will help researchers develop new approaches to improve communication among and with people affected by crisis.

To understand how individuals make sense of crisis events, I applied David Boje’s theories and …

Considering The Crossroads Of Distance Education: The Experiences Of Instructors As They Transitioned To Online Or Blended Courses, David D. Hoffman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the short history of online education research, researchers studying teacher experiences regularly relied on anecdotal examples or small samples. In this research, we sought to support and enhance previous findings concerning the best practices in online education by performing randomly sampled, nationwide survey of online and blended course instructors. The survey inquired about demographics (such as age, race, and gender), professional position (i.e. tenured professor), institution, department, and their initial and current feelings about teaching online education. It questioned if the respondents studied online as students, what resources administrators provided, their audience, length of instructional experience, and personal behaviors …

The Bat And The Spider: A Folkloristic Analysis Of Comic Book Narratives, Wesley Colin Van De Water

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis examines the folkloric evolution of superhero narratives over the past century. Utilizing theories from folklorists such as Lord Raglan, Vladimir Propp, Joseph Campbell, Barre Toelken, and Alan Dundes, it examines the core qualities prized by folklorists, and how these same elements can be found in superhero narratives, despite their mass produced nature and place amidst American popular culture. It examines classic hero tale structures, as well as the folkloric theories of dynamism and conservatism. The main argument is that these narratives are folkloric in nature, and that the discipline of folklore would benefit from their study.

Disrupting The Past To Disrupt The Future: An Antenarrative Of Technical Communication, Natasha N. Jones, Kristen R. Moore, Rebecca Walton

English Faculty Publications

This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice andinclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.

Voices Of Usu: A Publication Of The Citizen Scholar Conference, 2016, Utah State University Department Of English

Voices of USU

This collection of student writing represents the voices of over 2,000 students who enroll each academic year in Utah State University’s second-year composition course, Intermediate Writing: Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode. Voices of USU celebrates excellence in writing by providing undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and disciplines the opportunity to have their work published.

Sink Hollow Volume 2

Sink Hollow

No abstract provided.

Sink Hollow Spring 2016

Sink Hollow

No abstract provided.

Plotting The “Female Wits” Controversy: Gender, Genre, And Printed Plays, 1670–1699, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Archives, Numbers, Meaning: The Eighteenth-Century Playbill At Scale, Mark Vareschi, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

In response to the growing prominence of quantification in the humanities, scholars of media and digital culture have highlighted the friction between the cultural and disciplinary roles of data and the epistemologies of humanistic inquiry. Johanna Drucker aptly characterizes the humanities as fields that emphasize “the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production,” while data are often taken to be representations of “observer-independent reality.” Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson likewise critique the dominant assumption of data’s transparency: data, they insist, “are always already ‘cooked’ and never entirely ‘raw.’” The choices involved in data collection and preparation are not objective; …