English Language and Literature Commons^™

Introduction To Colloquium: John Shirley’S Cambridge, Trinity College, Ms R.3.20 And The Culture Of The Anthology In Late Medieval England, Megan Cook, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Common Precedents: The Presentness Of The Past In Victorian Law And Fiction By Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

What Should Be In That Caesar: The Question Of Julius Caesar's Greatness, John E. Curran Jr.

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: William Fitzgerald’S Spiritual Modalities: Prayer As Rhetoric And Performance, Steven J. Mailloux

English Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Civil Religion, Nativist Rhetoric, And The Origins Of Washington National Cathedral, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Set atop the highest point in the nation's capital, The Washington National Cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world. It has become a central site for the high holy rituals of American civil religion, hosting presidential funerals, National Day of Prayer services, and the tombs of national luminaries. Drawing on archival research, this essay situates the cathedral within a history of religious competition and national tension. The essay concludes that the cathedral's roots lie largely in the fecund rhetorical soil of nineteenth-century nativism, the cultural prejudice that emerged in reaction to Roman Catholicism's remarkable growth during that period. …

Clusivity In Presidential Discourse: A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis Of State-Of-The-Nation Addresses In Ghana And The United States, Stephen K. Dadugblor

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis examines the ways in which rhetors in presidential discourse simultaneously associate with and dissociate from their audiences in an attempt to consolidate power while subtly masking their actions. Drawing on comparative rhetoric and Andrus’ (2013) Rhetorical Discourse Analysis (RDA) that combines rhetoric and (critical) discourse analysis, I analyze the expressive values of selected lexical items, and the inclusive and exclusive uses of “we” in selected State of the Nation/Union Addresses in Ghana and the United States. I argue that presidents’ unique position during these speeches as both heads of nations and heads of their political parties presents a …

Education Through Violence In Modern American Literature, Adam Griffey

Theses and Dissertations

“Education through Violence in Modern American Literature” examines how violence is employed as a pedagogical tool in overseeing the transition of young people into adulthood in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. Examining texts by Robert Cormier, John Knowles, Suzanne Collins, Orson Scott Card, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Cormac McCarthy, this study demonstrates that a pedagogy of violence may be used as a coercive method to further the goals of the powerful, but it is equally interested in the ways that young people are able to rebel against structural systems of power that demand conformity and adherence to social, …

Magic At The Crossroads: The Rise Of The Video Essay, Morganne Tinsley August

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create …

I Am Adele Bloch-Bauer, I Am Hester Prynne, Laurie Lico Albanese Mfa

All Student Scholarship

I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE is a compilation of fiction and nonfiction. This cross-genre thesis includes two excerpts from historical novels with female protagonists, and an essay on women’s historical fiction. For the study and creation of female-centered historical fiction I researched and wrote in a wide range of areas, both intellectual and temporal. First, I read and traced the emergence of female-focused American historical fiction that began with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and continues today with historical fiction based in fact such as Lily King’s Euphoria and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife and Circling the …

Currency, Elisha M. Emerson Mfa

All Student Scholarship

The privileged Watters family, David, Winnie, and their 14-year-old daughter, Faye, struggle to adjust their suburban Charlotte lifestyle to fit a much-reduced income. Their fast failure leads them down separate paths: David after enlightenment through Transcendental Meditation, Faye after the power she feels in the company of her handsome Earth Science teacher, and Winnie in a romantic foray to Alaska after buried gold. Currency probes that moment when everything changes size, when initial annoyances shrink and reality resumes a new and disturbing sense of proportion.

Heart Of The Machine, Lauren Liebowitz Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Rion lives as a roach in the down-below, sharing what little she has with other kids in need. An encounter with a dead body leaves her with what seems like someone else's memories in her head--Obsidian, one of the synthetic humanoid Protectors who battle against unknown, inhuman invaders. Rion's everyday struggle to survive and keep her friends safe is complicated by this unfamiliar, unwanted presence. As she searches for a cure or at least an explanation, she comes to the attention of different powers at play who want access to Obsidian's memories, at any cost. Soon she is fighting not …

The Cultural And Rhetorical Elements Of American Picaresque, Cory James Dahlstrom

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The picaresque is a literary genre with a long and rich history. Although protean in nature, it is essentially the fictional autobiography of a likeable delinquent or rogue, who survives a series of adventures and a life of hardships by his or her wits and affinity for trickery. Stemming from a long line of tropes dating back to Greek mythology, the picaresque comes into its own fruition towards the end of the Spanish Golden Age with the anonymous publication of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Since then, the antihero of the picaresque, the picaro, has become a literary figure across a …

Spiritual Modalities: Prayer As Rhetoric And Performance, By William Fitzgerald (Review), Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Spiritual Modalities is arguably the first major work to take up the high theoretical questions of rhetoric and religion since Burke's Rhetoric of Religion published more than half a century ago. While a number of other studies deal with the relationship between religious discourse and other phenomena, such as politics, social movements, or particular rhetors and periods, Spiritual Modalities makes a strong claim to understand the primeval stuff of prayer's varied and complex discourses. As Burke writes: "we are to be concerned not directly with religion, but with the terminology of religion" (vi). So Fitzgerald is not concerned with prayer …

Writing In College: From Competence To Excellence, Amy Guptill

Milne Open Textbooks

Writing in College is designed for students who have largely mastered high-school level conventions of formal academic writing and are now moving beyond the five-paragraph essay to more advanced engagement with text. It is well suited to composition courses or first-year seminars and valuable as a supplemental or recommended text in other writing-intensive classes. It provides a friendly, down-to-earth introduction to professors’ goals and expectations, demystifying the norms of the academy and how they shape college writing assignments. Each of the nine chapters can be read separately, and each includes suggested exercises to bring the main messages to life.

Students …

Steps To Success: Crossing The Bridge Between Literacy Research And Practice, Kristen A. Munger, Bryan Ripley Crandall, Kathleen A. Cullen, Michelle A. Duffy, Tess M. Dussling, Elizabeth Lewis, Vicki Mcquitty, Maria S. Murray, Joanne E. O'Toole, Joanna M. Robertson, Elizabeth Y. Stevens

Milne Open Textbooks

Steps to Success: Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice introduces instructional strategies linked to the most current research-supported practices in the field of literacy. The book includes chapters related to scientifically-based literacy research, early literacy development, literacy assessment, digital age influences on children’s literature, literacy development in underserved student groups, secondary literacy instructional strategies, literacy and modern language, and critical discourse analysis. Chapters are written by authors with expertise in both college teaching and the delivery of research-supported literacy practices in schools. The book features detailed explanations of a wide variety of literacy strategies that can be implemented …

Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing In The Classroom, Melissa Tombro

Milne Open Textbooks

Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom is dedicated to the practice of immersive ethnographic and autoethnographic writing that encourages authors to participate in the communities about which they write. This book draws not only on critical qualitative inquiry methods such as interview and observation, but also on theories and sensibilities from creative writing and performance studies, which encourage self-reflection and narrative composition. Concepts from qualitative inquiry studies, which examine everyday life, are combined with approaches to the creation of character and scene to help writers develop engaging narratives that examine chosen subcultures and the author’s position in relation to …

She Voices Them: Evidence Of Black Feminism In Black Women’S Harlem Renaissance Literature, Danielle Carr

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

"Voices At The Crossroads: East Indian Women, Grass-Root Culture, And The Power Of Becoming", Rufena Watson

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

“Why Italian? Why Not Italian?” Jhumpa Lahiri, Amara Lakhous, Ali Mumin Ahad, Maristella Lorch And Their Unique Journeys Through Italian Language, Mariagrazia De Luca

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Threshold, Leah Vahjen

Theses and Dissertations

This senior thesis details an exploration by Leah V into spaces and places in time—be they emotional or physical—in which an important boundary has been crossed, thereby removing the possibility of returning to that space or place. The critical introduction for this collection of poems by Leah V focuses on the esteemed voices of Robert Penn Warren and Seamus Heaney, two men whose poetry has been, and continues to be, highly influential in Leah’s own poetic quest.

“Let Joy Size At God Knows When To God Knows What”: Gerard Manley Hopkins’S Struggle For Comfort, And The Illuminating Nature Of Unwarranted Suffering, Joel Kirk

CMC Senior Theses

Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered deeply. His “Terrible Sonnets” are confessional poetry that demonstrate his struggle with his God and with himself. This work analyses the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, starting Noah and ending with Jesus’s promise of a Paraclete, to analyze how both God and Man approach earthly and heavenly comfort. The work will then turn to Hopkins’s poetry to show that Hopkins’s unshakable faith and deep understanding of the Bible is both the cause and the cure of his suffering. This essay concludes that it is only through suffering that Hopkins, like Job, Jesus, and King Lear, …

The Performance Of Melancholy: Understanding The Humours Through Burton, Jonson, And Shakespeare, Lindsey N. Betts

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis aims to explore the relationships between dramatic texts and the Elizabethan topic of the humours. It covers Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jonson's plays Every Man Out of His Humour and Every Man in His Humour, and Shakespeare's plays Hamlet and As You Like It. Each of these works provides a glimpse into society and its opinions specifically on melancholy, from its most basic and complex definitions to how it is perceived and addressed.

Poetic Labor: Meaning And Matter In Robert Frost's Poetry., Lina Pan

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will …

The Value Of Attending University: An Analysis On The Novels Of Evelyn Waugh And Their Adaptations, Evan J. Molineux

CMC Senior Theses

An analysis on Evelyn Waugh's novels: Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies as well as their film and television adaptations. The paper relates all of these works to Waugh's idea that the true value and reason why students should attend university is not because their degree will earn them a massive salary, but because it allows for another four years of sequestered development away from adult society. Waugh stated that the true value of his time as an undergraduate at Oxford was because it provided him with the opportunity to drink, throw parties, discover art, etc...which therefore …

The Value Of Commerce In The Merchant Of Venice, Caroline B. Ward

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the pervasive role of commerce in Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice, with a particular focus on the characters of Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, and Portia, and the dual locales of Venice and Belmont. The way in which various characters engage in commerce is a reflection of their individual motives and affiliations. At the same time, the rhetoric of commerce, worth, and value colors the speech of various characters, and influences seemingly extra-commercial considerations such as identity, friendship, religion, socioeconomic status, and love. Ultimately, a close analysis of commercial transaction and language in the play reveals the …

Seeing Harry Potter As An At-Risk Student: Critical Literacy, Cultural Capital, And The Wizarding World, Dawan Coombs, Jon Ostenson, Whitney Sommerville

Faculty Publications

Despite his celebrity status in the wizard community, Harry’s lack of familiarity with its culture, language, social structures, and institutions constantly causes him to question his competence and magical potential. Although most muggle teens will never deal with the challenges Harry confronts as he tries to sort out Quidditch from Slytherin and Hufflepuff on his first visit to Diagon Alley, they can empathize with Harry’s attempts to acculturate into the social, academic, and political norms of a very unfamiliar world. Many students in secondary schools exist on the margins because of disconnects between their own cultures, languages, and social practices …

The Representation Of The Iraqi War, Middle Eastern Culture, And Women In Benjamin Buchholz's One Hundred And One Nights, Entidhar Hamzah Abbas Al-Rashid

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The Iraqi war not only affected Iraqi culture but also had a significant impact on a historically marginalized member of Iraqi society, namely, women. The American novelist Benjamin Buchholz explored the life of Iraqis from a unique perspective after his 2003 deployment. Instead of writing from the perspective of an American soldier, he gave an Iraqi perspective on the effect of the US-led invasion on Iraqi culture through the eyes of his two main protagonists, Abu Saheeh and Layla. In his novel, One Hundred and One Nights, Buchholz addresses the effect of war on Iraqi culture generally and Middle Eastern …

“You Can't Ever Find A Place That's Nice And Peaceful”: The Adolescent Identity In J. D. Salinger’S The Catcher In The Rye, Whitney Thacker

Masters Theses

Many consider The Catcher in the Rye the most poignant and popular story of adolescence in American literature, challenged only perhaps by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Reading reviews, examining the public reception, and uncovering depths of research would evidence this well. However, the value of the novel rests not in its popularity—a simple sign of its inherent value—but in its ability to resonate truth. More than merely telling a story, Salinger creates a life, or at the very least a glimpse of a life, through the actions and attitude of his ornery adolescent character Holden Caulfield. This …

Doktorvater, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Hundred Years War In Literature, 1337-1600, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.