English Language and Literature Commons^™

Catching All Passions In His Craft Of Will: Portraits And Pater In Oscar Wilde’S “The Portrait Of Mr. W. H.”, Rebecca E. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” as the product of Wilde’s long interest in critic Walter Pater’s literature and scholarship. From its first iteration published in 1889, through Wilde’s ongoing revision and expansion into the version commonly anthologized today, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is an evolving work that mirrors Wilde’s enduring relationship with the art and ideas of his former teacher. This relationship is explored in three contexts: Pater’s contribution to Wilde’s understanding of the Renaissance period; the steady influence of Pater’s ideas and persona on Wilde’s other major works from the period …

Narrative And The Reconfiguration Of The Humanist Subject In Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, And Ligotti, Zachary L. Acosta-Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the utility of the novels, short stories, critical writing, and generically indistinct work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Ligotti in developing a critique of the contemporary manifestations of liberal humanist social, economic, and political subjectivities. To this end, the concurrence of formal fragmentation and sublime aesthetics in early Gothic fiction models the manner in which narrative structures can appropriate structural tropes of dominant institutions, critically reflecting ideological fracture. Read according to the assemblative approach outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, these authors serve as a productive and incisive response to the hegemony of capitalist territorialization with …

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 …

To Come Alive In Our Experience: The Sounds Of Listening In Sigurd F. Olson, Allison Fulton

Honors Papers

My research explores the reflective qualities of nature that can lead to different ways of being in and of the world. In The Singing Wilderness, Sigurd Olson details his experiences in the Quetico-Superior region, an international wilderness of lakes and forests on the border of Canada and Minnesota that is replete with spaces for reflection. Olson encourages his readers to listen to the sounds, songs, and silences of the wilderness. I address his creation of a literary terrain he made accessible to his readers by acting as a guide to the imaginative wilderness with a literary canoe and paddle.

“‘It’S A Cu’Ous Thing Ter Me, Suh’: The Distinctive Narrative Innovation Of Literary Dialect In Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature”, Kym M. Goering

Theses and Dissertations

American literature and verse advanced in dialectal writing during the late-nineteenth century. Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” (1887), “Po’ Sandy” (1888), and “Hot-Foot Hannibal” (1899); Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881); Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” (1884); and Mark Twain’s “Sociable Jimmy” (1874) and “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874) provided diverse dialect representations. Dialect expanded into poetry with

James Whitcomb Riley’s “She ‘Displains’ It” (1888), “When the Frost is on the Punkin” (1882), and “My Philosofy” (1882) and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Spellin’ Bee” (1895), “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” …

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 …

Skin And Smoke, Kelly Anne Baker

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

My thesis consists of the first ten chapters of a horror novel, entitled Skin and Smoke. My novel focuses on the character of Violet Masterson and her attempts to create her own identify and reconcile with her family's past actions. Violet lives in the small, recently unincorporated town of Nuovita in central Washington. Following her grandmother's death, she must face the paranormal events occurring in Nuovita, while her father leaves on an unknown journey. My thesis addresses themes of loss, identity, and revenge. In Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he proposes that the monomyth ends with the …

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.

Challenging Classical Legacy: Virginia Woolf' Mythical Method In To The Lighthouse, Alex Rucka

Maria Dittman Library Research Competition: Student Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Code Violations: Chicago Review In The 1990s, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Dijon, Burgundy, Elizaveta Strakhov, Jean-Pascal Pouzet

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Doktorvater, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Decoding Each Other Through Coding: Sharing Our Unlikely Research Collaboration, Beth Godbee, Adrianne Wojcik

English Faculty Research and Publications

This narrative is a story of our cross-disciplinary collaboration. While teachers and researchers in English studies often share stories of teaching, we too infrequently share those of research. The consequence is that the everyday, lived experiences of conducting inquiry and doing research—the key intellectual activities in all learning— become muted, if not hidden. In response, we relate here our journey of teaching and learning the method of qualitative coding.

After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction In Kurt Vonnegut And Clifford D. Simak, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article takes up the question of whether and to what extent humanistic values can survive confrontation with the "deep time" of the Anthropocene, specifically with the inevitability of human extinction. In particular, I focus on representations of human extinction and the emergence of sapient successor species in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos (1985). and Clifford D. Simak's City (1952), identifying in the latter two submerged humanisms that belie the surface anti-humanism and cosmic pessimism of the novels .

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

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Women Poets, Child Readers, Angela Sorby

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

‘But Who Will Bell The Cat?’: Deschamps, Brinton, Langland, And The Hundred Years’ War, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay investigates the mutual use of the ‘belling the cat’ fable in Langland’s Prologue to Piers Plowman, in Thomas Brinton’s sermon from 1376, and in a cluster of poems about the Hundred Years War by Langland’s French contemporary, Eustache Deschamps. Although the fable was popular in their day, only these three authors offer it a specifically topical application, and each, the essay argues, uses it to critique administrative dysfunction and excessive taxation during the Hundred Years War. By teasing out this Anglo-French political context, the essay offers a new reading of Langland’s mouse’s exhortation of inaction before the …

Langland And The French Tradition: Introduction, R. D. Perry, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

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.

Don’T Point That Gun At My Mum: Geriatric Zombies, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Hundred Years War In Literature, 1337-1600 By Joanna Bellis, 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.

Science Fiction, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

Science fiction (SF) emerges as a distinct literary and cultural genre out of a familiar set of world-famous texts ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966–) to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–) that have, in aggregate, generated a colossal, communal archive of alternate worlds and possible future histories. SF’s dialectical interplay between utopian optimism and apocalyptic pessimism can be felt across the genre’s now centuries-long history, only intensifying in the 20th century as the clash between humankind’s growing technological capabilities and its ability to use those powers safely or wisely has reached existential-threat propositions, not …

Tending To One’S Garden: Deschamps’S ‘Ballade To Chaucer’ Reconsidered, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Somewhere We Wish Were Nowhere: Dystopian Realities And (Un)Democratic Imaginaries, Benjamin B. Taylor

Senior Independent Study Theses

How do political practices influence mass culture? Conversely, how does mass culture influence political practice? This project addresses these questions by turning to the concepts of utopia and dystopia. Imagined utopic and dystopic visions express both the hopes and anxieties of the societies producing them. Dystopias also highlight the mechanisms of power that function within particular social orders. Through readings of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I demonstrate how utopia and dystopia function and how we can respond to dystopic realities by theorizing solutions that are more conducive to the …

"Don't Read This!": Lemony Snicket And The Control Of Youth Reading Autonomy In Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain, Brittany A. Previte

Senior Independent Study Theses

This independent study investigates adult authority in youth literature in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Examining both sensational literature known as “penny dreadfuls” and the didactic magazines The Boy’s Own Paper and The Girl’s Own Paper, this project analyzes how rhetoric enforced middle class ideology outside of the classroom and shaped the youth reading experience. In an urbanizing, industrializing Britain, anxiety about social mobility ran high, and youth consumption of penny dreadfuls received suspicion due to their supposedly subversive content. This study argues that penny dreadfuls actually reinforced the social order, mirroring didactic literature in their construction of conservative adult authority. In …

Joyce's Musical Doublespeak, James May

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.