English Language and Literature Commons^™

Of Neere Neighbors: Sacrament And Sociality In The Drama Of Islamic Conversion, C.1600-1640, Stephanie Kucsera

Dissertations

This dissertation traces scenes of Christian-Muslim conversion across representative works by William Shakespeare, Robert Daborne, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome to examine how the popular drama of the early seventeenth century participates in English political and ecclesiastical discourses about the meaning of interfaith conversion and its stakes for the construction and stability of late-Reformation English national identity. I argue that the structural and stylistic changes that define each drama’s distinct presentation of interfaith conversion may be understood as engaged in the still-evolving debates over the Church of England’s sacramental theology and ceremonial practices—the very ritual actions that could render the …

Fake News And News Anxiety In Early Modern England, Richard David Macey

Dissertations

This work defines and analyzes the concepts of fake news and news anxiety in early modern England, arguing that fears about the dishonesty, abundance, and intrusiveness of cheap newsprint became key cultural concerns—concerns that find frequent expression in the literature of the time. Professional theater and commercial news came of age together in England, and the dramatic stage, itself a kind of news venue, proved a trenchant critic of printed news. Other academic works have examined connections between commercial news and professional theater, but mine is the first to examine the theater’s anxious preoccupation with fake news. This study focuses …

"We Were Framed To Fail And Die": The Ethics And Poetics Of Mortality In The Works Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Brett C. Beasley

Dissertations

This dissertation is the first comprehensive analysis of the subject of mortality in Gerard Manley Hopkins's writings. Hopkins's writings on this subject are broad and varied: while still a student at Oxford, Hopkins became fascinated by martyrs; later, as a priest he would go on to write movingly about the deaths of parishioners in his care and would extol the virtues of soldiers, or "daredeaths" as he refers to them in one poem; finally, toward the end of his life, Hopkins became preoccupied with the role our own mortality plays in shaping our life, perspective, and choices. While previous scholars …

The User, The Reader, And The Pocket Cathedral: William Morris's Arts And Crafts Aesthetic And The Decorated Book, Brandiann Molby

Dissertations

In an expansion of Jerome McGann's claims for a "materialist aesthetic" as the defining feature of William Morris's Kelmscott Press books, this dissertation maintains that Morris's book designs are the fullest expression of an Arts and Crafts interpretive model that Morris established over his career as a designer and a craftsman and that decisively intervenes in traditional theoretical discussions of the distinctions between the visual and verbal arts. This dissertation demonstrates that Morris's book designs are predicated on the user's interpretive engagement with the material object to bring together word and image, form and function, and decoration and design in …

Art Of Documentation: Documents And Visual Culture In Medieval England (Book Review), Jamie K. Taylor

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lies, Puns, Tallies: Marital And Material Deceit In Langland And Chaucer, Jamie K. Taylor

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

'No Home Here': Female Space And The Modernist Aesthetic In Nella Larsen's Quicksand And Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Julianna N. Cherinka

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf famously asserts that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (4). This concept places an immediate importance on the role of the Modernist female subject as an artist and as an architect, constructing the places and spaces that she exists within. With Woolf's argument as its point of departure, this thesis investigates the theme of female space in two Modernist texts: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). The respective protagonists of Quicksand and …

Sculpted From Clay, Shaped By Power: Feminine Narrative And Agency In Wonder Woman, Mikala Carpenter

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

By applying deconstructive and feminist theories to the Wonder Woman saga, this thesis develops a potential definition of feminine narrative in contrast to the normative and exclusionary patriarchal narrative that reigns supreme in popular culture and Western ideology. Though much of comics discourse functions on the assumption that superhero narratives are homogenous reflections of this ideological hero narrative, I posit that the Amazonian princess's resilience and iconicity stem from her own narrative's uniquely deconstructive nature: Where the patriarchal story would demand dominance, destruction, and violence, the feminine narrative that Diana models advocates for equality, nurturance, and emotional and rational communication. …

The Enduring Impact Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Katlyn Dudek

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

Mauritian Literature Versus The Cambridge International Education System, Iman Gareeboo

Honors Program Theses

The motivating issue that drove me to compare Mauritian literature and the public literary education system is my fascination at the fact that the school system is British while the majority of popular Mauritian literature is written in French, with a burgeoning subgroup of works written in Mauritian Kreol. I cannot explain the divide, and many Mauritian students do study French language and (limited) literature, but I seek to show that Mauritians should be interested in their own literature and that they should actively question their British education.

The Art Of The Tweet: How To Change Political Rhetoric In 140 Characters Or Less, Alice Byrd

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Excerpt from Literature Review

The Internet age has seen a huge shift in the way that candidates communicate their political rhetoric, because there has been a huge shift in how voters consume that rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook are now some of the vehicles by which voters consume political rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook are home to lots of non-political content, but many members of the politically engaged community have flocked to both social networking sites to create politically engaged social networks. The emergence of social media as an important information source within the electorate has fundamentally changed not only the way …

Theory To Practice: Negotiating Expertise For New Technical Communicators, Jennifer C. Mallette, Megan Gehrke

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In technical communication, discussions on how to best prepare graduates to meet workplace challenges range from responding to changing technology and occupational needs to focusing on creating flexible workers. Part of this conversation centers on expertise: what kinds of expertise are most valued and how can graduates be trained to be experts? In this article, we explore our field’s understandings of expertise by focusing on a recent master’s graduate and practitioner, Megan. As first an intern then a full-time employee at HP Inc, Megan experienced clashes between the classroom and workplace, which she sought to reconcile. In addition, she also …

Shared Landscapes, Contested Borders: Locating Disciplinarity In An Ma Program Revision, Whitney Douglas, Heidi Estrem, Kelly Myers, Dawn Shepherd

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

It is not unusual to consider a discipline spatially as a "space defined or touched by a particular characteristic or force" (Wardle and Downs, this collection, emphasis added). This conceptualization makes visible the metaphor at play here: territories are demarcated and differentiated from neighboring environments by borders that can be more or less visible. In this chapter, we use our experience as faculty members invested in a substantive revision of an MA program revision to explore how that process of delineation opens up new questions about disciplinarity. We sought to create a generous curricular space within an MA degree, …

Considering Ethical Questions In (Non)Fiction: Reading And Writing About Graphic Novels, Gene Mcquillan

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

An Exploration Of Representations Of Race And Ethnicity In Three Transitional Series For Young Children, Sonia M. Balkaran

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis seeks to explore the related research literature surrounding representations and portrayals of protagonists of various multicultural backgrounds in series or transitional books. As teachers, it is essential to acknowledge the lack of multicultural characters in children's literature among elementary classroom bookshelves and learn how to incorporate literature featuring strong main characters of varying races and ethnicities so that children can see role models who mirror their own contexts. Prior studies, such as Gangi (2008) and Green and Hopenwasser (2017) have examined the deficiency of multicultural literature in the classroom, particularly among transitional stories, which shows the importance of …

Cervantes: The Enduring Survival Of The Creative Mind In Don Quixote, Nan Darbous Marthaller

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

One Fragment At A Time: The Literature Of Deborah Miranda And Wendy Rose, Kristin Leonard

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

Preserving Jeffers Country, Shelley Alden Brooks

Jeffers Studies

For more than one hundred years, writers and artists have interpreted the beauty and power of Big Sur. No artist has done so more enduringly than Robinson Jeffers, whose writing helped define a land ethic for this prized California coastline. To a degree greater than any other private individual, and arguably more than any single county, state, or federal land manager, Jeffers can be credited with shaping perceptions and attitudes regarding the appropriate treatment of the Big Sur landscape. The iconic beauty of Big Sur has long been celebrated in advertisements and portrayals of the California coast, luring millions of …

An American Myth In The (Re)Making: The Timeless Fantasy Appeal Of 'The King And I', Lina Purtscher

Scripps Senior Theses

It is now well-known that The King and I has little claim to truth. Recent research has exposed the inaccuracy of the “biographical” works on which the musical is based: Anna Leonowens invented many things about her personal background and experiences. Much of her life, then, is a contrived fantasy. Yet her life of fantasy has been resurrected in countless adaptations, including the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and its 2015 revival production, that ceaselessly draw audiences. The fascination of American audiences with Anna’s tale lies their belief in the timeless American ideals that her fantasy employs: those of freedom …

Liminally White: Jews, Mormons, And Whiteness, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Jews and Mormons have pasts as racialized Others. Although they appear dissimilar, both groups have been inscribed historically as non-White. Both groups responded to these inscriptions by attempting to achieve Whiteness, making numerous and radical concessions to U.S. American culture. As a result, both groups became "liminally White". We argue that such liminal status demonstrates the fissures in Whiteness and provides creative new grounds for critiquing Whiteness as a rhetorical construct.

Walcott, Joyce, And Planetary Modernisms, Aaron Eastley

Faculty Publications

Within the framework of global or planetary modernism studies, chronological before and after sequences are receding in importance as situational similarities come to the fore. 'Modernism' has become 'modernisms'. This shift toward an ethical, eclectic inclusivity is especially salutary when it comes to comparative studies of writers such as Derek Walcott and James Joyce. On the face of things, it seems clear that Walcott was a follower of Joyce: a postcolonial writer inspired by the semi-colonial Irishman, who was himself a follower in/of the British literary tradition. And followers are not as great as leaders. Originals are better than copies. …

African-American Poetry, Music, And Politics, Tyler H. Macdonald

Honors Theses

The 2016 decision to award songwriter and musician Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between music and poetry and raised many questions about music’s place in literary canon. However, this debate is nothing new. Questions about the relationship between music and poetry have long been debated. Some scholars believe the two disciplines should be studied separately, while others prefer to consider the connections between the two.

My project begins with a question: if Bob Dylan’s songs can be considered poetry, what other forms of music might also be considered poetry? Rap implements …

Using Young Adult Literature To Confront Mental Health: A Culturally Relevant Approach, Briana Hendrickson

Masters Theses

This thesis highlights the need for addressing mental health in secondary school settings and argues that high school English educators can help eliminate the stigma surrounding mental illness using young adult (YA) literature. I discuss the benefits of using YA literature in the secondary English classroom and why YA literature is an effective tool for introducing timely topics like mental health. I analyze the limitations of popular YA novels such as Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why and Jennifer Niven's All the Bright Places and argue that the mental health representation in these novels hinders students' ability to challenge the current …

The Best Story: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's Return To The South Revealed Through The Analysis Of Her Articles And Fiction Published Between 1920 And 1932, Kemry H. Farthing

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s writing published between 1920 and 1932. To date, biographers and scholars have largely failed to carefully examine and understand Zelda’s publications. During this period Zelda critiques the materialism and generational lack of respect she finds in the North in her articles, while using her imagination to discuss the possibilities of the South in her short stories. All of her works during these years culminate in her novel, Save Me the Waltz, in which much of her life and return to the South is mirrored by her heroine, Alabama Knight. This thesis examines Zelda’s …

Why Katniss Everdeen Is Our Favorite Feminist – An Analysis Of The Heroine Of The Hunger Games Film Saga And Her Reception By Young Female Spectators, Paula Talero Álvarez

Theses and Dissertations

THROUGH THE FIGURE OF FICTIONAL CHARACTER KATNISS EVERDEEN, THIS DISSERTATION STUDIES HOW THE FILM INDUSTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY ENTRENCHES AND DISRUPTS GENDER, SEXUAL, AND RACIAL NORMATIVITIES. THE PROJECT USES TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND PARTICIPANT RESEARCH TO ANALYZE HOW THE FILMS AND NOVELS OF THE HUNGER GAMES SAGA ENCAPSULATE BOTH DOMINANT AND ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS RELATED TO FEMININITY, MASCULINITY, WOMANHOOD, AND MOTHERHOOD. IT ALSO EXPLORES IF AND HOW THE FEMALE HEROINE CAN BE READ AS FEMINIST AND PRODUCES A SENSE OF EMPOWERMENT. I CONCLUDE THAT ALTHOUGH THE INDUSTRY IS PRODUCING NEW MODELS OF WOMANHOOD THAT CHALLENGE TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES, IT STILL PERPETUATES ROMANTIC IDEALS AND …

Validating The Consequences Of Social Justice Pedagogy: Explicit Values In Course-Based Grading Contracts, Cruz Medina

English

In 2012, in Tucson, Arizona, conservative Superintendent of Education Tom Horne used House Bill (HB) 2281 to outlaw Tucson High School’s Mexican American Studies (TUSD/MAS) program. Despite demonstrated increases in graduation rates and state test scores (Cabrera, Milem, and Marx 2012), the social justice program was dismantled and books from the curriculum were banned, including Paulo Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As teacher-scholars concerned with critical consciousness1 and the application of social justice theories to the classroom, we found these events highly disturbing and demonstrative of what Angela Haas and Michelle Eble refer to in the Introduction of this …

Monological Madness In Nabokov: A Discursive Investigation Into The Solipsizing Operations Of Really Unreliable Narrators, Jennifer Skoglund

English Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Renaissance Revenge And The Age Of Interiority, Riley Meachem

English Honors Papers

No abstract provided.