English Language and Literature Commons^™

Editorial, Gwenyth E. Hood

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Poet, The Prince, And The Prophet, Mathew Block

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

A Chance Meeting, Clinton Nix

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Song Of Thetis, Christopher J. Tuthill

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Cocked Eye Of A Crow, Holly Day

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Ah, Photinus Pyralis, My Love, S. Dorman

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Tradition, Joe Christopher

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

For Marionne, Gwenyth E. Hood

The Mythic Circle

Marion Snee Hood (1926-2010)

The New Apartment, Holly Day

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

We Never Will Be Gods, Marissa Glover

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

The Carving, Holly Day

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

No Body But Yours, Jude O. Mahony

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Golden Treasure, Robert Field Tredray

The Mythic Circle

No abstract provided.

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's Dis Mem Ber And Other Stories Of Mystery And Suspense, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Review of Joyce Carol Oates's short story collection DIS MEM BER, considering the author's attention to psychological detail and experimental forms of narrative.

“Enough Of Thought, Philosopher!”: Emily Brontë’S Interrogations Of Death, Katherine Marie Alexander

English Language and Literature ETDs

The year 1847 marked the appearance of Wuthering Heights on the literary scene. Writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë soon became known as the “Sphynx (sic) of Literature” following the publication of the culminating masterpiece of her literary career. Although she was not a trained philosopher, her drawings, poems, letters, devoirs, and only novel offer an organic approach to philosophical matters, particularly in her engagements with the meanings of time and space and her interrogations of death.

Surrounded by the pervasive presence of death from her earliest years and beyond, Brontë moved to rigorous interrogations of the …

Review Of Joyce Carol Oates's Night-Gaunts And Other Tales Of Suspense, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

A review of Joyce Carol Oates's short story collection Night-Gaunts focusing on the influence of H.P. Lovecraft and gothic fiction.

Adoption Of Open Educational Resources In California Colleges And Universities, Ruth Guthrie, Katherine Harris, Peter Krapp

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

The California Open Educational Resources Council (CAOERC) was formed in 2014 to find solutions to reduce the cost of college textbooks without impacting quality. Comprised of faculty from California's three public higher education systems, the CAOERC conducted a field study of 16 faculty using OER materials to discover practical knowledge about the challenges of adopting OER textbooks. The quality of the OER textbooks received positive reviews. The faculty also reported being more engaged with their teaching. The faculty felt that availability of OER support materials was a challenge to implementing OER. The following article presents the results of the CAOERC's …

“The Testing Served Its Purpose ”: High-Stakes Testing As A Method Of Categorization And Control In Young Adult Dystopian Novels, Rebecca Lorenzo

Theses and Dissertations

In “‘The Testing Served its Purpose’: High-Stakes Testing as a Method of Categorization and Control in Young Adult Dystopian Novels,” I examine representations of high-stakes testing in the Divergent, Legend, and Testing trilogies using educational, cultural studies, and dystopian/utopian scholarship. In chapters one and two, I examine each society’s system of high-stakes testing and the ideological indoctrination and physical repression used by those in power to maintain control of the citizenry, respectively. In the third chapter, I analyze the ways in which the state’s indoctrination, coupled with an exaggerated focus on the success or failure of specific individuals, creates competition …

A Reckless Verisimilitude: The Archive In James Ellroy’S Fiction, Bradley J. Wiles

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

The archive as both plot element and narrative presentation factors significantly into the work of James Ellroy’s novels in the L.A. Quartet and USA Underworld Trilogy series. This article examines the important role of the archive as a source of information and evidence that Ellroy’s characters utilize in their attempts at either maintaining or attacking the status quo. Through these novels, Ellroy conveys the potential power archives wield over the trajectory of history and our understanding of it by demonstrating how the historical record is often shaped in favor of the powerful. Yet even if the archive is a manifestation …

Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, And Literary Authority, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, commonplacing was a habitual practice of middle-class US households, undertaken by children and adults alike to record notable quotations and to cultivate their literary taste. Though it declined in popularity with the rise of the scrapbook in the midcentury, commonplacing was for centuries a standard feature of both educational curricula and domestic literacy, with generations of students instructed in the intellectual and moral benefits of selecting and copying passages culled from reading. Commonplace books offer a wealth of vital information about US literary culture, for they not only illuminate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading …

Gender Politics And Dualistic Othering: Possession, Christianity And The Repudiation Of The Maternal/Feminine In Desire Under The Elms, Aamir Aziz, Sulaim Sarfraz

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

Run Me Dusk, Zane Truman Dezeeuw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a full-length novel with a critical afterward. Run Me Dusk is a falling-out of love narrative about twenty-seven-year-old Milo who, after being broken up with by his boyfriend Red, flees from Illinois back to his hometown in southwestern Colorado to meditate on his place and purpose in life. The themes covered in this book are gay relationships, family relationships, mortality, and the natural world.

Race And Post-9/11 Arab-American Identity: Contestatory Agency And African-American Metaphors In The Poetic Discourse Of Suheir Hammad And Andrea Assaf, Omar Baz Radwan

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.

Curriculum Vitae: Transsexual Life Writing And The Biofictional Novel, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The complex relation between bio and fiction, life and writing, is central to the project I am currently working on, a comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, formerly Einar Wegener, the Danish artist who became Lili Elvenes (her legal name) through a series of surgeries in 1930. In chapter six, Andreas Sparre (the fictional name used for Wegener in the narrative) offers to tell his life story to his friends, Niels and Inger, on the night before his first surgery, his last night as …

Break Us Beautiful, Elizabeth Upshur

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The problem addressed in this thesis is cultivating an answer to the question: what creates or comprises the sum total of my Blackness as a modern American woman living in our current political climate? I primarily use a read/call and response methodology, responding to both lived and hypothetical experiences that explore or demonstrate the ways that identity, race, gender, sexuality, regionality, religion, and the historical thumbprint intersect. The results are this collection of poems that is at times mythological, at times irreverent, both abstract and formal as it seeks to fit these pieces into a singular mosaic. The conclusion drawn …

Togetherness With The Past: Literary Pedagogy And The Digital Archive, Madeline B. Gangnes

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Archival materials are invaluable to an understanding of the historical, cultural, and material contexts in which literary texts were published. Materiality, paratextual elements, and other key characteristics of literature cannot be discerned from recent editions. Yet original and rare versions of literary texts are difficult or impossible for most scholars, let alone their students, to access. Digital facsimiles provide opportunities to examine archival texts over the Internet, alleviating logistical and financial barriers. In Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001), Carolyn Steedman writes: “The Archive is a place in which people can be alone with the past” (81); archives are …

"What Do The Divils Find To Laugh About" In Melville's The Confidence-Man, Truedson J. Sandberg

Theses and Dissertations

The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining …

Questioning Gynocentric Utopia: Nature As Addict In “Description Of Cookeham”, Liberty S. Stanavage

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In her 1610 “The Description of Cookeham,” Amelia Lanyer presents Cookeham as a space in which women and nature exist in poetry-inducing harmony until the intervention of man. Lanyer’s poem highlights the deference of both the animals (who “sport . . . in her eye” and “attend”), and the landscape to Clifford: the hills “descend” to meet her footstep and then raise themselves again at her whim. This alignment frequently leads critics to describe Cookeham as a utopian feminist landscape that aligns women and nature against an antagonistic masculine influence.

However, this utopian vision dramatizes a landscape that is not …

Traditional Knowledge And Digital Archives: An Interview With Kim Christen, Kimberly Christen, Leslie Davis, Zachary Griffith, Jacob Neely

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Dr. Kim Christen is a Professor in the Department of English, the Director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program, the Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, and the Director of Digital Initiatives for the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington State University. Christen is also the Director of the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, a collaboratively curated site of Plateau cultural materials; Mukurtu CMS, a content management system and community digital archive platform built around the particular needs of indigenous peoples globally; and co-Director with Jane Anderson of Local Contexts, an educational website for innovative traditional …

Living Clocks And Mouments: African Americans In The Sound An The Fury, Edward Mahoney

Journal of South Texas English Studies

No abstract provided.