English Language and Literature Commons^™

Kekuaokalani: An Historical Fiction Exploration Of The Hawaiian Iconoclasm, Alex Oldroyd

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis offers an exploration of the Hawaiian Iconoclasm of 1819 through the lens of an historical fiction novella. The thesis consists of two parts: a critical introduction outlining the theoretical background and writing process and the novella itself. 1819 was a year of incredible change on Hawaiian Islands. Kamehameha, the Great Uniter and first monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, had recently died, thousands of the indigenous population were dying, and foreign powers were arriving with increasing frequency, bringing with them change that could not be undone. With the death of Kamehameha, Hawaiʻi’s rulers faced the impossible of task …

A Genealogy Of Personal Development In Modern America, Kelsey M. Binder

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

Societal Rebirth: The Importance Of Spirituality, Lauren Rothstein

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The two texts Grapes of Wrath and Black Elk Speaks both include moments of anonymous forces imposing systematic modernization on society. Through the controversial subject of societal rebirths, traditionally defined through employment and steady food source availability. I propose an approach to societal rebirths that emphasizes the importance of spiritual connection to the land through a critical analysis of Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope and Leopold’s theory of land ethic.

The Curious Case Of Dr. Writer And Mr. Verbalizer, Libbey Hanson

Tutor's Column

The writer and verbalizer can cause major communication issues within a piece of writing. At the writing center, many students don’t mean what they write; they mean what they verbally say. The writer tries to sound smart while the verbalizer tries to make sense. Many times, students will say “But I know what I want to say!” However, they simply cannot write it down. Communication between the writer and the verbalizer fails because of the attempt to sound smart, and the fear of the written word and its permanence. Freshmen struggle in learning an essay format different than what they …

The Lay Folks’ Catechism, Alliterative Verse, And Cursus, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Lay Folks’ Catechism is an English rendering of injunctions issued in 1357 by John Thoresby, Archbishop of York, setting forth the elements of Christian belief. Ever since W. W. Skeat’s treatments, the Catechism has been placed in the general orbit of alliterative verse, yet closer identifications have proved elusive. The text is now recorded in both The Index of Middle English Verse and The Index of Middle English Prose; the principal stylistic study proposes that John Gaytryge, the author of the English text, may have been influenced by the system of Latin prose rhythm known as cursus. …

Searching For Identity: Connecting Students To Young Adult Literature In The Classroom Through Language, Samantha Correia

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Young adult literature largely influences the cultures and the lives of young people; often these popular young adult novels become well-known as they are made into movies and are in high demand. These novels are not just for young adults; these texts can be read at any age and have accessible themes that many people can relate to. However, in this research, young adult literature will be discussed in terms of how these novels affect children, mostly from ages ten to eighteen, as many of the characters in these texts are a similar age to them. Young adult literature (YA …

“Good Enough”: Teaching Confidence Through Revision, Mckayla Freeman

Tutor's Column

This paper explores the relationship between a student’s writing and their response to criticism. Many students respond negatively to revision suggestions when they have already finished their paper. However, revision is a vital part of all writings and must be included in the writing process. Criticizing a student’s essay can often cause the student to feel personally insulted. In order for them to revisit and edit something they’ve written, tutors must encourage them and remind them of the things they did well before pointing out mistakes. This will cause the student to remain self-affirmed, confident, and ready to change their …

Spiders, Satan, And Uncertainty: Turning Idle Tutoring Sessions Into Teaching Opportunities, Olivia Brock

Tutor's Column

Though brand new writing tutors are given an army of tools and resources to aid students in the writing process, it is inevitable that they will come across a session that they just do not know how to handle. Whether it be vague and confusing assignment descriptions, unenthusiastic students, or a discipline outside of the tutor’s knowledge-base, seemingly fruitless sessions will land in the room of almost every tutor. This essay aims to help tutors recognize when sessions may not be going anywhere, and offer them advice and specific ideas for handling these sessions in a way that has students …

How The ‘Abortion Miracle’ Motif In Medieval Irish Hagiographies Structured Gender Roles In Relation To Female Reproductivity And Sexual Sin, Lora Lynn Horner

Essential Studies UNDergraduate Showcase

Four Irish Saints are accredited to performing abortions, otherwise known as the ‘Abortion Miracle’ motif. These four Saints are St. Brigid of Kildare, Ciarán of Saigir, Áed mac Bricc, and Cainnech of Aghoboe. In each of these four Saints lives they share a similar motif in which they bless a mother’s womb resulting in the mother no longer being pregnant. These ‘abortion miracles’ created structured gender roles in which a masculine figure would partake in the intervention of a female and a female’s reproductivity. The intervention of the Saints would come when the women would start to become visually pregnant …

Standing In Solidarity

St. Norbert Times

• News
  • Standing in Solidarity
  • Heid E. Erdrich Visits St. Norbert College
  • Shelby Rodeffer “Paints Out” Towards the Reality of Social Media
  • “God’s Got This”: The Story of the Decleenes
  • Building Hope for Homelessness Week
  • Hour of Power Honors Later Swimmer
• Opinion
  • The Holiday Spirit
  • A College Christmas List
  • Politics Today
  • Not Sorry
  • Thankful for the Athem
• Features
  • Political Diversity in WI Schools
  • The Season of Giving and Emptying Wallets
• Entertainment
  • Junk Drawer: Holiday Traditions
  • Sudoku
  • Trivia
  • 2018 in Music… so far
  • Review: “Devils Unto Dust” by Emma Berquist
  • Mother Knows Best
  • The Wild Kingdom of Black Friday Shopping
  • Review Corner …

The Creative, The Critic, & The Tutor: Tutoring The Creative Process, Nate Hardy

Tutor's Column

The creative writing session presents tutors with the unique opportunity to become an integrated part of the writer’s creative process, a system balanced between both the writer’s creative and critical voice. The former spontaneously invents material while the latter crafts it into a final product. While the creative session can be daunting for general tutors as it requires stepping away from the familiarity of the traditional academic setting, embracing the uncertainty of the session allows the tutor to play imperative roles as a student of the writer, audience to their work, and creative voice for their creative process.

Rigid, Joshua Salisbury

Tutor's Column

As tutors, we are asked to do the same task on a daily basis. Because of this monotony, we can fall into a rigid routine that may have us saying and doing the same things. This article examines the leading causes of these rigid sessions and some helpful solutions. More precisely, it focuses on the critical aspects of conversation and how this simple idea can promote better tutoring sessions. A basic outline of a productive conversation is provided as a reference.

Confidence Is Key: The Importance Of Building A Student’S Confidence In Writing, Tyler Monson

Tutor's Column

It’s Friday afternoon and there’s barely any wiggle room between tutoring sessions. Every English 2010 student has been rushing to the Writing Center to get their papers edited before they have to turn it in at midnight. Some papers are contemplative, well-structured and only need light tweaks, while others are “more of a thought piece at the moment.”

Representations Of Immigrants In Young Adult Literature, Frances Augusta Ramos Verbruggen

Dissertations and Theses

This study was conducted to determine how immigrants and the immigration experience are represented in current young adult (YA) literature. In the study, I asked the following questions: Who are the immigrant characters in recent YA books? Why do they come? How do they experience immigration? How are they perceived or treated by others? A content analysis methodology was used to examine, from a critical literacy viewpoint, recent young adult novels with immigration themes. Data were analyzed by identifying and interpreting patterns in themes across 22 YA novels with immigrant protagonists or other important characters, published between 2013 and 2017. …

Life On Wheels, James C. Mangum

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This analysis offers an insightful look into an aspect of travel and modernity that has gone seemingly unnoticed in the culture of American Mobility. As a social product space is created to serve the function of something integral in society. Working individuals need offices for example, students need schools, and citizens need residences. These are created spaces of society that intersect the realities of life, and an automobile is how we get to and from these spaces. Modernity has allowed us to stretch the ideas of mobility and space by combining the two. This analysis is an in depth look …

Automobility And The Future Of Transport, Lukas Koch

English Department: Traveling American Modernism Posters (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

No abstract provided.

“Does That Make Sense?” The Importance Of Clear Assignment Instructions And Rubrics, Carly Schaelling

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Students often struggle to understand the expectations of their teachers when completing writing assignments. Teachers often feel frustrated when students seem to understand what they are asking, only to grade papers and see that the gap between their assignment tasks and students’ performance is larger than expected. As a Writing Center tutor and first year graduate instructor for English 1010, I have had experiences that have helped me appreciate the importance of having clear written assignment instructions as well as detailed rubrics. Having these two elements incorporated with assignments can help students focus more on their writing tasks and less …

Leading Questions: Prohibited In Court And Tutoring Sessions, Jared Gheen

Tutor's Column

Throughout the Writing Center, tutors often ask leading questions in order to foster a specific train of thought from their readers. Throughout this essay, I will discuss the harms of asking leading questions, using psychological experiments to illustrate my point. I will present several examples of questions that may surface in a tutoring session. I will explain ways to expand the original scope of the questions and prevent those questions from falling into the category of “leading questions.” Leading questions can severely alter a student’s interpretation or perspective on their writing, which limits learning, inhibits self-growth, and minimizes the effectiveness …

Perché Non Mi Aiuti? (​Why Won't You Help Me?​), Hailey Hibbard

Tutor's Column

Writing center tutors often have difficulties navigating tutoring sessions with EnglishLanguage Learner students and are not able to meet their unique needs. This paper reports the emotional and academic needs of these students, and how writing center tutors can best address and meet those needs.

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

Potential Of A Tutor's Personality, Matt Crabtree

Tutor's Column

In this paper I talk about the importance of each individual tutor’s personality to the value of the Writing Center. Without the various personalities, students could just search for answers on the internet. What the Writing Center provides is a dynamic tutoring experience where tutors can shift to meet students’ needs.

Romantic Poetry, Technical Breakthrough And The Changing Editorial Role, Paul Eggert, Desmond A. Schmidt

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This report provides (1) a short history of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), which has been in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales. Writing from the 1830s to the 1860s, he was unable to publish in book form because of the undeveloped state of the local literary publishing scene. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and in manuscript form have been recovered. (2) A summary of the technical approach, a new one for special-purpose digital archives, is provided. The principal innovation is the use of a Multi-Version Document …

A Tutor As An Educator, Justyn Hardy

Tutor's Column

Tutoring as a verb implies the requirement to educate; however, the role of the tutor as an educator is often set aside in order to fix the immediate issues with a paper rather than the overarching issues with a student’s writing. Tutors provide answers, but it’s far better to provide long-term solutions through a moment of education. This paper seeks to identify the moments a tutor ought to become the educator and assuage the trepidations a tutor might have in using their voice in a moment of formal education with a student.

The Writer: An Endangered Species, Hayley Dykman

Tutor's Column

The ability to write is a necessity in every stage of education and the career field beyond; however, few people are willing to label themselves as “writers.” It is especially important that students adopt the mindset that they are “writers” because writing is something they are required to do frequently. Believing you are a “writer” makes writing seem easier and a more innate part of your abilities. However, students often have an incorrect idea of what it means to be a “writer,” thinking that to be a “writer” is to be a published author or someone who always enjoys the …

Italian American Literature And Food: A Match Made In The Kitchen A Handbook, Monica Marchi

English Dissertations - Archive

Food is a recurrent theme in Italian American literature and authors have used it to highlight the importance of family, women, and the community at large and to teach about Italian customs to the U.S. public. Oftentimes, for the older Italian immigrants, food triggers fond memories of the Old country, while, for the younger generations, it might cause shame that leads to clashes with the older generations. Characters use food as a tool to express power and, later, status and to communicate. Food also defines relationships, gives an identity to the Italian immigrants on foreign soil, and allows them to …

A Staring Contest With The Self: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Linguistic Inquiry And Word Count, And Explanatory Style, Colton Tyler Royle

English Theses - Archive

Shame as an emotional response in the late 2010s has been discussed in both high and low sectors, from a high level of shame with social media use in high school classrooms, to the lack of shame by the president of the United States. My thesis addresses this question by analyzing Karl Ove Knausgaard’s two autobiographical works, My Struggle and his Seasonal Quartet. Readers, critics, and Knausgaard himself have described his work as a focus on the shameful moments of his life. Using positive psychology’s term “explanatory style,” coined by Martin E.P. Seligman, I do a structural reading of explicit …

Society Does Not R-E-S-P-E-C-T Black Mothers: Historically Racialized Representations And Black Women’S Compromised Obstetrical Care, Ashleigh Riley

English Theses - Archive

This thesis explores the correlation between racialized representations of Black women with the disparities in the level of healthcare they receive and the resulting outcomes. I argue racialized representations of Black women throughout history and into the modern-era compromise Black women’s obstetrical care, affect their reproductive freedom, and contribute to their disproportionately higher maternal mortality rates. By citing pivotal historical events and the resulting racialized tropes from the antebellum, reconstruction, and civil rights time-periods, I identify the modern-era manifestations of those representations. Using theoretical lenses associated with Black Feminist Theory, Intersectionality, and Scripting, I analyze how historically racialized representations of …

Truth And Strength In Vulnerability: Using Topoanalysis To Reveal The Need For Expanding The Modernist Literary Canon, Misty Dawnmarie Falkenstein

English Theses - Archive

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public role of women shifted dramatically. Women asserted themselves in politics, education, and work in a way foreign to their Victorian predecessors. Although these “New Women” altered the gender landscape and set in motion a new path for women that would continue even into the twenty-first century, their writing still goes largely unnoticed in the current study of the Modernist literary canon. This project makes a case for expanding the current Modernist literary canon to include more of these women, especially women of disenfranchised racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic groups. Writers …

Meming And Enthymeming: Persuasion In The Age Of Social Media, Taylor R. Parrish

English Theses - Archive

While rhetoric as a field of study has existed for several millennia, social media can prove to be a difficult medium to analyze rhetorically. This thesis examines some traditional elements of rhetoric, including the rhetorical triangle as well as the canons of rhetoric, and weaves them together with the narrative paradigm theory, as posited by Walter Fisher in his 1987 book Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy or Reason, Value, and Action. Together, rhetoric and the narrative paradigm provide some useful tools for analyzing the world of social media, helping users to more accurately ascertain the veracity of posting; …

Immortal Melancholia: A Psychoanalytical Study Of Byronic Heroes, Kathryn Frazell

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This culminating project examines Byronic heroes using psychoanalytic theory across four case studies in media, including classic literature, theater, film, and television. The Byronic hero is a literary archetype inspired by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Typical characteristics include angst, arrogance, cunning intelligence, criminality, desire, passion, dominance, and otherness. The characters I have chosen to study include Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (1847), the Phantom from the 2004 film The Phantom of the Opera, James Bond from the 2012 film Skyfall, and Damon Salvatore from the hit television series The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017). Through examining the …