English Language and Literature Commons^™

English Composition I & Ii (Gsu, G2c), Rebecca Weaver, Lynne Bost, Michelle Kassorla, Karen Mckinney-Holley, Kirk Swenson

English Grants Collections

This Grants Collection for English Composition I & II was created under a Spring 2018 Pilot for G2C and Scaling Up OER Textbook Transformation Grant.

Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process.

Each collection contains the following materials:

• Linked Syllabus or Syllabi
• Initial Proposal
• Final Report

Children's Literature As A Catalyst For Social Change, Lyndsey Reynolds

Senior Theses

This thesis is the amalgamation of a creative writing project and an exploration of the ways that children’s literature influences and draws from social justice causes. It started after reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and realizing that children’s books are not as simple as I remember them being. This book inspired me to consider the power of children’s literature to push young readers to be aware of and thoughtfully engaged with political, social and cultural conversations. The first phase of my thesis was exploring the relationship between social justice and children’s books by reading scholarly materials. In these …

Language Attitudes Of Writing Center Consultants: Perception And Expectation, Benjamin John Sparks

Masters Theses

This master’s thesis explores the results of research into the language attitudes of peer consultants working in a writing center at a large regional public university in the American Midwest. A survey was administered to writing center staff in which they were asked to evaluate the sociopolitical relationship between standard and nonstandard English dialects, the perceived relative grammaticality of these dialects, and the traditional concept of appropriateness in academic writing. Also included were questions pertaining to how consultants manage the practical responsibilities of their positions and the expectations of students and professors with the writing center’s stated policy of linguistic …

Enchantment: A Teleology, Nathanael S. Toth

Senior Honors Theses

Despite the highly developed nature of his fictional world, Middle-earth, Tolkien never formally laid out a tabulated magic system for his fantasy creation. Nevertheless, unlike many stories by others in the fantasy genre, the magic he does include is far from just a shallow, world-building mechanism. Instead, it encapsulates the core theme of his fiction and the purposes which Ilúvatar (the God of Middle-earth) has given to the story’s many characters.

This paper will examine the nature and function of this magic from many angles: the identification of good magic with art and evil magic with domination; the delineation between …

Walt Before Leaves: Complicating Whitman's Authorship Through Jack Engle, Christopher Preston Burright

Theses and Dissertations

The rediscovery of a number of Walt Whitman's early fictions prompts a discussion of where they belong within the larger web of Whitman scholarship. Though we have been aware of the existence of these writings for quite some time, frequently these works return to obscurity soon after being discovered due to the lack of research regarding them. This thesis presents an alternative framework whereby these novels can be integrated into a hypertextual model centered on Leaves of Grass (1855) and Whitman's overall authorial identity. I build on Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price's work creating a hypertext archive incorporating Whitman's works, …

Women’S Writing And The Poetics Of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740, Rachel Mann

Theses and Dissertations

Women’s Writing and the Poetics of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740 probes the porous boundary between science and literature, revealing that the methodologies undergirding scientific experimentation were developed communally and through a confluence of interdisciplinary and cultural concerns. Ultimately, it shows that our contemporary understanding of the natural world and the scientific method have a history that is largely one of fragments. Secondly, and more importantly, it demonstrates the value of reading imaginative writing alongside scientific developments of the day.

Focusing on women’s imaginative writing in particular reveals the power and limits that ostensibly liminal voices have. As such, Women’s Writing and …

Russian Roots In Southern Soil, James Preston Edge

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the profound influence that 19th-century Russian authors had on 20th-century Southern writers. Recent analyses of the American South have looked to the fluid nature of this region’s borders, often spreading into the Caribbean, South America, and American West, but there has not yet been any book- length study of the ways in which several Russian literary masters, including Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, influenced Southern authors, particularly Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. In particular, these Southern authors, in interviews and essays, have repeatedly extolled these Russian figures for their elevation of communal folklore, …

Moral Ambiguity In The Works Of Cormac Mccarthy, Christina Xan

Theses and Dissertations

Cormac McCarthy’s works have presented a question since he first published The Orchard Keeper in 1965 – what are his characters’ motivations? McCarthy’s novels are known for showing little to no interiority of his characters. This choice to depict action and not thought makes it nearly impossible to discern the reasoning behind the actions of the characters. Not being able to definitively know the motivations of the characters in his novels makes it hard to argue that his characters are simply “good” or “bad,” and morality becomes hard to discern. Although actions such as murder appear immoral without having an …

Divine Absence, Divine Presence: The Theological Arguments Of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’S The History Of Joseph, Laura Macgowan

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Biblical epic The History of Joseph (1736), which dramatizes the events of Genesis 37-45, stands out in her oeuvre not only generically—it is her only long narrative poem—but because of how rarely God appears as an intervening agent or subject of narrative attention. Rather than highlight God’s splendor by imbuing Scripture with poetic embellishment, as is her wont, Rowe’s language downplays God’s hand in a famously Providential story (Genesis 50.20). While God shows up most often as an entity to beseech or a cultural token to reference, pagan deities govern the plot’s action; Rowe relishes in …

“A Solid Foundation Of Stable Possessions”: Gendered Genealogies In Shirley Jackson’S We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Andi Waddell

Theses and Dissertations

Shirley Jackson’s odd and unsettling novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, explores the relationship between family, gender roles, and property through the murdered and murderous Blackwood family. Throughout the novel, Jackson associates objects with either male or female legacies within the family. Constance, Julian, and Merricat Blackwood engage in repetitive, formalized handling of objects, and these ritualized interactions create family history. Even as items associated with the women constitute narratives of female history and thereby subvert the family’s patriarchal structure, objects in the text reveal the way patriarchy reproduces itself in the mundane and the personal. Merricat …

Building Worlds Out Of Inadequate Materials: Infrastucture And Affect In John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer And John Steinbeck’S The Grapes Of Wrath, David Scott Mathews

Theses and Dissertations

The beginning of the 20th century in America featured the rapid economic and infrastructural development of New York City, recently dubbed the “second metropolis.” The technological advancements in electric power and automobility made it possible, and economically desirable, for a larger and larger community to have access to the promise of good fortune that being connected to the metropolis signified. The result of this promise was the formation of the subway system and the highway system. Both John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath explore the space between these poles. In this essay I argue …

The Sandman: The Artifice Of Comics And Power Of Dreams, Nathan Teft

Masters Theses

Neil Gaiman’s Vertigo Series The Sandman is an exceptional artistic endeavor. From “Preludes and Nocturnes”(1988) to “The Wake” (1996), Gaiman worked alongside a team of talented artists and graphic designers to produce an indelible work of revisionist mythology. This thesis will attempt to establish the framework by which our modern literary canon has celebrated classical Western myths while relegating graphic or visual forms of literature or outright neglecting comic myths altogether. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics will frame the discourse for pictographic analysis of Neil Gaiman’s mythological revisionism of Milton’s Paradise Lost in Season of Mists, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities …

“Chosen Instruments”: Tolkien’S Hobbits And The Rhetoric Of The Dispossessed, Samuel Bennett Watson

Theses and Dissertations

Tolkien’s hobbit characters are capable of a particular type of rhetorical persuasion, one which relies on their ability to leverage their status as outsiders among the other people of Middle-earth. The hobbits are uniquely suited to the task of bringing unity to Middle-earth’s people because of the simplicity of their rhetoric, which focuses on proving their own morality and presenting truths without elaboration. When compared with the text, the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings also help highlight the importance that Tolkien placed on the simplicity of hobbit rhetoric. These abilities of the hobbits become clear through a …

Speaking For The Grotesques: The Historical Articulation Of The Disabled Body In The Archive, Violet Marie Strawderman

English Theses & Dissertations

This project examines the ways in which the disabled body is constructed and produced in larger society, via the creation of and interaction with (and through) the archive. The archive, for the purposes of this project, is defined by scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Carolyn Steedman. It is a place where information is stored and documented, but through this process, history and power are also created and maintained. In order to properly examine the ways the archive helps shape the understanding of the disabled body and experience, I use three case studies: Richard III, Caliban and Joseph Merrick. Each …

Familiar Forms, Strange Uses: Paratexts, Narrative Interventions, And The Queering Of Possible Worlds In Illicit Narratives Of Nineteenth-Century Britain, Jessica Saxon

English Theses & Dissertations

“Losing” one’s self in a story is one of the great pleasures of reading. Key to this act is the “transport” of the reader into the storyworld. Nineteenth-century British narratives offered various transport modes, including prefaces and footnotes designed to orient the reader to the storyworld and narrative interventions designed to align the reader with the values of that world. Yet this act of transport was fraught with tensions and anxieties in the nineteenth century. Worries about the dangers of reading, especially the dangers for women and the lower classes, abounded; much of the worry stemmed from fears that these …

Session Iii English, Religious Studies & Marketing Presentation 2: Critical T.H.U.G.: An Examination Of Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give Using Critical Race Theory, Brandon J. Watkins

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

Examining Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give through the lens of racism is ordinary and allows us to raise questions about institutional and everyday racism in our communities and lives. We will also address the intersecting patterns of dominance across race, class, gender, and other markers of difference.

Ii A English I Presentation 1: The Magical Spirit Of Christmas That Began Over A Century Ago, Callie West

Life of the Scholar Multidisciplinary Conference

The poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Moore has changed the perspective of St. Nicholas and Christmas. Through the analysis of the original St. Nicholas' historic background, a character comparison of the old and new St. Nicholas, and the poem, one will see how this new fantastical St. Nicholas feels more real vs. mythical and Christmas feels more magical.

Writing Early Ireland: A Panel Discussion, Laura Steblay, Caroline Vodacek, Rachel Larsen, Corinne Mccumber, Bailey Kemp

Undergraduate Research Symposium 2019

In past decades, early Irish literature has received relatively little scholarly attention. However, works such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Edmund Spenser’s Book Five of The Faerie Queene, and Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland provide unique and important representations of early Irish culture. In this five-person panel, we will examine these works and our collective analyses of Irish cultural and literary representations within them. Specifically, we will critique problems of colonialism and portrayals of gender, and we will affirm the importance of the landscape and of literary intersections with archaeology and …

Pronouns In Asl-English Simultaneous Interpretation, David Quinto-Pozos, Kierstin Muroski, Emily Saunders

Journal of Interpretation

Pronominal systems across languages mark grammatical categories in different ways, and this can pose challenges for simultaneous interpretation. Pronouns can also be ambiguous, for example, by collapsing distinctions in some forms or by resembling demonstratives. We examine pronouns produced by a Deaf signer of American Sign Language (ASL) within a TEDx talk and how they are interpreted (simultaneously) by an ASL-English interpreter. Pronouns from both languages were coded and scrutinized for semantic correspondence across the two languages. Robust correspondences were found with some personal pronouns, especially first-person forms. However, mismatches across languages, in particular third-person forms and demonstratives, provide evidence …

A Dark Side, Gilbert Hu

Forces

No abstract provided.

“The Right Use Of Reason”: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, And Moral Education In Peter Parley’S Annual, Taylor Topham

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis discusses the relationship between the start of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature and the educational policy and philosophy changes that took place in mid- to late-19^th century England. Some scholars have argued that the reasons for the rise in fantasy literature that characterized the Golden Age of Children’s Literature are primarily economic, while others find philosophical and cultural precedents for the movement toward fantasy. This paper presents the work of William Martin as an example of how fantasy literature emerged. Martin’s work reveals that he was proactively experimenting with the fantasy genre in response to debates …

2019 Forces, Scott Yarbrough

Forces

No abstract provided.

Bad Flood, Good Colors, Gilbert Hu

Forces

No abstract provided.

Conversation?, Gilbert Hu

Forces

No abstract provided.

Together We Know A Lot: Consensus Decision Making In The Classroom, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

Student group work is common practice in many courses whether they are focused on writing theory or application. The purpose of this review is to introduce one strategy for teaching cooperative teamwork. It is easy to say to a group of students, “decide as a group…” It is less common, and I am certainly guilty of this, to provide clear directions on how to decide as a group.

Consensus decision making (CDM, or sometimes known as CBDM, consensus-based decision making) is a common strategy for making decisions as a group in collective and community organizing. Used in the classroom, CDM …

Joanna Hone Mathews And Julia Anthon Mathews: Sisterhood And Sunday School Books, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

A number of women who authored children’s series came from writing families, with parents, siblings, cousins, or other relatives also publishing in some fashion. Another group had connections to the clergy, with fathers or husbands (or both) serving as ministers or teaching religious studies. One small subset of this population was sisters who wrote girls’ or children’s series and who had ministers as fathers. The earliest such pair were Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815-1852) and Sarah Stuart Robbins (1817-1910), daughters of Andover theologian Moses Stuart (1780-1852). The most successful – in terms of series fiction ‑- were probably the Mathews sisters, …

“Indeed, It Is A Strange-Disposed Time:” Julius Caesar, A Game At Chess, And The Politics Of Staging, Gabriel A. Rieger

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

You’Re Never Too Old To Laugh: An Adaption Of Shakespeare’S Fool In The Modern Era, Tina Kramer

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

The Cognition And Performance Of Resonant Temporalities In Richard Iii, Joe Keener

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

The Taming Of The Shrew And Coriolanus: Re-Interpretations And Adaptations After The Major Western Ideological Revolutions, David George

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.