English Language and Literature Commons^™

From Nursery Rhymes To Childlore: Orality And Ideology, Catalina Millán Scheiding

Faculty Works

When approaching nursery rhymes, they appear as a concrete, limited and cohesive collection shared by all English-speaking countries packaged in colorful books or fun, animated Youtube channels. Yet they have truly been something that was alive: a group of productions that changed and increased throughout time, drawn from and shared with different languages and cultures, accommodated or purged, considered to hide secret meanings and, subsequently, fossilized in print. They pre-date literary culture although, since society has become literary, nursery rhymes have been generally approached either from the folkloric ethnography field through a collection and analysis of rhymes, their variations and …

Ghosts Of Madmen: A Generational Tale, Kristen Leigh Olin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A family story depicting an immigrant family that must deal with the horrors of the past while delving through the psyche of the present. One woman's look into the deepest reaches of her American family and their generations of alcoholism and abuse and her resolution to the ghosts that haunt the family's women.

Waiting For A Queer Change: Gender Identity Through Performative Waiting And The Boudoir Chronotope In Call Me By Your Name, Gregory R. Clarke

Theses : Honours

This thesis analyses André Aciman’s novel, Call Me By Your Name (2007), in light of its portrayal of a nineteen-eighties gay relationship that is not entirely defined by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Rather than the abjection associated with illness and death, I focus on the narrative’s evocation of pleasure and love for its protagonists, Elio and Oliver, who do not identify as exclusively gay. My argument focuses on Elio exemplifying and undermining Roland Barthes’ trope of the lover-who-waits as historically ‘feminine’ in A Lover’s Discourse. In doing so, I demonstrate how Barthes’s work prefigures Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory.

First, …

Vicar Victoria: Writing The Church Of England In Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Rachel Elizabeth Cason

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how the organizing force of the Anglican Church and the figure of the Anglican clergyman were used to interrogate social, legal, and historical developments in nineteenth-century fiction. The project outlines how authors reacted to events such as Pluralism reform, the opening of training schools for clergy, and the Oxford Movement. There was a growing importance of institutions (including new physical buildings and Anglican reform movements). Further, the clergy, pushed by the increased expectation to modernize and professionalize, became a specialist career, with raised training and performance requirements. As a …

Disturbing The Ecological Pastoral: An Examination Of Willa Cather's Fictional Spaces In My Ántonia And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Anne Carter Stowe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Willa Cather is universally lauded for her ability to render landscape into prose. Critics have observed for years that the landscape often functions as the main character in her fiction, or that her characters can easily be evaluated in terms of how deep and successful their relationships to the land are. In an attempt to evaluate Cather’s treatment of two different “Western” landscapes, I will focus first on My Ántonia, one of her most famous Nebraska novels, and second on Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose narrative unravels on the New Mexican landscape. I argue that Cather treats …

Of Mules And Mamas: Four Women, Africana Mothering, And Resistance, Ebony Olivia Lumumba

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The black woman’s humanity is unjustly linked to domestic responsibility and, thus, the traditional constraints of mothering. The roles of the mother and the created archetype of the mammy often become marred with the latter role overtaking the former—leaving black children without full benefit and access to their biological maternal parent. With the pervasive threat to black lives present in spaces all over the globe, for women of the African Diaspora, simply deciding to accept the role of a mother to a life that is physically, socially, and economically under siege is revolutionary. Considering this, the act of mothering, especially …

Reimagined: An Analysis And Retelling Of Hans Christian Andersen's Works, Preston Smith

Honors Projects

Where do modern retellings of classic fairytales stick to their source texts and where do they differ? Inspired by ABC’s fairytale drama Once Upon a Time, my reimagining project was born. I originally became obsessed with Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen character both through this television series and through the character’s titular story, and after that, grew to love many of his tales from the nineteenth century. It has been two hundred years since Andersen was writing, and thus society has changed in ways potentially unimaginable in Andersen’s time. I have taken three of his stories— “The Snow Queen,” “The …

“Introduction: Theory, Practice, And Critical Agency In Andrew Marvell’S Poetry, Ben Labreche, Ryan Netzley

English & Linguistics Articles

An introduction for the special issue on theoretical approaches to Andrew Marvell.

"Woven Into The Deeps Of Life": Death, Redemption, And Memory In Bob Kaufman's Poetry, Peter Davis

Pomona Senior Theses

The scholars who have taken up the task of writing about Bob Kaufman have most often done so in response to a perceived demand: the lack of Kaufman scholarship, readership, anthology, publicity, canonization. The basis of this need is clear: Kaufman is almost never included as even a third-string Beat, a fringe Surrealist, or an underappreciated Jazz performer. To the committed readers of Kaufman – and almost all of his readers seem to be committed ones – it’s unforgivable. These various canons, major (mid-century American poets, Beat poets) and minor (Jazz poets, American Surrealists), are clearly missing one of their …

Lexical Complexity Of Academic Presentations: Similarities Despite Situational Differences, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

The present study examined the lexical complexity profiles of academic presentations of three groups of university students– native English speaking, English as a second language, and English as a lingua franca users. It adopted a notion of lexical complexity which includes lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication as main dimensions of the framework. The study aimed at finding out how the three academically similar groups of presenters compared on their lexical complexity choices, what the lexical complexity profiles of high quality students’ academic presentations looked like, and whether we can identify variables that contribute to the overall lexical complexity …

Sleight Of Hand: Gender, Performance, And (In)Sincerity In E. D. E. N. Southworth’S The Hidden Hand, Samantha Martin

Scripps Senior Theses

One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, …

"The Double Sorwe Of Troilus": Experimentation Of The Chivalric And Tragic Genres In Chaucer And Shakespeare, Rena Patel

Scripps Senior Theses

The tumulus tale of Troilus and his lover Cressida has left readers intrigued in renditions written by both Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare due to their subversive nature of the authors’ chosen generic forms. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde challenges the expectations and limitations of the narrative of the chivalric romance. Shakespeare took the story and turned Troilus and Cressida into one of his famous “problem plays” by challenging his audience’s expectations of the tragic genre. I endeavor to draw attention to the ways in which both Chaucer and Shakespeare use the conventions of the chivalric romance and tragedy to play …

George Eliot’S Middlemarch And Florence Nightingale: Friendship And Respect Influences Reform In Sanitation, Hospitals, And The Training Of Nurses, Kerrie A. Patterson

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

George Eliot and Florence Nightingale were certainly two of the most influential women of their Era. George Eliot was known for her genius at writing intelligent novels that address societal and historical issues, and Florence Nightingale was known for her work in sanitation reform, hospital design, and as the founder of nursing as a profession. These two women met when they were thirty two years old, and from that meeting onwards, they shared a friendship and a high regard for each other’s work. This paper explores the influence that Nightingale had on George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, and it explores the …

Anfibia, Martha Carolina Davila Diaz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Anfibia es una exploración poética de la relación con el propio cuerpo, en particular de los momentos en que se evidencia el modo en que operan en este los procesos de generización y feminización. Esta exploración se concreta mediante la confluencia de dos elementos: la herencia de la metáfora animal como camino para explicar las virtudes, defectos, características y roles de los seres humanos, y la tecnología como extensión de nuestra corporalidad. Anfibia es la mirada atrás sobre la historia personal con el fin de identificar las circunstancias en que los discursos únicos, los conceptos normativos que forjan la subjetividad, …

Cicada's Song: A Memoir, Luz Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cicada's Song is a true account of my coming-of-age as a first-generation Colombian-American girl growing up as the only child of two loving parents-one of whom abused me sexually for eleven years, while the other stood by without intervening. Yet the story is not one of resentment, blame, or self-pity. Rather, it is one of identity, self-reliance, survival, forgiveness, and love. Through a series of memories, essays, statements, and poems, the memoir invites the reader on a voyage through my childhood and youth, with stops in my both present-day and recent past, in the hopes that he will see the …

La Enfermedad Florece En El Desierto, Xochilt Alejandra Sequeira Aguilar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

La enfermedad florece en el desierto es un poemario híbrido cuyo material discursivo se construye a partir del verso libre, el diario y las anotaciones de cuaderno. Es, además, un libro ecfrástico que propone un diálogo entre poesía y fotografía para meditar sobre dos tópicos recurrentes en la literatura: el desierto y la enfermedad. Sus objetivos son, en primer lugar, explorar una metáfora propia de ambos tópicos y, en segundo lugar, definir a qué tradición pertenece este trabajo al recurrir a la técnica de la écfrasis y a los temas en mención.

Tourists Of The Past: Topographies Of Memory In W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Ana Menéndez's Loving Che, And Teju Cole's Open City, Benjamin Lee Williams

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Examining, comparatively, the exemplary fictional texts of W. G. Sebald, Ana Menéndez, and Teju Cole enriches the study of exilic experience concerning cultural memory as their destabilization, while geographically and ethnically divergent, represents the constellations of mobility and potential for memory. As absences resonate and profoundly disrupt their works, there is a turn to histories to cope with traumas. By turning to the past, each writer confronts destabilization and uprootedness and, in doing so, plays a game with History. Readers play too as we search through the fictionalized lacunae to consider the extent to which we are complicit in the …

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Illegitimacy And The Power Of The Mother In The Lais Of Marie De France, Claudia Mccarron

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Reflecting Identity Through Glass Windows In Charles Dickens’S Tom Tiddler’S Ground, Ryder Seamons

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Earth And The Portrait: A Comparison Of Dostoevsky’S Alyosha Karamazov And Prince Myshkin, Callaghan Mcdonough

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

When Life Imitates Art: Aestheticism In The Importance Of Being Earnest, Drake Deornellis

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Looking Through, At, And Beyond In Thelma And Louise, Mercer Greenwald

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 21 Fall 2019, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Cripping Modernism: An Introduction, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

This introduction briefly introduces literary disability studies and crip methodology. After informing readers about a few key concepts of disability studies and giving some examples of modernist writers’ use of disability metaphors, it raises questions about how disability inflects modernist themes and modernist form. It then offers synopses of the nine articles in the special issue, articles that treat a range of authors from the early to mid-twentieth century. The essays engage with literary theory, various early twentieth-century historical contexts, and issues of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and class.

Under The Sign Of Suicide, Theodore Emmanuel Prassinos

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Under the Sign of Suicide,” examines modernist writers’ intense and sustained preoccupation with and representations of suicide. Beyond numerous essays on the topic, we also find many fictional characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov and Kirilov both taken by gunshot, Stavrogin and Smerdyakov both by hanging. We also find Franz Kafka’s George Bendemann who takes his life by drowning, and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith by impaling, Her character, Rhoda, dies off a cliff. In American literature, we find Edna Pontellier, Quentin Compson, Clare Kendry, Semour Glass, Teddy McArdle, Willy Loman, Tod Clifton, and on and on. This list is surely …

Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …

Using Eye Tracking To Measure How People View Infrared And Visible Astronomical Images, Abigail Vo

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.