English Language and Literature Commons^™

Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable Of The Trickster And Utopia, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Dan Trachtenberg’S 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) – Inconceivable Horror, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Everyday Reflective Writing: What Conference Records Tell Us About Building A Culture Of Reflection, Rebecca Nowacek, Andrew Hoffmann, Carolyne Hurlburt, Lisa Lamson, Sareene Proodian, Anna P. Scanlon

English Faculty Research and Publications

Heeding previous scholars’ calls for a critical investigation of the role of reflection in the professional development of tutors, this article examines reflections written by tutors in the context of conference records. More specifically, the authors investigate the consequences of incorporating a prompt to reflect on tutoring strategies into our online conference-records database. The authors first present the results of their opening coding of nearly 300 conference records, offering a taxonomy of specific types of reflections found in the conference records. The authors then identify three shifts in the content of conference records written after the introduction of the reflection …

Ohio Women Writers Inspire In Ya: A Study Of Three Authors, Their Most Recent Young Adult Texts, And Their Paths To Publication, Genevieve Wadge

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this project, I will explore the world of YA literature and publishing with a focus on three female authors, Dr. Julie Drew, Rachele Alpine, and Colleen Clayton, and will use their most recently published young adult literature books to further reinforce my research. I will focus on how those texts fit into or go against the current canon of YAL, what common themes these stories touch on, how an adolescent reader might relate to the story and the characters, and other nuances of the texts.

“A Secret Place Above The Trees”: Keatsian Imagination In Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby, Kate Lisowski

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Prowler: Stories, Conor Hultman

Honors Theses

These are a collection of five short stories. Their common feature is the use of the first-person perspective. The intent of these prose experiments was to find the limitations of the first-person narrative, to see how it could be disfigured and reborn. In preparation, I read several books with my advisor that are known for their strong first-person voices. These included: If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O’Brien, Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller, The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, and The Collected Stories of …

The Last Of Anything, Malerie V. Lovejoy

Honors Theses

DR. MARCUS HALL BENNETT is lead archaeologist on a site in Northumberland, England dated after the Norman Conquest. The excavation seems standard until the discovery of Artifact XX.46.8.2, a collection of animal skins covered in writing. To translate the writing, Hall calls in DR. QUINN PRESTON, a linguist studying Middle English as a creole. As Quinn begins to analyze the writing, she realizes they have discovered a new pidgin—a perfect storm of changing language during a time of political upheaval. Through months of study, Quinn understands the text as a history of the tribe leading up to their extinction at …

Borrowing Time: The Classical Tradition In The Poetic Thoeries Of T. S. Eliot And Ezra Pound, Nicholas Odom

Honors Undergraduate Theses

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are two of the most prominent figures of Anglo-American modernist poetry, both having played central roles in the development of a distinct poetic style and atmosphere in the early 20^th century by means of their publishing and editing the work of other poets as well as publishing their own poetry. However, Eliot and Pound have an interest in the classical world that is not clearly shared with the majority of other modernist poets, and this interest distinguishes the sense of "modernism" that Eliot and Pound promoted from that of other major modernists like …

Testimony, Objectivism, And Poetic Form In Charles Reznikoff’S Holocaust, Rachel E. Trnka

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This essay examines the gradual development of Charles Reznikoff’s testimony form Holocaust poetry, which ultimately rejected the traditional lyric forms of his earlier works in favor of a stark, Objectivist poetry that culminated in Holocaust (1975)—a poem based on the transcripts from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. The WWI poems from Reznikoff’s first volume Rhythms (1918) underscore the importance of music to his early elegies in contrast to the blunt, impersonal testimonies in Holocaust. In Rhythms, Reznikoff employs traditional conventions ironically to convey war’s unpoetic reality while the poetic speakers in Going To and Fro and Walking Up …

Topic-Comment Sentence Structure In Written English, Hongmei Wu

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigates the topic-comment sentence structure in written English. It finds that English makes use of both the subject-predicate structure syntactically and the topic-comment structure pragmatically. The results of this study challenge the typological claim that English sentence structures are subject-prominent which mainly follows the subject-predicate structure (Li & Thompson, 1976). Via the investigation, this study proposes that English sentence structures exhibit the properties of subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages. As is believed that the topic-comment structure in English is represented differently from that in the topic-prominent languages, this study investigates the constructions in English writing to explore the appearances …

"Solace For [The] Very Soul": The Role Of Trees Within The American Short-Story Cycle, Breanna B. Harris

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Over the last couple of centuries, the American short-story genre became characterized by its observations of life and human nature—specifically by using scenes of nature to highlight characters’ development and the underlying theme. While much critical attention has been given to the role of nature in the American short-story cycle, very little consideration has been given to the purpose of trees and their specific breeds within the genre. This project focuses on three distinct pedagogical approaches to analyzing trees in three short-story cycles. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome and Freud’s theory of dream-thoughts are applied to Mary Wilkins …

From Beyond The Grave: Dead Narrators In Young Adult Literature, Jessica L. Branton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

While scholars and critics have explored various aspects of young adult literature, few have focused on the popular, but odd, use of dead narrators. When examining the dead narrators of Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, and Jess Rothenberg’s The Catastrophic History of You and Me, it becomes clear that the dead narrators are used as a foil for adolescent growth and maturation, and they also allow young readers to empathize with and accept death through the protagonists. These protagonists experience a proto-adulthood as they die too soon to …

Wandersoul Of The South: Situating 20th Century Alabama Poet Clement Wood In A Literary Tradition, Skye Rozario

Honors Program Theses

The following is a literary study on 20th century Alabama poet Clement Wood. As a writer, Wood lived and worked mainly in Alabama and New York, and was greatly involved and connected to the literary movements Modernism, the Southern Renaissance, and American Romanticism. He published many poems, short stories, and criticism in a variety of literary magazines, wrote his own columns, and edited journals as well. Though Wood was heavily involved in this community, his work is under-researched on the whole. Wood’s poetry attests to his mastery of rhyme and form and mainly focuses on the value of nature in …

"The Hazards Of Being Free": Thinking About Not Thinking In Infinite Jest, Josh Cunningham

Dissertations and Theses

This paper is about self-consciousness and how it figures in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Because Infinite Jest is such a large novel (1079 pages, including the indispensable footnotes), it serves, like other large novels before it, as a kind of encyclopedia of contemporary culture. The novel, in large part, treats self-consciousness—a distinctly human phenomenon, one which certainly accounts for our dominance as a species—as a problem (on both an individual and collective level) that needs to be overcome. This is because, as it turns out, self consciousness, when it becomes epidemic, is as much a boon as it …

"Beyond Consolation": Or Strangeness, Estrangement, And Strange-Ing In The Elegy For The Black Body, 1955-Present, Naomie Jean-Pierre

Dissertations and Theses

The Elegy for the Black Body examines the mid-twentieth to early-twenty-first-century poetic justice crafted by African American poets to eulogize individual African Americans whose deaths were the result of racial and political violence. In the age of lynching, mass shooting, and police brutality, I argue that an African American poetic tradition persists that, while not entirely beholden to the ancient elegy, is its distant relative, along with the English and American Elegy. I argue further that while the contemporary American elegy has undergone for the last six decades intensive study, from the notable studies done by Peter Sack’s in The …

The Hydra Of Modern Literature, Genevieve Sharp

Dissertations and Theses

Modernist Literature

The Embodiment Of Theory In Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Julie A. Ficks

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore how Maggie Nelson, in her groundbreaking memoir The Argonauts (2015), works to bring critical theory (primarily queer and feminist theory) out of the academy and into the realm of the personal, rendering theory as tangible and embodied in a real-world setting. Through this unique exchange, Nelson radically reinstates norms relating to gender, sexuality, motherhood and relationships.

Suffering And The Black Female Narrative In The Twentieth Century, Aquilah Jourdain

Dissertations and Theses

Adventure, romance, and happiness are not large parts of the stories Black women tell. If we had to name ten mainstream literary novels released in the last 50 years that featured Black women central to the plot — and included the aforementioned themes — we would be hard-pressed to find them. Though there are real life accounts of love, joy, and adventure in the lives of Black women, why do we see these life experiences documented sparingly? In the stories written by andforBlack women, where can Black female readers find joy in their history and culture without elements of grave …

"Dawn And Doom Was In The Branches": Eros Revisited In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Fernando M. Duran

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

"The More They’Re Beaten The Better They Be": Gendered Violence And Abuse In Victorian Laws And Literature, Danielle T. Dominguez

CMC Senior Theses

During the Victorian age, the law and society were in conversation with each other, and the law reflected Victorian gender norms. Nineteenth-century gender attitudes intersected with the law, medical discourse, and social customs in a multitude of ways. Abuse and gender violence occurred beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability. The models of nineteenth-century social conduct were highly gendered and placed men and women in separate social spheres. As this research indicates, the lived practices of Victorians, across social and economic strata, deviated from these accepted models of behavior. This thesis explores the ways that accepted and unaccepted standards of female …

Burning, Drowning, Shining, Blooming: The Shapes Of Aging In W.B. Yeats’ Poetry, Malea C. Martin

CMC Senior Theses

Love and growing old are thematically inseparable in W.B. Yeats' poetry, yet it is the former with which this great Irish poet is often associated. The poet's attitudes toward aging are made clear through his symbolism, complicated Irish allusions, and a sometimes jarring treatment of women. As it turns out, these devices have as much to do with Yeats' concern over aging as they have to do with the infamous Maud Gonne. This thesis attempts to not only expose and analyze these intricacies, but also challenge the way the literary canon typically isolates Yeats’ more famous poems without the context …

Revolution, Reform, And Class Conflict In Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron-Mills, Thomas Collins

Dissertations and Theses

Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis is a very early example of American fiction that depicts the living and working conditions in a mill town. Although the novella advocates for workers, it does not accurately depict contemporaneous working-class culture. Davis depicts workers as isolated and helpless in the face of the forces that oppress them rather than giving voice to the workers’ movement of her time. Although Davis depicts workers in a debased state, the text’s narrator holds out hope of the “Dawn,” suggesting a revolutionary movement. Because the narrator offers no interpretation regarding how the working …

Embracing Wobble: Exploring Novice Teachers’ Efforts To Enact Dialogic Literacy Instruction, Trevor Thomas Stewart, Dawan Coombs, Bob Fecho, Todd Hawley

Faculty Publications

By mid-January, Leah (all names are pseudonyms), a first-year high school English teacher, recognized the need to provide more support for students struggling to meet state reading and writing standards. In spite of her efforts to support students’ literacy development by working from a dialogical stance that brings English content into dialogue with students’ lives (Fecho, 2011), some of her students were still not passing the statewide assessments. Leah shared her concerns with a veteran teacher who told her that he employed a remediation practice common at their school, which required students earning Ds or Fs to participate in additional …

Emily Dickinson's Echology: A Listener's Reconceptualization Of Citizenship, Consciousness, And The World, Beth Ann Staley

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

What I call Emily Dickinson’s “echology” combines the terms “echo” and “ecology” to understand how Dickinson’s work echoes – and is an echo – of the world and how, consequently, her work resides not just in her handwritten documents and their publication in various editions but in an ecology that’s tied to the earth that hosted her, the air that faced her, and the sea kept her listening. To assess the critical value of Dickinson’s echology, this dissertation begins by apprehending how the story of the echo is a story about sound masking, specifically about how the echo that is …

Delivery, Facilitas, And Copia : Job Market Preparation And The Revival Of The Fifth Canon., Joseph Turner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay argues that English Studies departments should implement training programs in oral delivery strategies for graduate students seeking tenure track employment. A sample a 13-week training program, modeled on elements of classical rhetorical pedagogy, can help students develop and refine stills in oral delivery necessary for academic job interviews.

Rome And Tragic Ambivalence: The Case Of Jonson's Sejanus, John E. Curran Jr.

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Beyond A Language Boundary: Encounters With Silence And L1 Spanish-Speakers' Willingness To Communicate In English, John Turnbull

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The descriptive multi-case study asks three adult migrants, first-language (L1) Spanish-speakers from México, about their interpretations of their own and others’ silences as they navigate daily life, jobs, family, and English-language learning in the United States. Subjective opinions about silence, their second-language (L2) acquisition processes, comfort levels in various speaking situations, functions of L2 communication, and affective and social dimensions of language learning are related to participants’ willingness to communicate (WTC), a construct that measures a predisposition to talk, rather than stay silent, in L2 interaction.

The research, through daily language-use surveys and semi-structured Spanish-language interviews with the three English-language …

Witness: The Modern Writer As Witness, Amitai Ben-Abba, Bruce Bond, Dakota Canon, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Kate Finegan, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Josef Krebs, Brandon Krieg, Cody Lee, Zining Mok, Aimee Noel, Martha Petersen, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Eman Quotah, Tim Raymond, Maxine Rosaler, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Fabian Severo, Sarah Mollie Silberman, Jean Thompson, Amber Weelerbacon, Amy A. Whitcomb, Caroline Wilkinson, Kristin Winet, Carolyne Wright

Witness Magazine

Editor's Note [Excerpt] The United States, as a society, is on the brink of profound and positive change. Demographically and culturally, things are improving, and the reason is obvious to people who study history: Conflict pushes us to be better, to strive for principled goals. Consider the inspired eco-advocacy of Greta Thunberg. Or the swearing in of most diverse class of lawmakers in history into the 116th Congress. Or billionaire Robert F. Smith’s pledge to pay off every Morehouse College (in Atlanta, Georgia) student’s debt. Indeed, there are many good people helping and great moments happening in spite of a …

Volume 11, Jacob Carney, Ryan White, Joseph Hyman, Jenny Raven, Megan Garrett, Ibrahim Kante, Summer Meinhard, Lauren Johnson, William "Editha" Dean Howells, Laura Gottschalk, Christopher Siefke, Pink Powell, Natasha Woodmancy, Katharine Colley, Abbey Mays, Charlotte Potts

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Table of Contents:

Introduction, Dr. Roger A. Byrne, Dean

From the Editor, Dr. Larissa "Kat" Tracy

From the Designers, Rachel English, Rachel Hanson

Synthesis of 3,5-substituted Parabens and their Antimicrobial Properties, Jacob Coarney, Ryan White

Chernobyl: Putting "Perestroika" and "Glasnot" to the Test, Joseph Hyman

Art by Jenny Raven

Watering Down Accessibility: The Issue with Public Access to Alaska's Federal Waterways, Meagan Garrett

Why Has the Democratic Republic of the Congo outsourced its Responsibility to Educate its Citizens? Ibrahim Kante

Art by Summer Meinhard

A Computational Study of Single Molecule Diodes, Lauren Johnson

Satire of …

Material Disease: Agency And Illness In Early American Literature, Mariah Crilley

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Material Disease: Agency and Illness in Early American Literature argues that diseases shaped bodies of literature. Drawing on new materialism, disability studies, and the medical humanities, this dissertation argues that diseases were material and literary agents that transformed not only individual bodies and lives but also cultures, history, and even literature. In each chapter, I explore how one disease impacted a particular genre or paradigm: syphilis and the natural history, smallpox and the body politic, yellow fever and the novel, dysentery and sensibility, and malaria and narratives of Western expansion. By emphasizing disease’s material and literary agency, by conjoining the …