English Language and Literature Commons^™

Useless, Seth Stone

Graduate Thesis Collection

Useless is a short story collection about people who feel lost in the world and go searching for fulfillment. Six disconnected stories about six disconnected people. The collection deals with themes of loss, identity, loneliness and the exploration of niche subcultures.

One Hundred Books: A Journey Through A Century Of John Newbery Award Books, Tyler Sassaman

Graduate Thesis Collection

"On a quest to read all of the existing Newbery award-winning books (est. 1921), a reading specialist examines the history of the books and the award itself. Considered the “most distinguished contribution to children’s literature,” the John Newbery gold medal, awarded by the American Library Association, is a high-water mark for upper elementary-aged children across the United States. The author’s two decades of teaching experience provide the analytical perspective and memoir-style investigation. Interviews with a book buyer for the Scholastic publisher, children’s librarians, former Newbery committee members, and a visit to the famed Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature, frame the …

The Effect Of Phonetic Training On The Perception And The Production Of L1-Related Difficult Sounds In Esl, Moonjung Jang

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

A considerable amount of research has been conducted on the influence of first languages’ phonological features in pronunciation of a second language. While it has been accepted that pronunciation is one of the most significant aspects in the acquisition of a second language, many studies have not considered whether explicit phonetic training in pronunciation would help English as Second language Learners to improve their pronunciation on particular English sounds that can be confused due to L1 influence. The present study will explore whether Korean ESL learners are able to perceive the particular pairs of the different phonetic sounds (i.e., /p/-/f/, …

“I Didn’T Want To Make Them Feel Wrong In Any Way”: Preservice Teachers Craft Digital Feedback On Sociopolitical Perspectives In Student Texts, James S. Chisholm, Alison Heron-Hruby, Andrea R. Olinger

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This qualitative multicase analysis investigated the role of “educational niceness” and “neutrality” (e.g., Baptiste, 2008; Bissonnette, 2016) in preservice English teacher feedback on sociopolitical issues in student writing. As part of the field experiences for several ELA methods courses at two universities, one urban and one rural, the teacher-researchers used Google Docs and other technologies (e.g., screencasts and Google Community) to connect preservice teachers (PSTs) with high school writers at a geographical distance so that urban-situated PSTs could mentor rural-situated writers and vice versa. Five methods courses over two semesters served as cases, and 12 PSTs from those courses participated …

Black Hawk In Translation: Indigenous Critique And Liberal Guilt In The 1847 Dutch Edition Of Life Of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …

Afterlives Of Indigenous Archives, Ivy Schweitzer, Gordon Henry Jr

Dartmouth Scholarship

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of …

Extending The Morpheme Order Studies: Acquisition Of Modal And Non-Modal Verbal Morphemes By Esl Learners, Amal Alshehry

All Master's Theses

The morpheme order studies have long prevailed in the field of second language acquisition. However, these studies are often undermined by their extent and focus on a limited number of morphemes. Thus, the present study extends the scope of morphemes to include modal verbs within other verbal morphemes and studies the order of their acquisition. Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) were used to examine a total of twenty-seven ESL learners from a wide range of L1 backgrounds: Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese. The study reveals a universal pattern in ESL learners’ acquisition of English verb morphology. …

Why We Turn The Page: A Literary Theory Of Dynamic Structuralism, Justin J. J. Ness

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study claims that every narrative text intrinsically possesses a structure of fixed relationships among its interest components. The progress of literary structuralism gave more attention to the static nature of what a narrative is than it did to the dynamic nature of how it operates. This study seeks to build on the work of those few theorists who have addressed this general oversight and to contribute a more comprehensive framework through which literary critics may better chart the distinct tensions that a narrative text cultivates as it proactively produces interest to motivate a reader’s continued investment therein. This study …

A Lingua Franca Afloat And Ashore: Contact English In American Sea Fiction, 1824 To 1914, Fredrik Reidar Stark

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines how American sea writers between 1824 and 1914 promoted new perceptions of English as a various and expanding intercultural and international language. It argues that presentations of language contact form a critically underemphasized component of American nautical literature. It surveys how such presentations take shape in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) and The Crater (1847), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). It asserts that Herman Melville’s innovative presentations of contact between pidgins and native varieties of English in Typee (1846) and Omoo …

Cavalier Reading: Examining The Problematic Nature Of Signifiers, Monique Nichelle Branscumb

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Workers, Athletes And Artists: The Historical Continuity Of White Control Of Black America, Courtney Walton

Masters Theses

From the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, black Americans have been subject to different forms of control. This subjection of blacks to societal demands arose in part because black people are viewed as inferior to white people. Because of this misconstrued perception, black people are forced to present an acceptable level of blackness to prevent punishment. Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (1938), Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928), and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain" (1926) detail their lives at the tum of the …

Narrating Trauma: Youth, Masculinity, And Storytelling In The Midst Of War, Rebekah Smith

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

On The Edge Of Inclusion: A Look At The Shifting Of Representation In Museum Display And Archival Cataloging, Natalie Ray

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project, entitled "On The Edge of Inclusion: A Look at the Shifting of Representation in Museum Display and Archival Cataloging" by Natalie Ray delves into how the growing trend of social justice has raised new questions about how to better represent marginalized populations and how museum work has followed this pursuit. The digital age continues to impact the dynamism of exhibiting. Accurate representation becomes more imperative now that representative texts are able to reach more people than ever before. This increasing access coupled with the expanding interest in social justice and cultural reconciliation renders it necessary for curators and …

From Wanderer To Warrior: Martin's Journey To Sainthood In Brian Jacques's Redwall Series, Marie A. Bliemeister

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Children’s fantasy series have been set in the Medieval Era, a way to explore contemporary themes. This use of the Medieval Era is known as medievalism, where authors can explore contemporary issues by comparing them to the past (Bradford 3). Brian Jacques, the author of the popular children’s series Redwall, uses many aspects of the Medieval Era such as prophecies, glory, and battle, and visions or dreams to effectively spin a good yarn while commenting on the religious development of England in the late twentieth century. English moral was down due to the devastation of World War Two and …

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Donna R. White

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

The Lamp-Post Of The Southern California C.S. Lewis Society, Janet Brennan Croft

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Teaching With Technology: Using A Virtual Learning Community And Peer Mentoring To Create An Interdisciplinary Intervention, Rebecca Mazumdar, Nadia Benakli, Pamela Brown

Publications and Research

This paper describes the development and implementation of engaging and supportive experiences to promote student engagement, persistence and success at a commuter, open enrollment, public, minority serving institution. Project components included faculty development at the SENCER Summer Institute (SSI) 2016, attended by a team comprised of an academic administrator, full-time faculty from English and math, and part-time faculty in chemistry; creation of a virtual learning community of freshmen enrolled in chemistry, English, and math linked by the specific theme of the environmental impacts of deicing roads with salt and the overarching theme of the impacts of human activities on the …

C. S. Lewis And Satan: A Preface To Paradise Lost And Its Respondents, 1942-1952, David V. Urban

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This essay discusses C. S. Lewis’s influential and controversial chapter, within A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942), on Milton’s Satan. Lewis’s chapter presents itself as a response to what Lewis sees as the dominant Romantic understanding of Milton’s Satan, but Lewis oversimplifies the critical landscape both by misrepresenting Shelley’s discussion of Satan and by failing to acknowledge various post-Shelley challenges to Milton’s Satan that had appeared before Lewis’s book. Lewis’s chapter elicited various sustained critical responses in the ensuing decade. This essay analyzes those responses—most of which seek to refute Lewis’s presentation of Satan by reasserting a Romantic understanding of …

Simultaneity And Solidarity In The Time Of Permanent War, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excerpt in lieu of abstract:

The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war.
--Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

In their defense of the Muslim travel ban, lawyers for the Trump administration invoked the plenary power doctrine to justify its legality: "The Order was well under the president's authority under Congress' delegation, particularly in an area like immigration, in which the admission to the United States of foreign aliens is subject to plenary control by the political branches." (1) By …

Nothing Monstrous Existed Here: Uncanny Nature In The Southern Reach Trilogy, Morgan Mundy

Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationships between humans and their environments in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach series. VanderMeer, throughout the trilogy, uses the horror aesthetics of the New Weird genre to break down the barriers between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural. By showing the characters as more aware of their status as human and the agency of the natural world around them as a result of the novels’ plot, The Southern Reach forces characters and readers alike to confront a world in which becoming something more than human might be possible and even necessary …

The Charles Harpur Critical Archive: A History And Technical Report, Paul Eggert, Desmond A. Schmidt

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is a history of and a technical report on the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales from the 1830s to the 1860s. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and manuscript form have been recovered. In order to manage the complexity of his often heavily revised manuscripts traditional encoding in XML–TEI, with its known difficulties in handling overlapping structures and complex revisions, was rejected. Instead, the transcriptions were split into simplified versions and layers of revision. Markup describing textual formats was stored externally …

Disability, Decoloniality, And Other-Than-Humanist Ethics In Anzaldúan Thought, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing has been read as decolonial based on her resistance to dominant national, racial, and cultural formations. This essay turns to unpublished documents from the Gloria Anzaldúa archive that are decolonial at a more fundamental level. In autobiographical writings about her own experiences with disability, as well as doodles and figure drawings, the alternate forms of human life that Anzaldúa depicts defy the logics of identification and differentiation that underlie colonial hierarchies. Refusing to fix bodies with labels, Anzaldúa accepted mystical encounters and inter-species minglings without judgment. She experienced her own disabling conditions (including a severe hormone imbalance …

How Lawrence Launched His Career In London, Joyce Wexler

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Irrational Bodies, Emerging Beings: Disability And Decoloniality In Anzaldúan Thought, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing has been read as decolonial based on her resistance to dominant national, racial, and cultural formations. This essay turns to unpublished documents from the Gloria Anzaldúa archive that are decolonial at a more fundamental level. In autobiographical writings about her own experiences with disability, as well as doodles and figure drawings, the alternate forms of human life that Anzaldúa depicts defy the logics of identification and differentiation that underlie colonial hierarchies. Refusing to fix bodies with labels, Anzaldúa accepted mystical encounters and inter-species minglings without judgment. She experienced her own disabling conditions (including a severe hormone imbalance …

Review Of Piers Plowman And The Books Of Nature By Rebecca Davis, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Embodied Healthcare Intuition: A Taxonomy Of Sensory Cues Used By Healthcare Providers, Lillian Campbell, Elizabeth L. Angeli

English Faculty Research and Publications

Although healthcare providers’ decision-making is informed by data and proto­cols for care, recent research suggests that individuals’ intuition—which integrates previous experiences with situational awareness and sensory knowledge—also plays a large role in directing action. Drawing on two different datasets from research on EMS providers and nurses in clinical nursing simulations, this article intro­duces a taxonomy for the various cues that trigger intuitive action and unpacks how intuition manifests at different stages of care. We argue that healthcare providers rhetorically navigate a wide range of both external and internal intuitive cues, and that external cues draw on sensory engagement with bodies, …

Syntactic And Semantic Interpretations Of Control Constructions In British And American Sports News Articles, Abhinan Wongkittiporn

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study observes control constructions, traditionally known as to- infinitives, null infinitives, and -ing infinitives to examine their occurrence and connection with syntactic functions and semantic interpretations. The data is from sports news articles in British and American English. From previous studies, semantic interpretation and language variation are the reasons for the appearances of most control constructions. However, most previous studies only paid attention to specific types of control constructions, specific verbs and positions (i.e. Verb Phrase complements) in academic and fiction texts. This study observes all types of control constructions. While interpreting the appearance of control constructions in British …

Variability Of English Past Tense Morphology By L1 Thai And L1 French Learners, Chariya Prapobratanakul

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study examined variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai and L1 French learners. English, French and Thai are different in that past tense inflectional morphology is obligatory in English and French, but not in Thai. Based on the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003), it was hypothesized that variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai learners was due to non-target-like syntactic representations, not the target-like syntactic representations according to the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Prévost & White, 2000; Lardiere, 2003). A cloze test and a grammaticality judgment …