English Language and Literature Commons^™

Ofermod And Aristocratic Chivalry In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Amber Dunai

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper explores connections between J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1953 Essays and Studies publication The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son and representations of ofermod and aristocratic “chivalry” in The Lord of the Rings. Focusing on the motivations and leadership-related decisions of Denethor and Faramir in The Lord of the Rings, this paper argues that Faramir's behavior and motivations, despite Denethor’s implications to the contrary, cannot be described in terms of ofermod regardless of the risk that his choice to reject the Ring appears to pose to Gondor. By contrast, Denethor and his son Boromir represent the pride-motivated decision-making and rash …

Medievalism In A Song Of Ice And Fire And Game Of Thrones By Shiloh Carroll, Joseph Young

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

No abstract provided.

A Modern Fairy-Story: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Seen Through The Prism Of Tolkien’S Classic Essay, Douglas Charles Kane

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

Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” provides both a definitive discussion of fairy-stories and their relationship to myth and fantasy and his most explicit analysis of his own art. In addition, in carefully laying out over the course of his essay what makes a true fairy-story, he also makes it possible to analyze other artists’ works to determine how successful they are as fairy-stories. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell meets those standards on every point, and is thus shown to be a true modern fairy-story in the tradition that Tolkien documents so plainly.

The Romance And The Real: A. S. Byatt’S Possession: A Romance, Jordana Long

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

Demonstrates Possession’s mythic elements, in particular, how the encounter between the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and his daughter Maia in the novel’s Postscript constitutes Ash’s confrontation with Slavoj Žižek’s famous interpretation of the Lacanian Real. Building on Žižek, argues that Ash’s encounter with the Real actually springs from and mediates grace. This reimagining of the Real is an integral element of myth and introduces the mythic into Possession, giving it the qualities of a Romance.

Phantastes: Annotated Edition By George Macdonald. Edited By John Pennington And Roderick Mcgillis, Tiffany Brooke Martin Phd

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

No abstract provided.

The Faun’S Bookshelf: C.S. Lewis On Why Myth Matters By Charlie Starr, Louis Markos

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

No abstract provided.

Cardinal Newman's Pilgrimage, In His Own Words, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the text of a presentation given at Marshall University on October 14 and 17, 2019, to commemorate the October 13 canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman. As the title suggests, it draws largely upon his autobiography, an autobiographical novel, and his published letters to trace the trajectory of his religious life, from the earliest glimmers in his mid-teens to his conversion to Catholicism at the age of 44.

Three Poems: The Dog At The Hospital; Bracken Ferns; Branta Canadensis, Pos L. Moua

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

These three poems reflect the speaker's refugee experience and his adjustment to the new land and the natural world and present an account of his love, companionship, and memory of war.

Digital Scholarship: Current Challenges In Hiring, Promotion, And Tenure, Bridget Whearty

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric Faculty Scholarship

This is the performance script and slides (embedded) of my Oct 11, 2019 talk given at the University of Albany Library's Digital Scholarship Conference--Digital Scholarship: Opportunities and Challenges (see https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/dsconf/).

This talk examines how local conditions can strongly discourage pretenure faculty from engaging in innovative digital work. Arguing that individual faculty, larger institutions, local communities, and the humanities themselves lose out when digital scholarship is not adequately valued, I offer an "alternative universe tenure timeline," outlining some of the work I would have done in the past five years if digital scholarship was valued for promotion and tenure.

The Significance Of Story: A Review Of On Reading Well, Shelbi Gesch

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"In reading Prior’s book, I was given a fresh view on books I’d already read, and was encouraged even more to read those I hadn’t, despite the abounding spoilers."

Posting about the book On Reading Well from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/the-significance-of-story-a-review-of-on-reading-well/

Why Love Matters For Human Rights, Lena Khor

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Human rights are typically thought of as a matter of justice, but I argue that at its core, human rights are a matter of love. To develop this argument, I analyze select literary representations of human rights at work including Dave Eggers’ What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Novel (2006) and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (2003). My concept of love builds on the vision of “open love” proposed by French philosopher Henri Bergson in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion …

Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article draws on methods from transgender theory, historicist literary studies, and visual analysis of medieval sealing practices to show that Empress Matilda of England was controversially styled as a female king during her career in the early to mid twelfth century. While the chronicle Gesta Stephani castigates Matilda’s failure to engage in sanctioned gendered behaviors as she waged civil war to claim her inherited throne, Matilda’s seal harnesses both masculine and feminine signifiers in order to proclaim herself both king and queen. While Matilda’s transgressive gender position was targeted by her detractors during her lifetime, the obstinately transgender object …

A Space Of Her Own: Genderfluidity And Negotiation In The Life Of Christina Of Markyate, Meghan L. Nestel

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper draws on transgender studies and theories of gender performativity and genderfluidity to consider how twelfth-century holy woman Christina of Markyate resists traditional and third-gender binary policing. It argues that Christina is genderfluid, and that as a secular, masculinized, and religious virgin, she co-exists within and moves among multiple gender spaces that allow her to establish her own authority.

Cal Poly Frankenreads: An All-Day Public Reading Of Mary Shelly’S Frankenstein, Robert E. Kennedy Library

Creative Works

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the Cal Poly English Department and Kennedy Library organized a series of interdisciplinary events including FrankenReads, an all-day public reading of the novel. Spanning twelve hours, members of the Cal Poly community from all colleges participated in the celebration by volunteering to read portions of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

This catalog is based on the celebration of events “FrankenFall” which took place on October 31, 2018 at the Robert E. Kennedy Library.

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

Syntax, Newsletter Of The Suffolk University English Department, Issue 5, 2019, English Department

Syntax Newsletter of the Suffolk University English Department

No abstract provided.

Rolle Reassembled: Booklet Production, Single-Author Anthologies, And The Making Of Bodley 861, Andrew B. Kraebel

English Faculty Research

The assignment of value to manuscripts on the basis of their antiquity—that is, the notion that books written at a greater distance from the present were therefore more deserving of attention—reflects a sensibility more commonly associated with early modern collectors than with medieval scribes. Malcolm Parkes, for example, though describing many instances of archaizing hands in medieval manuscripts, tends to see these as pragmatic efforts driven by “the need to copy replacement leaves,” a more practical aim than the Tudor valuing of medieval scripts, which “came to be perceived as emblematic of the past.”¹ Within this framework, though generally …

The Trial Of The (Eighteenth) Century: Active Learning And Moll Flanders, Ann Campbell

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Like every professor of eighteenth-century British literature I know, I find it challenging to fill undergraduate courses in my field. The English majors who have satisfied the prerequisites for 300-level period-based courses tend to gravitate to classes they assume will straightforwardly address their concerns and reflect their experiences. Consequently, courses on eighteenth-century authors such as Daniel Defoe often get cancelled while surveys of post-modernism thrive. I have tried obvious tactics, such as revising the title of a typical eighteenth-century literature course to “Hellions and Harlots in Eighteenth-Century Novels” or teaching episodes of Survivor alongside Robinson Crusoe, to increase enrollment …

Walt Whitman At The Aurora: A Model For Journalistic Attribution, Kevin Mcmullen, Stefan Schöberlein

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit- manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is …

The Naulahka: A Story Of Cultural Representation, Eve Papa

Sacred Heart University Scholar

This article addresses the issues of cultural theory and representation that arise in Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier’s 1892 novel The Naulahka: A Story of West and East. Kipling and Balestier’s novel highlights cultural differences between America and India, and in doing so raises controversial points on acceptance and understanding (or lack thereof). Framed through the theme of service travel, the novel’s characters navigate a new life riddled with culture shock in an attempt to find their own version of cultural compassion. Additionally, this article will reference the cultural theories of Stuart Hall to help understand representation of Indians in …

Sadie Jane, Esther French

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Sadie Jane is a novella set in the town of Gypsum, a fictional location in rural Kentucky. The introduction covers the inspiration for the novella, which is based on Southern storytelling traditions and features the adventures of Sadie Jane, an independent octogenarian who returns to her hometown after many years. Sadie experiences the internal challenges of regrets and grief as well as the external challenges of busybodies and car thieves before finding her place in the community.

How Do You Stage A Problem Like Kevin Spacey? Reflections On Performance And Consent, With Help From Ellie Moon And Adam Lazarus, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

How can theatre and performance open avenues for a nuanced exploration of consent in the wake of #MeToo? What aesthetic, generic, and dramaturgical choices may best contribute to this kind of exploration? As audience members, do we need to be made properly uncomfortable in our seats in order to think deeply about consent at the theatre? What are the ethical boundaries of such discomfort? Kim Solga investigates these questions and more as she revisits her experiences seeing Ellie Moon’s Asking for It and Adam Lazarus’s Daughter shortly after the Weinstein allegations broke in late 2017.

Do We Have Enough Bibles Yet? English Bible Translations And The Transitions Through Time, Allison C. Stephan

Selected Honors Theses

The Bible is read in a variety of contexts, but with the hundreds of translations in English and controversy over which is “most accurate” or “best,” this thesis examines a brief history of Bible translation, a few translation theories such as formal and functional equivalence, what to look for in a Bible translation, and some of the most common English Bible translations. A study was conducted with college students, focusing primarily on the purpose of each translation and the people who read a specified version. Finally, this thesis supports the usage of different translations in different contexts, according to the …

Negotiating Ambivalent Gender Space For Collective And Individual Empowerment: Sikh Women's Life Writing In The Diaspora, Jaspal Kaur Singh 2508334

Journal Articles

In order to examine gender and identity within Sikh literature and culture and to understand the construction of gender and the practice of Sikhi within the contemporary Sikh diaspora in the US, I analyze a selection from creative non-fiction pieces, variously termed essays, personal narrative, or life writing, in Meeta Kaur’s edited collection, Her Name is Kaur: Sikh American Women Write About Love, Courage, and Faith. Gender, understood as a social construct (Butler, among others), is almost always inconsistent and is related to religion, which, too, is a construct and is also almost always inconsistent in many ways. Therefore, my …

Open City'S Abschied: Teju Cole, Gustav Mahler, And Elliptical Cosmopolitanism, Josh Epstein

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay addresses Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), a deconstructed bildungsroman preoccupied with Gustav Mahler’s late compositions. Building on Theodor Adorno’s account of Mahler, the essay argues that Cole positions Julius’s violent subjectivity in dialectical tension with the patterns of consumption that inform both his and Mahler’s intellectual landscapes. Previous scholarship, though attentive to Cole’s cosmopolitanism, has ignored the novel’s fixation on Mahler: a Jewish Bohemian-Austrian composer whose cosmopolitan sensibilities led him to appropriate a range of literary and musical sources, Western and Eastern. These sources, Adorno argued, are mediated in Mahler’s music as “pseudomorphs” that unravel their own pretenses …

Blanket Dance, Lloyd Milburn

English Faculty/Staff Publications

Lloyd Milburn's poem “Blanket Dance” depicts a memorial dance at a Seneca Ganondagan Festival, and has just been published in The New Guard literary review Volume VIII, Fall 2019. The poem illustrates shared grieving, and music's tension and resolution to help the process.

“This Damned Act”: Walt Whitman And The Fugitive Slave Law Of 1850, Kevin Mcmullen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

“THERE IS A SIN OF OMISSION often laid at [Walt] Whitman’s door by ardent humanitarians,” Clifton Furness wrote in 1928; “‘How is it,’ they say, ‘that a poet of democracy and humanitarianism did not express himself on the subjects of abolition, ill-treatment of slaves, the Missouri Compromise, and the national issues leading up to the Civil War?’”1 For all his expansiveness of both form and content, Whitman was indeed, on certain key matters, a poet of omission. As Kenneth M. Price, Martin Klammer, Ed Folsom, and others have demonstrated, the poet repeatedly grappled with issues of slavery and race in …

Fictions Of Sexuality, Emelyn Schaeffer

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

I conducted a Creative Independent Study Project and wrote two short stories that include themes of women’s sexual desire/pleasure, sexual debuts, masturbation, discoveries, and understandings of one’s sexuality. Because women receive so many messages about keeping their chastity and so few about pursuing the pleasures sex can provide, the opportunities to promote the exploration of women’s sexual desire cannot be missed. To write my stories and answer my research question, I read and watched a variety of both academic and creative materials. I wanted to do this work because these are the stories I needed in high school when I …

I Had To Do The Reading: A Phenomenological Case Study Of College English Students, Jennifer Eleanor Frank

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

The purposes of this qualitative phenomenological case study were to investigate multiple student experiences in a general elective introduction to literature course when music was added as an autonomously structured assignment. Music and song lyrics are no strangers to the classroom setting, but there is a gap in the literature examining the space where students can create meaningful links between music they enjoy and assigned course readings in college English. Informed by social constructivism and English studies theories this study was designed to investigate any impact that autonomously driven music-link assignments may have on students. The structured assignments were called …

Twenty-First Century Book Studies: The State Of The Discipline, Rachel Noorda, Stevie Marsden

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the 25th annual Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) conference in 2017, held at the University of Victoria, Canada, Stevie Marsden and Rachel Noorda moderated a workshop on the topic of “The Twenty-First Century Book.” Six scholars (Beth Driscoll, Per Henningsgaard, Simone Murray, DeNel Rehberg-Sedo, Simon Rowberry and Claire Squires), whose research is predominantly positioned within the twenty-first century, were invited to discuss the challenges and opportunities for studying the twenty-first century book. The 2017 SHARP conference, “Technologies of the Book”, seemed the perfect setting to hold this workshop. Not only did the conference theme …