English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Soul Lives On, Nicholas S. Boone

Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Born Or Made: Problems Of Prose Style & Stylistic Improvability At The Sentence Level, An Interdisciplinary Approach, Hope Petrash Mccarthy

English Dissertations - Archive

In this interdisciplinary dissertation, I problematize the issue of style at the sentence level from a variety of perspectives, past and present, literary and compositional. My two-fold driving question throughout is, Can an adult significantly improve his/her sentence-level style, regardless of inborn linguistic talent, and if so, what methods will most effectively bring about such improvement? Put another way, to what extent is style learnable, a techne or craft, and to what extent is it simply a matter of gift? After its heyday fifty years ago, the study of style has all but disappeared from the academy in recent days. …

Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root: Arboreal Ecocriticism And Shakespearean Drama, Jason Charles Hogue

English Dissertations - Archive

Leaf, Bark, Thorn, Root traces the appearance of trees and their constituent parts in five Shakespearean plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and As You Like It. The dissertation shows how these plays reveal arboreal agencies intra-acting with the characters of the play-texts by assessing the mergings of human and arboreal bodies, as well as instances of hacking and hewing inflicted across these bodies. Taking a posthumanist approach informed by ecomaterialism, critical plant studies, and affect theory, I argue that these sites of painful human-arboreal encounter in Shakespeare’s plays initiate potentials for thinking-with and feeling-with, across not …

Radical Empowerment And Evolution In Fay Weldon’S Menippean Satire: The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil (1983), Jackson A. Rivera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis explores Fay Weldon’s implementation of Menippean satire in her 1983 novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. The present discussion argues Weldon utilizes this specific satiric mode within her novel in order to convey a story of radical female empowerment and evolution that critiques gendered stereotypes of marriage and female roles in society. To make this argument, this thesis applies satire theory, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about Menippean satire, as well as marriage and family psychology, to Weldon’s characterization of wives, husbands, and mistresses throughout the novel. Through this discussion, Rivera demonstrates the effectiveness of …

Comments On Etymology, May 2019: Kibosh Update #4 (Compilation), Gerald Leonard Cohen, Stephen Goranson, Matthew Little

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

It has been ten years since Matthew Little sent me his suggestion that ‘kibosh’ in ‘put the kibosh on’ derives from the fearsome Mideastern whip known as the kurbash; Stephen Goranson soon thereafter independently made the same suggestion in messages to the American Dialect Society, gradually adding the important initial discoveries to buttress that proposal.

The three of us wound up collaborating on ‘kibosh,’ first in Comments on Etymology and then in our 2017 book Origin of Kibosh. Updates continued to appear in COE as various scholars weighed in and some new material appeared. It is time now to …

"Thus Saith The Lord": The Theological Rhetoric Of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nathaniel Ryan Davis

Masters Theses

This text seeks to explain the rhetorical appeals that Martin Luther King, Jr. used to persuade his audience of the fundamental truths of human dignity, sin, justice, and hope.

Persecutor’S Remorse: Mimetic Desire, Institutions, And Shūsaku Endō’S Loving Gaze On Persecutors, Jirayu Smitthimedhin

Masters Theses

Building on Mark Williams’ thesis that Endō’s characters often reconcile with an unconscious Other within themselves, I will argue that Endō’s “weak” characters are trapped by mimetic desire and are drawn toward acts of persecution; their status as persecutors depends on their relationships—whom they wish to imitate or whom they imitated in their past. While Williams and other Endō scholars often focus on the psychology and existential choices facing Endō’s characters, I point out how contextualizing Endō within the postwar Daisan no shinjin writers reveals Endō’s criticism of institutional powers, particularly because institutions can become “centers of desire.” Drawing on …

Teaching English As A Second Language In An Urban Public University In Sri Lanka : A Reflective Paper, Kasun Gajasinghe Maramba Liyanage

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The purpose of this Master of Arts (MA) thesis is threefold:

First, this reflective paper provides a critical literature review on English Language Teaching (ELT) in Sri Lanka.

Second, this reflective paper presents seven guiding principles which will steer my English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching in an urban public university in Sri Lanka.

Third, drawing from the seven guiding principles, this reflective paper presents a complete syllabus and three assignments as concrete examples (attached as appendixes) which will be implemented in a College of Humanities and Social Sciences in an urban public university in Sri Lanka.

The importance …

Mainstream Teachers Learning To Teach English Language Learners : Uncovering The Systems Of Teacher Professional Learning, Alma Morel

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In this qualitative study, I followed three teachers as they participated in a sheltered English instruction professional learning initiative planned and implemented by their school district for purposes of preparing middle school science and social studies teachers to teach English language learners (ELLs). I explored the professional learning process of these teachers and how the ideas to which they were exposed in the professional learning initiative moved into their classroom practices, if at all. The study was guided by a complexity perspective, from which teacher professional learning was conceptualized as emerging from nested systems. In general, the study sought to …

MōNstrum Ex Machina : Reading The Artificial Life As Monster In Three Contemporary Western Narratives, Constance Lynnette Humphrey

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Using Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory (Seven Theses)” as a template for the monstrous and D. Felton’s article “Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome,” this project seeks to investigate the presentation of artificial life as monsters using three science fiction narratives from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The narratives include Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), five episodes of the Ronald D. Moore developed reimagining of Battlestar Galactica television series (2004-2006), Moore’s Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries (2003), and Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2015). Analysis of these narratives will …

Decentering The Dictator: ‘In The Time Of The Butterflies’ And The Mirabal Sisters’ Outspoken Challenge, Elise Coombs

English

Julia Alvarez’s portrayal of the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies centers the novel around the sisters’ speech and humanity. This decenters the dictator, a figure who was often central to Latin American dictator novels. The first chapter will provide background on the dictator’s characteristics to demonstrate how the Mirabal sisters’ speech draws attention away from his power. The four times the sisters encounter the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the novel, their speech decenters him because Alvarez emphasizes their experience. In the second chapter, I examine the gaps between each encounter, focusing on Minerva’s speech development towards …

“Into The Unknown”: Annihilation In Children’S Media, Kathleen Gibson

English

Physical death can be painful, but annihilation is far more terrifying. According to Donald Winnicott, annihilation is the death of the ‘self’, ego, or identity. It’s the nagging fear that we will die and then everything we are and everything we have done will mean nothing. Or that we will wake up, as if with amnesia, having no idea who we are. Annihilation is a crisis of identity. This fear manifests in children as well. Annihilation rears its head as the fear of being turned into a toad, lost in the jungle, caged by a wicked witch, or abandoned by …

Undone By Adaptation? : Tracing Desdemona And Emilia In Othello And Otello(S), Emily Buckley-Crist

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis explores the characters of Desdemona and Emilia in Shakespeare’s Othello and productions of Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito’s operatic adaptation, Otello (1887). Shakespeare structures the play’s meditation on the limitations of feminine agency in early modern England with Desdemona and Emilia’s detached acts of defiance. When both women succumb to the parasitism of their marriages, Shakespeare illuminates the unjust danger defiant women face under the unyielding power of early modern patriarchy. Surprisingly, Verdi and Boito diminish the agency of these female characters in their opera, instead favoring male characters while adapting Shakespeare’s play to the form and audience …

The Criterion (2019)

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

Commodification Of Blackness In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Jordan Peele’S Get Out, Nicholas Blauner

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This paper examines the commodification of blackness in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (2017) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). The paper traces the differences in representation of a commodified blackness; whereas Lee created a commodification of blackness that celebrated black culture and represented it positively, Jordan Peele used the commodification of blackness as the source of his film’s horror. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) helped propagate the trend of American cinema to exploit blackness and commodify it for a source of filmic entertainment and marketing. The blaxploitation era shifted this method towards a representation of blackness …

Materiality And Minority Representation In Timothy Mcsweeney’S Quarterly Concern, Julia Leyden

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Founded in San Francisco in 1998, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern was launched by Dave Eggers in tandem with McSweeney’s publishing house in an attempt to create a platform for up-and-coming writers, experimental literature, and other forms of writing that would be difficult to publish in a traditional magazine. Two representative examples of how McSweeney’s attention to physical design, unfixed format, and interest in global literature overlap are McSweeney’s 36 and McSweeney’s 43. McSweeney’s 36 includes an oral history of governmental oppression titled “Ma Su Mon,” an excerpt from Nowhere to be Home, a text in the McSweeney’s …

Traduttore Traditore: All Translators Are Traitors. Except, Maybe, For Chaucer., Karen Miranda

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The aim of this project is to analyse plot elements and word choices in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” from his greater work, The Canterbury Tales, and compare them to those used in a similar story from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Day 9, Story 6 in order to determine if there are enough similar elements between the two stories to infer that Chaucer could have been familiar with Boccaccio’s version of the tale when writing “The Reeve’s Tale". The paper also addresses the question of whether or not Chaucer “merely translated” his source text into English and, if so, what …

Concerning The Perceptive Gaze: The Impact Of Vision Theories On Late Nineteenth-Century Victorian Literature, Lindsay Rushworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two specific interventions in vision theory—namely, Herbert Spencer's theory of organic memory, which he developed by way of Lamarckian genetics and Darwinian evolution in A System of Synthetic Philosophy (1864), and the Aesthetic Movement (1870s–1890s), famously articulated by Walter Pater in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873 and 1893). I explore the impact of these theories on late nineteenth-century fiction, focusing on two novels: Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882) and Edith Johnstone's A Sunless Heart (1894). These two authors' texts engage with scientific and aesthetic visual theories to demonstrate their anxieties concerning the …

These Places We Walk : Stories Of Mental Illness In American Society., Rachel Grace Trimble

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This paper examines research on mental illness and mental health literacy as well as an examination of literary elements in interlinked stories in order to write a linked collection of five short stories about mental illnesses. Depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Mental Illness In Young Adult Literature: A Classroom Approach, Claire Ghent

Honors College Theses

As high school curriculum in the 21st century evolves, the need to increase exposure of diverse literature that reflects culture, gender, and ethnicity is growing. One crucial area often overlooked by educators, parents, and publishers is literature that provides attention to mental illness, in spite of the growing amount of adolescents who suffer from a mental illness. By increasing awareness of mental illness in the classrooms, teachers can reduce stigma and increase empathy in their students while still providing challenging and engaging literary interactions. One of the best vehicles to deliver mental illness and stigma education is young adult literature …

Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …

“A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter”: Medieval Histories Of Intoxication And Consent, Carissa M. Harris

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay traces medieval representations of intoxication and consent and links them to contemporary cases, including Brock Turner’s 2016 rape trial and the 2017 slew of lawsuits filed against Baylor University. Through an examination of medieval texts from a range of genres, including the Biblical stories of Lot and Noah, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, proverbs, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the 1292 legal case of Isabella Plomet, and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, this essay explores past views of gender, perpetrators, culpability, alcohol, and consent. It argues that victim-blaming those who have been assaulted while intoxicated has …

Madwomen And Resistance: Gender And Self-Harm In Romantic And Victorian Literature, Emily V. Rasch

Honors Theses

Literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was concerned with madness. However, relatively little research has been done to indicate how supposed “madwomen” escaped patriarchal control. This thesis will analyze madwomen from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and will argue that suicide appears in literature as the sole way that “mad” characters can resist patriarchal control. I examine the impact of self-harm and suicide in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman; John Keats’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil”; and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I connect self-harm to the desire to escape patriarchal …

More Than Remembering: How Memoirists Recall And Write The Past, Faith Garner

Honors Theses

Memory is integral to writing memoir, but sometimes, memory fails. How do successful memoirists mine their past for meaning, while staying true to their recollections? In my craft essay, I examine how writers harness the energy of their own explorations of the past. Then, I show how I have used these techniques in my own work. Six personal essays comprise the remainder of my thesis project.

The Craft Of Felt Sense: Writing Sentences To Create Singular Effects, Jacquelyn Leigh Muncy Scott

Honors Theses

Poe defines a successful author of the short story as one who writes to create a singular effect, or felt sense, where a particular emotion is created in the reader. Every event, sentence, and word aids in achieving this specific effect, and if it does not, the author fails. In this craft paper, three craft books are used to examine three collections of short stories, analyzing the use of sentences to create a singular effect. Then, this craft is applied to three original short fiction pieces.

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

"I Wanted Her Dead More Than Voldemort": Examining People's Hatred Of Dolores Umbridge, Jessica Griffeth

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This Plan B thesis explores the question: Why do audience members detest Dolores Umbridge so much? Dolores Umbridge is an incredibly hated woman in the Harry Potter series who has attracted attention from audiences, but Umbridge has not been studied fully by scholarship. When scholars do discuss Umbridge, they typically focus on her cruelty while ignoring her other characteristics. Looking at popular internet audience reactions to Umbridge, however, shows the complexities of Umbridge’s character by revealing what Louise Rosenblatt calls the “transaction” between the audience and the texts, and scholarship has ignored that “transaction.” Using quantitative and qualitative methods to …

"'Who’S There?' 'Nay, Answer Me. Stand And Unfold Yourself' : Attending To Students In Diversified Settings", Naomi C. Liebler

Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Teaching Shakespeare at secondary or undergraduate university levels is remarkably variegated. Students bring their lives and experiences to their understanding, making it an unpredictably rich experience, regardless of the “level” of the class. I aim to tap into what they already know to enable them to find a path for them to forge their own connections. I want them to own what they read, to make it their own.

Science, Poetry, And Defining Life In The Romantic Era: “Life! What Is Life?”, Michelle E. Trantham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

What defines humanity? Is it the soul? The body? In the early nineteenth century, these questions were not purely philosophical. Science, religion, politics, and literature were changing rapidly, and the question of “What is Life?” was central to the public and private pursuit of knowledge. One way to track the evolution of the question through the Romantic period is to look at the work of Dr. John Hunter, the originator of ‘vitalism’, which was the subject in the infamous the Lawrence-Abernethy debates. The question of life, and the nature of life, permeated the literary, scientific, and cultural spheres, influencing Romanticism …

The Implementation Of A Systematic Method For Identifying The Root Causes Of Manufacturing Negative Process Yield In A North American Fastener Manufacturing Facility, Bradley J. Venable

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Negative process yield is an unexplained expense that does have a significant impact on profits. As like most other manufacturing processes, there are multiple processing operations that a finished good can be exposed to during the course of the entire process. Negative process yield can occur during these known operations but without accurate reporting and data collection, it becomes a moot point. In order to investigate this unexplainable phenomena properly, understanding of what could possibly cause this from occurring must be achieved. In the case of the North American fastener manufacturing plant, missing pieces that are not accounted for through …