English Language and Literature Commons^™

A Conceptual Mapping Approach For Presenting A Practical Past: Addressing Responsibility Through Contextualization In Information System Design For The Ward One Mobile Application, Sadia Obaid Khan

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents and documents a model for telling history through technology using the Ward One application for iOS mobile devices as a test site for the idea of conceptual mapping. The historical-information delivery system was created to mobilize the rhetoricity of representation that is a procedural necessity of technological mediation.

The paper begins by explaining the exigence of the app—to tell the history of an African-American community displaced from the land now occupied by the University of South Carolina as a result of racially discriminating housing policies in Columbia, SC and across the United States. It then addresses the …

Beginning At The End: Reimagining The Dissertation Committee, Reimagining Careers, Amy J. Lueck, Beth Boehm

English

In this article, we forward a perspective on interdisciplinarity and diversity that reconsiders the notion of expertise in order to unstick discussions of graduate education reform that have been at an impasse for some fortyfive years. As research problems have become increasingly complex so has demand for scholars who specialize narrowly within a discipline and who understand the importance of contributions from other disciplines. In light of this, we reimagine the dissertation committee as a group of diverse participants from within and beyond the academy who contribute their knowledge and skills to train the next generation of scholars and researchers …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 27, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Zenith on the Liffey: Sinclair Lewis and James Joyce,” by Robert L. McLaughlin, Illinois State University

“Lewis’s Lasting Conocimiento: Ann Vickers in Spain,” by Ralph Goldstein

“Book Burning: Not the Spark of Fascism but the Ashes of Democracy,” by Andrew Stevens, Illinois State University

“What Were They Reading Then?: Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley, 1923,” by Rebecca Pugsley, College of St. Scholastica

“Dorothy Thompson and Her Advice to American Women,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“Why Writer Sinclair Lewis Keeps Paying Dividends from Pittsfield, and Will Forever,” by Larry Parnass, the Berkshire Eagle

Why Do You Want To Teach? Interpreting Stem Pre-Service Teachers' Motivations Through A Semantic Lens, Delaney Holt

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This qualitative study sought to examine the relationship between the motivational profiles that pushed undergraduate STEM pre-service teachers (N = 181) to enter the teaching profession and the word choice used to articulate those motivations. Through the application of a semantically-analytical lens, this study aimed to uncover preliminary patterns that could predict STEM pre-service teachers’ overall commitment levels to the completion of the STEM education major and overall certification. Written responses to the question “Why did you want to become a teacher?” were gathered from a longitudinal survey administered from spring 2011 to fall 2016 as part of the Knowing …

The Power Of Positivity In The #Conservewater Movement On Twitter, Sarah Kubik

English Undergraduate

This poster looks into how authors on social media uses rhetoric to affect the perception and promotion of the #conservewater movement. This study used content analysis and analyzed 100 tweets from the 2018 year looking at who the author of each tweet was, what the tone of the tweet was, the function of the tweet, if there were any attachments and more. The findings gathered were overwhelmingly positive.

Reactions To Highly Publicized Sexual Assault Cases Via Twitter Over Time, Tessa Sulimowicz

English Undergraduate

In public spaces, do reactions to sexual assault cases depict more of a victim blaming or offender blaming attitude? How has that changed over time?

Prior to collecting data, I hypothesized that I would find more Tweets portraying a victim blaming attitude rather than offender blaming. This hypothesis was ultimately derived from the research I did and the other studies I looked at.

Decolonial Potential In A Multilingual Fyc, Cruz Medina

English

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have questioned to what extent the field can be decolonial because of the gatekeeping role that writing plays in the university. This article examines the decolonial potential of implementing multilingual practices in first-year composition (fyc), enacting what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience” by complicating the primacy of English as the language of knowledge-building. I describe a Spanish-English “bilingual” fyc course offered at a private university with a Jesuit Catholic heritage. The course is characterized by a translanguaging approach in which Spanish is presented as a valid language for academic writing. The students’ writing highlights the …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad", Amelia Tomei , '19, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. Learning Goals. Students will: understand how the narrator guides reader's interpretation of the story; understand how to read dialogue and how it contributes to characterization; explore the complexity of the themes present in the story and the characters Whitehead has created; understand how to annotate key references to things outside of the text and apply these back to the main text. Necessary Preparation: The teacher should have familiarized him or herself with Whitehead's The Underground Railroad before the first lesson. It is also important that the …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Ruby Guerrero , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to high school grades 11-12, community college, and/or college and university students. This lesson is planned for three weeks and three times a week, but I recommend that teachers revise these plans as needed in order for the lesson to fit their class schedules. Learning Goals: students will be able to identify stereotypes of migrants and refuse to accept these as proper understandings of people; students will be able to reclaim their identities using the novel as a basis for this outcome; students will learn to identify the different types of narration, how …

Soul-Error, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

Freud, in his essay on The Uncanny, explores a spatial confusion: a state of mind in which one sees "out there" something palpably shaped from "in here." Freud's most striking vignette in the essay rehearses how, some years earlier, he found himself wandering through an unknown Italian village, looking for the train station. He perused his map, made the appropriate right and left turns--and found himself in the red-light district. Here, Weinstein returns repeatedly to the traffic that unpredictably occurs between us ("in here") and the world ("out there"). Because we are endowed with stunningly intricate minds, we move through …

Intentionally So: Morality In Children’S Literature, Anna Edwards

Honors Theses

There are tales that follow us from childhood and into adult life: they take the shape of children’s stories. Within these books there are moral lessons to be learned; often times these lessons are communicated through enchanting characters and strange settings. However, in addition to the morality that can be found in the pages of these texts, I believe there is also a morality surrounding their creation. More specifically, the way their authors approach their writing. By looking at the two works The Complete Adventures of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, a …

Misreading The Hybrid Face: The Alienation Of Performed And Authentic Self In Danzy Senna’S Caucasia And Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, William E. Landers

Honors Theses

Race is epistemological. It shapes worldviews, conceptions of self, and interactions with society. It defines who belongs in the national community and who counts as fully human. The myth of whiteness as a homogenizing and nativist identity creates false personas around and within racialized others. These personas define non-white populations according to exclusionary stereotypes. These stereotypes, in turn, separate populations based on appearance and cultural practice. This thesis applies Critical Race Theory and comparative racialization tools to examine the historical implications of race on the conception of an authentic, or internally true, identity. These implications are illustrated by the dynamics …

Law Library Blog (April 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

“All I Wanted To Know Was How To Live In It”: Rituals And The Quest For Meaning In Hemingway And Faulkner, Marissa Ortosky

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

2019 Greenleaf Review (No. 32), Sigma Tau Delta

The Greenleaf Review

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (Sp19) Coli 214b--Literature & Society: "A.I. And Other Radical Humanisms In Cyberpunk And Science Fiction", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

As that which we call “technology” continues to evolve as both concept and practice, we discover ever more inventive ways to answer its call, and science fiction seems to serve as a universal standpoint from which global societies manage to confront, question, and reimagine the nature of our shared humanity as a radically technical relation. While the growing social pervasiveness of artificial intelligence and the attendant encoded transformations of “the human” appear, together, to form a relatively absolute horizon of political thinking, social agency, and aesthetic experience, it seems certain that our current crisis also offers us …

“Thanks To ‘X’ For Beta-Ing!”: Fan Fiction Beta Readers In The Writing Center, Regan Levitte

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, I pose the question: what can we learn from fan fiction beta reading practices that can be applied to the writing center? Through interviews of writing center consultants who have had beta reading experiences, I consider what collaborative practices they have transferred into their writing center consultant skill sets. This project records how their affinity groups supported their literacy habits, and which dynamics of power and embodiment meant the most to them in these two discourse communities.

Combining historic texts on what ideal writing center pedagogy looks like, I explore how writers could interact with acknowledgement of …

Deforming Normalcy: Deformity And Disability In William Blake's Art, Seolha Lee

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines William Blake’s verbal and visual art from the perspective that disability is a physical and mental condition that is viewed by society as deviant. Prior to modern conceptions of disability in Britain, the deviation was labeled as “deformity.” This thesis demonstrates various ways in which Blake illustrates deformity, and through this, prefigures the modern sense of disability in his art. I argue that Blake’s representation of deformity in his poetry and drawings is intended to reveal the precariousness of the “normal” human body and inform the reader and viewer that normality is an illusion. The age of …

Englands Happie Queene: Female Rulers In Early English History, Emily Benes

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This paper examines the historical records and later literature surrounding three early mythic and historical British queens: Albina, mythic founder of Albion; Cordelia, pre-Roman queen regnant in British legend; and Boudica, the British leader of a first-century CE rebellion against the Romans. My work focuses on who these queens were, what powers they were given, and the mythos around them. I examine when they appear in the historical record and when their stories are expanded upon, and how those stories were influenced by the political culture of England through the early seventeenth century. In particular, I examine English attitudes toward …

Troll-In-Chief: Donald Trump, Antinomic Rhetoric, And The Short-Circuiting Of Civic Discourse, Joseph Wayne Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. No aspect of the campaign was more remarkable than Trump’s rhetoric, which ranged from the candid and unexpected to the crude and incendiary. Now, two years later, his rhetoric—and the reasons for its widespread appeal—remain largely opaque, even under examination from proto-fascist or populist lenses. I seek for a partial account of Trump’s rhetoric using the concept of antinomic rhetoric coupled with the widespread popular perception of him as similar to an internet troll. In short, I believe it is his violation of the conventional standards (nomoi) …

No Home But The World: Forced Migration And Transnational Identity, Justice Hagan

Dissertations (1934 -)

In my dissertation, I investigate how 20th and 21st century literature depicts new transnational identities that challenge the conventional understanding that belonging and identity are routed primarily through the nation-state. Specifically, I focus on those narratives within immigrant literature that address the lived experiences and consequent identity formations of forced migrants: individuals, families, and communities displaced from their country or region of origin and forced to inhabit spaces with which they often have no prior familiarity. This literature challenges the idea that a spectrum of lived experiences can be restricted to a codified US nationalism and contained within an identity …

The City As A Trap: 20th And 21st Century American Literature And The American Myth Of Mobility, Andrew Joseph Hoffmann

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation reads twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. multicultural literatures, women’s literature, and science-fiction film and literature to identify a tradition of literary representation of long-standing patterns of economic entrapment in American cities.” I argue that the capitalist ideologies of opportunity and spatial, economic, and social mobility associated with American cities have been largely false promises, and that literature provides an avenue to investigate the ideological matrices and cultural narratives that American capitalism uses to situate bodies where it needs them, primarily in urban centers. I claim that this entrapment remains more or less a constant in American cities despite …

Reading Multicultural Novels Melancholically: Racial Grief And Grievance In The Joy Luck Club, Beloved, And Anil's Ghost, Jennifer Arias Sweeney

Dissertations (1934 -)

The teaching of multicultural literature in English classrooms has focused on a liberal rather than critical approach. The liberal multicultural approach focuses on pluralism, which is actually a form of assimilationism that denies ethnic difference and silences racial conflict. This silencing produces a new kind of racial grief where ethnic and racial identities are ignored and the expectation is for racialized figures to get over their losses. I believe we should focus on a critical multiculturalism that critiques assimilationism and recognizes racial grief. I assert that English instructors should teach an interpretive strategy called reading melancholically. I am defining melancholia …

The Fantastic And The First World War, Brian Kenna

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study argues that the First World War was a key event in the formation of the modern fantasy genre. It asserts that academic literary criticism formed around a set of assumptions that left it ill-equipped to conceptualize the fantastic as a modern mode of writing. By studying veteran English authors of World War I, including Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, and J. R. R. Tolkien, it identifies the fantastic as an essential means of representing and responding to a set of events that were experienced as incomprehensible, even impossible. Because it offered a safe means of engaging the events of …

Flappers And Gibson Girls: Faulkner’S Perspective On The Feminine Ideal, Rachel Schratz

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Yesterday’S Darkness: Spenser, Conrad, And Empire, Marten Frazier

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

College, Career, And Community Writer’S Program (C3wp) Data-Driven Reports Of Literacy Growth, Kathy J. Kurtze

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Through the implementation of mini-units in from the C3WP, a teacher demonstrates that routine argument writing leads to great gains in argument writing literacy.

Sand, Water, Salt: Managing The Elements In Literature Of The American West, 1880-1925, Jada Ach

Theses and Dissertations

Sand, Water, Salt focuses on Progressive Era American literature that explores the theme of land management set in the so-called wasteland spaces of the arid deserts, semi- arid high plains, and Pacific Ocean. The rhetoric of turn-of-the-century land managers, engineers, and developers insisted that humans and their environments remained separate, thus affording humans the ability to control land from a safe distance. However, the works I examine in my project demonstrate that even thoroughly regulated environments remain lively and beyond total control. My project archive, which includes Progressive Era fiction, memoirs, irrigation maps, aerial photographs, dry farming manifestos, and other …

The Warped One: Nationalist Adaptations Of The Cuchulain Myth, Martha J. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I trace the use of the mythic Irish hero Cuchulain by early Irish nationalists. From 1878 to 1939, Standish James O’Grady, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats employed this figure for specific political and cultural agendas. Cuchulain makes a fitting symbol for the “poet warrior” stereotype that was purposely and incidentally cultivated during the cultural nationalist phase of the Irish Literary Revival, when writers were beginning to explore the Cuchulain myth to demonstrate cultural and linguistic ideals. Nationalists found in Cuchulain a symbol that could tie the cultural to the political and the political to the …

A Portrait Of Freedom: A Bakhtinian Interpretation Of Henry James' The Portrait Of A Lady, Bryan J. Richardson

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Few issues in the Jamesian corpus have been more controversial than Isabel Archer’s decision to return to her cruel husband Gilbert Osmond at the end of The Portrait of a Lady. While critics have often thought of Isabel’s decision as either unrealistic, unjustifiable, or misguided, her choice becomes more rational when viewed within the context of a Bakhtinian polyphonic novel. By seeing the novel as a free-flowing novel of voices about the nature of freedom, Isabel’s choice can be explained as holding true to her belief that “freedom” means holding steadfast to one’s responsibilities, a conclusion she reaches by synthesizing …