English Language and Literature Commons^™

Witness: The Modern Writer As Witness, Alex Berge, Andrew Bertaina, Andrew Collard, Miranda Dennis, Andrea Eberly, Emily Greenberg, Day Heisinger-Nixon, Sarah Helen, L.A. Johnson, Anne Liu Kellor, Mary Kuryla, Emmy Newman, Lara Palmqvist, Mary Lane Potter, David Lerner Schwartz, Michelle Sharpe, Nina Sudhakar, Kristina Ten, Eric Tran, Pamela Yenser

Witness Magazine

Editor's Note [Excerpt] Magic can mean many different things, especially for writers. Magic can be an illusion, a sleight of hand designed to trick onlookers into believing the impossible. Or magic can be a supernatural force in a world of harsh reality, a set of beliefs that sits just outside the realms of organized religion and advanced technology. Wizards and demons, Las Vegas entertainers and houngans --they all practice a kind of sorcery. For poets and prose writers, though, magic affords an opportunity for us to stretch the limitations of the physical world in search of new themes, settings, and …

“‘Faith’ Is A Fine Invention”: Emily Dickinson’S Critique Of Empiricism, Harrison Dietzman

Faculty Publications - Department of English

In opposition to those who might read Emily Dickinson’s opus as emblematic of nineteenth-century empiricism, or at least the work of a poet enthralled with and enchanted by modern science, a close examination of Dickinson’s poems demonstrates her attention to the constructedness of empirical science. The roots of Dickinson’s examination of empiricism lies in her exploration of selfhood and the relationship between experience and knowledge. As such, Dickinson’s critique of empiricism is contained within a critique of secularizing visions of human autonomy. In a few isolated poems Dickinson explicitly addresses empiricism, but on the whole she prefers to approach empiricism …

Etymology Of “Ragtime”: Role Of “Tag, Rag, And “Bobtail” (The Rabble) And The 19th Century “Fancy Rag Balls”, Fred Hoeptner

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

Despite abundant speculation about the etymology of “rag” in “ragtime” since the emergence of ragtime music into popular consciousness in 1896, a convincing solution has remained elusive. As OED3 sums up the situation (rag, n. meaning #5): “Origin uncertain and disputed.”

But at least some new insight may now be possible. The present study is the first to use digitized newspaper archives to track “rag” and “ragtime” from their sources to full maturity, and the following picture emerges:

1. The starting point is tag, rag, and bobtail “the common herd, the rabble”; the word appears in OED3 under bob-tail.
2. Rag as …

Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger

English Honors Projects

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a …

How Cypress Tress Become Mangroves: An Analysis Of The Works Of Amitav Ghosh And Climate Change, Alyssa D. Dobson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Yahooskin (Beatty, Oregon), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although it is clear that the term “Yahooskin” is not a native term (likely originating from the Sahaptin (Ichiskiin) language), it has been in general use as a reference to disparate Northern Paiute bands (e.g., YapatɨkaɁa, ‘wild carrot-eaters’) around any of several lake basins of south-central Oregon, including the Silver, Summer, and Abert lakes, and the Warner Valley region. These bands were brought together after the formation of the Klamath Reservation and the signing of the treaty at Yainax in 1864. The “Yahooskin Band of Snake Indians,” as they had come to be called, were most closely tied to the …

Kuiyuidɨkadɨ (Pyramid Lake Reservation, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Pyramid Lake Reservation is about an hour’s drive northeast of Reno, Ne- vada. As such, it lies close to the major isogloss boundary that separates Oregon Northern Paiute (including Bannock) from Nevada Northern Paiute (Paviotso). The lake, a remnant of ancient Lake Lahontan, is home to the endemic Lahontan cutthroat trout, known locally as kuiyui, and is a popular fishery.

Toidɨkadɨ (Cattail-Eaters) Of Stillwater Marsh, Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wuzzie George (b. ~1880, d. December 20, 1984) was, by all accounts, a true keeper of traditional knowledge. Over the course of more than three decades, she provided detailed ethnographic information about her people, the Toidɨkadɨ (Cattail-Eaters), for ethnographer Margaret Wheat (1967) and anthropologist and historical linguist Catherine S. Fowler (1992). Wuzzie also had an ongoing working relationship with the intrepid folklorist Sven Liljeblad, as evidenced by this prayer, which she composed for him in Fallon, Nevada, during a time of illness.

Fort Mcdermitt Reservation (Mcdermitt, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The McDermitt reservation straddles the Oregon-Nevada border and is the home of the majority of all remaining first language Northern Paiute speakers. Like the Duck Valley Reservation, it is quite isolated, lying approximately 90 miles northeast of the town of Winnemucca, Nevada (population > 7,000). The following stories are two of the many texts collected in the early 1960s by Sven Liljeblad from Pete Snapp, a fluent speaker from McDermitt. Mr. Snapp was in his early nineties at the time of this recording, which was made on reel-to-reel tape and archived as part of the Sven Liljeblad Collection in the Special …

Duck Valley Reservation (Owyhee, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Shoshone-Paiute community of Duck Valley includes reservation territory that straddles the Idaho-Nevada border. Recordings of the Duck Valley communolect were made at the home of the speaker’s niece in the presence of several extended family members, including speakers, passive bilinguals and non-speakers alike, as well as children. The speaker was 60 years old at the time and clearly enjoyed recounting Coyote stories. That said, a few of the stories were considered by her family to be a bit too lurid to include here.

Northern Paiute Texts: Introduction, Tim Thornes, Maziar Toosarvandani

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This volume of Northern Paiute texts is the result of continued collaborative relationships between members of several Northern Paiute (Western Numic; Uto-Aztecan) speech communities and two linguists who have nearly 30 years of combined experience working on the language. The resulting documentary resource provides varied samples of naturally occurring speech—narratives recorded and analyzed by the editors as part of their own fieldwork as well as materials recorded of earlier generations of speakers. In one case, materials from three generations of speakers from the same speech community are provided. By providing access in a single volume to previously inaccessible texts from …

The Adventures Of Mousy And Jasper, James Schantz

English Senior Capstone

In my senior project I wanted to explore the world of children's literature that is meant specifically to be listened to. The project is in audio-script form and it is the tale of a dog and a mouse who become unlikely friends, share a nemesis in an evil cat named Mr. Bojangles, and need each other's help in order to get back home.

Metaphors Of Mental Illness: How Emily Dickinson And Vincent Van Gogh Understood And Expressed Their Personal Battles With Depression, Samantha Moss

English Senior Capstone

Both the poet Emily Dickinson and the artist Vincent van Gogh wrestled with mental illness in their adult lives. There are indications that both suffered from major depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder. Both lived in a time when there was no real understanding of mental illness and there was no language through which people could interpret and explain their pain. Dickinson used her poetry to create metaphors, metaphors centered around death and winter. Van Gogh created nature metaphors – and some centered around dying like Dickinson’s – in his paintings and in letters to his brother. These metaphors …

Searching For Understanding: How Hamlet And Frankenstein Inform Humanity’S Response To Trauma, Jonathan Knippenberg

English Senior Capstone

By looking at trauma narratives we are able to learn about the nature of trauma as well as the effective and ineffective ways it has been handled by literary characters. Hamlet by William Shakespeare tells of the young prince Hamlet who, in repressing his trauma, unwittingly falls victim to repeating the anger reinforced by his father’s ghost while he continually allows no one to see anything but the mask of his antic disposition. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley portrays the turmoil between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster—a rejected creation scorned by a tortured creator—which not only consumes them but also tears …

The End Of Art Is Peace: Memory, Witness, And Restorative Imagination In Anna Burns’S Milkman And The Poetry Of Seamus Heaney, Sarah Davis

English Senior Capstone

Northern Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Anna Burns both explore the suffocation and trauma of living in civil conflict as informed by their time spent living in Belfast during the Troubles. In her 2018 novel Milkman, Burns depicts a beleaguered community that has succumbed to hypervigilance and learned helplessness. Burns’s characters try desperately to establish normality by twisting memory and refusing to witness the present, resulting in an inability to imagine a future unmarred by violence. In his poetry collections North and Field Work, Heaney wrestles with the responsibility of an artist to such a community, to his art, and …

Broadening The Feminist Ideal: Female Expression In Kate Chopin’S The Awakening And Kathryn Stockett’S The Help, Hannah Funk

English Senior Capstone

Feminist criticism can be difficult to navigate, especially given the sociopolitical contexts connected to feminism all throughout history. In literature, idealized feminist characterizations can often leave less dramatically feminist characters behind, relegating them to a category of characters who are “not feminist enough.” But it is important to understand that these characters are still just as validly feminist as their dramatically feminist counterparts. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, readers see wonderful examples of women who operate in feminist ways, some within the roles that traditional feminist criticism would see as roles which trap them and …

Learning Or Not Learning To Overcome Trauma: Jane Eyre And A Farewell To Arms, Jessica Cutter

English Senior Capstone

In the novels Jane Eyre and A Farewell to Arms, Charlotte Brontë and Ernest Hemingway both display characters that have experienced devastating trauma. In both novels, female characters demonstrate strength and mental support that their male counterparts are unable to reciprocate because they cannot move on from their past. Jane learns that letting go of past trauma will lead to her growth and success in life, which ultimately influences Mr. Rochester to be like Jane, and the novel ends with them happy and mentally healthier. On the other hand, Henry can’t let go of his past traumas and leans heavily …

Seeking The Tomato: Encounters With Beauty In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God And Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Jessica Dundas

English Senior Capstone

When Zadie Smith was first given a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, she was reluctant to read it. But once she did, she found herself captivated by the beauty protagonist Janie Crawford is seeking and encountering throughout the novel. Later in Smith’s own novel On Beauty the protagonist Howard Belsey becomes the inverse of Janie as he intellectually rejects the idea of beauty and ignores the encounters he has with it. Thus while Janie finds that beauty decenters her from thinking herself the center of her world, Howard stubbornly refuses to allow himself to be …

Authenticity In Glimpses: Framing Art And Identity In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse And Zadie Smith’S Swing Time, Taylor Budzikowski

English Senior Capstone

In their novels To the Lighthouse and Swing Time, Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith communicate that art frames reality for those who choose to pay attention. Art provides a glimpse of permanence and stability for Lily Briscoe, a young woman who paints her reality while visiting Isle of Skye, and Zadie Smith’s unnamed narrator, a young woman who contemplates her mixed-race background through the lens of dance in London and Africa. These observations encourage Lily and the narrator to consider the perspectives of others amid their own visions. Gradually, Lily and the narrator find and foster their identities by sorting …

Global Language Variation In Online Writing Instructional Spaces: English As A Lingua Franca Among Global Participants In A Massive Open Online Course, Angela May Dadak

English Theses & Dissertations

Two vectors of the internationalization of US higher education—online courses and student diversity—intersect at a point where a broad mix of culturally and linguistically diverse students enroll in online courses, including writing courses. This study applies an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) lens to examine language in an online writing environment in order to understand how the participants use their linguistic resources to communicate in English across varieties and around the world. This study employs discourse analysis to two discussion forums from a US-based composition MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). More than three quarters of the MOOC participants came …

What We Do Not Perceive When We Perceive It, Hannah Jane Trammell

English Theses & Dissertations

The thesis herein attempts to traverse, overcome, and, ultimately subsume back into the conventions of such genres as science-fiction, fabulism, surrealism, romance, horror, and speculative fiction. The primary tool used for this purpose is a great bag of hot, sparking meat caught between two ears and a thick skull. A few notebooks, pens, and a laptop might also have helped in this pursuit. The stories and poems contained herein are works of fiction inspired by non-fictional systems of feeling. Using all the tools given to me by my professors and the craft and theory books I read during my coursework …

Flood, Elizabeth Haley

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Women’S Disabled Bodies In The Novels Of Agatha Christie, Victoria Pfeifer

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Narrative Of Courtship: Literary And Biological Constructions And Their Impact On Women, Drew Harris 20

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Anne Frank In Translation, Emily Cluff

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Andersen Vs. Schaffert: Mermaids As A Symbol For Experience's Relationship To Gender, Krista Butts

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Peter, Pan, And Persephone: Keepers Of The Mythical Wild, Noelle Conder

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Caught In The Middle: Existentialism In A Contemporary Fantasy, Hannah Depauw 20

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

An Architectural Reading Of Kristeva, Woolf, And Shakespeare, Bailey M. Graham

English Literature Student Projects and Publications

Julia Kristeva’s seminal theories of the signifying process and the abject illuminate texts that challenge readers’ expectations. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and linguistic ideas build analytic links between texts as seemingly disparate as Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and William Shakespeare’s late 1590s play Titus Andronicus. In this portfolio, I will apply Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic to elucidate the multiple meanings of nature in Woolf’s Orlando, as well as utilize Kristeva’s notion of the abject to analyze the narrative breakdown of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In doing so, I will trace the development of Kristeva’s ideas …