English Language and Literature Commons^™

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …

Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the last twenty years, specifically with the summer 2002 issue of Social Text edited by Dr. Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism has become a serious focus for academic inquiry. For people familiar with the term, Afrofuturism is presented as a movement borne of our contemporary moment. However, this dissertation explores the ways in which Afrofuturism is actually a cornerstone for both African American literature and the struggle for civil/human rights. I do this by exploring the following questions: How does the enslavement of African/ African Americans and its aftermath play out in early African American literature? How do African Americans writers …

Chicano English At The Dinner Table, Elena Silva

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Dinner talk, or dinnertime conversations, have been investigated and studied by many scholars such as Blum-Kukla (1997) Ochs (1995), Haesook (2006), Arcidiacono (2009), and Herot (2002). Dinnertime conversations are the locus of family interactions and language socialization (Ochs 1986) in that they represent recurring activities or speech events in which all or most family members participate. Conversations at the dinner table serve as a daily (or near daily) forum for family members to interact and converse with each other and in so doing, instantiate their identities as parents, siblings, and children and express their stances.

While dinner talk has been …

Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia

Publications and Research

This article locates Fantomina in a literary tradition that proposes all-female communities, such as convents and monasteries, as liberating and empowering spaces. I argue that the novella implies a virtual community rather than an actual one, as the heroine collectively embodies many different women, all of distinct social ranks: the heroine is both one woman and a variety of women brought together under the auspices of a single body, much the way discrete individuals together compose a community. Then, too, Beauplaisir, the object of the heroine’s desire, treats all the personae the same, no matter their social station. This emphasis …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Returning To Imaginative Literary Texts In The Composition Classroom: A Case Study Of Greek Literature And Their Potential In First-Year Writing, Esther M. Gabay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The basis for the argument—a return to literature in first-year college composition—stems from a composition debate that emerged in the 90s that suggested instructors of composition refrain from using literature in their writing courses. The thesis proposes that literature, specifically Greek literature, be re-purposed and integrated back into first-year writing college courses. Chapter one contextualizes the historical debate and proposes imaginative literary texts return to first-year writing. The second chapter presents cross-disciplinary advantages, looking closely at the value of teaching literature in composition classes as a tool for building prior knowledge, developing cross-disciplinary insights and access into other disciplinary conversations, …

Impacts Of Positioning, Power, And Resistance On Efl Learners’ Identity Construction Through Classroom Interaction: A Perspective From Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis, Wenwen Tian, Remart Padua Dumlao

The Qualitative Report

In this study, we explored how positioning, power, and resistance might have possible impacts on learners’ identity construction. We conducted this study in a 6-month language and culture program from August 2018 to January 2019 involving one teacher and 24 English major undergraduate students at a public university in Thailand. Using Kumaravadivelu’s (1999) Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis (CCDA) as an analytical framework and Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis approach to analysing data , we found three themes that illustrate how participants demonstrated positioning, power, and resistance: (a) learners’ choice of code as passive resistance, (b) circulating power in interaction …

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

"The Sweet And The Bitter": Death And Dying In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings (2018) By Amy Amendt-Raduege; And Fantasies Of Time And Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien (2020) By Anna Vaninskaya, Kris Swank

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book reviews by Kris Swank of "The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (2018) by Amy Amendt-Raduege; and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien (2020) by Anna Vaninskaya

Bombadil And Bible Stories: A Biblical Function For Tom Bombadil Within Frodo’S Quest, Clive Shergold

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay probes the purpose of the encounter between Tom Bombadil and Frodo and his friends, within the overall narrative of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It asks: Why do the hobbits encounter Tom at this point in their journey? Why does Tom rescue, care for, equip and send them on? Why does Tom not accompany them further, and why does he never meet them again? Then it proposes an explanation based on comparisons with Bible stories that include theophanies and angelic appearances, and shown to provide answers to the questions, and suggestions for Tom Bombadil’s wider …

The Nature Of Government And Civic Responsibility In Herman Melville’S Billy Budd, Sailor, Nirvani V. Anoop Ms.

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis examines how Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor raises destabilizing questions about the function of government, its manipulation of the governed through institutions such as the law, education, and religion, as well as its infringement on the rights of the individual in various, often subtle ways. The power relations aboard the British naval warship, Bellipotent, are explored through a Foucauldian lens, utilizing the ideas Michel Foucault elaborates in his lectures titled, “Governmentality.” How do governments ensure their continued existence as well as obedience from their citizens? How is justice in a society determined? How is one’s identity formed in …

"Strong Female Characters"? An Analysis Of Six Female Fantasy Characters From Novel To Film, Valari Westeren

Honors Projects

This project is twofold. The first section analyzes six female fantasy characters in their literary and filmic incarnations—Dorothy Gale (The Wizard of Oz), Susan Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), Arwen Evenstar (The Lord of the Rings), Princess Buttercup (The Princess Bride), Hermione Granger (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), and Annabeth Chase (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief)—noting adaptational changes made to each and placing the twelve incarnations in conversation with each other. This conversation centers around the concept of the “strong female character,” …

( Dis ) Ability Discourse And The Mediation Of Disabled Identity In Young Adult Literature And Television, Daniel Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

The primary aim of literary (and media) disability studies scholarship has been to examine the rhetorical effects of the various representations of disability that are found throughout literature, television, and other cultural sites of inquiry. The Internet has helped to facilitate this aim, opening these types of discussions to the general public. Social media has given individuals the power, agency, and voice to assert their ideas about disability identity, and (dis)ability (as a system; see Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined) more broadly to the world, and in doing so, has radically altered the author-text-audience relationship. My project examines the authorial choices of …

Engl 110: College Writing (Writing About Memory), Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Open Educational Resources

English 110: Writing about Memory is designed to help students improve critical thinking and writing skills. Fundamentals of academic writing are practiced in relation to the subject of memory examined from historical, philosophical, scientific, psychological, literary, artistic, political, and cultural perspectives.

Waiting For Autistic Superman: On Autistic Representation In Superhero Comics, Robert Rozema

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Climate activist Greta Thunberg recently likened her autism to a “superpower,” invoking a term first used in the American Golden Age comic Supersnipe in 1945. Thunberg’s use of the term superpower, however, is complicated by the way in which superhero comics have historically represented disability in general--and autism in particular. Over the past 30 years, representations of autistic characters in superhero comics have been very rare and mostly wrong, even as autistic presence has increased dramatically in film, television, popular fiction, and other media. This article examines the representation of autistic superheroes, who appear only rarely in superhero comics. As …

Ladies Of The Forest: Melian And Mielikki, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

In this roundtable paper the author compares Melian, the Lady of Doriath, with the mysterious Mielikki of the Kalevala and The Story of Kullervo.

Anatomic By Adam Dickinson, Heather Houser

The Goose

Review of Adam Dickinson's Anatomic.

Melusine, Invisible Leadership And The Future (In The Past), Jan Shaw

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper considers the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine from the late Middle English romance Melusine. By invoking contemporary leadership theory, this paper identifies leadership maneuvers in Melusine that are similar to those often practiced by women today, but the discourses of gender identity then ultimately render Melusine’s leadership invisible, just as leadership discourses today often render female leadership invisible. By uncovering the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine and identifying commonalities with the leadership of women today, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the contemporary problem of the marked …

Some Notes On The Nonexistence Of Wakanda, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Truths And Fabrications Of Sir John Mandeville, Jake Sanborn

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presents a unique and nuanced perspective of the Eastern World during the time of the Crusades. By critically analyzing the still-unknown author’s depictions of the Eastern lands and their peoples, I demonstrate that it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the status of Christianity during the late 14th century. The Travels comments upon the concepts of Eastern religions and cultural practices in a way that is remarkable and surprising — instead of reacting to such topics with hostility or aggression, the likely-Christian author of The Travels is willing to learn from those …

Matrons, Mothers, And Monsters: The Heroine In Beowulf, Grendel, And The Mere Wife, Grace Lucier

College Honors Program

This thesis examines the relationship between gender and heroism in the Beowulf tale and two of its modern retellings. It includes an exploration of the medieval gender roles of the original epic using Seamus Heaney and E. Talbot Donaldson’s translations. This thesis also addresses the ways in which some characters disturb gender binaries and social roles — especially in the case of Grendel’s mother. The second and third chapters focus on two retellings of the Beowulf text respectively: John Gardner’s Grendel , told from the perspective of the monster Grendel; and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife , which is …

Female Torture Poetry: Petrarchan Love And Carpe Diem, Luke C. Widlund

Theses and Dissertations

My MA thesis examines sixteenth and seventeeth-century lyric poetry by the male poets Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell. These poets make use of different lyric genres and forms, including Petrarchan sonnets and carpe diem arguments, to torture the purported female mistresses. A close examination of specific works, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Donne’s “The Apparition”, Carew’s “Song: Persuasion to Enjoy”, and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” demonstrates that they all share a preoccupation with weaponizing poetry in their depiction of mistresses and female lovers in pain and punishment. Poetry functions as a tool for imposing …

More Human Than Human: Artificial People In Literature And Media, Taylor P. Amalfitano

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein over two hundred years ago, many of the main themes of alienation and revenge featured in Shelley’s novel reappear in HBO’s Westworld in 2016. This thesis establishes a genealogy for the stories of artificial people and analyzes the relationship between human beings and artificial life, as it is portrayed in speculative fiction and popular media. The popularity of robots and cyborgs is associated with people’s fear of technology, but their stories are often used as an allegory to explain aspects of the human experience that are unknown or difficult to understand. As artificial intelligence becomes …

An Anthology Of Irish Nationalism: Music, Verse, Speeches, And Interviews Regarding The Betterment Of The State Of Ireland, From The Sixth Century Until The Liberation Of Ireland, Sofia J. Gilmore-Montero

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

When I started this project because in my extensive amount of research into Irish literature, I found that the common theme in many of the works was nationalism and the desire to have a free state. I could not find any books that focused on nationalistic literature over the lengthy history of Ireland, only collections that pertained to a specific time period. This thesis project proposes introductory material and a potential table of contents to an anthology that would be centered around the theme of Irish nationalism in literature between the ninth century and the liberation of Ireland. It covers …

A Story-Centered Approach To Ap English Literature, Curriculum, And Assessment, Christopher L. Mccurry

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Advanced Placement and Literature and Composition is the pinnacle of literary studies in the secondary school classroom. However, the content of the course and its primary mode of assessment equally damage the reputation of literary analysis as a purposeful academic field and threaten to further stigmatize the humanities in a moment when their usefulness is under scrutiny. Students should be shown how stories, and not literature, can be better appreciated in the AP literature classroom through a biocultural, and evolutionary approach to fiction and storytelling.

The Pursuit Of Democracy: The Racial Subject And Sympathy’S Limits In Leaves Of Grass, Aidan Kennelley

University Honors Theses

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has long been celebrated as a great work of American democracy, a work of democratic poetics. Throughout the text, Whitman goes to great lengths to sympathize with as many different sects of American society as possible. But where do his sympathies deserve scrutiny? By analyzing Whitman's relationship to the black, enslaved subject throughout the text, it becomes clear that there are limits to sympathy, and sympathetic intentions can inadvertently inflict violence upon subjugated groups. In turn, it becomes evident that Whitman’s democratic project is much more flawed and complicated than the way it is often …