English Language and Literature Commons^™

Community Through Commonality: Growth Beyond The Academic While In College, Lekesha Parkman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

I’ve drawn on the knowledge I have gained while attending The University of Akron to complete this project. Before I became a student, I carried myself differently but in my years here I have grown in a variety of areas and have also had the privilege of seeing some of my classmates grow in similar ways. My project is multifaceted and each piece is necessary to the other components. It consists of an essay, interviews, photography and full size portraits. During this process I hoped to convey an appreciation for people and their experiences. The participants included in my project …

Front Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Front matter for Writing Center Journal 40.3.

Vampire Narratives: Looking At Queer-Centric Experiences In Comparison To Hetero-Centric Norms In Order To Model A New Queer Vampiric Experience, Marah Heikkila

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines vampire narratives such as Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Gilda Stories, and Fledgling using queer and sexuality studies frameworks to look at salient patterns in the texts. The project focuses on how gender performances take place in the text, what the performances mean, and what the implications of them are. In addition to gender performance, in the thesis, I also look at how vampire narratives influence and transform binaries related to gender and sexuality. Furthermore, while popular narratives such as Twilight are fan favorites, there are …

From The Field: Using A Simple Guide To Help Students Write Better Abstracts., Rochelle H. Holm, Anna Karin Roo

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) often write abstracts for research assignments but may not understand the purpose of an abstract. This paper presents the pilot of a simple guide for writing abstracts which gave student support to two undergraduate Malawian ELL students for their undergraduate research assignment. The two students and the instructor found the handout was helpful for the students to develop technical writing skills for the abstracts.

Demonstratives In Nsélišcn ‘Montana Salish’, Aspen A. Decker

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a detailed analysis of the Nsélišcn ‘Montana Salish’ demonstrative system. I propose that there are three features encoded in the demonstratives that I examined in this thesis: (i) proximity of the speaker in relation to the referent, (ii) common ground between the speaker and addressee, and (iii) visibility of the referent. I further propose that the Nsélišcn demonstrative system distinguishes three degrees of proximity: proximal, medial, and distal. Nsélišcn is a member of the Southern Interior branch of the Salishan language family. The data analyzed in this thesis was collected from native Nsélišcn speakers.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 24, 2022, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Desperate, Exploited, And Abandoned: Laborers In "Life In The Iron-Mills" And Today, Danielle Durning

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Beasts And Bestiality, Deities And Deification: Boethius’ The Consolation Of Philosophy In Milton's Comus, Bret Van Den Brink

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Milton’S Cardinal Directions Symbolism In Paradise Lost, Micah Gill

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Milton And Radical Female Prophets: Millenarianism, Readership, And Poetics, Bosik Kim

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways in which John Milton and three radical female prophets, Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Dorothy White, utilize literary genres and prophetic forms to build readerships that are favorable to their millennial visions in the 1640s and 1660s. By analyzing their literary strategies to appropriate the idea of the millennium to call for a national renewal through a combination of historicist and formalist approaches, this dissertation seeks to redress critical neglect over how their poetics serves to build pro-republican readerships that advocate their revolutionary causes. More specifically, it examines their development of a plain poetics which …

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Back Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Back Matter for Writing Center Journal 40.3.

Does Peer-To-Peer Writing Tutoring Cause Stress? A Multi-Institutional Rad Study, Matthew Nelson, Kathleen Weaver, Sam Deges, Pornchanok Ruengvirayudh, Savannah Garcia, Sarah Dunn

The Writing Center Journal

Writing center literature often notes the stress and anxiety of students as a special concern for peer writing tutors, and tutor training manuals offer advice for tutors on how to manage student writers’ anxiety and stress in sessions. Few writing center sources, however, examine the stress/anxiety tutors may experience as a result of their work in the writing center, despite increasing interest in emotions and emotional labor in writing centers. This multi-institutional study examines whether peer writing tutors experience increased stress/anxiety while tutoring. Using a mixed-methods approach combining both surveys and physiological data (salivary cortisol levels controlled against days when …

Meet The Tutors: Student Expectations, Tutor Perspectives, And Some Recommendations For Sharing Information About Tutors Online, Jessica Robbins, Jaclyn M. Wells

The Writing Center Journal

This article presents findings from an IRB-approved study about tutors’ online information on writing center websites, scheduling systems, and social media. The study used surveys to investigate students’ responses to tutors’ online information and focus groups to investigate tutors’ rationale for the information they shared. While many researchers have studied how writing centers are presented online, little research considers how tutors are represented. The authors argue that such representation merits attention, as tutor profiles can affect students’ comfort with the writing center staff and their microdecisions about who to see and how to interact with them (Salem, 2016). The authors …

Multidisciplinary Staffing In A Graduate Writing Center: Making Writing Labor Visible, Valued, And Shared, Nancy Welch, Diana Hackenburg, Leigh Ann Holterman, Judith Keller, Seth Orman, Vanesa Liliana Perillo, Rebecca Stern, Ashley Waldron

The Writing Center Journal

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic …

Back Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Back Matter for WCJ 40.2.

Review: Queerly Centered: Lgbtqia Writing Center Directors Navigate The Workplace, Tyler Martinez

The Writing Center Journal

Dr. Travis Webster’s monograph reports on qualitative research conducted into the working lives of 20 LGBTQIA-identifying writing center directors. From those interviews, Webster identifies three features of LGBTQIA writing center administrative labor: the unique capital with which their identities equip them, the activist labor that their identities call them to perform, and tensions between their labor and identities. He calls on writing center professionals and higher education administrators to become accomplices in the struggle against workplace injustices, moving beyond allyship that is all too often based in kind words rather than sustained action. The insights available in this book are …

Corporate Persons, Collective Responsibility, And The Literary Imagination, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay examines the contributions of Lisa Siraganian's Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2021) to our understanding of the historical development and philosophical underpinning of United States corporate law as well as to broader studies of law and literature. The first part of the essay considers Siraganian's analysis of problems related to corporate agency, intention, and responsibility. The second part considers the book's implications for other types of collective social entities. In particular, the essay reads Ida Fink's The Table (1970) and Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust (1975) through the lens of Siraganian's study, examining their treatment of the challenges …

Review Of Female Desire In Chaucer’S “Legend Of Good Women” And Middle English Romance, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Anthology Versus Miscellany: John Shirley's Scribal Agency And The Fantasy Of Origins In The Medieval Compilation, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

In Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.20, John Shirley offers a famously enigmatic rubric to his copy of Chaucer's Complaint of Venus. He cites Chaucer as the translator of the piece and notes, correctly, that Oton de Granson composed the English poem's original. He then claims that Chaucer's poem is describing a court scandal: an adulterous affair between John Holland, Earl of Huntington, and Isabel of York, daughter of King Pedro of Castile and sister-in-law to John of Gaunt. Shirley's rubrics thus appear to construct a very loose Anglo-Iberian connection for Chaucer's translation of Granson from French to English, so …

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …

Angelic And Demonic Womanhood: The Provocative Power Of Convergent Identities In Dickens And Eliot, Mackenzie Clinger

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Best Books Of The Past 20 Years For Ages 3-6, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

Ages 3-6

Selecting books for preschoolers and beginning readers that engage their attention while teaching values, can be an elusive task. We have chosen some titles that that will cause giggles of amusement, some that may bring wrinkles of concentration to little brows, and others that may raise questions for them to ask adults. All are well-written.

Title reviews are taken from See Me Shine: Developing Character Through Books: Ages 3-6

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

Gambling: The Dialogue Of Excess In Lanval And The Franklin’S Tale, Fanrui Shao

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Marie de France’s Lanval and Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale are two medieval stories based on the Breton form of poetry called the lai. Both texts focus on rash actions, in particular thoughtless utterance, committed by virtuous foreigners, and the consequences that ensue. On the surface, the outsiders suffer xenophobia and the disfavor of the local patriarchy. But their true problem is the “excess” that they carry with them. Communities censor the circulation of this excess, i.e., all people, objects and relationships that either come from outside or deviate from local norms. Reading excess in these tales through the lens …

English Absolute Clauses In Context Of Fiction: The Study Of Unaugmented And Augmented Absolute Clauses In Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone And Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, Chayapol Khaphaeng

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigates the reasons for the different frequencies of unaugmented and the augmented absolutes. It also presents in-depth analyses on their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects in the context of fiction. The data were collected from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the first two books of the bestselling Harry Potter series. The findings of the study reveal that syntax, semantics, and pragmatics play an interrelated role in determining the way the absolute clauses appear in fiction. Syntactically, the structure of both unaugmented and augmented absolute clauses, with the majority of …

The Use Of Portfolio In Assessing English Writing Ability Of Thai Undergraduate Students, Kritsada Punyapratheep

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This research study aimed to (1) develop the criteria of the portfolio assessment in assessing English writing ability, (2) document the progresses of the students’ English writing ability by using portfolio assessment, and (3) investigate the perceptions toward the use of portfolio assessment in assessing English writing ability in a classroom-based setting of Thai EFL undergraduate students. The 25 first-year students who had enrolled in an English foundation course offered at a public university were the participants. These participants completed two types of essays, which comprised eight drafts in total for compiling the portfolios. Reflective journals, a perception questionnaire, a …