English Language and Literature Commons^™

Young Adult And Canonical Literature Instruction In The High School Classroom: Assessing Students’ Reading Interest, Alexis Yang

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

In the high school English classroom, classic novels are taught as cornerstones of the curriculum. Although these canonical works such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) are revered for their literary merit, students often find them boring and skim through the readings or decline to read altogether. Young adult literature (YAL), a genre written for teens, may be an effective genre to teach in high school to boost students’ reading interest. This study aims to determine how teaching young adult literature in the high school classroom, as opposed to canonical works, might affect …

Diversifying Knowledge: Presenting And Applying A Framework For Inclusive Graduate Program Websites, Jamal-Jared Alexander, Hannah L. Stevens, Rebecca Walton

English Student Research

This paper reports our experience improving the inclusivity of Utah State University’s (USU) Technical Communication and Rhetoric (TCR) graduate program’s online materials. We report outcomes and implications of a 20-hour project in which Stevens applies aspects of an analytical framework developed by Alexander. In addition to the nine-tactic framework introduced in this report, readers may find value in four takeaways we share, based on our experience applying the framework.

Cultivating Ethics In The Peer Review Process, Rachel Welton Bryson, Sam Clem

English Student Research

After describing the content and implementation of an anti-racist scholarly review training informed by recent scholarship in technical communication (TC), the authors reflect on an unanticipated outcome of that training: a participant using language from the training in an attempt to silence an author they were reviewing. We analyze this experience through a framework of modern virtue ethics scholarship and explore ways to cultivate more ethical peer review practices. Drawing upon elements of ethical self-cultivation articulated by Vallor, we use concepts of moral habituation, relational understanding, and reflective self-examination to understand how to cultivate more ethical, reflexive peer review processes.

Tolkien, Race, And Racism In Middle-Earth (2022) By Robert Stuart, Dimitra Fimi

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Dimitra Fimi, of Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth (2022) by Robert Stuart

American Becoming : Poetics, Space, And Race In The Travel Narratives Of Herman Melville And Jack Kerouac, Yun Song

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

This dissertation examines the travel narratives of Herman Melville and Jack Kerouac arguing that these works epitomize a literary ”becoming” in American history. Being a crucial component of Gilles Deleuze’s positive ontology, this ”becoming” mirrors a multiple and constant transformation toward the minor, the marginal, and the non-white and resonates rigorously with the literature of Melville and Kerouac. The representative works by these two canonical American authors, namely, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and On the Road (1957), construct aesthetic spaces in which readers are called upon to appreciate the American life of becoming-Pacific and becoming-beat. The geographical …

Developing Biblical, Community-Based Resources For Military Wives Entering The Empty Nest And Midlife Transition Period, Cynthia Louise Stumme

Masters Theses

Military wives approaching the onset of middle age and the empty nest should have access to resources that help them navigate the challenges of midlife within the context of the military lifestyle. The US military provides resources supporting successful family relationships for almost every other demographic except for military wives at the midlife and empty nest stage of life. While midlife is understudied as a life stage, the existing research does identify specific objectives for personal development and growth during middle age which lead to thriving in that stage and in old age. Using these objectives as a guide, this …

Uk Shakespeare Travel Course Photo Presentation, Elliot Morelli-Wolfe

Study Away Presentations and Photo Contest Winners

Photo presentation of Shakespeare's Britain, including Edinburgh, England, the Globe Theatre, and Westminster Abbey

The Fall Of The House Of Usher, And The Rise Of The Civil War, Richard E. Campbell Ii

2022 Symposium

Poe may have died before the Civil War began, but he was close to the politics of his time. He was also an astute observer of people. His writings often explore deep aspects of the human condition. Using his in depth understanding of people and his close proximity and personal interest it would make sense that he could see how the wheels were turning. In the end it is possible that Poe would predict and hide clues of his observations within this writings, specifically The Fall of the House of Usher.

Highlights Of Taylor Etiquette: 2022 Edition, Taylor University

Heritage Books and Booklets

Students in Dr. Aaron Housholder's ENG110 class collaborated with Special Collections & University Archives to produce an updated etiquette guide. The original etiquette guide was booklet produced circa 1930 detailing the expectations of Taylor University students. Sections in the booklet included:

• As Regarding the Dining Hall
• As Regarding the Campus
• As Regarding Chapel

Students in the ENG110 (College Composition) course spent time reviewing the original etiquette booklet, identified guidelines that should be carried forward into 2022, and then worked together to generate several new "guidelines" they felt were relevant to today's Taylor culture.

Unit Plan For A Course On Banned Books For 11th And 12th Grade, Jonny Gherman

English and Creative Writing Capstone Projects

This lesson plan will teach high school students (11th-12th grade) what censorship is, why it is powerful, and what to do with it. Aligned with Pennsylvania State Standards, students will identify common themes between the two most popular genres of banned books (race & gender/sexuality). Through a series of activities, discussions, and a final project, students will practice close reading, critical thinking, and basic research skills.

Meeting The Next Generation: ​ A Cross-Campus Collaboration Via A Scholarship Workshop, Lora Winters, Ruth Monnier

Faculty Submissions

Reaching high school students before they set foot on campus would allow writing centers to increase awareness of services while also making personal connections to students, which has been proven to increase student retention. Targeting these students can be difficult and expensive, but our writing center collaborated with library services and our admissions office to create a program about finding scholarship opportunities/writing scholarship essays that was inexpensive, targeted local high schools, and initial results indicate that this program is beneficial to our university’s recruitment efforts. We will discuss our findings and how this program could be replicated by other institutions.

Henry James's "Poor Sensitive Gentlemen" And The Quest For Meaning (And Happiness) In Three Late Tales: "The Altar Of The Dead," "The Beast In The Jungle," And "The Jolly Corner", Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

“Happiness” is not an emotion we immediately associate with the life of Henry James or with the characters in his fiction. It is true that some of his characters comment on the idea of happiness, but not without persistent irony. The protagonists of James’s late tales express no explicit interest in happiness; however, their desire to understand their journeys results in an important insight into the complex, and perhaps contradictory, nature of personal fulfillment. It is an experience, I argue, that offers a moment of painful joy, and it is the closest thing to happiness possible for James’s characters, and …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2800 (Great Works Of Literature I), Joseph Riccio

Open Educational Resources

In this course, we’ll be exploring a wide range of texts from ancient, medieval, and early modern cultures; from oral and written literary traditions; in a variety of genres (epic, lyric, tales, and drama). We will trace the development of themes, ideas, and characters across time and space. Our conversations about these texts will be shaped loosely around the role of literature and storytelling in relation to empires and various formations of power. We will read each of these works in context, thinking about the cultures that produced them, and consider how they relate to our own present moment. And, …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Eng 2150t (Writing Ii), Cathryn Crosby Grundleger

Open Educational Resources

Writing II is an intensification of Writing I. This course encourages students to read, reflect on, write about, and synthesize ideas from a range of genres and literary forms. Students examine and learn how to employ different styles, various appropriate uses of evidence and counter-evidence, multiple methods of interpretations, close readings of texts, and, finally, literary-cultural contextualizations. As the course proceeds, students further develop competency in the use and evaluation of multiple external sources as they shape and express their own ideas and cast them into well organized, thoughtful, and persuasive argumentative essays. This course is required for all undergraduate …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol 31, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Real America: A Speech about Sinclair Lewis by Lion Feuchtwanger,” with an introduction and translation by Sean Nye, University of Southern California

“‘Good Morning, America!’: A Retrospective of the 2022 Sinclair Lewis Virtual Conference,” by Shaun F. Richards

“Opening Remarks for the 2022 Sinclair Lewis Conference,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre,” by Marcia Noe

“Robert L. McLaughlin’s Sinclair Lewis Scholarship”

“Play of Main Street Produced at University of Minnesota Duluth,” by George Killough, College of St. Scholastica

“Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal,” by …

“The Time Has Not Been Wasted”: The Accounting Diaries Of Marian Evans And Louisa May Alcott, Ashley A. Alvarado

Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, the Victorian desire for utility, respectability, and self-improvement became deeply ingrained in daily life, and consequently, the diary grew to be a popular tool to measure and evaluate time management and personal development. Accounting diaries, in particular, set out to provide a record of activity and achievement (or conversely, inactivity and failure). This thesis performs a case study of the accounting diaries of Marian Evans (George Eliot) and Louisa May Alcott, exploring how they document progress towards their personal goals of utility, morality, and productivity. Specific diary-writing techniques—such as an efficient style, income tracking, illness recording, …

Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the differences between dialects along racial, cultural, and ethnic lines with a specific focus on Black and Latine students inside the public secondary classrooms of America. The focus of the paper is on two linguistic tactics: “code-switching,” a linguistic practice which teaches students to separate their home language from the language they use in formal or professional settings, and “code-meshing,” a linguistic practice to teach students how to mesh together multiple dialects with which a student is familiar. Through the creation of a historical framework and an analysis of existing literature, theory, and pedagogical practices regarding the …

Transmuting Grief: More Than One “Feat Of Creation” In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Taylor Cripe '26

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

No abstract provided.

"A Kind Of Insanity In My Spirits": Frankenstein, Childhood, And Criminal Intent, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

Criminal responsibility in England underwent an important shift between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before this period, jurists focused less on whether a person meant to commit an act and more on whether the individual committed it. English law thus made little distinction between children and adults. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, criminal responsibility became linked to new ideas about human understanding. Jurists such as Matthew Hale and William Blackstone maintained that individuals could not be guilty of crimes unless they fully understood and intended the consequences of their actions. In this essay, I argue …

The Man Nobody Knows: George Babbitt And Religion, Sally E. Parry

Faculty Publications – English

No abstract provided.

Review Of Reading English Verse In Manuscript, C. 1350-C. 1500, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Speculative Pasts: American Historical Fiction In An Age Of Empire, Gregory William Deinert

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies a new generic form termed here the “Speculative Historical Novel” within contemporary American fiction. The works that Speculative Pasts collect all agonize over the erasure of the past, and question how we can incorporate history into the present while accepting that full recuperation may be impossible. In their emphasis on the erasure of the past, these novels trace the manifold silences created by the imperial conquest of the New World and articulate how this past continues to structure the lived experiences of everyone on this continent.

This speculation is, on the one hand, necessarily suppositional. When faced …

Embodied Participation In Digital Publics: Somnambulance, Surveillance, And The Construction Of Identity, Adam S. Padgett

Theses and Dissertations

In our current information landscape, routine surveillance has changed the nature of rhetorical engagement in public spheres. Scholarship in publics theory have done productive work to map out the complex field of discursive participation. Michael Warner has demonstrated how, through the circulation of common texts, people no longer have to be in public in order to participate in publics. However, in the wake of ubiquitous surveillance, this focus on publicness has offered little attention to privacy in publics theory. I argue that legal and postmodern theories of bodies-as-texts is problematic for reading and writing bodies online. Intersecting with embodiment and …

Literature As A Monument: Uncle Tom’S Cabin Reflecting The Morality Of A Nation, Shalane Parcenue Conrads

Theses and Dissertations

This essay studies the critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by studying the novel’s critical reception from publication and into contemporary America to understand how the novel remains an institution of Civil War remembrance. In accepting the polemical status of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both a literary and historical document, I argue that the novel is a monument in American culture. In studying the wide spectrum of critical response to the novel since its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a social barometer that reflects the controversial race relations in the United States from the Civil …

Vox Populi Or News From Spain, Translated According To The Spanish Copy Which May Serve To Forewarn Both England And The United Provinces How Far To Trust To Spanish Pretenses, Imprinted In The Year 1620, Thomas Scott

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

Exploring Transnational Dimensions Of Activism In Contemporary Book Culture, Rachel Noorda, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Elizabeth Le Roux

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

The board book A is for Activist is an ABC children’s title written and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara, an Indonesian social justice graphic designer living in the United States. The title started out as a self-published book crowdfunded on Kickstarter for his own child in 2012, was then picked up by independent publisher Seven Stories Press, and has since achieved bestselling sales status. While originally published in English, it has been translated and sold all over the world, including by Seven Stories’ Spanish-language imprint Siete Cuentos, in an edition with Martha Gonzalez’s translation and an audio version from guitarist and …

The Divine Consumptive: The Depiction Of Tuberculosis In Jane Eyre, Haley Highfield

Theses and Dissertations

Disease was a constant and unavoidable facet of life in British society during the Victorian Era. Despite the overwhelming prevalence of disease, the true cause of these illnesses remained mysterious until the turn of the century. With the origins of many of these diseases being either unknown or ascribed to mistaken sources, effective treatment was an impossibility. Tuberculosis is a prime example of this conundrum. Even with an estimated twenty-five percent of the British population dying from this particular disease during the nineteenth century, the actual provenance for infection was not discovered until 1882 with Robert Koch’s identification of the …

“Nothing To Do But Be Borne And Steered”: Unpacking Feminist Scripts In Elana Arnold’S Damsel, Jenna Spiering, Nicole Ann Amato

Faculty Publications

Feminism in novels marketed for young adults often reflects the values of a popular feminism that relies on individual and personal means of empowerment, rather than critiquing or seeking to dismantle systems of domination. In this paper, we illumminate frameworks and methods for engaging students in careful readings and evaluations of texts marketed as feminist, through an analysis of Elana Arnold’s feminist fairy tale, Damsel (2018). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of popular feminism, feral feminism, and theories of becoming, the authors use Critical Content Anlaysis to explore several tenets in contemporary feminist thought in order to analyze Arnold’s text and …

Critical Insights: The Lord Of The Rings (2022), Edited By Robert C. Evans, Mariana Rios Maldonado

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Mariana Rios Maldonado, of Critical Insights: The Lord of the Rings (2022), edited by Robert C. Evans

Jane Austen: A Study On The Influences, World, And Character Of An Eighteenth-Century Novelist, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Jane Austen is one of the most influential authors in history and her works are regarded as timeless classics. Her ability to harness the motif of the strong, independent woman in a time when society wanted women to have neither attribute is incomparable in contemporary works. This article examines Austen's life and the variety of factors (family, religious, intellectual, historical) that molded her mind and character and thus informed the characters she created and the stories she crafted.