English Language and Literature Commons^™

Building A Communication-Integrated Curriculum In Materials Science, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

With the need to meet ABET outcomes around professional skills, such as communication and teamwork, engineering programs have long explored approaches to ensure their graduates are able to participate in the workplace in ways that employers demand. While approaches vary and success depends on a number of factors, research demonstrates that an integrated approach to professional skill development is the most impactful for student learning. How can an engineering program build an integrated approach that provides meaningful communication education?

This paper shares the experiences from faculty in a material science and engineering program that has created an integrated approach to …

Process Interviews, Joe Anson

The Utah English Journal

In an attempt to have the students care more about how they could improve their writing, I decided to focus on the writing process as opposed to the final product. And because students start with varying shades of writing aptitude, I felt it important that all the writers in my classroom be given the chance to earn a high grade as we focused on improving writing, not writing perfectly.

Using Inquiry To Drive Revision, Mercedes Allen

The Utah English Journal

When an object needs motion, it needs something to cause movement, to drive it. A car needs gasoline. A kite needs wind. A runner needs nutrient rich food and plenty of water. Just like these things need a substance or force to keep them going, students need something to fuel them as they go through the writing process. While it would be much simpler for us to give students crackers or suckers to fix a student with writer's block, there is something else we can implement into our classrooms daily to give our students the power to continue to move …

Book Review: Ain't Burned All The Bright, Rachel Billings

The Utah English Journal

Ain't Burned All the Bright captures the anxieties, fears, and tensions of 2020 clearly and vividly even though it consists of only three long sentences. Jason Reynolds tells the story of a Black boy and his family during the Covid-19 quarantine and pandemic. Through the prose of Reynolds and illustrations of Jason Griffin, the reader learns what the pandemic was like from the point of view of a typical teenager.

An Incomplete Success, Elva Shule Escobedo

The Utah English Journal

Once, I wrote a letter to my US senator, a request from my older brother who had left the country voluntarily just a few months before. In the letter, I explained my brother's complicated situation with his legal status and pleaded for his case. This letter became the catalyst for a writing assignment in my classroom. Students wanted to write their own letters and pleas to government officials, too, explaining their different family members' situations in hopes that their letters would make a difference. And so, they set out to write. They wrote like I had never seen them write. …

Playing With Poetry, Jessica Ashurst

The Utah English Journal

In my experience, the average student claims that they hate poetry. But, what if we try to get them to experience poetry by trying it in various forms instead of just digging for meaning in obscure poetry? This poetry unit encourages them to play with words and author's craft choices. Each poem becomes part of the poetry portfolio they tum in at the end of the unit.

Nonhuman Animals And Hope: Kazuo Ishiguro’S Never Let Me Go And Philip K. Dick’S Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, David P. Rando

English Faculty Research

What can critical animal studies learn by temporarily directing attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature? Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allow readers to experience the hopes of engineered or artificial nonhuman creatures. Without presuming to know the unknowable or to make the animal speak, these novels help to further animal liberation discourses by democratizing the ostensibly human concept of hope, opening new paths of empathy between nonhuman and human animals while making it harder to accept the instrumentalization of nonhuman animals under anthropocentric capitalism.

Princes, Princesses, And Socialites: Feminism And Class Transgression In Hollywood Romantic Comedies, Justina Marie Clayburn

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explored how characters in romantic comedies negotiate and transgress class boundaries as the films conform to and challenge genre and social expectations, focusing primarily through a feminist lens. Specifically, it addresses the different ways the films negotiate ideas about American identity and economic systems, simultaneously trying to acknowledge problematic elements while upholding social and nationalistic ideals. Feminism has a complicated relationship with Hollywood romantic comedies. While the genre often focuses on issues of interest to women and forefronts female characters and their professional and personal experiences, the denouement generally reinforces heteronormative monogamous relationships above others and the traditional …

"Killers Who Preach": Horror And The "Victorian" Culture Text In The Modern American Musical, Amy Erickson

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines American Broadway musicals adapted from Victorian horror and mystery novels, investigating the ways in which the musical adaptations represent and critique modern American social problems and traditional American values and ideology. Specifically, it analyzes Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a Musical Thriller, adapted from the anonymously published Victorian penny serial The String of Pearls; Rupert Holmes’s 1985 musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, adapted from Charles Dickens’s unfinished 1870 novel of the same name; Frank Wildhorn’s 1997 musical Jekyll & Hyde, adapted from Robert Louis Stephenson’s 1886 novella The Strange …

Othello As A Political Commentary On "The Myth Of Venice", Alejandro Tamayo

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The premise of this essay is that the ascension of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603 motivated Shakespeare to give Othello -- performed for the king in 1604-- a setting, topicality, and an embedded political commentary that suited the political ideas and personal interests of the new monarch. After an overview of the possible sources of the play, this essay also reviews some of James's political writings, where he expresses his absolutist philosophy. Although some commentators believe there is a pro-republican subtext in Othello, this essay argues the opposite. It posits that by adding the …

Bibliography, Jane Fife

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Jane Fife.

Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The twenty-first century, marked by neoliberalism and suspicious, visibly violent far-Right politics, has presented new challenges to critical and literary theorists. In response, some theorists advocate for a postcritical turn, challenging both the surface/depth picture of language and the privileged status of suspicion in interpretation in order to explore alternative pictures of language and reading that can better address the challenges of our own day. In this thesis, I connect one of these alternatives, Toril Moi’s use of Ordinary Language Philosophy in literary studies, to Wendell Berry’s prioritization of place in environmentalist activism. In connecting these two thinkers, I contend …

Mrs. Blackbird And The Visiting Chair, Taylor Barnhart

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The following thesis is a middle grade novel exploring the events of one summer in the lives of two siblings, Susannah and Sawyer. The siblings are grieving the recent death of their mother and, at the same time, attempting to navigate the emotional withdrawal of their father. During the summer, the siblings get to know their eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Blackbird, who communicates with the spirit of her dead husband through an old armchair which is rumored to have magical powers. The novel deals primarily with the theme of grief and its pervasive nature in people’s lives. The story looks at …

Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

By critically analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, I was able to conclude that the transgressive portrayal of hyperrealized consumerism warranted a close examination into the value American society places on an individual’s ability to replace authenticity for consumer obedience. Palahniuk’s dangerous representation of the body throughout the novel serves to highlight numerous ways in which a consumer transgresses against their own physical and mental well-being to achieve happiness constructed by capitalistic agendas. By using French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality in connection with gender, disability, and feminist theory and ecocriticism, I attempt to deconstruct the neoliberal ideology to which …

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …

Revisiting History: Anti-Racialist Afrofuturism In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Brad C. Kelly

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Popular understanding of history is dominated by racial binaries that suggest the Black past and the white past are wholly antithetical to one another. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uncovers interconnections between Black and white Americans that complicate this understanding by having her characters travel to the antebellum period. By uncovering these interconnections, Butler is able to envision a future in which Black and white Americans are reunited through the recognition of their shared, yet vastly differing, sufferings under white supremacy. I have termed this idea anti-racialist Afrofuturism because Butler seeks to dismantle the social construct of race through her illumination …

Queer(Ly) Lingering In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Emily Datskou

Dissertations

This dissertation is a critical critique of Queer Theory as an academic field. It argues that queer theory’s establishment as an academic discipline and as a periodizing and historicizing force through the bibliographies that make up its canon has upheld and supported the very normative models of temporality and progression that the field claims to resist. As a result, I argue, queer theory has focused most heavily on modernism and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has positioned the nineteenth century as the precursor to the queer strategies and representations that we see more fully fleshed out in the twentieth …

Takamiya Ms 23, Its Exemplar, And The Editio Princeps Of Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius, J. Eric Ensley

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 23 is a mid sixteenth-century copy of the B Version of Piers Plowman, distinguished by pervasive linguistic modernization. The manuscript derives from a source very similar to that used by Robert Crowley for the editio princeps, a textual affiliation that remains unexplained. In their critical edition, George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson collated Takamiya 23 in full but did not print its unique variant readings and the manuscript has not figured in recent textual scholarship on Piers Plowman. This neglect has led to some conclusions that should be revisited, particularly regarding …

Make A Foreigner Of Yourself: An Analysis Of The Dueling Critical Utopias Of The Dispossessed And Trouble On Triton, Anthony Michael Lowe

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The purpose of this project is to analyze the critical utopias of two sci-fi novels: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin and Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) by Samuel R. Delany. Both novels were published within two years of each other, with Delany rewriting his novel to intentionally put it into direct dialogue with Le Guin’s. This project will attempt to establish the landscape of utopian fiction, draw out this dialogue between these two grandmasters of the science fiction genre, and answer this question: “As a result of Delany positioning his novel in …

Teaching Dystopia In Dystopian Realities: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy And The Dystopian Novel After Covid-19, Emily Rose Lavrador

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project advocates for a trauma-informed approach when teaching dystopian literature, particularly those with plague or pandemic plots. To have a truly student-centered approach in the classroom, trauma-informed pedagogy is necessary for students not only to learn comfortably, but to actively be creative or retain information.

Dystopian literature is assigned and consumed at pervasive rates; this popularity calls for additional attention to its teaching. The survey data presented in this project shows that 68 of 100 students had been assigned one or more dystopian texts through school years 2020 onwards, and 72 additionally were seeking out the dystopian genre on …

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.

Different Shades Of Red: From Prostitution To Purity, The Evolution Of Little Red Riding Hood, Jill Lester

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

The Little Red Riding Hood tale is one of the most popular, beloved, and recounted fairytales ever. It is rare to find someone unfamiliar with the little girl in the woods, meeting the “Big Bad Wolf,” and their subsequent encounter. This comparative essay will analyze the sexuality or innocence in the versions of Little Red Riding Hood through the antagonist, the wolf, sensuality, and symbolism. The three oldest versions of Little Red Riding Hood, the oral tale, “The Story of Grandmother,” Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' “Little Red Cap” will be analyzed. Each story …

Language As Resistance: An Exploration Of The Use And Implications Of Spanish In Three Memoirs By Female Chicana Authors, Ella Ross Franzoni

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

“I'M Kind Of A Big Deal In This Industry:” How Killing Eve’S Villanelle Subverts The Femme Fatale Archetype, Molly Kent

Honors Theses and Capstones

From the instant Catherine Tramell stepped on screen with shaven, glossy legs and a perfectly curled, bouncy, blonde bob, Basic Instinct (1992) became a cult classic, centered around the dangerous and seductive femme fatale who makes the movie tick. Nearly 25 years later, a new monstress steps on screen as a suited, quirky, slicked-back assassin with a penchant for curly-haired women and a destiny to reform the femme fatale trope: Villanelle of Killing Eve.

The co-lead and resident femme fatale of Killing Eve, Villanelle, subverts the traditional role of the femme fatale in a decentering of the patriarchy …

The Unwatched Pot, Grace Lyde

Scripps Senior Theses

From the inside out:

The staff of the Gell-Mann Zweig Library are going through it. Edith, who had been transferred to another branch has just been transferred back and promoted, bumping their ex, Augustine, down a step. On their first day back, Edith ends up turning their contentious ongoing flirtationship with Heidi, a different co-worker, into… something else. Meanwhile, both Green and Heidi’s chronic nightmares have taken a turn for the strange devolving into encoded messages and countdowns.

And Felix is there. Doing his best.

Slowly but surely the five of them are going to have to grapple with the …

"Witness For Her": The Vanderbilt Variant Of "Further In Summer Than The Birds" And The Stakes Of Transcribing Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts For Publication, Isabel Evans

Scripps Senior Theses

For more than eighty years, scholars believed that the earliest version of Emily Dickinson’s “Further in Summer than the Birds,” a major mid-career poem often regarded as “one of Dickinson’s finest” (McSweeney 155) and “best-known poems,” had been lost (Franklin, “The Manuscripts” 552). Yet, against all odds, the manuscript survived, resurfacing miraculously at Ella Strong Denison Library, the special collections library at Scripps College in Claremont, California, in 1986, exactly a century after Dickinson’s death. Known as the Vanderbilt Variant of “Further in Summer than the Birds,” this poem continues to be misprinted, overlooked, and under analyzed by Dickinson scholars …

Overzealous: The Harm Caused By Parental And Administrative Censorship Of Books In An Intellectually Free Education, Tyler Engel

Outstanding Gateway Papers

Books and their ideas are such a fundamental part of our learning culture. Despite this fact, many books, some of our best books, have been banned in schools and communities across the world for the controversial, uncomfortable, necessary ideas they contain. Parents, school administration, and state legislatures often go to great lengths to police these ideas within the classroom, limiting what teachers can actually teach within their classrooms and the ideas that students come into contact with. This practice is harmful, and we as a country need to normalize the reading of banned books so that students can engage diverse …

Front Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Front matter for Writing Center Journal 41.1.

Trading Spaces: Space As Metaphor For Contingency In Writing Centers, Genie N. Giaimo

The Writing Center Journal

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), …