English Language and Literature Commons^™

Playing With Every Sense Of The Word : Lolita Through The Lens Of Jacques Derrida, Noelle Marie Florio

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This essay ties both the repetition and doubling found in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with the art of retelling to find a means of a center origin in Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” This essay argues how unreliable narration works to substitute and redefine a center origin of/for the novel, and in doing so, pulls the reader further from any reliable foundation from which to draw conclusions. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, employs what readers recognize as Derrida’s theory of deconstruction not only to disorient readers of Lolita, but to provide a sort of …

Exploring Instability In Dream-Based Narratives : A Comparative Analysis Of “Vanilla Sky” And "Inception", Sara Glemaud

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis aims to dissect the deliberate destabilization that emerges from Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. By stripping away stabilizing elements and weaving intricate dream sequences, Nolan and Crowe craft a cinematic experience that blurs the distinction between reality and imaginary. The means in which Nolan and Crowe execute this is through several ways. Firstly, through the exploration of the symbiotic relationship between the characters' bodies and minds within the dream narrative. Secondly, through the deliberate creation of spatial and temporal instability, which blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy or the imaginary. Lastly, both films deliberately …

Beyond Print : The Web Of Egan’S Narrative Universe, Cassandra Sardo

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jennifer Egan’s website greatly rewards readers and literary critics interested in A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House. It hosts an interactive timeline filled with details like when and where she wrote each chapter of Goon Squad, a digital counterpart to her famous PowerPoint chapter, and excerpts from her handwritten first drafts of The Candy House. These digital epitexts, however, have been largely overlooked by critics, and a comprehensive analysis and close reading of Egan’s work in this important context remains uncharted territory. My thesis aims to bridge this gap by exploring the technological elements within Egan’s …

Los Angeles Miscellany Volume 72, 2024, Loyola Marymount University English Department

LA Miscellany

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Maclay

Editor-in-Chief: Madeleine Misner

Describing Dictee, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

The visual images in Dictee are famously captionless. They resist straightforward explanation. In writing image descriptions of the images in Dictee, I have tried to preserve the "captionlessness" of the original. The point here is not to explain the pictures—an image description is not identical to a caption—but to make Dictee more accessible to readers who are blind and visually impaired. I realize, of course, that in trying to make Dictee's captionless images more "legible," I have inevitably "mistranslated" Dictee as it was originally designed to be experienced. Its captionlessness is lost in translation despite my efforts to preserve it. …

Great Books: Everyone's Inheritance, Michael Gose

Faculty Books

This book explores the benefits of reading "Great Books," and is virtually unique in detailing what a series of Great Books classes has looked like over the past decades

Flannery O'Connor's Why Do The Heathen Rage? A Behind-The-Scenes Look At A Work In Progress, Jessica Hooten Wilson

Faculty Books

In this work of literary excavation, an award-winning author transcribes, compiles, and organizes a final unfinished novel by celebrated American fiction writer Flannery O'Connor. This book introduces O'Connor's final work to the public for the first time and imagines themes and directions the novel might have taken

The Role Of Input Frequency And Different Prroficiency Levels On The Acquisition Of English Nominal Suffixes By L1 Thai Learners: A Case Of The Usage-Based Account, Chanikarn Thatchatham

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigated how input frequency enhanced the acquisition of English nominal suffixes by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Usage-based Account (Tomasello, 2003), it was hypothesized that input frequency—i.e., token frequency (the frequency of derived forms containing a particular suffix) and type frequency (suffix frequency)—facilitates the perception and production of English nominal suffixes. Also, there is a relationship between input frequency and proficiency levels among L1 Thai learners. A Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) and a Fill-in-the-Blank Test were administered to three groups. The first two groups consisted of 60 L1 Thai learners at the intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, …

Investigating Integrated Written Feedback On The Promotion Of Thai Efl University Students’ Writing Ability, Nattapat-Orn Chuleethongrerk

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigated the effects of two instructional approaches incorporating automated feedback in an EFL writing context: Integrated AWE-only (IAO) and Integrated AWE-plus-Teacher (IAPT). It examined their impact on students’ writing ability, revision practices, and satisfaction levels. Grounded in a process-based writing approach, both groups received teacher-written feedback on content and organization for their first revisions. For language revisions in subsequent drafts, the IAO group received automated feedback generated by an automated writing evaluation (AWE) system, while the IAPT group received the automated feedback report supplemented with in-focus grammatical explanations from the teacher. The study involved 29 first-year undergraduate students …

The Effects Of Global Englishes Reading Instruction On Reading Comprehension And Digital Literacy Of Thai Undergraduate Students, Karuna Chuenban

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The digital age has transformed reading, moving beyond print to include diverse multimodal formats, which presents challenges for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners due to the growing global diversity of English. This study proposes Global Englishes Reading Instruction (GERI) as an instructional reform to address these complexities. The GERI framework integrates principles from Global Englishes and Language Teaching (Rose & Galloway, 2021), digital literacy (Castek & Manderino, 2017; Spires, 2018; Hobbs, 2013), and EFL reading instruction (Anderson, 2008). A mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design was employed with 50 Thai undergraduate students. Research instruments included a Global Englishes reading comprehension pre-test …

Effects Of Hyflex Instruction Using The Ecrif Method On The Enhancement Of English Speaking Ability Of Thai Upper Secondary School Students, Kittibodee Rubporn

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This quasi-experimental mixed-methods study 1) explored the effects of HyFlex (Hybrid-Flexible) instruction using the ECRIF (Encounter, Clarify, Remember, Internalize, Fluently Use) method on the enhancement of English speaking ability of Thai upper secondary students. The study assessed five components of speaking ability: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, and 2) investigated students’ perceptions towards the HyFlex instruction and 3) its modes of instruction: onsite, synchronous online, and asynchronous online. Thirty students participated, completing a B1-level speaking test before and after instruction. Quantitative data from a 4-point Likert-scale questionnaire and qualitative insights from open-ended responses and semi-structured interviews were analyzed. Results …

การใช้และการเลี่ยงใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกในภาษาญี่ปุ่น ภาษาไทย และภาษาอังกฤษ: การวิเคราะห์ผ่านคลังข้อมูลคู่ขนานจากเรื่อง Harry Potter, เตชินี นาคจำรัสศรี

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาลักษณะการใช้และการเลี่ยงใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกในภาษาญี่ปุ่น ภาษาไทย และภาษาอังกฤษ โดยให้ความสำคัญกับการวิเคราะห์ประเด็นเกี่ยวกับสัดส่วนการใช้ จุดร่วมการใช้ ลักษณะการใช้ที่พบเฉพาะในแต่ละภาษา และลักษณะการเลี่ยงใช้ในแต่ละภาษา งานวิจัยนี้วิเคราะห์ผ่านคลังข้อมูลคู่ขนานที่ทำการเก็บข้อมูลจากเรื่อง “แฮร์รี่ พอตเตอร์กับนักโทษแห่งอัซคาบัน” ผลการวิจัยพบว่า ภาษาญี่ปุ่นและภาษาอังกฤษมีการใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกในสัดส่วนที่มากและใกล้เคียงกัน ในขณะที่ภาษาไทยพบสัดส่วนการใช้ที่น้อยกว่าอีกสองภาษา ส่วนจุดร่วมในการใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกของทั้งสามภาษาคือคำกริยาที่สร้างความเปลี่ยนแปลงให้กับประธานของประโยคและมีความเป็นสกรรมสูง โดยมีแนวโน้มเป็นคำกริยาความหมายเชิงลบ และประธานที่ใช้มักเป็นคำนามที่มีชีวิต ส่วนลักษณะการใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกที่พบเฉพาะในแต่ละภาษา กรณีภาษาไทยพบลักษณะการบรรยายผลลัพธ์จากการถูกกระทำร่วมกับหน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกโดยใช้โครงสร้าง “ถูก+กริยา(กระทำ)+ผลลัพธ์” กรณีภาษาญี่ปุ่นใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกเพื่อรักษาความเป็นประธานต่อเนื่องของประโยค (subject continuity) และกรณีภาษาอังกฤษใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกร่วมกับคำนามที่ไม่มีชีวิต ส่วนลักษณะการเลี่ยงใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจก กรณีภาษาญี่ปุ่นเลี่ยงใช้หน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกโดยใช้คำนามมากที่สุด ส่วนภาษาอังกฤษจะเลี่ยงใช้โดยใช้บุรุษสรรพนามร่วมกับหน่วยสร้างกรรตุวาจก ในขณะที่ภาษาไทยพบประเภทของหน่วยสร้างที่นำมาใช้ทดแทนหน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจกได้มากที่สุด เช่น หน่วยสร้าง “มี”, หน่วยสร้างกรรตุวาจก, หน่วยสร้าง “ให้” เป็นต้น โดยหน่วยสร้าง “มี” เป็นหน่วยสร้างที่สามารถใช้ทดแทนหน่วยสร้างกรรมวาจก “ถูก” ได้ในระดับหนึ่ง

การศึกษาขนบการตั้งชื่อท่าไม้ตายในมังงะฉบับภาษาญี่ปุ่นและฉบับแปลภาษาไทย, ศุภิสรา สิทธิเวช

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้ศึกษาการตั้งชื่อท่าไม้ตายที่พบในหนังสือการ์ตูนหรือมังงะทั้งในฉบับภาษาญี่ปุ่นและฉบับแปลภาษาไทยว่ามีขนบการตั้งชื่ออย่างไร และเมื่อแปลเป็นภาษาไทยแล้วจะมีการใช้ขนบหรือมีการเปลี่ยนแปลงอย่างไรบ้าง ผู้วิจัยรวบรวมกับศึกษาท่าไม้ตายในมังงะภาษาญี่ปุ่นจำนวน 16 เรื่อง และศึกษาฉบับแปลภาษาไทยจำนวน 10 เรื่อง รวมทั้งหมด 1,435 ท่าในฉบับภาษาญี่ปุ่น และ 636 ท่าในฉบับภาษาไทย และได้ทำการวิเคราะห์ประเด็นหลักทั้งสองภาษาโดยรวมจำนวน 8 ประเด็นได้แก่ 1) จำนวนคำ 2) วลีชื่อเฉพาะ 3) หน่วยเสียงพยางค์ 4) รูปเขียนตัวอักษร 5) ตัวอักษรรูบิ (ルビ) 6) ภาพพื้นหลังกับเครื่องหมาย 7) การใช้ภาษาบาลี - สันสกฤตในชื่อภาษาไทย 8) กลวิธีการแปลชื่อท่าไม้ตาย นอกจากนี้ผู้วิจัยศึกษาว่าขนบการตั้งชื่อท่าไม้ตายมีการเปลี่ยนแปลงตามกาลเวลาหรือไม่ด้วย ผลการวิจัยพบว่า 1) จำนวนคำในท่าไม้ตายภาษาญี่ปุ่นจะนิยมการใช้ 2 คำ เพื่อความกระชับ ในขณะที่ชื่อภาษาไทยจะมีการใช้จำนวนคำที่ยาวกว่า 2) วลีชื่อเฉพาะในท่าไม้ตายภาษาญี่ปุ่นนิยมใช้คำนามกับคำนาม ในขณะที่ภาษาไทยนิยมใช้คำกริยากับคำนามมากกว่าเพื่อขายความให้คนไทยเข้าใจ 3) หน่วยเสียงพยางค์ของทั้งสองภาษานิยมการใช้ 10 พยางค์ขึ้นไป แต่ฉบับภาษาไทยจะนิยมการใช้ 5-6 พยางค์ในแต่ละเรื่องมากกว่า 4) ชื่อท่าไม้ตายภาษาญี่ปุ่นนิยมตัวอักษรคันจิมากที่สุด รองลงมาคือคาตากานะและฮิรางานะกับคันจิ 5) ตัวอักษรรูบินิยมการใช้ตัวอักษรฮิรางานะเพื่อบอกวิธีอ่านทั่วไปมากกว่า 6) ภาพพื้นหลังกับเครื่องหมายมีความสัมพันธ์กับชื่อท่าไม้ตาย และการใช้เครื่องหมายก็มีการเปลี่ยนแปลงตามกาลเวลาด้วย 7) ภาษาบาลี-สันสกฤตพบการนิยมใช้ในชื่อของท่าไม้ตายฉบับแปล และการเลือกใช้จะขึ้นกับรูปแบบการแปลของผู้แปลแต่ละคนหรือสำนักพิมพ์นั้นๆ 8) กลวิธีการแปลนิยมการแปลแบบตรงตัวมากที่สุด นอกจากนี้ยังพบการแปลที่สร้างคำศัพท์ใหม่โดยอิงจากภาพพื้นหลังหรือบริบทของเนื้อเรื่องด้วย 9) ท่าไม้ตายในช่วงยุคค.ศ. 1980 จะเน้นรูปภาพที่แสดงถึงการตะโกนเสียงดังมากกว่า และท่าไม้ตายที่มีขนาดสั้น อย่างไรก็ตามท่าไม้ตายในยุคค.ศ. 2000 นั้นนิยมการใช้คำบรรยายมากกว่า และชื่อท่าไม้ตายมีความยาวมากขึ้นด้วย

Gary D. Schmidt Josette Frank Award 2024 Acceptance Letter, Gary D. Schmidt

Children's Book Committee

Author Gary D. Schmidt wins the Josette Frank Award 2024 for The Labors of Hercules Beal

The Josette Frank Award

This award for fiction honors a book or books of outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally. The award has been given annually since 1943. Josette Frank, the editor of anthologies for children, served for many years as the Executive Director of the Child Study Association of America of which this committee was a part.

Alabama Postcards, Katie Nethery

Theses

I chose to write Alabama Postcards to give my reader a clear view of what different areas of Alabama are like, as well as the kinds of people you can find there, based on personal experiences throughout life. I also feel these essays serve as a memoir about my family and how they have helped shape me into who I am today, even those I never got to meet. I chose to use “postcards” in the title since I chose to write about different areas of Alabama, and aimed to give my reader a clear image of what these towns …

Fetishized Portraits In Victorian Literature, Rachel Smith

Theses

No abstract provided.

Critical Reading Pedagogical Approaches To College Literature In A Post-Pandemic, Mckenzie London

Theses

This project uses a mixed methods approach to study the impact of COVID-19 on faculty and students in the English college classroom. Research indicates that COVID-19 correlates with changes in students’ academic performance, but there is a need for research concerning how to approach these changes in the English classroom through critical reading practices. “Critical reading” is complex to define and even more challenging to exemplify or illustrate. Critical reading practices are often the center of the college English classroom, but with changing technology and a cultural shift from COVID-19, students now approach critical reading differently. The purpose of this …

Imaginary Margins: Disability Poetics & Reinventing The Page, Audrey T. Heffers

Graduate Publications – English

Disability poetics resist marginalisation by centralising disabled words and experiences, both literally and figuratively. In a world that prioritises ability, disabled bodyminds are marked as deviant from norms and conventions. Disabled poets have the opportunity to resist the normalised ‘body’ of the poem on the page. Conventions, rules, and norms can shape poetry – not just rhyme and metre, but line breaks, line arrangements, and limiting poems to the written linguistic mode. Disability poetics can include techniques such as poems written sideways, prose poems, and multimodally-composed texts, as explored in Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Wound from the Mouth of …

Artlessness: A Disturbing Ideal In Fanny Burney's Evelina, Autumn Wille

Undergraduate Research Awards

Before the Enlightenment, the psychological symptoms which are now associated with autism were rationalized through a lens of religion and folklore. Post-Enlightenment, the term “autism” and its classification as a neurodivergence were first recorded midway through the 20^th century (Zeldovich). Between these two explanations is a two-hundred-year gap in which faith-based rationalizations were shunned in the name of science, yet science had not developed a label for autism—nor was that label perhaps yet necessary, given the relative simplicity of the world compared to today. What, then, was the social appraisal of autistic-coded symptoms during those two hundred years, and …

The Aesthetics Of Environmental Risk In Paolo Bacigalupi’S The Windup Girl And The Water Knife, David Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations--English

Any work of environmentally oriented fiction that seeks to represent the wide-reaching effects of climate change is faced with the problem of scale. These texts must render visible change which is at once ubiquitous and microscopic, along with the cascade of side-effects generated in the wake of rising temperature, rising sea levels, and winnowing biodiversity. In short order, these texts must fully imagine what it means to live within the modern global risk society. Borrowing this sociological model from the late Ulrich Beck, I analyze the literary work of Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the foremost authors in the growing genre …

Spaces Of Citizenship: Negotiating Belonging Through Cold War Literature And Culture, Daria Goncharova

Theses and Dissertations--English

At the height of Cold War containment culture, when fears of Communism and nuclear warfare overlapped with anxieties about homosexuality, gender inversion, miscegenation, and juvenile delinquency, formal citizenship—narrowly defined as one’s legal status—did not provide all American citizens with a sense of belonging, equal access to civil liberties, and a reasonable degree of safety. Instead, spatialized identity, rather than civic responsibilities and legal rights, came to define the boundaries of proper citizenship. In this context, highly exclusionary suburbs, which sprang up outside major metropolitan areas in the late 1940s-1950s, emerged as a cornerstone of the cultural narratives defining American citizenship. …

The Dark Sides Of Giving: Representations Of Philanthropy And Gifts In Eighteenth-Century Literature, C.1750-1820, Jillian Winter

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation explores representations of the gift in popular women’s novels of the long eighteenth century. Gift transactions in women’s fiction from this period reveal larger cultural reflections about the limitations placed on women who try to give and to help others. The primary works discussed in this project include Frances Burney’s Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760), and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Frequently, the novels considered in this dissertation showcase the complicated conditions, oftentimes troubling …

Trust And Knowing In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Fictional Genres And Metacognitive Disruptions, Jessica Marie Van Gilder

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation investigates how constructions of trust can be undermined or reinforced by examining trust’s entanglement with our compulsive and subjective desire to know in nineteenth-century American literature. Specifically, I analyze how different fictional genres – satire, historical romance, fantastic, and gothic – respond to our desire to know through the types of trust fictional texts feature and construct with the reader. In doing so, I demonstrate how genres of fiction in nineteenth-century America function as dynamic social contracts that amplify and undermine the reader’s trust in larger sociopolitical systems (e.g., national identity) and the epistemologies that underpin those systems …

Writing White Women: White (Supremacist) Feminism In American Literature And Culture, Post Suffrage To Post Hillary (1920–2020s), Jannell C. Mcconnell Parsons

Theses and Dissertations--English

Recent critical texts by Jessie Daniels, Mikki Kendall, and more frame the histories of mainstream white feminism in ways that highlight its ongoing complicity with white supremacy and its maintenance of racist structures and systems. In conversation with these current scholarly as well as mainstream cultural conversations about white feminism that have been happening with more frequency since 2016, this project turns to post-suffrage narratives of white womanhood to historicize the modern narratives we tell about feminism’s history. Each chapter of this project considers a 1920s or 1930s literary narrative alongside current literary and cultural narratives as I explore the …

Reconceptualizing South Asia: Bangladeshi Literature And The Politics Of Representation, Qazi Arka Rahman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

I explore Bangladeshi literature’s specificity and contributions in the context South Asia. This project expands the existing oeuvre of South Asian literary and postcolonial studies by bringing Bangladeshi literature into current debates on nation, nationality, and identity. I investigate the role of literary texts in developing a national ethos by doing analysis of twentieth to twenty-first-century Bangladeshi novels – in English and Bangla – to argue the necessity of developing a temporal understanding of South Asia rather than a spatial one. The dissertation demonstrates how Bangladeshi novels have contributed to and subverted the idea of “imagined community” following Bangladesh’s independence …

The Lighthouse Keepers Daughter: The Life And Work Of Celia Laighton Thaxter, Haley J. Parker

Honors Theses and Capstones

Living on the edge of the American empire, Celia Thaxter explored the dimensions of her life in ways that transcended, yet never fully abandoned traditional gender boundaries by cultivating her lifelong relationship with nature through creative expression. The lighthouse keeper's daughter constructed her identity based on the experiences that shaped her on the very edge of civilization. Coming of age on the Isles of Shoals, Celia reveled in flexibility and unrestricted freedom of her natural environment isolated from the cultural spheres on the mainland that reinforced the ideology of domestic femininity. This ideology was dominant in the 19th century in …

The "State Of Art": Evolutionary Ethics In Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D' Urbervilles, Brooks Lampe

Faculty Publications - Department of English

What was literary naturalism? One might be tempted to say it was an experiment in fiction (at least in Europe), eventually absorbed into its more successful sibling, Realism. Or one might argue it was a seminal movement which has been misunderstood and read reductively as depicting humans as passive pawns in an indifferent world. Beyond this obstacle of perceived one-dimensionality, there is the less obvious but equally challenging charge that naturalism was, at bottom, a propagandistic genre, appropriating, as Keith Newlin suggests, melodrama for the purpose of persuading readers to "redress social imbalance" ( 4). Finally, there is the muddiness …

Criterion, Volume 42, 2024, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Maclay

Co-Editor-in-Chiefs: Izabel Mah y Busch & Chester Mlcek

Law And Literature In Pennsylvania: A Changing Landscape, Juliette Gaggini

Honors Theses

This thesis examines themes of American national identity perpetuated in Pennsylvania surrounding private property through historical, literary and legal analysis. Ideals of private property and land ownership are broken into three transitions throughout Pennsylvania history: the American frontier and initial land claiming by settlers, mass-deforestation and the introduction of widespread agriculture, and finally industrialization and the introduction of mining and fracking. Each of these transitions highlights the physical changes to the region and how they were influenced by American ideals of private property, productivity, and profitability.

Throughout this thesis, I analyze both literary and legal texts to examine societal beliefs …

The Ruins Of Solitude: Maternity At The Limits Of Academic Discourse, Lette Bragg

English Literature Faculty Works

What happens when love unravels one’s knowledge structures? In The Ruins of Solitude, after the birth of a child, Bragg embraces the event of love and examines the resulting disintegration of her supposed authorial subjectivity. Against the pressure to produce and organize knowledge—the pressure of writing a dissertation, for example—Bragg contemplates the poetic modes of thinking and ethics that emerge from her experience of reading continental philosophy while caring for her infant child. Dwelling on what she would have once excluded from her intellectual work—her maternity, the mole on her chest, her palm against another body, her exhaustion at the …