English Language and Literature Commons^™

Lost In Translation: The Absence Of Untranslatable Words In The English Classroom, Ashley Boledovic

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This qualitative study explores the impact of lexical gaps and untranslatable words on self-expression and communication in English-speaking classrooms. Seven interviews were conducted with bilingual or non-native English speakers representing a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, including Arabic, Portuguese, Marathi, Hindi, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Each interview investigated how language impacts self-expression, or the ability to communicate thoughts, emotions, and identity within the classroom. The findings suggest that untranslatable words and cultural concepts from participants’ native languages offer insights into cultural perspectives, which are often undervalued and not represented in English-speaking classrooms. Additionally, all participants desired greater language inclusivity …

Worlds Built And Borrowed: A Paracosmic Exploration Of The Metatextual Unconscious, Ryleigh Michele Roberts

Master’s Theses

This thesis explores literary phenomenology through the lens of fictional world-building and borrowing, integrating psychoanalytic play theories and reader response criticism, primarily through the works of D.W. Winnicott, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser. In applying this theoretical approach, the thesis investigates how fictional worlds function as intermediary phenomena through which creators can externalize and process their individual or collective experiences of being. Employing a comprehensive literary survey framework, the project spans a diverse range of texts, from canonical literature, such as the Brontës’ juvenilia and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to contemporary works like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades …

Chasing Dreams In Modern America: Can We All Still Reach The Stars?, Selina Osebre Yawson

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

Judges' Statement

"Chasing Dreams in Modern America: Can We All Still Reach the Stars?" is an excellent and timely examination of the American Dream during a time of political polarization and economic uncertainty. Yawson synthesizes systemic social critique with close literary analysis, applying a reading of Langston Hughes' poetry to address the current moment. Her unique selection of sources and well-reasoned call to action earned the paper an honorable mention.

Pseudo-Vampires In The Nineteenth-Century English Vampire Canon: Draining Life Force By Class, Matt Tanner

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Feeling Foreign / Foreign Feeling: Affect In Southeast Asian Diasporic Short Story Collections, Francys Aerin Fortes

Theses and Dissertations

Affect studies have long been saturated with scholarship investigating the fluidity of emotions, though a larger turn in the field now prioritizes the felt experiences of marginalized peoples. Sianne Ngai’s work is one part of this turn that seeks to unpack the effects of oppressive systemic forces on Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Sianne Ngai reexamined the nature of emotions in her seminal text Ugly Feelings (2005), particularly concerned with how negative feelings are disproportionately felt by marginalized bodies as a result of conditions of obstructed agency, systems of power, and wage labor capitalism. Drawing from Ngai’s writing, this thesis …

Voicing The Violence: Carmen Maria Machado's Contribution To A Queer Archive, Audrey C. Bryant

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This project analyzes In the Dream House (2019) alongside “The Husband Stitch” and “Eight Bites” from the collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado. The first, a memoir, details Machado’s personal experience with domestic abuse between partners who share a female gender identity; the latter is a collection of short stories outlining everyday violations made against women. Scholars have discussed these works with specifications including female domestic horror, Machado’s use of retellings, and domestic violence and abuse. This project fills a gap in the discourse by intersecting and connecting queer theory with archival studies to support …

Censorship: Through An Iowan’S Eyes, Erin Mcrae

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This is a collection of creative work prefaced by an introduction, which gives an overview of the development of these pieces. The pieces contained in this thesis are comprised of various genres, including creative nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction.

Maurice Sendak’S Trio, And What Good Picture Books Have To Say, Eli F. Protas

Pomona Senior Theses

When we teach children how to read, we start with picture books. We do this despite the fact that picture books blend visual and verbal storytelling in ways that require nuanced understandings of both elements. Rather than studying these aspects individually, a complete picture book analysis relies on examining the intersection of words and images, how they interact structurally and how each lends meaning to the other. To understand how to better close read picture books, this thesis turns to the stories of Maurice Sendak, a picture book writer and illustrator whose work redefined the relationship between words and images …

English 328 - The Golden Age Of Children's Literature In Britain - Syllabus, Veronica Schanoes

Open Educational Resources

A syllabus for a course on the Golden Age of children's literature in Britain (1865-1926).

Literary Homeplace As A Site Of Knowing And Healing, Shamonique Hassell

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The concept of literary homeplace serves as a locus of rhetorical healing for Black women, emphasizing their lived experiences and creative expressions as forms of resistance and restoration (Collins, 1986; hooks, 1990; Nettles, 2001). The labor of Black women within families, churches, and artistic endeavors contributes to the cultivation of a collective consciousness surrounding oppression and healing (Edwards, 2010; Carey, 2016; Morrison, 1992). Building upon hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplace, this dissertation examines how Black women foster spaces characterized by care, dignity, and resilience (Hersey, 2022; Tate, 1984). Using personal narrative and articulating Black women’s voices, I position homeplace as …

Children At The Heart Of Dialectical Tension In Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, Holly A. Garrett

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

As a product of its time, Ernest Hemingway’s short-story cycle In Our Time explores the modernist struggle for human connection in a post-World-War-I landscape. This search for meaningful connection is demonstrated through various forms of relationships, but specifically those of the romantic nature. These relationships are brought to the forefront by a series of marriage stories along with multiple Nick Adams stories that feature dysfunctional couples who are often alienated by their inability to properly communicate. The tension surrounding these imperfect unions often features a child at the center of the conflict, exacerbating the preexisting issue. If the short-story cycle …

Investigating Pronunciation Teaching Practices And Teachers’ Beliefs About Pronunciation Instruction In Efl/Esl Classrooms, Barry Moussa

Graduate Research Papers

This literature review aims to explore existing research on pronunciation teaching practices and teachers’ beliefs about pronunciation instruction in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. To achieve this, I will first delve into teacher cognition research, intending to find current reported and actual practices surrounding pronunciation teaching. The importance of pronunciation instruction has been widely discussed and acknowledged by scholars in applied linguistics and teacher education programs. Various studies have identified pronunciation instruction as a key component for fostering effective oral communication skills in second language acquisition, specifically enhancing intelligibility (i.e., accuracy …

Addressing The Overemphasis And Impacts Of Academic Language In English Language Learner Instruction, Rebecca Pint

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Material Sins: A Novel Excerpt, Patrick Markovich

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This excerpt from Material Sins includes the first six chapters of the novel. The book is a supernatural crime thriller focused on the life of a young butcher’s apprentice, Charles, as he attempts to uncover his father’s criminal past. When Charles encounters his father’s childhood friend, Salo, he realizes his father had been involved in the mafia in his youth. As Charles learns the extent of his father’s sins, he fights to maintain his sanity and keep the demonic entity attached to him at bay. With the help of his best friend Sofia, Charles struggles to dispel the demon who …

Rural Girl Comedy Hour, Riley Mccall

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

No abstract provided.

Revelations: Spirituality As Privileged Perspectivism In Magical Realist Distortions, Isabella Scala-Kazanecki

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the role of spiritual beliefs in the literary mode now known as magical realism in Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), Indian-Born British and American Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), and a lesser-known novel, Household Saints (1981) by Francine Prose, an American writer. The Kingdom of This World, itself the originator of the mode of magical realism, has allowed me to conclude with Carpentier that magical realism arises from “privileged revelations,” as he notes in the preface to his seminal book. But these revelations in magical realism are not necessarily always of the …

Asian-American Literature And The Family Saga: Cyclical Histories Of Racial Melancholia And Racial Dissociation, Molly Schwarz

Dissertations and Theses

This paper analyzes the novels The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig and argues how the family saga within Asian American literature draws out elements of the diaspora to best share histories across different ethnic and racial groups. There is a brief overview of the development of Asian-American literature and an explanation of how hyphenated identity is intrinsic to diasporic literatures, and then further discussion of how each of these novels contributes to the legacies of Asian-American writing and storytelling. Then, each novel is analyzed for how the various family saga …

Cosmopolitanism Now: Fragmented Belonging, Adriana Fischetti

Dissertations and Theses

Abstract

This thesis reconceptualizes cosmopolitanism for the contemporary moment as fragmented belonging, critiquing and moving beyond traditional cosmopolitan frameworks grounded in universal reason, seamless integration, or coherent identity. Through close readings of Teju Cole’s Open City and Tremor, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, this study argues that cosmopolitanism today emerges explicitly from rupture, contradiction, and ethical struggle, shaped fundamentally by conditions of displacement, empire, surveillance, and global capitalism. Engaging critical theorists such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Pheng Cheah, and Roland Barthes, the thesis identifies fragmented belonging as an ethically charged response to …

Self-Preservation: Autobiography As A Form Of Archivization As Seen Through The Life And Poetic Works Of John Clare, Meghan J. Slaff

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This paper will look at how the processing efforts of an archivist mirror that of an autobiographer through the shared motivation of adding to the cultural memory or textual canon of a society. For archival purposes, the typical steps of ingesting, preparing, and presenting a collection are creation, capture, arrangement/description, and pluralization. To create an autobiography, writers take the memories that have been created and experienced due to events in their lives and capture those memories via recording in the literary form known as autobiography. These autobiographers then arrange and describe their memories in a way that shows vast similarities …

Mythogenesis In As I Lay Dying: A Comparative Exploration Of Mythmaking And Counter-Myths, Allison K. Groupp

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through the lens of comparative mythology, arguing that the novel constructs a counter-myth that challenges dominant Western narratives. By engaging with non-Western mythological traditions—particularly Proto-Indo European, Hindu, and Indigenous cosmologies—the study reveals how Faulkner embeds symbolic structures that transcend Christian and Greco-Roman frameworks. Using semiology and structuralist frameworks developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, the analysis deciphers a mythopoetic narrative that refocuses marginalized myths to destabilize binary oppositions such as Christian/Pagan, civilized/uncivilized, and male creation myths with female creation myths. Each chapter examines a different mythic layer: …

Kafka In The Plague Years: Reinterpreting Absurdity In The 2020s, Chris Lownie

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

No word better encapsulates the confusion and inequality proliferating in the post-2020 global world than “absurd.” Absurdity consumes the way we interact with one another, going about life-as-usual in pocket worlds in which the individual is alienated from both oneself and others. Life is defined by a series of problems that regularly go ignored by both institution and general populace alike, but not by the human body: the effects of sustained illness and reinfection by recurrent viruses in a world that no longer acknowledges their severity nor their pervasiveness nor steps we may take towards personal safety. Daily life has …

Author-Centered Approaches In Ela Instruction: A Multiple Case Study Of Secondary English Teachers, Jennifer M. Lockhart Mchugh

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Literary authors are often neglected in secondary ELA (English Language Arts) literary instruction. Teachers are unsure how to teach about the author and how much time to spend on establishing the context for the text when the goal is to “cover” a variety of literary texts as part of a planned curriculum during the school year. Acknowledging the role of authors’ intentions as well as their experiences and aesthetic decisions in the production of literature may provide new entry points into literary texts for students. This multiple-case study of secondary English teachers and their high school students in a “bounded …

The Liminal South : Explorations Of Black Time, Space, And Memory, Kennedy Buckner

Theses and Dissertations

This project is composed of two analytical essays and a three-dimensional art exhibition that tangibly extract and display the ways I view the U.S. American south and my interactions with it. Inspired by the narrative photography of Carrie Mae Weems and her “Kitchen Table Series,” the project focuses on multiple generations of my own family in order to document my family's experiences in the south while theorizing how our experiences provide greater historical understanding of southern black communities over time. The first essay theorizes time, space, and memory in Toni Morrison's narrative novel Song of Solomon, with a focus on …

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

“Broken Things: An Archive”, Kristen Mccallum

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This creative thesis starts from the idea that memory is shaped as much by the present as by the past. It explores the emotional and personal complexities of family estrangement, grief, survival, and love. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s idea that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past,” the project moves away from more traditional storytelling and instead is constructed as a collection of archival elements, that includes prose. What originally intended to be a collection of short stories gradually became a fictional family archive—made up of letters, text messages, and other everyday items—that reflects the messy, often conflicting …

Nothing I Said Was Enough: Writing As Self-Validation, Michama M. Dorvile

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores the process of using writing as a coping mechanism to heal from trauma by portraying how personal narratives confront pain and reclaim agency. This thesis also explores how writing serves as a means of survival and sharing testimony. The thesis starts with a critical analysis essay, drawing on literary criticism and trauma theory. I explore how Roxane Gay, Kathryn Harrison, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Maya Angelou have used writing to challenge societal perceptions of trauma, and how through writing, they have resisted erasure.

The heart of this thesis is an original creative work, which involves an …

The Benefit Of New Perspective: An Analysis Of Postcolonial Adaptation, Sara L. Tilbe

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In our modern world, the concept of literary adaptation is not unheard of. Each release of a new, popular text comes with an underlying chance that it will likely be snatched up by Hollywood executives to be told through a cinematic setting. However, there is less fanfare when it comes to the topic of literary adaptation, particularly of famous texts that are deemed “classic” of the literary canon. Usually, any news of a literary adaptation of a classic book is meant with polarizing views from the general public. Some welcome the change, excited for what a new author can bring …

Heterogeneous Being: The Inhumanities And The Creative-Scientific Aesthetic, Steven L. Ogden

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Heterogeneous Being attempts to set the often-disunited aspects of the sciences and humanities in congruence and to extol and advance a hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic that moves beyond any restricted dimensions of its previously segregated fields of study. It likewise expresses the need to perpetuate that hybrid form of inquiry and representation to successfully address or convey the precarious realities of Earth’s ecological and environmental conditions. Heterogeneous Being asks readers to observe the inexhaustible proofs of our pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world, to recognize the agentic potentialities nonhuman subjects may hold both in and outside of those inhuman enmeshments, and …

Dystopian Fiction As Liberatory Practice: Dystopian Theory In The Classroom, Hailey C. Bowen

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Dystopian Fiction as Liberatory Practice, a title inspired by bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” is a proposal for an English 2090 course that focuses on dystopian theory. This class is centered on The Nine Symptoms of Dystopian Theory, which I developed using multiple theoretical models including Afrofuturist Reading Practices, Marxist theory, and feminist, gender, and sexuality theories in conjunction with my own observations about the genre. Dystopian theory is a nine-step reading process that I have developed to reframe any text as dystopian. It is possible to argue that any text is dystopian using this process because, in any …

Slaying The Windigo: Fear And Faith In The Anthropocene, Daniel J. Irwin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the changing affect of fear in the environment and how it is influencing writing in the Anthropocene. Chapter one lays the groundwork for the present moment of ecocriticism, examining how the relationship with the environment has changed throughout the history of ecocritical writing. The second chapter examines how fear has been an intrinsic element of environmental storytelling, starting with the romantic ideas of the sublime. With the recognition of the impact that humanity has had on Earth over the past several centuries, and the accelerating acceptance of the idea of the Anthropocene since the turn of the …