English Language and Literature Commons^™

Newspeak Warrants New Thought: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four And Linguistic Determinism In Nazi Language, Barry Rogenmoser

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

No abstract provided.

From Heo To Zir: A History Of Gender Expression In The English Language, Brodie Robinson

Senior Honors Theses

With the growing presence of the LGBTQ+ community on the global stage, the matter of gender has been rushed to the forefront of the public consciousness. News outlets have hotly debated the topic of gender expression, a topic which has motivated mass demonstrations and acts of violence, and this has promoted a linguistic conversation at the international level.

This thesis is intended to provide the historical context for the contemporary debate on gender expression in the English language, and explores both the grammatical background (the Indo-European origins of linguistic gender, the development of the modern pronoun system, etc.) and the …

Owen Barfield: Philosophy, Poetry, And Theology. Michael Vincent Di Fuccia, Tiffany Brooke Martin

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Say It Ain't So: An Analysis Of The Etymology And The Colloquial Usage Of "Ain't", Abbey Johnson

Undergraduate Research Celebration 2018

No abstract provided.

Moving Up The Ladder, Sami Issa

The Diana McDonald Writer's Challenge

Due to civil war in Syria, Sami Issa decided to extend his visit to his sister in the U.S. With the U.S. being his temporary home, Sami decided to do his best to improve his English and his general academic skills. With entertaining details, Sami’s personal narrative describes his fears and confusions in his English-speaking workplace. He also describes the strategies he employed to overcome the fears and to improve his speaking and comprehension skills. (Seth Mendelowitz)

Review Of Landmarks, By Robert Macfarlane. Published By Hamish Hamilton, London, 2015. Cover Price £20.00., Patrick Armstrong

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A review of Robert Macfarlane's book, Landmarks.

Walt Whitman: The Man Behind The Words, Sara Duke

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Walt Whitman is often considered to be one of the greatest American poets. His ways of writing were unconventional, inappropriate to a degree (according to Victorian standards), yet they intrigued readers not only of the New World, but also those of the Old World. But his writing was not the only thing he was known for. The “Good Gray Poet” was also known for being gentle and warm-hearted, with a striking face and piercing blue eyes. He was welcoming to his neighbors, visitors, and passers-by on the street.

This thesis seeks to understand the man behind Leaves of Grass. …

Language, Literacy And Project Based Learning: An Ethnographic Case Study Of A New Tech Classroom In A High School On The Us/Mexico Border, Nora Lee Paugh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This ethnographic case study sought to understand how English Language Learners used their language and literacy practices within a project based learning (PBL) classroom to complete their PBL tasks. Studies revealed the impact of how English language learners within a PBL learning environment were able to use their language and literacy as a social practices that led to successful student engagement (Call & Sotillo, 1995; Campbell, 2012). This study was conducted at Wilson High School, located along the US/Mexico border. The focus of the case study was a 9th grade combination English/World Geography class of the school's inaugural New Tech …

Sounding And Dressing The Part: Understanding Macbeth Through Language And Costume, Jacqueline Peveto

Conversations: A Graduate Student Journal of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology

Macbeth, written by William Shakespeare, is a complex tragedy driven by the relationships of its characters. While it can appear that Macbeth decides his own actions, staging of this production greatly influences the audience’s perception of Macbeth as a character. Is Macbeth inherently disposed towards evil, or do the witches possess him to do these wicked deeds? In stage productions, the relationship of Macbeth to the three witches influences readings of Macbeth and his status as a sympathetic character. This paper will analyze the link between the witches and Macbeth through the relationship identifiers of verbal similarity and costume in …

Coding The Discourse And Translingual Strategies Of Collaborative Writing Of Secondary Education Students, Zane Lee Arredondo

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Bruffee used collaborative writing pedagogy to help reacculturate students’ discoursal identities to help them adhere to the expectations of the academic community. Although studies have shown that reacculturation may not exactly happen, Collaborative writing pedagogy still has maintained its presence within Composition studies since then and has been adapted into being implemented into digitally shared spaces. However, one aspect has been overlooked about physical shared spaces, the conversations themselves being studied. This study explores Kenneth Bruffee’s constructive conversations among secondary students within collaborative writing pedagogy. The collaborative sessions are recorded and viewed with a translingual lens applying Johnny Saldana’s …

Lost In Translation: The Immigration To Academia And Implementing Critical Thought, Stacie Denetsosie

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Denetsosie compares her entry-level English students to immigrants. New to the requirements of academia, these students need practice acclimating to academic culture. Denetsosie recommends writing centers and composition classes as low-stakes environments where students can practice their new voice. Tutors and teachers can make this transition easier by asking open-ended questions, encouraging students to use their own words, and teaching students to think critically.

The Monstrosity Of Language: Frankenstein And The Descent Into Cultural Misrepresentation, Diandra Alvarado

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

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of La Mexicana In Corridos Popular In The South Texas Borderlands (1930-2016), Gabriela Cavazos

Theses and Dissertations

Corridos have been exhibiting history for almost two hundred years. Moreover, throughout the years, corridos have been demonstrating the cultural shifts of Mexico and the South Texas Borderlands. Corridos represent the spirit of the Mexican and Mexican American culture. They are ballads written to celebrate or to be critical of the life of the protagonists through their accomplishments and actions.

Wayne Booth's Rhetoric Of Pluralism, William John Ordeman

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I will be examining the arguments Wayne C. Booth put forth for Pluralism in rhetorical studies. I will show how Booth believed that ethical criticism, not only in literary criticism but in all disputation, must take place in order for us to understand each other and objective values. Booth believed that our differing opinions and arguments may not be reconcilable, but by employing “listening rhetoric”, a method of paying close attention to the arguments of those who disagree with us, we can arrive at truths that are shared within a community. I juxtapose Booth with both Positivists …

Dogs, Cats, And A Lambkin: Speechlessness And The Animal In Ulysses, Pierce R. Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This essay explores the status of the animal and the consequences of animal speechlessness in Ulysses, mainly focusing on encounters with dogs and cats. Through these animal encounters, Joyce provides a foundation for understanding the complications faced by the Bloom family in grieving their deceased infant son.

The Iallt Language Center Evaluation Toolkit: Context, Development, And Usage, Elizabeth Lavolette, Angelika Kraemer

Language Resource Center

In the summer of 2014, a committee composed of members of the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT) began discussions toward accomplishing the following charge:

Design a tool that internal evaluation committees can use to evaluate and make recommendations for the improvement of their institution's language center. We emphasize the fact that it is the university appointed evaluation committee that will use this evaluation toolkit, not the language center directors themselves (although the LC Director should have input on how the toolkit should be deployed). Such evaluation committees might be composed of language department Chairs, TA/Language coordinators, Dean or …

Reclaiming The Dark: Defining Darkness As Feminist Agency Within The Garden Of Eden, "Never Marry A Mexican," And Selected Social Media Platforms, Teresa Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986), Sandra Cisneros’ “Never Marry a Mexican” (1991), and the social media platforms of Tomi Lahren, The Root, and Xicanisma on Facebook and Instagram . In my exploration of these texts and platforms, I define darkness within its multiple definitions primarily via the theme of destruction, sexuality, and/or a literal racial, physical darkness. Furthermore, in this project I challenged the traditionally pejorative analysis of darkness within American literature and provided a chronological presentation of the transformative function darkness imparts on these two texts and selected social media platforms. Ultimately, reclaiming …

The Madwoman Persists: Expression As Resistance In Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter Of Snow And H.D.'S Hermione, Spring Healy

Honors Projects

Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and H.D.’s HERmione each feature a female narrator struggling to survive in a patriarchal society that confines them and polices the movement of their bodies through space in attempt to gain control. The characters Marthe Gail and Hermione Gart experience bouts of insanity in response to their confinement by the patriarchy. I explore the various ways these two women push against their confinement, and argue that despite their places in society, Marthe and Hermione are able to use expression—writing, language, voice, movement, sexuality—to successfully resist the patriarchy and create legitimate identities.

"A Magic Deeper Still": Sacramental Poetics In William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, And C.S. Lewis, Eric Michael Bontempo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A sacramental poetics requires a particular mode of being-in-the-world. Religiously-minded poets, from Dante and Milton to Donne and Herbert, have long considered how the individual becomes attuned with creation and God’s will. But what happens when modernity and secularization challenge long-held assumptions about the universe and how humankind fits into it? A reevaluation is then needed. My thesis begins with an examination of how William Wordsworth, who sort of falls into modernity, seeks to reoccupy the functions of religion in an increasingly secularized landscape. One consequence of the European Enlightenment is the disentangling and distancing that occurs in regards to …

The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mad female characters in Western literature have traditionally represented attempts by dominant patriarchal discourse to subjugate women’s discourse: these characters are usually pathologized in both their dialogue with other characters and in their physical bodies. This subjugation by representation of mad female characters in dominant discourse parallels similar attempts to portray women as lacking in humor. This thesis studies the intersections between madness and humor and the ability of female characters that embody both to challenge and subvert dominant discourse. By examining the characters of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s novel and Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman …

( Re ) Claiming History And Visibility Through Rhetorical Sovereignty: The Power Of Diné Rhetorics In The Works Of Laura Tohe, Jessica Marie Safran Hoover

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the intricate intersections of code switching, trickster discourse and rhetorical sovereignty in the scholarship of Diné author Laura Tohe, as Tohe operationalizes survivance and alliance in complex ways, ways that “actuate a presence” in the face of ongoing attempts to render American Indian peoples absent from American rhetorical, literary, and geographic landscapes. Existing research in American Indian literatures and rhetorics often focus on the need for reclaiming rhetorical sovereignty. Yet, little work has been done to emphasize connections between the use of code switching, translation, and trickster discourse in order to give visibility to past and contemporary …

“Blame The Due Of Blame”: The Ethics And Efficacy Of Curses In Richard Iii, Alexandra Malouf

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Language, particularly the language of cursing, plays a powerful role in determining the outcome of events in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gender imperatives reflected in the speech of Richard III’s characters indicate where power lies and how it is exercised across gendered spheres. While male characters in the history plays typically obtain and exert power through violence, both in war and in secret, the primary source of power held by female characters in Richard III is their use of language. Consistently, the women seal the violent ends of their enemies with curses, and Richard is perpetually given cause to …

Music And Words: Connecting The Love Of Music With Language, Eileen P. Kennedy, Raymond Torres- Santos

Publications and Research

Children from different cultures have a natural affinity for rhymes, rhythm and music. Imagine if students were able, from the beginning of their education and experiences with academic writing and literacy, to access their unconscious and original selves from which to create their writing. The study of music can help to access this aware, inventive side that can enhance anyone’s writing. As an early childhood writing teacher and a composition teacher, we draw on our experiences with young children with words and music. We examine the relationship between music and words in an effort to bring the primitive drive of …

The Power Fantastic: How Genre Expectations Mediate Authority, Angela Rose Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reconciles academic and popular uses of the term genre, concluding that genre is a transmedial, mutable, associative, recognized system regulated through tacit understandings of prestige and power in a given Social space. The study employs a digital humanities method (dependent on digitally facilitated data analysis), conducting descriptive discourse analysis on collected online discussions from fan spaces concerning the fantasy genre and matters related to fantasy. In this way, I construct an image of the fantasy genre, and genre in general, as a multimodal space in which material freely passes between traditional and new media and participants actively negotiate …

Ecological Approaches To Modernism, The U.S. South, And 20th Century American Literature, Justin Ford Tinsley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, …

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Language And Inter-Racial Harmony: The Battle For English As Singapore Lingua, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Against the backdrop of world religious violence, Singapore is as a beacon of inter-ethnic harmony: A 2015 poll, carried out in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, returned the unanimous verdict that it was Singapore that had made the most social progress among the four Chinese ethnic Chinese societies. In 2014, the Pew Research Center ranked Singapore at the top of their Religious Diversity Index. The nation's bilingual policy is critical to the integration of the multi-racial communities of Singapore. This position is highlighted in a discussion of how, in the early years after independence in 1965, the Singapore government …