English Language and Literature Commons^™

Lessons From The Bluest Eye: The Discovery Of Self, Shanda D. Boone-Hurdle

Virginia English Journal

This article will explore the profound impact of reading, utilizing Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye as a catalyst for students to create real-life connections that resonate with their own experiences. The love of reading is a transformative force that not only enriches the intellectual landscape but also serves as a powerful tool for fostering empathy and understanding. This article will demonstrate how reading empowers students and helps them find solace and strength in the realization that their struggles, dreams, and aspirations are not isolated but are woven into the fabric of a broader narrative in which students can reflect …

The Double Entry Journal, Doreen C. Bowens

Open Educational Resources

The Double Entry Journal is a note-taking technique for English Composition courses that encourages students to become active readers.

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

The Impact Of Social Media On The Publishing Industry: A Case Study Of Author Colleen Hoover, Chloe Foster

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Thanks to the BookTok community, adult romance author Colleen Hoover has taken the world by storm. Anyone that has had access to TikTok within the past year has probably had a Colleen Hoover book appear in video on their “For You Page,” the page on TikTok where users can scroll through content that follows an algorithm which learns about the user’s specific interests. However, Hoover has been writing and publishing novels since 2012. She had already published more than a dozen novels by 2020, yet her popularity has only grown since she made her appearance on social media. Her book …

The Importance Of Reading In Jane Austen's Novels, Leah Rice

Student Works

Reading is a central theme of both Emma (1815) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), two of Jane Austen’s most celebrated novels. The characters are constantly reading books, comparing the sizes of their libraries, and endeavoring to respond to tricky situations based on their readings of them. Mr. Darcy claims that a lady’s education is not complete until she adds to all the usual accomplishments something “more substantial”: the “improvement of her mind by extensive reading” (27). Though reading is regarded as a source of knowledge and even wisdom, these novels are what Bonaparte calls “a map of misreading” (142). Elizabeth …

Female Superheroes, Rhetorical Reading, And Feminist Imagination : A Study Of College-Aged Readers And Comic Book Reading Practices Using Eye Tracking And Cued Retrospective Interviews, Aimee Vincent

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation uses feminist analysis and rhetorical genre studies to analyze the strategies used by college-aged students to read female superhero comic books. The dissertation responds to the growing trend of literature and writing instructors assigning comic books and graphic novels under the untested assumption that these texts are readily accessible to college students. This assumption contradicts what we have learned from studies of rhetorical reading strategies that found that readers analyze texts most effectively when readers are familiar with the text’s genre. In addition, the assumption ignores the specific rhetorical contexts of comics, including a problematic but powerful narrative …

Book Worms? A Profile Of The Reading Lives Of English Majors, Ryan Collins, Claire Atwood, Virginia Beikmann, Josephine Rivera, Mya Bethers, Kerrin Mountcastle, Sam Richens, Cayla Cappel

Fall Student Research Symposium 2021

What are the reading lives of a group of upper-division English majors in terms of their autobiographies, their processes of reading, and their preferred texts? How do they manage required reading and reading for pleasure? Although university students who major in English Studies read consistently, often reading behaviors are taken for granted, particularly the long-term reading lives of these students. How did they develop as readers? What strategies have they developed to be successful? What are preferred tools and technology? How has their various cultures influenced their reading? By using an autoethnographic approach that describes and interrogates their processes and …

Carrying The Stories Of Las Mariposas: Literacy As Collective And Transformative, Deborah Vriend Van Duinen

Michigan Reading Journal

Literacy is often understood as the acquisition of individual skills and knowledge. In this essay, I explore different approaches to understanding literacy that focus on social meaning-making and action. Drawing on historical examples of literacy learning and my recent experiences in a community-wide reading program focused on Julia Alvarez’s (1994) In the Time of the Butterflies, I use the concept of “carrying stories” to reflect on how literacy learning can be collective and transformative for self and society.

Reading: The Starting Line Of My Imagination, Daniel Sheldon

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I asked my parents a few questions about how I learned to read. They started with my dad reading to me while my mom was still pregnant, so that is where I started. Between the questions my parents answered and my own memories, I was able to write about how reading was introduced into my life and what happened as a result.

Adventure Book Club - The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Courtney Helseth, Jillian Jacoba

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

This after school club serves to improve reading comprehension, teach ideas such as storyline and character development, and to add creativity to reading to encourage love of reading. The club utilizes the text, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis and includes various crafts, worksheets, and games to improve comprehension and make reading fun.

Autism: The Life Of Present And Future, Jong Moon Kim

ESL for Academic Purposes

This unit addresses people with autism and the inherent characteristics and struggles people affected by autism strive to overcome. Students can understand the traits of autism, the challenges autistic people have, and ways to support them. The unit is aimed at English Language Learners and is written to help ELLs learn more autism and the people who live with autism. Also, it is useful for teenagers and adults living with people who are autistic. It is intended for secondary school students with a B1 level on the CEFR scale. Students can improve their academic vocabulary related to autism, reading, listening, …

Toward An Erotics Of Reading: Three Hypotheses On Pleasure From Barthes's "The Pleasure Of The Text", C. Connor Syrewicz

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In this paper, I argue that it would be pedagogically useful to investigate the psychological processes which lead readers to like and dislike texts, and I offer an initial set of hypotheses on the pleasures of reading which can be gleaned from Roland Barthes’s short monograph, The Pleasure of the Text. I begin by briefly addressing the origins of this research before I discuss the concept of writing “expertise” as it has been conceptualized by other fields of writing research. I argue that understanding those factors which lead different audiences to like or dislike texts as they read could …

Reviving Reading Through Student Choice In The High School English Classroom

The Graduate Review

No abstract provided.

Ne Bɛna Maana Bɔ: A Story Will Come Out Of Me, Emmanuelle Spronk

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Translated from Bambara, the title of this collection expresses the inevitability of stories in human life. These essays explore the origins and ubiquity of stories and the writer’s own beginnings as a lover and sharer of them. Some of the questions explored are:

• Why do we love stories?
• How do stories help us in hardship?
• How are stories important to the Christian faith?

Learning And Speaking The Uzbek Language As A Foreign Learning For Speech Activity Preparation, Begam Кaraeva Candidate Of Pedagogical Sciences

Philology Matters

The purpose of the article is to study the issues of teaching foreign students to read and speak in Uzbek using the types of speech activities in teaching Uzbek as a second foreign language. The content, forms, means of teaching the types of speech activities in the educational process consists of research, generalization and systematization. The object of the article is the current state of the study of speech activities, its essence, the content of the educational process, the comparative status of traditional methods and new approaches to the study of the subject, their application in practice, new modern technologies …

The Lived Experiences Of High School Students Who Self-Identify As Readers: A Phenomenological Study, Michael J. Romick

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore and better understand the lived experiences of what it means to be a reader as a high school student. The literature revealed a plethora of studies and articles on various aspects of reading and many pieces from teachers, researchers, and academics’ perspectives, but there are virtually no studies that have explored what being a reader means from the high school reader’s perspective; no studies that have explored the lived experiences of what being a reader means to high school students. The central question guiding this study asked, “What is the lived …

The Storying Of Colombian Writing Centers, Jennifer Erin Pretzer

Masters Theses

Using the results from a study conducted on Colombian writing centers, this thesis applies principles from narrative theory to posit a grand narrative for Colombian writing center professionals. The study was modeled on one Jackie Grutsch McKinney used to examine US writing center professionals’ descriptions of their work, and the thesis includes a comparison with her results. Respondents were asked to answer seven questions, two of which were multiple choice and five of which were short answer. The questions asked respondents to describe their tutoring staff composition, their center’s operations, writing centers in general, and ways their center resembles and …

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Urban Formalism: The Work Of City Reading [Table Of Contents], David Faflik

Sociology

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at …

Understanding Reading In The English Program: An Inquiry Of How Students Are Guided With Advanced Reading Materials, Kelley L. Ellion

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Reading and writing are connected activities. Research has shown that you cannot truly be successful in one without the other. In post-secondary writing intensive courses, the teaching of reading in regards to advanced academic texts is often forgotten or ignored due to pre-existing conceptions of reading practices. In this project, I have conducted a research study across three (3) FYC courses at Humboldt State University to understand how the teaching of reading is implemented within its FYC program. I specifically study how the reading pedagogy known as the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) framework is used by instructors within their classrooms and …

L.M. Montgomery, Physical Books, And The Pandemic, Rebecca Janzen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Is It ‘A Marriage Of True Minds’? Balanced Reading In Northanger Abbey And Persuasion, Lynda A. Hall

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Jane Austen often uses reading as a way to develop her characters. For instance, in Persuasion, Captain Benwick‘s melancholic disposition is revealed through his partiality for Romantic poetry, but Anne Elliot’s value for balance is expressed when she recommends moral essays. Other times, and not unfrequently, characters’ reading choice falls on the works of William Shakespeare—such as Hamlet, which Willoughby reads to Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and the excerpts from Elegant Extracts we learn that Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland has memorized.

Some of Austen’s characters read Shakespeare with seductive intent, but others show their …

Cal Poly Frankenreads: An All-Day Public Reading Of Mary Shelly’S Frankenstein, Robert E. Kennedy Library

Creative Works

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the Cal Poly English Department and Kennedy Library organized a series of interdisciplinary events including FrankenReads, an all-day public reading of the novel. Spanning twelve hours, members of the Cal Poly community from all colleges participated in the celebration by volunteering to read portions of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

This catalog is based on the celebration of events “FrankenFall” which took place on October 31, 2018 at the Robert E. Kennedy Library.

Digging Into Durable Books, Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"In his excellent essay about why people ought to read old books, C.S. Lewis recommends that all readers should read them as much as they do contemporary ones."

Posting about broadening our literary experiences from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/digging-into-durable-books/

Narratives Of Sexuality In The Lives Of Young Women Readers, Davin L. Helkenberg

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, research on adolescent sexuality in Young Adult (YA) Literature has included a discussion of its potential role in sex education. Based on the extensive yet problematic presentation of sexuality within these texts, it has gained both support and opposition. However, very few empirical studies have been done on how readers say YA Literature has informed their sexual lives.

This thesis investigates how narratives of sexuality found within YA Literature may inform the sexual lives of young women readers by examining both readers’ experiences and YA texts. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 female participants (aged 18 …

I Survived Hopscotch Hill A Collection Of Nonfiction Essay About Homeschooling, Mialise Carney

Honors Program Theses and Projects

When I first set out to work on this thesis project, I was apprehensive. For years I had done my best to distance myself from my experience growing up homeschooled because I didn’t want to be marked by it. Throughout my life, I sought out fiction or nonfiction accounts of homeschooling, yet the identities never seemed to align with any part of my experiences or observations. During this project, however, as I read homeschooling nonfiction books like Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, or Real Lives edited by Grace Llewellyn, I began to …

Charlotte Werbe, Assistant Professor Of French, Musselman Library, Charlotte Werbe

Next Page

In this Next Page column, Charlotte Werbe, Assistant Professor of French, shares her love of cinema and the films you should watch next, as well as the text that first inspired her research on the Holocaust and the challenging but important work of translating Holocaust memoirs.

Caroline Ferraris-Besso, Assistant Professor Of French, Musselman Library, Caroline Ferraris-Besso

Next Page

In this first column of the spring semester, Caroline Ferraris-Besso, Assistant Professor of French, shares which recent novel made her laugh out loud, her favorite cookbooks (and favorite brioche recipe!), and works that have inspired her academic writing.

[Introduction To] Constructing The Adolescent Reader In Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

Bookshelf

This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents. Reading, these novels suggest, is neither an unalloyed good nor a dangerous ploy, but rather an essential, occasionally fraught, by turns escapist and instrumental, deeply pleasurable, and highly contentious activity that has value far beyond the classroom skills or the specific content it conveys. After an introductory chapter that examines the state of reading and young adult fiction today, the book examines novels that depict reading in school, gendered and racialized reading, …

A Literary Journey Back In Time, Hannah K. Heil

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

Before I began writing, I reflected on the effect literature has had on my life. I brainstormed different experiences in which I found literature to be very influential. I talked with various people including my parents and past teachers to ensure the accuracy of the various childhood stories I decided to write about. When it came time to put the final draft together, I focused on my various experiences with literature and the grand effect it has had on my life. I also incorporated why I value being a literate person today as a university student.

Editor's note: For this …