English Language and Literature Commons^™

Systems Of Expression: Counter-Discourse In Online Intersex Communities, Jasmine Shirey

CMC Senior Theses

Individuals who do not fit neatly into the expected genetic and phenotypic XX/XY binary have been misrepresented, ignored, operated on without consent, denied legal rights, and gaslighted by multiple spheres of dominant society including, but not limited to: medicine, popular culture, and the justice system. Using Michael Foucault’s conception of 'counter-discourse' in conversation with the work of Gayatri Spivak, I ask how online intersex communities (OICs) have participated in counter-discourse by examining forums, blogs, comments, organization websites, memoirs and social media pages.

Major examples of phenomena OICs respond to, engage with, and critique include: surgery on intersex infants; the introduction …

Political Animals: Form And The Animal Fable In Langland’S Rodent Parliament And Chaucer’S Nun’S Priest’S Tale, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

Chaucer and Langland have generally been read independently of one another, in large part due to the profound formal differences of rhyme, metre, and lexical features within their poetry. However, a broader definition of form, that sees texts receiving their shape from an animating concept at their core, affords richer purchase on the potential convergences between the two poets. I take as my paradigmatic example of this phenomenon Chaucer’s and Langland’s mutual choice to couch their rare topical references in retellings of well-known animal fables (Langland’s Rodent Parliament and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Animal fables, I argue, are governed by …

Utopia, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Stichomythia, Tyler Farrell

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Law And Literature And History, Christine Krueger

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Peak Oil After Hydrofracking, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Walcott, Joyce, And Planetary Modernisms, Aaron Eastley

Faculty Publications

Within the framework of global or planetary modernism studies, chronological before and after sequences are receding in importance as situational similarities come to the fore. 'Modernism' has become 'modernisms'. This shift toward an ethical, eclectic inclusivity is especially salutary when it comes to comparative studies of writers such as Derek Walcott and James Joyce. On the face of things, it seems clear that Walcott was a follower of Joyce: a postcolonial writer inspired by the semi-colonial Irishman, who was himself a follower in/of the British literary tradition. And followers are not as great as leaders. Originals are better than copies. …

What Is A Christian Teacher To Do With Louise Rosenblatt’S Transactional Theory Of Reading?, Andrew P. Huddleston, Dawan Coombs, Katlin Sehres, Ashley Miller

Faculty Publications

In this theoretical analysis, the authors explore the question, What is a Christian teacher educator to do with Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading? They begin by outlining the primary components of Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, focusing on reading as a transaction and the efferent and aesthetic stances. Next, they discuss who they are as teacher educators and former students, how their faith backgrounds intersect with Rosenblatt’s work, and the approach they took to address areas of tension that they and other Christian educators have experienced with Rosenblatt’s theory. Finally, they conclude by discussing implications of Rosenblatt’s work for reading scripture, …

Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Narrative, And Individual Development, Benjamin Luke Flournoy

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Excerpt from Introduction

In 1982, Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) was created. BADD was a group consisted of parents, teachers, and clergy who were worried about the spiritual and mental development of children, who they saw were at risk of being corrupted by a single game—Dungeons & Dragons. The group campaigned again and again, warning fellow parents about the detrimental effect that this game could have on a child’s life. They believed Dungeons & Dragons had a kind of power over its players—a power that could create meaning and even take children to their eternal doom. This …

'Behold The Dreamers' Raises Issues Of Class, Immigration, And Color, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows the path of a Cameroonian family whose members, like many newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly “post-racial” culture converge as major themes in this new generation of immigrants’ painful encounter with the American Dream. Yet Mbue’s novel is also a distinctly New York story, capturing the particular experiences of the city.

Ela For M/S: A Guidebook For Beginning Teachers, John Franklin

Open Educational Resources - English and Modern Languages

ELA for M/S: A Guidebook for Beginning Teachers (ELA for M/S is an acronym: English and Language Arts for Middle-and-Secondary schools) is designed to enable ENGL 478: Literature for Middle and Secondary Schools and ENGL 480: Internship students to develop competence in their field. The book also prepares ENGL 579: Professional Semester and Follow-up students to transition into professional life. The book's contents includes 13 chapters: 1. Eight Pedagogical Imperatives; 2. Four Theories: Bloom, Gardner, Piaget and UDL; 3. Three Teaching Approaches; 9. Constructing Tests; 10. Writing Templates; 11. Tragedy for non-English Majors; to name a few. ELA for M/S …

The Pound And The Hammer: An Analysis Of The Effects Of Finance On Edward I’S Conquest Of Wales And Scotland, Mackenzie Mohr

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

“Whither Then I Cannot Say”: Epistemological Uncertainty And Tolkien’S Transnational Myth, Mitchell Kooh

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Diversity In The College Composition Classroom: A Case Study On Second-Language Writers And Early College Entrants, Moises I. De Lima

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Student populations in post-secondary institutions in the United States have increasingly become more diverse in the past several decades. This diversity includes students from distinct ethnic groups, of various linguistic backgrounds, and from a wide age range. English as a second language students have largely populated these classes, creating an exigency for modifications in the political, social, administrative, and pedagogical practices of these universities and colleges. Some higher education institutions have also diversified their student body by creating early acceptance programs for gifted students. Like second-language students, they might too present peculiarities that require changes in the way the university …

The Sky Of Our Manufacture: The London Fog In British Fiction From Dickens To Woolf, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Afterword: Horizons Of Transformation: When Age, Literacy And Scholarship Meet, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dialogical Numbers: Counting Humanimal Pain In J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Mike Piero

English Faculty Publications

This essay argues that J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello stages numerical sequences strategically, dialogically, and parodically in order to call attention to the ideological weight involved in counting. Focusing on how one counts - and accounts for - human and nonhuman animal pain, I contend that the repetition of numbers in the novel works to subvert the neoliberal faith put in numbers, quantification, and data. Without succumbing to some religious-mystical numerology, this reading attempts to expose the fiction involved in the act of counting and the need to pay more attention to numerical discourse in literary fiction. In tracking these numbers …

Players In A Storm: Climate And Political Migrants In The Tempest And Othello, Darcie Rees

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This paper presents a reading of migrants and their relationships with political and environmental slow violence in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Othello. Using Steve Mentz’s work with water and shipwreck, Lowell Duckert’s work on water in Shakespeare, Rob Nixon’s concept “slow violence,” Patricia Fumerton’s book on vagrancy in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, and Ken Hiltner’s work with environmental advocacy of the same time, I read the social history of vagrancy of the time (presented by Hiltner and Fumerton) alongside the Poor Laws. This social history is combined with water-focused ecocriticism, shipwreck and a postcolonial reading of migrancy. Ultimately, …

Coming To Voice: An Analysis Of Social Justice And Transformative Learning Approaches In English Language Curriculum Design, Lucy Burriss

Capstone Collection

Language is a tool for communication and an expression of cultural values, norms and beliefs. Teaching the English language is a global profession that carries social justice and ethical implications. The School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS), a program of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) offers an alternative and transformative English learning opportunity, which emphasizes self-reflection and strengthening interpersonal relationships to live a life of greater integrity and work towards social change. Yet, there are still social justice implications to consider in any program or initiative. This Training Course Linked Capstone (CLC) is an analysis of …

Moving Experiences: Women And Mobility In Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century American Literature, Amy Simpson Birk

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project recovers and revises late nineteenth and early twentieth-century narratives of mobility which invoke female protagonists who move from stifling, patriarchal domestic settings in the rural and suburban United States to the more symbolically emancipated settings of New York City and even Europe to reveal both the limitations and possibilities for women’s lives in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. By challenging popular American fiction’s preoccupation with urban white slavery myths and the lingering proscriptive standards for women’s behavior of the Victorian era, the Introduction argues the selected works of this dissertation mark a significant, …

Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology And Authenticity, Alexander F. Menrisky

Theses and Dissertations--English

Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a …

American Mnemonic: Racial Identity In Women’S Life Writing Of The Civil War, Katherine Waddell

Theses and Dissertations--English

American Mnemonic: Racial Identity in Women’s Life Writing of the Civil War takes up three American women's autobiographies: Emilie Davis’s pocket diaries (1863-65), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House (1868), and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863). Chapter one is devoted to literary review and methodology. Chapter two, "the all-absorbing topic': Belonging and Isolation in Emilie Davis’s Diaries," explores the everyday record of Emilie Davis in the context of Philadelphia’s free black community during the war. Davis’s position as a working-class free woman offers a fresh perspective on the much-discussed “elite” …

Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton

Theses and Dissertations--English

Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.

Understanding The Gray: Aging Women In Victorian Culture And Fiction, Hannah T. Ruehl

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in …

Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations--English

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …

The Experience Of A Brazilian Graduate Student In The United States In Disciplinary Writing: The Cognitive, Social, And Rhetorical Influences On A Thesis Introduction, Gilberto Pereira

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Eighty percent of the international students in the US are pursuing their post-graduate degrees (Institute of International Education, 2017) and studies show that the introduction of the thesis or dissertation is the most challenging section for this population to compose. However, most of these studies are based on textual analysis and overlooks the social factor and cognitive processes underlying the composition of this intricate section. Another gap in the literature is the lack of attention to how Latin-Americans develop their writing in master’s programs, especially to Brazilian students, the ninth largest international student population in the US. Therefore, this study …

Empowering Parents To Encourage Children To Read Beyond The Early Years, Margaret K. Merga, Saiyidi Mat Roni

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Enjoyment of reading books is related to reading proficiency, and fostering students’ enjoyment of reading is imperative to support continued reading engagement. However, not all students understand that reading is important, and not all students are regularly engaged in recreational reading. Children typically read for pleasure less often as they age, leading researchers to seek effective ways that social influences can support them to be lifelong readers beyond the early years. Parents can play an important role in communicating the continued importance of reading and fostering positive attitudes toward reading. However, after independent reading skill acquisition, parents may become a …

Seeing The Human Face: Refugee And Asylum Seeker Narratives And An Ethics Of Care In Recent Australian Picture Books, Debra Dudek

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

While working on the final stages of this essay, I went to a local children’s bookstore to look for a retelling of The Tempest to assist the eleven-year-old in my life with a drama audition. The audition required him to memorize the monologue in which Trinculo finds Caliban on the beach and asks, “What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive?” (2.2.24–25). The owner of the shop—who knows my field of research and advises me when new books arrive that she thinks would interest me—asked whether I had seen the latest Armin Greder book, The Mediterranean, …

Depression And Anxiety In Current Middle Grade Fiction: Finding Quality, Authentic Portrayals For Use In Bibliotherapy, Tonia Sandersfeld-Miller

Graduate Research Papers

Young adults need a safe environment to learn about mental illness, and librarians must ensure that books being recommended authentically and realistically portray mental illness. The purpose of this study is to analyze the authenticity of fiction titles for middle school students that include content related to depression and anxiety to support recommendations to school counselors for bibliotherapy. The research questions this study sought to address included the following: Do the plots and characters of young adult novels written for middle school students realistically and authentically portray mental illness, and what criteria can be used to determine a novel's quality …

Ideology In Literature And Literature As Ideology: Totalitarian And Reactionary Appropriation Of Resistant Texts, Huntley Hughes

Master’s Theses

This thesis seeks to explore the means by which nominally or potentially resistant texts are appropriated into violent or exploitative political structures for propaganda and profit. In the first chapter two pre-soviet Russian novels closely associated with the radical tradition are examined, through the lens of literary analysis, in order to uncover the ways in which ideologically egalitarian revolutionary movements can degenerate into authoritarian regimes. The second chapter is concerned with a Welsh text, How Green Was My Valley, which, despite being concerned with the conditions of the Welsh mining class, utilizes the narrative form of childhood recollection to insidiously …