English Language and Literature Commons^™

Toward A More Loving Framework For Literacy Education, Clio Stearns

Occasional Paper Series

In this provocative and moving essay, Clio Stearns, a Bank Street educated teacher, toggles back and forth between moments with her young daughter who daily grows more attached to books and moments with her fifth grade students who remain disconnected from her carefully chosen texts. Refracted through a psychoanalytic lens and a deeply caring heart, Stearns’ description of her classroom practices offers a canny account of all that she must give up in order to see through and past her students’ resistance. In a surprising turn of events she learns to join with her students as they become curious …

Unfolding: An Academic Autobiography, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

An academic autobiography of one who came to academia later in life than most, Unfolding uses blog post from the past decade stitched together by a narrative of what brought one person to teaching.

Exile And Identity: Chaim Potok's Contribution To Jewish-American Literature, Sarah Anne Hamner

MA in English Theses

Questions of identity and exile are deep in the bones of the Jewish people. In this thesis I will discuss the manifestations of exile and identity in the works of Chaim Potok, a Jewish-American novelist. Potok’s work has long been excluded from the canon of Jewish-American criticism. I suspect this exclusion is due to critical oversight, as Potok’s characters lead more traditional Jewish lives in terms of religious beliefs, backgrounds, and behaviors. In order to prove the critical value of Potok’s work I will note the gaps in Jewish-American criticism where Potok’s work is missing. Then I will concentrate around …

A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre

MA in English Theses

The objective of this thesis was to analyze the progression of a woman’s voice in literature looking particularly at three American women writers spanning the 20th and into the 21st century—Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. In conjunction, these three novels show a progression through the history of American women’s literature, demonstrating the successes and failures of voice and silence in their works and the ways in which creating an identity through voice is necessary, even if one must create it complexly. Ultimately, the authors establish a voice in their works that lays the foundation for writers who …

Toward "What Bleeds Or Trembles": Reflections On Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Paul Eisenstein

English Faculty Scholarship

By way of its protagonist Isak Borg, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) enacts and exemplifies a psychoanalytic understanding of change. Bergman’s film, in its form and content, presents and ultimately overturns a narcissistic world of “living death”—a form of living closed off to constitutive features of desire and to meaningful relationships with others. By the film’s end, rather than a “living death,” Bergman stages a life that has been achieved—a life that embraces anew the risks and joys of desire.

The Scandal Of Jewish Rage In William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Michael Lackey

English Publications

Scholars have suggested that William Styron’s Nathan in Sophie’s Choice is insane or depraved—a character whose motivations lack rationality at best and are unambiguously evil at worst. Elie Wiesel, the author of the famous Holocaust memoir Night, has been very critical of Styron’s novel. Ironically, by using the Yiddish version of Wiesel’s memoir Night, it is possible to demonstrate that Nathan’s behavior is more “logical” than scholars have previously understood. This approach offers us a new way of reading and interpreting Styron’s novel by clarifying how Nathan’s character functions within a well-established tradition of sociopolitical outrage about racial oppression, …

Pop, Hip Hop, And Empire, Study Of A New Pedagogical Approach In A Developmental Reading And English Class, Karen Denise Taylor

MA in English Theses

This thesis focuses on the impact of studying students’ identities after using the television show, Empire as a Hip Hop studies based text in a developmental reading and English class. I frame the pedagogical approach to reading and writing by using the television show as a doorway into the varied language practices of the Hip Hop culture as opposed to Standard American English (SAE). This research uses James Paul Gee’s discourse analysis as a method for coding and analysis of the responses of the interviewees to survey questions. The questions were designed to determine from the students’ responses their attitudes …

The Nature, Function, And Value Of Emojis As Contemporary Tools Of Digital Interpersonal Communication, Nicole L. Bliss-Carroll

MA in English Theses

The roles and characteristics of emojis are rapidly expanding within computer-mediated communication spaces, forcing many to acknowledge their seemingly inescapable social influence as tools of digital written communication. These colorful, contemporary icons—which became widely available through a range of global, technical platforms in 2011—convey interpersonal emotional expressions in a much more sophisticated manner than their charming appearance initially indicates. Communicators can learn a great deal about the processes of interpretation that are contributing to the continued and expanding use of emojis. An emoji’s perceived meaning can paradoxically be clear in one instance and ambiguous in another when utilized by individuals …

Technology Usage Versus Technology Integration In Esl Classrooms: Drivers And Barriers, Ayman Serag

Capstone and Graduation Projects

Technology integration is a significant aspect of teaching and learning in the 21st century. This study examines faculty technology integration in the Department of English Language Instruction (ELI) at the American University in Cairo (AUC). It also explores the factors that facilitate or inhibit their computer usage, and also their perceptions about the professional development opportunities in technology that are available to them. Using a case-study design, the researcher used semi-structured interviews conducted with 19 ELI instructors to understand the phenomenon at hand. Eight of the 19 instructors also served dual administrative roles as department chair, committee and program coordinators. …

Honey, Wax, And The Dead Bee, Keith Botelho

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

When Is A Panther Not A Panther? Representing Animals In Early Modern English Heraldry, Kathryn Will

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Ear To The Battleground: New Books On Hearing What Is Lost, Howard S. Axelrod

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Of the five senses, vision tends to get the glory. We hail great innovators as visionary, praise writers for their insight, and thank friends for offering perspective. We call prophets seers, but also admire daily perspicacity and seek to avoid myopia and blind spots. Just consider the words spectacles and spectacular, and you catch a glimpse—not a whisper, a glimpse—of the divergence between vision in the optometrist’s office and vision in our cultural construction of it. But while vision gets the glory, hearing has our trust. We want justice to be blind during court hearings. In times of …

Palpable Hits: Popular Music Forms And Teaching Early Modern Poetry, Stephen M. Buhler

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Recent pedagogical scholarship has engaged strenuously with the use of YouTube and other online platforms in the literature classroom. Stephen O’Neill, for one, champions video-sharing and similar media “in the interests of fostering various experiential, collaborative and peer-learning scenarios,” especially in tandem with the “array of Shakespeare content, which can potentially illuminate and deepen [learners’] understanding of the text and its diverse contexts” (190). In this essay, I discuss the advantages of sharing for this purpose online materials that have been developed by artists, instructors, students, and others—specifically, materials with a musical orientation. Along the way, I shall explain my …

You've Gotta Read This: Summer Reading At Musselman Library (2016), Musselman Library

You’ve Gotta Read This: Summer Reading at Musselman Library

Each year, Musselman Library asks Gettysburg College faculty, staff, and administrators to help create a suggested summer reading list. Our goal is to inspire students and the rest of our community to take time in the summer to sit back, relax, and read.

With the 2016 collection, we again bring together recommendations from across our campus—the books, movies, TV shows, and even musicals that have meant something special to us over the past year. 124 faculty, administrators and staff offer up a record number of 226 recommendations.

We include five special features this year. Two of our regular columnists are …

‘How Little I Cared For Fame’: T. Sparrow And Women’S Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the work of an overlooked female journalist, T. Sparrow, arguing that her career reveals the difficulties female journalists faced when negotiating between the expectations of middle-class gentility and the demands of investigative journalism.

Sparrow asserted her gentility rhetorically, in part because female reporters who took up investigative reporting were vulnerable to criticism for assaying beyond domestic subjects. Moreover, incognito investigative reporting often brought celebrity to its practitioners, which challenged the convention of middle-class female modesty.

Sparrow, therefore, strove for a delicate balance in her career—assuming the stance of a middle-class woman who lived among the poor, someone …

Response: Fabulous Or Spectral?, Ian Macinnes

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Response: Literary And Multispecies Entanglements And The Challenges Of Historical Animal Studies, Brett Mizelle

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Response: Monster Pets, Karen Raber

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

Technology In The College Classroom: Crisis And Opportunity, Theresa Conefrey

English

The 21st century classroom is large, diverse, underfunded, and populated by students weaned on digital devices espousing a consumer mentality looking for a good return on investment (ROI) on their education. These students, the so-called "millennials," and the coming Generation Z, who have grown up in the digital age, are more pragmatic than previous generations of students and are less amenable to traditional teaching approaches. While some lament this "crisis" in education, it can be seen as an opportunity. As "digital natives," students are immersed in the newer technologies both as consumers and producers and anticipate remaining plugged in during …

Gravities, Sierra Faye Sitzes

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis is an attempt to explore, through the genre of literary fiction, the influence of hometowns and childhood friendships and how the power of these entities result in either an escape or capture. My thesis is the first two parts of my three part novel, Gravities, and introduces the non-linear structure of the narrative as well as set up the antagonist, Charlise Rosengren, for her both literal and figurative fall. The novel's three protagonists—Mae Silva, June Silva, and Anna Spence—are each given a perspective in their own sections containing scenes that exemplify the power both Charlise and their hometown …

The History Of English As A Tool For Teaching Grammar, Nathan Henton

Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Junot Díaz’S The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao And Its Punishment Of Failed Gender Performances, Bruno Yupanqui Tovar

Masters Theses

Junot Díaz’s renowned novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar Wao), presents the brief and wondrous life of its main character, Oscar Wao, but also describes the exceptional lives of Lola and Belicia, his sister and mother, respectively. While the story’s title asserts an enthusiastic tone to the lives of Oscar—and the females in his family—the story actually reveals the victimization and demise of these characters. Though Díaz offers the spell of Fukú americanus, a Dominican superstition, Feminist Theorist Judith Butler provides a more advantageous, concrete explanation for the subjugation of these characters. Butler argues that culture dictates …

“I Must Tell The Whole World”: Septimus Smith As Virginia Woolf’S Legal Messenger, Riley H. Floyd

Indiana Law Journal

This Note explores the disjunctive moral gap between a civilian ethic of mutual responsibility and the laws of war that eschew that ethic. To illustrate that gap, this Note conducts a case study of Virginia Woolf’s rendering of shell shock in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The war put mass, mechanized killing at center stage, and international law permitted killing in war. But Woolf’s character study of Septimus Smith reveals that whether war-associated killing is “criminal” requires more than legal analysis. An extralegal approach is especially meaningful because it demonstrates the difficulty of processing and rationalizing global conflict that plays …

"A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration": Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, And Totality, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

Using research undertaken at the Olaf Stapledon archive at the University of Liverpool, this article explores the tension between cosmopolitan optimism and cosmic pessimism that structures Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, and asks whether the novel succeeds in solving the philosophical problems that first spurred Stapledon to write it. I conclude, unhappily, that it does not: while an impressive achievement, and despite a surface optimism, the book's confrontation with infinity, totality, and the sublime is ultimately depressive rather than generative of a felicitous cosmological order, requiring Stapledon to try again and again to somehow solve this philosophical conundrum in …

Review Of Kingsman: The Secret Service, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Waiting For A Place: At Gravedigger’S Pub, Jeffrey Alan Tolbert

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay I consider how place can defeat our attempts to analyze it by become meaningful to us in ways that exceed the scope of our scholarly interests and methods. Discussing my fieldwork at a Dublin pub, I touch on the concepts of sense of place, nostalgia, and the importance of human relationships that form in places even in the context of what might be considered "failed" research.

International Communication: The Effect Of Culture On The Content, Organization, And Design Of Nonprofit Annual Reports, Lia Blanchard

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

A professional document must convey information with a high degree of readability and usability. The inclusion of visual rhetoric, the transformation of technical writing from product-oriented to user-oriented information, the development of Simplified Technical English, and the adoption of plain writing practices are all steps toward communicating effectively in today’s “postnational” world. Continued evolution requires a deeper understanding of cultural differences—acknowledging not only differing symbols, heroes, and rituals, but the values that inspire them. This study examines the content, organization, and design of two nonprofit annual reports produced in 2013: one from the Russian Federation and one from the United …

And, Oh, My Heart Goes Out, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

I Dreamed In Terms Of Novels: Dorothy Day And The Ethics Of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Katherine Thomsen Pierson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To the extent that she is known, Dorothy Day, a twentieth-century American Catholic journalist and social reformer currently under consideration for sainthood by the Vatican, is recognized for her religious influences. Pope Francis, in his 2015 speech before the American Congress, said she was inspired by “the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.” Yet throughout her life Day was a consistent reader of secular texts and even said she “lived by” the vision of some of her favorite writers. This thesis examines Day’s secular influences—in particular Dickens’s David Copperfield and Little Dorrit—and begins to trace their …

Aubrey’S Fragile Psyche And The Signal Of The Real: A Lacanian Analysis Of John William Polidori’S “The Vampyre”, Melissa Powell

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.