English Language and Literature Commons^™

Vespers, Robert W. Hill

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 100

They Stopped, Kathryn Starbuck

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 136

Maybe Time Meant To Tell Us, Greg Williamson

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 151

My Youngest Daughter Brings Me Daisies And Bits Of Plastic Trash, Sean Thomas Dougherty

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 72

Another Picture Of The Future, Stuart Dischell

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 71

Saint Columbia In Old Age, Rob Griffith

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 92

Mea Maxima Culpa, Rob Griffith

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 93

Postcards From The Tokaido Road, Debora Greger

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 83-87

Indexia In The Dark, Terese Svoboda

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 141

Reflective Teaching And Self-Efficacy Beliefs: Exploring Relationships In The Context Of Teaching Efl In Iran, Mehdi Babaei, Arman Abednia

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This article reports on a study that explored the relationship between reflective teaching and teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Two questionnaires, the English Language Teaching Reflection Inventory (Akbari, Behzadpoor, & Dadvand, 2010) and Teachers’ Efficacy Beliefs System-Self (TEBS-Self) (Dellinger, Bobbett, Olivier, & Ellett, 2008), were distributed among 225 Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers. Pearson product-moment correlation analysis showed a significant positive relationship between the general factors of teacher reflectiveness and self-efficacy. Standard multiple regression identified Efficacy for Learner Engagement as the only predictor of teacher reflectiveness and Meta-Cognitive Reflection as the only predictor of teacher self-efficacy. Finally, the interconnections …

An Awakened Woman With A Room Of Her Own, Erica Garcia

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In the early 1900’s, women were obviously being oppressed considering they lacked the right to vote, to an education, and to freedom. Through bold women who spoke out against the said oppression, women were able to work together to fight for equality. By digging deeper into the literature of the time period, the point of view of an oppressed woman is more easily seen and can therefore be better understood. Women among Woolf and Chopin, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt helped move along the passing of the 19th Amendment with assistance from the NAWSA. Once women got the ball rolling …

There And Back Again… And Again, Dylan Spilinek

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The goal of this research project was to analyze literature to understand the time period the piece was written in. J. R. R. Tolkien claimed that his children’s story, The Hobbit, held no historical allegories that related to his time period. However, analyzing The Hobbit shows how Tolkien’s personal life held many areas that influenced his writing, and those who read his tales.

Tolkien was inspired by Beowulf’s epic hero plot and Christian beliefs as seen by his character, ideologies and symbolic objects, and by his naturalistic mindset reflected by the story’s species relations and underlying themes. This childhood …

Overcoming More Than Physical Borders: The Challenges Gender Creates For Hispanic Immigrants, Guadalupe Esquivel

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

An analysis of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and Sandra Cisneros's “Woman Hollering Creek” shows the measures that Mexican women take to find their identity after immigrating. Facing discrimination on the basis of both race and gender, this task is more difficult for females than for their male counterparts. It is a challenge that continues for many women today as they balance two worlds and are expected to fully carry the roles of both. This is a focus on the main characters of the above texts, Americá Rincón and Cleofilas, respectively, as well as personal essays written by first …

Becoming South: Postmodern Southern Distinction, Melody Knight Pritchard

Theses and Dissertations

Within Southern studies scholarship, much has been said (or told) about "the South" and southern distinction or essentialism. No one can define what, exactly, the South or southernness is, but we are determined to spend much energy and ink writing about it, anyway. Since the late 20th century, southern studies scholarship has largely followed a discourse-focused trajectory, and the popular (or at least the loudest) answers to questions about the South's distinction have often been angry “nos,” critical rejections of a "special" South that functions—or even exists—outside of discourse. Though this line of inquiry is well-intentioned, it has done little …

From The Multi To The Modal: Relations In Multimodal Composition, Sebastian Ivy

Theses and Dissertations

In response to the development of multimodal composition over the last twenty years, significant questions regarding its relationship to traditional composition and the discipline’s pedagogical practices have been posed. These questions are most often raised regarding the way that multimodal composition isolates media and modes, and is thus “tacked on” to composition courses. These concerns are primarily due to the way that multimodality has been theorized, which is usually rooted in the work of the New London Group. Developing a version of multimodal composition that can avoid both isolating its various parts and being tacked on to traditional concerns requires …

Tarred And Floral: Femininity, Race, And The Abject In Bayou, Chalice Ritter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes abjection in the African-American female experience using Bayou, a graphic novel series by Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan. I examine the relationship between the protagonist, Lee, and her late mother, Tar Baby, to reveal the latter as an abject component of the former’s identity. The project continues a trend of reading abjection into the African-American experience using gothic fiction and focuses on multiple scenes that serve as intersections of violence and femininity. It draws on sociological and psychological studies concerning black womanhood and beauty politics to extend investigation to the Mississippi community Lee and Tar Baby share. …

In The Belly Of The Whale: Archive And Access In Melville’S Moby-Dick, Garrett Urban

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Melville’s depiction of archival anxiety as it appears in Moby-Dick. This narrative is fixated on the archive, brimming with motifs that equate whaling with the creation of an archive—and which associates the hunt for the whale with an obsession resembling Derrida’s vision of archive fever. As Melville depicts it, the archive is rooted in a fundamental anxiety concerning inaccessible and unknowable information. Ishmael constantly presents whales as physical repositories of information, attempting to archive the social and historical contexts of every scrap of flesh on them and every substance they produce. Yet his archival mission is perpetually …

Bound Bodies: Book Use And The Early Modern Reader, 1450-1660, Emily Rendek

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the act of reading during the early modern period. Examining both the text block and the margins of printed pages, this project contends that early modern reading practices create a hybrid book/body circuit. The texts selected for this project provide a depiction of not only how the act of reading functioned during the early modern period but also reveal the manner in which reading was presented to audiences and readers on the stage and printed page. This project resists a linear, chronological narrative of the act of reading and instead makes evident different versions of reading and …

The Poetry Of Wilmer Mills, Rachael Acheson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to contextualize the work of Wilmer Mills, a late, minor Southeastern American poet, within the complex and frequently misread tradition of New Formalism, as this manifested in the United States shortly after World War II. The analysis places Mills‟s work in conversation with the formalist philosophy of former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur, and it suggests that both Mills‟s poetry and his reception amongst fellow academics who adhered to a more progressive philosophy demonstrates the continued relevance of this older, less-often discussed strain of formalism in American poetry. An appendix presents the first checklist of Mills‟s published …

Efficacious Uncertainty In Two Animal Texts: The Lives Of Animals By J. M. Coetzee And "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)" By Jacques Derrida, Kristofer Jon Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jacques Derrida divides all texts into two categories in light of human encounters with animals. On the one hand are texts produced by those who may have devoted thought and attention to animals but have not imagined that animals might have a gaze of their own directed back at humans. On the other hand are texts produced by those whose thought and attention to animals has indeed been troubled, perplexed, and complicated by the recognition of an animal’s reciprocal gaze. Derrida’s own text, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” in which he distinguishes between these two kinds …

“When Do I Cross The Street?” Roberta’S Guilty Reflection, Irene A. Lietz

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Following a student’s evolving attitudes on race issues through her undergraduate years, a researcher concludes that a critical pedagogy can have long-term effects on student and instructor alike.

Adult Influences In The Construction Of Youth War Diaries, Amanda Slater

Undergraduate Research Journal

In her article, “Youth Voices in the War Diary Business,” Susan Honeyman argues that interviews with children and youth – although influenced by the adult population – “resist being reducible simply to war propaganda or protectionist sentimentality” (74). This is especially true for award-winning author and peace activist Deborah Ellis, whose recent nonfiction – Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees (2009), Off to War: Voices of Soldier’s Children (2008), and Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children (2004) – tend to lack “imposing adult interpretation” (Honeyman 82). While this may be accurate within the work of Ellis as well as …

The Self Is A Moving Target: The Neuroscience Of Siri Hustvedt's Artists, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Modest Monograph On Shaw, Julie Sparks

Faculty Publications, English and Comparative Literature

A review of Gautam Sengupta. Myriad-Minded Shaw: Perspectives on Shavian Drama (Politics, War and History). Delhi: PHI Learning (Prentice Hall of India), 2016. 144 pages.

When Time Stops: A Loss Of Identity Or A Lack Of Responsibility?, Emma M. Kuper

The Criterion

Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”, and Louis MacNeice’s “Sunday Morning” follow a similar temporal structure as they begin with a normal passing of time, feature a hiatus or stretch of time in the central part of the poem, and then end with a return to normalcy. In addition, both poems include a connection among strangers during this stretched time period. However, Bishop’s speaker finds this connection frightening, due to her resulting loss of identity. In contrast, MacNeice portrays this connection as positive, as all of humanity shares in a peaceful, joyous morning. This difference originates in the cause of …

Bridges Instead Of Borders: A Look Into Hispanic-American Literature And Its Effect On Hyphenated Youth, Cristal Villarreal

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Commerce In The Merchant Of Venice, Caroline B. Ward

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the pervasive role of commerce in Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice, with a particular focus on the characters of Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, and Portia, and the dual locales of Venice and Belmont. The way in which various characters engage in commerce is a reflection of their individual motives and affiliations. At the same time, the rhetoric of commerce, worth, and value colors the speech of various characters, and influences seemingly extra-commercial considerations such as identity, friendship, religion, socioeconomic status, and love. Ultimately, a close analysis of commercial transaction and language in the play reveals the …

Threshold, Leah Vahjen

Theses and Dissertations

This senior thesis details an exploration by Leah V into spaces and places in time—be they emotional or physical—in which an important boundary has been crossed, thereby removing the possibility of returning to that space or place. The critical introduction for this collection of poems by Leah V focuses on the esteemed voices of Robert Penn Warren and Seamus Heaney, two men whose poetry has been, and continues to be, highly influential in Leah’s own poetic quest.

Don’T Point That Gun At My Mum: Geriatric Zombies, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

What Should Be In That Caesar: The Question Of Julius Caesar's Greatness, John E. Curran Jr.

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.