English Language and Literature Commons^™

Book Review: Revision Decisions: Talk Through Sentences And Beyond, Jennifer Dunn

The Utah English Journal

As an English teacher teaching writing, I sometimes struggle to help my students understand the importance of revising--of making changes and not just sticking with the first thing they write.

In Revision Decisions Jeff Anderson- a grammar guru-and Deborah Dean-a strong champion and voice for strategic writing, teamed together to create a book that even the most novice of teachers can use to instruct their students on how to make revisions to writing through a variety of grammar strategies. Their focus is creating a dialogic classroom in order to help students understand that there are multiple ways to write something …

Helping Students To Dare Greatly: Feedback In The English Classroom, Katie Fredrickson

The Utah English Journal

Teaching literature is lovely, but I became an English teacher because I wanted to teach students to write. I wasn't one month into my first year of teaching when I realized how difficult of a task teaching writing can be, even after years of studying writing instruction. Often, I'd pour my passion into developing an assignment. With Katie Wood Ray's (1999) Wondrous Words in mind, I'd find mentor texts for my students to study and use as examples. Following John Bean's (2011) advice in Engaging Ideas, I'd "build process requirements into the assignment, including due dates for drafts" in order …

Book Review: Nightbird, Trent Mikesell

The Utah English Journal

A real fairy tale should be every child's dream. However, when the fairy tale world is plagued with a curse, the dream becomes a nightmare. This is the nightmare that Twig faces in Alice Hoffman's novel, Nightbird. Twig should be happy-she lives in an enchanting town with a loving family-but she is one of the unwilling victims of a dark spell and has to deal with its effects while helping to overcome it. Nightbird tells the story of what happens when curses and monsters attempt to destroy a family and town.

Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism, Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Criterion: A Journal For Literary Criticism

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As the editor of an academic annual, I have the pleasure of interacting with scholars from across the United States and the world. While most of these interactions take place via e-mail, I feel as if I get to know RAE's contributors, in addition to their work, as I take a manuscript from submission to publication. Of course, some interactions are more personal than others. This was particularly true of my email exchanges with Adrianne Wadewitz, who died in a rock-climbing accident during the production of this volume. I am pleased to include her excellent essay on the ways eighteenth-century …

Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, And The American Episcopate: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Perhaps the most charming aspect of Kenneth Elliott's Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, and the American Episcopate is its author's propensity to take at face value the statements made in the voluminous correspondence, the many pam - phlets, and the occasional published sermons on the subject of whether a resident bishop would help secure the Church of England in the North American colonies and whether such an outcome was in any case desirable.

David Hume: The Philosopher As Historian: Book Review, Richard Kleer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Judging a book by its cover would give especially misleading results in this case. From its title, readers might expect a general introduction to Hume's scholarly work. Instead, they will get an account mainly of Hume the historian. The volume was originally commissioned as part of "a series of short books by historians writing about their favourite historians" (5). First published by Avon (in Britain) and St. Martin's (in the United States), it is now reprinted by Penguin and Yale. The rerelease may have a lot to do with the apparent popularity (judging by the many reviews, at least) of …

Finding Unifying Texts: Make Lemonade And The Book Thief As Tools Of Differentiated Instruction For English Language Learners, Dane Spencer

The Utah English Journal

Standing in front of a high school classroom with deeply variant levels of English proficiency is a daunting experience for almost any teacher. Last year, as I looked out over my sophomore class of students, I saw five students raised in the United States (including three second-generation Americans) mingled with five international, English language learner (ELL) students. Three of the international students hailed from China, while the other two were from Vietnam. A few months into the year, the equation became even more complex as another non-international student joined the class, along with another international student from war-torn Ukraine (the …

President's Message: Language, Limits & Literacy, Kim Irvine

The Utah English Journal

I cried in my silent classroom when her picture came up on my role. Her sparkling eyes, clear and full of promise, stared out at me from a darling, dimpled smile ringed by shining blonde curls. In her sixth grade year, this angelic-looking student was in a car accident-caused by a drunk driver. She was badly hurt with her face and head taking most of the damage. I sat numbly listening as they explained my new student's situation. The accident was horrific. She had been thrown from the car through the back window. She lost an ear. We were told …

Stand-Up Comedy And Self-Deprecating Humor, Amelia M. Bell

UROP Posters

Stand-up comedy has been around for centuries, making people laugh for generations. Through the years the forms and techniques stand-up comedians use have shifted back and forth. Self-deprecation humor is one of these forms of humor, where the comedian pokes fun at his or herself, and it has recently become more incredibly popular in today’s society. Stand-up comedians like Louis C.K. have risen to newfound popularity by using self-deprecating humor almost completely in their sets. This paper attempts to answer the question of why audiences respond so positively to stand-up comedians who use self-deprecating humor. It does so by arguing …

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …

Punto Ciego, Adelmar Alvin Ramirez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ciudad Juarez, another type of history shown through newspaper articles and headlines, going against the stereotypical values of violence and feminicides.

El Paso Odyessy, Tafari Amin Nugent

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El Paso Odyssey not only attempts to give an accurate reflection of everyday American life within a particular timeframe but, also attempts to give characters the ability to speak for themselves. The audience must judge and interpret the authenticity and accuracy of the language throughout the text and if the veracity of the dialogue rings true, the narrative story has succeeded on some level.

Peer Review In A Graduate Writing Class: Case Studies Of First-And Second- Language Students, Petcharat Saenpoch

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research explored peer review strategies of L1 (native speakers of English) and L2 (non-native speakers of English) graduate student writers from different disciplines. The focus was on how they revised their writing and which strategies they used. The study was conducted in a Graduate Writing Workshop class at a public university on the U.S. - Mexican border in the United States of America. Five participants were selected as case studies. The researcher collected data by recording face-to-face peer review sessions, observing the class, interviewing the instructor and students, collecting the students' reflections, and gathering the students' writing drafts. The …

Though My Gross Blood Be Stain'd: Bleeding Bodies And Power Dynamics In Shakespeare's The Tragedy Of Coriolanus And The Rape Of Lucrece, Lindsey Katherine Dee Wedow

Master's Theses

Early modern literature is replete with references to blood. These references appear in the contexts of class and gender distinction, medical information, religious significance, and more. Upon looking into the Galenic model of medicine utilized in early modern England, it becomes clear that blood, while one of the four humors of the body, held a place of special significance amongst the rest. Thus in reading the works of Shakespeare we are able to see how he often handles blood as a substance that holds special qualities and as such plays an important role in human lives. This paper examines two …

The Trauma Thesis: Medical And Literary Representations Of Psychological Trauma In The Twentieth Century, Sarah Louise Eilefson

Dissertations

The historian Samuel Hynes has observed that World War I was not only the greatest military and political event of its time but also the greatest imaginative event. Soldiers and civilians struggled to comprehend the war’s devastation and the changes it produced while medical practitioners and artists examined the war as a site of extraordinary trauma. My project explores two of the many archives of trauma: the medical discourse through which trauma was defined; and representations of trauma in a variety of English language novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. I begin with a historical survey of the medical …

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …

The Modernist Novel In Its Contemporaneity, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Through the writings of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen, this chapter considers the temporality of the now, the modernist novel in its contemporaneity, to show how the ambient environment of daily life takes shape in, and shapes, the modernist novel.

White Woods And Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen Rewrites A Streetcar Named Desire, Verna Foster

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The film's reviewers almost invariably commented on the parallels with Streetcar, many noting, too, that Cate Blanchett, who plays the title character, Jasmine, had also successfully played Blanche Dubois in Liv Ullmann's 2009 production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.2 But for all the similarities in character types and plot structure and for all the allusions to specific lines in Streetcar, the themes of Blue Jasmine are very different from those of Williams's play because the story that Allen tells also channels the fall of Bernie Madoff and his wife, Ruth. The flashbacks are a filmic equivalent …

Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction, Bethany Dailey Tisdale

Theses and Dissertations

In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success.

In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled …

Poverty And Homelessness : A Content Analysis Of Children's Nonfiction Literature, Christine Newell

Graduate Research Papers

Units taught in social studies and language arts that address family issues, neighborhoods, communities, economic diversity, and social issues need to address the struggles, challenges, and fears of children living in poverty or who are homeless. Depictions of poverty and homelessness should be handled with accuracy and sensitivity. Connections made through the use of literature can help all students develop an understanding about the world around them and help them begin to realize the struggles of those who live in poverty.

This study of K-6 nonfiction books about poverty and homelessness investigated how these social problems were depicted in the …

Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Postsouthern Melancholia offers a new way of conceptualizing the elusive concept of melancholia through contemporary fiction, particularly fiction of or about the American South. Critics have long discussed national literature through the lens of melancholia: an unceasing attachment to a lost object or ideal that a subject or culture internalizes. My project positions melancholia as a literary strategy—one that contemporary southern fiction frequently contests and critiques. I read fiction that has been called “postsouthern,” a term applied to texts that reassess the bedrock concepts of southern literature such as community, storytelling, and sense of place. While much scholarship has focused …

Paradoxical Agency: The Ethics Of Women's Rhetoric In Shakespeare's Rome, Catherine Riley Godbold

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I address the problems of ethics and agency for women’s speech in Shakepseare’s Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus—and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Regardless of their rhetorical skill, virtue, or agency, it seems that the Roman women in these works are doomed to fail: either their lives become unlivable or they lose the people most important to them. This prompts the project’s initiating question: why do Shakespeare’s Roman women speak if their words have no long-term effect? For these characters, rhetorical success in Shakespeare’s Rome is dependent upon a particular …

"Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction In Victorian Literature And Culture, Mary Timothy Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Examining a broad range of texts,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture,” argues that Thomas Hardy’s final naturalist novels, popular nineteenth-century vampire narratives, and the fiction of Oscar Wilde queered the bildungsroman (or novel of development) through characters who failed or refused to progress along sexual and maturational timelines. Where these texts’ critics have tended to read them as cautionary tales about homosexuality or predatory female sexuality, this dissertation contends that they also presented alternate forms of kinship and reproduction. They do so through the use of recursive, inverted, or otherwise backward relationships to time. Where Victorian sexology …

Gender And The Popular Heroines (And Heroes) Of The Young Adult Dystopia, Kara E. Hemphill

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For the past few years, dystopian stories have ruled the young adult fiction aisles and the box office. Taking the reins from similarly popular predecessors like Harry Potter and Twilight, the genre has set itself apart by telling stories of action, war, and heroism that are often led by a young female protagonist. This project examines a variety of gender-related themes in six young adult dystopian novels, chosen for their popularity and subject matter. While it is not a comprehensive look at the genre, it is meant to analyze some of the most widely known works, which is important because …

The Erotics Of Race Suicide: The Making Of Whiteness And The Death Drive In The Progressive Era, 1880-1920, Madoka Kishi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

"The Erotics of Race Suicide" examines the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive Era American literature in light of a widely proclaimed socio-political concept of the time: “race suicide.” Coined by the sociologist Edward Ross, the term “race suicide” nominates a nativist fear over the racial enervation of indigenous white Americans. Ross and other commentators on race suicide, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, proclaimed that the diminution of the indigenous white Americans was caused by their unwillingness to breed, signaling the self-destructive, “suicidal” tendency of the race. Consequently, through such means as the enactment of immigration restrictions, the reinforcement of anti-miscegenation …

Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …

Sisters Before The Fall, Heather Lanae Captain

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis comprises the first fourteen chapters of a fiction entitled "Sisters Before the Fall", which brings to the forefront extreme, yet, real abuses faced by women in the Middle East and the northeastern countries of Africa. Those abuses are the result of social, political, and cultural influences, and include general repression of women and girls, female genital mutilation, marriage of prepubescent girls, and the slave trade. A female American volunteer and a female Hispanic doctor meet these women in a humanitarian compound in western Sudan. As they work together to overcome challenges brought on by war, they realize they …

The Essence Of English Identity: Gender's Role In The Stability Of The Nation In English Literature, From The Anglo-Saxons To The Victorians, Natalie Marie Whitaker

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis, using Jungian analysis, investigates how the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, William Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield reflect the interdependent spheres of gender relationships that affected societal perceptions of English national identity and stability for over a thousand years. Historian Geoffrey Hindley writes, "the historical reality of an English identity grew out of the traditions of loyalty and lordship from the epic heritage of a pagan past embodied in the poem of Beowulf in a common vernacular tongue.” In the three periods examined here, men and women had responsibilities in marriage that were defined by the societal ideals …