English Language and Literature Commons^™

October 9, 2014: Patrick Brantlinger Visit, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

October 8, 2014: Anthony Ellis Speakers Series /Full Season Poster 2014/2015, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

(In)Famous Cover Tunes Of 2014, Simon Orpana

The Goose

A cartoon and commentary by Simon Orpana.

Post-Postmodernism, Robert L. Mclaughlin

Faculty Publications – English

No abstract provided.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, Gregory Chad Wilkes

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), directed by Peter Jackson.

Hell Of A Life, Julia Frantzen

Fall 2014, Storytelling and the Life of Faith

This paper reflects on the work completed for the Storytelling and the Life of Faith Colloquium. It reflects on the author's time in college, time abroad, life, and the course itself. It includes not only introspections on the course readings but also the larger course themes including the use of memory, and universal truths — be there any. It’s about struggle, the internal and the external, it’s an overview of a lot of realizations the author had during her college career. It’s about learning to be ok with the fluctuation called life.

The Unicorn Newsletter Fall 2014, Stephanie Nunley

English Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Defending Compromise, Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

The article focuses on the opinion of James Wagner, president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, about the role of compromise in founding and sustaining the American political system. The reaction of the public to the article he published in the Winter 2013 issue of the "Emory Magazine" entitled "As American as...Compromise" is discussed. The view of professor Avishai Margalit about the idea of rotten compromises outlined in the article is also noted.

Nothing Human (Invited Paper For The Special Volume “Humanism, Cosmopolitanism, And The Ethics Of Translation"), C. Wharram

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

In this essay C. C. Wharram argues that Terence's concept of translation as a form of “contamination” anticipates recent developments in philosophy, ecology, and translation studies. Placing these divergent fields of inquiry into dialogue enables us read Terence's well-known statement “I am a human being — I deem nothing human alien to me” as a recognition of the significance of the “nothing human” for contemporary humanism. By recasting Terence's human/foreign pairing through Freud's concept of the uncanny, Wharram draws a parallel between a “nothing human” that is radically interior to the human subject and an exterior agency of “nothing human” …

Catholic Conversion And Incest In Dryden's "Don Sebastian", Geremy Carnes

Faculty Scholarship

John Dryden's decision to end his 1689 tragedy, Don Sebastian , with the discovery of an act of incest has persistently puzzled the plays readers. The historical Sebastian almost certainly died in the battle which immediately precedes the events of the play; a slightly delayed death would therefore have been a logical conclusion to the play. Or, Dryden could have followed the traditions of romance and legend, which took hope from the fact that Sebastian's body had never been found. These stories, which grew up among the Portuguese after they had been conquered by Spain in 1 580, held that …

Burbage's Father's Ghost, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Poetics Of Talk In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, Amy Wong

Collected Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-loved adventure classic Treasure Island and his philosophical commitments to talk. For Stevenson, talking and adventuring share an experiential poetics that emphasizes responsiveness to unpredictable interactions. By examining several of Stevenson’s prose pieces, including “Talk and Talkers” and “My First Book” as well as Treasure Island, this essay argues that the novel aspires to translate the poetics of talk into a print medium. Treasure Island imagines itself as a form of “living print,” a work that, like Long John Silver’s parrot, seems more dynamic than print typically is, yet is …

The Multidimensional Prospects For L2 English Legal Writing, Jongkyung Park

Open Access Theses

Due to a rapidly rising population of international law students in the United States, considering the guiding role of language specialists in L2 legal writing has become more critical than ever regarding academic curricula and research as well as prospective professional practice. Given the lack of rich body of research on L2 legal writing, this thesis contemplates how legal writing curricula and research could be practically beneficial to L2 English learners (especially to those with legal backgrounds), through the researcher's own point of view as a L2 English-speaking lawyer. For this purpose, the researcher investigates diverse approaches to L2 legal …

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

“The Other One”: An Unpublished Chapter Of Sarah Orne Jewett’S The Country Of The Pointed Firs, Melissa J. Homestead, Terry Heller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) has long been central to literary critical debates about the nature and character of American literary regionalism. In the early 1990s, some New Historicist critics aligned the emergence of the literary movement with the rise of tourism as two means by which urban elites defined themselves as a socially and racially privileged class in the postwar nation. In an influential analysis of the mutually reinforcing development of the literary marketplace and class and cultural hierarchies, Richard Brodhead describes regionalism in Cultures of Letters (1993) as evidencing “an elite need for …

Relentless Engagement With State Educational Policy Reform: Collaborating To Change The Writing Placement Conversation, Heidi Estrem, Dawn Shepherd, Lloyd Duman

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article describes the educational reform efforts surrounding writing placement in one state context. We propose that placement offers a particularly useful engagement point because it is often controlled by state-level policies and it directly impacts the lived experience of first-year college students. To document how we worked across institutions in our state, we describe a series of events that occurred over several years and that fostered collaborative exchanges. Then, we explore the challenges and opportunities afforded by our long-term engagement with policymakers. Ultimately, we propose strategies that writing program administrators might consider as they become engaged with state-level higher …

"Dear Burns": Editing The Other Side Of Burns's Correspondence, Joseph C. Durant, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

This paper provides an overview of the history, sources, and editorial approach for the first-ever collected edition of the letters written to the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). Originally conceived by the late Prof. G. Ross Roy of the University of South Carolina over fifty years ago, and more recently planned as a joint venture with the late Kenneth Simpson of the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow, it is now in progress under new editors at South Carolina, as a distinct preliminary stage in work on the correspondence volumes for the new AHRC-funded Clarendon edition of the collected works of …

Constructing Community From Corpses In Medieval English And Icelandic Literature, Erin C Kissick

Open Access Dissertations

I argue that the bodies of the dead interred within medieval texts are used as focal points for the communities created within those texts. The most famous textual medieval corpses are the relics of saints as described in hagiographies, relics which, outside of these texts, became the centerpieces of many medieval communities, both religious and secular, as demonstrated by Patrick Geary and Carolyn Walker Bynum. More broadly, material culture scholars such as Howard Williams have shown that the graves of nonsaints played a significant role in the preservation of communal memory. In medieval communities, ancestors and other long-gone ancient communities …

Disentangling Fluency, Comprehensibility And Coherence: Toward A Better Understanding Of Oral Proficiency Profiles, Haiying Cao

Open Access Dissertations

This study is an empirical attempt to examine how removal of all possible disfluency markers can help disentangle proficiency components assessed by the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) in order to help build empirical foundations for establishing OEPT profiles. Silent and filled pauses, false starts and repetitions were removed from 50 test recordings in WAVEPAD SOUND EDITOR. Five trained OEPT raters rated the original and edited speeches. Statistical analyses addressed three research questions: 1) do fluency, comprehensibility and coherence ratings significantly change after the disfluency manipulation; 2) do correlations between fluency, comprehensibility, coherence and coherence subcomponents change after the disfluency …

Depressives And The Scenes Of Queer Writing, Allen Durgin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading . Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick's brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to …

Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.

In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …

Selva Simbólica Selva Simbiótica Apuntes Para Una Ecocritica Latinoamericana, Liza Pamela Rosas-Bustos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Latin America's selvatic territories. It argues for prevailing ecological principles as revealed in the selected works of three twentieth-century Latin American story-writers and poets. They portray rainforests as multisensorial lands that encompass bewildering events from which a principle of local authority emerges. This analysis is based on Francisco Coloane's short stories "Tierra del Fuego" and "Cabo de Hornos," Rosario Castellanos'Balún Canán, and Luis Sepúlveda's Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. Such phenomenology is also present on the environmental poetics from Marosa di Giorgio, Cecilia Vicuña, and Leonel Lienlaf linked to emotions of fear, urgency, …

Marvel Comics And New York Stories: Anti-Heroes And Street Level Vigilantes Daredevil And The Punisher, Jesse Allen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that the creation of street level, vigilante heroes The Punisher and Daredevil created by Marvel Comics authors and illustrators in the late 1970s and early 1980s reflected the socio-economic environment of New York City at this same moment in history. By examining an era of New York that was fiscally and socially tense along with the development of characters created by the New York based Marvel Comics, I aim to show how their creation was directly related to the environment which they were produced in.

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism, Anne Donlon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archives Of Transnational Modernism: Lost Networks Of Art And Activism considers the work of several intersecting figures in transnational modernism, in order to reassess the contours of race and gender in anglophone literature of the interwar period in the U.S. and Europe. Writers and organizers experimented with literary form and print culture to build and maintain networks of internationalism. This dissertation begins to suggest some of these maps of connection, paying particular attention to people who played key roles as hubs within networks. British radical Sylvia Pankhurst's 1920s publications, which have not been much considered in terms of literary contribution, …

Standard Deviations: Genre, Gender, And The Cartographical Imagination In Popular British Literature, 1830-1880, Taylor R. Kennamer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While cartography is understood to undergird the spatial interventions integral to Victorian reform in areas such as sewerage and housing, little critical attention has been paid to the influence of cartographical discourse in itself, rather than through its concrete products, as a force that fundamentally altered nineteenth-century conceptions of self, other, and environment. Standard Deviations fills that gap, studying the changing parameters of spatial epistemology by monitoring expanding and contracting definitions of bodily deviance across four generic modes historically associated with the nineteenth century: detective, sensation, and domestic fiction, and the household management guide. Altered perceptions of spatial reality and …

Review Of Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens And Eighteenth-Century Culture, Nicolle Jordan

Faculty Publications

Review of Stephen Bending. Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. X +312 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-107-04002-1.

Past Griefs, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Steve Martin's "Patter For The Floating Lady", Abhinav Tiku , '18, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Abhinav Tiku, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 9H, "Portraits of the Artist," fall 2014.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Tobias Wolff's "That Room", Kate L. Crowley , '16, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Kate Crowley, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2014.

Impact Of Corporate Sustainability Behavior On Financial Performance In Aerospace Companies, Petulia Blake

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sustainability is increasingly becoming an integral part of how organizations communicate their business operation to stakeholders. As it is common knowledge that organizations are more inclined to invest in programs that contribute to their bottom-line, this study presents an analysis of the relationship between corporate sustainability behaviors and their impact on financial performance. The sample size was 40 United States (U.S.) aerospace companies, selected from the “Top 100 Aerospace Companies” world-wide in a report produced by Candesic consulting firm in 2012. Of the 40 U.S. companies, 21 were found to provide some form of sustainability report. Quantitative and qualitative instruments …