English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Art Speaks For Itself: Aura And Corruption In Cuarón’S Children Of Men, Colby Orton

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In the world of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, the audience comes face to face with many scenes and shots that are filled with symbolism that it may become difficult to pick up on all the excellent directional moves made by Cuarón. This essay will closely analyze not only the clever placement of art but the heavy symbolic nature that each of these art pieces possess; furthermore, I will analyze the implications that these symbolic references bring to the film and how these implications complicate the film while furthering the difficult themes proposed by Cuarón. To achieve the highest understanding …

Volume 72, Issue 2: Windows, Mirrors And Sliding Glass Doors - Bridging The Divide Call For Submissions

Virginia English Journal

No abstract provided.

I Can... Will You?, Cheryl Golden

Virginia English Journal

No abstract provided.

Take A Risk: A Review Of Expanding Literacy, Hollie M. Bergeron, Jenny M. Martin

Virginia English Journal

This is a book review of Expanding Literacy: Bringing Digital Storytelling into Your Classroom by Brett Pierce in 2022. Review collaboratively by two teacher educators and a content area literacy course, this thorough review of Pierce's book for educators includes many perspectives.

The Learning Center: Changing Your Writing Center To A Learning Center, Kyle D. Trott Ph.D.

Virginia English Journal

The purpose of this article is to reimagine the Writing Center not as an island removed from the disciplines or resource extending from the English Department, but as the heart of the secondary school. One way to do this is to recognize the need for secondary school writing centers to engage the academic community comprised of the five core disciplines—English, Math, Science, Social Studies, Foreign Language—through advocacy and shared responsibility by means of creating and engaging through agency by utilizing the honor societies in the various disciplines through the local example of the Woodbridge Senior High School’s development of the …

Lessons From The Bluest Eye: The Discovery Of Self, Shanda D. Boone-Hurdle

Virginia English Journal

This article will explore the profound impact of reading, utilizing Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye as a catalyst for students to create real-life connections that resonate with their own experiences. The love of reading is a transformative force that not only enriches the intellectual landscape but also serves as a powerful tool for fostering empathy and understanding. This article will demonstrate how reading empowers students and helps them find solace and strength in the realization that their struggles, dreams, and aspirations are not isolated but are woven into the fabric of a broader narrative in which students can reflect …

Engaging Students In Writing With Nonfiction Social Justice Texts, Tracy Spurlin-Saravanan

Virginia English Journal

Getting students engaged in writing in a high school setting is usually challenging and often elicits complaints of boredom. However, the utilization of texts that focus on the experiences of marginalized people and that educates about social injustices can get students interested. When students read texts that inform them about such issues that they might otherwise never hear about and when they are invited to share their views through writing, the door to learning to become critical thinkers and global citizens is opened for them.

Write Like The Character: A New Take On Using Mentor Text To Support Writing, Tracy L. Hough

Virginia English Journal

Writing is a complex process that requires the orchestration of cognitive, social, and emotional processes. This analysis explores ways to help our students navigate the complexities of becoming a writer by expanding the use of mentor texts to include an examination of characters who write, modeling the real challenges and rewards associated with becoming a writer. The themes identified within the selected mentor texts focus on finding encouragement and inspiration to write from others, making sense of the world through personal writing, and discovering one's voice and identity as a writer. By extending our use of mentor texts, we help …

Shifting Scaffolds: Building Intellective Capacity Through Student Choice, Amanda Blevins

Virginia English Journal

In an effort to meet the wide-ranging capacities and even wider-ranging levels of student motivation in ELA classrooms, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers are tasked with examining current instructional practices through the lenses of efficacy and engagement. Disengagement, worsened by an over-reliance on prescriptive structures like the five-paragraph essay, hampers students' growth and independence. This essay explores how scaffolding, particularly through student choice, can nurture students' intellective capacity and foster genuine engagement with literacy. By embracing student interests and providing opportunities for authentic analysis, educators can empower students to navigate complex texts and develop nuanced thinking skills essential for …

Introduction From The Editor's Desk: Spring 2024, Cinde Wollenberg

Virginia English Journal

No abstract provided.

Realizing The Sustainability Of Portfolio Assessment In Second-Language Writing, Pauline Mak, Kevin M. Wong

Education Division Scholarship

Portfolio assessment, as an alternative writing assessment approach, has received growing attention in the past few decades. Although the benefits of portfolio assessment are well validated, there is a dearth of empirical research on how portfolio assessment can be sustained over time and the support teachers need to sustain portfolio assessment practice in their teaching contexts. To fill this significant void, the present study examines the influences that contribute to the sustainability of portfolio assessment in second-language writing. Drawing on data from interviews with the principal, English department chair and four English teachers from one elementary school in Hong Kong, …

"How Nicely You Talk; I Love To Hear You": Speech As Cultural Capital In Emma, Middlemarch, And The Portrait Of A Lady, Rosetta Young

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this essay, I examine how, in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who unite a precarious relationship to the British gentry with a talent for conversation. I argue that, through this glorification of their heroines’ eloquence, Austen, Eliot, and James align this socioeconomic positionality—what I term “precarious affluence” or “gentry-adjacence”—with novelistic protagonicity. Through this analysis, I study the differing degrees to which these three major nineteenth-century novelists use their smooth-talking heroines to imagine an emerging, alternative elite to the gentry and the aristocratic upper classes. …

A Hegelian Study Of Richard Ford’S Bascombe Tetralogy, Arash Khoshsafa

Student Works (2020-2029)

This dissertation investigates Richard Ford’s principal character, Frank Bascombe, in his four consecutive books, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, from Hegel’s familial love and self-consciousness theory. The project’s four chapters examine Hegel’s general philosophy concerning the a for ementioned concepts and then provide a close reading analysis of their loss throughout Frank’s lifetime, which begins with the new post-divorce days in The Sportswriter in his mid-30s and ends with an old Frank in Let Me Be Frank With You. Richard Ford’s Bascombe Tetralogy challenges us to look at our …

Daughters And Fathers In Memoirs: Najla Said And Fatima Bhutto, Yasmina Bakry

Theses and Dissertations

The father-daughter relationship has always been crucial in shaping the identity of the daughter. Daughters inevitably inherit their fathers’ personal trauma, and in the case of the daughters of activists, national trauma as well. Throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, daughters struggle to depoliticize their famous fathers, as well as assert their individuality amidst the overshadowing activism of their fathers and conflictual history of their nations. To heal the daughters’ identity fissures, they embark on a journey to chronicle memories of their fathers throughout their lives and critically assess their fathers’ cultural, social and political heritage and identity. This thesis will …

The Romani People In The European Cultural Imagination: Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée And Virginia Woolf, Nadya Siyam

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly literature on Roma is scarce compared to other racial groups as a lack of academic interest, financial limitations, and other social and political factors has constrained it. This resulted in a cross-cultural circulation of misinformation about Romani people and the reproduction of Romani myths and stereotypes in fiction. This project aims to analyze selected literary works on Gypsies from three Eastern and Western European countries and two periods to unpack the cultural and political roots of Romani literary misrepresentation. This research employs a range of theoretical frameworks chosen to put the Gypsy protagonists under maximum spotlight without unnecessary repetition, …

Miscellaneous, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Announcements:

Call for papers (The Abolition of Man 80 Years On)

The C. S. Lewis Correspondence Project

The Inaugural Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference (George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon September 5-8, 2024)

Submission guidelines, style guide, copyright notice, and order form.

Review Of Further Up And Further In, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Further Up and Further In. Written and performed by Max McLean. Phoenix, AZ: Herberger Theater, 18 March 2023.

Review Of Bareface, David Bates

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of C. S. Lewis, Bareface (Proposed title for Till We Have Faces). Produced by Ballet 5:8. Choreography and Lighting by Julianna Rubio Slager. Costumes by Lorianne Robertson. Props by Sarah L. Freeman. Chicago, United States: Harris Theatre, 22 April 2023.

Review Of The Nature Of Middle-Earth, Brenton D.G. Dickieson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of J. R. R. Tolkien, The Nature of Middle-earth, ed. by Carl Hostetter (New York: Mariner Books, 2021). 464 pages, including appendices and index. $32.00. ISBN 9780358454601.

Review Of A Narnian Vision Of The Atonement: A Defense Of The Ransom Theory, William Gentrup

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Charles Taliaferro, A Narnian Vision of the Atonement: A Defense of the Ransom Theory (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022). 134 pages. $37.00. ISBN 9781666796537.

Review Of The Lion's Country: C.S. Lewis's Theory Of The Real, David N. Beckmann

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Charlie W. Starr, The Lion’s Country: C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real (Kent, OH; Kent State University Press, 2022). 132 pages. $18.95. ISBN 9781606354537.

Review Of The Man Born To Be King: Wade Annotated Edition, Barbara L. Prescott

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King: Wade Annotated Edition, ed. by Kathryn Wehr (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2023). 464 pages. $43.49. ISBN 9781514005330.

Review Of C.S. Lewis In America: Readings And Reception, 1935-1947, Gina Dalfonzo

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Mark Noll, C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935 –1947 (Donovan Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2023). 176 pages. $20.00. ISBN 9781514007006.

Review Of Mere Evangelism, Monique Stam

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Randy Newman, Mere Evangelism, (Charlotte, NC: The Good Book Company, 2021). 160 pages. $16.99. ISBN 9781784986445.

Review Of The Case For Aslan: Evidence For Jesus In The Land Of Narnia, Brian C. Roden

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of David Marshall, The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia (Tampa, FL: DeWard Publishing Company, 2022). 219 pages. $14.99. ISBN 9781947929210.

Review Of Inkling, Historian, Soldier, And Brother: A Life Of Warren Hamilton Lewis, Crystal Hurd

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Don King, Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother: A Life of Warren Hamilton Lewis (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2023). 193 pages, including Epilogue, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. $45.00. ISBN 9781606354506.

Review Of The Abolition Of Man: The Deluxe Edition, John Stanifer

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Carson Grubaugh, Midjourney AI, Sean Michael Robinson, and Luciano Floridi, The Abolition of Man: The Deluxe Edition (St. Paul, Minnesota: Living the Line, 2023). 228 pages, including an Afterword to each issue and essays. $35.00. ISBN 9781736860571.

Review Of The Major And The Missionary: The Letters Of Warren Hamilton Lewis And Blanche Biggs, Crystal Hurd

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Diana Glyer, ed., The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs (Nashville: Rabbit Room Press, 2023). 277 pages, including “Afterword” and Index. $18.00. ISBN 9781951872205.

Review Of The Chronicles Of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey With C.S. Lewis, Josiah Peterson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Leonard J. DeLorenzo, ed. The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2022). 251 pages. $17.95. ISBN 9781621645351.

Surprised By Similarity: C.S. Lewis And Thomas Merton On The Self, John M. Gillespie

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Although they never corresponded, and they never met, the Anglican professor C.S. Lewis and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton nevertheless wrote in strikingly similar terms of the “true self,” or a person redeemed by Christ, and a “false self,” the rebellious person one believes themselves to be, but is not. There is very little academic work on the confluence of Lewis and Merton, and none thus far that specifically addresses their shared concept of the self. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in scholarship and, through an intertextual investigation of each man’s major works, fill it. …