English Language and Literature Commons^™

Spaces Of Citizenship: Negotiating Belonging Through Cold War Literature And Culture, Daria Goncharova

Theses and Dissertations--English

At the height of Cold War containment culture, when fears of Communism and nuclear warfare overlapped with anxieties about homosexuality, gender inversion, miscegenation, and juvenile delinquency, formal citizenship—narrowly defined as one’s legal status—did not provide all American citizens with a sense of belonging, equal access to civil liberties, and a reasonable degree of safety. Instead, spatialized identity, rather than civic responsibilities and legal rights, came to define the boundaries of proper citizenship. In this context, highly exclusionary suburbs, which sprang up outside major metropolitan areas in the late 1940s-1950s, emerged as a cornerstone of the cultural narratives defining American citizenship. …

The Dark Sides Of Giving: Representations Of Philanthropy And Gifts In Eighteenth-Century Literature, C.1750-1820, Jillian Winter

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation explores representations of the gift in popular women’s novels of the long eighteenth century. Gift transactions in women’s fiction from this period reveal larger cultural reflections about the limitations placed on women who try to give and to help others. The primary works discussed in this project include Frances Burney’s Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760), and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Frequently, the novels considered in this dissertation showcase the complicated conditions, oftentimes troubling …

Trust And Knowing In Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Fictional Genres And Metacognitive Disruptions, Jessica Marie Van Gilder

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation investigates how constructions of trust can be undermined or reinforced by examining trust’s entanglement with our compulsive and subjective desire to know in nineteenth-century American literature. Specifically, I analyze how different fictional genres – satire, historical romance, fantastic, and gothic – respond to our desire to know through the types of trust fictional texts feature and construct with the reader. In doing so, I demonstrate how genres of fiction in nineteenth-century America function as dynamic social contracts that amplify and undermine the reader’s trust in larger sociopolitical systems (e.g., national identity) and the epistemologies that underpin those systems …

Writing White Women: White (Supremacist) Feminism In American Literature And Culture, Post Suffrage To Post Hillary (1920–2020s), Jannell C. Mcconnell Parsons

Theses and Dissertations--English

Recent critical texts by Jessie Daniels, Mikki Kendall, and more frame the histories of mainstream white feminism in ways that highlight its ongoing complicity with white supremacy and its maintenance of racist structures and systems. In conversation with these current scholarly as well as mainstream cultural conversations about white feminism that have been happening with more frequency since 2016, this project turns to post-suffrage narratives of white womanhood to historicize the modern narratives we tell about feminism’s history. Each chapter of this project considers a 1920s or 1930s literary narrative alongside current literary and cultural narratives as I explore the …

The Lighthouse Keepers Daughter: The Life And Work Of Celia Laighton Thaxter, Haley J. Parker

Honors Theses and Capstones

Living on the edge of the American empire, Celia Thaxter explored the dimensions of her life in ways that transcended, yet never fully abandoned traditional gender boundaries by cultivating her lifelong relationship with nature through creative expression. The lighthouse keeper's daughter constructed her identity based on the experiences that shaped her on the very edge of civilization. Coming of age on the Isles of Shoals, Celia reveled in flexibility and unrestricted freedom of her natural environment isolated from the cultural spheres on the mainland that reinforced the ideology of domestic femininity. This ideology was dominant in the 19th century in …

The "State Of Art": Evolutionary Ethics In Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D' Urbervilles, Brooks Lampe

Faculty Publications - Department of English

What was literary naturalism? One might be tempted to say it was an experiment in fiction (at least in Europe), eventually absorbed into its more successful sibling, Realism. Or one might argue it was a seminal movement which has been misunderstood and read reductively as depicting humans as passive pawns in an indifferent world. Beyond this obstacle of perceived one-dimensionality, there is the less obvious but equally challenging charge that naturalism was, at bottom, a propagandistic genre, appropriating, as Keith Newlin suggests, melodrama for the purpose of persuading readers to "redress social imbalance" ( 4). Finally, there is the muddiness …

Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, And The Discursive Production And Policing Of Gender, Alan J. Bandyk, Alan J. Bandyk

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis utilizes the works of Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said in a discourse analysis of influencers and writers in the right wing "manosphere." The figures analyzed herein are Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh. Their rhetoric aims to create a discursive woman who embodies traditional notions of gender and sex that de Beauvoir critiqued in 1949. The constant adherence and reference to a mythical past exhibits ways of thinking that coincide perfectly with Jameson's own theoretical work with the term and its inherent false nostalgia. Tate's and Walsh's efforts also fall into discursive attempts at …

Representation Of Lgbtq+ Characters In The 2019 To 2022 Iowa Teen Award Books, Jamie Thompson

Graduate Research Papers

This qualitative literary content analysis examines the representation of LGBTQ+ themes in the student-nominated Iowa Teen Award (ITA) books from the past three years to help librarians and classroom teachers build an inclusive library collection. The research question posed in this study is: In what ways are LGBTQ+ characters represented in the Iowa Teen Award books? The analysis of eight middle-grade books (Appendix A) using the book analysis tool (Appendix B) identified three themes: Transformation of Understanding, Hopefulness, and Richness of Plot. Results showed that while all the books had a complex storyline, only five of the books showed a …

Little Miss Sure Shot: Essays On A Young Woman Journalist's Search For Fulfillment, Mallory Schmitz

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Unreliable Narrators; Origins And Impact, Lauren Fetzer

Honors Program Theses

Unreliable narrators can be found in every source of information. They mediate the text for the reader and raise our perceptions of stories, news articles, and forms of receiving facts. While they can be seen in a variety of different genres and forms of literature over the span of many decades, the understanding and acceptance of unreliable narrators have shifted over time. During the late nineteenth century, many authors utilized neutral narrators, intended to be without opinions or bias, when discussing social issues. In Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: a Girl of the Streets the narrator is not the main …

Criterion, Volume 42, 2024, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Maclay

Co-Editor-in-Chiefs: Izabel Mah y Busch & Chester Mlcek

Law And Literature In Pennsylvania: A Changing Landscape, Juliette Gaggini

Honors Theses

This thesis examines themes of American national identity perpetuated in Pennsylvania surrounding private property through historical, literary and legal analysis. Ideals of private property and land ownership are broken into three transitions throughout Pennsylvania history: the American frontier and initial land claiming by settlers, mass-deforestation and the introduction of widespread agriculture, and finally industrialization and the introduction of mining and fracking. Each of these transitions highlights the physical changes to the region and how they were influenced by American ideals of private property, productivity, and profitability.

Throughout this thesis, I analyze both literary and legal texts to examine societal beliefs …

The Ruins Of Solitude: Maternity At The Limits Of Academic Discourse, Lette Bragg

English Literature Faculty Works

What happens when love unravels one’s knowledge structures? In The Ruins of Solitude, after the birth of a child, Bragg embraces the event of love and examines the resulting disintegration of her supposed authorial subjectivity. Against the pressure to produce and organize knowledge—the pressure of writing a dissertation, for example—Bragg contemplates the poetic modes of thinking and ethics that emerge from her experience of reading continental philosophy while caring for her infant child. Dwelling on what she would have once excluded from her intellectual work—her maternity, the mole on her chest, her palm against another body, her exhaustion at the …

Labyrinthine Routes To Meditation: Contemplative Pedagogy And Instructor Self-Care, Natalie Mera Ford

English Literature Faculty Works

In the pandemic- and post-pandemic era, new as well as exacerbated work-life stressors have led academia to recognize the vital role wellness plays in teaching and learning. While most institutional and pedagogical response has understandably focused on students’ holistic health, this essay promotes increased instructor self-care as a necessary complement to supporting learners in higher education. By practicing meditative exercises drawn from contemplative pedagogy, faculty and instructional staff can create synergy between mindfulness strategies that we might invite students to try and our own attention to the whole self outside class. As the essay’s case study shows, labyrinth walking in …

Effect Of Feedback Types And English Achievement On Efl Oral Presentation Performance Of Thai Undergraduates, Raveewan Wanchid, Valaikorn Charoensuk

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Interlanguage Functional Usage Of The L2 English Present Continuous Tense By Thai Learners, Pajaree Buasomboon, Nattama Pongpairoj

PASAA

No abstract provided.

“Climate Change Is Destructive; I Will Address It In My Class”: Pre-Service English Teachers’ Perspectives On Climate Change And Its Integration Into Elt, Jepri Ali Saiful, Sofi Yunianti

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Metacognitive Learning Strategies And English Language Proficiency Of Efl Undergraduate Science Students : The Mediating Role Of Self-Efficacy, Montha Polrak, Akadet Kedcham, Charinee Chansri

PASAA

No abstract provided.

An Investigation Of Global Englishes-Informed Assessment Perceptions And Practices Among Secondary School Teachers In Thailand, Pongpol Suansri, Supong Tangkiengsirisin

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Translanguaging With Purpose : An Exploratory Study On Student Translanguaging Practices And Perceptions In The Thai Elt Context, Dalton Le

PASAA

No abstract provided.

Computerized Adaptive Receptive Vocabulary Assessment Tool : An Experimental Study With Vietnamese Efl Learners, Bui Thi Kim Phuong, Nguyen Quy Thanh, Le Thai Hung, Nguyen Thai Ha

PASAA

No abstract provided.

How Intersectional Identities Affect Queer Self-Consciousness In Passing And Other Novels, Lee Mckennon Kassay

Longwood Senior Thesis Proposal

No abstract provided.

Meeting The Needs Of Diverse Esl Classrooms: A Team Approach To The Professional Development Of Educators, Alla Zareva, Silvana Watson

English Faculty Publications

The focus of this chapter is threefold: 1) To report on the effectiveness of a professional development program offered to elementary school educators to work effectively with diverse ELs; 2) to present the results from a pre-professional development survey which helped identify specific aspects of working with diverse ELs in immediate need of professional development; and 3) to discuss the wider implications of our findings and recommendations for teacher preparation programs. The chapter reports on three main areas of a year-long professional development training provided to teams of in-service elementary school teachers, school administrators, and other specialists (N=60) in the …

Autoimmunities After Covid: An Interview With Cindy Patton, Cindy Patton, Travis Alexander, Nishant Shahani

English Faculty Publications

Taken collectively, Patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly AIDS studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. Patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. Among Patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “African AIDS” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated HIV pandemics split by the …

“Why Blackness, Black Girl?:” Discovering Multilocal Blackness In Wonderful Adventures Of Mrs. Seacole In Many Lands And Americanah, Sydney A. Ware

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In “Why Blackness, Black Girl?” I argue that as a consequence of imperialism, Western Blackness has an interdependent relationship with whiteness, resulting in the domination of Western Blackness over non-Western Blackness. Tensions between both groups are usually portrayed by Western media as divisive. I pose Multilocality as a theory to reconcile this tension. I use Taiye Selasi's concept of the multilocal, and her Three Markers (3 R’s) to identify where hybridized identities are local to and how they can connect to each local space. I expand Selasi’s concept into a theory called Multilocality, and added a fourth marker that I …

The Othered Mothers: Monstrous Motherhood In Dracula, Dawn, And Nightbitch, Makay C. Walsh

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the monstrous mothers in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn (1987), and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021). Stoker’s Dracula serves as the foundational, or “mother,” text in terms of the model monstrous mothers: Dracula and Lucy Westenra. Dawn and Nightbitch provide more contemporary examples of monstrous mothers, yet they are different enough to contrast each other: Lilith in Dawn must navigate motherhood living amongst an alien species, and Nightbitch is a stay-at-home mom who starts turning into a dog. This thesis also establishes 7 Markers of Monstrous Motherhood as a critical framework for classifying monstrous mothers. …

Politicizing The Past: The Exploration Of Revolutionary Collectivity Within Neoliberalism In Dionne Brand’S In Another Place, Not Here And Rita Indiana’S Tentacle, Siobhan Nerz

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the depictions of revolutions in the two Caribbean novels In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand and Tentacle by Rita Indiana. I analyze how the novels explore the potential for political collectivity within neoliberalism through their depictions of the environment and same-sex relationships. I also examine how both authors engage their reader by forcing them to confront their positionality within the economic system. While Brand imagines ephemeral moments of collectivity within neoliberalism, Indiana shows revolutionary individual and collective action is inhibited by late-stage capitalism. Paring these novels together shows how contemporary individuals of differing positionalities can …

Camera Obscura, Melissa Ginsburg

Nelle (literary magazine)

p. 25

Tree Roots (July 1890), Sara Henning

Nelle (literary magazine)

p. 31

Beech Tree, Sara Henning

Nelle (literary magazine)

pp. 29-30