English Language and Literature Commons^™

Count Your Blessings, Mark Rubin

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 154-155

Dendrochronology, Carson Colenbaugh

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 93

Transformation And Embodiment: Posthumanism In Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales And Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, Samantha Ludlow

All Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to analyze Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, with a particular emphasis on how one’s age, gender, and racial identity each affect the reception an individual has towards their animality and connections with nonhuman animals. By using posthumanism as a framework, I argue that though it is initially difficult for Darrieussecq’s narrator to accept her changing body during her adulthood (where she already has a strong sense of identity), her transformation and choice to life as a sow by the end of the novel illustrates a rejection of her society’s anthropocentrism. Further, …

Reading In Place: Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wendell Berry, And Post Critique, Calvin L. Coon

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The twenty-first century, marked by neoliberalism and suspicious, visibly violent far-Right politics, has presented new challenges to critical and literary theorists. In response, some theorists advocate for a postcritical turn, challenging both the surface/depth picture of language and the privileged status of suspicion in interpretation in order to explore alternative pictures of language and reading that can better address the challenges of our own day. In this thesis, I connect one of these alternatives, Toril Moi’s use of Ordinary Language Philosophy in literary studies, to Wendell Berry’s prioritization of place in environmentalist activism. In connecting these two thinkers, I contend …

Lights And Shadows - 2023, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

Editorial, Isabel Pefianco Martin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Preface, Maria Luz Elena Nabong Canilao, Robin Atilano De Los Reyes

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Doing The Work -- Collectively Pursuing Anti-Racist And Equitable Teaching: One High School English Department’S Journey, Sharon Murchie, Anthony Andrus, Pat Brennan, Gina Farnelli, Shelby Fletcher, Dawn Reed, Emily Solomon, Benjamin K. Woodcock

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Our district has long been heralded as a beacon school, one that delivers exceptional education in an exceptional community. Peeling back the layers, however, revealed a district that lurched towards the traditional, even with the hiring of DEI faculty and the step away from an historical indigenous mascot. In a time where teachers are exhausted and afraid of community backlash, our

English department dared to tear off the scabs of old wounds and united to push toward what is best for our changing community and students. Hard conversations, difficult topics, and months of legwork at last successfully provided the impetus …

Engaging Students And Teaching Life Skills Through Community Collaboration, Kim Stein

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Collaboration with the Youth First Program of Saginaw increased students' engagement in eleventh-grade English. Students bonded with community partners, their teacher, and their peers in new ways which produced an environment of mutual respect and deeper learning. Students engaged in a debate project which garnered recognition from school administrators and community members, who were influenced to enact positive changes for the school community.

The Effects Of A Genre-Based Writing Assessment-For-Learning Model On Enhancement Of Thai Efl Students’Writing Proficiency, Kasidit Supan

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Previous research has shown that teaching writing through different genres helps English as a foreign language (EFL) students improve their writing skills (Dickinson, 2013; Taufiqulloh, 2018; Sritakarn, 2019). However, other studies have found that this method does not always help students organize argumentative essays or use the right linguistic features in these essays (Udomyamokkul, 2004; Ka-Kan-Dee, 2015). The purposes of the present study were (1) to investigate the effects of a genre-based writing assessment-for-learning model on enhancement of Thai EFL students’ writing proficiency, (2) to examine the effects of the model on Thai EFL students’ assessment literacy, and (3) to …

What’S Long About Long John Silver: Anormative Masculinities And Histories In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, David V. Riser

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Historical queer and transgender experiences have been obscured by the dominant narrative of history. However, these experiences surface in works of fiction. This thesis analyzes affective responses to constructions of queer masculinity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Affects of disgust and desire in Treasure Island, and in the popular history of Treasure Island, reveal a proto-queer transgender experience found in 19th-century maritime fiction. These affects demonstrate a fear that there is no reproductive futurity in queer masculinity while producing narratives of queer masculinity. This production makes historical queer and transgender experiences legible, and allows contemporary queer readers to navigate …

The Wh-Eye Of The Storm: How Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, And Arif Anwar Fictionalize Extreme Weather In Their Works, Elena Vedovello

Pomona Senior Theses

In this thesis, I used Robin Wall Kimmerer’s and James D. Rice’s ideas of “ecological imagination” to analyze three twentieth and twenty-first century works that feature historical extreme weather events. American Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston introduces her fictional characters to the historical force of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; British Modernist writer Virginia Woolf writes about the 1609 Great Frost in Orlando; and Bangladeshi author Arif Anwar sets his novel The Storm during and around the infamous Bhola Cyclone of 1970.

Although these authors and their novels stem …

Old Invisible Presence: Nonhuman Intelligence And Artificial Nature In A Coast Of Trees By A. R. Ammons And S*Perm**K*T By Harryette Mullen, Miles Jochem

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Ruslan And Lolita: Nabokov's Pursuit Of Pushkin's Monsters, Maidens, And Morals, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

This article discusses the Russian precursor to Humbert’s explicit “kingdom by the sea”: Pushkin’s mock-epic Ruslan and Liudmila (RL). An amalgam of Slavic and Western folklore that scandalized the reading public in its day, Pushkin’s work underpins Nabokov’s own transnational position as a writer whose splash onto the Anglophone scene was accompanied by similar outcries of smut and pornography. In addition to a multitude of fairy-tale sources already documented in the scholarship, Lolita’s cluster of mermaids, sleeping beauties, dark magic, invisibility, pursuit and captivity, physical topography, and “brothers”-rivals finds in Pushkin’s RL a synthesizing subtext. Moreover, Pushkin’s play …

Reading Utopian Pedagogies: Discovering The Practical Here And Now Of Utopian Thinking, Carter Johnke

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis offers a way of reading texts for their utopian aims, a term I use to analyze utopian themes and ideas in a text while keeping the focus on practicality. Reading a text for its utopian aims discovers what a text hopes for but always reflects on how those hopes serve the here and now of the author and the reader. The idealistic conclusions of utopian thinking, the utopian visions, only play a role in the utopian aim. This project does not promote the ultimate or extreme ends of utopian visions; instead, it analyzes the educational effects of entertaining …

A Short Time Ago In The Messaging Of Children's Media Very Close By, Katelin Bailey

Capstone Showcase

Most children in the US grow up watching television that tries to teach them some kind of life lesson that they should carry with them as they grow up. The children’s show, Star Wars Rebels, does something similar but goes a step further to handle topics that would be considered more mature, such as the imperialistic nature of empires. The project looks at what the implications of such messages are. With an overview of studies that show how well children understand what they're watching and an examination of why the themes in this show are overlooked, the project seeks to …

"Witness For Her": The Vanderbilt Variant Of "Further In Summer Than The Birds" And The Stakes Of Transcribing Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts For Publication, Isabel Evans

Scripps Senior Theses

For more than eighty years, scholars believed that the earliest version of Emily Dickinson’s “Further in Summer than the Birds,” a major mid-career poem often regarded as “one of Dickinson’s finest” (McSweeney 155) and “best-known poems,” had been lost (Franklin, “The Manuscripts” 552). Yet, against all odds, the manuscript survived, resurfacing miraculously at Ella Strong Denison Library, the special collections library at Scripps College in Claremont, California, in 1986, exactly a century after Dickinson’s death. Known as the Vanderbilt Variant of “Further in Summer than the Birds,” this poem continues to be misprinted, overlooked, and under analyzed by Dickinson scholars …

The Unwatched Pot, Grace Lyde

Scripps Senior Theses

From the inside out:

The staff of the Gell-Mann Zweig Library are going through it. Edith, who had been transferred to another branch has just been transferred back and promoted, bumping their ex, Augustine, down a step. On their first day back, Edith ends up turning their contentious ongoing flirtationship with Heidi, a different co-worker, into… something else. Meanwhile, both Green and Heidi’s chronic nightmares have taken a turn for the strange devolving into encoded messages and countdowns.

And Felix is there. Doing his best.

Slowly but surely the five of them are going to have to grapple with the …

“Decorate The Dungeon With Flowers And Air-Cushions:” Virginia Woolf And War, Claire Dumont

Scripps Senior Theses

Virginia Woolf was particularly interested throughout her career in writing about war, ranging from the perspective of a depressed World War I veteran and his wife in Mrs. Dalloway, a dinner party held during an air raid in 1917 in The Years, an argument for the connections between patriarchal society and war in Three Guineas, and a pageant of British history held before World War II in Between the Acts. Woolf specifically writes of war as it impacts spheres away from the battlefield, in a way that is inherently gendered to her experience as a woman …

True Love Waits: A Barthesian Reading Of Desire And Delay In Flaubert And James, Yasmin Patel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the theme of amorous waiting in the literature of Gustave Flaubert and Henry James. Roland Barthes' definition of waiting, as articulated in A Lover's Discourse, is used as a tool to examine the waiting conditions of characters in Madame Bovary, The Beast in the Jungle, and The Ambassadors. By using the Barthesian framework, this thesis identifies and analyzes different forms of gender-based waiting and their distinctive consequences. However, it also notes that the primary texts further complicate the relationship between romantic waiting, gender, and autonomy. Ultimately, this analysis shows us that amorous waiting goes beyond a simple …

Visualizing The Permanent Lie: An Examination Of Dystopian Literature Using Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’S Model, Anthony Mitchell

Master’s Theses

This thesis argues for the formation of an evolving canon of literature critical to continued resistance to totalitarianism, focusing primarily on the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Ji Xianlin. In crafting the theoretical basis of my study, I rely primarily on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s concept of the “permanent lie” and its related concepts, “survive at any price” and “only material results matter” as formulated in his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the “permanent lie” is rooted in the creation of a virtual reality among individuals trapped in a totalitarian society, in which they must hold …

Moments Of Excess: Type 1 Diabetes And The Myth Of Control In Adolescent Fiction For Girls, Michelle E. Legault

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis is the first academic work to analyze the stories of the Type 1 diabetic teen girls of adolescent fiction. In novels for adolescent readers, these girls are often White, female, heterosexual, and middle class—resulting in a collective disability narrative that portrays an “every girl” and lacks cultural or political dimensions. This thesis explores the narratives of five fictional teen protagonists with Type 1 diabetes. They are: Stacey McGill from the Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M. Martin, Rachel Deering in Lurlene McDaniel’s Will I Ever Dance Again? (1982), Mackenzie “Zie” Clark in Sarah White’s Let Me List the …

“Hideous Things Have Happened Here”: Rape Myths, Rape Culture, And Healing In Adolescent Literature, Holly J. Greca

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Adolescent novels about rape are one way to discuss rape and rape culture with a young audience. These novels can depict and challenge aspects of rape culture, including the myths that ultimately reinforce a culture hostile to rape victims. Considering the prevalence of rape in society at large, as well as its prevalence among adolescents, this thesis examines the elements of rape culture at play within adolescent rape novels, which can serve as pieces of activism as they give voice to adolescent survivors of rape. Adolescent rape novels explore the internal struggles of survivors as well as the external process …

Blood And Oil: How Vampiric Literature Bolsters Big Oil’S Power, Sarah Marie Demond

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the relationship between blood and oil, that is, the multitude of ways in which the petromodernity industries harvests and threatens vitality. The introduction of this thesis is concerned tracking how petromodernity is a byproduct, offspring, or extension of colonialism. In this way, petromodernity can be thought about as “petro-colonialism.” Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” informs the argument that the way thay petro-colonialism came to be and also maintains itself is by utilizing the “killer story.” This thesis also employs autorheoretical techniques informed by Lauren Fournier to show how petro-colonialism or “oiliness” sticks to its …

Contents, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Robinson Crusoe Crusades Against Traditional Ideas Of Heroism, Sabrina Hess

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 25, 2023, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Living “Long In A Cold Land”: Ecofeminist Perspectives On Environment, Culture, And “Othering” In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness, Bethany Pineda

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Douglas Higbee

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.