English Language and Literature Commons^™

Descended From Cain: The Biopolitics In Beowulf, Jia-Ying Liu

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

No abstract provided.

Reading Zora Neale Hurston's Works Through An Islamic Lens: The Absence Of Islam In Moses, Man Of The Mountain And Jonah's Gourd Vine, Asma Abdullah Saud Alqahtani

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston is an African-American writer, anthropologist, and ethnographer of the Harlem Renaissance. She is distinguished for documenting and celebrating the religions of African Americans in the South. In this study, the author argues that Hurston represents the practiced religions in Southern African-American communities in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain while noticeably omitting Islam, despite the fact that Islam predominated in more Northern African-American Communities as a reclaimed religious history and practice. Hurston’s exclusion prompts inquiries into the history of Islamic erasures in Southern African-American communities and introduces ambiguity in interpreting the metaphors found in …

All Winged Their Supermen: Mina Loy, Olive Moore, And The Transhumanist Imagination, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the ways modernism depends on eugenic thinking. Exploring similarities and differences between eugenics and early transhumanism, this article identifies in modernist literature a strand of more radical transhumanist desire. Looking in particular at Mina Loy's poems "Parturition" and "Songs to Joannes" and Olive Moore's novel Spleen, it argues that these texts turn the modernist call to "make it new" on human beings ourselves, as Loy and Moore imagine maternity as a means to advance evolution, if only it could transcend the disappointing reproducibility of the human being.

Mind The Gap: Eugenics And Animality, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

This article argues that eugenics was motivated, in part, by human exceptionalism. It first explores the ways in which eugenics understood nonwhite race, disability, and animality as forces capable of exerting a drag on the forward thrust of eugenic progress. Next, it traces the incoherent discourse about animality within eugenics, demonstrating that while eugenic breeding—eugenic methods—relied on human animality, the fundamental goal of eugenics was to improve human beings by distancing us from that animality. The final part of the essay explores the imbrication of animality, race, and disability in Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel Ape and Essence, arguing that the …

Making Us New: From Eugenics To Transhumanism In Modernist Culture, Maren Linett

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Whirlybird Island, Ernest Hebert

Dartmouth Scholarship

Whirlybird Island is a novel in murder mystery format about the trauma of war and how such trauma suffered by soldiers is often transmitted to their offspring and society at large. The accompanying essay, The Sons and Daughters of War, is a personal essay that details my experience with the trauma my father suffered in World War II and how such experience led to the writing of the book and essay.

Back Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Back matter for WCJ 41.1.

Contingency As A Barrier To Decolonial Engagement: Listening To Multilingual Writers, Grace Lee-Amuzie

The Writing Center Journal

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of …

Front Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Front matter for Writing Center Journal 41.1.

Queer Contingency In Writing Center Administrative Work, Patrick Greene, Travis Webster

The Writing Center Journal

Using a sprinkle of Queer Theory, their on-the-job experiences, and writing center scholarship that challenges disciplinary orthodoxies, two intersectionally queer and contingent writing center researcher-administrators examine the constraints of contingency; discuss the underlife of queer labor; and point to queer labor nuances and possibilities alongside contingent writing center work.

Writing Tutor Alumni Takeaways: Pros And Cons Of Contingency, Glenn Hutchinson, Xuan Jiang, Mario Avalos

The Writing Center Journal

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of …

Pedagogies Of Rhetorical Empathy-In-Action: Role Playing And Story Sharing In Healthcare Provider Education, Lillian Campbell, Elisabeth L. Miller

English Faculty Research and Publications

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through …

Possibility Thinking In The Community-Engaged Classroom: Uniting Hope And Imagination Towards Anti-Racist Action, Betsy Bowen, Lillian Campbell, Jenna Green, Emily A. Phillips

English Faculty Research and Publications

Drawing on the work of Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J., this article examines the contribution that “possibility thinking” makes to community-engaged learning at three Jesuit universities. The article considers ways in which possibility thinking intersects both Jesuit and secular perspectives on hope and imagination, and their relationship to anti-racist praxis. We then describe three institutional contexts at different stages of enacting community-engaged learning in introductory and upper-level English classes. The article concludes by offering three praxis-oriented directions for community-engaged learning educators to take up in their own institutional contexts: developing faculty capacity and awareness; fostering solidarity not charity; and encouraging reflection not …

Feeling For Deaf Resonance In The Eighteenth Century And Beyond, Jason S. Farr

English Faculty Research and Publications

The article examines how resonance has anchored deaf self-representation in the eighteenth century and the present. Through an interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds Deaf and sound studies in the context of the eighteenth century, the article conducts a close reading of writing from two of the first published deaf authors, Pierre Desloges and Charles Shirreff. The argument is that synchronous vibration figures centrally into their sentimental self-fashioning at a time when organized deaf education was first being implemented in Europe. The article also reveals personal stakes in examining resonance alongside John Bulwer's seventeenth-century multisensory model of perception in Philocophus: or the …

Writing For A “High Purpose”: Examining Charles Chesnutt’S Antiracist Manipulation Of Genre And Language In The Conjure Woman, Sheniah Lanier

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Comfort, Contingency, And Writing Center Work: An Essay In Three Illusions, Loren Maria Guay

The Writing Center Journal

In this hybrid essay, I engage creatively with the illusory nature of contingent work, presenting three episodes from my personal experiences as a contingent writing program administrator (WPA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, I interrogate these experiences by building on past critiques of “comfortable” writing centers, applying Sara Ahmed’s work on the affectiveness of (dis)comfort in order to examine comfort and its uneasy relationship with labor. For whom is the writing center expected to labor to provide comfort? Whose comfort, and moreover whose safety, is jeopardized or made invisible in the process? In answering these questions, this …

Engl 157: Great Works Of Global Literature, Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for a general education course bringing together celebrated texts by Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, and Marjane Satrapi. Survey of perspectives beginning during the "scramble for Africa" via Conrad, through postcolonial writers Achebe and Head, and finally making a connection via dehumanization to Orientalism and undoing monocultural presumptions in the near East through Satrapi's Persepolis.

Engl 211w: Intro To Nonfiction (Points Of Entry And/Or Exit Wounds), Heather Simon

Open Educational Resources

We will explore the notion of creativity as it pertains to new ways of engaging familiar topics and carving out frameworks for exploring uncharted territory. We will actively read and respond to works of creative nonfiction to enrich our understanding of structure, style, and language. Assigned readings will demonstrate how creative nonfiction can encompass a variety of forms (think: reportage, braided essay, erasure, visual essay) and draw from both research and experience to offer a unique perspective and elicit an emotional response. We will develop our own creative nonfiction toolbox through a series of reflections, creative exercise, and projects. We …

Bound To A Mast: Matelotage And The Queer Contract In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night And The Tempest, Agnese Palumbo

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Analyzing the language of a 1699 matelotage contract and locating that same terminology in Shakespeare’s maritime plays, this essay argues that there is a thematic and genealogical link between the contractual forms of homosocial union that existed during the premodern and early modern periods and the bonds shared by male characters in those plays where a “sea change” occurs. First, the essay delineates a history of matelotage and of contractual bonds; then, it establishes this homosocial dynamic as an additional point of inquiry for male relationships in Shakespeare. Critical attention has largely overlooked this queer contract, and prioritized a focus …

Joining A Conversation Research Project, Nicole Green, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.

Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of …

Building A Communication-Integrated Curriculum In Materials Science, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

With the need to meet ABET outcomes around professional skills, such as communication and teamwork, engineering programs have long explored approaches to ensure their graduates are able to participate in the workplace in ways that employers demand. While approaches vary and success depends on a number of factors, research demonstrates that an integrated approach to professional skill development is the most impactful for student learning. How can an engineering program build an integrated approach that provides meaningful communication education?

This paper shares the experiences from faculty in a material science and engineering program that has created an integrated approach to …

Interlanguage Of Functional Usages Of L2 English Present Continuous Tense By L1 Thai Learners, Pajaree Buasomboon

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study aimed at examining the functional use of English present continuous tense by L1 Thai learners, under the theoretical framework of the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Selinker 1974; Tarone 2006). The functions investigated included instant, continuing, temporary, habitual, and future (Eastwood, 1994). A Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT), aiming for perception, a Fill-in-the-Blank Test, focusing on production, and interviews were employed to elicit data from the subjects, i.e. 30 L1 Thai learners of the intermediate proficiency level. The results revealed the learners’ low accuracy rates in some functions, from both perception and production tasks. The accuracy rate in the production task was …

"Variety": A Look At Several Genres, Ryan Dean Carlin

Honors Program Theses

This thesis was made to both explore the impact on a writer’s mind and thoughts that writing different genres could cause, as well as stretch the limits of creativity that any one writer can bring about. The following stories are the result of a single writer’s efforts. Following them will be the writer’s own observations about his approach as he wrote each, as well as any ways that the restrictions of the genre stumped his attempts at writing. Each work is no fewer than ten pages, and each story attempts to stretch the boundaries of writing and imagination through unique …

Sinking Into My Skin: An Exploration Of The Mind And Body Through Multigenre Creative Writing, Ana Elizabeth Eagan

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Carceral Form And Social Critique In Zadie Smith's Nw, Wesley Hackman

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Incurable Fanny Price: Disabled Perspective And Resistance To The Cure Narrative In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Aurora C. Soriano

Dissertations and Theses

Improvement and cure are frequently on the minds of the characters in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. However, what happens when you introduce a chronically ill character like Fanny, who can’t ever be fully cured, into these curative plots? In order to better understand the ways Austen complicates curative discourse, this paper focuses on Fanny’s own perspective and embodied experience of chronic illness, in which she fatigues easily and experiences headaches and pain. Despite clear evidence in the novel of Fanny’s ill health, scholarship analyzing Fanny’s character has historically been fraught with ableist assumptions and subjective opinions. Ignoring the way …

The Dissonant History Of Tristan And Isolde, Amanda Persaud

Dissertations and Theses

This essay traces the historical evolution of the story of Tristan and Isolde through three distinct phases, highlighting the transformation of the story from a feudal version to a post-feudal rendition infused with courtly love doctrines and notions of Christian love. It examines the early versions of the story by Béroul and Gottfried von Strassburg and discusses the shift in the portrayal of the relationship between Tristan and Isolde from one that decries disloyalty to one that is more sympathetic to their love. The essay also analyzes Richard Wagner's opera version of the story, which celebrates individual desire over duty …

Performing Grrrlhood: A Lyrical Analysis Of Riot Grrrl Music, Vida Hasson

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the lyrics of the three founding Riot Grrrl bands: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy. I explore how Riot Grrrl bands politicize girlhood to undermine patriarchal authority and empower girls to redefine feminism for themselves. I provide the historical context for Riot Grrrl as a political movement and its cultural impact in the 1990s. In my analysis I connect the lyrics to feminist discourse to demonstrate how Riot Grrrl provided women and girls a platform to discuss feminism and patriarchal oppression. Music has the power to send messages to the masses and Riot Grrrl's legacy proves …

Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is one of the prominent American writers of Bengali descent, contributing mainly to diaspora literature to depict the nuanced aspects of Bengalis in their immigrant lives. Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) illustrate the challenges of the Bengali diaspora due to their indentured identity, which I have used to refer to the Bengali people’s culturally-rooted identity. This study investigates how the diaspora’s native cultural identity fluctuates in connection with the host culture. The research renders a reconfigured image of “home” because the concept of home changes for these people after migration in …

Mrs. Blackbird And The Visiting Chair, Taylor Barnhart

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The following thesis is a middle grade novel exploring the events of one summer in the lives of two siblings, Susannah and Sawyer. The siblings are grieving the recent death of their mother and, at the same time, attempting to navigate the emotional withdrawal of their father. During the summer, the siblings get to know their eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Blackbird, who communicates with the spirit of her dead husband through an old armchair which is rumored to have magical powers. The novel deals primarily with the theme of grief and its pervasive nature in people’s lives. The story looks at …