English Language and Literature Commons^™

Valiant Consequences, Johnjulius Lodato

Student Publications

War and conflict are significant events that hold a reasonable possibility to alter countries and their cultural populations. These transforming effects can come in many forms, ranging from mental trauma to the abandonment or modification of culture and its ideals. In this illustration, perhaps no group has endured the same everlasting detrimental effects as the Native Americans and their underlying consequences stemming from World War 2. These detriments can be seen in the form of erratic drunken or violent behavior and forgotten traditions. On the contrary, these effects may have at one time been diminished and replaced by the gratitude …

The Archives Magazine, 2022, Matthew Bandy, Jenna Sala, Hannah Abatemarco, Michael Alberto, Jakob Lemke, Dillon Hamilton, Gabby Kane, Michelle Kamienski

Kutztown University Archives

No abstract provided.

The Walls That Define Us, Kaitlyn C. Nielson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” tells the story of Bartleby, a man living in the lower-class of nineteenth century New York City, who secures a job copying legal documents. Unlike the other employees’ eagerness to work, Bartleby remains behind his “green screen” that demarcates his office space and repeatedly responds “I would prefer not to” when asked to complete a task.

Most readers and critics alike interpret Bartleby’s behavior as a mode of passive resistance against his boss and the larger institutions of Wall Street and capitalism. However, through close reading, I instead …

A Sharply Worded Silence: Silence As The Revelatory Link Between Past And Future In Faithful And Virtuous Night, Noah Hickman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Given the recent celebrity of 2020 Nobel Prize Laurette Louise Glück, the 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night enjoys a relative bounty of reviews and criticism for such a recent collection. Most of these reviews make oblique reference to Glück’s use of silence in the collection, but none forward any serious argument regarding the function of silence in the argument of the collection. This essay argues that Glück relies on silence as a kind of revelation for her speakers, marking the end of a given system of being and the inauguration its supplanting ontology. Within the collection, Glück’s silence represents …

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol 30, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Backstage with The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis“

“Sinclair Lewis Society Announces Virtual Conference for Summer 2022”

“Remembering Daniel Chabris”

“Letter from the Editor: Sinclair Lewis Society Celebrates 30 Years!,” by Sally E. Parry, Illinois State University

“New York Times Book Review Celebrates Lewis and Babbitt“

“Babbitt and Thucydides?,” by Rex Levang

“Significant Writer: Flawed Man: A Review of The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis by Bob Beverage,” by Sean C. Denniston

“Sinclair Lewis’s Leading Ladies: Part I: Irene Dunne: Perfect Lady, as Ann Vickers, 1933,” by Susan K. O’Brien

Archives And Literary History: English House, Christina Rose Walcott, Justin Shaw

English

This presentation is part of a Directed Study project and was given at Clark FEST 2022. It is also associated with the longer paper, "The Malleability of Home: A Genealogy of Clark University's English House," composed collaboratively by the authors. It is about the history of Clark's English Department and, particularly, about the House it occupies. This presentation was presented orally by Christina Rose Walcott for a public audience as a culminating project in the Directed Study, and includes visual and interactive educational components. It also utilizes and showcases the project's extensive use of Open Access Resources from various digital …

English And Cultural Studies, Spring 2022, English And Cultural Studies Department

Bryant University Communications and Press

No abstract provided.

"You Can Disagree Without Being Disagreeable": A Rhetorical Study Of Tweets About Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg And Amy Coney Barrett, Lauren Durham

Honors Theses

The selection, nomination, and swearing in of Justice Amy Coney Barrett took place amid an already tension-ridden political and cultural landscape. As a figurehead of women’s rights and equality, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not want President Trump to choose her successor. Her dying wish was for her seat to be replaced after the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, Trump moved his Supreme Court nominee through the process at an unprecedented rate, and within six weeks of Ginsburg’s passing, a conservative constitutional originalist named Amy Coney Barrett took her place.

The nature of the Supreme Court position, the contrasts between the two …

Gonzo Eternal, John Francis Brick

Dissertations (1934 -)

Gonzo Eternal enters the recent surge in scholarly attention to the work of Hunter S. Thompson and his practice of Gonzo journalism by examining the growing conflict between the dominant view of Gonzo journalism as Thompson’s unique and proprietary style, and the relatively new trend toward an understanding of Gonzo as a continuum of literary practice that both predates Thompson and continues to adapt and evolve beyond his death in 2005. I contend that this problem is fundamentally one of definition, and that the continued growth of the field depends on a reassessment of Thompson that reframes him from Gonzo …

Negotiating Ideology, Self, And Classroom Instruction: A Framework Of Critical Text Selection For High School English Language Arts Curricula, Abigail Bautista , '22

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

2022 Greenleaf Review-- The Gen Z Survival Guide (No. 35), Sigma Tau Delta

The Greenleaf Review

No abstract provided.

Dewey In The Digital Age: Experiential Composition And Reflection As Transformation, Danielle Shumaker Page

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the act of composing as a transformational, ongoing event and offers digital reflection as a tool for first-year writing students to evaluate their own writing practices. I analyze student vlogs produced in response to an assignment that asked students to produce digital reflections on their work as writers across the process of completing a final course project. My findings suggest that adapting experiential learning principles, digital and non-digital, into composition classroom design creates and facilitates writing experiences that are immersive and transformational. Crucial to designing learning occasions is the process of active reflection upon what the writer …

The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biographers of George Eliot, when writing about her childhood, have focused on her close and complicated relationships with two of the most important men in her life, her father Robert Evans and brother Isaac Evans. Less discussed are Eliot’s relationships with her immediate female family members, her mother Christiana Pearson Evans and her sister Christiana (Chrissey) Evans Clarke. This thesis reviews the predominant interpretations of Eliot’s relations with her father and brother. It also pulls together the known information about Christiana and Chrissey from several major biographies and adds new insights from Eliot's letters in combination with two of her …

Migration And Trauma: Memory And The Myths Of El Otro Lado, Elva Moreno Del Rio

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis is composed of two parts that scrutinize the myth of the United States

and el cuento of El Otro Lado. The first part titled, “The Illness Rooted in the American Myth” connects the U.S. myth to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s piece Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. In analyzing the writings of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Eden E. Torres, I indentify the impact that Crevecoeur’s myth had on Black, Indigenous and other people of color. This research illustrates the physical and psychological effects that these ideologies have on the mind and body of …

Seeing Double: Tolkien And The Indo-European Divine Twins, Kristine Larsen

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The archetype of the Divine/Celestial/Heavenly Twins as described in Donald Ward’s 1968 The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition has been used to argue for Greco-Roman literary precedents for the sons of Elrond. However, the genesis of the mythological trope of the Divine Twins in Indo-European scholarship originated a century before, for example, in the work of Max Müller. This essay briefly reviews the history of the trope of the Divine Twins that was argued by some late 19^th and early 20^th century authors to exist within so-called Indo-European mythology before tracing parallels between the trope …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

“...Reveling In That Freedom”: Roxane Gay’S Hunger As 21st-Century Freedom Narrative, Kendra R. Parker

Literature: Faculty Publications

Work published in South Atlantic Review.

Spring Awakening: A Midwest Children's Tragedy, Lena Nighswander

Honors Projects

Spring Awakening: A Midwest Children's Tragedy is a new play that takes up the issues of adaptation, translation, and temporality in regards to Frank Wedekind's Frühlingserwachen, a play infamous in its revelry in controversy and unflinching nature in the face of social issues many would prefer to ignore. Several modern adaptations of the original text exist, but none have utilized the 2020s as a setting nor have they used the fertile landscape of the American midwest as a background.

This play, set in Toledo, OH, leans into the Wedekindian tradition of cutting social criticism and controversy in its exploration of …

Wave By Wave: A Fantasy Author's Guide For Refining A Creative Writing Style, Michael Bose

Senior Honors Theses

Writing a novel is a great undertaking. Many would-be writers have set out to create a novel and give up halfway through, uncertain where or how they failed. This project aims to help prospective authors get past that barrier. By analyzing one’s own writing style, a writer can ascertain greater insight into the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own work and therefore help rectify mistakes one might make otherwise, or learn to see a chapter from a new angle. The author will demonstrate this method on himself first by way of focused revisions. A sample chapter of a fantasy novel, …

Yahweh’S Benevolence Vs. Anat’S Malevolence: A Comparative Analysis Of Judges 4–5 And Col Ii 1–Col Iii 2, Michaela Misantone

Senior Honors Theses

The actions of ancient Near Eastern warrior gods are often depicted as acts of vengeance, greed, and brutality, serving selfish ambition and never-ending power struggles. These gods and their warfare ethic dominated the worldview of the ancient world in which the events of the Old Testament took place. The actions of the Hebrew God are often included, even emphasized, in discussions of ancient divine warfare today. There are supposed similarities between the actions of war gods like Anat from the Ugaritic pantheon and those of Yahweh from ancient Israel. Unfortunately, this has led to the present-day belief that the God …

Focused And Autonomous Writing Through Objects, Yvonne Houy

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Objects—carefully curated—help focus discussions and knowledge explorations, and become the basis of student-centered scholarly writing when Object-based learning (OBL) is combined with structured research writing assignments using the Cornell Notes questions in a Google form.

Educators cannot eliminate distractions but can encourage focus and attention (Lang, Distracted, 2020, 1-24). I propose using curated objects to focus student attention: Such object-based learning (OBL) allows students to engage holistically with otherwise abstract facts, figures and frameworks (Chatterjee and Hannan, 2016). Combining OBL with structured active note taking, such as through the Cornell note taking method, “can lead to efficient study practices, better …

George Macdonald's Phantastes As A Bildungsroman Of Spiritual Reality, Hannah O'Malley

Senior Theses

George MacDonald's 1858 novel Phantastes is one of the first fantasy novels written for adults, but it has received little attention in part because of its confusing structure. I argue that Phantastes is best understood as a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation. While the Bildungsroman is usually a realist novel of commercial society, Phantastes’ fantasy elements allow the protagonist to grow up into a spiritual reality that contrasts with many commercial values. MacDonald uses the fantasy genre to show his protagonist's inner development as he learns humility, gains feminine and childlike virtues, and leaves behind the old self

Editorial, Janet Brennan Croft

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Once again we test the limits of both our printer and the U.S. Postal service with the size of this issue of Mythlore. Our inbox overflows with essay and note submissions, and publishers WILL keep publishing books we want to review. The next limiting factors we may face, alas, are continuing paper shortages and prohibitions on shipping to certain countries, whether politically or pandemically-imposed. We’ll deal with those as we come to them; meanwhile, Mythlore’s content continues to be available free on our online platform, even as we move into a new phase with the engagement of our longtime printer, …

“One Aims At The Officers First”: Reassessing The Relationship Of C. S. Lewis And T. S. Eliot, Ben Reinhard

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This article challenges the received account of the relationship between C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot, arguing that Lewis's antipathy towards Eliot was a defining feature of his career as a scholar, critic, and literary artist. By attending to the anti-Eliotic strain in Lewis's thought, we gain new insights into the development of his imagination and the creation of his own works, including The Chronicles of Narnia.

Being Psyche: The Jungian Soul In Glome, Kelly Webber

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Orual undergoes a psychological transformation as a predecessor to her spiritual conversion. Understanding her psychic journey through the lens of a Jungian archetypal story assists the reader in understanding how she is eventually able to approach the gods bareface.

Who Is Merlin? A Closer Look At The Character In Charles Williams’ Taliessin Poetry, Joseph Thompson

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

By understanding how Merlin and Brisen manifest the influence of archaic ideas concerning time and the esoteric teachings of the Zohar in Williams’s Taliessin cycle, we are able to account for their roles in the story, and to understand more clearly Williams’s eschatological vision of unity to which all events in the cycle are either directed or opposed. This vision incorporates both Platonic (or Neoplatonic) and Kabbalistic elements in harmony with one another, adapted through the filter of Williams’s own esoteric ideas and Christian beliefs.

The Wheel Of Power In Hbo's Game Of Thrones, Inbar Shaham

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Maps the familial power struggles and patterns of inheritance of Westeros as depicted in the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series by using A.J. Griemas’s semiotic square. Applying this framework to the title logo of the series also supports this interpretation.

Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph R. Young

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Contests the suggestion that Sansa Stark, a character in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is a weak and indecisive by analyzing her in relation to William Patrick Day’s system of Gothic fantasy. While Sansa is indeed physically passive, she manages to retain her own identity in a challenging literary environment. This physical passivity allows her to assert herself intellectually, analyzing and indicting the misdeeds and abuses she suffers. This combination of passive and active attributes precisely instantiates the skill set of the detective, a species of literary being developed from the Gothic fantasies Day analyses, and …

A Lost Tale, A Found Influence: Earendel And Tinúviel, Verlyn Flieger

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Examines two examples of J.R.R. Tolkien’s story-telling art: one an experiment in omission, the other in commission. The Tale of Earendel is established through poems about him, by references to the tale in other tales, by outlines, and by what seem to be consciously contrived omissions where it ought to have been. That there ought to be a Tale of Earendel to go with the other three now seems obvious, yet Christopher commented more than once that it “was never written.” Of the many attempts at the Beren and Lúthien story that Tolkien made over the years, “The Tale of …

Soup, Bones, And Shakespeare: Literary Authorship And Allusion In Middle-Earth, Owen Dugan, James Krasner

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Examines Tolkien’s theory of authorship and storytelling by exploring the literary allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Witch-king’s fall and the theory of creation in Tolkien’s description of the Silmarils. Tolkien alludes to Macbeth to undercut both the modern view of the author as an isolated genius and to critique the approach to literary allusion that reinforces this view. Fëanor’s creation of the Silmarils serves as a symbolic representation of modern authorship, suggesting that Tolkien not only disagrees with a singular model of authorship but also believes it to be a manifestation of corrupted artistry. Ultimately, both the Witch-king and …