English Language and Literature Commons^™

Milton And Radical Female Prophets: Millenarianism, Readership, And Poetics, Bosik Kim

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways in which John Milton and three radical female prophets, Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Dorothy White, utilize literary genres and prophetic forms to build readerships that are favorable to their millennial visions in the 1640s and 1660s. By analyzing their literary strategies to appropriate the idea of the millennium to call for a national renewal through a combination of historicist and formalist approaches, this dissertation seeks to redress critical neglect over how their poetics serves to build pro-republican readerships that advocate their revolutionary causes. More specifically, it examines their development of a plain poetics which …

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Back Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Back Matter for Writing Center Journal 40.3.

Does Peer-To-Peer Writing Tutoring Cause Stress? A Multi-Institutional Rad Study, Matthew Nelson, Kathleen Weaver, Sam Deges, Pornchanok Ruengvirayudh, Savannah Garcia, Sarah Dunn

The Writing Center Journal

Writing center literature often notes the stress and anxiety of students as a special concern for peer writing tutors, and tutor training manuals offer advice for tutors on how to manage student writers’ anxiety and stress in sessions. Few writing center sources, however, examine the stress/anxiety tutors may experience as a result of their work in the writing center, despite increasing interest in emotions and emotional labor in writing centers. This multi-institutional study examines whether peer writing tutors experience increased stress/anxiety while tutoring. Using a mixed-methods approach combining both surveys and physiological data (salivary cortisol levels controlled against days when …

Meet The Tutors: Student Expectations, Tutor Perspectives, And Some Recommendations For Sharing Information About Tutors Online, Jessica Robbins, Jaclyn M. Wells

The Writing Center Journal

This article presents findings from an IRB-approved study about tutors’ online information on writing center websites, scheduling systems, and social media. The study used surveys to investigate students’ responses to tutors’ online information and focus groups to investigate tutors’ rationale for the information they shared. While many researchers have studied how writing centers are presented online, little research considers how tutors are represented. The authors argue that such representation merits attention, as tutor profiles can affect students’ comfort with the writing center staff and their microdecisions about who to see and how to interact with them (Salem, 2016). The authors …

Multidisciplinary Staffing In A Graduate Writing Center: Making Writing Labor Visible, Valued, And Shared, Nancy Welch, Diana Hackenburg, Leigh Ann Holterman, Judith Keller, Seth Orman, Vanesa Liliana Perillo, Rebecca Stern, Ashley Waldron

The Writing Center Journal

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic …

Back Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Back Matter for WCJ 40.2.

Review: Queerly Centered: Lgbtqia Writing Center Directors Navigate The Workplace, Tyler Martinez

The Writing Center Journal

Dr. Travis Webster’s monograph reports on qualitative research conducted into the working lives of 20 LGBTQIA-identifying writing center directors. From those interviews, Webster identifies three features of LGBTQIA writing center administrative labor: the unique capital with which their identities equip them, the activist labor that their identities call them to perform, and tensions between their labor and identities. He calls on writing center professionals and higher education administrators to become accomplices in the struggle against workplace injustices, moving beyond allyship that is all too often based in kind words rather than sustained action. The insights available in this book are …

Corporate Persons, Collective Responsibility, And The Literary Imagination, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay examines the contributions of Lisa Siraganian's Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2021) to our understanding of the historical development and philosophical underpinning of United States corporate law as well as to broader studies of law and literature. The first part of the essay considers Siraganian's analysis of problems related to corporate agency, intention, and responsibility. The second part considers the book's implications for other types of collective social entities. In particular, the essay reads Ida Fink's The Table (1970) and Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust (1975) through the lens of Siraganian's study, examining their treatment of the challenges …

Review Of Female Desire In Chaucer’S “Legend Of Good Women” And Middle English Romance, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Anthology Versus Miscellany: John Shirley's Scribal Agency And The Fantasy Of Origins In The Medieval Compilation, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

In Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.20, John Shirley offers a famously enigmatic rubric to his copy of Chaucer's Complaint of Venus. He cites Chaucer as the translator of the piece and notes, correctly, that Oton de Granson composed the English poem's original. He then claims that Chaucer's poem is describing a court scandal: an adulterous affair between John Holland, Earl of Huntington, and Isabel of York, daughter of King Pedro of Castile and sister-in-law to John of Gaunt. Shirley's rubrics thus appear to construct a very loose Anglo-Iberian connection for Chaucer's translation of Granson from French to English, so …

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …

Angelic And Demonic Womanhood: The Provocative Power Of Convergent Identities In Dickens And Eliot, Mackenzie Clinger

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Best Books Of The Past 20 Years For Ages 3-6, Rachel Schwedt, Janice A. Delong

Ages 3-6

Selecting books for preschoolers and beginning readers that engage their attention while teaching values, can be an elusive task. We have chosen some titles that that will cause giggles of amusement, some that may bring wrinkles of concentration to little brows, and others that may raise questions for them to ask adults. All are well-written.

Title reviews are taken from See Me Shine: Developing Character Through Books: Ages 3-6

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

Gambling: The Dialogue Of Excess In Lanval And The Franklin’S Tale, Fanrui Shao

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Marie de France’s Lanval and Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale are two medieval stories based on the Breton form of poetry called the lai. Both texts focus on rash actions, in particular thoughtless utterance, committed by virtuous foreigners, and the consequences that ensue. On the surface, the outsiders suffer xenophobia and the disfavor of the local patriarchy. But their true problem is the “excess” that they carry with them. Communities censor the circulation of this excess, i.e., all people, objects and relationships that either come from outside or deviate from local norms. Reading excess in these tales through the lens …

English Absolute Clauses In Context Of Fiction: The Study Of Unaugmented And Augmented Absolute Clauses In Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone And Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, Chayapol Khaphaeng

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigates the reasons for the different frequencies of unaugmented and the augmented absolutes. It also presents in-depth analyses on their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects in the context of fiction. The data were collected from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the first two books of the bestselling Harry Potter series. The findings of the study reveal that syntax, semantics, and pragmatics play an interrelated role in determining the way the absolute clauses appear in fiction. Syntactically, the structure of both unaugmented and augmented absolute clauses, with the majority of …

The Use Of Portfolio In Assessing English Writing Ability Of Thai Undergraduate Students, Kritsada Punyapratheep

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This research study aimed to (1) develop the criteria of the portfolio assessment in assessing English writing ability, (2) document the progresses of the students’ English writing ability by using portfolio assessment, and (3) investigate the perceptions toward the use of portfolio assessment in assessing English writing ability in a classroom-based setting of Thai EFL undergraduate students. The 25 first-year students who had enrolled in an English foundation course offered at a public university were the participants. These participants completed two types of essays, which comprised eight drafts in total for compiling the portfolios. Reflective journals, a perception questionnaire, a …

Effects Of Structural Priming And Lexical Residual Activation On The Acquisition Of The English “Noun + Relative Clause” By L1 Chinese Learners, Xueli Li

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the English “Noun + Relative Clause” based on Structural Priming (SP) (Bock, 1986; Bock, 1989; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA) (Cleland, 2003; Levelt et al., 1999). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English “Noun + Relative Clause”, when the priming and the target structures shared different head nouns, they would produce more “Noun + Relative Clause” than when they were primed by the English “Adj + Noun”, and the priming effect was significant. Also, based on SP and LRA, …

Greenpeace In Germany And The U.S.: A Case Study In Non-Profit Web Design, Maximilian J. Weirauch

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis draws on Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model, connects it to basic principles of web design, and applies it to a website analysis of the global non-profit organization Greenpeace. This case study of cultural dimensions in web design utilizes Hofstede’s framework from 1974 throughout all its chapters and focuses on the cultural differences between Germany and the U.S. My hypothesis that successful marketing materials such as websites must communicate differently with their U.S.-American and German audiences is partially borne out. But it is important to note that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model cannot fully account for certain intercultural dimensions of …

Language In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Axel Ahdritz

CMC Senior Theses

AI language models can now produce text that is indistinguishable from our own, forcing us into a confrontation with the romantic assumptions underlying ‘natural language’ in the West. In this thesis, I will conduct a genealogy of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ qualities of language through the literary, philosophical, and mathematical texts in which our ideas of authorship are premised. My hope is that this discussion will deepen our understanding of the language produced by AI models, answer why we feel compelled to anthropomorphize these machines, and situate readers in the reality of our present linguistic moment.

The Tragedy Of Caspian: C. S. Lewis And His Trauma, Chandler Hanton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis reconsiders C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as a type of scriptotherapy that enabled Lewis to process and come to terms with a life full of serious and significant traumatic events. Trauma theory offers a vehicle for us to consider the alignments and connections between Lewis himself and his fictional creation, Caspian. In the specifics of both characterization and incident, Lewis mirrors the events and relationships that instilled and healed the trauma in his own life. In situating Caspian as his alter-ego, Lewis allowed his writing to function as a gender-specific therapeutic process for addressing the effects of his …

The Funeral's The Thing: Unification Through The Burial Rite In Hamlet, Ferrell J. Mowell

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The funeral service is an ancient custom that is deeply cultural, and Shakespeare uses it prominently in Hamlet. The play's ending with Fortinbras commanding a military-like tribute for Hamlet is somewhat surprising because Hamlet was never a soldier, and he has breached the etiquette of funeral rites in the cases of Polonius, by withholding the remains immediately after the death, and Ophelia by making a spectacle with Laertes in her grave. Additionally, he has arranged for the execution before the observance of confessional rites in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet's dead march is an example of how …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

Spenser And Logic: Gigantomachia And Contentlessness In The Faerie Queene, John E. Curran Jr.

English Faculty Research and Publications

Figuring the enforcement of authority against rebellion, the war between the Olympians and the earth-spawned Giants is typically read as a marker of ideology. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s abundant allusions to the Gigantomachia can seem straightforwardly ideological, aligning Olympian rule with his virtue-knights, avatars of Elizabethan hegemony, and his giants with subversion. This essay explores another significance for the Gigantomachia, reviewing a different tradition of meaning for the myth-pattern and locating it in the poem—a tradition wherein, rather than liberation in the political realm, the Giants portend the radical oversimplification and even the nullification of thought within the …

Review Of Children Of The Raven And The Whale, Sarah Wadsworth

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Confined In (Patri)Architecture: How Gothic And Horror Literature Exposes Ongoing Violence And Oppression Against Women, Clara A. Macilravie Cañas

Dissertations and Theses

This project focuses on the intersections of space, power, gender, religion, and the architecture of institutions that confine and repress women. I argue that these texts focus on how patriarchal and domestic ideologies lock women into gendered expectations through oppressive gender politics. Chapter one demonstrates how early gothic female writers used representations of physical structures, such as abbeys and castles, to expose the eighteenth-century woman’s experiences of abuse and confinement by repressive patriarchal and monarchal rule. This chapter connects themes and arguments within Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) to reveal the metaphors that …

Queer Gothic Literature And Culture, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, …

Amplifying Agency And Presence Of Native American Women In 21st Century Literature, Rachel Mitchell

Dissertations and Theses

This project analyzes Native American women's voices and agency through their presence in a variety of 21st-century literary genres. The texts illuminate a clear presence of Native American authors who actively write Native American female characters that are powerful and take agency over their bodies and stories. The examples of Native American female characters allow readers to see more realistic and relatable figures within literature. Chapter one focuses on the empowering Native American female protagonists in Larissa FastHorse’s What Would Crazy Horse Do? (2019) and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty (2020). The playwrights offer crucial insight into more empowering and complex …