English Language and Literature Commons^™

Writing In Film Studies: Poetics And Pedagogy, Bryan Mead

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is writing instruction inside undergraduate film courses. While the existence of textbooks devoted to teaching students how to write about film highlights the need for such instruction, evidence suggests many courses underuse or neglect such texts. Instead, most instructors focus their efforts on content instruction, expecting students to translate an increased content knowledge into written argumentation. Yet, as is the case across the disciplines, students struggle to write successfully in these disciplinary courses. One of the main reasons for this disparity between instructor expectation and student success is the notion of disciplinarity, and how influential …

Controlling Women’S Appetites: Food And Femininity In Victorian Literature, Elizabeth Murray

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This project contributes to the growing field of feminist food studies by examining Victorian women’s relationships to food. I argue that beginning at a young age Victorian middle-class girls and women had to learn to regulate their appetites and eating as a way of performing “proper” Victorian femininity. Chapter one explains why the Victorian period, the middle-class, and women are apt subjects for a feminist food studies exploration of literature and culture. The second chapter discusses non-fiction advice literature that includes guidance about how middle-class girls and women should eat and control their bodies as part of their performance of …

David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus: An Anti-Fantasy, Bryan Wysopal

Masters Theses

This is a study of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) in which I argue that the novel is an anti-fantasy, that is, a fantasy that negates certain tropes common to the genre as part of the author’s wider intentions for writing. I contextualize Lindsay by comparing him to several authors of his time who also worked in the mode of fantasy, then explain how the generic traits of the novel are handled unconventionally to promote Lindsay’s personal philosophy. I explore Lindsay’s treatment of the basic generic traits of the hero and his quest, the imaginary world, and …

Heathen Husband: The Corrupting Patriarchal Hierarchy In Shakespeare’S Othello And Its Absence In Cinthio’S Gli Hecatommithi, Heavyn Renee Lester

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis places William Shakespeare’s Othello within cultural context to examine the moral corruption that Desdemona and Othello undergo once they fulfill marital roles within a patriarchal hierarchy that reflects the hierarchy religious conduct literature calls on Christians to maintain within marriage. At the same time, this thesis contrasts Shakespeare’s Othello with the Italian story of Disdemona and a Moorish captain within Decade Three of Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi. Hecatommithi does not ascribe a corrupting power to patriarchal hierarchy or explore Othello’s downfall in relation to his Christian faith. This thesis determines that the alterations Shakespeare makes to Othello’s source material …

“I Save Me”: Gender, Agency, And Power In Better Call Saul, Stephanie Kocer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Historically, women on television have been portrayed in wife and mother roles, making them a foil to their husbands, but never the main focal point of the show. These characters stay on the sidelines, without being given truly original storylines where they are allowed to drive their own narratives. During the first season of Better Call Saul, Kim Wexler is a supporting character, without any storylines that aren’t linked to Jimmy McGill. Jimmy often treats Kim as a damsel in distress. He thinks it’s his job to save her, and usually from the chaos that he’s created. In this thesis …

Abomination, Elias Joel Donstad, Anneliese Donstad

Dissertations and Theses

Abomination is a collection of creative nonfiction essays through which I examine my sexual and gender identity alongside negotiating the trauma of my childhood, adolescences, and early adulthood. I specifically interrogate how evangelical Christianity acted as a traumatizing agent in its focus on the total depravity of humanity and demonization of queerness. I explore the various ways language impacts and constructs individuals and their experiences. The essays in this collection partly come together to form a narrative of my life; however, this collection is not arranged to be chronological. There is no singular narrative arc. While the essays are interconnected, …

Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, And Contamination: Key Tropes For Narrating Extinction In Jeff Vandermeer's Hummingbird Salamander And James Bradley's Ghost Species, Christopher Hardesty Nicholson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the narrative portrayals of issues pertaining to anthropogenic extinction in two contemporary speculative fiction novels: Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021) and James Bradley’s Ghost Species (2020). This focus leads to consideration of narrative genre, tropes, and affective resonance. The first half of this thesis centers the genres of tragedy and elegy, their tropes of ghosts and hauntings, and the affective processes of grief and horror. Within these narrative frameworks extinction is experienced as a claustrophobic site of horror in Hummingbird Salamander, and as a time-warping inspiration of grief in Ghost Species. However, in each novel …

Sacramental Ethnicity: Women’S Culture And Vernacular Religion In Twentieth-Century America, Aaron J. Rovan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This project examines the reciprocal and evolving relationship between American women’s culture, vernacular religion, and the social development of American ethnicity. This project focuses on the roles of white ethnic women, both literary and real, in the construction, maintenance, and transmission of ethnic identity. The project highlights the connections between the folkloric performances of vernacular religion and the discursive articulation of ethnicity by focusing on two women writers and two groups of Slovak American women. The fiction of Kate Chopin and Anzia Yezierska illustrates how literary authors bring their contemporary concepts of folklore into their writing. The writings of these …

Beyond What's Missing: Silence In Women-Authored Novels From Wollstonecraft To Shelley, Kelli Wilhelm

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation responds to and intends to subvert binary interpretations of silence, particularly women’s silences, as representing either submission or resistance to oppressive institutions and societal expectations. I examine five women-authored novels from British Romanticism. The first half of this dissertation focuses on three radical works of the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House. The second half discusses two well-known early nineteenth-century novels, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Through examinations of these novels, I discuss how silence functions …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

Front Matter, Keb Editorial Board

Kentucky English Bulletin

No abstract provided.

Why Do I Cry?, Synthia Shelby

Kentucky English Bulletin

No abstract provided.

Full Edition, Keb Editorial Board

Kentucky English Bulletin

No abstract provided.

Viruses, Vaccines, And The Erotics Of Risk In Latinx Hiv Stories And Covid-19, Dr. Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2019, I published Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism (University of Illinois Press), in which I discuss contagion as a metaphor for embracing our shared materiality with others. Six months later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, neighbors were crossing streets to avoid each other. Social distancing is, counterintuitively, asking us to view separation and seclusion as forms of solidarity. But how can we be solid if we are oriented against each other? Isolation itself has become contagious: sharing repulsion and rejection, measuring six feet of “social” distance from others. These spaces are made up of a variety …

An Implementation Of An Integrated Performance Assessment Module To Promote English Speaking Ability And Learning Engagement Of Undergraduate Students, Benjawan Plengkham

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Integrating assessment with instruction has been a challenge for English language teachers, especially in English speaking courses. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate instruction and assessment methodologies that can help enhance students’ speaking ability. The Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA), designed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (Adair-Hauck et al., 2015), is a cluster assessment consisting of three modes of communication, namely interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational, to seamlessly connect instruction and assessment as well as reflect how students use the language. This study was conducted to 1) investigate the effects of an IPA module on undergraduate students’ …

Digital Reading On Eil Materials For Thai Undergraduate Students, Nopphanan Adungdejjaroon

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This exploratory study had two research objectives. First, it aimed to investigate digital reading on EIL materials for Thai undergraduate students and, second, explore students' perceptions towards digital reading on EIL materials. The study involved two hundred and ninety-nine undergraduate students enrolled in an aviation business management program. The EIL Digital Reading Questionnaire is to collect quantitative data, while the semi-structured interview is to collect qualitative data. The result from descriptive statistics of the questionnaire and thematic analysis of the semi-interview reported that Thai undergraduate students tended to encounter, engage, and evaluate EIL materials frequently. Most of the participants strongly …

The Effects Of Peer Feedback And Self-Regulated Learning On Thai Efl University Students’ Essay Writing Ability And Self-Regulation, Jantra Prompan

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The primary objective of this mixed-method study was to explore the effectiveness of integrating peer feedback and self-regulated learning (SRL) in improving students’ essay writing ability and self-regulation. The study also investigated the relationship between students’ essay writing ability and their self-regulation, as well as explored students’ attitudes towards the intervention. During the 12-week online instruction necessitated by the pandemic crisis, a group of thirty-five 3rd year students majoring in Business English at Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University were instructed in essay writing using peer feedback activities and SRL techniques. Data collection involved an essay writing test, a self-regulation questionnaire, semi-structured …

Effects Of The Writing Instructional Model With Integration Of Inquiry-Based Learning And Visual Literacy On 21st Century Skills Of Efl Learners, Patsawut Sukserm

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Although a body of research illustrates the potential of inquiry-based learning in promoting the 21st century skills among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students (AbuRezeq, 2018; Imansyan et al., 2019; Milatasari, 2013; Palupi et al., 2020; Tongjean et al., 2019), other studies have indicated its occasional failure in eliciting students’ engagement (Duschl & Wright, 1989; Gill, 2005), which affects students’ success in language learning. This results in the need to leverage other pedagogical strategies, including visual literacy, to increase the efficacy of inquiry-based learning (Gonzalez-Ledo, 2015; Maricimoi, 2017; Navidinia et al., 2018; Rokhaniyah, 2019, Sulastri, 2019; Tayib, 2015; Villasor, …

A Study Of Students' Reading Engagement And Perception Of Eil Materials, Tayaporn Nakornsut

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The popularity of English as an International Language has been rapidly growing, contributing EIL materials to have become more widespread in learning. This study discusses students’ reading engagement and their perception of EIL materials, which aims to (1) investigate students’ engagement in reading EIL materials, (2) explore student perception of EIL materials, and (3) explore the relationship between students’ level of reading engagement and their perception of EIL materials. 113 undergraduate students at one private college who use English as a medium for their instruction were participated in this study. A mixed-method study which Reading Engagement Questionnaire and EIL Perception …

Effects Of Salience And Working Memory On L2 Processing Of English Relative Clauses With Past Participles And Past Participial Reduced Relative Clauses By L1 Thai Learners, Supakit Thiamtawan

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The present study explored effects of working memory (WM), structure, and salience on the processing of irregular past participial forms in English relative clauses (RCs) and participial reduced relative clauses (PRRCs) among L1 Thai learners. Based on Bayley’s research (1994), the salience in this study was related to phonological changes from the past tense form of English irregular verbs into their past participial form. The research included two groups of past participles with different salience degrees, i.e., an internal vowel change plus an addition of the syllabic [ən] morpheme and an internal vowel change plus an affixation of n. The …

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Book Review: The Sound Of Stars, Megan Russell Harbin

The Utah English Journal

One glance at Alechia Dow's stunning cover for The Sound of Stars drew me in, but I wasn't prepared for the beautifully told, relevant story that followed.

The Sound of Stars is written from two, distinct perspectives: Janelle (Ellie) Baker, a human teenage girl, and M0RrlS, a labmade Ilori alien. M0Rrls is part of the alien invasion that has taken over Earth, where Ellie resides. Over the past two years since the takeover, M0Rrls has been in charge of creating a "vaccine" for the humans, per orders from the superior "true Ilori." This "vaccine" will provide the true Ilori with …

Book Review: Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher's Guide To Engaging Families For Student Success, Leah Day

The Utah English Journal

A devastating pandemic has now shaped nearly all aspects of our lives, including education. Students are more disengaged than ever, and we need to take a reflective look at how to drive student success-through engagement with their families.

Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher's Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success is a plentiful resource for all types of educators looking to up their game in connecting with families in their learning community.

Experimenting Upon The Feelings: Maria Edgeworth’S Empirical Approach To Love In Belinda, Emily Hopwood Durney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In her 1801 novel/moral tale Belinda, Maria Edgeworth presents a story of love, family, reconciliation, and education in a time when the popularity of companionate marriages was rising in British society along with the acceleration of scientific innovations and advancements. Belinda mixes these two interests of love and science as Edgeworth, empirically minded like her inventor father, frequently has her characters debunk illusion and deceit through induction and logic. Critics, such as Nicole Wright, have argued that Belinda is a far more significant character than is often recognized because of her logic and reason—especially as she helps other characters …

"All The Litter As It Lay": Swift, Montagu, And Their Practice Of Thing Theory, Eli M. Phillips

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this article, I argue that, although "Thing Theory" was not so named until the 21st century, and has been mostly applied to prose of the 18th century and not its poetry, Jonathan Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu engaged in a poetic thing theory of their own. For Swift, this meant examining the "thingness" of physical objects, leading to an uncertain conclusion about the poem as an object. For Montagu, the "thingness" of objects was instead downplayed, while the "thingness" of the genre of 18th-century satire, including its often ugly attitude toward women, was foregrounded, asking important questions about …

“What We Ought To Say”: Debating The Morality Of Dishonesty And Equivocation In King Lear, Markelle Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

King Lear does not reveal the nature of honesty but provides a stage on which the morality of honesty can be debated. The play questions whether honesty is inherently moral at all, or if there are ways in which honesty can be considered harmful and even immoral. Other scholars have noted this as well in characters such as Edgar and Kent, but missing from the critical conversation are the ways in which Cordelia is the pillar of moral goodness in the play, and how her own paradoxical honesty and dishonesty were what enabled Lear to “see better” and ultimately, to …

To Forsake, To Forswear: The Freedom Of Abandoning The Oath Within King Richard Ii, Abby Thatcher

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Cover And Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Femme Ex Machina: Sex Robots, Embodiment, And Posthuman Subjectivity, Julia A. Empey

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Andrea Dworkin warned in her 1974 book Woman Hating that men would soon develop the technology to “create the sex objects that will gratify them” (199). This dissertation investigates one of those technologies: sex robots, as mediated through science fiction film and literature. While the sex robot is still an emerging technology, its embodiment, particularly when female-rendered, has been imagined and negotiated for centuries. Men creating women in a specific, desired image is not new, but the sex robot is currently being transformed from imagined representation to embodied subject. This dissertation traces a pattern of representation that has allowed us …