Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

William Caxton's Paris And Vienne And Blanchardyn And Eglantine, Harriet Elizabeth Hudson

TEAMS Middle English Texts

William Caxton’s Paris and Vienne and Blanchardyn and Eglantine are English versions of romances well-known in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, but outside the modern canon of early English literature. Like many of his publications, they are translations of prose works circulating at the court of Burgundy, but unlike his other romances, they do not belong to the matters of the Nine Worthies. They are independent narratives of love and adventure presenting two differing but complementary accounts of chivalry and courtly love. Following fifteenth-century fashions, they treat conventional materials with a degree of realism and imbue characters with subjectivity. Blanchardyn …

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Covid-19 As An Industry Accelerant, Betty Huang

Honors Theses

The coronavirus pandemic, declared as a national emergency on March 13th, 2020, has caused extreme social and economic disruption all over the world, forever leaving a distinct imprint on history. Although many companies struggled immensely, either barely pulling out of the pandemic alive or having to completely shut down, several other companies have found ways to flourish during this unprecedented time.

The beginning of the pandemic brought lowered advertising rates. Several companies made the marketing decision to run campaigns during this time to take advantage of these lowered rates while creating a company response to the pandemic itself. The world …

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

The Exploration Of Various Literary Genres Through Short Story Writing, Abigail Cowan

Honors Theses

This project contains four short stories and one collection of poetry. The first, “Touch-Me-Nots,” explores self-harm and healing using the touch-me-not plant as an analogy for avoiding self-harm and leaves readers with the hopeful sentiment of a person willing to heal by “leaving it alone.” Next, “The Bear and the Ant,” inspired by Aesop’s Fables, anthropomorphizes a bear and an ant and leaves readers with a ‘moral’ in true Aesop Fable fashion. Inspired by the ants who ransacked my six-month-old Halloween candy stash, I detail a Bear which attempts to “save” its honey for a day that never comes. The …

Preservice English Teachers’ Evolving Conceptions Of 21st-Century Writing, Amber Jensen

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study used stimulated-recall interviews throughout four secondary English preservice teachers’ (PSTs) semester-long student teaching internships to examine how critical teaching moments shaped their evolving conceptions of 21st-century writing. The article first describes the participants’ collective definitions of features and experiences of 21st-century writing in the ELA classroom, focusing specifically on how they understood digital and multimodal composition. It then examines two case studies that demonstrate how PSTs’ teaching experiences destabilized, challenged, and contradicted their emerging definitions. Findings suggest that English educators may engage PSTs in conceptualizing nuanced and flexible 21st-century writing pedagogies as they construct field experiences as reflective …

Body Of Work, Ben Gunsberg

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This essay offers a college English teacher's account of transitioning from face-to-face to web-based instruction during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

17th Edition Of The Laureate, Jessie Fales

Honors Theses

The Laureate is an undergraduate literary journal sponsored by the Lee Honors College at Western Michigan University. As Editor in Chief of the 17^th Edition, I coordinated the journal’s publication over the course of an academic year. The editorial process follows methodical stages, which have become standard over The Laureate’s lifetime—recruiting submissions, selecting submissions, coordinating with the design center, and hosting a launch party, etc... Of course, every editor has a unique experience, but we must honor the journal’s entity as something larger than ourselves—this journal has existed long before my time, and I hope it keeps on …

Cross-Curricular Writing In Mathematics For Comprehension, Kirsten Stowell

Honors Theses

Even though the idea of implementing writing in a mathematics classroom is far from new and the benefits from doing so are hardly nonexistent, this concept is often not found in modern secondary mathematics classrooms. Writing about mathematics allows students to organize and communicate their thinking, gain a better conceptual understanding of mathematical topics, develop a stronger sense of mathematical procedure, move beyond surface-level thinking, and place abstract ideas into context. Writing can also be used by teachers as a formative assessment to explicitly determine if students are struggling conceptually or procedurally in a mathematics classroom to then adjust instruction …

Delving Into Multicultural Literature With Inquiry, Juan Gonzalez

Honors Theses

This paper argues for the use of multicultural literature in the classroom, and puts forth a unit plan that uses critical literacy in an English 11 classroom, though it can be readapted to fit other grade levels. Bishop (1990) describes multicultural literature as a set of windows, that people use to view the experiences of others, and mirrors, that reflect and validate peoples’ experience, a core principal in this paper. Critical literacy is comprised of four dimensions (Lewison, Flint, & Van Sluys, 2002) that allows for analyzing literature in a different and meaningful way. The final part of this paper …

The Laureate Collection, Samantha Mcveigh

Honors Theses

No abstract available.

Advocating For Mother Earth In The Undergraduate Classroom: Uniting Twenty-First Century Technologies, Local Resources, Art, And Activism To Explore Our Place In Nature, Christina Triezenberg Ph.D., Ilse A. Schweitzer Vandonkelaar

The Hilltop Review

Despite the growing evidence of humanity’s impact on the natural world and the urgent need to shape citizens who understand the impact that their choices and actions have on their local and global environments, colleges and universities throughout the United States have been slow to add environmental education as a core component of their undergraduate curricula. Harnessing our shared interest in environment issues and the humanities, we designed and taught an experimental course in environmental literature for the honors program at Western Michigan University that we hope will become a template of what is possible in postsecondary environmental education. Using …

"'More Safe I Sing With Mortal Voice': The Bard, The Reader, And The Problematics Of Creation In Paradise Lost", Benjamin Moran

Honors Theses

For the first three centuries following its initial publication in 1667, John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost was understood by its critics the epitome of stateliness, a poem brimming with grandeur, and above all, the product of a writer certain about his poetic skills and his theodical mission. Joseph Addison, one of the poem's earliest and most influential critics, summarizes this orthodoxy when he wrote that readers find in Paradise Lost "all the Greatness of Plan, Regularity of Design, and masterly Beauties which we discover in Homer and Virgil." In this essay, I directly and indirectly address Addison's argument as …

Closing The Book On Libraries? Challenging The Idea That Libraries Are Obsolete And Discovering Why They Are More Important Now Than Ever Before, Kayla Hampton

Honors Theses

Libraries have been a part of civilization for thousands of years, but many people are beginning to believe that the information centers are becoming obsolete due to the Internet and other technological advancements. This thesis challenges that opinion by focusing on the past, present and future of libraries. In “The Past” section, the historical background of libraries is discussed, beginning with the first libraries in Greece during the fourth century B.C. to the first public library that opened in the United States, which was located in Peterborough, New Hampshire. During the portion of the thesis that discusses the challenges that …

Glottopoeia: A Case Study In Language Change, Ian Hollenbaugh

Honors Theses

"Glottopoeia: A Case Study in Language Change" is a thesis in the form of a I32-page grammar booklet, entitled An Elementary Ghau Aethauic Grammar, with a preface detailing what I did, why I did it, and how I accomplished it. In effect, I invented a language called Ghau Aethau. It was created almost entirely ex nihilo, borrowing nothing in the way of phonetics, morphology, or vocabulary from any real language. It does employ grammatical concepts present in many real-world languages, but also several of my own design. I chose this project for two reasons: first, to explore the art form …

Australian Aboriginal English And African American Language: The Development Of Marginalized Language Varieties, Sarah E. Hercula

The Hilltop Review

The development of distinct varieties of English is a diverse and interesting process. In places over the entire globe where once existed exclusively non-English speaking peoples, various forms of English are now used as the primary means of communication in many different settings: governmental, business, educational, and home. Frequently, new varieties of English form out of necessity as a way for groups of people with differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds to communicate and effectively coexist. Two such languages, Australian Aboriginal English and African American Language, though they developed within different circumstances, have some interesting similarities in terms of their origins …

How Does It Mean? Literary Theory As Metacognitive Reading Strategy In The High School English Classroom, Lisa J. Schade

Dissertations

In the last two decades, serious scholarly attention has been paid both to theories of teaching reading and to theories of literary interpretation. These potentially related fields have been treated as separate, focused either on teaching reading in the elementary grades or on teaching interpretation to advanced college literature students. Until very recently the relevance of either reading theory or literary theory to middle school or high school pedagogy has remained unexamined. My research, as a reflective practitioner, addresses this important gap. I focus on the teaching of literary theory in the high school English classroom as a strategy to …

"How Should One Love?": Alternative Love Plots And Their Ethical Implications In The Victorian Novel, Jennifer J. Carpentier

Dissertations

In reading Victorian fiction through an ethical lens, I am attentive to questions of what constitutes the good, loving, w ell-lived life. It is my contention that Victorian writers turned to fiction - specifically, the rapidly emerging novel form - to explore the ethical implications of being in love, and the problem s occasioned by erotic love. The writers I examine modify the basic Aristotelian search for a specification of the good life for human beings: they used novels as testing grounds for the ethical question, "How should one love?"

My study of 19th-century British fiction reveals a strain of …