Modern Literature Commons^™

Life Histories Center Performance As Response To Text, Susan Browne, Marjorie Madden

College of Education Departmental Research

Based in anthropology (Cole & Knowles, 2001), life history inquiry into literature emphasizes deep understandings of literary characters that are expressed through dramatic performance. For teachers or teacher-educators, life histories offer a powerful teaching strategy. Life histories support locating readers in a particular pattern or “grammar” of events, situations, and goals while also revealing the subjective worlds of characters who are involved in such events. In an undergraduate Honors Literacies course, life histories performances in response to the young adult novel, The Skin I’m In(Flake, 1998), enabled examinations of the complex interaction of characters, their lives, and particular contexts.

Teaching Language Courses Online During A Global Pandemic, Maria Robertson-Justiniano

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, By Nadège T. Clitandre, Ana B. Rodríguez Navas

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Review Of La Bella España: El Teatro De Lope De Vega En La Rusia Soviética Y Postsoviética By Veronika Ryjik, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

There are certain writers whose importance only grows with time, and the longer the distance that separates us from them, the more facets of their genius they demonstrate to us, the readers of the twenty-first century. One of these authors is Lope de Vega. The new book of Veronika Ryjik now makes another major contribution to the scholarship of a great master who was well known and admired in Soviet Russia. It is indeed a serious study and one that fermented in the mind of the scholar for more than ten years – the true symbol of a truly remarkable …

Desarrollando Las Destrezas De Conversación De Una Estudiante Universitaria, Evelyn Loya

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to showcase a method for improving conversational language skills by having weekly sessions over the phone or by videoconference. A fellow Cal Poly student and I spoke over the phone for a number of weeks in Spanish during the course of Spring Quarter 2020 with the goal of bettering her overall language skills and gaining proficiency in aspects such as grammar, vocabulary acquisition, and sentence structure. We took on this project with hopes of mutually helping each other gain a better understanding of each other's cultural backgrounds and thus utilizing that to enrich our conversations. From the …

Traducción Del Sitio Web Del "Transitions Mental Health Association, San Luis Obispo", Lilli M. Barbaduomo

World Languages and Cultures

This project is the initial efforts to translate San Luis Obispo's Transitions Mental Health Association's website from English to Spanish. This translated website will hopefully allow for TMHA's services to be more widely read, understood, and utilized by San Luis Obispo's Latino community.

Investigando Los Éxitos Y Las Dificultades De Implementar Un Programa De Inmersión Dual A Través De Las Perspectivas De Tres Administradores, Victoria E. Slaybaugh

World Languages and Cultures

This Modern Languages and Literatures senior project investigates and analyses the successes and struggles of implementing a dual immersion program through interviews with three dual immersion principles. In interviewing three highly experienced administrators, ample information was collected on why some programs are prosperous while others see little success. Each individual principal had unique and valuable input, especially with regard to why their respective schools changed programs from 50/50 to 90/10, why they implemented K-12, and even why they chose to eliminate the program entirely. Using supplemental studies to more thoroughly examine the historical and social context of dual immersion, this …

Creando Un Sitio Web Para Concientizar Cómo Implementar Un Programa Bilingüe, Kylie S. Potter

World Languages and Cultures

This website serves the purpose of educating the community of the process of the implementation of bilingual education programs, specifically dual immersion programs. Because the demand for bilingual education is evidently high in the San Luis Obispo County, it is important for local families and community members to have access to information regarding the implementation process. The website provides detailed information from the book Designing and Implementing Two-Way Bilingual Programs by Calderón and Minaya-Rowe. As bilingual education rises in popularity, it is essential that all members of the community are aware of not only the benefits of bilingual education programs, …

The Languages Of Belonging: Heritage Language And Sense Of Belonging In Clubs And Organizations, Lou. Ibe

World Languages and Cultures

As a culminating project for a graduate in Modern Languages & Literatures and Comparative Ethnic Studies, this research paper focuses on the concepts of sense of belonging in institutions of higher education, specifically in relation to the presence of heritage languages within cultural clubs and organizations. It explores this relationship through a survey sent to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo students involved in various cultural clubs and organizations, exploring their feelings of sense of belonging as tied to the university in general, alongside their club/organization, while also inquiring about the presence of their heritage language in various spaces at the …

Explorando Lo No-Binario: Un Proyecto Sobre El Lenguaje Inlcusivo, Los Pronombres De Género, Y El Género No-Binario En Español, Elijah Michael Sobrien

World Languages and Cultures

En este proyecto, he traducido un sitio web de Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, sobre el uso de los pronombres de género. Además de la traducción, he explicado la razón por la cual es importante traducir este documento y proporcionar acceso a la información a diversas comunidades. La meta de este proyecto es promover el uso del lenguaje inclusivo entre todas personas. La traducción es importante porque para usar lenguaje inclusivo, una persona tiene que educarse sobre los pronombres de género y esforzarse por cambiar su modo de hablar. Este documento puede servir como recurso para personas que quieren aprender …

Where Do We Go From Here? Québécois Identity In The Road Novel From 1964 To 2008, Antoinette Williams-Tutt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Made famous with American of French-Canadian origin Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the road novel genre typically expresses evolving values and beliefs through the lens of the lone adventurer, embarking on journeys that are not only spatial but also social and cultural. The Québécois road novel adapts and reinterprets the American model, moving its protagonists within and without the province to address the deep-seated questions of Québec’s identity and nationalism through confrontations with the past, loss, grief, family, and cultural others. Car travel and cultural border crossings allow the protagonists to achieve a complicated individual and collective autonomy in …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Unfreiwillige Wanderjahre Von Egon Schwarz: Erfahrung, Bildung Und Glück Auf Dem Weg Zur Wirkungsmächtigkeit Im Exil, Reinhard Andress

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article chronicles the life and career of the Jewish Austrian-American Germanist Egon Schwarz through his autobiographical writings and other sources. Following Schwarz’s travels and studies in South and North American exile, the author asks what account of free will or external determination is most fitting for Schwarz’s meditations on exile and identity.

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

The World’S Greatest Hero: An Examination Of Superhero Tropes In My Hero Academia, Jerry Waller

Master's Projects and Capstones

In this paper the author explores the cross-cultural transmission of genre archetypes in illustrated media. Specifically, the representation of the archetype of American superheroes as represented in the Japanese manga and anime series, My Hero Academia. Through examination of the extant corpus of manga chapters and anime episodes for the franchise, the author draws comparison between characters and situations in the manga series with examples from American comic books by Marvel Comics and DC Comics. By skillfully incorporating foundational themes of American superhero comics into the shonen manga genre, My Hero Academia joins a growing collection of media that draws …

Iron Manicures: Sex, Power, And Sedition In Margaret Atwood's Writing, Anna Zarra Aldrich

Honors Scholar Theses

Margaret Atwood has often been criticized as a bad feminist writer for featuring villainous, cruel women. Atwood has combatted this criticism by pointing out that evil women exist in life, so they should in literature as well. Every story requires a villain and a victim, for Atwood these roles are both usually played by women. This thesis will explore the idea of the woman as spectacle in both behavior and body. Women are controlled by the idea that they must care. When they stop caring, they become a threat. At the heart of Atwood’s writing are the relationships between women …

"The Flat Earth Made Round And Tolkien’S Failure To Finish The Silmarillion", John D. Rateliff

Journal of Tolkien Research

Towards the end of his career, J. R. R. Tolkien faced many obstacles both internal and external that stood in the way of his finishing and publishing The Silmarillion. This paper explores the various elements that contributed to his dilemma and concludes that the key factors were twofold.

First came the traumatic breakdown of his efforts to publish the book through Collins, leading to a catastrophic interruption of his work on the book.

In addition, by this time Tolkien had concluded that many of the most iconic elements in his mythology could no longer command evoke secondary belief in …

"Shade Of The Earth", Joseph Patrick Self

2020 Symposium Creative Works

“Shade of the Earth” is a collection of 5 narrative poems: “On The Mountaintop”, “The Burning Boy”, “May Live or Die”, “Must Burn to Feel”, and “Shade of the Earth." The story runs together as one narrative with each poem linking into the next, split up into parts, not to divide but to bring them together. Perhaps in the hope of showing that life is separated yet whole.

This series portrays the state of mind of someone (possibly) self-entitled, the Burning Boy, as they battle against the entity of Night who exists as the complexities of pain and sadness and …

The Enduring Hold Of The Bible On Modern Literature: Exploring The Fall Narrative As A Conceptual Metaphor For American Literature In John Steinbeck’S East Of Eden, Lauren Stotsky

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There is no greater work of literature, perhaps, than the Bible. The Bible has shaped and influenced more literature, art, and culture than any other work in our time. The effects of the Bible’s words are still woven into modern literature today, illustrating that the Bible’s themes, allegories, parables, fables, metaphors, and characters are things that we humans are unable to depart far from even many decades later. One of the very first stories in the Bible, found at the beginning in Genesis, tells of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s depiction as the first kind of our species and …

Aventuras En Todo El Mundo, Maya G. Blair

World Languages and Cultures

This project is a fictional collection of stories baed loosely off of my own travel experiences during my college years. My goal with this piece of literature is to expose the reader to a wide variety of different cultures around the world. I do this with by recounting events which are loosely based off of my own adventures. I found inspiration for this piece of literature from my adventures for sure, but especially from my friends and all the amazing people who I met on my travels.

By understanding other cultures and people we can collaborate better on a global …

Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace

Articles

Commensality is an inherently social activity that shapes society and enacts social dynamics. Consequently, these shared exchanges can reveal much about the society and the individuals who engage in the act. This thesis explores commensality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book of Dust Series and companion texts to the novels. The research investigates how commensal exchanges create and maintain connections between characters across the collection. In doing so, it considers how literary characters differ from real-life humans and how the existing body of knowledge on commensality can be applied to literary figures. A qualitative approach was …

Bookended: Someone To Believe In Me, David Bowles

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Snowfall On Orhan Pamuk's Literary Canvas, Jane Eden Hartle

Anthós

In the novels Snow, My Name is Red, and The Black Book, and the memoir Istanbul: Memories and The City, Orhan Pamuk uses the symbolism of snowfall the way a visual artist would use paint. It is used to blur and define boarders on a micro and macro level, both covering and revealing historical, cultural, and political content. Snow simultaneously hides and announces, shelters and exposes. These equally powerful, often contradictory, and ultimately interdependent concepts, symbolized by the use of snow, are characteristic of the duality and identity conflict explored throughout these literary works. The readers’ interpretation of …

Audience And Narrative In Female-Authored Diaries Of The Twentieth Century: Analyzing Diaries As Modernist Texts, Rose Grosskopf

College Honors Program

During the early twentieth century the literary modernists reacted to a changing world by pioneering new literary forms that could depict the subjective experience of thought. Their new forms eschewed tradition, convention, and narrative and experimented with literary techniques that could depict the mind in an expanded moment of time.

In her modernist essay “A Diary,” Gertrude Stein reveals the similarities between diaries and her own experimental modernist literature. “A Diary,” which is both modernist literature and a diary, provides a critical lens by which to examine other diaries as modernist texts. An analysis of the diaries of Anne Frank, …

Beyond Maidens And Mothers: A Study Of Till We Have Faces, Tamar Peterson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines how C.S. Lewis’ final novel, Till We Have Faces, demonstrates a significant diversion from the author's typical writing habits, especially regarding his depictions of women. Progressing through the novel chronologically, this thesis studies sixteen notable scenes that demonstrate this diversion. It tracks the development and depiction of women characters who exemplify a more realistic, complex, egalitarian writing style—one that allows women to wield legitimate power, excel in military combat, operate as conduits to the Divine, and enjoy their sexuality in affirming ways.

This thesis begins with an introduction to Lewis' position as a lay theologian and popular …

Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes the use of objective correlative and varying points of view in creative writing in order to generate dialogue on cultural issues. I relate theories from Edward T. Hall, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lubomír Doležel to my own writing. Additionally, I situate my own multi-genre writing with work of contemporaries such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. My hypothesis is that writers can use an objective correlative (Eliot) from the top of the cultural iceberg (Hall) as an entry point to representing deeper, more fraught cultural issues. Additionally, by experimenting with …

The Translator-Function: Translating Bande-Dessinée For The Anglophone Reader, Ryan C. Gomez

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis focuses on the question of translator roles in literary theory. I characterize these roles between positions that have traditionally been described by literary and philosophical theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. By examining the products of translation (French-language bandes-dessinées and their English translations), and considering critical literary and translation theories, I demonstrate the unique position held by translators and their work through the proposal of what I call the translator-function (modeled after Foucault’s author-function). The principal aim of this thesis is to problematize preconceived ideas about translators and to examine the unique position of the …

The Hope Of Salman Masalha: Re-Territorializing Hebrew, Yael Dekel, Eran Tzelgov

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Israeli poetry can be depicted as a triangle composed of three elements: territory (the State of Israel); language (Hebrew); and identity (Jewish). In his Hebrew collection of poetry Eḥad Mikan (in place, 2004), Salman Masalha—a bilingual author publishing in both Arabic and Hebrew—challenges this interrelation of territory, language and identity. The debate between the literary scholars Hannan Hever and Reuven Snir explore the central expressions of this challenge. For it points, on the one hand, to the subversive potential of such work towards the Israeli canon while, on the other hand, to its connection to Arabic literature. Writing in the …

Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete …

Arab Music And Mizraḥi Poetry, Yochai Oppenheimer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The concept of “Arab Jews,” which has appeared in Israeli Mizraḥi (Oriental) discourse over the last decade, resists the framework of Israeli national culture that demands the elimination of Arab identity. For this music suggests possibilities of remembering and “re-presenting” this partially-repressed element. Moreover, the experience of remembering Arab music represents, more than anything else, the diasporic attitude of the Mizraḥim (Oriental Jews). It demonstrates a common legacy that Israeli culture is unwilling to accept and understand. Extrication from the boundaries of Zionist culture (which has historically rejected the diasporic past and its cultures, especially the Arab-Jewish past) manifests itself, …