Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Approaches To Life Narrative: A Scholarly And Creative Thesis, Tanya Bomsta

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis includes both scholarly and creative approaches to women’s life narrative and rhetoric. The author first analyzes Terry Tempest Williams’ recently published memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory. She examines how Williams’ hybrid genre negotiates the boundaries between journaling and autobiographical writing and between silence and voice. She argues that Williams employs a feminist rhetoric in her writing in order to negotiate these boundaries.

The second and third works are personal essays in which the author examines her journals and her marriage. These creative works meditate on the …

Understanding School Genres Using Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Study Of Science And Narrative Texts, Allison D. Canfield

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to examine elementary level textbooks (grades 2-4; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing; The Trophies Collection) using Systemic Functional Linguistics as the theoretical framework to study the different types of lexical choice and grammatical options made in the textbooks. The two genres examined are science and narrative, which are significantly different from each other. Science texts are “information based,” and narrative texts, “story based.” It is very important for teachers to understand how the genres are different so that they can convey those differences to their students.

The two school genres, science and narrative, differ from …

Patterns Of Computer-Mediated Interaction In Small Writing Groups Using Wikis, Mimi Li, Wei Zhu

English Faculty Research

Informed by sociocultural theory and guided especially by “collective scaffolding”, this study investigated the nature of computer-mediated interaction of three groups of English as a Foreign Language students when they performed collaborative writing tasks using wikis. Nine college students from a Chinese university participated in the wiki-mediated collaborative writing project. Analyses of data from the wiki “Discussion”, “Page”, and “History” modules on each group tab revealed that the three small groups displayed three distinct patterns of online interaction: collectively contributing/mutually supportive, authoritative/responsive, and dominant/withdrawn. These patterns were substantiated by the roles group members assumed and members’ task approaches in terms …

Logogenesis And Appraisal: A Systemic Functional Analysis Of English And Japanese Language Arts Textbooks, Shinji Kawamitsu

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the distinct and purposeful differences of the language of evaluation between English textbooks and Japanese textbooks. This thesis applies Appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics to the language arts textbooks used in 2nd to 4th grade classrooms in Japan and in the U.S. The analysis shows that the number of Attitudinal lexical items, especially invoked Attitude, is notably higher than that in the English texts. The analysis also shows that the Japanese texts employ Judgment lexis, which is a resource to form a sense of group harmony, more than the other Attitudinal …

Methodological Orientation Of Research Articles Appearing In Higher Education Journals, Sherri E. Ritter

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this study was to understand the methodologies authors in higher education journals used to obtain knowledge in their fields. This study looked at five peer-reviewed journals of higher education and analyzed the methods of research employed by the authors to help them answer their respective research questions. The methods of research are qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods. Additionally, this study examined the effects of author, gender, and academic rank on the selection of research methods.

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …

Use Of Wikis In Second/Foreign Language Classes: A Literature Review, Mimi Li

English Faculty Research

Wikis, as emerging Web 2.0 tools, have been increasingly implemented in language classrooms. To explore the current state of research and inform future studies, this article reviews the past research on the use of wikis in second/foreign language classes. Using Google Scholar and the ERIC database, the researcher examines twenty-one empirical studies published in fourteen peer-reviewed journals from 2008 to 2011. Specifically, the researcher takes a holistic review of this body of literature, including theoretical frameworks, research goals, contexts and participants, tasks and wiki applications, and research methods and instruments. The researcher identifies four main research themes investigated in the …

The Elephants Evaluate: Some Notes On The Problem Of Grades In Graduate Creative Writing Programs, Rachel Peckham

English Faculty Research

This article takes up the "special strangeness" of grading practices in the graduate creative writing workshop, based on the author's research, personal experience, and interviews with the faculty of her doctoral creative writing program. Using a structure of notes, the author attempts to make sense of the way grades are understood by both teacher and student at the post-secondary level. First, she considers why the formal evaluation of creative writing continues to be defined by a system of grades, despite the perceived failure of grades to represent the value of such work, and despite educators' historic and ongoing attempts at …

The Tractarians' Sermons And Other Speeches, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the first chapter of A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It provides an overview of the Tractarians' homiletic theory, and examines the various genres of their oratory: sermons (both "plain" and "university"), lectures, and episcopal charges.

Introduction To A New History Of The Sermon : The Nineteenth Century, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the introduction to A New History of the Sermon:The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It discusses the concept and history of "rhetorical criticism," and seeks to lay a foundation for the rhetorical study of the Anglo-American pulpit.

Cosmopolitanism After Derrida: City, Signature And Sovereignty, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

Cosmopolitanism in Derrida's works sounds like an afterthought in comparison to other more recurring themes of his texts, like 'writing', 'differance', 'supplement', 'metaphysics', or 'violence'. Cosmopolitanism seems to belong to deconstruction, which is often associated with decentring, fragmentation, and critique of totality and universality, only as an intimate other, a foreign element grafted in the body by force, or by miracle. That is the reason why, perhaps, hardly any cosmopolitanist refers to the issue of cosmopolitanism in Derrida or in deconstruction, so much so that even Derrida has written very sparsely on it as it belongs perhaps to the dormant, …

Spectrogenetic Translation In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Elsewhere, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

South Asians, in their attempts to articulate post-colonial subjectivity, have themselves only reinscribed various aspects of colonial exoticism in their work. South Asian author Arundhati Roy’s rendering of untouchability in terms of godliness in The God of Small Things resonates with colonial ideologies that read “subalterns” as objects, not as subjects. Roy’s invocation of colonial methods of translation envisions untouchability in “absolutist terms”—a strategy that may ultimately mitigate against a recognition of the highly varied experiences, social agencies, and subjectivities of dalits living in South Asia and abroad.

Heroic Orual And The Tasks Of Psyche, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

C.S. Lewis's last novel, Till We have Faces: A Myth Retold, concerns transformations. After all, it deals with the myth of Psyche. In Greek, Psyche means not only soul but also butterfly.¹ This brings to mind the metamorphosis of a crawling caterpillar into a winged butterfly, analogous to the protagonist's transformation from mortal to goddess. In Lewis's retelling, not only does a mortal human becomes an immortal goddess,² but also, an ugly soul turns beautiful, a coarse, barbaric populace grows into a gracious civilization, and cruel divinities with a thirst for human blood become loving guardians of the …

The Tractarians' Political Rhetoric, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This article examines the political speaking and writing of John Keble, John Henry Newman, and other leading figures of the Oxford Movement. It argues that while they were essentially conservative in the pulpit, where they spoke as official representatives of the Established Church, they were more critical and outspoken in other works, where they enjoyed more of the freedom afforded to private citizens.

A Functional Analysis Of English Humanities And Biochemistry Writing With Respect To Teaching University Composition, Joshua Glenn Iddings

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis examines how writing differs in both English departments and Biochemistry departments in realization at the grammatical, that is, the lexico-grammatical level; and thus, how the differing writing modes are not merely realizations of differences at the lexical level, but the grammar of the texts is affected by the different world perspectives reflected by each discipline. By analyzing the lexico-grammatical realizations in texts produced by professionals in both the English and Biochemistry disciplines, through the analysis of basic writing handbooks which are required reading for many introductory writing students, and through analysis of a survey given to full-time university …

Religion And The Academy: Report On The Western Conference On British Studies Roundtable, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This article is a report of a roundtable I moderated at the 2006 meeting of the Western Conference on British Studies. It proposes some directions religious studies might take in the 21st century; it is also the first publication to mention of the British Pulpit Online, an emerging digital resource for the study of the sermon from 1688-1901.

Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge And Hospitality In Derrida, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

‘‘Listen first to those who, like myself, did not have to watch TV to know that SOME of L.A. was burning,’’ Derrida wrote to a newsletter in response to the riots triggered by the Rodney King events in 1992, adding, ‘‘L.A. is not anywhere, but it is a singular organization of the experience of ‘anywhere’’’ (‘‘Faxitexture’’ 28). At a time when one hardly needs to watch TV to know that many cities around the world are burning, or are targeted and wounded, bombed and invaded—as if the Biblical injunction, ‘‘Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge …

“’National Apostasy,’ Tracts For The Times, And Plain Sermons: John Keble's Tractarian Prose.”, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

John Keble is perhaps best known for The Christian Year and his work as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1831 to 1841. In this essay, I argue that his prose is worthy of study as well. I focus on "National Apostasy," the sermon that John Henry Newman saw as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement; the 8 pieces he contributed to the Tracts for the Times; and his many contributions to the Plain Sermons, by Contributors to the "Tracts for the Times."

Prophecy And Anti-Popery In Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered, Robert Ellison, Carol Herringer

English Faculty Research

John Cumming (1807-1881) was the popular minister of the Crown Court Church of Scotland in London's Covent Garden. This article examines his views on the end times and the Roman Catholic Church, two of the favorite subjects of his preaching.

Falcandus And Fulcaudus Epistola Ad Petrum Liber De Regno Sicilie Literary Form And Author's Identity, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

In Paris, in 1550, when the printing press was still relatively new, Gervais de Tournay published a medieval chronicle under the title, Historia Hugonis Falcandi Siculi De rebus gestis in Siciliae regno iam primum typis excusa [« The History of Hugo Falcandus the Sicilian, concerning things done in the Kingdom of Sicily, now printed for the first time »]. He had discovered this history, as he explains in his preface, in a codex placed at his disposal by Matthew Longuejoue, bishop of Soissons, a codex so ravaged by time that it looked repulsive enough to poison the hand that dared …

The Earthly Paradise In Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

Valinor, modelled on the Earthly Paradise, is described more fully in Tolkien's posthumously published works than in The Lord of the Rings. Yet the fleeting Valinorean images within the trilogy have a powerful impact, heightening and simultaneously providing consolation for the horrors of Mordor.

The Latest Model, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

Though it was only superficial, the lesion on the three-year old's arm looked sinister. Oddly symmetrical and oval, it looked like a pinkish field of delicate needlepricks on the pudgy arm and elbow, oozing a little and forming a crust the color of lemon yogurt on the edges. The child sniffled as Sandra gently explored his injury. His cheekswere still red from bawling.

Nature And Technology: Angelic And Sacrificial Strategies In Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

Tolkien is often lightly accused of having a romantic view of nature, in that he portrays the natural environment as an embodiment of goodness, while technology is evil. Indeed, more than one critic has seen The Lord of the Rings as an attack on modem science and technology. This view is more commonly expressed word-of-the-mouth than in print, but it can be found even there, with Lee Donald Rossi, in his dissertation, classing Tolkien and Lewis as "reactionary fantasists" who would "get rid of most of the machines and return to a primarily agrarian economy" and Walter Scheps noting that …

Sweet As Muscatel, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

Although my grandfather had made his fortune in trade, I had been educated as a gentleman and at first I expected Flora society to accept me as such. After a youth spent in Paris and Vienna, I was anyone's equal in deportment. My attire, always elegant without flashiness, had elsewhere disarmed the stuffiest arbiters. So when with a lover's shyness I followed the Lady Celia into the Contessa di Filipini's salon at Flora, I was not expecting difficulties from the threadbare remnants of aristocracy which infested that small city. I took no special notice of Prospero until the night he …

Foreground And Background: Three Literary Treatments Of The Bubonic Plague, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

Though many diseases bring suffering and death, plagues strike the imagination with special awe because they threaten death to whole cities and nations. So it is not surprising that novelists have treated of plagues now and then. A visitation of bubonic plague is the central event in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’s The Plague. In Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, it is the culminating event, through which all the plot lines are finally resolved. Though much separates these writers, including language, culture, century. and philosophical outlook. each presents the plague accurately according to the scientific knowledge …

Medieval Love-Madness And Divine Love, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

Lovers in the Middle Ages had a tendency to go mad. In fact, they were subject to a whole range of disorders which nowadays are considered symptoms of mental illness, from pining away to outright suicide, to raging and raving madness. Of course, then as now, these manifestations of inner turmoil were not mutually exclusive. Malory's Sir Lancelot goes raging mad at one stage of his career and starves himself to death at the end of it. There are also more or less pure examples of each type: of pining away, Malory's Elaine, the fair maid of Astalot; of suicide, …

The Fountain And The Black Fish, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

It was late afternoon when Oscar Verplank and his mother arrived at his Aunt Penny's apartment. The boards of the porch creaked as they crossed to the heavy oak door. "The house is more than a hundred years old,"murmured his mother as she rang the bell. A buzz sounded and Oscar quickly opened the door. "They had to update the place to make it livable, Mother," he noted. As they climbed the creaky stairs, the door to the upstairs apartment was thrown open.

"Louise! It's been too long!" cried the woman who rushed out. As the sisters embraced each other, …

Uniting Conference Addresses, David Frederick Wertz

Uniting Conference Addresses

This volume contains 8 addresses by 4 speakers: the bishop of the West Virginia Area, the dean of the Duke Divinity School, the “minister of reconciliation” for the West Virginia Area, and the superintendent of the Buckhannon District.

Trinity Church, Huntington, West Virginia: Something Of Its Story, James Rodgers Haworth

Atkinson, Robert Poland, 1927-2012

This is Chapter XVI of Haworth's history of Trinity Episcopal Church from its beginnings in 1869 through the early 1960s. The book focuses primarily on the rectors who have served the church over the years; there are also chapters with such titles as “The Building of the Church,” “The Vestrymen,” “The Women,” and “The Sunday School.”

Trinity Church, Huntington, West Virginia: Something Of Its Story, James Rodgers Haworth

Tyler, S. Roger, 1878-1963

This is Chapters XI-XIV of Haworth's history of Trinity Episcopal Church from its beginnings in 1869 through the early 1960s. The book focuses primarily on the rectors who have served the church over the years; there are also chapters with such titles as “The Building of the Church,” “The Vestrymen,” “The Women,” and “The Sunday School.”