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1
Piantanida, Cecilia. "Classical lyricism in Italian and North American 20th-century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4422c01a-ba88-4fe0-a21f-4804e4c610ce.
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This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.
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Schultheiss, Lore Katharina Gerti. "Cross-Language Perception of German Vowels by Speakers of American English." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2406.pdf.
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Beard, Alexander Charles. "Narconovela : four case studies of the representation of drug trafficking in Mexican fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7eb6c837-cb79-4625-86dc-38267d36047a.
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In addition to coverage in the national and international media of the ongoing violence in Mexico related to the drug trade, there has been growing interest in fictional representations of the Mexican drug trade, its origins and social context. There is now a considerable body of written narratives that have been christened narconovelas. A small number of academic works has charted the emergence of the narconovela and sought to examine how drug traffickers have been represented and evaluated in fiction. However, very little attention has been paid to the aesthetic qualities of ‘narco-literature’. This study examines four of the most highly-regarded works in detail: Balas de plata (2008), by Élmer Mendoza; Los minutos negros (2006), by Martín Solares; Contrabando (2008), by Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda; and Trabajos del reino (2004), by Yuri Herrera. So embedded is the phenomenon of drug trafficking in northern Mexican culture, so suffused with cliché is its representation in other media, that to write about the topic with originality and ethical nuance is difficult. This thesis accounts for the distinct choices made by the four authors in question to address this difficulty of representation in the structure, style and tone of their novels. The self-awareness exhibited by these works of fiction regarding the challenges of representing their subject matter render them the most sophisticated examples yet created of the so-called narconovela.
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Lewis, Abby N. "How Disassociating the Past Reassociates the Present: Distilling the Magic out of Magic Realism in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/421.
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American Indian author Susan Power’s novel The Grass Dancer is often categorized as magical realism, yet Power has stated the novel is a representation of her reality and that it is not a magical realist text. The term magical realism was first applied to the work of Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez whose writing depicts magical events in a matter-of-fact narrative tone. It has since expanded to include other cultures. The question is whether it is a term that can readily be applied to the literary work of all cultures. The closest Wendy B. Faris, one of the most prominent experts on magical realism, comes to discussing the term in relation to the work of American Indian authors is by simply acknowledging Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich’s label as a magical realist author. In order to aid Power in her rejection of the association, I delve into both her Dakota heritage and her life through the lens of biographical criticism in order to obtain a working image of her reality. By locating and examining the seeds of truth in her fiction, I explain the magical qualities of her novel in a rational and logical manner.
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Kent, Alan M. "“Mozeying on down ...” : the Cornish Language in North America." Universität Potsdam, 2007. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/1927/.
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Content:
Cornish Scat Abroad
The Next Parish after Land’s End: Early Explorations
William Gwavas and that 1710 Letter
Yee-Har!!: Miners and Cowboys
Some Language Cowboys: Nancarrow, Bottrell and Weekes
Cornish Language in Twenty-First-Century North America
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Stepe, Margaret J. "KALAMAZOO REVISITED: HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AMONG LATVIANS IN NORTH AMERICA." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2014. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/82.
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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the entwined roles of schooling, family support and investment, and community contact in Heritage Language Learning (HLL), Heritage Language Maintenance (HLM) and identity formation among two groups of North American Latvians. One is made up of 49 teenagers at Gaŗezers language camp in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The other comprises 25 parents, other adult Latvian speakers and camp staff members. I explore differences and similarities among them by age, gender and self-stated national identity and language proficiency. Primary data consist of some 70 questionnaires completed by youths and adults and six 30- to 90-minute interviews conducted and transcribed by me. Six more were conducted via e-mail. Based on aggregate analysis of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, supplemented by participants’ individual responses to longer-form survey questions and to my questions during interviews, findings demonstrate a connection between self-stated national identity (Latvian, Latvian-American or Latvian-Canadian, or American or Latvian) and self-assessment of Latvian language proficiency among the youths. Among the adults, men were more likely to identify simply as Latvian than were women, and adults of both genders who identified as Latvian averaged slightly lower in self-assessment of proficiency, even though most of them grew up speaking Latvian at home. Additionally, my research shows a community proud of its HLM accomplishments alongside those of displaced peoples from other nations—a community now at home in North America, although 60 years ago members were determined to return to Latvia.
Keywords: L2, Latvian heritage language revitalization, third space, lingua franca, language immersion, heritage language maintenance.
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Blu, Wakpa Makha, and Wakpa Makha Blu. "Cyclical Continuity and Multimodal Language Planning for Indigenous North America." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/626148.
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This dissertation initially reviews the literature on Indigenous language planning (LP) with an emphasis on orientations, dispositions, and their roles in Indigenous society. Token policies pertaining to Indigenous LP are often mistaken for resolving the social ailments that cause language shift--none of which result in systemic, institutional, or effective changes to programs revitalizing Indigenous languages. The author argues for a focus on sovereignty, early childhood development, teacher training, curriculum, assessment, immersion, economic sustainability, and Indigenous epistemologies.
Ethnographic studies are an important aspect of LP. Oftentimes Indigenous nations have little documentation of their historical efforts to reverse language shift (RLS), leaving newcomers uninformed about the achievements of their RLS predecessors. Therefore the collection and documentation of Indigenous RLS projects can potentially prevent future language planners from recreating historical obstacles, while presenting new methods that anticipate reoccurring problems. This study overviews Lakota language (LL) status while focusing on shifting centre-periphery authentication and healing Historical Trauma by implementing cultural continuity for Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (CRST).
Much attention has been given to spoken lingua francas, but less has been given to signed lingua francas. The purpose of this research is to map distinct boundaries of Indigenous North America's signed lingua franca, emphasizing national boundaries and culture areas. Other goals include redirecting anthro-linguistic attention to the historically widespread eight dialects of Hand Talk and encouraging their hereditary signers to revitalize multimodal aspects of their respective cultures.
Spoken language immersion is an effective method for RLS that usually incorporates multimodal instructional scaffolding through total physical response (TPR), and common gestures to mediate target language acquisition. However, spoken language immersion often overlooks sign language and its motor for ethnic gestures that can profoundly expand TPR's role to orchestrate holistic multimodal communication. North American Hand Talk (NAHT) is a sign language indigenous to the majority of North American Indigenous nations who are also attempting RLS among their spoken languages. Making NAHT the standard for multimodal RLS applications could increase target spoken language retention while redeveloping an Indigenous multimodal culture in North America.
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Kalter, Susan Mary. "Keep these words until the stones melt : language, ecology, war and the written land in nineteenth century U.S.-Indian relations /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9949683.
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Panzeca, Andrea. "You Don't Have to Be Good." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2015. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1979.
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You Don't Have to be Good, is a nonfiction collection of prose, poetry and graphic memoir set in New Orleans, central Florida, and points in between. In this coming-of-age memoir, I recall the abrupt end of my dad's life, the 24 years of my life in which he was alive, and the years after his death—remembering him while living without him in his hometown of New Orleans. Along the way there are meditations on language, race, gender, dreams, addiction, and ecology. My family and I encounter Hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras, and at least one shuttle launch. These are the stories I find myself telling at parties, and also those I've never voiced until now.
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Picard, Marc. "On teaching the pronunciation of allophones : the case of flapping in North American English." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32937.
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This study is primarily concerned with the issue of determining whether it is worthwhile to try to teach the correct pronunciation of subphonemic segments in ESL courses. It focuses specifically on the allophones [J, J] produced by the Flapping (or Tapping) of medial and final alveolar stops in North American English. Through an exhaustive examination of the ESL and TESL pronunciation manuals that have been published in the last thirty years or so, an assessment is first made of the manner and extent to which this widespread phonological process has been dealt with by the authors of such books. These findings are then compared with the opinions expressed by researchers in the field of second language education in order to determine what sort of consensus currently exists on this issue. The general conclusion is that since flaps are demonstrably the most salient of all NAE allophones and occur as phonemes in the first language of many ESL learners, these segments should be given due consideration in any pronunciation curriculum.
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Tomlin, Carol. "Black language style in sacred and secular contexts." Thesis, University of Reading, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262631.
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Maffay, Jonathan. "Language imperialism versus linguistic rights : the case of native Americans." Morgantown, W. Va. : [West Virginia University Libraries], 1998. http://157.182.199.25/etd/templates/showETD.cfm?recnum=124.
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Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 1998.<br>Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 68 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-68).
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Basile, Jennifer. "Prototypes in Europe and North America : How they reflect gender and cultural differences." Thesis, Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Education, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-1232.
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<p>The aim of this study was to find out whether Europeans and North Americans differ as to what they consider to be best examples of four categories; namely vehicles, clothes, vegetables, and furniture. I compared the two continents with each other and tried to find out to what extent the cultural differences really influence the best examples chosen by the research participants. Further, I briefly</p><p>compared the prototypes with European females and males and North American females and males and tried to point out some differences between the two genders. Moreover I tried to connect the differences to cultural and gender related factors. The results show the existence of some good and some bad examples that were the same no matter if we looked at the European list or the North American one. However, as we have found out through our research there seem to be strong cultural reasons for the best examples the participants chose. It is a natural behavior to choose prototypes of categories that are well known by the research participants. The best known items are those which are present in the lives of the participants. So, for example riding a bicycle does not seem to be very common among people in North America. They consider bicycle only a lower average example for the category vehicles, whereas Europeans for example seem to use bicycles much more often. They place it on rank four out of 17. People seem to choose things they know or are interested in.</p>
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Chan, Lai Yee Emily. "Intercultural communication : exploring first encounters between Hong Kong Chinese and North Americans." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2003. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/498.
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Casero, Eric E. "Mind Against Matter: Isolating Consciousness in American Fiction, 1980-2010." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/38.
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Mind Against Matter uses cognitive literary theory to explore a set of contemporary texts that emphasize characters’ feelings of alienation and isolation from their social and material worlds. Focusing on novels by Nicholson Baker and David Markson, short stories by David Foster Wallace, and the film The Truman Show, I consider how these texts focus on characters’ individual, subjective experiences while deemphasizing their physical environments and social contexts. I argue that by privileging subjectivity in this way, these texts portray their characters as independent, to varying degrees, from their material and cultural surroundings. The texts isolate individual consciousness, causing their characters to live in mental worlds of their own making. While the novel, as a genre, often depicts alienation as a condition deriving from a character’s status as a social outcast, the texts featured in this study treat it as a condition inherent to consciousness, derived from what their creators envision as an inevitable separation of mind from world. Rather than bemoan alienation as a loss of social connectedness, these texts portray it as inherent to mental life.
The chapters of this dissertation explore the particular visions of alienation that emerge in each of these texts. In a chapter on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I argue that Howie, the novel’s protagonist, views his mind as a machine that operates according to self-sufficient, automatic processes. My analysis of David Markson’s final novels demonstrates that Markson portrays artistic creation as a process through which individual consciousness is isolated from society. David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion treats alienation as a general human condition, as Wallace’s interests in loneliness and solipsism derive, I argue, from his assumptions about the individualized nature of consciousness. Finally, in a chapter on The Truman Show, I argue that the film’s sense of paranoia stems from its protagonist’s sense of being alone in his worldview. I thus present a corpus of works that maintain a close, limited focus on singular fictional minds, shutting out social and physical environments in order to depict the mind as a cloistered, self-enclosed entity. My analysis highlights the ways in which the philosophical underpinnings of these narratives render consciousness as an isolating force, stranding fictional characters on mental islands of their own making.
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Strand, Amy Dunham. "Governing voices : language, gender, and citizenship in America literature, 1789-1919 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9391.
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Seifart, Frank. "The structure and use of shape-based noun classes in Miraña (north west Amazon) /." [S.l. : s.n.], 2005. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=016988620&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.
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Chakravarty, Subhasree. "Long-distance nationalism persuasive invocations of militant Hinduism in North America /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1164248005.
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Franks, Mary Susan Tomat. "A whole language curriculum for nonreading, limited English proficient Native American adult factory workers." Diss., This resource online, 1992. http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-06062008-170311/.
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Pinto, Marcia Veirano. "A linguagem dos filmes norte-americanos ao longo dos anos: uma abordagem multidimensional." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2013. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/13634.
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Previous issue date: 2013-08-05<br>This study will investigate variation in the language of American movies over an 80-
year time period. The corpus is a collection of 640 movie subtitles that includes
comedies, dramas, action-adventure, and horror-suspense movies from 1930 to 2010
totaling, approximately, 7,750,000 tokens and 325,000 types. The sampling frame for
the corpus comprised the film guide 1001 Movies you Must See before you Die , in
which sixty-seven renowned film critics elected the best movies of each decade, the
website www.filmsite.org, as well as nominations for the Oscar, BAFTA, and the
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films awards. The corpus was tagged
for part of speech with the Biber tagger, and post-processed with the TagCount
programs, which provides further syntactic and semantic analyses. This study will
provide two different MD analyses, namely one that uses the existing 1988 dimensions
to characterize the movies, and another that extracts new dimensions of variation based
solely on movies. For the first one, scores were computed for each movie on each of the
first five 1988 dimensions, for the corpus as a whole as well as for each individual
movie genre. And for the second analysis, a new factor analysis was run to determine
the factors that best represent the data, which were then interpreted in terms of
underlying dimensions of variation. For both analyses, the effects of a set of
independent variables were considered, including year of first screening, award
nomination/win, length, genre, director, ratings, original/adapted script and production
studio. Cluster analyses were also carried out to determine the optimal groups of movies
within each dimension, such that they cut across the existing genre labels and provided
characterizations that were grounded on linguistic characteristics rather than marketdriven
concerns. The chapter will present each analysis together with text samples that
illustrate the salient features of movies on each dimension. It will also present the
results for cluster analysis that dissects time periods as well as statistical tests on these
clusters that determine whether there are significant differences across movie genres
over time.<br>O objetivo desta pesquisa é investigar dimensões de variação na linguagem dos filmes
americanos ao longo de 80 anos de cinema falado. Para tanto, buscou-se suporte teórico
na visão de linguagem da Linguística de Corpus e na abordagem metodológica da
Análise Multidimensional. Mais especificamente, nas duas modalidades propostas por
essa metodologia: a que mapeia o registro filme nas 5 dimensões de variação do inglês
apontadas por Biber (1988), e a que propõe novas dimensões de variação baseadas
apenas nos textos retratados dos filmes. Ambas as modalidades de análise levaram em
conta as variáveis extralinguísticas: ano em que os filmes foram apresentados ao público,
indicações/ premiações, duração, gênero, diretores, roteiro original versus adaptado,
estúdio em que foram produzidos e avaliação da crítica. O corpus utilizado na pesquisa
é composto por 640 legendas de filmes de gêneros diversos organizados sob quatro
grandes categorias: comédia, drama, ação-aventura e horror-suspense-mistério. Os
filmes foram selecionados com base no guia de filmes 1001 filmes par a ver antes de
morrer , elaborado por sessenta e sete críticos de cinema renomados, que elegeram os
melhores filmes de cada década, do sítio www.filmesite.org, e das nomeações e
premiações recebidas pelas seguintes Academias: Oscar, BAFTA e Filmes de Horror,
Fantasia e Ficção Científica (The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror
Films). Para que se pudesse concluir o trabalho com a proposição de uma nova
categorização para os filmes, baseada nas dimensões de variação encontradas recorreuse
à análise estatística de Clusters, que permitiu o agrupamento ideal dos filmes de
acordo com suas características morfossintáticas e semânticas
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Ko, Kyoungrok. "Perceptions of KFL/ESL Teachers in North America Regarding Feedback on College Student Writing." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1276447371.
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Honea, Benjamin D. "Comanche Boys." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/44.
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Comanche Boys is a novel that was written and revised during Benjamin Honea’s time at the University of Kentucky. The novel focuses on Brandon, who lives in rural southwest Oklahoma, and how the arrival of two people in his life, one old and one new, changes his future irrevocably. Taking place at the intersections of modern American and Native American life, the narrative explores history, culture, mythology, faith, despair, racism, poverty, vengeance, and justice. The struggles of the past and present, the lost and reclaimed, propel and pervade the lives of the characters.
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Martin, Samantha. "Sleight of Hand: Gender, Performance, and (In)sincerity in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1360.
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One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, is reflected by several characters in the novel who regularly engage in performance. Southworth codes manipulation, inauthenticity, and performance as distinctly masculine traits, whereas honesty, transparency, and guilelessness are coded as feminine. She draws on these idealized depictions to make a point about the limiting nature of such codified standards—and to disavow masculine manipulation and feminine passivity—before going on to complicate these binaries through Capitola Le Noir and Traverse Rocke. The implicit ideological thrust of The Hidden Hand points to the unstable, performative nature of gender as a construct. Both characters destabilize identity categories to reveal the arbitrary nature of gender and the harmful constraints of gender roles. They stage the confrontation between the reality of one’s body and the antebellum ideologies of femininity and masculinity. Capitola and Traverse are ultimately held up as ideal figures of femininity and masculinity, respectively, because their synthesis of traits produces an androgyny valorized by Southworth.
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Burris, Jessica Margaret. "Finding Feminism in American Political Discourse : A Discourse Analysis of Post-Feminist Language." UNF Digital Commons, 2012. http://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/395.
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The term “feminist” is a widely used label that is often embraced by women who do not advocate feminism. The wide use of the feminist label in contrast to the declining presence of feminist activism indicates a problem with the development of a third wave of feminism in the United States. In this study, I evaluated trends in feminism in the United States through an analysis of public political discourse. A semantic discourse analysis of political discourse from 1870 to 2011 evaluated a shift in the use of inclusive and exclusive pronoun usage by female political speakers. Speeches compiled for this study were obtained from internet sources such as NPR, C-Span and CNN, and evaluated the oratory of Victoria Woodhull, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. The results of this study indicated that there was not a strong shift in the use of inclusive and exclusive pronouns overtime, but there was a large growth in both population and diversity of the targeted audience, and this growth was often not accommodated for in the discourse of contemporary female political candidates. The slow shift in inclusive discourse indicated a post-feminist line of thought that questioned the validity of an argument for a third wave of feminist activism in the United States. Political discourse cannot define a cause for post-feminism, but can indicate a downward trend in the influence of feminism as a contemporary cultural movement.
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Sugden, Edward. "American literature and global time, 1812-59." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0c1a68fe-2e17-48bd-851b-00133ca256f0.
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American Literature and Global Time, 1812-59 explores the effects of the early stages of globalization on time consciousness in antebellum American literature and non-fiction. It argues that oceanic trade, extracontinental imperialism, immigration, and Pacific exploration all affected how antebellum Americans configured their national pasts, presents, and futures. The ensuing pluralisation of time that followed disallowed cogent conceptions of national identity. It analyses transnational geographies to examine how they transmit heterogeneous times. The project’s interest is in U.S. national sites that counterintuitively acted as fulcrums for the importations of foreign times and non-U.S. sites that interacted with and modified the homogenous progressive time of nationalism. As such, my project seeks to combine the transnational and temporal turns. It argues that the ethnic, racial, and geographic contestation emphasized by transnational critics found parallels in how antebellum Americans conceived of time. Conversely, it suggests that there were profound links between globalization and the sorts of instabilities in time identified by the critics of the temporal turn. Over its course my project identifies a series of “global times” that came into being in the years between the War of 1812 and the discovery of petroleum in 1859. These fall under three broad headings. First, what I term, entangled times that came about as a result of the movement of ships across borders and different social contexts; secondly, foreign local times that re-set the clock of imperialism and national progress; and, thirdly, a huge mass of reconfigurations in the origins and futures of the still-young United States.
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Gespass, Suzanne Ruth. "Control and use of pronouns in the writing of native American children." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184750.
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Research into the comprehension of pronominal anaphora in reading has lead to contradictory conclusions about the role of pronouns in text and about how and when they are processed by the reader. This study investigated pronoun assignment from the point of view of the writer. Pronouns and other referring expressions were examined in the writing of six native American (Tohono O'odom) children over two years while in third and fourth grade. The young writers appropriately used and controlled the full range of pronouns in regard to person, number, case and gender. In the two hundred ten text analyzed, pronoun frequency was actually greater than the pronoun frequency in professionally authored text. This finding is attributed to an overgeneralization of the language principle of economy identified by Kenneth Goodman which states that pronouns are used whenever possible except where ambiguity would result. Unnecessary repetition of the noun phrase is, thus, avoided. That the young writers conform to the rule provides evidence that they understand and control the pronoun system. Reference establishment, reference miscues, and genre influences were investigated in relation to pronoun choice, strategies for choosing, and patterns of ambiguity. Strategies for avoiding ambiguity included the use of naming and length to disambiguate. Reference ambiguities were rare and occurred primarily in situations where the text merged with the context as when the definite article or demonstrative is used to point to something in the general context of the writing situation such as a picture or reference material. Although related indirectly to genre, the specific conditions of the assignment were found to affect the amount and kind of ambiguity most directly. Developmental effects were examined in relation to sense of audience. Implications are that the direct teaching of pronominal anaphora is not only a necessary but may be counterproductive because of the unnatural focus on something that is already controlled. This study confirms and supports the strength of a whole language classroom where a writing process approach is used.
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Anderson, Joshua Tyler. "Dams, Roads, and Bridges: (Re)defining Work and Masculinity in American Indian Literature of the Great Plains, 1968-Present." DigitalCommons@USU, 2013. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1768.
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This master's thesis explores the intersections of labor, socioeconomic class, and constructed American Indian masculinities in the literature of indigenous writers of the Great Plains published after the Native American Renaissance of the late 1960s. By engaging scholars and theorists from multiple disciplines--including Native labor historians such as Colleen O'Neill and Alexandra Harmon, (trans)indigenous studies scholars such as Chadwick Allen and Philip Deloria, and Native literary and cultural critics such as Gerald Vizenor and Louis Owens--this thesis offers an American Studies approach to definitions and expressions of work, wealth, and masculinity in American Indian literature of the Great Plains. With chapters on D'Arcy McNickle's posthumous Wind From an Enemy Sky (1978), Carter Revard's poetry and mixed-genre memoirs, and Thomas King's Truth and Bright Water (1999), this thesis emphasizes the roles of cross-cultural apprenticeships for young Native protagonists whose socioeconomic opportunities are often obstructed, threatened, or complicated by dams, roads, and bridges, both literal and metaphorical, as they seek ways to engage (or circumvent) the capitalist marketplace on their own terms. In highlighting each protagonist's relationship to blood (family and community), land, and memory, the chapters reveal how the respective Native authors challenge and reimagine stereotypes regarding Native workers and offer more complicated and nuanced discussions of Native "traditions" in modernity. (173 pages)
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Hurst, Rebecca Eldridge Hurst. "Spiritual Quest as Poetic Sequence: Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence" and its Relation to T S Eliot's "Four Quartets"." W&M ScholarWorks, 1997. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626121.
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Olsen, Harper Anita Carleton University Dissertation Canadian Studies. "Aboriginal self-interpretation in heritage presentation." Ottawa, 1999.
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Anderson, Starla H. "The discourse performance of native Indian students : a case study with implications for academic instruction." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27656.
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This investigation is concerned with the oral and written discourse performance of underachieving urban Native Indian secondary students. Primary data was collected during eight interactive talk-write sessions conducted individually with eight case study subjects. Within an ABAB design, two narrative and two academic topics were alternated. Oral discourse performance followed written discourse performance during each of the two (composing and revision) sessions conducted for each topic. Supplementary data includes: observations of classroom writing behaviors, interviews, analysis of students' record files, and standardized reading and writing assessments.
The four male and four female subjects are from varying Native Indian cultural backgrounds but share common histories of family instability. Only one subject could read and write at skill levels expected of like-aged mainstream students. The writing processes and products of these subjects were similar to those of other unskilled (Basic) writers. They were overly concerned with surface errors and little concerned with overall conceptualization.
Despite difficulties with writing, and contrary to established language theory developed from research with non-Native populations, these subjects were more at ease with written performance than oral performance. Further, their writing difficulties appeared to be more related to the demands of academic discourse than writing skills per se. They were more at ease with written narrative than any other combination of mode and genre.
While previous research has seldom distinguished clearly between mode and genre of discourse, the findings of this investigation suggest that each of these factors may have differing effects for individuals and varying sub-groups. Findings also suggest that structural comparisons of oral and written modes of discourse may reflect differing linguistic demands of genre as much as mode.
The interactive talk-write sessions were found to be an effective means for data collection. These sessions also revealed direction for improving methods of academic instruction. The subjects appeared to develop a better understanding of the purpose of academic discourse as they were helped to generate knowledge, theorize about this knowledge and shape their arguments. All subjects indicated that they would feel more confident about participating in academic discussions after thinking about the discussion topic through such a talk-write process.<br>Education, Faculty of<br>Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of<br>Graduate
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Holmes, Janel L. "The Color of Memory: Reimagining the Antebellum South in Works by James McBride Through the use of Free Indirect Discourse." VCU Scholars Compass, 2016. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4220.
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This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who lived during the antebellum period. His use of interior narrative techniques deviates from his peers’ conventional approach to the neo-slave narrative. His exploration of the psyche demonstrates a focalized attention to the individual, rather than a characterization of the community, which is typically portrayed in neo-slave narratives. In conclusion, this thesis argues that James McBride’s neo-slave narratives reveal his interest in deconstructing the hierarchal positioning of whites and blacks during the antebellum period in order to communicate that although African Americans were the intended victims, slave masters and mistresses were oppressed by the ideologies of slavery as well.
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Lansing, Sandra Joyce. "From thought to style: Emerson's interplay of ideas and language." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1997. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1404.
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Simpson, Richard. "How to Tell a Story: Mark Twain and the Short Story Genre." TopSCHOLAR®, 2007. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/378.
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This study examines the short fiction of Mark Twain in relation to major theories concerning the short story genre. Despite his popularity as a novelist and historical figure, Twain has not been recognized as a major figure in the development of the short story genre. This study attempts to show that the short fiction produced by Twain deserves greater regard within studies specific to the short story, and calls for a reconsideration of Twain as a dynamic figure in the development of the genre. The introductory chapter lays the groundwork for understanding how the short story genre has developed since its inception as an actual literary genre, and outlines the existing Twain scholarship concerning his short fiction. Differences between the traditional and modern forms of the short story are defined, and Twain's chronological position in the evolution of the genre is briefly explained. Chapter one examines two of Twain's short stories—"The $30,000 Bequest" and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"—in relation to the compositional theories of the first major short story theorist: Edgar Allan Poe. This chapter shows how these two Twain stories abide by Poe's rules concerning unity of effect. Chapter two explores Twain's "Journalism in Tennessee" and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in relation to the modern short story, and examines these two stories through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of genre. This chapter closely examines Twain's use of various dialects to show that these two stories contain an unrealized complexity and are very closely related to the ostensibly "plotless" short fiction that developed in the twentieth century. The final chapter takes Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" and examines it with respect to both old and new theories of the short story genre. This chapter shows how "The Mysterious Stranger" fuses both traditional and modern forms of the short story genre. The conclusion to this chapter reiterates the argument for a greater appreciation of Twain as a short story artist.
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Skillern, Ada. "Southern Post-Modernism, Anti-Romanticism and Gender Difference in Flannery O'Connor and Some Other Southern Contemporaries." TopSCHOLAR®, 1999. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/758.
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Flannery O' Connor has long been an established southern writer of the mid-twentieth century. This paper discusses briefly the tenets of both Modernism and Post-Modernism as literary movements of the twentieth-century, then looks specifically at how O'Connor's fiction makes her a key hallmark figure in the movement known as Post-Modernism, but also as one of the first female southern writers to utilize very anti-Romantic themes and style. Further, this paper attempts to examine through a discussion of various contemporary male and female southern writers the depth of O'Connor's influence on their own works. Attention is also given to the differences found in voice, theme and tone between southern contemporary male and female writers today, and explanations are offered as to why these marked differences exist.
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Carr, Jeff. "A Spectre is Haunting Samuel Clemens: A Marxist Critique of Wealth as Resolution in Mark Twain's Novels." TopSCHOLAR®, 2006. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/447.
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The distribution of wealth occurs frequently in Mark Twain's novels, especially at the resolution. Indeed, Twain uses wealth as resolution in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. The repeated use of this formula in the author's approach to novel writing indicates the tremendous influence that capitalism had in shaping his worldview. In his early works, Twain appears to endorse capitalism in his use of wealth as resolution. Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and Huckleberry Finn each conclude with the distribution of capital as a reward to the protagonists and as an effective solution to conflicts presented throughout the texts. However, the tone of Pudd'nhead Wilson is decidedly different. This later novel ends with wealth as resolution, but the result is not the happiness granted to characters in Twain's previous works. Instead, the fates of Tom Driscoll, Chambers, and Roxy leave the reader with a sense of the inadequacy of capitalism. Twain's change in his approach reveals a rejection of bourgeois values. An examination at the resolution to all four novels reveals Twain's shifting Weltanschauung, culminating with a rejection of the dominant ideology in Pudd'nhead Wilson.
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Chandarlapaty, Raj. "Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder: The beat generation reconsidered as postmodern literature." FIU Digital Commons, 2000. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2105.
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The purpose of this thesis paper is to uncover how the major writers of the Beat Generation-Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Snyder-reflect the coming of postmodern literary theory and aesthetic principles and values. The Beats, far from being the sole territory of modernist discourse, are indications of the dismantling of cultural barriers and the introduction of postmodern commercial and visual culture into literary reality.
The paper considers and establishes the writing of the Beats within eight ideals that are found in postmodern literature, visual arts, and theory: the concept of culture as a commodity, the deterritorialization of culture, historicizing the past into the present, decentering American hegemony, deconstructing the “bourgeois ego”, deconstructing “otherness”, muti-imagistic qualities, and “schizophrenia”.
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Arnold, Wayne. "Melville's Missionaries and the Loss of Culture." TopSCHOLAR®, 2007. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/958.
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On January 3, 1841, Herman Melville boarded the whaler Acushnet and left the harbor of New Bedford. Traveling through the South Pacific, Melville spent time in the Marquesas, Tahiti, and the Sandwich Islands where he witnessed the missionary efforts among the islanders. The religious conversion and acculturation of the Polynesian natives led Melville to question the missionaries' activities. The different cultures of these islands increased Melville's already skeptical outlook on the standards his own culture insisted that he follow. Experiencing both the tranquil Typee Valley and the "civilized" island of Tahiti, Melville felt compelled to write about his island adventures in his first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Observing the influence of the Sandwich Islands' missionaries, Melville came to the conclusion that the natives of the Pacific would have been better off left to their own devices, as opposed to being converted to the Euro-American standards of civilized living. Instead of receiving the benefits of Christian living, the natives had been reduced from the Edenic state of the Typee Valley to the devastating, dehumanizing existence Melville witnessed in Tahiti and Hawaii. The contrasts Melville draws between the primitive Typee and the converted Tahitian cultures illustrate his belief that the missionaries were actually driving the natives toward a cultural death through the removal of pagan practices and the introduction of the "civilized" Christian beliefs governing Euro-American society.
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Clopton, Kay Krystal. "Now Hear This: Onomatopoeia, Emanata, Gitaigo, Giongo – Sound Effects in North American Comics and Japanese Manga and How They Impact the Reading Experience." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1525744652209227.
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Gooch, Catherine. "“I’VE KNOWN RIVERS:” REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/97.
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My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism examine how enslaved black labor contributed to the expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth century, but little is known about artistic representations of the Mississippi in the twentieth century. While scholars point primarily to the Mississippi River’s impact on slavery in the nineteenth century, I’ve Known Rivers reveals how black writers and artists capture the relationship between slavery, capitalism, and the Mississippi River. I consider a wide variety of texts in this study, from Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and early 20th century Blues music, to late 20th century novels such as Toni Morrison’s Sula. This broad array of interdisciplinary texts illustrates a literary tradition in which the Mississippi’s representation in twentieth-century African American literature serves as both a reflection of the continuously changing economic landscape and a haunting reminder of slavery’s aftermath through the cotton empire. Furthermore, I’ve Known Rivers demonstrates how traumatic sites of slavery along the river are often reclaimed by black artists as source of empowerment, thereby contributing a long overdue analysis of the Mississippi River in African American literature as a potent symbol of racial progress.
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Brown, Margaret. "Museum-Making in Women's Poetry: How Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson Confront the Time of History." TopSCHOLAR®, 2007. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/965.
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In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement note that Michelet and Freud "both thought that the repressed past survives in woman; woman, more than anyone else, is dedicated to reminiscence" (5). Whether or not this is true of woman, that expectation of her—as keeper of the past—has perhaps subsisted in the deepest realms of the collective unconscious. From the work of Cixous and Clement, Julia Kristeva and Angela Leighton, I ultimately deduce that there are two perceptions of time: man's time has been associated with the straight, the linear, the historical, and the prosaic; woman's time has been associated with the circular, the cyclical, the monumental, and the poetic. Each time has its obstacles to overcome: man's time is stubbornly rooted in patriarchal language; woman's time is dizzyingly enigmatic. The struggles between these two times manifest themselves in the poetry of perhaps the two most canonical American women poets, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. In the corpus of each, I find a common mode of operation that attempts to reconcile man's and woman's time, to varying degrees of success. Emily Dickinson uses the language of linear history to stretch its boundaries; she experiments with the nature of time and memory as related to trauma, beginning to question and reform historical memory (men's and women's) and our experience of it in poems such as #1458, "Time's wily Chargers will not wait"; #563, "I could not prove the Years had feet"; #33, "If recollecting were forgetting"; and #312, "Her - 'last Poems'—." Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, is not as certain that the two can be so easily reconciled. Determined to establish her place in literary history and lay claim to posterity, but terrified that doing so will take away her present voice, Plath often represents woman—sometimes literally, as in "All the Dead Dears," and sometimes metaphorically, as in "The Courage of Shutting- Up"—as a potential museum, a live body always in danger of drying out and immobilizing, being admired as she is, frozen in the present moment, but denied future evolution. Through close readings of the poets' afore-mentioned works and others, in conjunction with the frequent application of critical/theoretical scholarship in feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and postcolonial veins, I will explore the attempted reconciliation of man's and woman's time in four chapters: "The Thrust of Manliness" concerns the limitations of linear time, including entropy, atrophy, and the charge of feminine reminiscence; "Morning Glory: Cycles and Resurrection" outlines the advantages of a circular perspective, including possibilities for change and resurrection; "Secretaries of Aporia: Recording without Meaning" explores the limitations of cyclical time as encased in linear time, particularly in the literary charge to detail without explaining; and "The Time of Trauma" underlines the historical and political implications of both the burden of reminiscence without return and the study of women's poetry in linear time.
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Downing, Lea L. "Roadside." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2014. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1791.
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Roadside deals with themes of self-discovery, transcendence, and the search for camaraderie in modern America. Many of the stories take place on or adjacent to the road: that eternal path of transience and transformation. Whether metaphorically or literally on the "roadside," many of the characters contained within are marginalized in their own lives and communities. It is through their grasping and searching for greater meaning in their lives that they come to gain understanding of their places in the world.
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Villarreal-Licona, Aida M. ""Pa'l Norte," "Sueño Americano" e "Ice El Hielo": Un Análisis del Video Musical en el Desmontaje de la Retórica Anti-Inmigrante en los Estados Unidos." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/884.
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This thesis is an analytical case study of three music videos, "Pa'l Norte" by Calle 13, "Sueño Americano" by Los Rakas, and "Ice El Hielo" by La Santa Cecilia. It explores the visual and lyric narratives of these works and their role in critiquing anti-immigration rhetoric towards Latino immigrants in the United States in a post-9/11 context. Through critical analysis, this thesis argues that their work is vital in dismantling the dehumanizing and criminalizing language prevalent in legal and popular discourse, as well as challenging the manifestations of everyday "illegality."
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Rivera, Alexandra. "Human Monsters: Examining the Relationship Between the Posthuman Gothic and Gender in American Gothic Fiction." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1358.
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According to Michael Sean Bolton, the posthuman Gothic involves a fear of internal monsters that won't destroy humanity apocalyptically, but will instead redefine what it means to be human overall. These internal monsters reflect societal anxieties about the "other" gaining power and overtaking the current groups in power. The posthuman Gothic shows psychological horrors and transformations. Traditionally this genre has been used to theorize postmodern media and literary work by focusing on cyborgs and transhumanist medical advancements. However, the internal and psychological nature of posthumanism is fascinating and can more clearly manifest in a different Gothic setting, 1800s American Gothic Fiction. This subgenre of the Gothic melds well with the posthuman Gothic because unlike the Victorian Gothic, its supernatural entities are not literal; they are often figurative and symbolic, appearing through hallucinations. In this historical context, one can examine the dynamic in which the "human" is determined by a rational humanism that bases its human model on Western, white masculinity. Therefore, the other is clearly gendered and racialized. Margrit Shildrick offers an interesting analysis of the way women fit into this construction of the other because of their uncanniness and Gothic monstrosity. Three works of American Gothic fiction--George Lippard's The Quaker City, Edgar Allen Poe's "Ligeia," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" portray these gendered power dynamics present within the posthuman Gothic when applied to the American Gothic; the female characters are either forced by patriarchy into becoming monstrous, or they were never fully human in the first place.
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Brent, Martha. "Female Characterization in the Novels of Robert Penn Warren: Variations on a Cinderella Theme." TopSCHOLAR®, 1995. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/932.
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The psychological construction of Robert Penn Warren's characters is an established tenet among Warren critics as is the influence of Sigmund Freud's work upon Warren's fiction. Specifically the oedipal nature of Warren's male characters has been widely discussed especially in regard to plots culminating in patricide. Based upon this criticism of Robert Penn Warren's novels to date, Warren's female characters are revealed to be developed likewise upon an oedipal paradigm. The female paradigm which corresponds to Freud's Oedipus complex in women is the Cinderella tale. These stories, some at least a thousand years old, were critically divided into three main types by Marian Roalfe Cox a century ago. These three archetypes as well as the writings of Sigmund Freud were a part of the intellectual climate from which Warren as artist drew. The eleven females in Warren's ten novels that are developed sufficiently for study—given physical, emotional, and psychological construction—correspond to the three Cinderella archetypes. As such this reading offers a new understanding of Warren's fictional women by revealing them not as aberrations of "normal" women but simply as types of women first revealed to us in our earliest childhood tales.
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Allen, Melanie. "The Short Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason: Exposing the Problems in American Society & Searching for Some Solutions." TopSCHOLAR®, 1990. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2113.
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Bobbie Ann Mason uses her fiction to portray the problems in American society. She devotes most of her time to average persons who are suffering from the rapid changes that society is going through. These characters at times seem lost and helpless, but ultimately they do not give up hope for a brighter future. Through social problems such as divorce, lack of communication, loss of identity and place, obsession with the past, submersion in rock music and TV, loss of ritual, proliferation of objects, lack of education, and the need to face mortality, these characters still seem to have hope and strength. There are serious problems to deal with, but there is also a future that can possibly bring better times if the problems can be solved successfully.
But Mason's world is not completely pessimistic and not all of her characters are miserable. Many of them take advantage of the changes in society, and improve their lives. Also, there are still positive values left. They are not as obvious, but they are still there if a person takes the time to look. Not everything has changed for the worse. For example, Mason seems to suggest later marriages. Early marriages lead to discontentment and more
than an abundance of problems, and most of Mason's characters who married younp. are very dissatisfied with their lives. Mason also stresses the fact that most people have the freedom of choice since people no longer have to behave in a certain manner, and society is more accepting than it once was. Mason also points out the peace and contentment that can be found with the land. She says as well that simplicity many times is preferable to the "technological advances" that have driven people to large cities where everyone seems the same, and she Insists that there are still small towns and contented people who inhabit them. Other positive qualities are the fact that we have the opportunity to receive an education, and we still have humor. We can look at the mistakes we have made and find humor in them as well as learn from them. Mason also seems to retain the hope that changes will keep occurring, that people still care enough to fight for a better, less problem-filled life. In subtle ways, Mason's fiction is optimistic.
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Sacchi, Aline Cristina. "A percepção das vogais do inglês norte-americano por falantes de inglês como le." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2018. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/21591.
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Previous issue date: 2018-09-26<br>Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq<br>This dissertation aims to study how bilinguals perceive English vowels. The subjects are students from a Canadian school in Sao Paulo who speak both English and Brazilian Portuguese fluently. The English language will be considered a foreign language (FL) in this context, because the subjects learn and use the language within a country in which English is not the first language. In the process of learning a new language some differences in terms of (FL) foreign language sounds may not be perceived due to interference of the first language (L1). Assimilation of L2 to L1 sounds may occur as the Speech Learning Model states, which explains the importance of formal teaching to train students to improve their fluency and intelligibility. The goal of this project is to investigate how bilingual speakers perceive English vowels using perception identification and discrimination tests. The judges are 27 students who study at a Canadian school in Sao Paulo, and whose L1 is Brazilian Portuguese and FL is English, and their average age is 9 years old. A Canadian native speaker of English at the age of 50 recorded the stimuli for the perception test containing the English vowels analyzed in this study. The hypothesis is that the subjects will not be able to discriminate between some sounds contrasts and will associate different sound pairs to only one Portuguese sound (Speech Learning Model, Flege). We conducted an experiment and analyzed the stimuli acoustic-articulatory characteristics based on acoustic inspection, formants and durations of the vowels were measured. The software PRAAT developed by Paul Boersma and Weenink from Amsterdam University was used to analyze the data collected. The results indicated that the identification task showed more accuracy compared with the discrimination task. The assimilation of two sounds in English (med-low and low vowels) to one sound in Portuguese (med-low vowel) confirmed the hypothesis that the absence of perceptual targets confers difficulties to the speakers in the production of sounds in a foreign language. The results confirmed the Speech Learning Model hypothesis. This research aims to contribute to the pronunciation teaching in a FL, because an accurate sound production may prevent communication problem, and it is essential for learner’s development in terms of oral communication and fluency<br>Esta dissertação tem como objetivo investigar a percepção de sons vocálicos da língua inglesa, variante canadense, por estudantes de uma escola bilíngue canadense da cidade de São Paulo em contexto de Inglês como Língua Estrangeira (LE). Ao sermos expostos a uma LE, segundo o Speech Learning Model, certas características dessa língua podem não ser percebidas devido à interferência da L1 (Primeira Língua, Língua Nativa ou Língua Materna) na LE. Dado isso, destaca-se a importância do trabalho com contrastes sonoros para que aprendizes possam melhorar a percepção e consequentemente a produção dos sons da LE. Como hipótese de pesquisa postulamos que os aprendizes não discriminam certos contrastes e assimilam pares de sons distintivos do Inglês a um som do Português. A investigação da percepção de sons vocálicos da língua inglesa nesta pesquisa foi realizada por meio de testes de discriminação e identificação, tendo, como juízes da pesquisa, 27 alunos de uma escola canadense em São Paulo com idade média de 9 anos, os quais possuem o Português Brasileiro (PB) como L1 e Inglês como LE. Os estímulos que contêm as vogais, utilizadas nesta pesquisa para a construção do teste de percepção, foram gravados por uma canadense, falante nativa de Inglês, com 50 anos de idade. Medições das frequências dos formantes (F1, F2 e F3) em Hz e de duração em ms das vogais dos estímulos dos testes de percepção foram efetuadas com o auxílio do software PRAAT e os resultados do teste de percepção submetidos à análise estatística multidimensional. Os resultados mostraram que a tarefa de identificação apresentou um nível de acerto maior do que a de discriminação. O contraste entre as vogais anteriores média-baixa e a baixa do Inglês foi o que causou maior dificuldade de discriminação aos juízes do teste de percepção. Os resultados confirmam a hipótese do Speech Learning Model sobre a assimilação de sons da LE a sons da L1. Diante do apresentado, esta pesquisa contribuiu com subsídios para o ensino de pronúncia em língua estrangeira, pois dificuldades de percepção levam comumente à produção dos sons de uma língua de forma inadequada e podem causar problemas de comunicação. Consideramos que o desenvolvimento da percepção de contrastes sonoros da LE tem repercussões positivas para a evolução dos aprendizes em termos de compreensão, comunicação oral e fluência na LE
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Cameron, Gabe. "The Establishment and Development of the Mockingbird as the Nightingale’s “American Rival”." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3224.
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During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many British poets attempted to establish a universal poetic image in the European nightingale, often viewing it as a muse or contemporary artist. This use of the songster became so prevalent that it was adopted, along with other conventions, for use in the United States. Yet, despite the efforts of both British and American poets, this imperialized songbird would ultimately fail in America, as the nightingale is not indigenous to the United States. The failure of this nightingale image, I contend, is reflective of the growing need to establish a national identity in nineteenth-century American literature, separate from British convention. In this process of cultural exploration, I believe the northern mockingbird becomes the replacement for the nightingale, and is developed as a distinctly American image through the poetry of Maurice Thompson, Walt Whitman, and others, exemplifying traits of the country through its charismatic song and personality
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Birk, Amy Simpson. "MOVING EXPERIENCES: WOMEN AND MOBILITY IN LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/65.
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This project recovers and revises late nineteenth and early twentieth-century narratives of mobility which invoke female protagonists who move from stifling, patriarchal domestic settings in the rural and suburban United States to the more symbolically emancipated settings of New York City and even Europe to reveal both the limitations and possibilities for women’s lives in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. By challenging popular American fiction’s preoccupation with urban white slavery myths and the lingering proscriptive standards for women’s behavior of the Victorian era, the Introduction argues the selected works of this dissertation mark a significant, but perhaps fleeting moment in American history when women were on the verge of profound gains toward equality. Chapter Two reads Gertrude Atherton’s late nineteenth-century interrogation of intimate and professional mobility in Patience Sparhawk as a significant precursor, if not prototype, of the recently recognized middlebrow moderns of the 1920s. Chapter Three examines Edith Wharton’s competing views of mobility and motherhood in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Summer. Chapter Four aims to recover David Graham Phillips’ posthumously published novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, as a complicated engagement with unconventional views of mobility and prostitution in early twentieth-century America, and Chapter Five argues that Jessie Redmon Fauset’s oft-maligned, sentimental novel, Plum Bun, warrants more critical attention for its revolutionary efforts to imagine an alternative cultural aesthetic whereby young, aspiring African-American women can acquire intimate and professional fulfillment through an empowering transnational mobility. Recognizing how stories of fallen womanhood in American literature traditionally overemphasized and criminalized a woman’s desire for intimacy, while stories of New Womanhood often scripted characters ultimately devoid of desire and companionship, I argue Atherton, Wharton, Phillips and Fauset examine and challenge these categories of womanhood in important, often overlooked, depictions of mobility. Too often dismissed or excused for their conservativism, these authors warrant more attention from modern literary scholars for their shared, varied, and intentionally “moving” experiences for women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America.
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Shank, Nathan A. "Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation of Consciousness in Postwar American Novels." UKnowledge, 2015. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/19.
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Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to represent the state of Marianne’s mind on the night she was raped, Judd finds that simply turning to a verbalized account of her thoughts, such as “I felt terrible,” or a seeming-omniscient gloss of her mental state, such as “She suffered incredible mental turmoil,” is insufficient and incommensurate with the traumatic and painful mental state she must have endured. In cases like these, authors and narrators reject conventional models of representation and turn to partial minds to effectively articulate to the reader the mental state that the character experiences. These more effective representations are pivotal in communicating to the reader a more adequate—whether from a mimetic, synthetic, or thematic perspective—understanding of characters’ experiences. Partial minds are often the very required conditions for readers to empathize with a character. By looking at several different instantiations of partial minds in recent American novels, I show how this technique both heightens the value of cognitive narrative criticism and revises the way we read many of literature’s most interesting characters.
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Shumer, Daniel. "Robin Becomes the Major: The Collision between the Practical & the Ideal in Hawthorne's Life & Art." TopSCHOLAR®, 1992. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2855.
Full textAbstract:
Nathaniel Hawthorne's life can be divided into four periods each containing a practical and ideal component. These components create a duality containing the dynamic Hawthorne confronted when moving between the practical world of work, family, and politics and the ideal world of art. This dynamic is used to explain the ambiguity of Hawthorne's works, particularly "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux," "The Artist of the Beautiful," and The Blithedale Romance. The movement present in these works between practical and ideal interests is connected to Hawthorne's view of the artist in society, the relationship of tradition and progress, and the issue of slavery. The conclusion shows that Hawthorne's pride and integrity both lifted up and undermined his art--a paradox in keeping with Hawthorne's character as a practical man and idealistic artist.