English Department Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/613

For more on IUPUI's Department of English Graduate Studies Programs visit http://liberalarts.iupui.edu/english/

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Best Practices in the Multidialectal High School English Class: Implementing Code-switching and Code-meshing
(2022-01) Johnson, Alicia M.; Fox, Stephen; Lovejoy, Kim Brian; Buchenot, Andre
Linguists define dialect as a form of a language, and they agree that all dialects are equally legitimate forms of the language. The stratification of dialects, however, is based on social hierarchies and results in some dialects being privileged and others carrying stigma. The bias against nondominant dialects results in language discrimination and limits one’s access to social power. This inequity gives rise to additional obstacles that impede academic success for students who speak a nondominant variety. A significant portion of those obstacles can be addressed with appropriate teacher training and the incorporation of language studies in the secondary English classroom. Language studies will benefit students who speak the dominant dialect by preparing them for interactions with the wide varieties of English they will encounter in the increasingly diverse and global workforce. Students who speak nondominant dialects will be equipped with the tools to navigate and challenge the standard language ideology.
Psychological Mirroring in Tana French's In the Woods and The Likeness
(2021-12) Gott-Helton, Sarah Meghan; Marvin, Thomas; Layden, Sarah; Kirts, Terry
Tana French’s work has been the subject of a number of recent scholars. Scholarship on French ranges from theories of liminality, to meditations on how French’s work explores the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon in Ireland, to looking at her stories as new takes on old fairy tales. French’s work straddles the line between popular detective fiction and literary fiction, upending popular tropes and creating something wholly new. One issue that has not been explored is how French’s work fits into a Lacanian framework. The six novels in her Dublin Murder Squad detective stories are rife with issues of psychological mirroring, or doubling. As such, they take the typical mystery trope of pairing a detective with a case that alters and reflects back their own psychological traumas, and takes them to a new level. This work will address issues of French’s characters and how they fit into the theories of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, as well as the “Real,” “Symbolic,” and “Imaginary” realms that we human beings unconsciously construct for ourselves. This writing examines the first two novels of the series, In the Woods, and The Likeness, and analyzes them in light of these theories, showing how mirroring exists in nearly every aspect of each text.
"I Knew Grad School Was Gonna Be Hard But...": Community and Feedback in Graduate Writing Support
(2021-06) Worrell, Brandilyn Nicole; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andre; Layden, Sarah
Often, one of the first areas to cave under the pressures of graduate school is a graduate student’s writing. Sometimes this is because a writer feels unprepared for the amount or types of writing or it is simply due to the fact that writing is a layered process that has not been fully explained to graduate students before. In any of these situations, there remains a need for graduate writing support that accounts for these varied experiences and the larger graduate school environment. In order to better understand these needs on the IUPUI campus and begin to address them, this study collected data from current IUPUI graduate students and a pilot Graduate Writing Group program through the University Writing Center. Through this research, two key themes arose as vital to addressing graduate writer needs and student success in graduate school: community and feedback. By encouraging consideration of these topics within graduate writing programming, support offered can encourage these areas for graduate writers. Community provides space for students not only to learn from each other but also share common experiences and struggles. Through these spaces, graduate students can gain insight into their writing, program, field, and themselves by recognizing what is a natural part of the graduate school process, what needs to change, and how they develop as a result. Quality and diverse feedback leads to deeper understanding of a student’s field, their voice, and their writing process. Without an understanding of these two elements of graduate writing, students remain more likely to struggle with the graduate school process and with the liminal space of being students and professionals.
Discerning Consistent Evidence-Based Communication Strategies for Supporting Deaf Writers in the First Year Composition Classroom: A Study
(2020-08) Meranda, Stephanie Kay; Fox, Stephen; White, Julie; Weeden, Scott
The presented study contributes to growing and necessary research compilations that include the field of Deaf Education and First Year Composition. The central goal of this study is to better understand what d/Deaf students, American Sign Language interpreters, and writing instructors currently experience when working together in a mainstream writing classroom to conduct clear communication among all participants. To address the support of d/Deaf students in such environments, a review of current literature that intersects the fields of Deaf Education, Disability Studies, and Writing and Rhetoric was conducted. Then, an IRB approved general interview study was conducted with culturally Deaf students, mainstream writing educators, and a nationally certified interpreter of the Deaf. Although this research touches just the very edges of an entire situation of inquiry and discourse, it offers a starting point from which educators and researchers alike can continue to develop further analysis of communication techniques to support d/Deaf writers in the writing classroom at the college level.
Indications of Single-Session Improvement in Writing Center Sessions
(2020-05) Wilder, Aaron; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Fox, Steve; DiCamilla, Fred
In the complementary fields of Composition and Writing Center Studies, the common goal is to guide writers toward improvement in literate practices. However, the meaning of the word “improvement” has undergone radical shifts across time within both fields. It has of late shifted away from a concrete, product-oriented definition toward a non-concrete, process and person-centered nebula. In short, the field of Writing Studies has become very sure what improvement is not, while less sure what it is. Despite this uncertainty, one area of recent agreement appears to be the importance of control that writers hold in navigating within and across literate contexts, often referred to by the slippery term, agency. This pilot study seeks to utilize the voices of researchers across a spectrum of fields to more precisely define agency. This definition will be consistent with current scholarship in both Composition and Writing Center Studies and informed by related fields such as linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. It will then utilize that definition in constructing a RAD (replicable, aggregable and data-driven) qualitative analysis of post-session interviews between researcher and writer. This method will attempt to determine possibilities and guidelines for future research. Particularly, it will provide a framework for future researchers to measure improvement in writing through a more refined definition of social agency. Through that, it will seek to support previous study which suggests as little as a single session in the Writing Center can demonstrate improvement in students’ perceptions of their own writing.
California Dreaming: Place and Persona in the Essays of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz
(2019-12) Christoff, Claire Elizabeth; Rebein, Robert; Kovacik, Karen; Minor, Kyle
Joan Didion, a native of Sacramento, California, is the author of many acclaimed collections of journalism and memoir, the first of which were Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). Eve Babitz, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, has produced two such volumes: Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977). While much critical ink has been spilled over Didion’s oeuvre, Babitz was, until the recent reprinting of the aforementioned titles, known best as an artist and muse. Perhaps due to this disparity in recognition and renown, no extant critical piece serves to compare the nonfiction of Didion and Babitz, despite their close geographic and social proximity. In viewing their early work side by side, the Golden West of the 1960s and ’70s emerges as the clearest point of comparison; however, the ways in which Didion and Babitz use place and time in their work often differ due to the marked contrasts in the identities they convey. In characterizing herself as a journalist and an observer, Didion offers a perspective that feels objective but is, at turns, wry and cool. Babitz, writing in a manner that was, at one time, considered autofiction, positions herself as the freewheeling focal point around which Hollywood’s dizzying cultural landscape unfolds. By manipulating the constructs of place and persona, these writers are better equipped to tell the story at hand and analyze their places within it, cementing their work in California’s literary canon.
Generation Five: A Chicana's Journey From Being to Becoming in the Biracial Kitchen
(2019-10) Chan-Brose, Khirston S.; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Zimmerman, Anna; Kirts, Terry
Cultural rhetoricians work to decolonize research practices to make space for all possible realities, placing a particular emphasis on story as theory. As such, this thesis utilizes an auto-ethnographic approach to demonstrates how KC Chan-Brose struggled to construct her biracial identity as a white-passing Chicana and how she used food and cooking as a tool for reading and writing cultures. Chan-Brose argues that cultural identity is made, or constructed, by people. With this argument, the oppressive notion of either/or, which implies that biracials must choose one culture and align themselves with that culture, loses power. This loss of power also challenges the notion of authenticity within cultures, positing the notion of authenticity as exclusionary, rather than inclusive. She examines her claim to color by storying her experience of coming to understand herself as biracial. She concludes that biracial identity is constructed from the mundane everyday experiences of our lives, and of both sides of our cultures. Chan-Brose posits that we must acknowledge the ways our culture is constructed by the ways we speak, relate to one another, and understand ourselves, and then garner the authority over our own identities to influence our culture’s construction. To model this, Chan-Brose proposes constructing cultural identity through the lens of fusion food and uses Gloria Anzaldua’s mestizaje and Malea Powell’s metis to demonstrate both/and identities as viewed from biracials who have claimed their biracialness as their power.
A Microgenetic Analysis of the Development of Thematic Coherence Between the Topic Sentence and Supporting Ideas in the English Academic Paragraph: A Case Study of a Saudi Female Writer
(2019-08) Kepler, Grady; Belz, Julie A.; DiCamilla, Frederick J.; Buchenot, André
This thesis explores the developmental pathway of thematic coherence among one Saudi female student in a foundational second language (L2) writing composition course, contributing to the field of L2 academic writing by offering a rich description of writing development. Despite a rapid increase in enrollment in the past 10 years, students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) remain an understudied L2 learner population. In addition, although a number of studies have explored coherence among L2 learners of English, such research focuses either on the linguistic features utilized by learners to ensure cohesion or on the contrast between L2 learners’ cohesive devices and that of professional standards. To date, no studies offer insight into learners’ developmental trajectory toward greater competency in producing coherent academic paragraphs. The present study proposes an alternative approach by analyzing academic paragraphs in light of the definition of thematic coherence as a general-to-particular structure of ideas, i.e., a flow of information to form a superordinate-subordinate structure in which subordinate ideas support the abstract, overarching assertion. Further, the study uses the methodology of a microgenetic analysis to facilitate the tracing of the history of mediation and micro-changes in the focal learner’s written production over time as it relates to the proposed definition of thematic coherence. Each of the written drafts of paragraphs produced by the focal student is analyzed in sequence. An analysis of qualitative data is presented to contextualize and describe the focal learner’s experience in the instructional context and how this is interconnected to the development of her written paragraphs. The results showed an increase in the student’s ability to produce academic paragraphs with a general-to-particular structure, particularly during mediation that was rich with metalinguistic terminology that also created opportunities to collaboratively construct meanings of such terms. A main contribution to L2 academic writing this study offers is a rich description of a student’s developing skills in producing academic paragraphs. An implication is that to nurture academic writing skills, such as thematic coherence among students from KSA, instruction must be attentive to the developmental stages this student population progresses through.
Emerson's Philosophy: A Process of Becoming through Personal and Public Tragedy
(2019-08) Simonson, Amy L.; Schultz, Jane E.; Rebein, Robert; Graber, Samuel
This thesis explores Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical becoming throughout decades of reflection and experience, particularly regarding death and slavery. Emerson was a buoyant writer and speaker, but the death of his five-year-old son and protégé, Waldo, challenged the father’s belief in Nature’s goodness and the reality of maintaining a tenaciously optimistic outlook. As he was grieving in the mid-1840s, slavery was threatening the Union, and Emerson was compelled to turn his attention to the subject of human bondage. He began his career indifferent to the plight of slaves, but as legislation about the issue brought it closer to his personal sphere, he was gradually yet firmly gripped by the tragedy of human bondage. These simultaneously existing spheres of sorrow – Waldo’s death and slavery – joined in refining Emerson’s personal philosophy toward greater utilitarian and humanitarian conduct. His letters, journals, essays, and lectures reflect the inward changes caused by outward events, and the conclusions herein are supported by modern grief studies as well as numerous philosophers, literary specialists, and historians.
Power, Resistance, and Transformation: A Leadership Studies Analysis of Dystopian Young Adult Literature
(2019-08) Hampshire, Kathryn Marie; Musgrave, Megan; Seelinger Trites, Roberta; Sickmann Han, Carrie
Through an analysis of the depiction of female protagonists in young adult dystopian and speculative works of fiction, this thesis establishes leadership studies as a theoretical framework for literary study. Leadership studies is a relatively young branch of academic inquiry, using interdisciplinary approaches to investigate the phenomenon of leadership. From psychology, sociology, and philosophy, to education, business, and history, leadership studies has both drawn from and provided insight into a variety of disciplines; however, these theories have not yet found their way into conversations about literature. My thesis pulls leadership studies away from its corporate connotations to establish it as a valid and valuable addition to our literary analysis repertoire through a demonstration of its potential to further conversations about texts. This analysis is positioned within the contexts of children’s literature, feminist theory, and practices of reading for ideology, anchoring leadership studies in already-established modes of inquiry while demonstrating how this field offers valuable insight into them. My focus on dystopian and speculative young adult novels reflects the recent surge in dystopic/postapocalyptic texts that feature strong female protagonists, presenting potential leadership strategies for young girl readers during an important stage of development. Thus, this thesis uses leadership studies to further our analysis of how agency, power, and gender are represented within children’s literature.

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