Master of Arts in English
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Item An Analysis of the Impact Literature Choices in K-12 ELA Curriculum have on the LGBTQ+ Student Population(Southern New Hampshire University, 2020-09-04) Crowson, Sherri Dee; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherAs a high school ELA teacher, I have seen first-hand, the negative impact some literature choices have on students identifying outside of the binary definitions most often encouraged in society. This paper addresses the challenges and concerns with the current literature used in high school ELA classrooms and breaks down the negative impact on the ever-growing population identifying outside of cisgender and heteronormative groups. While identities that do not fit within these two categories are becoming more accepted, school curricula are not keeping up with these changes. The subconscious identification of characters portraying traditional gender roles reinforces the stigma associated with alternate identities. In order to address the growing awareness of the fluidity of identity found in modern society, the current selection of literature used in the high school English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum which reinforces cisgender and heteronormative characters needs to be reviewed and revised.Item Comics Literature to the Rescue: Multimodal Theory within Composition Literature Classrooms(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-06-23) Allaire, Faith; Harrison, MarlenA top priority for community colleges is ensuring student retention and overall academic success, and core class requirements bear the responsibility of ensuring this. Degree demographics from Three Rivers Community college in Norwich, Ct were analyzed to show that the majority of students on this campus will be required to enroll within the ENG 102- Composition and Literature course in order to graduate, making this course a key area to ensure that student engagement and retention is at its peak efficiency. However, students are often not connecting with literature in the classroom, leading to low student engagement and contrasting the objectives of this course. After reviewing numerous academic texts and pairing them with respective comics literature, this study confirms that comics literature is an exemplary tool to mitigate growing ambivalence in students while still ensuring that course objectives can be met. This is due to comics literature’s ability to maximize multimodal elements. Multimodal theory is meeting the needs of students who are acclimated to digital technology while also providing an environment that allows for a new academic structure found within on-campus classrooms and online to adapt. This study looks at various elements found unique to comics literature structure. It also looks at literary genres and how they appear in the text and applies traditional literary theories taught in current classrooms. Finally, sample discussion questions, assignments, and essay prompts are provided to show the practicality of implementing multimodal theory and comics literature into a Composition and Literature course.Item Cross Temporal Analysis of Existentialist Authors Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and Ellison Relative to the Divergence Between Their Disenfranchised and Non-Marginalized Characters(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-03-03) Beal, Sherri Guffey; Jackson, Jennie; Lee, ChristopherThrough their works, existentialist authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Ralph Ellison endorsed groundbreaking beliefs which advanced the limits of intellectualism. Traits such as alienation, nihilism, absurdism, and authenticity seeped into the plotlines of their novels. Through the literary lens of New Historicism, a cross-temporal examination will be performed on several of their works. It will explore their intentional minimization of certain characters and how their storyline conclusions were deliberately written as ambiguous in order to bring their plights to the foreground. The authors purposely othered characters in order to make their story heard. These four authors created characters whose shared existential transformations and profound life experiences paralleled or were painfully close to their own. Through their protagonists and supporting characters, Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, and Ellison utilized a type of rhetorical chronotope to convey a message about the negative effects of hegemonic exploitation due to race, gender, or economic circumstances. In addition, the writing of nineteenth century Dostoevsky and early twentieth century Kafka influenced the later writings of Camus and Ellison. Although these authors were trying to impart this message to their own respective audiences throughout a time-span of almost one hundred years, they were all essentially conveying a tragically similar message. It is a message that still needs to be heard today, as has become overwhelmingly apparent.Item Derek Walcott’s Omeros: How Effective Stories Benefit the Human Experience(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-01-25) Gustave, Trisha Pauline; Harrison, Marlen E.; Lee, ChristopherThis thesis offers a fresh perspective about the benefits of stories on the human experience when they are written, structured, and told effectively. To examine how stories inform us, Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros is deconstructed through the theoretical framework of narratology in the paper. The theory of narrative highlights how Walcott’s exceptional use of structure, language, characters, and themes educate readers about the past and present struggles of life on the island. In his poem, Walcott revisits the history of St. Lucia through the tale of local characters who feel dispossessed in a post-slavery/post-colonial environment. Mieke Bal’s “The Point of Narratology,” Mark Freeman’s, “Why Narrative Matters: Philosophy, Method, Theory” and David Herman’s “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction”, explain how stories help readers form human connections whilst providing them with an opportunity to understand familiar and unfamiliar worlds that are imagined or real, in the past, present, or future. Through Walcott’s Omeros, this thesis expands on the idea that stories allow writers to transport their interpretation of identity and their experience of the self and otherness, as readers experience how Walcott uses storytelling, textuality, and expression to revisit unhealed wounds within himself and his people.Item Destabilizing Gender Binaries and Ideologies: The Progression of Gender and Queer Studies Through Twentieth Century Literature(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-04-02) Cole, Nakida LeeAnn; Jackson, Jennie; Lee, Christopher; ChristopherToday, when you pick up a new novel, it hardly comes as a surprise when you are introduced to characters who defy gender binaries and ideologies that have been in place for hundreds of years. This has not always been the case. During the 1900s, there seemed to be a shift in the creation of literature, the intent of literature, and the way that literature was analyzed in terms of gender and sexuality; ample research has been done in the field of gender and queer studies, allowing new perspectives to form and new information to be shared. And while the different genders and sexuality preferences have been voiced in various ways, literature has been an exceptional outlet to share this knowledge, especially during the twentieth century. The addition of queer studies that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s has provided a new perspective not only on feminist aspects presented in literature but also on how gender identity and sexual preferences are portrayed in literature, giving a voice to those who have been silenced for far too long. During the twentieth century, authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jeanette Winterson pushed the boundaries of gender ideologies, effectively using the strength of their own voices to upset the oppressive nature of gender binaries. The unsettling of these binaries in twentieth-century literature has created a long-standing platform for others to speak their own truth.Item Detecting Women: Cultural Evolution in Detective Fiction(Southern New Hampshire University, 2023-10-26) Vasquez, Marian E.; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherAgatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh are the universally acknowledged Queens of Crime from the Golden Age of detective fiction. However, despite being ruled by female authors, this genre—now known as the “cozy”—is often criticized for its conservative portrayal of women’s roles in society, as well as other social issues. The popularity of their work has waxed and waned over the years, but their writing continues to speak to readers today. This paper argues that each author’s work reflects the social issues of their time and provides subtle commentary that continues to influence writers of detective fiction today. Modern detective fiction continues to reflect our views of women in society through the decisions authors make when crafting their plots and characters, just as today’s social dynamics echo those of the interwar period.Item Disabled Identities Revealed Through the Empiricism of a Quartet of Female Dramatis Personae: a Psycho-Social Autoethnographic Portrait(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-11-11) Domenick, Anthony; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, Christopher; ChristopherDramatists have always built upon pure psychological foundations for character development. The intrinsic qualities associated with humanity impel subjective thoughts, insights, and interpretations on consciousness and introspection. There have been a plethora of protagonists and antagonists to illustrate this argument. In particular, the following four female personas exemplify motifs of affliction, dereliction and social ostracism: Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller from The Miracle Worker, Sarah Norman from Children of a Lesser God, and Laura Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie. These characters are detailed and contrasted through an autoethnographic perspective culminating in the universal theme of psychosocial survival. The cognitive processes, sensibilities, and visceral tendencies of these disabled female characters rouse exploration. Orphaned, blind, and institutionalized, Annie Sullivan overcame egregious cruelties through fervency for an education. With indefatigable exertion, her first job was teaching a deaf, blind, and mute Helen Keller, an exile from humanity, appropriate behavior and basic communication skills with the ultimate goal of language and its significance. The pedagogy process becomes a quagmire of violent tantrums and thwarted efforts. Analogously, Sarah Norman is also a defector from humanity. A version of a misanthrope, Sarah rejects the hearing world with its condescending nonconformity to the language, culture, and values of her world, the deaf world. Laura Wingfield also disengages humankind with a penchant for escapism tethered to an incandescent menagerie of unicorns. What is most intriguing about all four personas is the dramatist’s distillation of the human experience, in particular, their social and psychological adaptation and resignation as an affirmation of their inured reality.Item Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity of Multi-Cultural Text Using Critical Race Theory in a 21st Century Classroom: Equitable or Hindrance?(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-10-11) Whitneybell, Brittany; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherEducation has always understood racial and ethnic lines, teaching them in a K-12 classrooms. Teaching about the civil war to the civil rights and everything in between, students gain foundational understanding in terms of the treatment of a culture or race versus the others. Looking at other races, we can also understand the troubles that they also go through and look at them in a comparative manner to formulate and evaluate our understanding of history. Further, looking at texts from various perspectives in terms of race, ethnicity, and cultural background aids in the comprehension of perspective. By reading multiple views on a black perspective, or a Native American perspective, students see various aspects within the cultures. Looking through autoethnographic terms, we can see the creation of critical race theory and how it creates a negative connotation for ethnic literary lenses. By taking this away from the classroom and our students, we are not teaching them about our nation’s history which in turn is hindering both the students, and our nation.Item Eclipsing the Patriarchy: The Power of Intergenerational Female Connection in Stephen King’s It, Carrie, Gerald’s Game, and Dolores Claiborne(Southern New Hampshire University, 2023-09-13) Smith, Jennifer Lee; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherUsing feminist and reader response theories to examine the ways in which American horror writer Stephen King creates strong female characters who break free from abusive patriarchal systems, this Thesis responds to critics of Stephen King’s portrayals of women and to research by Amy Canfield, Erika Dymond, Maysaa Husam Jaber, and Erin Mercer. While recent scholarship has focused on King’s female characters individually or on the pairing of a select few, this Thesis uses close reading and literary analysis to argue that King creates a network of strong intergenerational women who break free from patriarchal systems in his novels It, Carrie, Gerald’s Game, and Dolores Claiborne. Applying feminist theory to King’s characters Beverly Marsh, Carrie White, Jessie Burlingame, and Dolores Claiborne demonstrates how King uses intergenerational female connection to create powerful women characters who break free from patriarchal oppression.Item Feminist Fractured Fairy Tales: Angela Carter, Emma Donoghue, and Heroines Who Embrace Their Desires(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-07-27) Kelly, Caitlin Michelle; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherAmong the earliest tales told to children are fairy tales; these stories stick with us into adulthood, and we pass them on to the next generation because they speak to the human experience as well as provide guidance for moving through the world. However, while the themes of fairy tales comprise so-called universal truths of the human experience, further examination of these tales reveals antiquated social views whose dissemination may be harmful. Many fairy tales, for instance, silence their female characters while promoting patriarchal, heterosexual family structures as being necessary to a happy ending. To challenge such outdated perspectives, feminist writers have taken to rewriting fairy tales through a woman-centric lens. Such retellings are known as fractured fairy tales. Two such collections are The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter and Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue. Carter’s retellings of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Company of Wolves” respectively, give voice to the heroines, allowing them to narrate their own stories as well as throw off traditional gender roles to embrace their sexuality and desires, thus becoming three-dimensional people. Meanwhile, Donoghue’s retellings of “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Little Mermaid,” “The Tale of the Rose and “The Tale of the Voice respectively, play with the very structure of the tales by providing new endings, often with a queer twist, as well as providing an outlet for all these women to express their own desires and exercise their agency, something they are unable to do when they are silenced and forced into heterosexual boxes. However, though fractured tales like those of Carter and Donoghue have power, they cannot be the only way to challenge the shortcomings of traditional tales; they should not be the end of the process—but rather the beginning.Item Gender in Fiction: An Autoethnographic Approach to J.R.R. Tolkien, Female Characters and Gamers(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-10-25) Riggins, Lois; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherThe thesis is an autoethnographic approach to J.R.R. Tolkien, female characters and gamers. It will focus the gender studies theory to study how female characters have changed and grown throughout history in Fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien's work The Lord of the Rings are the primary source and how he had few female characters in the work. The paper will also look at how he wrote his characters and depicted them in the work. Laura Măcineanu’s “Women Figures in George Macdonald’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fantasy Writings” makes a point about Tolkien’s characters “It has often been noted that women are hardly present in Tolkien’s legendarium. However few they are, though, these women hold positions of power in the hierarchy of Middle-earth and easily stand out among the multitude of male characters that populate Tolkien’s world” (70). Female gamers are studied in the paper to tie together how female characters were/are written and portrayed in multiple media outlets. Female avatars/toons in most games are still sexualized and female gamers a lot of times play in a toxic environment. Christopher J. Ferguson and Brad Glasgow’s “Who Are GamerGate? A Descriptive Study of Individuals Involved in the GamerGate Controversy” is a look at a controversy involving the gaming world “In 2014, the GamerGate controversy erupted, focusing international attention to issues related to sexism and misogyny in gaming communities. Exactly how the controversy began remains an issue of debate” (243). The paper will be used to bridge the gap between how female characters were portrayed in early Fantasy to how times are changing and female characters are becoming the protagonists of the story. The paper will look at bridging the gap in how fiction is taught in English programs by studying female characters as an important part of Fiction. Keywords: fantasy, gender, The Lord of the Rings, video gamesItem Healing the Educator through the Written Word(Southern New Hampshire University, 2024-01-01) LaVergne, Emily; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, Christopher“Healing the Educator Through the Written Word” centralizes on the lived experience of a female educator and how scriptotherapy, particularly Expressive Writing, offers benefits as relief from the stress of emotional labor. While Expressive Writing has been studied extensively as a writing tool for students, to date there is no intentional scholarship on Expressive Writing employed as a tool for educators as a daily practice. My work is to create a space for teachers to use writing to their advantage regularly: to reflect, to express, to remember, and to inspire. Helene Cixous’s theoretical concept of writing and Virginia Woolf's Angel in the House are utilized to center the experience of female educators and maximize therapeutic effects while maintaining a space for their marginalized voice. Through a blending of academic research and my own lived experience as an educator and writer, I both position Expressive Writing as a viable tool for the female educator’s daily use as effective relief of stressful symptoms and as a reflective practice for professional development and personal growth.Item How Does a White Educator Critically and Empathetically Teach Black Literature?(Southern New Hampshire University, 2020-12-01) Richardson, Jasen Walter; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherCurrently in the United States, there has been social and political unrest, reviving a surge in racist ideologies. As an educator, I feel it is of the utmost importance for us to combat this civil instability with a more effective strategy of teaching multicultural texts. It is important for educators to find ways to empathize with people of all backgrounds and push against any socially set anxieties in regard to teaching multicultural texts, so to illuminate upon ways educators can find a semblance of reassurance and motivation to teach literary texts outside their racial and ethnic backgrounds, I am adding to scholarship by intervening textually in a critical reflective practice in which I engage important members of the Black community, both past and present, in a Socratic Seminar to answer questions I have formulated that will help me and other educators empathetically and critically teach Black literature. The methodological framework I use is autoethnography, which enables me to connect the oppression I have faced in my life to that of Blacks, and through a Critical Race Theory lens, I unveil some of the avenues White educators can take to empathetically and critically teach Black texts in American schools. Through the critical reflective practice in this paper, I expose, with the guidance of textual intervention, how teachers can build upon their knowledge and understanding of Black literature and how they can connect their lives and the lives of their students to the texts regardless of racial and ethnic similarities and differences. The objective of this paper is to further the dialogue about how educators teach and integrate multicultural texts in the classrooms and curricula across America, particularly in the English discipline, and expose teachers to ways in which they can disrupt any anxieties that have prolonged the neglection of the use of multicultural texts in their classrooms.Item How Russian Literature Influenced the Modernist Movement: A closer look at who inspired Hemingway, Kafka, Woolf, and others(Southern New Hampshire University, 2023-07-17) McBride, Connor; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherThe authors of the Modernist era are best known for their unique styles of writing that deviated from the traditional narrative structures of the past. After World War I, the world began to move in a new direction towards modernity. Modernists used their new ways of writing to not only capture Western sentiment during this time, but to also encourage new ways of thinking as the world emerged from chaos and began anew. However, this essay argues that many techniques that the Modernists used were not as new as scholars often make them out to be. In fact, the techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narration, and fragmentation, were all inspired by the authors of 19th century Russia. Alongside the analysis of these literary devices, this essay also examines the influential relationships between certain authors of these eras such as Gogol and Kafka, Turgenev and Hemingway, and Dostoevsky and Woolf.Item Immigration, Identity, and the Caribbean Immigrant Student in the English Language Arts Classroom(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-01-26) Jones-Young, Neisha; Harrison, Marlen Elliot; Lee, ChristopherThe incidence of immigration to the USA from the Caribbean region has seen a steady increase in the last few decades. As such, the number of Caribbean immigrants, in particular those of school-age, has increased exponentially. These immigrants often experience a sense of displacement and alienation as a result of being uprooted from their Caribbean culture and transplanted in a foreign one. The absence of adequate Caribbean cultural representation in mainstream society and in the schools, in particular, serves to deepen this identity crisis. However, there are a variety of ways in which this problem may be addressed and alleviated. One such way is through the expansion of the ELA curriculum to incorporate representations of Caribbean culture. Such an expansion would benefit not only the Caribbean immigrant student but also the other students as well.Item Latina Voices, the Immigrant Experience and the Missing Stories in American Literature(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-03-20) Camacho, Crista Cristella; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherLatina/Chicana stories in American literature are important to understand contemporary America as a multicultural society. However, Chicana/Latina literature is not considered part of mainstream American literature. Previous papers regarding this topic have brought up challenges that Latina/Chicana literature confronted in the space of American literature. The absence of Latina/Chicana stories in American life has affected the development of immigrants and their children’s identity. This paper explores and suggests the importance of Latina/Chicana stories in America from the perspective of Chicana/Latina writers. Looking at the text through Feminist and Marxist lenses highlights the problems that ultimately marginalize Latina/Chicana writers. Their stories are rooted in economic and gender inequalities in America and in their countries of Origin/Heritage. The Autoethnography method provides the narrative of the author’s personal experience as a Latina/Chicana developing her identity as a guiding point to display the need of advancing the growth of multicultural American literature.Item Literary Analysis of Trauma Narrative for Composition Course(Southern New Hampshire University, 2020-08-12) Roper, Karen; Harrison, Marlen E.; Lee, ChristopherAnalysis of a trauma narrative can empower an individual by providing opportunity and means to create or reform one’s self-identity. Including a literary analysis of a trauma narrative within a composition course offers a unique opportunity for a writer to not only rhetorically engage with the meaning of the narrative’s message, but also to acquire agency in his/her writing. This proposed unit plan weaves together social identity theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory to help students glean a deeper, and maybe more personal, meaning from a narrative. Additionally, this plan draws upon the ideas behind scriptotherapy and bibliotherapy. These are both clinical uses of writing and reading as methods to speed emotional and psychological healing. Social identity theory, feminist theory and critical race theory address how the narrative’s message connects to the greater culture within which the narrative is set. The application of social identity theory to the use of trauma narratives in the classroom allows for exploration of socially constructed identities and the ramifications of forced adherence to these identities. Consequently, within this unit plan lies the potential to empower an individual by providing a rhetorical situation in which to explore the creation of self-identity. Additionally, the focus on the feminist and critical race lenses offer a modern perception by which to examine the narrative’s message. While keeping in mind the benefits of scriptotherapy and bibliotherapy, the instructor can create a classroom in which students feel empowered to develop their own meanings of and relationships to the narratives. This plan considers multimodal literacies and incorporates listening and speaking activities. Collaboration among small group members is included as well as small group discussion. The final analysis is an individual project.Item Literary Evolution: How Technology Can (and Will) Enhance Literary Scholarship(Southern New Hampshire University, 2022-01-29) Niesen, Joseph Leo; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherThe impact of computer technology on the creation of the written word is something apparent in the multitude of available e-books, blogs, and collaborative writing sites that populate the internet. Existing and emerging technologies are starting to change not only the format of what is written, but the content and context of modern literature as well. For the Literary scholar the opportunity to explore writings that would not have seen public release without the rise of electronic publishing is both exciting and terrifying. Contemporary and future scholars need to be cognizant of the role that software, format, and electracy played in the creation of a given text. This project examined the secondary skills necessary for the modern literary scholar to assess the increasingly populous textual landscape and make sense of the wealth of secondary and tertiary information available. Computer driven research methods like topic modeling and data mining were explored as they have been used by those in the humanities to study both current and historical works in new and exciting ways. In the case study for this project, Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins was examined in the context of the secondary media that applies to the primary text. Because Hamilton’s novel is set during, and primarily focused on, the Arab Spring protests that took place in Cairo in 2011, this analysis incorporated information found in non-literary sources like YouTube videos, news articles, and social media artifacts of the period. By incorporating additional sources, this paper brought lite to how Hamilton’s novel reflects both the ever-present civil unrest in 2011 Egypt and the growing importance of digital literacy to the development of a well informed and ideologically aligned population.Item Looking For A Hero: The Development of the Christian Hero in English Literature(Southern New Hampshire University, 2021-02-23) Tucker, Rafique Hakeem; Jones, Stephen; Lee, ChritsopherThe history of English literature is a history of cultural collision, fusion, and reappropriation. When the Germanic tribes who invaded England in the 5th century were converted to Christianity, their pagan ethos was reframed through a Christian lens, and a heroic literary and cultural tradition was born that reflected their spiritual and cultural outlook. The fusion of Germanic paganism and Christianity gave birth to the body of Anglo-Saxon literature, particularly Beowulf and “The Dream of the Rood.” As the Christianity of England matured, the Welsh legends of Arthur and the Round Table were appropriated to fashion a more mature heroic medieval heroic ethos, as expressed in such works as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Using the lens of New Historicism, this paper will trace the development of this heroic tradition, from the martial heroism of Beowulf, to the more explicitly spiritual heroism of Sir Gawain.Item Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Me, her Reader(Southern New Hampshire University, 2023-05-16) Ainsworth, Michele; Harrison, Marlen; Lee, ChristopherAt the beginning of her book, Little Women, Louisa May Alcott presents Pilgrim’s Progress as a guidebook for living to the March sisters. In turn, Little Women itself allows the female reader to use Alcott’s text for their own journey to their feminist self. This paper illustrates how Alcott’s book, Little Women influences the develop of agency in its reader. Therefore, the 19th century female writer, Louisa May Alcott continues to have relevance and influence toward the 21st century woman, reflecting the link between feminist thought and literature. By using autoethnography within this paper I am using my own voice and my experiences to illustrate the discovery of how Little Women affected me and my role in society. This paper uses a combination of the theoretical frameworks of both feminism and the reader-response literary theories. The reader-response theory allows me to illustrate my own reactions to Alcott’s book and how I could look up to Jo March as a role model and her sisters as friends. The feminism lens illustrates how Alcott modeled aspiring writer Jo March as herself therefore illustrating how young women can reach their full potential despite how they perform their gender. This paper incorporates arts-based research (ABR) and the form of creating with collage to illustrate creating art provides the creator with the empowerment of agency.