Academics
I like to joke that the Haley Center was my second home in Auburn, and I don't say that just because of its name. The Haley Center houses the English Department as well as many of the other humanities, so since I have studied English Literature with a focus on Medieval and Renaissance/Early Modern Studies and since I have taken several Latin and Italian classes, this is where the majority of my classes convened.
You can find a few of my favorite projects below.
You can find a few of my favorite projects below.
Chaucer
I took a class on Chaucer during the spring of 2013. We wrote two papers for the class. The first was a shorter paper that served as a rough draft for the second paper, which was much longer and involved research. I decided to write about the Pardoner. I love my final draft of my Chaucer paper because the first draft was my first paper to not go well. After reexamining my first attempt, I learned better ways to talk about literature through the lens of critical theory, specifically Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the habitus, and wrote one the paper that I'm the most proud of. While working on my Chaucer paper, I began to learn more about the importance of a character's (and writer's) rhetorical choices, which is one of the things I'm interested in exploring in Rhetoric and Composition.
Click here to read my paper.
Click here to read my paper.
20th Century American Fiction
During my last semester at Auburn, I took 20th C American Fiction, and being an Early Modern Studies minor, I was completely out of my element. However, I found the time period and writer's style's fascinating. By the end of the class, I produced a short piece that used Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic to examine Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild." While writing this paper, I was able to get a better grasp on Hegel's theories.
Click here to read my paper.
Click here to read my paper.
Capstone
In the fall of 2013, I took my Capstone Course. It focused on America in 1963, but we could research anything relating to the '60s. Since I'm interested in the culture and importance of Young Adult (YA) novels, I examined the treatment of popularity and identity in two YA novels from the '60s in comparison to a few novels from the 2000's. This project was interesting to me not only because I was able to work with YA novels, but also because I was able to continue my work on habitus that I began in my paper on Chaucer's Pardoner.
Novels examined:
The Popular Crowd by Anne Emery (1961)
The Unchosen by Nan Gilbert (1963)
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli (2000)
Bras and Broomsticks by Sarah Mylnowski (2005)
Click here to read my paper.
Novels examined:
The Popular Crowd by Anne Emery (1961)
The Unchosen by Nan Gilbert (1963)
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli (2000)
Bras and Broomsticks by Sarah Mylnowski (2005)
Click here to read my paper.
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Creative Project
My Shakespeare class focused on pre-texts and post-texts. We had the opportunity to analyze a post-text, imagine a pre-text, or to create our own post-text. I decided to modernize Act II Scene iii from Romeo and Juliet in Friar Lawrence's point of view. Since he offers help and advice to Romeo and Juliet that essentially lead to their downfall, Friar Lawrence's character is paramount to the story's action. In my modernization, Lawrence is a new free college campus counselor who often talks to Romeo. I use elements from Shakespeare's language, and I portray Lawrence as someone who tries to appear confident and be helpful but falls to his desire to make things easy for himself. In writing my scene, I learned more about the mindset of authors who write modernizations. I also learned that I want to use more "hands-on" activities like this when I teach.
You can read my scene, "The Dead Feverfew Flower Effect," here.
You can read my scene, "The Dead Feverfew Flower Effect," here.