The Ends of Smaller Worlds is a collection of short stories set in Indiana. The preface is about the representation of the information age using elements of dirty realism and Gothic fiction.

The purpose of this paper is to picture the West as Mark Twain saw it. Many books have been written which describe Twain's Western years, but few have given much consideration to the accuracy of his account of the West in the 1860's. This paper attempts to portray Twain not only as a social and political satirist, but also as a possible historical satirist.

Using Ethnography of Communication, Conversational Analysis, and surveys, Thai students' participation in group work was studied to determine how they interact with native English-speaking students. Issues discussed are: (1) behaviors Thai students display during group work; including comparisons and contrasts to native students' behaviors, (2) prejudices native students have about including Thai students in group work, (3) Thais' strengths and weaknesses in group work, and (4) perceptions native and Thai students and their professors have regarding group work and its importance to successful course completion. The study concludes by recommending ways that both Thai students and their professors can enhance the learning outcomes of courses that heavily emphasize group work.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute some knowledge of the vowel sounds in the speech of one part of East Texas, Gregg County. Although these sounds do not vary greatly from those heard in other parts of the South, the variations which do occur are of interest to the student of speech sounds, and for that reason the sounds studied are carefully recorded in this paper.

A creative dissertation consisting of two parts: a novel and a critical preface. The critical preface, titled “Novel without Falsehood” deals directly with David Shields’s Reality Hunger, touching on issues of reality as it pertains to truth, writing, fiction, and contemporary culture. The novel is entitled Down and Out and follows the fortunes of a small town in Arkansas before, during, and after its sole source of employment ceases to exist.

The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the problems that short story theorists encounter when they try to define the short story genre. Part of the problem results from the lack of a definition of the short story in the Aristotelian sense. A looser, less traditional definition of literary genres helps solve some of the problem. Six short stories follow the introduction. "Billy and Me," "Queen of Hearts," "The Whiskey Man," and "Psychedelic Trash Cans" are representative of traditional short stories. "Mourning Coffee" and "Seven X Seven" might very well fit into other genres, but even these stories fit a loose definition of the short story genre.

Honors thesis written by a student in the UNT Honors College discussing the history of horror fiction and its sub-genres.

Thesis written by a student in the UNT Honors College discussing William Shakespeare's characters, Juliet and Cleopatra. The author examines both characters as strong women doing their best to take control of the paternalistic worlds they live in.

This study was basically concerned with the effect of occupation on the folklore of the people of Graford, Texas. The people interviewed in that area of North Central Texas were divided into three major occupational groups: ranchers, farmers, and farmer-laborers. At least two members from each of the occupational groups were interviewed; and these interviews revealed that their folklore included folktales, superstitions-remedies, songs, and customs, The customs included household, recreation, school, and church customs. Each informant's folklore was recorded directly as it was related. Then the information was placed in the appropriate categories of folklore. Finally, an analysis of the folklore from the standpoint of the informants occupation was completed. The findings indicated that the various occupations did influence each informant's folklore.

The stories in this collection represent an increasingly transcultural world by exploring the intersection of cultures and identities in border spaces, particularly the Mexican-American border. Characters, regardless of ethnicity, experience the effects of migration and deportation in schools, hometowns, relationships, and elsewhere. The collection as a whole focuses on the issues and themes found in Mexican-American literature, such as loss, separation, and the search for identity.

The purpose of this study is to give the common words, together with a collection of old expressions or terms, of the oldest residents of Ellis County and to trace their usage to the states in the Old South. The importance of recording these old words and terms is to preserve the oldest forms of the community for those who are interested in the growth and development of local speech and, also, to trace the history of these words.

It is the purpose of this thesis to contribute a small part to the large picture of Texas dialect by describing the use of certain stressed sounds in one locality, Parker County, Texas, which lies in the General American speech division of the United States.

This study analyzes the congruence between the objectives of secondary-level English methods courses in Texas universities and the objectives of the state-mandated high school curriculum (the essential elements) in language arts. A questionnaire was used to obtain information from 26 English methods instructors at 22 universities in Texas. The data obtained from these questionnaires reveal that these instructors strongly emphasize preparing prospective English teachers to teach the essential elements of composition. Other significant findings include: (1) the lack of emphasis in the English methods course on strategies for teaching the essential elements of language, when those elements are unrelated to composition, and (2) the lack of uniformity which characterizes the organization of the English methods course at major Texas universities.

This paper is an analysis of the relationship between journalism and formal literary usage in America. It is the purpose of this study to define and illustrate characteristics of modern journalese and to make a comparison of standards of correct usage advocated by recent textbooks in English composition and journalism. Particular attention will be given to diction, structure and length of sentences, capitalization, abbreviation, and punctuation. The conclusion will be a brief evaluation of modern journalism, a succinct resume of its impact on modern language and literature, and a simple prediction of future tendencies in journalistic and literary language. And to give a better perspective to the analysis of journalism and American English, the paper begins with a description of the American linguistic heritage.

The Remembering, an original drama set in rural Georgia in 1864, is about three ex-slaves, two men and an old woman, all runaways, whose fictional encounter in a deserted church sets off a series of conflicts and, significantly, incidents of remembering past conflicts which lead them to an understanding of the war, slavery, freedom, and individual responsibility. Many of the events which the slaves, naive witnesses to a great moment in history when mobilized modern warfare was being born, and the nearby Union soldiers remember reflect upon the pervasiveness, speed, and destructiveness of the new campaign. The efforts of the characters to survive in that harsh and bitter war represent one of the primary concerns of this dramatic study.

"The object of this thesis is neither to uphold the sacred cows of traditionalist grammar nor to forge a way for a liberal philology. It does, however, examine "the kind of English that most people use most of the time," that is, the idiom of the language, and specifically the phrases and expressions that compose idioms."--1.

For some time, teaching Standard English has been a problem of major proportion at Versia L. Williams Elementary School, Fort Worth, Texas. Even casual observation shows that pupils do not grasp much of the classroom English teaching, nor do they transfer that which they do learn to other school work or daily use. The instructional program in English at the Williams Elementary School, therefore, must be supplemented to the extent that the pupils may be given the kinds of experiences in the classroom that will ultimately result in their learning Standard English in a manner that will enable them to relate the "book talk" to their own idiolects, which according to Giddings (2) everyone has. They bring to school a well-established set of habits which they will continue to use in spite of the classroom instruction, because they hold on to the teaching of their first teachers--their mothers.

Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. The primitive conception of death as that through which one passes in initiatory suffering has been unavailable because the mythologies in which it was framed are outdated. However, some post-World-War-II novels are reflecting a new mythology which recognizes the threat of death as the terrifying face the universe shows during initiation. A few of these novels tap deep psychological sources from which mythical images traditionally come and reflect the necessity of the passage through the hell of initiation without hope of a savior. One of the best of these is Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, in which the Scanlon story is a central statement of the mythological ground ahead. This gripping tale uses the pioneer journey west to tell of the mysterious …

This thesis will deal with five points of emphasis--content, logic, organization, demon errors, and style. Not a complete manual for teaching freshman composition, this thesis will serve as a simplified guide. This thesis is written for the inexperienced teacher of freshman English who may need guidance, but it should also be of interest to the experienced teacher who wants to confirm his own practices or to find new approaches for teaching the college freshman how to write.

As a teacher of American literature in high school, I have become conscious of the importance of teaching students of that age level the lore and poetry of their native state. Poems of nature or local color in their own country will hold their interest when material from more distant points seems dull and uninteresting. Through my teaching I have become interested in the poetry of the Southwest and have enjoyed reading the poetry and knowing the poets through personal interview or correspondence.

The American Romantic writers laid a broad foundation for the historic and heroic Abraham Lincoln who has evolved as our national myth. The writers were attracted to Lincoln by his eloquent expression of the body of ideals and beliefs they shared with him, especially the ideal of individual liberty and the belief that achievement of the ideal would bring about an amelioration of the human condition. The time, place and conditions in which they lived enhanced the attraction, and Lincoln's able leadership during the Civil War strengthened their estimation of him. His martyrdom was the catalyst which enabled the Romantic writers to lay the foundation of the Lincoln myth which has made his name synonymous with individual freedom everywhere even today.

The status of bilingual education in Texas has been examined in this paper in order to explore the nature of bilingual education and bilingual education programs, to ascertain whether the implementation of bilingual education programs has been successful in Texas, and to determine if there is sufficient justification for the continuation of such programs.

This paper documents the decrease of short stories in three women's magazines from 1940 to 1970 and concludes that the decline results from readers turning to other sources for escape from housework. Chapter II describes patterns in plots, themes, characters, settings, and other elements of these stories. Chapter III shows the lack of influence which changes in writers, editors, and social and political developments in America have had on these short stories. The conclusion is reached that the magazine article is replacing magazine short stories.

A survey of language in a certain area is designed primarily to present a living language as it is actually spoken; thus, a morphological study of language is designed to determine the most widely-used syntactical and grammatical forms and to record these forms in a statistical manner. These findings are to be interpreted in the light of similar studies, not with the purpose of establishing the cultural level of the language in the area surveyed, but to present all the possible variations, and, in some cases, to draw a comparison as a matter of record between the forms found to be commonly used in every-day speech and the standard usage as given by leading linguistic authorities.