The study of the Back and Forth book of an eleven years old E.S.L. student introduces a type of personal writing which is argued to facilitate meaningful, written communication in the second language. The present study extends the findings of dialogue journal studies of Staton et al. in two directions. 1. The case study of the Back and Forth book activity presents a "communication triangle" which involves parental participation and thus serves as a bridge between school and home. The reported observations focus on the potentials and limitations of the Back and Forth book task in comparison to other journal writing practices. 2. The analysis of the selected 45 journal entries provides some explanation for the weak realization of the task. The application of Mohan's Knowledge Framework as a means of analyzing student writing provides a c picture of the language and content. The Knowledge framework presents guideline for monitoring the development of language and the development of discourse and content. The inconsistency of the task justifies the present study: the multi-purpose task of the Back and Forth book produces unsatisfactory writing, the research question is of determining its reason and provide a guideline to monitor the task in order to obtain more satisfactory product. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Thesis advisor: Mary Crane / Literary Constellations resituates collaboration within the networks of books and people in the publishing industry in early modern London. Though print technologies and publishing practices are most often understood as providing the conditions for the development of single authorship, this project proposes that print also produced new forms of collective literary endeavors. Looking into the book industry, especially the activities of publishers within the Stationers' Company, I present collaboration as creative activity dispersed among interconnected people and books in the literary arena. This approach expands the recent scholarly attention to collaborative literary activity while remaining grounded in the social and economic context in which books were produced. Not only were books written, translated, edited, marketed, printed, and sold collectively in various ways, but the publishing industry as it developed in London created new avenues for imagining books as existing within meaningful collectivities and as well. Each chapter of this project examines a publishing event and traces its connections in the arena of books to illuminate the dynamics of collaborative publishing. Readings of the literary works are crafted by finding, illuminating, and taking seriously the traces among, between, and in texts. The first chapter examines the 1551 English translation of Utopia as a representative example of a collaborative literary process that includes writing as one in a larger constellation of literary efforts that produce the book. I further explore how the publisher Abraham Veale developed a specialty in health-related texts in translation, of which Utopia becomes a part. Chapter 2 introduces the English translation of the Aeneid published by Abraham Veale, which included a supplementary "thirteenth book," and which was produced in a collaborative group of translators and annotators. This continuation of the epic raises questions about the potential for groups of agents in print to continue the work of poetry indefinitely. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene directly responds to the English Aeneidos and its collaborative continuing of the work of Virgil, and in the process articulates an individualist model of literary writing and reading. The third chapter turns to the interdependence of play writing and publishing with other books in the marketplace. I argue that Pericles was published as part of an identifiable group of books, and so operates in an interdependent cluster of collaboratively built stories. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that news was a collaboratively produced print genre with close associations with printed plays. The project of selling individual dramatic authorship in the First Folio and Ben Jonson's late plays required the disentanglement of play texts from their associations with news. Part of this move toward disentanglement includes Jonson's satiric depiction of the stationer Nathaniel Butter and his news syndicate in The Staple of News. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Inventing Authors draws on a diverse strand of methodologies from literary, book, and media studies to rethink the practice of authorship in the context of media history, specifically during the founding age of technological invention in the United States between 1870 and 1920. The Age of Edison witnessed an unprecedented explosion of new media that threw into relief traditional ideas about writing, literature, and authorship. By moving beyond economic narratives of authorial history, Inventing Authors radically disperses the practice and profession of authorship across the cultural techniques that mark it up. To rethink authorship in the midst of nineteenth-century media history, this project surrenders abstract concepts like "representation," "literature," and "culture" for the materialist rigor of what contemporary German media theorists call "cultural techniques" (Kulturtechnik), a term that combines an attention to media technologies with a focus on elementary techniques, skills, and practices, especially reading, writing, and counting. Drawing on material histories of inscription by Friedrich Kittler, James Beniger, and Lisa Gitelman, it engages authors not as artists, workers, or professionals in the market - the usual approach for studies of this period - but rather in mutually constitutive relationships with the skills, objects, and techniques that shaped the conditions of their possibility. Like Edison at Menlo Park, authors in the second half of the nineteenth century inaugurate a future in which technical expertise and ingenuity, not originality and inspiration, control the field of representation. Each chapter excavates the technical training of an author to demonstrate how authors capitalize on available materials to engineer new methods for inventing and marking up reality. My introduction and chapters are focalized around four authors - Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Theodore Dreiser - and the cultural techniques that shaped their methods, writing practices, and literature. In this period of American history, authors began to register how their literary inventions were not merely disembodied experiments in style, but rather technical operations that processed language through different markup strategies. They were not just artists making art; they were editors and engineers processing bits of culture in ways correlate with the cultural techniques trained into them.

Thesis (M.A.) in Communication--University of Maine, 2009. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-107).

Thesis (doctoral)--Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universtät zu Breslau, 1933. / Cover title. Vita. Complete work (vii, 144 p.) issued as Beiträge zur Anglistik, Heft 2. Breslau : Trewendt & Granier, 1933. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D.S.M.)--Northland Baptist Bible College, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-205).

The Walt Disney Company's acquisition of the Muppets in 2004 caused a significant rupture in the authorial history of a beloved franchise. Created in the 1970s the late media icon Jim Henson and his creative team, the classic Muppets enjoyed many years in the spotlight during the 1970s and 1980s -- on The Muppet Show (1976-1981), and in The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). The physically wacky and colorful puppets are known for their irreverent and chaotic antics, and they still have a sizeable cult following devoted to them. Fans attribute the character's "Muppetness" to Jim Henson's creativity as an author. However, Henson worked with a team of creative artists who all contributed to the Muppet franchise. As a result, is both impossible and inadvisable to try and breakdown Muppet authorship by contributor. Instead, I label Henson's authorship a brand in order to analysis the value of his perceived authorial power. These perceptions are what put the Muppets in such opposition with the corporate image of Disney. Disney, by contrast, has a reputation for commercial, family-oriented entertainment. The production studio has grown into a media conglomerate that saturates the market with merchandise, cross-promotions, and advertisement campaigns. Its dominant position in the media industry affects fan reception of any Disney-led project, so the re-launch of a long-dormant, independent brand like the Muppets creates an understandable tension among critics, popular press writers, and fans. By tracing media industry shifts the 1990s and 2000s and Disney's changing image and corporate structure, I analyze how it has "authored" the Muppets in the past few years. Both in its Muppet advertising campaign and in particular its treatment of the infamous character Miss Piggy, Disney has re-branded the Muppets for a new time and new generations, while attempting to hold onto the historical traits that make the Muppet brand appealing and profitable. / text

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Over the past decade, an interest in collaboration has been coming to the fore in composition studies. Whereas once we were primarily interested in investigating the cognitive processes of the individual, we now seek to understand more about the social dynamics of writing in groups to improve our teaching of composition in the classroom. To that end, this dissertation looks at the real world collaborative activities of business proposal writers within a high technology company. Writing in the workplace is often undertaken in groups, and my work at Cerebellum, Inc. with computer professionals (who wrote as part of their jobs) reveals complexities hitherto unsuspected in the social writing process. The importance of a detailed understanding of collaboration has been called for in the literature by, for example, Ede and Lunsford (1990). My dissertation surveys current literature in composition, including a review of investigations into collaboration during business writing as a salient behaviour of such a discourse community. In order to accomplish my research, I used a video camera to record the activities which embodied the writing process at Cerebellum Inc. I found that the use of the video camera in an ethnographic manner not only helped me to gather detailed data, both verbal and nonverbal, in the continuous and comprehensive detail so vital to communication research, but also assisted in initiating better understanding within the business community of the aims and approaches of academic research. Video technology gave me a chance to participate in as well as observe situations, and also opened the door to conversation concerning my methods and my findings with both researchers and informants. I propose a model of the varying levels of engagement undertaken by the writers of a business proposal. I then suggest the educational value of the representation with a discussion of implications for the teaching of writing in the workplace and in more traditional school settings. Detailed research into collaboration offers us a window on the social processes which constitute writing for our students now and in their futures in the workplace. Such work is vitally important to ensuring superior levels of advanced literacy which will be in continuing demand now and in the next century.

This dissertation is a qualitative case study of a woman's poetic process. Rather than examine creativity from the outside, I have viewed it from the inside in an attempt to document my direct engagement, as an emergent woman poet, with my own writing. I have conducted personal, poetic research throughout this project in an attempt to construct a self-portrait of my own creativity. / To do so, I have not attempted to prove a thesis, or strive for scientific objectivity. As the portrait of a woman's imagination, this text narrates the winding course of a transformative journey brought about by my experimentation with a number of writing strategies, or heuristics. Because the drafting of poems is a highly unpredictable endeavour, I have drawn on various techniques, discarding one if I became blocked in order to experiment with the hoped for success of the next. / Chief among the heuristics I have employed was a yearlong fictive correspondence that I entered upon with the Modernist poet, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]. During our exchanges, I would send her my musing about the writing process along with my poetry which she would critique and send back to me. After completing this epistolary venture, I analysed what our letters revealed about what both blocked and freed my developing voice. I conducted this investigation by laying down a secondary strata of theoretical intertexts addressed to a "Dear Reader" who symbolized my audience made up of my academic committee, in specific, and of writing theorists and scholars in general. / I then appended this two-tiered effort with an introduction, multiple conclusions, and a closing-poem. The resulting structure of my dissertation is that of a palimpsest, a genre that H.D. herself often employed to create a more fluid convergence of autobiographical and mythic motifs. Other heuristics such as key word analysis, bodywork, a photograph exercise, dreams, travel, and the retelling of a fairy tale have been called upon, as well, to further inspire this palimpsest of the poetic process.