Interdisciplinary Studies

Beppo, Byron and the Body: A Disability Poetics Analysis of Digression and Metrical Irregularity as Crip Time in Lord Byron’s poem Beppo: A Venetian Story
 

Jacob Betgeorge
California State University, Sacramento
 

This study is a disability-centered analysis of the narrative poem Beppo: A Venetian Story by Lord Byron. For the majority of literary studies, Byron’s disability had been reduced to a biographical factoid rather than something potentially influential on his versification. This study, however, argues the former, positioning Lord Byron’s congenital disability (what is commonly referred to as his clubfoot) as recognizable in the architecture of his narration and versification. 
Combining both classic literary analysis and scansion, alongside the concept of crip time in disability studies, this study reinterprets Byron’s digressive tendencies, self-referential satire, and metrical irregularity as acts of resistance against normative, linear time. Within the poem’s highly digressive stanzas, and metrically irregular lines therein, the poem and its readers experience the non-linear temporal space of crip time. It is in this way that the poem moves like Lord Byron’s own non-normative body, traversing through space and time differently, outside of linearity, narrative expectations, and metrical systems. At its heart, this study seeks to expand the emerging field of Disability Poetics by investigating how Lord Byron utilized his lived experience of bodily difference to compose verse that destabilizes and challenges temporal systems of linearity and normality.

Latina Mothers’ Experiences Learning English 
 

Gabriela Guadarrama
Our Lady of the Lake University
 

This qualitative study explores how first-generation Latina immigrant mothers’ experiences learning English influence the educational messages and expectations they communicate to their children. While existing research has examined immigrant mothers’ language learning and educational involvement, limited research has specifically on how these experiences shape the educational messages and expectations mothers communicate to their children regarding education, motivation, discipline, and bilingualism. The main research question guiding this study is: “How do first-generation Latina immigrant mothers experience learning English in the United States?” The sub-questions are: ‘How do mothers describe their experiences learning English across different contexts (e.g., school, work, and daily life)?’, ‘How do these English learning experiences shape mothers’ beliefs about education, bilingualism, and academic success?’ and ‘How do mothers describe the educational messages and expectations they communicate to their children?’ Guided by a testimonio-informed lens, this study employs semi-structured narrative interviews with first-generation Latina immigrant mothers residing in Texas who have children enrolled in K-12 education. Data will be analyzed using thematic analysis to identify shared patterns and lived experiences across participant narratives. This study seeks to contribute to research on immigrant families, bilingualism, and educational experiences by centering the voices and perspectives of Latina immigrant mothers.

Olivia Divel

In the city of Norwich, an epicenter for affective piety during the Middle Ages, a young woman experienced a series of mystical revelations as she lay on the brink of death. In both her Long and Short Texts of her Showings or Revelations of Divine Love, anchoress Julian of Norwich discloses the events in which she intimately experienced the passion of Christ and how she gradually received understanding of their deeper meanings. While originally using her writings as a means to grapple with this transcendent experience, Julian of Norwich eventually came to use her writings as a vehicle to convey her message of consolation to her fellow medieval Christians. Much of Julian’s task involves interpreting her mystical visions in a way similar to interpreting scripture or a literary text. Afterwards, Julian’s rhetoric must successfully enable her to appear trustworthy to her audience as she presents her expositions of her visions while not compromising the weight and depth of her message. This research seeks to examine the unique ways in which Julian of Norwich both interprets her visions and presents the theological insights gained from them, and considers the context in which she was writing. This research analyzes the parables woven throughout Julian’s writings and seeks to recognize how the language she uses would have been understood by her medieval audience. Julian’s lasting influence bridges the modern and the medieval to convey a message of divine love that transcends time and location.