Digital Commons Network^™

The Poetics Of Talk In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, Amy Wong

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay considers the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-loved adventure classic Treasure Island and his philosophical commitments to talk. For Stevenson, talking and adventuring share an experiential poetics that emphasizes responsiveness to unpredictable interactions. By examining several of Stevenson’s prose pieces, including “Talk and Talkers” and “My First Book” as well as Treasure Island, this essay argues that the novel aspires to translate the poetics of talk into a print medium. Treasure Island imagines itself as a form of “living print,” a work that, like Long John Silver’s parrot, seems more dynamic than print typically is, yet is …

Review Of "Dramatic Action In Greek Tragedy And Noh: Reading With And Beyond Aristotle" By Mae J. Smethurst, Judy Halebsky

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Mae J. Smethurst’s scholarship offers an illuminating examination of aspects of Japanese nō through Aristotle’s Poetics. Smethurst focuses on genzai or realistic nō alongside tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides that Aristotle favored. Published by Lexington Books, this text is part of the series Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches curated in partnership with Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies.

Remembering Gina Berriault, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"Near Sequoia movie theatre in downtown Mill Valley, in the space now occupied by Champagne French Bakery, I shared many lunches with the late, great Marin County writer Gina Berriault. I was her student then (MA in English: Creative Writing, SF State, 1983) and she was my thesis advisor, a one-to-one mentor relationship that did not involve a classroom full of other needy writing students. I cherished this focused attention: all about me. The professor’s long fingers often reached up to move her straight, dark hair away from her face so she could emphasize a point with serious eye contact; …

Teaching Asian Religions From Within Asian American Community, Emily Wu

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Article Excerpt:

Our 87 year-old Elder, a third-generation descendent of a Chinese American fishing village in Northern California, gives us a timid smile from behind the bar of the small diner that he and his family have operated since the 1940s. My students and I have just set up a laptop and microphone for recording a first-person account of his life story. The Elder looks over our shoulders, where a man stands with a stern face and his arms crossed—this is a member of the non-profit organization that now operates the village as a park. The twinkles in the eyes …

Innovation In Nō: Matsui Akira Continues A Tradition Of Change, Mariko Anno, Judy Halebsky

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Within the practice of Japanese nō theatre, there are tensions between preserving the art and allowing change. However, innovation through performance has been central to nō throughout its long history, from the variant nō of the Edo era (1603–1868) to the more recent emergence of revival nō and new nō. The long career of nō master Matsui Akira (1946–) offers an individual perspective on the history of change in the tradition of nō. Based on a series of interviews with Matsui and research conducted at the Kita School of Nō and the Hōsei Nō Research Institute, this article examines Matsui’s …

Savage Messiah: Ken Russell's Forgotten Masterpiece, John A. Duvall

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper presents an analysis of Savage Messiah, Ken Russell’s filmic biography of WWI-era artist and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, evaluating its various aesthetic codes of meaning, and demonstrating how these codes contribute to a unified narrative structure. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenological elements of the cinematic narrative – image composition, art direction, color, motion, editing and sound – in order to reveal the sensuous core of the film as its method of thematic expression. We offer observations on the narrative’s deep structure in terms of symbolic references, on Russell’s visual techniques of characterization, and on how these elements …

Voces Del Canal: Building Safe Communities Through Strong Partnerships In The Canal, Julia Van Der Ryn, Jennifer Lucko, Tom Wilson, Omar Carrera, Miho Kim, Reem Assil, Saba Waheed, Jennifer Lee, Diego Garcia, Bill Hogan, Voces Del Canal

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The Canal, a vibrant community of Latino immigrant families, is rich in diversity and cultural traditions, strong family networks, and a determination towards economic selfsufficiency. Latino immigrants in Marin County are heavily concentrated in the Canal and have the highest labor force participation rates in the County.i Despite being a vital part of Marin’s social, economic, and cultural society, Canal residents continue to struggle to meet basic necessities for their families.

To this end, a coalition of resident leaders from the community came together to form Voces del Canal to lead an unprecedented community-driven research project. Residents wanted to affirm …

Slimmer, Brighter, And Nearly Perfect: The New Big History Textbook Is Here, Mojgan Behmand

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Rarely has the appearance of a new textbook been the cause of such delight as broke out amongst the First Year Experience faculty at Dominican University of California in August 2013. The book that triggered such reaction is a seemingly unassuming volume, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2013), written by historians David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, and published by McGraw-Hill. Why was the book greeted with such enthusiasm, you might ask? Was it that the world needed another textbook on history? That the Dominican faculty felt a special bond with one of the authors, Dominican professor …

Gelang: A Photography Of Belonging, Chase Clow

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Gelang: A Photography of Belonging proposes a new category of landscape photography, one that moves away from emphasis upon imagery of particular kinds of landscape (such as wilderness, topographical, or wastelandscape) and also away from genres of photography (art, documentary, or scientific) and instead investigates the shared values and ethics among landscape and nature photographers and the kinds of awareness and knowledge that arise through outdoor, field-based photographic practice. An analysis of the writings of photographers and their published interviews, as well as the author's own photographic experiences in the field, reveals a common core of life-affirming values predicated on …