Digital Commons Network^™

A Review Of 'A Study Of The Spelling Development Of Adult Literacy Learners Compared With That Of Classroom Children', Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

A great deal of research has looked at the spelling development of children, but comparatively little has focused on ways adult literacy students develop as spellers. Neva M. Viise, in her article "A Study of the Spelling Development of Adult Literacy Learners Compared with that of Classroom Children," examines some interesting aspects of adults' and children's spelling development. This study "compared the spelling development of 195 child and 124 adult literacy learners through a comparison of spelling errors" (p. 561). The author asks two important questions in this research. First, will adult literacy students progress through the same stages of …

Chinese Landscape Painting In Stevens's 'Six Significant Landscapes', Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Growing up in Hanover, Virginia, "surrounded by people who cast the world in vibrant and poetic colors," Sw. Anand Prahlad "fell in love with proverbs at an early age" (ix). This lifelong love affair has resulted in a rich collection of African American proverbs that expanded as Prahlad went through college and graduate school, and did postgraduate research. All the while, he was sharpening his critical skills and developing the theoretical framework to establish a model for use in examining the varied components of proverbial speech in the African American community, proceeding on the assumption that in order to understand …

My Psychologist, My Psychiatrist, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I could not distinguish between them except by what we did. I was ten, then eleven. I would not ride the school bus. I always slunk home saying I missed it. I made my mother come to school with me every day, and sit in the lobby so I could wave to her during recess and class changes. In the evenings my father would come home from work, hear my mother's report, and storm upstairs, his weight pounding on the hardwood steps. I would be out of breath with crying, my head in the pillow, waiting to feel what he …

Teacher Research: Getting Started, Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

What is teacher research? Depending on who is asked, the responses could yield screams of horror or excited shouts of joy. Teacher research is a broad and important aspect of development not only for the teacher-researchers themselves but also for the colleagues with whom they share results in writing or at conferences or meetings. Teachers are doing research at all levels of education, from examining kindergartners' ability to synthesize materials to exploring adult GED students' writing improvement using journals. The positive effects of conducting research in the classroom are tremendous, and without research we are losing a valuable resource in …

Unemployment (Poem), John Gery

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ivanhoe, Chivalry, And The Murder Of Mary Ashford, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Re-Seeing Research On Response, Jane Fife, Peggy O'Neill

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Journey To An Expectation:" A Reflection And A Prayer, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

From Francis Williams in the first quarter of the 18th century to Phillis Wheatley in 1773 to C. L. R. James in 1932, to Sam Selvon and George Lamming in 1950, they pack their manuscripts and head to the Mother Country seeking the approval of the Colonialist Publisher, carrying a dream that cannot come true for the Black Colonial on this side of the ocean, certainly not in a little island where all too often people think the only artists are calypsonians or reggae stars. I can envision those budding writers setting out on what Lamming called their "journey to …

Working With Learning Disabled Writers: Some Perspectives, Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

During my career as an adult educator, I have spent a great deal of my time in the classroom trying to help my students improve their writing skills. The vast majority of my students had some type of learning disability, and trying to work with my students and approach their writing instruction in a way that would best help them became a very complex and often frustrating task both for me and for my students. It was obvious that most of them had a strong desire to enhance their writing skills, but an inordinate number of stumbling blocks seemed to …

Taking A Perspective: Hawthorne's Concept Of Language And Nineteenth-Century Language Theory, Patricia M. Roger

English Faculty Publications

English Sound Stucture [Book Review], Janet Mueller Bing

English Faculty Publications

Review of English Sound Structure, by John Harris. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

Freud's Jewish Science And Lacan's Sinthome, David Metzger

English Faculty Publications

In chapter nine of Seminar XVII, Lacan writes that the position of the analyst cannot be separated from Jewish history (158). More particularly, the invention of analytic discourse is part and parcel of a Hebraic tradition--represented by the Book of Hosea--in which one's god underscores the fact that even if everyone is speaking (let's say about sexual knowledge) this does not mean everyone is saying something. One of the defining moves of a Jewish Science, in this specific frame of reference, would be to situate the knowledge, "There is no Other," precisely where other intellectual and religious traditions establish their …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

'Judith' And The Rhetoric Of Heroism In Anglo‐Saxon England, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The Old English Judith differs from the Liber Judith of the Vulgate at several crucial points, and in one particularly important way. In the Vulgate version of the story, Judith is a heroine in every sense of the word: she is a tropological symbol of Chastity at battle with Licentiousness, an allegorical symbol of the Church in its constant and eventually triumphant battle with Satan, and an inspirational figure who infuses her warriors with much needed courage and confidence; but the Vulgate Judith is also, in a very real sense, the agent by which God's will is executed and the …

Review Of Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes Of Reading, Surfaces Of Writing, Paul Crumbley, Marta L. Werner

English Faculty Publications

In Emily Dickinson's Open Folios Marta L. Werner presents both an experimental edition of the forty holograph drafts and fragments known as the Lord correspondence and a highly suggestive analysis of this material. Werner's book proceeds from the simple seeming proposition that we must learn to see Dickinson's holographs before reading them. In this claim Werner aligns herself with Susan Howe, Martha Nell Smith, Sharon Cameron and a [End Page 111] growing list of scholars who believe that the visual complexities of Dickinson's holograph manuscripts significantly challenge generic categories such as poetry, prose, letters, and books. Werner's work most particularly …

Moore, Opal, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Moore, Opal (b. 1953), poet, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic of children's literature. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Opal Moore was influenced from childhood by the particular dynamics of the Pentecostal church; echoes of that institution reverberate in her plots, themes, characters, tone, and language. When Moore entered Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Art in 1970, she was so shocked by her first real encounter with racism and her sens~ of powerlessness in the face of it that she sought some control over what was happening to her by writing, thus initiating her first journals. She also …

New Narratives Of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, And Closure In Ernest Gaines's Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In his fiction Ernest Gaines is interested not only in deconstructing stereotypes but also in presenting new models of southern manhood, for both black and white men. While Gaines has employed traditional definitions of manhood in his fiction, the vision he presents in his most recent novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is similar to that of Cooper Thompson and other contemporary theorists of masculinity, who believe that young men must learn 'traditional masculinity is life threatening' and that being men in a modern world means accepting their vulnerability, expressing a range of emotions, asking for help and support, learning non-violent …

Edith Wharton's "Secret Sensitiveness" The Decoration Of Houses, And Her Fiction, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Surely one of the reasons that Edith Wharton lived most of her life in France was that she greatly admired the way the French "instinctively applies to living the same rules that they applies to artistic creation." Wharton believed that the French had an eye for beauty, or what she called "the seeing eye," in contrast to Americans whose sight had been dimmed by the puritanism of their Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, in her last and unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938), Wharton suggests through her American protagonist's relationship with her European governess, Laura Testvalley, that the art of seeing can be …

Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …