Digital Commons Network^™

Reflections On The Victorian(Ist) Impulse To Totalize Africa, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

IN this essay, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. In doing this, I respond to what Sukanya Banerjee, our panel organizer, asked us to do in determining the focus for our essays—namely, that we direct “attention to topics in Victorian studies that [we] feel might otherwise be overlooked or viewed differently.” In what follows I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural and social reality …

Joining A Conversation Research Project, Nicole Green, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented.

Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of …

Interpretation And Ovidian Myth In Alexander’S Bridge And O Pioneers!, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay describes interpretive strategies widely applied to Ovidian mythic materials during the period of Cather’s early career, especially those operative in Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! The article assumes that widely held conventional interpretations of myths, in this case Ovidian myths, in a specific time and area are part of their semantic content, or iconology, and are tools Cather used in communicating with her audience. The essay then looks at a passage in the 1912 Alexander’s Bridge and two disputed passages in the 1913 O Pioneers! along with extended Bacchic themes in the latter novel that employ conventional Ovidian …

Idiomatic Surrogacy And (Dis)Ability In Dombey And Son, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To assert that Charles Dickens possessed a mastery of language unique among nineteenth-century novelists for its vernacular inventiveness is hardly controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms lists Dickens among its most cited sources (others include the Bible and Shakespeare). Dickens’s use of ordinary, unembellished, and what Anthony Trollope termed vulgarly “ungrammatical” lower-class language sets his novels apart in style and tone from those of his famous peers (249). William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy and others – despite their many differences – generally composed their fiction in higher, more formal linguistic registers than …

Reading Ability, Study Habits And Students’ Academic Performance In Social Studies, Juliana Uloma Iheakanwa, Sunday Obro, Williams Pius Akpochafo

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study investigated reading ability, study habits and students’ academic performance in Social Studies. The study was an expos-facto study. The researcher employed a stratified and multi-sampling technique to sample 1103 students. The questionnaire was the instrument utilised to gather data. The Cronbach Alpha was utilised for the determination of the instrument reliability, and a reliability value coefficient value of 0.78 for Reading Fluency, 0.90 for Passage Recall and 0.92 for question Answering and 0.76 for Study habit was obtained. Data generated were evaluated employing correlation co-efficient of determination for the research questions, while the multiple regression and linear regression …

“Because Like – And So I Don’T – So I Think It’S Maybe, I Don’T Know”: Performing Traumatic Effects While Reading Lynda Barry’S The Freddie Stories, David Lewkowich, Michelle Miller Stafford

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

As a picture of childhood composed from the point of view of a young boy named Freddie, who suffers the effects of repeated and ongoing trauma, the experience of reading The Freddie Stories presents a number of interpretive challenges: its main character is often split and in various states of disassociation, the difference between dreaming and waking life is not always obvious, multiple monsters appear in different and changeable forms, and as Freddie experiences repeated difficulties with language and cognitive function, his traumatic past enfolds upon the time in which the story is set. In this paper, we analyze how …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

Feeling It:Toward Style As Culturally Structured Intuition, Keith Rhodes

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I have been moved to write a serious article about teaching style not because I have great and earth-shaking method to impart, but in some sense because I do not, even after years of study—including the small bit of empirical research at the core of this article. Style, as it turns out, remains as difficult, complex, and ultimately intuitive as most of the rest of writing. I hope, ultimately, to encourage writing teachers to focus more attention on style, basing approaches on what we already know rather than waiting and hoping for some flawless system to materialize. Indeed, by the …

Walt Whitman At The Aurora: A Model For Journalistic Attribution, Kevin Mcmullen, Stefan Schöberlein

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit- manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

Foreword To D.W. Robertson, Jr., Uncollected Essays, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

During the late summer of 1992, I received a call from Darryl Gless, a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of North Carolina and my former student, asking me if it would be all right if he and other people looking after the literary remains of D. W. Robertson would send me a package of published and unpublished articles that Robertson had left behind upon his death in July of that year. Gless had been a friend of Dr. and Mrs. Robertson in Chapel Hill, visiting with them frequently while trying a bit to look after their well-being in …

When Children Are Water: Representation Of Central American Migrant Children In Public Discourse And Implications For Educators, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Since June, 2014 when the U.S. government began to document an increase in unaccompanied/separated children arriving in the United States from Central America, these children have become a frequent topic in media discourse. Because rhetoric about immigration issues have been shown to affect schooling of these children, the present paper aims to examine how these children are represented in the discourse of one community. Findings from this critical multimodal discourse analysis reveal multiple strategies of representation that result in the dominant metaphor of IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE DANGEROUS WATER and negative perceptions that have implications for the education of these students.

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Travels (1613) In A Global Context, Kaya Sahin, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his travels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly …

Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’S Relation Of His Trauels (1613) In A Global Context, Julia Schleck, Kaya Sahin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Despite various attempts by literary theorists and historians to find more integrative ways of studying early modern societies and cultures, fairly essentialist notions of the difference between Europe and the rest of the world continue to persist in scholarship. The assumption of fundamental differences then leads to a search for sundry misperceptions, misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and other skewed representations in early modern texts, particularly in those produced by European travelers. Similarly, studies on cultural, ideological, religious, and intellectual exchanges have not always been able to transcend approaches that solely focus on encounters, a word that sometimes implies haphazard meetings and difficult …

Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation To Pragmatics, Critique, And Trends, Linda R. Waugh, Theresa Catalano, Khaled Al Masaeed, Tom Hong Do, Paul G. Renigar

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This chapter introduces the transdisciplinary research movement of critical discourse analysis (CDA) beginning with its definition and recent examples of CDA work. In addition, approaches to CDA such as the dialectical relational (Fairclough), sociocognitive (van Dijk), discourse historical (Wodak), social actors (van Leeuwen), and the Foucauldian dispositive analysis (Jager and Maier) are outlined, as well as the complex relation of CDA to pragmatics. Next, the chapter provides a brief mention of the extensive critique of CDA, the creation of critical discourse studies (CDS), and new trends in CDA, including positive discourse analysis (PDA), CDA with multimodality, CDA and cognitive linguistics, …

Teaching Attentive Reading And Motivated Writing Through Digital Editing, Amanda A Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though English departments, including my own at the University of Nebraska, have been teaching digital humanities (DH) courses for over a decade, hyperbolic claims about the perils and promises of using computers in the study of literature continue to appear in the press. A piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books likens the algorithms used by some digital humanities methods to fascism (Marche). Another, in The Huffington Post, compares the rise of digital humanities to “our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks” (Mohamed). On the other hand, digital humanists such as Franco Moretti, who famously promote “distant reading” as opposed …

The Shape Of Catharine Sedgwick's Career, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her first novel in 1822 and her last in 1857. Her productivity slackened in the 1850S, as aging weakened her eyesight and arthritis made it difficult to write clearly. However, from 1822 through the 1840s, she published multiple works of prose fiction (tales, sketches, novellas, or novels) nearly every year. Despite this extraordinary record of productivity, Sedgwick regularly appears in literary history as the author of a single work, Hope Leslie (I827), her historical novel about relations between the Puritans and the native inhabitants of New England. A few other women authors before and contemporary with …

Cold War Legacies In Digital Editing, Amanda A. Gailey

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The editorial methods developed during the Cold War professionalized scholarly editing and appealed to new ideas about the relationship between American academics and the government by aligning with the supposedly value-neutral goals and methods of the behavioral sciences, much to the discomfort of many humanists. Some of the implicit assumptions underlying midcentury editorial methods persist in digital editing, and may risk positioning digital editions as marginalized scholarship within the digital era, just as print scholarly editions became widely considered second-rate scholarship in the twentieth century.

Rethinking Digital Editing Practices To Better Address Non-Canonical Texts, Amanda A Gailey

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This article stems from my recent work on Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age (RCLGA),1 a digital archive that aims to provide a heavily annotated resource for scholars and students of literature, history, African American studies, visual communication, and education to examine how adults wanted children to think about race during the era of Jim Crow. I edit the archive with Gerald Early, Professor of Modern letters, English, African studies, and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and D. B. Dowd, Professor of Communication Design and American Culture Studies, also at Washington University. When complete, …

Editing Harriet Beecher Stowe’S Uncle Tom’S Cabin And The Fluid Text Of Race, Wesley Raabe

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

I suspect that many scholars begin to edit a work by accident: I begin with the anecdote of how I became an accidental editor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in academic year 2002. I had read not a single work by Harriet Beecher Stowe when I was admitted to the Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia. During my first semester, I was often at Alderman Library’s Special Collections floor to subject a copy of Delariviér Manley’s Memoirs of Europe (1710) to bibliographical analysis. I was reading Stowe’s work in another course, was already in Alderman for the Manley work, and …

"Good English": Literacy And Institutional Systems At A Community Literacy Organization, Charise G. Alexander

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the impact of institutions and the systems and communities of which they are a part on literacy instruction, practices, and rhetoric at a community literacy organization in Lincoln, Nebraska. A majority of students served by this organization are adult English Language Learners, many of whom receive instruction from volunteer tutors. In this unique context, a number of factors affect literacy learning, particularly the perpetuation of conservative, hegemonic discourses about literacy by the organizations which fund literacy education programming at this site.

The power dynamics at work in these granting organizations and in larger systems that control and …

Review Of Irish Immigrants In The Land Of Canaan: Letters And Memoirs From Colonial And Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. Written And Edited By Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, And David N. Doyle., James M. Perry

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The Irish Diaspora and the influx of Irish immigrants to North America have received much attention in recent decades. The multitudes of Irish- Catholics arriving in the middle nineteenth century in the aftermath of Ireland’s Potato Famine have received the majority of this scholarly attention. In Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle tackle an often overlooked aspect of the Irish migration to North America, the largely Protestant immigrants arriving before the American Revolution and in its immediate aftermath. Using letters, and occasionally other sources such as personal …

Review Of The Moravian Springplace Mission To The Cherokees, Volume I, 1805–1813 And The Moravian Springplace Mission To The Cherokees, Volume Ii, 1814–1821. Edited And With An Introduction By Rowena Mcclinton; Preface By Chad Smith., Angela Pulley Hudson

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Noted historian William G. McLoughlin once observed that in addition to mirroring U.S. political structures, the nineteenth-century Cherokee Nation shared two other trends with the young Republic: slavery and Christianity.1 Indeed, even as Cherokee people fought to retain their eastern lands in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they often adopted the ideologies of the land-hungry Americans they tried to resist. Few sources document this complex and contradictory process more vividly than The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees. Rarely do Cherokee, Christian, and slave histories appear in such intimate relation to one another. In the secondary works on …

Recent Editions, Linnéa Caproni

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This semiannual bibliography of documentary editions recently published in the fields of American and British history, literature, and culture is generally restricted to scholarly first editions of English language works. In addition to the bibliographical references, Internet addresses are provided for the editorial project or the publisher.

Chaos Is The Poetry: From Outcomes To Inquiry In Service-Learning Pedagogy, Shari J. Stenberg, Darby Arant Whealy

Department of English: Faculty Publications

It is no secret that the contemporary university values a model of efficiency, of tangible, quantifiable outcomes. Jan Currie and Lesley Vidovich (qtd. in Downing, Hurlbert, Mathieu 9) contend that since the 1980s, the boundaries between higher education, government, and business have largely deteriorated, and business discourse of "excellence" has come to dominate university culture. Consequently, output, outcomes, and efficiency are valorized over and above process, inquiry, and the inevitable tensions of learning. Stanley Aronowitz puts it this way: "[A]cademic leaders chant the mantra of excellence . . . [which] means ... all parts of the university 'perform' and are …

9. Regionalism And The Realities Of Naming, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Complications seem inevitably to arise whenever one tries to define either regionalism in general or any specific region like the South or the Great Plains or to categorize the art and artifacts that come from or relate to that area by means of such language. Commentators occasionally try to take the easy way out of these taxonomic difficulties by simply declaring that “writing is writing,” by which reductive expression they apparently mean that all writing is “universal” in nature (the local manifestation of some “universal language”) and that, therefore, all that varies from “region” to “region” is the inflection. Inflection …

Documentary Editing, Volume 29, 2007-- Front Matter

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Cover--View of Richmond, Virginia Canal in 1864--Title page--Publication Information--Contents--Contributors

Scholarly Editing As A Dissertation Topic: Philological Perspectives On Documentary Editing In Theory And Practice, Harry Lonnroth

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The doctoral dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Scandinavian Languages that I duly defended in public at the University of Tampere, Finland, was a so-called philological edition3 for the period of 1678-1695 of the judgment book of the town of Ekenas,4 a Swedish-speaking town in southern Finland:" The scholarly edition includes philological commentary and indices for persons, places, subjects and cases. It constitutes a legal-historical document, which, I hope, will prove to have a long lasting philological and historical source value in both the Finnish and the Scandinavian perspective. (; Before I go on to discuss in …

Documentary Editing, Volume 29, 2007.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.

Documentary Editing, Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 2005.

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

No abstract provided.