Digital Commons Network^™

Conception: A Personal History, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

November 19 is Remembrance Day in Gettysburg, the day that Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead in 1863. That year in July the dead lay on the battlefield, on the farmers’ fields planted with crops and in the summer-green woods where they had taken positions behind boulders and tree trunks. Some lay covered with dirt, and others just lay bare to the weather. When land for a cemetery was set aside, the townspeople moved the dead to proper graves.

As a citizen of Gettysburg more than a century later, I carry no …

Who Was Cock Robin? A New Reading Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Much has been written about the quest of Brodber's protagonist Nellie for identity, for wholeness, for balance, for sanity, for finding her way back home into the community. Nellie's efforts to find herself and to integrate into the community will be easier, Brodber declared in a speech in 1988, "when Jane and Louisa come home, i.e., when the women find themselves" (Notes). Brodber also observed in that same speech, "'coming' rather than 'being' is the appropriate action word with which to address the issue of integration into the community," a fact suggested by the game that gives the title to …

Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, The Camera, And The Octoroon, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fritz Oelshlaeger. Love And Good Reasons: Postliberal Approaches To Christian Ethics And Literature, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

In the interest of full disclosure, Professor Oehlschlaeger identifies his purpose and intended audience at the outset of the book: "This study seeks to articulate a particular moral vision, a Christian one, and discover what it entails for reading texts." This Christian moral vision is one "marked by the specific convictions of a body of people formed by the history of Israel, Jesus, and the Church" (3), (Oehlschlaeger never specifies which church he means by this, but his appeals to the authority of Pope John Paul II and neo-Thomist philosophers and theologians Alisdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas are suggestive, as …

In Transit, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

There is the birthplace and there is the deathplace. We are in the deathplace. The deathplace is Bad Aibling, in southern Germany, just north of the Austrian border. To get here, we have driven through the Tyrol, the Italian-Austrian-German alpine region in which gingerbread houses stack up on the green slopes of valleys.

Bad Aibling sounds fitting for a deathplace, a bad place, though in fact “bad” means “bath.” As we drive on a two-lane road, we see cars parked in bunches on the grassy shoulder, and it seems people might be bathing, dipping their feet in the country creeks …

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …

Ismith Khan (1925-2002), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Trinidadian novelist who explored the conflicts experienced by East Indians in the Caribbean as well as the racial diversity that characterizes the region. A brilliant storyteller, he created memorable characters through whom the sights and cadences of Trinidad will forever live.

Bennett, Louise, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Louise Bennett, affectionately called Miss Lou, is Jamaica's most beloved folk poet, performer, and collector; she was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on September 7, 1919. Her father, a baker, died when she was seven years old, and her mother worked as a dressmaker to provide for her only child. She was educated in Jamaica at Calabar Elementary School, Excelsior High School, and St. Simon's College, after which she received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England.

Practical Ecocriticism (Review Essay), Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ezra Pound And His First Chinese Contact For And Against Confucianism, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Lorenzo Thomas (31 August 1944 – 4 July 2005), John Gery

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Robert Scholes. Paradoxy Of Modernism, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

Readers familiar with Scholes' The Rise and Fall o/English should find his latest book equally engaging. Cyril Connolly's characterization of the work of Dornford Yates, quoted with admiration by Scholes in Chapter Six of this book, might apply equally well to Scholes' own work, as it exhibits "a wit that is ageless united to a courtesy that is extinct." What Scholes finds so admirable in the phrase is "not merely its elegant syntax, but the way that the syntax balances against each other and thus emphasizes the words 'ageless' and 'extinct'-suggesting that the admirable quality of Yates' work derives from …

Our So-Called Illustrious Past, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

I went to London not to see the queen, but to find the Dutch baronet from whom we were all descended. I went as my father and forefathers and foremothers had done, to turn the crackling pages of a parish register and put my finger on our name. I went with an image of Gualter de Raedt, a young Dutchman in 1660, boarding a ship to accompany Charles the Second back to England, where monarchy would be restored. The fleet of thirteen ships sailed from Schevinengen on a flat gray sea as fifty thousand people stood on the beach to …

English Ethnicity And Race In Early Modern Drama, By Mary Floyd-Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (Book Review), Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The article reviews the book "English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama," by Mary Floyd-Wilson.

"When A Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a "psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or …