Digital Commons Network^™

Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn From Engagement, Shirley K. Rose, Irwin Weiser

All USU Press Publications

An important new resource for WPA preparation courses. In Going Public, Rose and Weiser moderate a discussion of the role of the writing program vis-a-vis the engagement movement, the service learning movement, and the current interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetoric and composition. While there have been a number of publications describing service-learning and community leadership programs, most of these focus on curricular elements and address administrative issues primarily from a curricular perspective. The emphasis of Going Public is on the ways that engagement-focused programs change conceptions of WPA identity. Writing programs are typically situated at points …

What We Are Becoming: Developments In Undergraduate Writing Majors, Greg A. Giberson, Thomas A. Moriarty

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Greg Giberson and Tom Moriarty have collected a rich volume that offers a state-of-the-field look at the question of the undergraduate writing major, a vital issue for compositionists as the discipline continues to evolve. What We Are Becoming provides an indispensable resource for departments and WPAs who are building undergraduate majors. Contributors to the volume address a range of vital questions for undergraduate programs, including such issues as the competition for majors within departments, the job market for undergraduates, varying focuses and curricula of such majors, and the formation of them in departments separate from English. Other chapters discuss the …

Fairy Tale Films, Pauline Greenhill, Sidney Eve Matrix

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In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. …

Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons On The Page, Stage, And Screen, Mark T. Decker, Michael Austin

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In a time when Mormons appear to have larger roles in everything from political conflict to television shows and when Mormon-related topics seem to show up more frequently in the news, eight scholars take a close look at Mormonism in popular media: film, television, theater, and books.

Some authors examine specific works, including the Tony-winning play Angels in America, the hit TV series Big Love, and the bestselling books Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith and The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. Others consider the phenomena of Mormon cinema and Mormon fiction; the use of the …

Natural-Born Proud, S. R. Martin Jr.

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A young man from Monterey and his younger brother go on their first deer hunt with their minister father and his friends. The setting is 1950s northern California, in country where, from the right height, one can see Mt. Shasta in one direction, Mt. Lassen in the other. It is a region of small, insular towns, and although it is a familiar hunting ground for the Reverend and his buddies, not everyone there welcomes black hunters. Father and son both shoulder their pride, and a racial confrontation seems inevitable.

Among the lessons young Satch learns is the sometime advantage of …

Exploring Desert Stone, Steven K. Madsen

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The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, now in Canyonlands National Park, near popular tourist destination Moab, still cannot be reached or viewed easily. Much of the surrounding region remained remote and rarely visited for decades after settlement of other parts of the West. The first U.S. government expedition to explore the canyon country and the Four Corners area was led by John Macomb of the army's topographical engineers. The soldiers and scientists followed in part the Old Spanish Trail, whose location they documented and verified. Seeking to find the confluence of the Colorado and the Green and looking …

Mule Deer: A Handbook For Utah Hunters And Landowners, Dennis D. Austin

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Mule deer are a familiar sight to residents of Utah and the Intermountain West. Sportsmen hunt them, others seek a glimpse of them while hiking or camping, drivers dodge them, and homeowners sometimes delight, sometimes fret as deer visit backyards and gardens. Deer, many of which live in the towns, cities, and farms that sprawl over their historical habitat, sometimes seem ubiquitous. Useful information about them, either scientific or practical, is less widespread. In this handbook, Dennis Austin fills that need for information, offering a one-stop reference packed with up-to-date knowledge and practical advice on mule deer. Data on deer …

Facing The Center: Toward An Identity Poltiics Of One-To-One Mentoring, Harry C. Denny

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In the diversity of their clients as well as their professional and student staff, writing centers present a complicated set of relationships that inevitably affect the instruction they offer. In Facing the Center, Harry Denny unpacks the identity matrices that enrich teachable moments, and he explores the pedagogical dynamics and implications of identity within the writing center. The face of the writing center, be it mainstream or marginal, majority or miority, orthodox or subversive, always has implications for teaching and learning. Facing the Center will extend current research in writing center theory to bring it in touch with theories now …

Japanese Demon Lore, Noriko T. Reider

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Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism, they also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctivly gendered social and cultural meanings.

Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, They remain common figures in popular …

Who Owns This Text?: Plagiarism, Authorship, And Disciplinary Cultures, Carol Petersen Haviland, Joan A. Mullin

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Carol Haviland, Joan Mullin, and their collaborators report on a three-year interdisciplinary interview project on the subject of plagiarism, authorship, and "property," and how these are conceived across different fields. The study investigated seven different academic fields to discover disciplinary conceptions of what types of scholarly production count as "owned." Less a research report than a conversation, the book offers a wide range of ideas, and the chapters here will provoke discussion on scholarly practice relating to intellectual property, plagiarism, and authorship---and to how these matters are conveyed to students. Although these authors find a good deal of consensus in …

Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence Of Helen, Owen, And Avery Woodruff, Lu Ann Faylor Snyder, Phillip A. Snyder

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These letters among two women and their husband offer a rare look into the personal dynamics of an LDS polygamous relationship. Abraham "Owen" Woodruff was a young polygamous Mormon apostle, and the son of LDS President Wilford Woodruff, who is remembered for the Woodruff Manifesto, a divinely-inspired call for the termination of plural marriage. The Woodruff Manifesto eased a systematic federal judicial assault on Mormons and made Utah statehood possible. It did not end polygamy in the church. Some leaders continued to encourage and perform such marriages. Owen Woodruff, himself married to Helen May Winters, contracted a secretive second marriage …

Folklore And The Internet: Vernacular Expression In A Digital World, Trevor J. Blank

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Folklore and the Internet is a pioneering examination of the folkloric qualities of the World Wide Web, e-mail, and related digital media. It shows that folk culture, sustained by a new and evolving vernacular, has been a key, since the Internetýs beginnings, to language, practice, and interaction online. Users of many sorts continue to develop the Internet as a significant medium for generating, transmitting, documenting, and preserving folklore. In a set of new, insightful essays, contributors Trevor J. Blank, Simon J. Bronner, Robert Dobler, Russell Frank, Gregory Hansen, Robert Glenn Howard, Lynne S. McNeill, Elizabeth Tucker, and William Westerman showcase …

The Mormon Passage Of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe For Zion, Ronald G. Watt

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Nineteenth century Mormonism was a frontier religion with roots so entangled with the American experience as to be seen by some scholars as the most American of religions and by others as a direct critique of that experience. Yet it was also a missionary religion that through proselytizing quickly gained an international, if initially mostly Northern European, makeup. This mix brought it a roster of interesting characters: frontiersmen and hardscrabble farmers; preachers and theologians; dreamers and idealists; craftsmen and social engineers. Although the Mormon elite soon took on, as elites do, a rather fixed, dynastic character, the social origins of …

Jesus In America, Claudia Gould

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Claudia Gould draws on fieldwork she conducted, as an anthropologist, in North Carolina, where she earlier spent large parts of her childhood, among a net of paternal relations. From that ethnography and from lifelong observation, she crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist Christian belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them pull us into the complicated, variable core of religious experience among southern American Christians. Jesus in America, a perceptive work rich with cultural insight, is a singular addition to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction.

Dangerous Writing: Understanding And Political Economy Of Composition, Tony Scott

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Building on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, Dangerous Writing outlines a political economic theory of composition. In addition to work by others, Tony Scott also draws from two of his own studies--a classroom ethnography of an upper division writing class that was focused on labor and institutionality, and a qualitative study of the function of textbooks within a writing program. The book connects pedagogical practices in writing classes to their broader political economic contexts, and argues that the power of students' writing is prevented from reaching its potential by pressures within the academy …

Landscaping On The New Frontier: Waterwise Design For The Intermountain West, Susan E. Meyer, Roger K. Kjelgren, Darrel G. Morrison, William A. Varga

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A practical volume for the home or business owner on landscaping with native, drought-tolerant plants in the Rocky Mountain West. Filled with color illustrations, photos, and design sketches, over 100 native species are described, while practical tips on landscape design, water-wise irrigation, and keeping down the weeds are provided. In this book you will learn how to use natural landscapes to inspire your own designed landscape--around your business or home and yard. Included are design principles, practical ideas, and strong examples of what some homeowners have already done to convert traditional "bluegrass" landscapes into ones that are more expressive of …

Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping In Action, Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler

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Educators appropriately strive to create "assessment cultures" (Huot 2002) in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators establish the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on writing assessment practice is just beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM …

Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory And Practice For Composition Studies, Jonathan Alexander

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Despite its centrality to much of contemporary personal and public discourse, sexuality remains infrequently discussed in composition courses and in our discipline at large. Moreover, its complicated relationship to discourse, to the very language we use to describe and define our worlds, is woefully understudied in our discipline. Talk and writing about sexuality surround us. Not only does the discourse of sexuality surround us, but sexuality itself forms a core set of complex discourses through which we approach, make sense of, and construct a variety of meanings, politics, and identities. In Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy, Jonathan Alexander argues for the development …

The Activist Wpa: Changing Stories About Writing And Writers, Linda Adler-Kassner

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One wonders if there is any academic field that doesn't suffer from the way it is portrayed by the media, by politicians, by pundits and other publics. How well scholars in a discipline articulate their own definition can influence not only issues of image but the very success of the discipline in serving students and its other constituencies. The Activist WPA is an effort to address this range of issues for the field of English composition in the aftermath of No Child Left Behind and the Spellings Commission. Drawing on recent developments in framing theory and the resurgent traditions of …

Exposé Of Polygamy: A Lady's Life Among The Mormons, Fanny Stenhouse

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After the 1872 publication of Exposé of Polygamy, Fanny Stenhouse became a celebrity in the cultural wars between Mormons and much of America. An English convert to Mormonism, she had grown disillusioned with the Mormon Church and with polygamy, which her husband practiced before associating with a circle of dissident Utah intellectua ls and merchants. Stenhouse's critique of plural marriage, Brigham Young, and Mormonism was also a sympathetic look at Utah's people and honest recounting of her life. Before long, she created a new edition, titled Tell It All, which ensured her notoriety in Utah and popularity elsewhere but turned …

Mormonism's Last Colonizer: The Life And Times Of William H. Smart, William B. Smart

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By the early twentieth century, the era of organized Mormon colonization of the West from a base in Salt Lake City was all but over. One significant region of Utah had not been colonized because it remained in Native American hands--the Uinta Basin, site of a reservation for the Northern Utes. When the federal government decided to open the reservation to white settlement, William H. Smart--a nineteenth-century Mormon traditionalist living in the twentieth century, a polygamist in an era when it was banned, a fervently moral stake president who as a youth had struggled mightily with his own sense of …

The Fierce Tribe, Mickey Weems

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In this ethnography that documents the folk nature of popular culture, Mickey Weems applies interdisciplinary interpretation to a subject that demands such a breakdown of intellectual boundaries. The Circuit, an expression of gay culture, comprises large dance events—gatherings, celebrations, communions, festivals. Music and dance drive complex, shared performances—electronic house music played by professional DJs and mass ecstatic dancing that engenders communitas. Other performances, from drag queens and concerts to contests, theatrics, and the individual display of muscular bodies are part of the festivities.

Body sculpting through muscle building is strongly associated with the Circuit, and masculine aggression is both displayed …

The Folklore Muse, Frank De Caro

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Folklore—the inherently creative expression, transmission, and performance of cultural traditions—has always provided a deep well of material for writers, musicians, and artists of all sorts. Folklorists usually employ descriptive and analytical prose, but they, like scholars in other social sciences, have increasingly sought new, creative and reflexive modes of discourse. Many folklorists are also creative writers, some well known as such, and the folk traditions they research often provide shape and substance to their work. This collection of creative writing grounded in folklore and its study brings together some of the best examples of such writing.

Contributors to this collection …

Living With Stories, William Schneider

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In essays about communities as varied as Alaskan Native, East Indian, Palestinian, Mexican, and African American, oral historians, folklorists, and anthropologists look at how traditional and historical oral narratives live through re-tellings, gaining meaning and significance in repeated performances, from varying contexts, through cultural and historical knowing, and due to tellers' consciousness of their audiences.

Old Deseret Live Stock Company, W. Dean Frischknecht

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In the high country of the northern Wasatch Mountains lies what is left of one of the American West's largest ranches. Deseret Live Stock Company was reputed at various times to be the largest private landholder in Utah and the single biggest producer of wool in the world. The ranch began as a sheep operation, but as it found success, it also ran cattle. Incorporated in the 1890s by a number of northern Utah ranchers who pooled their resources, the company was at the height of successful operations in the mid-twentieth century when a young Dean Frischknecht, bearing a recent …

Over The Range, Richard V. Francaviglia

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Francaviglia looks anew at the geographical-historical context of the driving of the golden spike in May 1869. He gazes outward from the site of the transcontinental railroad's completion—the summit of a remote mountain range that extends south into the Great Salt Lake. The transportation corridor that for the first time linked America's coasts gave this distinctive region significance, but it anchored two centuries of human activity linked to the area's landscape. Francaviglia brings to that larger story a geographer's perspective on place and society, a railroad enthusiast's knowledge of trains, a cartographic historian's understanding of the knowledge and experience embedded …

A Route For The Overland Stage, Jesse G. Petersen

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The 1859 exploration of the Great Basin by army topographical engineer James Simpson opened up one of the West's most important transportation and communication corridors, a vital link between the Pacific Coast and the rest of the nation. It became the route of the Pony Express and the Overland Mail and Stage, the line of the Pacific telegraph, a major wagon road for freighters and emigrants, and, later, the first transcontinental auto road, the Lincoln Highway, now Highway 50. No one has accurately tracked or mapped Simpson's original route, until now. Jesse Petersen shows in words, maps, and photos exactly …

Out Of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study In Composition And Rhetoric, Paul Butler

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Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among compositionists, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler's goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy. In so doing, he offers an important revisionist history of the field by reading it specifically through the canon of style. In addition, Butler argues that it is through style that scholars in …

Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, Luming Mao, Morris Young

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Despite tremendous growth in attention to and scholarship about Asian Americans and their cultural work, little research has emerged that focuses directly on Asian American rhetoric. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric addresses this need by examining the systematic, effective use of symbolic resources by Asians and Asian Americans in social, cultural, and political contexts. Such rhetoric challenges, disrupts, and transforms the dominant European American rhetoric and it commands a sense of unity or collective identity. However, such rhetoric also embodies internal differences and even contradictions, as each specific communicative situation is informed and inflected by particularizing contexts, by different relations …

Haunting Experiences: Ghosts In Contemporary Folklore, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, Jeannie B. Thomas

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Ghosts and the supernatural appear throughout modern culture, in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts. Popular media's commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from what people believe about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Belief and tradition and the popular or commercial nevertheless continually feed off each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from multiple angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously. They …