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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Trial Of The (Eighteenth) Century: Active Learning And Moll Flanders, Ann Campbell
The Trial Of The (Eighteenth) Century: Active Learning And Moll Flanders, Ann Campbell
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
Like every professor of eighteenth-century British literature I know, I find it challenging to fill undergraduate courses in my field. The English majors who have satisfied the prerequisites for 300-level period-based courses tend to gravitate to classes they assume will straightforwardly address their concerns and reflect their experiences. Consequently, courses on eighteenth-century authors such as Daniel Defoe often get cancelled while surveys of post-modernism thrive. I have tried obvious tactics, such as revising the title of a typical eighteenth-century literature course to “Hellions and Harlots in Eighteenth-Century Novels” or teaching episodes of Survivor alongside Robinson Crusoe, to increase enrollment …
Gothic Nature Revisited: Reflections On The Gothic Of Ecocriticism, Tom J. Hillard
Gothic Nature Revisited: Reflections On The Gothic Of Ecocriticism, Tom J. Hillard
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
The 2017 ‘Gothic Nature I’ conference in Dublin, Ireland, and the launch of the new journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic present an occasion to reflect on how the entangled fields of ecocriticism and Gothic literary studies have developed and evolved over the past decade. While ecocritics have historically been slow and at times reluctant to embrace Gothic texts and approaches, in recent years that has begun to change. This essay argues that the development of ecocriticism itself can been read as a type of Gothic story. If imagined figuratively as if it were a horror …
Using Reflection To Facilitate Writing Knowledge Transfer In Upper-Level Materials Science Courses, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler
Using Reflection To Facilitate Writing Knowledge Transfer In Upper-Level Materials Science Courses, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
When students enter upper-level engineering courses, they may bring with them unclear or inconsistent approaches to writing in engineering. Influenced by their past experiences with writing, students encountering engineering genres such as reports and proposals may struggle to write successfully. They may struggle in part because of the messiness inherent in writing knowledge transfer: a student who successfully completed freshman composition may still be unable to transfer skills, habits of mind, and approaches to writing from that setting to engineering because the rhetorical situations look drastically different. Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak define transfer as a “dynamic rather than a static …
Administration, Emotional Labor, And Gendered Discourses Of Power: A Feminist Chair’S Mission To Make Service Matter, Michelle Payne
Administration, Emotional Labor, And Gendered Discourses Of Power: A Feminist Chair’S Mission To Make Service Matter, Michelle Payne
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
Michelle Masse’ and Katie Hogan’s edited collection, Over Ten Million Served (2010), argues that “complaining about service is not the same as critically analyzing service as a significant dimension of academic labor” (15). Nor, as Phillips and Heinert argue, is the admonition to “just say no” an ethical solution to the gendered inequity of academic labor. In this essay, I not only illustrate the consequences of saying yes to service and analyze its significance, but I illustrate the ways that service positioned me to advocate for change at my own institution. More specifically, I focus on the unique administrative role …
Story, Discourse, And The Voice Of The Other In W. S. Merwin’S The Folding Cliffs, Jeff Westover
Story, Discourse, And The Voice Of The Other In W. S. Merwin’S The Folding Cliffs, Jeff Westover
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
In The Folding Cliffs, a narrative poem with a novelistic scope, W. S. Merwin reflects on poetic thinking by availing himself of the tools of narrative. He not only depicts historic injustice against indigenous Hawaiians but also tropes the form of his storytelling to assess the history it relates and its ethical implications. To promote this assessment, Merwin inculcates a judicious self-questioning in his readers by means of his narrative structure, which emphasizes the discrepancy between plot and story. By making readers keenly aware of the mechanics of his storytelling, Merwin offers a model of narrative ethics that respects …
"A Vision Of Greyness": The Liminal Vantage Of Illness In Heart Of Darkness, Cheryl Hindrichs
"A Vision Of Greyness": The Liminal Vantage Of Illness In Heart Of Darkness, Cheryl Hindrichs
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
In Heart of Darkness, illness and physical vulnerability provide a sense of defamiliarization that enables what Virginia Woolf described as the exile's perspective, which in turn allows for a critique of normative regimes. Marlow's outsider perception of the physical qualities of imperialist Europeans in contrast to subjugated native Africans suggests an ambivalent aesthetic morality that is characteristic of modernist irony. This ambivalence is particularly significant in the frequently overlooked scene in which Marlow falls ill and nearly dies. The perspective Marlow acquires in his own experience of illness ultimately frames both his final encounter with Kurtz and with the …
Repression, Renewal And 'The Race Of Women' In H.D.'S Ion, Jeff Westover
Repression, Renewal And 'The Race Of Women' In H.D.'S Ion, Jeff Westover
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
Steven Yao has called H.D.'s Ion her 'most ambitious feat of translation' (2002a: 83). Two contexts are relevant for thinking about H.D.'s work on this project. One is psychoanalysis, and the other is the scholarship which interprets myth as a narrative reflection of ritual practice. Both contexts are significantly tied to H.D.'s personal life and writing career. Matte Robinson even claims that one of the major characters in the play, Kreousa, 'becomes an extension of H.D.' (2013: 270). This claim may be overstated, but Kreousa's quest for recognition from Apollo does resemble H.D's effort to supply her daughter, Perdita, with …
Wallaceward The American Literature Survey Course Takes Its Way, Ralph Clare
Wallaceward The American Literature Survey Course Takes Its Way, Ralph Clare
English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations
Finding a comfortable fit for David Foster Wallace's work in the American literature survey is a challenge that raises a host of questions regarding Wallace and American literature itself. Wallace criticism has tended to situate his oeuvre in relation to postmodernism in general and, more specifically, to postmodern metafiction. This is an important critical task, to be sure. Like many, I have taught Wallace's stories, essays, and novels in an array of courses, including twentieth-century American literature, postmodernist literature, and the single author course, all formats in which I had a luxurious amount of time to get students acquainted with …