Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Introduction: Media Studies Has Ninety-Nine Problems…But Tyler Perry Ain't One Of Them?, Treaandrea Russworm

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

The Hype Man As Racial Stereotype, Parody, And Ghost In Afro Samurai, Treaandrea Russworm

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

The Real Things: Photographing Scenes Of The 1960s, Nicholas Bromell

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

The Believing Game Or Methodological Believing, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

The kind of thinking most widely honored is often called "critical thinking." I call it "the doubting game" because the premise is that we should test ideas by subjecting them to the discipline of doubt. It's a valuable and necessary methodology for good thinking because it trains us to find hidden flaws in ideas that sound attractive or that are widely assumed to be true.

In this essay I suggest a different kind of thinking that is equally important but little honored or even noticed. I call it the believing game because the premise is that we should test ideas …

Coming To See Myself As A Vernacular Intellectual, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

A short essay taken from remarks at the annual 2007 convention on getting the Exemplar Award. I look back over my career as an ongoing attempt to democratize writing--operating from the stance of a "vernacular intellectual" (a concept coined by Grant Farret).

Why Deny Speakers Of African American Language A Choice Most Of Us Offer Other Students?, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

Mainstream teachers commonly invite mainstream students to freewrite and use very informal language for early and mid drafts of important academic essays--and hold off surface editing till the end. This amounts to inviting mainstream students to do lots of writing in their spoken vernacular--and to wait till the end to edit into a clearly different dialect: edited ("correct standard") written English. This essay argues the same approach for speakers of African American Language--and addresses objections.

The Believing Game--Methodological Believing, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

A defintion of the believing and doubting games; a thumbnail idealized history of believing and doubting; and three arguments why we need the believing game. Paper given 4/08 at annual CCCC.

A Unilateral Grading Contract To Improve Learning And Teaching [Co-Written With Jane Danielewicz], Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

Regular grading is a problem for many reasons--but most of all because it so often harms the climate for teaching and learning. In this essay we describe and explain a contract grading system that we have found extremely beneficial to teaching and learning. It's a hybrid system. Students are guaranteed a B if they do all the things laid out in the contract. The teacher gives evaluative feedback as usual, but no teacher judgment can endanger the guaranteed grade. Grades higher than B, however, depend on teacher judgments of writing quality. The central leverage lies in designing a set of …

Voice In Writing Again: Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

"Voice in writing" has fallen into a kind of limbo as a topic: it's vexed; it's discredited by most composition scholars; it's not much written about recently; and yet it remains widely used by readers, teachers, and writers. I examine good reasons for paying lots of attention to voice when we read and teach writing; and also good reasons for ignoring it. And finally insist that we can usefully do both.

The Music Of Form, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

The concept itself of "organization" tends to be biased towards a picture of how objects are organized in space--and neglects the story of how events are organized in time. I’ll explore five ways to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I'm exploring form as a source of energy.

Vernacular Literacy, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

How our present culture of literacy serves to exclude many many potential writers--and why changing that culture is a sensible and feasible goal

The Bosom Of The Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's Belinda, Jordana Rosenberg

English Department Faculty Publication Series

Recent work in eighteenth-century studies has been notoriously preoccupied by what seem to be striking metaphorical resonances between economic and aesthetic 'spheres of practice,' but, as I argue in my paper, it is the confounding of these analogies that may be most salient. Although Edgeworth's Belinda has been frequently read as demystifying aristocratic codes by replacing sharp sociality with good-natured bourgeois instruction, I show that this text imagines the difference between bourgeois and gift economies not as the substitution of humor's instructive mirth for wit's arch conceits, but as a spectacular encounter between the two.

The Block, Nicholas Bromell

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Exploring Problems With “Personal Writing” And “Expressivism”, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

The Uses Of Binary Thinking, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

When thinkers encounter a contradiction they have traditionally tended to take one of three courses: to try to figure out which side is right; to figure out which side should be seen as hierarchially dominant; or to figure out or how to use a dialectic process synthesize them into a higher concept. In this essay I argue for the value of trying to learn to affirm both sides in all their contrariness.