Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Black Range Christmas Tree, Thomas Lynch

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Driving north from Las Cruces on I-25, one departs the relative green of the sheltered town of tree-lined streets and enters stark desert. The view while skirting the southern edge of the Jornada del Muerto is hardly promising for an expedition, like ours, in search of a Christmas tree.

Reading Space As Time In Great Plains Recollective Architecture, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

It is a long way from Black Elk's tipi to the Stuart building. Clearly most cultures and periods impose one or more narrative plots on time and space (I have written of four that were part of the recent past of this state). It may be that we will need soon to return again to a celebration of the cyclical in our architecture. If the ethos of domination that goes with linear, progressive notions of time is as destructive to our environment as the Club of Rome (and other successor study groups looking at the future of the planet) have …

At Risk In The Writing Classroom: Negotiating A Lesbian Teacher Identity, Irene G. Meaker

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

"Education is a fearful enterprise," says teacher and philosopher, Parker Palmer. Student-centered/ processoriented pedagogy asks teachers to step out from behind the relative safety of the teacher mask and to enter the risky arena of learning. For the writing teacher, a special challenge is to help students negotiate the risks inherent in the act of writing and in sharing writing with the "Other."

To prevent fears from dominating our students, teachers must model risk-taking and risk negotiation. In my own teaching, my fears around students' reactions to learning my sexual identity meant that I more often reinforced fears than dispelled …

"Searching For The Route Of Inventions": Retracing The Renaissance Discovery Narrative In Gabriel García Márquez, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

If, as Harold Bloom suggests. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a "supreme fiction," it achieves that status as it reformulates early modern narratives of self-discovery and dominion. Garcia Márquez signals his intention of rewriting the great Renaissance narratives of discovery when he begins his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech with an account of Antonio Pigafetta's Viaggio attorno al mondo (1522). As a navigator aboard Magellan's 1519–21 voyage around the world, Pigafetta kept a log that Garcia Márquez categorizes as an ancestor "of our contemporary novels." Where many Latin American writers might describe their work as postcolonial. García Márquez …

Racing (Erasing) White Privilege In Teacher/Research Writing About Race, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In this essay, I examine several spheres of “race construction” and the ethical implications of these constructions for how I—as a white composition teacher/researcher—named, described, and interpreted student response in a dissertation chapter I wrote on a student discussion of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye within a writing course focused on “difference.” This essay describes my own process of coming to understand the ways that my readings of classroom events were/are shaped by my position as a white teacher/researcher and the implications for understanding what naming these moments might mean for others engaged in composition research. In particular, I examine …

"Links Of Similitude": The Narrator Of The Country Of The Pointed Firs And Author-Reader Relations At The End Of The Nineteenth Century, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs is an elusive figure. A narrator who is also a character in the fiction, she nevertheless reveals very little about herself as a character in the course of her narration. She is the unnamed speaking "I," and she is "you" to Mrs. Todd and other characters. Although the narrator apparently travels to Dunnet Landing from a city, we don't know where she lives the rest of the year; and we can only assume from her time spent in the schoolhouse engaged in "literary employments" that she writes for pay. But critics …

Literacy Practices At The Genoa Industrial Indian School, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Despite an abundance of scholarship on federal Indian boarding schools, few studies have focused on literacy as a central term for investigation. Although literacy studies is necessarily interdisciplinary and contributes to insights about the relationship between language and, in Levinson and Holland's words, the "cultural production of the educated person," few Indian boarding-school histories have focused on the significance of particular literacy practices for understanding Indian students' school experiences. When literacy is discussed, it is usually in terms of the federal "English only" requirement that prohibited Indian languages or the drill and rote exercises used in the primary language curriculum. …