Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast -Retrospective Of Season 2, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

Barbara and Jessie reflect on their experiences having completed season two of The Face of War podcast.

Participants

Barbara K Robins, Assistant Professor of English, UNO

Jessie Stewart, English Graduate Student

Link to Spotify …

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast -Season 2 Episode 3: Samuel Bak, Holocaust Survivor And Artist, Part 1, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

Sam shares a few of his experiences of survival during WWII and what it means to be an artist representing displacement, survival, and hope. Following a 2019 exhibition at UNO, the artist donated more …

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast -Season 2 Episode 5: A Personal Story Of Loss, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

In an interview discussion with Harley, Barbara shares her experiences living with a US Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam and his death by suicide in 2020 after a second cancer diagnosis.

Participants in this …

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast -Season 2 Episode 4: Samuel Bak, Holocaust Survivor And Artist, Part 2, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

Sam shares a few of his experiences of survival during WWII and what it means to be an artist representing displacement, survival, and hope. Following a 2019 exhibition at UNO, the artist donated more …

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast -Season 2 Episode 1: From The Woman Veteran's Point Of View, Part 1, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

Part One – Michelle, Flower and Jessie describe their decision to enlist, the support of family, bootcamp, and how the events of 9/11 shaped their careers.

The Face of War is a podcast series …

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast: Introduction To Season Two, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

Barbara and Jessie reflect on the lessons learned in Season One including the many reasons why we need to tell our own and hear each other’s stories.

The Face of War is a podcast …

Face Of War: A Collective Narrative Podcast -Season 2 Episode 2: From The Woman Veteran's Point Of View, Part 2, Barbara K. Robins, Jessie Stewart

English Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This podcast series reflects how war impacts all of us by listening to the different perspectives of those that have lived it, understanding how the media shapes our views of war, understanding our own feelings, and learning life skills for managing stress, fear, and anxiety. Our goal is to educate, remind you that you aren’t alone, and give you tools to navigate living and watching war.

Part Two – Being female and navigating the perceptions of others while in the military during deployment and the return home.

The Face of War is a podcast series including interviews and discussions with …

Feminist Ethnographic Case Study: Financial/Emotional Stressors Of Parenting Trans-Children, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

When a child resists gender socialization, many parents struggle to understand the path forward. Even supportive parents trying to help a gender-nonconforming child navigate a gendered world experience stress. These stressors are extended to the family. Through their attempts to navigate support for their gender-nonconforming children, parents are often without support or assistance when faced with systems of institutional power such as education, medicine, and government. This case study examines the complexities of being a supportive parent of a trans-identified child and the emotional, physical, and financial stress on the parent/family, using a feminist ethnographic approach. This case study of …

Black Feminists In Serialized Dramas: The Gender/Sex/Sexuality/Race Politics Of Being Mary Jane And Scandal, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

Starring representations of African-American women on television are rare. The versions of Black feminist characters on Scandal (ABC) and Being Mary Jane (BET) create a juxtaposition between a white supremacist Black feminism (Scandal) and an Afrocentric, female-centered rendering of Black feminism (Being Mary Jane).

Student-Centered Pedagogy In The Chinese Classroom: Let’S Talk About Sexual Empowerment, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at the politics of teaching sexuality education, healthy and comprehensive focusing on issues specific to female sexuality, in the context of a Chinese university ELL classroom. Through feminist pedagogical approaches and feminist beliefs in healthy sexuality, this article explores how a university ELL classroom was transformed. As with their U.S. peers, many Chinese young people rely on unhealthy and inaccurate information about human sexuality through pornography or dubious internet searches. Through feminist pedagogical approaches that focus on student-centered learning, critical thinking, and open debate, teachers can integrate controversial topics into a classroom setting to benefit the health …

Exporting America Via Leipzig, Germany: Tauchnitz Editions And The International Popularization Of American Literature, Charles Johanningsmeier

English Faculty Publications

In the twenty-first century, making a literary work readily available and potentially famous worldwide can, via the internet, be accomplished quite easily and almost instantaneously. During the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, however, because works of fiction were published only in paper formats, and the existing means for distributing such materials and information about them were quite limited, this process was much more difficult and took considerably longer. Somewhat surprisingly, the companies that in the past actually made American literary works available to readers outside the United States have thus far received comparatively little scholarly attention. Understanding these …

World War I, Anti-German Hysteria, The “Spanish” Flu, And My Ántonia, 1917–1919, Charles Johanningsmeier

English Faculty Publications

At first glance, My Ántonia might seem to have nothing to do with World War I. Despite the fact that Cather’s fourth novel was written between the fall of 1916 and June 1918, the war is nowhere mentioned in it, and no evidence exists to suggest that Cather consciously intended to embed any type of commentary about the war within its pages. Nevertheless, My Ántonia is inextricably connected to the war, chiefly because its early sales and reception among American readers were very likely heavily influenced by the xenophobic attitudes that the war exacerbated.

Boxed Wine Feminisms: The Rhetoric Of Women’S Wine Drinking In The Good Wife, Tammie M. Kennedy

English Faculty Publications

Two contending narratives about the drinking culture of women in the twenty-first century are represented by these opening quotations. On one hand, many feminists have distanced themselves from temperance rhetorics, opting instead to disrupt a traditional gender role associated with abstinence. On the other hand, the myriad of choices afforded by feminism and the increase in alcohol consumption among women have suggested that drinking practices are a reflection of the complexities of women’s roles in the new millennium. Some other critics go as far as blaming feminism for the increase in drinking. Regardless, drinking practices function rhetorically, pointing to “questions …

Oxymoronic Whiteness: From The Whitehouse To Ferguson, Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, Krista Ratcliffe

English Faculty Publications

THIS COLLECTION ESPOUSES a rhetorical lens for employing theories and methods of whiteness studies to analyze twenty-first-century texts and contexts; as such, it argues for the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century. In particular, this collection identifies new sites for analyses of racialized whiteness, such as digitized representations of whiteness on the web and implicit representations of racialized whiteness in educational policies and politics. In the process, this collection exposes how seemingly progressive gains made in representing nonwhites in various cultural sites often reify a normative, racialized whiteness.

Comics And Linguistics, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

However we define comics, it is safe to claim that in general they consist of two main components: images and language. With some exceptions, the vast majority of comics include linguistic elements: speech balloons, thought balloons, narrative boxes, sound effects, and ambient language (language used in the background, as on store fronts, t-shirts, restaurant menus, and the like). Comics scholarship examines the language used in comics to say something about narrative, character development, even the nature of comics themselves. And while fitful linguistic analysis of comics began in the early 20^th century, only recently has the academic discipline of …

Comics And Composition, Comics As Composition: Navigating Production And Consumption, Tammie M. Kennedy, Jessi Thomsen, Erica Trabold

English Faculty Publications

Composition has a vested interest in exploring how comics studies can inform our teaching of writing, multimodal literacies, and visual rhetoric. Composition and rhetoric has already demonstrated a growing interest in comics (including graphic literatures, graphic novels, graphic narratives, digital storytelling) as complex sites of literacy and as spaces to theorize and practice multimodal composing. Comics also provide opportunities to explore the rhetorical choices and transactions that must be negotiated between composers and readers. However, despite composition scholars’ interest in multiliteracies, multimodal composing, and visual rhetoric, the interdependent and fluid connections between images and words remain largely disengaged. For example, …

Review Of Social Class In Applied Linguistics By David Block, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As Block writes in the prologue and the epilogue, the book is primarily about erasure; his motivation for writing the book is to highlight “the substantial and sometimes complete erasure of social class in applied linguistics research due to the ways in which applied linguists frame their discussions of issues such as identity, inequality, disadvantage and exclusion” (pp. ix–x). Overall, Block achieves his goal of illustrating the widespread absence of social class in applied linguistics; however, the book itself makes some missteps in exploring the very construct it claims as its focus.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter …

The Role Of Culture In Comics Of The Quotidian, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Studies of the quotidian often start from a social sciences perspective that daily life is made up of routine practices and ingrained assumptions. This is also found in studies of literature, art and economics. The premise of the quotidian, however, must be examined through a lens of culture. This essay explores how the notion of the quotidian in comics rests on culture, which in turn comprises various nexus of practice. Drawing evidence from Exit Wounds (by Rutu Modan) and Questionable Content (by Jeph Jacques), the essay extends the notion of the quotidian from a specific reference to ‘slice of life …

Which Side Are You On? The Worlds Of Grant Morrison, Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutovic, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Grant Morrison is a key figure among the first wave of authors of the so-called "British Generation" (Sandifer and Eklund). The works of the other two creators, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, have been the basis for a wealth of scholarly research within the field of comics studies and whole constellations of literary scholarship (Sandifer and Eklund; Sanders; Krueger and Shaeffer; Millidge). Morrison's fictional worlds, however, remain understudied, despite the fact that, as Marc Singer observes, Morrison's work and career seem to be evenly distributed along a continuum ranging from the alternative Vertigo material to the mainstream superhero comics (Singer …

Making And Breaking The Superhero Quotidian: How All-Star Superman Embodies And Revises The Everyday, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This essay explores the idea of the everyday in All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Scholars identify the everyday, or the quotidian, as including routine behaviors and ingrained assumptions (e.g., Borland and Sutton), and the construct of the quotidian as culture has been explored in comics (Bramlett). Depending on circumstances, characters may navigate the Metropolis cityscape or the Kent farm, take trips to the moon, explore the Daily Planet office building, and meet otherworldly heroes and villains. Even though much of the world of the superhero is extraordinary and wondrous to readers, the characters themselves nevertheless have a …

A Luminous Haze; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Plagiarism, Todd Richardson

English Faculty Publications

"I really was never any more than what I was," Bob Dylan writes in his autobiography Chronicles, "a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."1 I'd call his proclamation inefficient if that didn't imply that it gets a job done, albeit poorly. The sentence, rather, strikes me as grand­sounding balderdash. It begins with a promise of humility, after which it gradually evaporates into bleary images that never realize anything resembling actual meaning. On the whole, Dylan is exceedingly specific throughout Chronicles, recounting in detail the music …

Editorial Cartoons: Is Michael Sam Gay? Or Is He Black?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

A lot of media attention has been paid lately to the case of American football generally and the National Football League in particular. Recently, the NFL drafted its first openly gay man into its ranks, causing a great deal of celebration in some quarters and a high degree of consternation in others. As a fan of (American) football, I am interested in this story because of what it says about the social implications for individual players, team camaraderie, and the fans, too. I am thinking about this because I try to be mindful about and supportive of efforts to eliminate …

How Do Song And Speech Go Together In Comics Panels?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In my last post, I wrote about simultaneous talk in comics, exploring the way that speech balloons can be positioned in a panel to convey a sense of overlapping talk. This post continues the series on the possibilities of simultaneous discourse. However, this one asks how visual and verbal cues might tell us something about the way readers are supposed to imagine hearing the production of both speech and song in the same panel.

The first example is drawn from Full Color, a graphic novel by Mark Haven Britt. I have taught this book a couple of times, …

What's So Feminist About Garters And Bustiers? Neo-Burlesque As Post-Feminist Sexual Liberation, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

The performance art of burlesque is gaining popularity in North American culture, but with many ‘neo-burlesque’ performers, critical reflection or commentary on the politics of female sexuality is glaringly absent or summarily dismissed. Neo-burlesque could be a feminist rewriting and reclaiming of a Western dance form, which showcased women simpering sexily for her audience. However, in order for neo-burlesque to have a feminist tone, it needs to do more than incorporate women of various ethnicities and body types to transcend patriarchal scripts of female sexuality. Some neo-burlesque includes disruptions of traditional scripts regarding female sexuality that demand the audience think …

How Do Comics Artists Use Speech Balloons?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This post is the first in a series on how comics artists represent talk in comics. I’ll be writing about speech balloons and how the discipline of conversation analysis (CA) helps us understand how creative these artists can be when they try to show the intricacies of everyday talk.

Consider the following two panels. These are from the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg. (Click on each of the titles to see the full comic.)

What Roles Might Linguistic Arbitrariness Play In Krazy Kat?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Welcome to the third post in the Pencil Panel Page roundtable on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. We are glad to have found a new home here at Hooded Utilitarian, and as Adrielle said in her inaugural post, you should dive into our archives here.

Since there has been some concern expressed on the Hooded Utilitarian site about the state of linguistic analysis, I wish to start my post on Krazy Kat with a note about the linguistic analysis of comics in general. As a linguist, I am most interested in the way that linguistic codes function …

How Do Southern, Racial, And Sexual Identities Mix?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This weekend, I have the great fortune to participate in Comics Studies in the US South, a symposium held at the University of South Carolina. My talk explores the juncture of linguistic production, race and ethnicity, and sexuality in characters that are presented as Southern. It isn’t my intention to make a broad survey of comics but instead to examine two in particular, Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast, by Greg Fox, and Stuck Rubber Baby, by Howard Cruse.

The first comic, Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast, is not a comic about the South. It is set in Northport, …

Of Nazis, False-Bottomed Suitcases, And Paperback Reprints: Der Tod Kommt Zum Erzbischof (Death Comes For The Archbishop) In Germany, 1936−1952, Charles Johanningsmeier

English Faculty Publications

In Willa Cather: A Bibliography, Joan Crane provides an extremely intriguing entry for the first German-language edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, entitled Der Tod kommt zum Erzbischof. The first part of this bibliographical description is quite innocuous: “Translated by Sigismund von Radecki. Stuttgart, 1940.” Immediately after this, however, Crane states: “Note: This edition was burned by the Nazis, and the plates were destroyed. The translator carried carbon sheets of his translation into Switzerland concealed under the lining of 2 suitcases.” She then concludes the description by noting, “The edition that follows (E50) was subsequently published in Zurich” in …

Are Comics Predictive, Or Do They Simply Follow The Society They’Re Produced In?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In early August 2013, Alyssa Rosenberg posted an article about a panel discussion she attended, which was a press tour to promote a new documentary about the history of comics in the U.S. One of the panelists was Gerry Conway, who made the claim that “comics follow society. They don’t lead society.” This was in the context of a discussion about the nature of superhero comics and representations of male and female characters.

Rosenberg’s article explores the disappointment she feels with the restrictive, underdeveloped representation of women in superhero comics. I think we can also ask similar questions about representations …

Does Swamp Thing Have A Penis?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Perhaps the answer to this question depends on who is in charge of the character. While many artists have been involved in Swamp Thing story arcs over the decades, I am most familiar with the Alan Moore arc, with art by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben.

In ‘The Anatomy Lesson,’ there is an autopsy performed on the body of Swamp Thing, who is presumed to be dead and whose body has been frozen for study. The autopsy reveals structures inside the chest cavity that resemble anatomically correct human organs. However, although they look like organs, they don’t function like them. …