Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Inquiry Journal Facilitation: A Writing Assignment For Practicing Exploratory Speech, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

English Faculty Publications

The Inquiry Journal Facilitation is a project that helps preservice teachers develop habits of mind for engaging in critical dialogue about the situations they confront in their teaching contexts. In this project, preservice teachers compose a piece of writing that examines an idea, question, or issue that emerges from their clinical teaching site and lead an inquiry-based discussion about the ideas raised in their writing. Pairing the activity of writing with the activity of discussion creates a context for preservice teachers to create "exploratory speech" (Smagorinsky, 2013) collaboratively. In doing so, preservice teachers practice intellectual moves–framing observations, explaining those constructions, …

Suffering In Medical Contexts: Laughter, Humor, And The Medical Carnivalesque, Lisa Gabbert

English Faculty Publications

This article argues that a primary context for medical humor is a culture of suffering that permeates the medical profession and suggests that this laughter–suffering connection is part of a broader phenomenon called the medical carnivalesque that is found in medical culture.

Connecting Our Pedagogical Questions And Goals: An Exercise For Writing Teacher Development, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

English Faculty Publications

In this article, the author argues writing teachers can more fully inquire into their questions about teaching writing by paying closer attention to the ways their goals for teacher development shape their engagement in pedagogical inquiry. To explain these connections and illustrate these possibilities, the author shares findings from a narrative-inquiry study that examined the development of pedagogical inquiry in the lives of four teachers of writing. Using the participating teachers' shared goals for teacher development, the author demonstrates how writing teachers can reflect upon the development of pedagogical inquiry, stretch themselves to practice other aspects of pedagogical inquiry, and …

Together We Know A Lot: Consensus Decision Making In The Classroom, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

Student group work is common practice in many courses whether they are focused on writing theory or application. The purpose of this review is to introduce one strategy for teaching cooperative teamwork. It is easy to say to a group of students, “decide as a group…” It is less common, and I am certainly guilty of this, to provide clear directions on how to decide as a group.

Consensus decision making (CDM, or sometimes known as CBDM, consensus-based decision making) is a common strategy for making decisions as a group in collective and community organizing. Used in the classroom, CDM …

Queering Consent: Design And Sexual Consent Messaging, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

For decades, sexual violence prevention and sexual consent have been a recurrent topic on college campuses and in popular media, most recently because of the success of the #MeToo movement. As a result, institutions are deeply invested in communicating consent information. This article problematizes those institutional attempts to teach consent by comparing them to an alternative grounded in queer politics. This alternative information may provide a useful path to redesigning consent information by destabilizing categories of gender, sexuality, and even consent itself.

Expanding To The Edges: Central Numic Dual Number, John Mclaughlin

English Faculty Publications

The Central Numic (Uto-Aztecan) dual number marking system on nouns and pronouns is of interest because even though most of the component morphemes involved in the system are reconstructible to Proto-Numic, the system itself is not. Indeed, while the reconstructible Proto-Numic system is rudimentary, the Central Numic system is robust and has expanded to the point that there are few environments where dual is not marked on equal footing with singular and plural. The Central Numic system is of further interest because it involves cycles of grammaticalization and not just a single diachronic event. This contrasts with the other two …

The Burden Of Ambiguity: Writing At A Cooperative, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

Purpose: While many organizations use ambiguity to strategically build a "unified diversity" around an organization's mission, democratically managed organizations need to tread a narrow path between necessary ambiguity (which allows flexibility) and dysfunctional ambiguity (which causes disarray). To illustrate, I report a subset of findings regarding occasions when ambiguous documents had a significant impact on a democratically managed organization.

Methods: I conducted a three-phase study of a democratic cooperative. Using a mixed-methods approach, I sought to uncover the ways technical and professional communication (TPC) concerns like ambiguity and clarity function in a democratic business. In my analysis, I looked for …

Growing Pains: The Transformative Journey From A Nascent To A Formal Not-For-Profit Venture, Avery C. Edenfield, Fredrik O. Andersson

English Faculty Publications

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the …

Social Justice Across The Curriculum: Research-Based Course Design, Rebecca Walton, Jared Sterling Colton, Rikki Kae Wheatley-Boxx, Krista Gurko

English Faculty Publications

This Programmatic Showcase describes why and how Utah State University redesigned our Technical Communication and Rhetoric program to incorporate considerations of social justice across the curriculum. After describing our programmatic vision, we describe in detail the design of a pedagogical study informing our curricular redesign and then share strategies for course design and university-community partnerships. The course-design strategies include 1) explicitly framing courses around broad issues of social justice, 2) incorporating hands-on practice to connect conceptions of social justice to professional practices, and 3) facilitating opportunities for both students and clients to reflect upon these connections. The strategies for facilitating …

Emily Dickinson's Funeral And The Paradox Of Literary Fame, Paul Crumbley

English Faculty Publications

In the months preceding her death on May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson requested that Emily Brontë's poem "No coward soul is mine" be read at her funeral, thereby enlisting Brontë's defiant declaration of immortality in what can be interpreted as Dickinson's own equally defiant final statement on the relation of fame to enduring art. Dickinson expressed the logic behind this request four years earlier in an 1882 letter to Roberts Brothers editor Thomas Niles in which she refused his request for a "volume of poems" (L749b) and instead sent him "How happy is the little Stone" (Fr1570E), a poem in …

This As Theory In The Context Of The London School Stylistics: A Prolegomena To A Longer Note, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

On John Wilmot (Lord Rochester) "Upon Nothing": A London School Stylistics Account, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Virtue Is As Much Debased As Our Money”: Generic And Economic Instability In Love’S Last Shift, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

In January 1696, Colley Cibber’s first comedy, Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion, debuted to great success at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The play was a hit and immediately entered the repertory, where it remained for decades. It inspired a sequel, John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), which debuted the following season and also became a stock play. Despite early audiences’ appreciation for Love’s Last Shift, however, modern critics have shown less enthusiasm. For scholars of British drama, the play is frequently a symbol of the shift from the rakish, witty, aristocratic comedies of the …

Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics With An Ethic Of Care, Jared Sterling Colton

English Faculty Publications

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment …

Disrupting The Past To Disrupt The Future: An Antenarrative Of Technical Communication, Natasha N. Jones, Kristen R. Moore, Rebecca Walton

English Faculty Publications

This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice andinclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.

Plotting The “Female Wits” Controversy: Gender, Genre, And Printed Plays, 1670–1699, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Archives, Numbers, Meaning: The Eighteenth-Century Playbill At Scale, Mark Vareschi, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

In response to the growing prominence of quantification in the humanities, scholars of media and digital culture have highlighted the friction between the cultural and disciplinary roles of data and the epistemologies of humanistic inquiry. Johanna Drucker aptly characterizes the humanities as fields that emphasize “the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production,” while data are often taken to be representations of “observer-independent reality.” Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson likewise critique the dominant assumption of data’s transparency: data, they insist, “are always already ‘cooked’ and never entirely ‘raw.’” The choices involved in data collection and preparation are not objective; …

"Hills Like White Elephants": Epistemic, Nonepistemic And Nonseeing, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

This essay, a though-experiment, explores the value of reading literary texts (with the example of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants") from the point of view of epistemic, nonepistemic and nonseeing. Epistemic seeing is defined as seeing with "belief-content" nonepistemic seeing without it. The technique is to examine each example of the word "seeing" (or one of the members of its family, "look, watch," "blink") and let it "lead" you to the object, its contest, and implications in the story as a whole..

Asking And Understanding Questions: An Inquiry-Based Framework For Writing Teacher Development, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

English Faculty Publications

Teachers develop when they critically examine the questions they ask about their work because questions make pedagogical beliefs visible and available for critical reflection and revision. In a standards-based educational climate—a time when writing becomes a set of measurable skills rather than a complex social practice—teachers may feel that a critical examination of their questions is (at best) a luxury or (at worst) a distraction to work they need to accomplish. Therefore, writing teacher educators may find it increasingly challenging to help teachers engage in reflexive inquiry. This essay describes a Deweyian-informed framework that shows how addressing inquiries and critically …

Shots In The Dark: The Presence Of Absence In Imaginative Literature (Iw), Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

Western metaphysics and IW can be described as a search for "first" presences, not absences. With the exception of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aristotle, writers like Lord Rochester (John Wilmot), Jonathan Swift and Philip Larkin, no one, to my knowledge, has taken absence as a "first" and consequently as also a "last." This essay is a modest attempt to open the door, if only a crack, for investigations into the metaphysics and meaning of absence as a means of creating, and understanding an interesting IW—from the perspective of the presence of absence as "first" and as "last."

Demystifying The Cowboy Through His Song: How Cowboy Poetry And Music Create A Common Language Between Multiple-Use Conservationists And Forever-Wild Preservationists To Meet The Goals Of Sustainable Agriculture, Kristin Y. Ladd, Roslynn Brain

English Faculty Publications

Though multiple-use conservationists (use the land for multiple purposes) and forever-wild preservationists (solely set aside land for non-human species) seem to be at odds, this article argues that key figures such as Gifford Pinchot and John Muir discredit this perceived discordance. As well, it probes into the unexplored arena of cowboy music gatherings as productive places for cooperation between the two groups. First, mystique of the cowboy is examined and unraveled through true stories of cowboy-environmentalist collaboration. The article addresses how cowboy poetry festivals function as entertainment and meeting places to support sustainable behavior through communitybased social marketing techniques.

An Infusion Of The Modern Spirit Into The Ancient Form:’ Textual Objects And Historical Consciousness In George Eliot’S Romola., Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

In George Eliot’s Romola, manuscripts represent the ability of objects to embody the past. Through various characters’ interactions with manuscripts, Eliot explores competing ways of using and valuing history, from Bardo’s obsessive collecting to Savonarola’s ideological co-optation. As the story progresses, however, manuscripts all but disappear and are replaced by printed texts. Through this depiction of technological change, Eliot advances her case for a particular kind of historical consciousness, one that engages critically—rather than fetishistically or opportunistically—with the past. Print, Eliot suggests, allows history to become widely accessible for public consumption, thereby weakening the aura of the past and allowing …

Review: Peter Mcdonald, "The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship And Its Cultural Consequences", Shane Graham

English Faculty Publications

Censorship has, of course, been much discussed in South African literary studies. But Peter McDonald's The Literature Police is a groundbreaking book in two ways: first, it is to my knowledge the first book to attempt a comprehensive historical overview of censorship in apartheid South Africa and its effects, not just on writers, but on publishers, literary journals, writers' organizations, and other key institutions. Second, it is the first text to look closely and methodically at the paper trail left behind by the Board of Censors to analyze precisely which texts were banned and the reasons given. The Literature Police …

Frenchifying The Frontier: Transnational Federalism In The Early West, Keri Holt

English Faculty Publications

The antebellum West was a hotbed of literary activism. Western presses published more than one hundred local newspapers and literary magazines from the late 1820s through the 1850s. Cities such as Vidalia, Lexington, Marietta, New Orleans, and Cincinnati were thriving literary centers, boasting numerous bookshops, libraries, theaters, and literary societies, including the Semi-Colon and Buckeye clubs of Cincinnati, where members exhibited their western pride by discussing the work of local authors while drinking beverages from buckeye bowls.¹ The “West” at this time was located much closer east and south than the West we know today. It encompassed, roughly, the …

Literature And Popular Culture In Early Modern England, Phebe Jensen

English Faculty Publications

"All students of popular culture," Tim Harris wrote in 1995, "would acknowledge the intellectual debt they owe to Peter Burke's seminal study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe." (1) Now in a third edition with substantial revisions and a new preface, the book defines "popular culture" as the culture of "ordinary people," which included "folksongs and folktales; devotional images and decorated marriage chests; mystery plays and farces; broadsides and chapbooks; and, above all, festivals...." Burke's central claim was that in 1500, the elite were culturally "amphibious," participating in this popular "little tradition" but also in the "great tradition" of the …

Dickinson, Blake, And The Hymnbooks Of Hell, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

Many early critics found affinities between William Blake and Emily Dickinson in their radical disruption of poetic language, their penchant for gnomic utterance, and their cryptic imagery that hinted at a complex private mythology, all of which contributed to a view of Blake and Dickinson as mystics or poet-prophets with a message accessible only to initiates. Later twentieth-century scholarship, however, turned toward a closer investigation of the cultural milieu in which Dickinson and Blake produced their poetry—in particular, their relationship to the Protestant hymn tradition exemplified by Isaac Watts. Scholars have examined the ways in which Dickinson and Blake individually …

Supporting Paraprofessionals, Virginia Exton, L. Foley

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Weavings Of War, Fabric Of Memory,” An Exhibit Review, Lisa Gabbert

English Faculty Publications

Weavings of War, Fabrics of Memory is an exhibition of international textiles spanning a number of countries and ethnic/linguistic groups. Bound together by the themes of war, armed conflict, displacement, and rupture, works in the exhibit include post-apartheid South African memory cloths, Hmong story cloths, arpilleras from Chile and Peru, and war rugs from Central Asia. I brought the exhibit to Logan, Utah, in the fall of 2007 and organized lectures and films around it. It was displayed at the Thatcher-Young Mansion, the final stop on its three-year tour. An exhibit catalogue of the same title was edited by Ariel …

Review Of Quotidiana By Patrick Madden, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of ‘Competitive Irish Dance: Art, Sport, Duty’, Christie L. Fox

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.