Arts and Humanities Commons^™

R.A., Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Medieval Dark Horse: Challenge And Reward In The Middle English Lyric, Andrew S. Marvin

English Faculty Publications

“The Medieval Dark Horse: Challenge and Reward in the Middle English Lyric” explores the genre’s history and literary merits while addressing the question of why this valuable and extensive body of literature has largely gone untapped by scholars.

The introductory sections detail the historical and modern contexts of the lyric, including the state of scholarship, manuscripts, editions, dating issues, purpose, audience, types of lyrics, and themes. This background informs a discussion of the genre’s difficulties and offers solutions with which to counter them. Close readings of eight poems are included to exemplify the lyric’s thematic range, stylistic diversity, and literary …

Are Rage Comics Really Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

A couple of years ago, some of my undergraduate students and I were talking about comics, and one of them mentioned rage comics. I hadn’t heard of that before, so I was grateful to learn about them. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a Redditor, and I don’t ever spend time on Reddit. But in August 2012, when I finally upgraded to a smart phone from my previous dumb phone, I downloaded the Rage Comics app. Every now and again, when I’m on the bus headed to work, I scroll through some of these comics.

Most of …

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.

What Can Found Art Teach Us About Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

When I first learned about found poetry, I was taught that we could encounter poetry anywhere we went. Any text could be considered poetry even if it weren’t meant to be seen as such. Later on, I learned that found poetry is also poetry that is cobbled together from other kinds of texts. There is even poetry constructed out of the speech of Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Likewise, everyday objects that weren’t meant to be art can be transformed into art, one very famous example being a urinal ‘made into’ a fountain.

Writers And Critics At The Dinner Table: Tristram Shandy As Conversational Model, Cynthia N. Malone

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Arrest Of Caleb Williams: Unnatural Crime, Constructive Violence, And Overwhelming Terror In Late Eighteenth-Century England, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

In the later eighteenth century, the twelve justices of the supreme English common law courts ruled repeatedly that blackmailing a man by threatening to accuse him of sodomitical practices constituted the capital offense of robbery; the judges focused on the overwhelming terror they claimed was unique to this threat. This legal doctrine is a covert presence in William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794). Ferdinando Falkland, fearing that his secret is about to be revealed by Caleb, accuses him of having 'robbed' him, and even though Falkland's secret is literally murder, the mutual persecution and mutual terrorizing that ensue evoke the …

Aesthetics And Ideology In Felicia Hemans's The Forest Sanctuary: A Biocultural Perspective, Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

When Is A (Comic Book) House A (Comic Book) Home?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

I recently made a rather significant move from Omaha, Nebraska to Stockholm, Sweden. I accepted a visiting lecturer position in the English Department at Stockholm University, where I am teaching a variety of linguistics courses and supervising student research projects.

One part of moving is that I had to say goodbye to my home comic book store, Legend Comics in Omaha. I had to shut down my pull file, and I already miss being able to sit in the coffee shop there, browsing comics and getting my caffeine buzz on. Back in May, Legend also hosted my book release party …

Essay Writing Instructional Lexicon And Semantic Confusion, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

“Introduction,” “body,” and “conclusion” are the most accessible words in the instructional lexicon for ESL writing teachers when they want to describe the structure of a typical five-paragraph persuasive or argumentative essay or its shorter variations for standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS. They are frequently employed to refer to the three tiers of the hamburger essay in textbooks, on classroom boards, and in YouTube tutorials.

Not surprisingly, English learners also might give you the same words if asked what the main components of an essay are. Like ESL teachers, students usually use the same terms or their equivalents …

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part Iii Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

For the final installment of this series about comics and representations of everyday life, I will be considering a short comic by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá called “Happy Birthday, My Friend!” The collection of comics is called De:TALES and its subtitle isStories from Urban Brazil, which describes the setting of each story perfectly: city streets, restaurants, night clubs, homes, art museums.

To me, the idea of a birthday seems pretty routine. After all, everybody has a birthday and birthdays happen every day. On the other hand, each person has only one birthday each year (the complications of …

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 …

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part Ii Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In my previous post on the textures of the everyday, I explored the blend of everyday occurrences during wartime. How do people who live during times of war construct their day-to-day lives?

In this post, I want to extend the notion of the quotidian to a popular web comic calledQuestionable Content. This daily comic, created by Jeph Jacques, is about the lives of urban twenty-somethings, some of whom work at a coffee shop or at a library, but all of whom are attempting to create and maintain friendships and romances as well as trying to figure out what …

A Clock And A Companion Poem To Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', Matthew Harkins

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part I Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In two separate posts on Pencil Panel Page, Qiana Whitted and Aaron Meskin have explored the way comics readers engage with images. (Click here to read Qiana’s post and click here to read Aaron’s.) Specifically, they engage Scott McCloud’s claim that readers identify with drawn images of human beings. To quote McCloud, “when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face–you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon–you see yourself” (36).

My question in this post has not to do with images but rather with narrative. When …

Force Or Fraud: British Seduction Stories And The Problem Of Resistance, 1660-1760, By Toni Bowers. (Review), Rachel Carnell, Toni Bowers

English Faculty Publications

A review of the book "Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760," by Toni Bowers is presented.

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 …

Does Alan Moore Have The (Untranslatable) Approach To Translation?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

We’ve all experienced it: that moment when we’re reading a sci-fi story or watching a sci-fi movie about alien contact and we realize that everyone is speaking the same language….usually English. Early Star Trek episodes are sometimes lampooned for this Anglo-centric stance. So the question for us is this: how does everyone know the same language?

Authors and artists approach the problem of cross-linguistic translation in multiple ways. (In this post, I’m conflating translation and interpretation under the term translation, but these are different linguistic processes.) Fans of Doctor Who, for example, know that the TARDIS facilitates the ‘automatic’ translation …

How Will We Manage The Alt Text?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

My interest in comics from an academic standpoint is how language codes function. Mostly I examine how dialogue is structured and how characters build their relationships and identities through their talk. This approach blends tenets of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. (For an example of this kind of research, see my article on The Rawhide Kid in the journal ImageTexT.)

One methodological concern for analysts who do similar work is this: how is the language in the comic best prepared for analysis? To analyze dialogue, we can create a transcript to account for typical features of conversation. For …

Does Mooch The Cat Speak French?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In the 1990s, I lived in Athens, Georgia, where I was a doctoral student in linguistics. I read the newspaper almost every day, and I started reading a comic strip called Mutts, by Patrick McDonnell. I loved the strip — the sweetness and good intentions of the dog, Earl, was paired with the slightly self-centered cat, Mooch, who also happened to be not quite as smart as Earl in many ways. These two characters are neighbors who live in an urban area that is best characterized as a city in the northeastern United States.

In the series that this …

Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries In The Digital Age, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

Contemporary representations of transgendered people often reinforce rigid gender binaries of masculinity and femininity, leading transgendered individuals to feel they must seek out hormones or surgery to “correctly align” their bodies with their gender. Cultural texts (e.g., films, television, Internet, digital texts) reinforce this “pre-op or post-op” ideology for trans identity. The pre-op or post-op MTF or FTM binary mandates an alignment with the heterosexual gender system (feminine female or masculine male). In this article, the author focuses on trans identities and how representations codify the need or desire for surgery and hormones and examines the paradoxical reification of gender …

How Do The Absurd And The Realistic Blend In Comic Strips?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

One of my favorite webcomics is Wondermark, by David Malki !. What fascinates me about the strip is how mundane, ordinary elements get combined with unexpected elements to create a strong sense of the absurd, the fantastic(al), and the unreal. Generally, the physical setting of the strip is Dickensian, often involving not much more than two or three characters in a library, parlor, or dining room. Occasionally, the characters will interact in a scientific laboratory or public place, like on a street corner. Often it’s the language of the strip that creates the absurd. The characters broach topics that …

From David Walker To President Obama: Tropes Of The Founding Fathers In African American Discourses Of Democracy, Or The Legacy Of Ishmael, Elizabeth J. West

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

[Review Of The Book: Deception And Detection In Eighteenth-Century Britain By Jack Lynch], Thomas M. Curley

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review: A Brief History Of The Soul, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A Brief History of a Soul is the story of a lively debate whose arguments, vocabulary, and even subject have evolved over millennia. In this historical narrative cum apologia, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro champion “substance dualism,” a philosophical position that asserts the ontologically distinct reality of matter and soul (or body and mind in post-Cartesian terms). They largely succeed in their efforts to be “fair and balanced” (4) and succeed in presenting a sophisticated and nuanced yet readable account of the controversy in its philosophical and, to some extent, theological and scientific dimensions. As entailed by the “Brief …

Joseph Smith, Romanticism, And Tragic Creation, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Joseph Smith, as I think historians readily recognize, has much to commend him as a Romantic thinker. Personal freedom was as sacred to him as to the young Schiller, his emphasis on individualism invites comparison with Byron and Emerson, his view of restoration as inspired syncretism is the religious equivalent of Friedrich Schlegel's "progressive universal poetry," his hostility to dogma and creeds evokes Blake's cry, "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's," and his celebration of human innocence and human potential transform into theology what Rousseau and Goethe had merely plumbed through the novel and …

Hybrid Species And Literatures: Ibrahim Al-Koni’S ‘Composite Apparition’, Susan Mchugh

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Sanguine, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

Health care in America: even my doctor lines up for the community multiphasic blood screening, rather than going to the regular lab.

It costs thirty-two dollars for the usual screen, plus ten dollars for thyroid, or PSA or B-12. The blood-drawing used to be held at the local rec park building. Now it’s at the county emergency services building, outside of town on a brand-new winding country road. They could just as well hold it at the public library, or firehouse, or agricultural center—any large room usable for voting, or the traveling reptile show, could be set up for phlebotomy. …