Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Our National Shame, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I spend a lot of time with my students working at soup kitchen and homeless shelters, and each winter, when it gets really cold and dark, my thoughts more often turn back to Dick. Dick died on Jan. 31, 1988. He was a veteran who served in Germany in the 1950s and was a graduate of St. John's University in New York, where his father has been an Engligh professor.

Dick had completed most of the work for his MBA during a career which included positions at Procter & Gamble, Federated Department Stores, and National Cash Register. At the time …

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, …

Death Of A Salesman In Beijing Revisited, Ou Rong, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany And Romantic Culture. A Review By James C. Mckusick, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

Book review by James C. McKusick. Truly encyclopedic in scope, Clandestine Marriage traces the efflorescence of botanical discourse in the long Romantic period, from the foundation of the Linnaean system of classification in Systema Naturae (1735) through the first publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Kelley offers a comprehensive historical view of botany as a distinct nexus of interaction between literature and science, showing how the characteristic certainties of Enlightenment science broke down under the pressure of newly-discovered plant specimens from distant parts of the world, new ways of understanding the taxonomic relationships among various plant species, and …

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 …

The Emergence Of The Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The past decade has seen a profound shift in our collective understanding of the digital network. What was once understood to be a transcendent virtual reality is now experienced as a ubiquitous grid of data that we move through and interact with every day, raising new questions about the social, locative, embodied, and object-oriented nature of our experience in the networked world.

In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones examines this shift in our relationship to digital technology and the ways that it has affected humanities scholarship and the academy more broadly. Based on the premise …

Like Grief To The Aching Side Of Love, Allison Schuette

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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. …

David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe And The Logic Of Sentimental Terror, Kevin Pelletier

English Faculty Publications

With few exceptions, contemporary criticism reads nineteenth-century sentimental fiction as a literature of love. When Harriet Beecher Stowe famously asserted that the moral growth of the nation depended on each citizen’s ability to “feel right,” she voiced a sentiment shared by many of her contemporaries. It is no surprise, then, that scholars have assumed Stowe’s injunction to “feel right” was a call to feel compassion and love, for it was ostensibly through a rhetoric of Christian love that Stowe was able to foment a passionate outcry against slavery from many of her Northern readers. Indeed, sentimentalism’s transformative potential is best …

Are More Countries On Their Way To Having A Culture Of Comic Book Readers?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

his week (starting Monday 10 June 2013), CNN is broadcasting stories every day in a series called Comic Book Heroes. The series will ‘take a look at the writers, artists, films and characters in this global industry.’ The first video in the series is called ‘The Booming World of Comic Books,’ and it is a rather wide-ranging look at the relationship between superhero comic books and the movies that are based on them.

Several men** are interviewed for this piece. Stan Lee describes superhero stories as ‘fairy tales for grown-ups. [Fairy tales] were stories about monsters and witches and …

Moral Reform In Comedy And Culture, 1696-1747 & Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, And The Rise Of Sensibility, 1670-1730. (Review), Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The article reviews the books "Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696-1747" by Aparna Gollapudi and "Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730" by Laura Linker.

Review: Childress, Alice. Selected Plays., Julie M. Burrell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Are The Properties Of Editorial Cartoons That Heal?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

On 23-24 April 2013, I attended a conference called “Images of Terror, Narratives of Insecurity: Literary, Artistic and Cultural Responses.” The conference was held by Project CILM–City and (In)security in Literature and the Media, and the organizers “aim to examine how literature, art and culture have dealt with notions of insecurity and to what extent they have provided significant challenges and responses to hegemonic discourses.” Visit this website for more information about the project and visit this site for more information about the conference.

The faculty at the University of Lisbon are not alone in their quest to understand how …

Juba’S “Black Face” / Lady Delacour’S “Mask”: Plotting Domesticity In Maria Edgeworth’S Belinda, Sharon Smith

English Faculty Publications

In Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth forges parallel subplots between Juba, a former African slave residing in England, and Lady Delacour, a wealthy and dissipated London socialite, both of whom undergo a process of domestication during the course of the novel. The connection Edgeworth creates between these characters allows her to explore a version of womanhood that promotes domesticity by negotiating the boundary between domestic and public life; at the same time, however, it reveals the anxieties surrounding this understanding of womanhood. Edgeworth’s novel configures Lady Delacour as a plotting woman who bridges the public/private divide, revealing domesticity to be as …

Clarissa: An Abridged Version (Review), Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

John Evelyn: The Forestry Of Imagination, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

John Evelyn was appointed as a founding member of the Royal Society in 1662, and in this capacity he published Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber (1664). Evelyn's Sylva foreshadows the development of a conservationist ethic in the management of forests and wildlands throughout the English-speaking world. In this treatise, Evelyn advocates the replanting of woodlands that had been devastated during the English Civil War as a means of restoring the nation's defenses, particularly its navy and merchant marine. The book describes the various kinds of trees, their cultivation, and the best use for each …

Is There A New Kind Of Hero In Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As a linguist, I am professionally devoted to the scientific study of language. But I have a confession: I used to be a literature major. As an undergraduate, I studied in a traditional English department, and I only accidentally found out about linguistics when I took a grammar class. In those literature courses, professors lectured about the different kinds of hero that have been discussed for thousands of years. In Greece, Aristotle wrote about the hero, and in the Middle Ages, the hero was construed differently. In the twentieth century, the notion of the anti-hero became possible, and writers in …

How Do Comics Talk About Love?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In recognition of Valentine’s Day, I decided to write a post about love in comics. But not any kind of love, of course, will do for this post—it should be about love across boundaries and the language that instantiates it.

Scenes from a Multiverse is a web comic by Jon Rosenberg that began appearing on the web in 2010. It explores social situations from an extraordinarily wide-ranging perspective of a multiplicity of worlds. As a satirist, Rosenberg often borrows from current events or internet memes and adapts them for his own purposes, making commentary about what he sees as social …

Being [T]Here, Dustin B. Smith

English Faculty Publications

When you awoke from the dream, in your early thirties, you knew, as you’ve never known anything else in all your seventy-plus years, that what you’d found was real. The dream began with you sitting in a church, head bowed in prayer. Your eyes opened slowly, and you noticed that you were wearing brilliantly colored, beaded moccasins. You stood abruptly, pushed open the mahogany gate that separated the pew from the center aisle of the church, and began to run. The dream then proposed a seemingly endless and entirely quotidian set of difficulties in The City, and led eventually to …

Which Is Frank’S Favorite Post By Roy?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

For my part in the retrospective, I have the pleasure of revisiting Roy’s questions to choose my favorite from. One of my top three is ‘Does the Joker Have Six-Inch Teeth?,’ and another is ‘What the $#@& is Happening to 1986?’ The post about the Joker’s dentition is a great example of Roy’s thinking about the characteristics and conventions, the very nature of comics. On the other hand, the post about 1986 dwells centrally on the relationship that comics have with audiences and, especially, the…uhm…business practices that for good and for ill run alongside.

But for …

Maps, Mythologies And Identities: Zombies And Contra-Anglo Spirituality In Edwidge Danticat’S Breath, Eyes, Memory And Angie Cruz’S Soledad, Elizabeth J. West

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Othello's "Malignant Turk" And George Manwaring's "A True Discourse": The Cultural Politics Of A Textual Derivation, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

A critique is presented of the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare, focusing on a reference from Othello's final speech to an incident in Aleppo, Syria that the author attributes to the manuscript essay "A True Discourse" by George Manwaring, a companion of English adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley. Early 17th century British history, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Queen Elizabeth I are mentioned, as well as references in the works to Turks and the censorship of English literature.

Of Ladybugs, Low Status, And Loving The Job: Writing Center Professionals Navigating Their Careers, Anne Ellen Geller, Harry Denny

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

[Review Of The Book Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays On The Plays And Other Works Edited By Philip C. Kolin], Heidi R. Bean

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale And Boccaccio's Decameron X.10, Jessica Harkins

English Faculty Publications

Many readers find that Chaucer's Clerk's Tale profoundly critiques Petrarch's methods of translation, but hesitate to claim that Chaucer knew the text Petrarch was translating: Boccaccio's version of the Griselda story from the Decameron. This hesitation goes back to J. Burke Severs's assertion that Chaucer did not know Boccaccio's text. David Wallace began to undermine this argument by drawing attention to shared textual traits of these two versions of the story, but only John Finlayson has advanced the case directly against Severs by arguing that Boccaccio must be a source. What has perhaps most prevented a shift in our reading …

Review: Twyla M. Hansen & Linda M. Hasselstrom's Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

Poems of place emerge so intimately from an intersection of landscape and culture that they couldn't exist someplace else. i Twyla M. Hansen and Linda M. Hasselstrorn's Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, Winner of the 2012 Nebraska Book Award, poetically embodies the Great Plains. These writers transport readers through high skies and over sprawling ranches and one-tavern towns, pinning stories and memories to creeks and kitchens, pies and opossums. Yet they resist "provincial" poetry; this book's emotional range-nostalgia, loss, joy, serenity-reflect broader human concerns. With its crisp subject matter, conversational writing styles, and exquisite renderings of place, Dirt Songs should …

Reading Austen's Lady Susan As Tory Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Anticipating The Neoliberal Nation: Philip Larkin And The Displacement Of Englishness, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.