Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Anthropomorphize, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

Jules is twenty-nine. She is sitting in her cold car, in a parking garage attached to the building where she works, in the concrete and leaded glass city of New Haven, the only anthropologist involved in a study of capuchin monkeys. The monkeys are being taught to exchange coins for fruit. Most of her coworkers are men, some are psychologists, and the others are economists. The economists call the monkeys “insatiable stomachs of want” and the psychologists call them “pre-capitalistic mind models” and although she knows better, Jules calls them each by human names. In the mornings, a zoology graduate …

Fruit Fly, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

A fruit fly has been hovering around my face for days, though maybe it isn’t the same fruit fly, since I’ve been told that fruit flies only live for twenty-four hours, yet there it is ...

Ursa Minor, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

In the last minutes of sleep, Nick dreamed a bear crawled out of his mouth and he woke up scratching at his beard, unsure whether he feared birth or death. He reached below the bed where yesterday’s checkered chef pants were still in a heap on the floor and pulled them on even though he wasn’t a chef. He worked at the deli in the supermarket.

Forsaken Trust, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

Book 2 in the Luce Hansen Thriller series. Third book forthcoming.

Description from the publisher:

Wallace Lake, Ohio, takes care of their own. Unwelcoming of outsiders, the community closes ranks when four women are found murdered along the water’s edge. Agent Luce Hansen of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation must find a way in before another woman loses her life to the ruthless serial killer.

With the help of her new team—a hot rookie and a smart, beautiful medical examiner—Luce uncovers a ring of devotion surrounding the prime suspect. As Luce works to unearth the dark secrets of this …

Little Mister Utah, James P. Austin

English Faculty Publications

My mother likes to tell me why she's famous. Usually it's late on some weekend night, after drinks at The Lasso, when she comes home fumbling with her keys, pressing her weight against our trailer's plastic door, falling into our little home I've made warm and snug for her, and I'll hand her the green tea I've had steeping for an hour, keeping it warm with shots from the microwave, until it's brown and thick. She plops down on that plush chair that's older than me, and she points to the faded poster of David Lee Roth, that first guy …

Leading Through Reading In Contemporary Young Adult Fantasy By Philip Pullman And Terry Pratchett, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

There’s a popular bumper sticker in some areas that reads: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” It is sometimes paired with another one: “Bibles that are falling apart usually belong to people that aren’t.” The two combine to suggest an approach to reading and religion that are at the core of my argument in this chapter: they suggest that religious reading is fundamentally anti-interpretive; that reading the Bible or other religious texts provides direct access to truth. In the young adult texts I discuss in this essay, however, the opposite is the case: while texts (of many …

Crossed, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

Book 1 in the Luce Hansen thriller series.

Description from the publisher:

Agent Luce Hansen returns home to Willow’s Ridge to catch a serial killer who has been murdering young women. It’s the case she’s been waiting for, the case that compels her to return to the small town she turned her back on nineteen years ago, the case she plans to ride from the Ohio BCI all the way to the FBI.

The case worth risking her shaky relationship with her lover, Rowan. But the horrors of the case recall the unsolved murder of Luce’s first girlfriend, and Luce …

A Swath Of Poppies, Spring Ulmer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Branded Cowboy, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

“Here is a moving story of a transgender man whose roots reach deeply into the dust of West Texas. He must choose between the woman he loves and the life he has made on his family’s ranch as a cowboy. I was impressed with how the writer chose to tell this story, with grace and nuance and heart." – Roxane Gay

Out Of Reach [Short Story], Kathleen Fowler

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Three Stories: "Permission," "Consolation," And "Presentation", Christopher Merkner

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Whitewashing Blackface Minstrelsy In Nineteenth-Century England: Female Banjo Players In 'Punch', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Blackface minstrelsy, popular in England since its introduction in 1836, reached its apogee in 1882 when the Prince of Wales took banjo lessons from James Bohee, an African-American performer. The result, according to musicologist Derek Scott, was a craze for the banjo among men of the middle classes. However, a close look at the periodical press, and the highly influential Punch in particular, indicates that the fad extended to women as well. While blackface minstrelsy was considered a wholesome entertainment in Victorian England, Punch's depiction of female banjo players highlights English unease with this practice in a way that male …

Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, And Actualized Metaphors In Mrs. Dalloway And Raymond, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

This article takes up Rita Felski’s recent call to modernists to explore how Bruno Latour’s latest work on actor-network theory might be adapted for literary studies. It examines two accounts of World War I soldiers who (allegedly) return from the dead in material form: Virginia Woolf’s fictional account of Septimus Smith, who is convinced his friend Evans has come back from the dead, and Oliver Lodge’s best-selling memoir, Raymond, or Life and Death, which recounts in detail how Lodge believed his dead son sent messages to the family to assure them of his continued material existence. That these moments …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …

R.A., Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress And Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This examination of late Victorian journalism reveals that one type of clothing offered middle-class women protection from street harassment: cross-cultural dress. In appropriate ethnic attire, reporters and social investigators ventured into the immigrant communities that made up a part of England’s urban poor, exploring such trades as Jewish fur-puller or Italian organ-grinder. This incognito ethnic attire afforded women both the means and the authority to carry out their investigations into the Italian constituency of the Victorian working poor. This study also examines how costumes enabled female investigators to manipulate class- and gender-based assumptions about who had broad access to the …

Trauma And Temporal Hybridity In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, presents an often bewildering mix of different times: images, stories, and sensations from the past blend together with present moments and even future experiences. Critics have noted this temporal blending and have cited this feature as reflecting the novel’s magical realism, or postcolonialism, or postmodernism, which are all associated with various forms of time play.¹ Indeed, as writers from Joyce to Woolf to Rushdie remind us, time is always to some extent a mixture, as the present must be understood as a complex amalgamation and negotiation of past moments. Roy’s …

The Exchange Student, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century.

Out Cold, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

Walter had just completed his five-mile route on the treadmill and was headed from the gym to his car in a nearby parking lot - he was in fact circumnavigating a field on which a few idiotic teenagers were kicking a soccer ball at a field hockey goal, so as not to approach near their game - when he was struck in the side and back of his head by something large and forceful and solid and round, and it sent his glasses flying from his face and his bright white tennis cap skittering from his head and it flattened …

Telling Old Tales Newly : Intertextuality In Young Adult Fiction For Girls, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In one of the inaugural articles in feminist literary criticism, "Feminism and Fairy Tales," Karen Rowe followed Simon de Beauvoir's lead in claiming that fairy tales structure the consciousness of girls and women, and in a negative way. As Donald Haase has noted, "In Rowe's view, the fairy tale--perhaps precisely because of its 'awesome imaginative power'--had a role to play in cultivating equality among men and women, but it would have to be a rejuvenated fairy tale fully divested of its idealized romantic fantasies" (5). In the years since Rowe's essay first appeared, however, it has been unclear whether the …

The Heart Is A Strange Muscle, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Rachel’s beeper went off just as her back began growing numb, jammed against the pieces of broken and discarded furniture in the storage room. A second later, Bobby’s went off too. She unwrapped her legs from around his sweaty back, pulled herself up to a sitting position, and groped through the jumble of clothing.

Just Man, Rica Remedios B. Santos

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Skylab, Cyan Abad-Jugo

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teach The Children: Education And Knowledge In Recent Children's Fantasy, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

This essay is an investigation into how learning is portrayed in children's books. It starts from two premises: first, that at least one origin of children's literature is in didacticism, and that learning and pedagogy continue to be important in much of the literature we provide for children today. Thus, for example, David Rudd claims that most histories of children's literature on "the tension between instruction and entertainment," and that the genre as we know it develops within, among other things, "an educational system promoting literacy" (29, 34). Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History similarly traces the origins …

Chalk Lines On The Field [Short Story], Kathleen Fowler

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Between Molecules, Then Atoms: Could This Be The End? [Short Story], Kathleen Fowler

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Short Fiction By Women In The Victorian Literature Survey, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The first time I taught a Victorian Literature survey, fresh out of a curriculum integration workshop in graduate school, I taught ten authors: five male and five female. One student evaluation after the course was over complained that despite the promise of “great” Victorian writers, half of those on the syllabus were women. While this did take place in the dark ages of the early nineties, I still find myself, as I design my syllabi, caught in the familiar conundrum as to what to teach, what to cut, and why. In my case, it seems simple: The Victorian period is …

Intertextuality And Ideology: Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' And James Fordyce's 'Sermons To Young Women', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

In Jane Austen’s Art of Memory and other works, Jocelyn Harris has demonstrated the importance of Austen’s literary contexts for understanding and appreciating Austen’s art. One context for understanding Pride and Prejudice is the conduct book it mentions by name, James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women. Mr. Collins chooses it to read aloud to the Bennet girls, and when Lydia interrupts him, he responds: “I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit.” I would argue that reading Pride and Prejudice next to Fordyce’s Sermons reveals that …

The Mill On The Floss, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The Mill on the Floss was the second novel Marian Evans published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Born in 1819 to a prosperous estate manager, Marian Evans spent her youth much as her heroine did, in reading and outdoor activities. In 1850 Evans moved to London where she worked as a translator and editor, and fell in love with the writer and editor George Henry Lewes, a married man. Contemporary marriage law prevented Lewes from obtaining a divorce from his adulterous wife; the law held that, having condoned the adultery previously, he now had no grounds for divorce. Knowing this, …