Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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. …

Catharine Trotter And The Claims Of Conscience, Joanne E. Myers

English Faculty Publications

Although Catherine Trotter, later Cockburn, has begun to receive increased critical attention, the role of religious themes in her writing remains largely unexplored. A key tendency in critical accounts, in fact, has been to ally her with the secular contractarian philosophy of John Locke, whom she defended in print. Biographical evidence suggests, however, that Trotter was not unconcerned with religious questions; raised an Anglican, she converted to Catholicism in her youth and returned to the Church of England in her early thirties. Her later philosophical works remain preoccupied with theological issues, notably voluntarism. This article proposes that we can identify …

Með Lögum Skal Land Vort Byggja: ‘With Law Shall The Land Be Built.’ Law-Speaking And Identity In The Medieval Norse Atlantic, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Gwyn Jones famously posited the notion of a cogent Norse identity as manifested by common language, culture, and mythology; further, as he clarified in his landmark work A History of the Vikings, law and the practice of law in local and national assemblies was a fundamental component of such a unifying cultural characteristic: "…for the Scandinavian peoples in general, their respect for law, their insistence upon its public and democratic exercise at the Thing, and its validity for all free men, together with their evolution of a primitive and exportable jury system, is one of the distinctive features of their …

Defoe And The Project Of "Neighbors Fare", Joanne Myers

English Faculty Publications

This article argues that Daniel Defoe’s essay, Upon Projects (1695), works to imagine and restore neighborly connections amongst people increasingly distances from one another due to social and economic changes in Restoration life. Although Defoe’s novels are often understood to promote a typically modern individualism, his social-improvement projects present an alternative view of Defoe as committed to a robust sociability.

Wayward, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

It’s hard to imagine, now, how it was that I took up with that boy in South Carolina, but facts are facts. William Buchanan Redmond was lawless and drawling, full of sideways glances and outrageous proposals. He went by Cannon.

One night on Hilton Head Island, where I was staying with a friend’s family (thanks to private school I had friends with houses on Nantucket, etcetera, though I lived in a modest house with my mother and sister that we were renovating to resell), he approached me at an outdoor concert. A guitarist was playing a sing-along rendition of “Take …

The Exchange Student, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Conception: A Personal History, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

November 19 is Remembrance Day in Gettysburg, the day that Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead in 1863. That year in July the dead lay on the battlefield, on the farmers’ fields planted with crops and in the summer-green woods where they had taken positions behind boulders and tree trunks. Some lay covered with dirt, and others just lay bare to the weather. When land for a cemetery was set aside, the townspeople moved the dead to proper graves.

As a citizen of Gettysburg more than a century later, I carry no …

In Transit, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

There is the birthplace and there is the deathplace. We are in the deathplace. The deathplace is Bad Aibling, in southern Germany, just north of the Austrian border. To get here, we have driven through the Tyrol, the Italian-Austrian-German alpine region in which gingerbread houses stack up on the green slopes of valleys.

Bad Aibling sounds fitting for a deathplace, a bad place, though in fact “bad” means “bath.” As we drive on a two-lane road, we see cars parked in bunches on the grassy shoulder, and it seems people might be bathing, dipping their feet in the country creeks …

Our So-Called Illustrious Past, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

I went to London not to see the queen, but to find the Dutch baronet from whom we were all descended. I went as my father and forefathers and foremothers had done, to turn the crackling pages of a parish register and put my finger on our name. I went with an image of Gualter de Raedt, a young Dutchman in 1660, boarding a ship to accompany Charles the Second back to England, where monarchy would be restored. The fleet of thirteen ships sailed from Schevinengen on a flat gray sea as fifty thousand people stood on the beach to …

We Are Not Friends, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

There is something about the way the phone rings that lets you know it's Them - a kind of glitter in the chime, a certain je ne sais quoi to the cadence, which seems to skip a beat as if it can't believe that They are calling. You pick up, heart throbbing, getting ready to move your mouth, a sly frisson of sweat striking your palms.

"They asked me to call," Their assistant says. "They want you at the house next Thursday. And then you'll all go somewhere. A plane will be involved. You'll want to bring a passport. Until …

Jefferson In Central Pennsylvania, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

My Psychologist, My Psychiatrist, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I could not distinguish between them except by what we did. I was ten, then eleven. I would not ride the school bus. I always slunk home saying I missed it. I made my mother come to school with me every day, and sit in the lobby so I could wave to her during recess and class changes. In the evenings my father would come home from work, hear my mother's report, and storm upstairs, his weight pounding on the hardwood steps. I would be out of breath with crying, my head in the pillow, waiting to feel what he …

'Judith' And The Rhetoric Of Heroism In Anglo‐Saxon England, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The Old English Judith differs from the Liber Judith of the Vulgate at several crucial points, and in one particularly important way. In the Vulgate version of the story, Judith is a heroine in every sense of the word: she is a tropological symbol of Chastity at battle with Licentiousness, an allegorical symbol of the Church in its constant and eventually triumphant battle with Satan, and an inspirational figure who infuses her warriors with much needed courage and confidence; but the Vulgate Judith is also, in a very real sense, the agent by which God's will is executed and the …

Hotel Room With My Brother, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Productive Destruction: Torture, Text, And The Body In The Old English 'Andreas', Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Writing in the Old English Andreas is at once both a productive and a destructive activity. We first become aware of the dangerous power of the written word quite early in the poem, when we learn that the Mermedonians have subverted the normally productive activity of writing into a tool for calculating the execution dates of their prisoners (134-37). Later, the words uttered by the devil to incite the Mermedonians against Andreas illuminate the lexical relationship between the destructive nature of writing and the productive nature of torture in the semiotic context of the poem. Finally, in a sort of …

Résumé, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I sat at the back of a pale classroom and watched my father teach. "Creative Inspiration," my father lectured, "is what you have as soon as you are born and the doctor slaps you on your bottom. That first cry, because you're hungry or tired or just glad to be breathing, is your first creative inspiration." I leaned back in my chair to ease the heat rising in my face. "Incidentally," my father said, grinning at the under graduates, "I've read the Sexual Harassment pamphlet, and I want you all to know I don't slap bottoms." [excerpt]

Lovelock, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

Presents a short story about Benjamin Scott, an ex-convict whose life turned a different course after a one-night stand with a retarded woman in Lovelock, Nevada. Promise of a job in San Francisco; Memories of traveling from state to state to get to his destination; Meeting Ana and her sister Lisa; Feelings of guilt for sleeping with Ana; Apologizing to the sisters; Decision to follow Ana to San Diego.

On Arrival, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Another Country, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

That summer we lived in an icebox of a house, where nothing worked. The gas stove was stuck in a chimney that had no fireplace, plaid linoleum covered the chipped and rotting floor, a cold wet wind blew through the cracks in the doors and windows, the light bulbs hummed and fluttered, the clock struck at odd and unwarranted times, and we weren't allowed to drink the water from the sink because it came from an impure place. [excerpt]

New Life, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.