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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Whitewashing Blackface Minstrelsy In Nineteenth-Century England: Female Banjo Players In 'Punch', Laura Vorachek
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 …
Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek
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 …
Selling The Amish: The Tourism Of Nostalgia, Susan L. Trollinger
Selling The Amish: The Tourism Of Nostalgia, Susan L. Trollinger
English Faculty Publications
In this book, I address these and related question. Although I talk about the Amish, my primary goal is not to describe them. Many others have offered excellent accounts of the Amish, and references to their books and articles can be found in this book's bibliography. Instead, my purpose is to understand Amish Country tourism and, specifically, how it attracts and sustains the interest of millions of visitors each year. The purveyors of Amish Country tourism use a variety of strategies to draw tourists in and give them pleasure during their stay, and I explore those techniques. I focus especially …
Inverting The Haiku Moment: Alienation, Objectification, And Mobility In Richard Wright’S ‘Haiku: This Other World’, Thomas Lewis Morgan
Inverting The Haiku Moment: Alienation, Objectification, And Mobility In Richard Wright’S ‘Haiku: This Other World’, Thomas Lewis Morgan
English Faculty Publications
Richard Wright’s haiku — both the 4,000 he wrote at the end of his life and the 817 he selected for inclusion in Haiku: This Other World (1998) — remain something of an enigma in his larger oeuvre; critics variously position them as a continuation of his earlier thematic concerns in a different literary form, an aesthetic departure from the racialized limitations imposed upon his earlier work, or one of several positions in between. Such arguments debate the formal construction as well as the strategic reinvention of Wright’s haiku. The present essay engages both sides of this conversation, arguing that …
Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek
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.
Heritage Versus History: Amish Tourism In Two Ohio Towns, Susan L. Trollinger
Heritage Versus History: Amish Tourism In Two Ohio Towns, Susan L. Trollinger
English Faculty Publications
Judging from the relative number of tourists who visit these two sorts of towns, tourists appear to prefer views of the Amish that are provided by more rather than less touristy venues. In this essay, I compare the views of Amish offered by two towns in Ohio's Amish Country. One town, Walnut Creek, is very popular among tourists; the other town, Mount Hope, is significantly less popular. Ultimately, I argue that Mount Hope is less popular than Walnut Creek largely because its representation of the Amish constitutes the tourist in ways that are less reassuring for middle Americans. But before …
Intertextuality And Ideology: Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' And James Fordyce's 'Sermons To Young Women', Laura Vorachek
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 …
Female Performances: Melodramatic Music Conventions And 'The Woman In White', Laura Vorachek
Female Performances: Melodramatic Music Conventions And 'The Woman In White', Laura Vorachek
English Faculty Publications
While the similarities between melodrama and sensation fiction are often noted, the similar use of music in each has been overlooked. Melodrama is characterized by excessive emotion, flat character types, a focus on plot at the expense of characterization and exaggerated expressions of right and wrong. As its name implies, it also relied heavily on musical accompaniment. For much of the first half of rhe nineteenth century, only the patent theatres were allowed to present drama with spoken dialogue due to grants from Charles II in 1660 giving to two royal favourites, Killigrew and Davenant, exclusive rights, which came to …
Nonviolence, Anabaptism, And The Impossible In Communication, Susan L. Trollinger
Nonviolence, Anabaptism, And The Impossible In Communication, Susan L. Trollinger
English Faculty Publications
In a sense, the discipline of communication is all about peace. This is so because the discipline seeks to explain the relationship between communication and understanding as well as to promote better understanding through instruction in effective communication practices. Thus, all sub-disciplines of communication-from organizational communication to public address to health communication-address both theoretical and practical questions about how communication assists or frustrates human understanding. To the extent that an understanding serves as an antidote to human conflict, then, communication seeks to promote peace.
Seeking The Rhetoric Of Jesus, Susan L. Trollinger
Seeking The Rhetoric Of Jesus, Susan L. Trollinger
English Faculty Publications
I come to the questions posed by this volume from a somewhat different background than one might expect. Whereas one might anticipate that I was an Anabaptist first and a scholar second, just the opposite was the case. I Before beginning my graduate studies I had never heard of Anabaptism. Indeed, I was poring over Aristotle's Rhetoric before I was even a Christian. I thus went through much of my graduate studies (not to mention all of college, high school, and elementary school) without giving a thought to how my studies were impacting my faith-never mind how my faith might …
Anabaptists And Postmodernity, Susan L. Trollinger, Gerald Biesecker-Mast
Anabaptists And Postmodernity, Susan L. Trollinger, Gerald Biesecker-Mast
English Faculty Publications
The title of this book was intended simply to bring together two concerns: Anabaptist identity on the one hand and our postmodern cultural moment on the other. Thus the purpose of the book was to inquire about the relationship between the two. The aim was to seek answers to such questions as what it means to be an Anabaptist today, the extent to which postmodernity presents problems and possibilities for Anabaptists, and how Anabaptists ought to live out their faith in the contemporary context.
Better Safe Than Sorry? Y2k, Preparation, And The Foreclosing Of The Future, Susan L. Trollinger
Better Safe Than Sorry? Y2k, Preparation, And The Foreclosing Of The Future, Susan L. Trollinger
English Faculty Publications
My purpose in taking a rhetorical approach to Y2K discourse is threefold. First, by suspending the question of h·uth and asking a question of rhetorical effects, I can take this popular discourse seriously without granting at the outset its claim to truth in its predictions. Second, a rhetorical approach enables me to study how the discourse works and what its effects are. Third, a study of its workings and effects may provide occasion to move beyond the binary oppositions Y2K discourse seeks to pose between belief and unbelief, preparedness and foolishness. Resisting those binaries allows one to answer other questions …
The Aporetic Witness, Susan L. Trollinger
The Aporetic Witness, Susan L. Trollinger
English Faculty Publications
The opportunity that this shift from modernity to postmodernity may have opened for faith to speak to reason has not gone unnoticed by theologians. Indeed a number of what we might call poshnodern theologians have advocated various ways that Christians ought to wihless in their contemporary context. However, because these theologians have tended to mistake our postmodern world for a pluralistic world, they also have tended to write theologies that promote cultural security over faithful witness.
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
English Faculty Publications
Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …