Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Culturally Responsive Persuasion In Alexander Posey’S Fus Fixico Letters, Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

Alexander Posey (1873–1908) was a Creek humorist, journalist, editor, and poet who crafted his Fus Fixico letters to help fellow Creeks negotiate upheavals wrought by allotment, dissolution of their tribal government, and Oklahoma’s impending statehood (which ultimately incorporated Indian Territory). While validating his people’s varied perspectives with a culturally responsive approach to literary persuasion, Posey nudged readers toward positions he thought best for Creek cultural continuance and economic survival. The letters’ dialogic structure—inclusive of diverse political perspectives—validated his people’s community-oriented values and was more persuasive than prescriptive. Posey utilized four overlapping rhetorical strategies in his literary approach to political activism: …

‘To Sing The Haiku The American Way Is A Beautiful Thing’: The Haiku Of Etheridge Knight, Thomas Lewis Morgan

English Faculty Publications

This essay takes up Etheridge Knight’s haiku as a means to trace his “major metaphor” of prison as a form of postcolonial cross-cultural haiku poetics. Knight’s haiku often focus on those that are voiceless along with the systems that work to disenfranchise them, using their experiences and conditions to engage the unequal power dynamics silently perpetuating inequality. In mapping out the explicit and implicit walls that position the hierarchies present in Knight’s haiku, and connecting these to his published comments on the role and function of haiku within his own poetic imagination, we can better understand Knight’s interest in re-imagining …

“His Appearance Is Against Him”: Race And Criminality In Dorothy L. Sayers’S Unnatural Death, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This essay places Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel Unnatural Death (1927 ) in the context of heightened xenophobia and racism in interwar Britain, arguing that Sayers attempts to challenge prevalent cultural associations of blackness and criminality. Like Wilkie Collins, Sayers works to critique and undermine racist assumptions and to generate sympathy for the colonial Other.

South Carolina, 2012, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

South Carolina, 2012 began with a writing prompt from NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest. I assigned it to my students and joined them in the writing challenge. The piece soon turned into a nonfiction flash about my father. I’d recently spent two weeks at my father’s home where I came to understand the gravity of his early onset Alzheimer’s. I’d been in denial about the severity of my father’s diagnosis, and instances like the ones described in the flash brought me face-to-face with a disease I was completely unprepared to deal with. My father passed away in the Spring of 2014.

Fighting For Indigenous Rights In The Trump Era, Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

American Indians are actively resisting President Donald Trump’s efforts and working to achieve their civil and human rights, even as US federal and state governments work to erode them.

Luchar Por Los Derechos Indígenas En La Era De Trump, Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

Los indígenas americanos se resisten activamente a los esfuerzos de Trump y trabajan para ejercer sus derechos civiles y humanos, incluso mientras los gobiernos estatales y federal de los EE. UU. tratan de debilitarlos.

Literary Didacticism And Collective Human Rights In Us Borderlands: Ana Castillo's 'The Guardians' And Louise Erdrich's 'The Round House', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

There is now a sizable body of scholarship on the relationship between human rights and literature. James Dawes suggests that the work of human rights is largely a matter of storytelling ("Human Rights in Literary Studies"). Joseph Slaughter contends, in turn, that "literary works and literary modes of thinking have played important parts in the emergence of modern human rights ideals and sentiments, as well as in the elaboration of national and international human rights laws" ("Rights" xiii). More specifically, in her oft-cited Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt argues that contemporary human rights thought derives from the rise of …

'Why Don’T You Just Go Back Where You Came From?' Or 'Slight Yams': 'Pangs' Of Regret And Unresolved Ambivalence In Joss Whedon’S California, Tereza M. Szeghi, Wesley Dempster

English Faculty Publications

Joss Whedon’s two longest-running television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) (1997-2003) and Angel (1999-2004), which together constitute the “Buffyverse,” often focus on questions about the degree to which past actions bear on one’s present moral character. Particularly in the case of reformed demons and vampires, regret for past sins weighs heavily on the present and motivates current benevolent and heroic deeds.

For the ensouled vampire Angel most especially, the need to make amends for centuries of sadistic cruelty and bloodshed stamps him with his ever brooding-personality and his nearly ceaseless attempts to balance the scales—while knowing that the scales …

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 …

The Bible And Creationism, Susan L. Trollinger, William Vance Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) marked a significant challenge to traditional understandings of the Bible and Christian theology. Darwin’s theory of organic evolution stood in sharp contrast with the Genesis account of creation, with its six days, separate creations of life forms, and special creation of human beings. More than this, Darwin’s ideas raised enormous theological questions about God’s role in creation (e.g., is there a role for God in organic evolution?) and about the nature of human beings (e.g., what does it mean to talk about original sin without a historic Adam and Eve?)

Of course, what really …

A Sociolinguistic Profile Of English In Lebanon, Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

This article provides an overview of the historical presence of foreign languages in Lebanon, focusing on language contact from the eighteenth century to date. Through sociolinguistic profiling, the paper describes the users and uses of English, as well as Lebanese attitudes towards English. The article begins by offering a general overview of the country, its languages and cultures, and its ethnic and religious groups. It presents a description of users of English along with a characterization of how the interpersonal, instrumental, regulative, and innovative functions of the language are manifested, while the final section of the article discusses attitudes to …

Response: Are American Christians Persecuted?, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

With an eye toward reuniting the church and the academy, this book focuses on the role that scholarship can play in making good preachers into really great preachers. This is the bridge between scholarly and popular writing that informs the sermon and makes it more powerful and meaningful for the people who regularly listen to sermons. Preachers are challenged to raise the level of their commitment to scholarship as well as overcome any pre-existing prejudices with scholarship. The preacher as scholar is the perfect way for the pulpit to respond to the challenges of a secular, post-modern world that often …

Teach The Partnership: Critical University Studies And The Future Of Service-Learning, David J. Fine

English Faculty Publications

Edward Zlotkowski’s (1995) article “Does Service-Learning Have a Future?” challenges the academy to integrate community-engaged learning into the curriculum. As Zlotkowski suggests, students, staff, and faculty ought to engender a culture of civic action and ethical accountability enhanced by rigorous coursework, but this goal necessitates resources: administrators must invest in service-learning to reap its full benefits. Issues arise, however, when one considers this investment in light of the academy’s corporatization. Nussbaum (2010) has noted, for instance, how colleges and universities increasingly emphasize vocational training and professional readiness at the expense of humanist inquiry and civic responsibility. The academy’s corporatization, she …

Unbalancing Acts: Plagiarism As Catalyst For Instructor Emotion In The Composition Classroom, Ann E. Biswas

English Faculty Publications

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors’ emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in the classroom. The author considers how and why her own emotional labor was altered in light of these findings and what this might suggest about the need for increased professional conversation in our discipline regarding the impact of emotions in the writing classroom.

‘How Little I Cared For Fame’: T. Sparrow And Women’S Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the work of an overlooked female journalist, T. Sparrow, arguing that her career reveals the difficulties female journalists faced when negotiating between the expectations of middle-class gentility and the demands of investigative journalism.

Sparrow asserted her gentility rhetorically, in part because female reporters who took up investigative reporting were vulnerable to criticism for assaying beyond domestic subjects. Moreover, incognito investigative reporting often brought celebrity to its practitioners, which challenged the convention of middle-class female modesty.

Sparrow, therefore, strove for a delicate balance in her career—assuming the stance of a middle-class woman who lived among the poor, someone …

Freedom Is A Good Book And A Sugar High, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

This is a creative nonfiction piece about reading literature with an inmate.

Righting America At The Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger, William Vance Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve.

In Righting America at the …

Degree Of Change: The Ma In English Studies, Margaret M. Strain, Rebecca C. Potter

English Faculty Publications

From the publisher: As the needs of those seeking an MA in English studies have evolved, so too have the degree’s mission and identity. Margaret M. Strain and Rebecca C. Potter, editors of Degree of Change: The MA in English Studies, argue that the MA is positioned in a dynamic contact zone—“a place where disciplinary knowledge, student need, and local exigencies interact and where disciplinary identity is constantly negotiated.”

Looking primarily at stand-alone master’s programs, this volume examines the design, delivery, and value of a master’s degree in English in the twenty-first century and challenges the characterization that MA programs …

Teaching Anglo-American Academic Writing And Intercultural Rhetoric: A Grounded Theory Study Of Practice In Ontario Secondary Schools, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

This qualitative research project is a grounded theory study of the experiences of five EAL (English as an additional language) academic writing instructors with intercultural rhetoric. Following the academic conversation about contrastive/intercultural rhetoric, this investigation explores narratives of classroom practice in Ontario secondary schools in order to underline L2 writing activities that are sensitive to intercultural rhetoric. This paper includes explanations of the phenomenon of intercultural rhetoric as identified by the interviewed instructors and lists practical strategies employed by the participants. These strategies are organized in three categories: (1) strategies that use the potential of students’ first languages and mother …

Who’S Afraid Of Multilingual Education?, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

More than 70 languages are spoken in contemporary Iran, yet all governmental correspondence and educational textbooks must be written in Farsi. To date, the Iranian mother tongue debate has remained far from the international scholarly exchanges of ideas about multilingual education. Using conversations with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Jim Cummins, Ajit Mohanty, and Stephen Bahry, prominent academic experts in linguistic human rights, mother tongue education and bilingual and multilingual education, this book bridges that gap. The author examines the arguments for rejecting multilingual education in Iran, and the four interviewees counter those arguments with evidence that mother tongue-based education has resulted in …

Mobilizing Practitioner Action Research To Foster Critical Pedagogy In A Large Online Undergrad University Course, Amir Kalan, Michelle Troberg

English Faculty Publications

This article reports aspects of a practitioner action research project conducted by the teachers of a large online English grammar course. The project was mobilized to create possibilities for developing online critical pedagogy. The online educators involved in this inquiry took measures to modify the syllabus they were working with in response to moments of dissonance while they were trying to comprehend students’ online identities as valuable resources to enrich the process of teaching and learning. The preliminary outcomes of the project, which is still in progress, suggest that critical pedagogy would be more accurately conceptualized by complexifying the traditional …

Adolescent Literacy And Collaborative Inquiry, Rob Simon, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

In a teacher education classroom in Toronto, groups of middle school students, teacher candidates, and university researchers, members of our research collaborative, the Teaching to Learn Project (Simon et al., 2014; Simon & the Teaching to Learn Project, 2014), discuss projects developed from curricula they coauthored for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986). Maus documents Spiegelman’s father’s recollections of the Holocaust and the author’s own struggles to come to terms with what it means to be the child of a Holocaust survivor.

Youth and teachers involved in the Teaching to Learn Project collectively worked through what historian …

Access, Oppression, And Social (In)Justice In Epidemic Control: Race, Profession, And Communication In Sars Outbreaks In Canada And Singapore, Huiling Ding, Xiaoli Li, Austin Caldwell Haigler

English Faculty Publications

This article investigates issues of social injustice experienced by various oppressed groups in SARS outbreaks in 2003, paying particular attention to medical care workers in Canada and Singapore, with many of them being immigrants from East Asia and Southeast Asia. It identifies communication strategies employed by civic networks, especially nonprofit organizations, to help marginalized groups acquire institutional and literacy accesses so that they could respond more effectively to such injustices in complicated and multicultural contexts. Through combined use of Jost and Kay’s work on the three types of social justice (2010), oppression (Young, 1990), and access (Porter, 1998), this study …

The Status Of Esl/Efl Writing In Lebanon, Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

Research on writing in a second or foreign language has been growing rapidly, with around 2600 articles published in the past 15 years, an average of 170 per year (Silva, McMartin- Miller, Jayne, & Pelaez-Morales, 2011). While Lebanese scholars authored only about two percent of those publications, L2 writing research in Lebanon goes back to the 1960s, primarily in the form of MA theses. Since then, only one synthesis article had been published (cf. Bacha, 2007), but it remained narrow in its coverage. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to provide an overview and synthesis of scholarship on L2 …

English Language Literacy And The Prediction Of Academic Success In And Beyond The Pathway Program, Jennifer Haan, Karyn E. Mallett

English Faculty Publications

Widespread emphasis on internationalization in higher education has generated tremendous growth in international student enrollments at U.S. colleges and universities. In fact, from 2002/2003 to 2012/2013, the number of international students in the U.S. increased from 586,323 to 819,644, an increase of almost 40% over ten years (Institute of International Education 2013). These students are primarily multilingual, contributing varying levels of English proficiency and, often, a new sense of institutional diversity. In addition, these students often pay out-of-state tuition, making it possible for the university to diversify tuition streams as well.

Partially motivated by these realities, and in order to …

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 …

Metal And Gothic Literature: Examining The Darker Side Of Life (And Death), Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

This article examines the connections between Gothic literature and the lyrics in Death metal music, specifically the lyrics of Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, and Deicide. The study examined the lyrics for each band’s first 3 albums and their most recent three albums, looking for Gothic characteristics. Further, the study aims to see if bands are changing their focus in terms of lyrics over the span of their careers — especially in terms of the Gothic tenets they incorporate into their songs and how they connect to traditional Gothic texts. This study continues the research begun in the article appearing in …

'I Second That Emotion': Minding How Plagiarism Feels, Ann E. Biswas

English Faculty Publications

It stands to reason that when writing teachers believe their students have plagiarized, they will experience strong emotions that impact their relationships with students, their pedagogy, and their sense of professional identity. Far from being a threat to reason, understanding and acknowledging writing teachers’ emotional responses to plagiarism can lead to a deeper wisdom of its true impact. By examining the literature on emotion from psychology, sociology, education, and writing studies as well as findings from a pilot study of writing teachers’ emotional responses to plagiarism, this article argues that the work involved in managing the emotions of plagiarism reflects …

For All The Mias Of This World, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

Over the past few years there has been a lot of attention given to the amount of women, or lack thereof, in the publishing world. Statistics provided by the 2013 Vida Count show that not only should those numbers be much stronger, but so should the representations of women and their variations of sexuality in published works. Roxane Gay writes in the introduction to her 2014 book, Bad Feminist: Essays, “Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are the sidekicks, the …

The Possibilities And Pitfalls In Teaching Sherman Alexie’S 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

About the book: This book provides original essays that suggest ways to engage students in the classroom with the cultural factors of American literature. Some of the essays focus on individual authors’ works, others view American literature more broadly, and still others focus on the application of culturally based methods for reading. All suggest a closer look at how ethnicity, culture and pedagogy interact in the classroom to help students better understand the complexity of works by African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and several other sometimes overlooked American cultural groups.

Abstract for Tereza M. Szeghi's essay: In March …