Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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

Familiar Strangers: International Students In The U.S. Composition Course, Elena Lawrick, Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

This chapter presents selected findings from our study of a well-established ESL writing program at a U.S. university with a large population of international undergraduate students. The study was conducted in all 13 writing sections. The instruments included demographic data from university registrars; one instructor survey, administered at the end of the semester; and two student surveys, one administered at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. The instructor survey response rate was 100% (13 teachers); the student survey response rates were 82.5% (161 students) and 88% (171 students), respectively.

The reported findings inform five areas: an …

Jewish Culture And Literature In England, Miriamne Ara Krummel

English Faculty Publications

The story of how the medieval English Jews lived their lives in eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century England intersects with the realities of the Jews' historical situation. Thinking about the contingent realities of Jewish lives brings us to the Christian community's view of Jews and the Jews' own view of themselves and how the Jews themselves navigated the fraught culture of medieval England. A powder keg, of sorts, resulted after the Normans claimed the seats of power in 1066. This combustible site that was medieval England in the eleventh century involved the English (that is, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other …

Cohesion And Perceived Proficiency In Ita Oral Communication Across Engineering And The Sciences, Jennifer Haan

English Faculty Publications

International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) often require additional instruction because their speech is not easily understandable. This lack of perceived proficiency may be attributable to mistakes in sentence level grammar or pronunciation, but may also be affected by discourse level structures including overall organization and coherence of talk. This chapter examines spoken data from an ITA proficiency test to better understand the relationship between cohesion-the linguistic property used to build coherence-and perceived comprehensibility of ITAs.

The study analyzes the use of cohesive ties (such as pronouns and conjunctions), across different proficiency levels in order to characterize and describe how ITAs at …

Familiar Strangers: International Students In The U.S. Composition Course, Elena Lawrick, Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

Many will recognize this sketch of new international undergraduates at a U.S. university: Excited. Jet-lagged. Late to class because they got lost on a big campus. Overwhelmed by myriad things to do on the first days of the semester. Confused by the English language that sounds so different. Thrown into a first-year writing course instrumental to their academic success.

Criticizing Local Color: Innovative Conformity In Kate Chopin’S Short Fiction, Thomas Lewis Morgan

English Faculty Publications

One of the difficulties in using regionalism as a descriptive category to discuss late nineteenth-century literature is the series of shifting relationships it has with other terms describing literary production. Not only is there regionalism’s implied connection to realism, there is naturalism, romance, and even local color to consider, if one desires to distinguish between types of regional literary production. Added to this initial framework are the unspoken assumptions concerning intersecting definitions of generic form: the novel is implicitly connected to realism (and later naturalism), while the short story is traditionally associated with regionalism. Further complicating both sets of terms …

Weaving Transnational Identity: Travel And Diaspora In Sandra Cisneros’S 'Caramelo', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento: A Novel (2002) dramatizes the functions of travel and tourism for members of the Mexican and Chicana/o diaspora, particularly for second-generation Chicana protagonist and narrator, Lala Reyes. Caramelo showcases travel's critical role in cultural identity formation, maintenance, and contestation for diasporic peoples, while also demonstrating the variability and mutability of diasporic cultural identity as mediated through travel. My explication of the novel's representations of cultural identity formation through travel contributes to critical conversations regarding the relationship between diaspora and tourism, argues for elastic understandings of diaspora itself, and brings needed attention to the particularities …

A Practice-Oriented Definition Of Post-Process Second Language Writing Theory, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

ENGLISH:

This article is a synthesis of the scholarly literature on the post-process approach to teaching second language (L2) writing, particularly college and university composition in English as an additional language. This synthesis aims to offer a definition of post-process L2 writing that can readily lend itself to practice and be more accessible to practitioners. All the publications that had either substantially or marginally discussed post-process theory since 1990 were systematically reviewed in order to answer the following question: What is a definition of post-process L2 writing theory that can readily lend itself to pedagogy and actual practice for helping …

Integrating Speaking And Listening Activities Into Teaching Anglo-American Academic Writing Rhetoric, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

In an attempt to widen the range of practical strategies grounded in theoretical speculations of genre theorists, this paper proposes teaching the rhetoric of Anglo-American argumentation through pre-writing listening and speaking activities in ESL academic writing classes. Research shows students’ struggles with ESL academic writing include more than inadequate knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. Instead, the main problem is suggested to be a problem of rhetoric. Students’ attachment to their native rhetorics and their unfamiliarity with Anglo-American academic rhetoric can seriously hinder the process of learning academic writing in English. Suggestions have been made that teachers should condition …

Reading Poetry In Standardized Efl Test Preparation To Increase Meaningful Literacy Engagement, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

This article reports the process of an action research project on the impact of reading poetry on student literacy engagement in an EFL standardized test preparation course. This research project was conducted in a class of eight female Iranian adult professionals preparing for the First Certificate of English (FCE) examination, provided by Cambridge English Language Assessment. Standardized tests are believed to narrow the curriculum, to reduce emphasis on complex thinking, and to have “washback” effect on the quality of teaching. In this project, in order to improve the quality of the students’ literacy engagement two particular measures were taken. In …

English Language Teaching In Lebanese Schools: Trends And Challenges, Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

Like many other countries around the world, the foreign language teaching profession in Lebanon has been flourishing, with English being the forerunner. The new curriculum established by the Lebanese government in the 1990s mandates that in addition to their native language, Arabic, Lebanese children must learn two foreign languages at school, the first language in grade one, and the second in grade seven. Some private schools, however, begin teaching the second foreign language as early as grade four or five, and parents of young learners have to choose one of the foreign languages as a medium of instruction for their …

With 'Cheekbones And Noses Like Eagles And Hawks': Indigeneity And Mestizaje In Ana Castillo’S 'The Mixquiahuala Letters' And Leslie Marmon Silko’S 'Almanac Of The Dead', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

This article argues that conceptions of indigeneity and mestizaje conveyed in Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead are influenced (differentially) by the very colonialist assumptions the novels otherwise aim to dismantle. I compare how indigeneity and mestizaje are defined in Letters andAlmanac (with particular attention to their oppositional features), addressing relationships between these definitions, popular colonialist discourse, and anti-colonial articulations of identity that have developed in American Indian and Chicana/o communities. Significantly (and tragically), Letters' Chicana protagonist, Teresa, envisions her recovery of a cohesive cultural identity as a return to a …

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 …

Scientific Racism And Masculine Recuperation: Charles Lummis And The Search For 'Home', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

Like many of his peers who came of age during the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles Lummis (1859-1928) chafed against the constraints of what he and other antimodernists viewed as the overly civilized Eastern United States. However, in Lummis’ own estimation, one of the many qualities that distinguished him from his peers was his willingness to take the necessary action to combat the devitalizing impact of city life by heading west to experience unfamiliar lands and cultures. As he states in the opening pages of his 1892 travel narrative, A Tramp Across the Continent, “I am an American …

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 …

The Impact Of Canadian Social Discourses On L2 Writing Pedagogy In Ontario, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

This paper attempts to illustrate the impact of Canadian social, political, and academic discourses on second language writing pedagogy in Ontario schools. Building upon the views that regard teacher knowledge as teachers’ sociocultural interactions and lived experiences, and not merely intellectual capabilities gained within teacher preparation, this article proposes that the impact of dominant social discourses on classroom practice might be more profound than teachers’ creativity and initiative. This idea is demonstrated by examining the findings of a grounded theory study of frequently employed strategies that can deal with intercultural rhetoric in EAL (English as an additional language) academic writing. …

Well-Worn, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

Technically it's not a bookshelf, but a collection of paperbacks stacked beside my nightstand. Most second-hand booksellers would term the current state of these paperbacks as well-worn. Multiple pages of these works are dog-eared, while the margins are filled with my scribbled thoughts and connections. The covers are permanently bent, torn, and haphazardly mended after so many harried shoves inside my cluttered book-bag. When I think of this book collection, I’m reminded of how my favorite music looked before the invention of the Ipod. My beloved tapes and CDs had been played so much, most of the printed material …

Essay Writing Instructional Lexicon And Semantic Confusion, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

“Introduction,” “body,” and “conclusion” are the most accessible words in the instructional lexicon for ESL writing teachers when they want to describe the structure of a typical five-paragraph persuasive or argumentative essay or its shorter variations for standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS. They are frequently employed to refer to the three tiers of the hamburger essay in textbooks, on classroom boards, and in YouTube tutorials.

Not surprisingly, English learners also might give you the same words if asked what the main components of an essay are. Like ESL teachers, students usually use the same terms or their equivalents …

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 …

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 …

A Primer On Copyright And Fair Use, Ann E. Biswas, Charles J. Russo

English Faculty Publications

One student creates a video for class using a Lady Gaga song. Another puts together a PowerPoint presentation about the Vietnam War using images she found online. A third student adds a link to a YouTube video in a blog post for an English class. One teacher photocopies and distributes articles from a national newspaper. Another teacher records a television documentary at home and shows it to her class.

Did those students and teachers violate copyright law? The complex, evolving laws governing copyright and fair use are muddied by the rapid growth and use of technology in schools, yet it's …

Training Graduate Assistants, Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

This article was featured in the journal's '4Sites Post-secondary' section. Overall, the goals for summer training are threefold:

• TAs need to become familiar with each other.
• TAs need to be knowledgeable about the material.
• TAs should be somewhat at ease in a classroom environment.

This I Believe: The Do-Over, Meredith Doench

English Faculty Publications

I believe in second chances. Even thirds. There’s nothing like the power of a sincere do-over.

As a junior and senior high student, school was never my forte. It wasn’t for lack of effort on my parents’ part—my mother had been a fourth grade teacher and my father, a doctor, worked hard to keep me in one of the best districts in our area. Still, I bucked most school activities. Study groups? No way. Extra-curriculars? Not unless my friends were doing it. Math club? Please!

My junior year I fell into an anxious depression so severe, I required hospitalization. All …

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 …

The Vanishing Mexicana/O: (Dis)Locating The Native In Ruiz De Burton’S 'Who Would Have Thought It?' And 'The Squatter And The Don', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political reform. American Indians’ presence in the novels, however marginal, and Ruiz de Burton’s rendering of them as savage, powerless, and justly shut out from the social and political life of the nation, are critical to the author’s aims. Accounting for the absence and strategic appearance of American …

From Reading To Revering The Good Book, Or How The Word Became Fossil At The Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

Given the complexity of this sacred text and the intensity with which Protestants have sought to glean its truths from it, it is not surprising that Luther’s “dangerous idea” yielded countless splits, schisms, and sects. Whereas once there was the Church, Protestants dedication to reading the Scripture for themselves has brought an endless variety of theologies, practices, and fellowships with no end in sight. While every one of these groups claims (whether explicitly or implicitly) that they alone have the true word of God, none has been able to arrest the flow of interpretations. With everyone free to read the …

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.

Reading Music: Representing Female Performance In Nineteenth-Century British Piano Method Books And Novels, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

The editorial content of piano method books published in the nineteenth century contributed to the gendering of the domestic piano by targeting a middle-class female audience. At the same time, these tutorials circumscribed the ability and ambition of female pianists, cautioning women against technical display or performing challenging pieces in company, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of the graceful, demure woman who played a little. However, this effort was complicated by both the tutorials themselves and contemporary fiction. The middle-class women reading these tutorials also read novels—a fact the method books occasionally acknowledge—which often presented a very different picture of women’s …

Comment 4 On 'Lingua Franca Or Lingua Frankensteinia? English In European Integration And Globalization', Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

Phillipson’s paper Lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia? addresses key concerns of linguists and politicians in the Outer and Expanding Circles, especially in relation to the spread of foreign languages and their threat to local languages, national aspirations, culture, religion, and identity. As a native of Lebanon, a multilingual country where Arabic, French, and English add to the linguistic complexity of Lebanese society, I agree with Phillipson that language policy-makers need to be aware of the dangers of the uncritical promotion of English and what he identifies as linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992). However, I am not convinced by specific arguments he …

'The Injin Is Civilized And Aint Extinct No More Than A Rabbit': Transformation And Transnationalism In Alexander Posey’S 'Fus Fixico Letters', Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

In this article I first introduce my critical approach to Posey’s life and work in conjunction with an overview of the Fus Fixico Letters, as situated in their historical and cultural context. I position my argument in relation to the ideological framework outlined by Creek/Cherokee writer and theorist Craig Womack (one of the most significant Posey scholars), and throughout the article draw upon the groundbreaking historical and archival research of Daniel Littlefield. Following an introduction to the letters and an outline of my central arguments, I analyze Posey’s conception of transformation, as it manifests in the Fus Fixico Letters, as …