Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Strange, Charles Hartman

English Faculty Publications

Presents the poem "The Strange," by Charles O. Hartman. First Line: fungus raised by the night's rain; Last Line: thread cubic miles of humus.

Who Is A Southern Writer?, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Richard Ford’s response to a questioner at the University of Mississippi symposium—that he is a “southerner” but not a “southern writer”—makes him only the latest in a long line of distinguished writers who grew up in the South, but have refused to be corralled into a regional stall. Other contemporary writers from the South, feeling “left out” of a potentially profitable niche market, have sought to broaden the definition of “southern literature.” Instead of worrying about who qualifies as a “southern writer” or rigidly delimiting “southern literature,” we might more fruitfully ask questions about who is writing about the U.S. …

Katrina And Her Poets, John Gery

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

A Navajo Legacy: The Life And Teachings Of John Holiday, H. Bert Jenson

English Faculty Publications

WITHOUT A DOUBT, Robert McPherson is one of the most prolific and conscientious writers on the Navajo people in this generation, and an advocate of their life ways, history, and place in American society. He is consummately careful not to breech the right of literary sovereignty native peoples everywhere are exerting over their own culture and heritage. In this latest work one perceives certain humility about his approach to such things, and one enters into the dialogue on that same premise. As co-author/editor, he is gracious in his acknowledgement of those who helped him bring the work to print: Baxter …

The Satanic Whitman: Woman, Nature And The Magic Of Four, D. J. Moores

English Faculty Publications

Had the Romantics lived in the twentieth-century and maintained their Romantic sensibility, they might have been Jungians, which is to say, there are a considerable number of parallels between Jungian theory and Romantic aesthetics. According to Jung the aim of all psychoanalytic work is to help the analysand become conscious of his or her entire Self, which includes conscious as well as disowned, unconscious elements. In Jungian theory when ego (conscious awareness) confronts and assimilates shadow (unconsciousness), the result is a revitalization and expansion of Self. Romantics longed for this expanded Self in their frequent transcendent yearnings, concerned as they …

Who Was Cock Robin? A New Reading Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Much has been written about the quest of Brodber's protagonist Nellie for identity, for wholeness, for balance, for sanity, for finding her way back home into the community. Nellie's efforts to find herself and to integrate into the community will be easier, Brodber declared in a speech in 1988, "when Jane and Louisa come home, i.e., when the women find themselves" (Notes). Brodber also observed in that same speech, "'coming' rather than 'being' is the appropriate action word with which to address the issue of integration into the community," a fact suggested by the game that gives the title to …

Taking Liberties, Matt Kozusko

English Faculty Publications

The 'place' scholars have assigned to the stage in early modern London is as much a reflection of the procedures of contemporary literary criticism as a reflection of the cultural function of popular drama in the early modern period. Modern critics are often not engaged in re-examining available data, preferring instead to rest on a conjectural paradigm or heuristic that has hardened, over the past couple of decades, into a New Historicist version of 'fact'. Critics have collapsed boundaries and important distinctions in London jurisdiction and geography in the interest of a unified critical narrative that characterizes the theatre as …

Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, The Camera, And The Octoroon, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sir Thomas Browne’S Annotated Copy Of His 1642 Religio Medici, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

Although relatively few readers today may have heard of Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), the works of this essayist, doctor, and amateur scientist cast long literary shadows. Among those influenced or inspired by Browne are Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and W. G. Sebald. The admiration of later generations has to do in part with Browne’s style, for he is widely regarded as one of the finest prose writers in the English language. However, Browne’s wide-ranging intellectual interests, his love of paradoxes, and his playful personality have surely also contributed to his popularity. Combining a skeptical, …

From Reproduction To Reproducibility: Creativity And Technics In Benjamin And Arendt, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reconstructing How We Respond To Student Writers: An An Exploratory Study, Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

This study sought to answer a number of questions. First, how do teachers respond to “successful” and “unsuccessful” writers? Also, how are these responses different? Furthermore, how did the distribution of the types of comments the teachers used affect student understanding of the comments? For instance, were certain types of comments understood more often than others, and what might be the results of such occurrences for student writers? Another objective of this research was to see how well the participating students understood the comments written on their essays, and to determine if there was any difference between how the “successful” …

Fritz Oelshlaeger. Love And Good Reasons: Postliberal Approaches To Christian Ethics And Literature, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

In the interest of full disclosure, Professor Oehlschlaeger identifies his purpose and intended audience at the outset of the book: "This study seeks to articulate a particular moral vision, a Christian one, and discover what it entails for reading texts." This Christian moral vision is one "marked by the specific convictions of a body of people formed by the history of Israel, Jesus, and the Church" (3), (Oehlschlaeger never specifies which church he means by this, but his appeals to the authority of Pope John Paul II and neo-Thomist philosophers and theologians Alisdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas are suggestive, as …

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 …

Petting Zoo, Charles Hartman

English Faculty Publications

Presents the poem "Petting Zoo," by Charles O. Hartman. First Line: Spring: the edges and middles; Last Line: think of it, mammals with wheels.

Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Recognizing the growing importance (at least for consumers) of video games as a popular form of narrative fiction, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska situate their collection, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces as a text which is corrective, informative and explorative. In the first case, the editors sought essays which would move the critical discourse on video games away from the more familiar but reductive debates surrounding the "effects" of video games (especially on children) and their modes of representation (especially of the female form and violence). Indeed, these have become the sine qua non of video game criticism and one feeds the other …

The Southern Family Farm As Endangered Species: Possibilities For Survival In Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

At the same time some southern studies scholars are positioning the U.S. South in a larger cultural, historic, and economic region that encompasses the Caribbean and Latin America, some southern environmentalist writers, such as long-time essayist and novelist Wendell Berry and activist-turned-memoirist Janisse Ray, are finding a pressing need to focus on smaller bioregions and the locatedness of the human subject. These writers believe that agribusiness and consumer ignorance are driving small farmers out of business and that clear-cutting timber and farming practices dependent on chemicals are threatening local ecosystems. Best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver has joined their ranks. With her …

Beur Travel Writing: Tassadit Imache’S Algerie, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

The particular cultural positioning described as the beur predicament and often summed up in the phrase “belonging neither here nor there,” is clearly a result of French colonial history. As such, it hardly refers to subjects able or willing to assume the vantage point of the classic European travel narrative or to employ its poetics. Beurs are children of North African immigrants (primarily from Algeria, but also Morocco and Tunisia) who arrived in France after the Second World War to work in the developing auto industries. While entitled to French citizenship (born in pre-independence Algeria, their parents are French subjects), …

Atanarjuat And The Ideological Work Of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998), a practice with vast historical precedent. With ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of indigenous letters, art and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with an earlier history of the expropriation and displacement of the Americas’ indigenous peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period, in …

The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon or LDS church, constitute an organization that transcends simple denominational status. Though the Mormons were originally one of a multitude of restorationist churches emerging out of the ferment known as the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, a number of factors conspired to forge an entity variously considered a religion, a people, a global tribe, and a New Religious Movement (NRM), the only "indigenously derived ethnic group" in the United States and an emerging world religion. Mormonism's distinctive doctrines challenge the boundaries of …

Mormons, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Mormonism was one of many religious movements that emerged in antebellum American during the ferment known as the Second Great Awakening. In 1820 a youthful Joseph Smith (1805-1844) told his family and skeptical neighbors that he had been visited by Jesus Christ in response to his prayerful request for guidance in choosing a true religion. All Christian denominations had gone astray, the personage told him. Smith created little subsequent stir on the religious stage until ten years later, when he produced the Book of Mormon, a lengthy narrative purportedly written by ancient American prophets of Israelite origins and revealed to …

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …

Ismith Khan (1925-2002), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Trinidadian novelist who explored the conflicts experienced by East Indians in the Caribbean as well as the racial diversity that characterizes the region. A brilliant storyteller, he created memorable characters through whom the sights and cadences of Trinidad will forever live.

Jasper, John, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Perhaps the most famous of all the slave preachers, John Jasper was born in Fluvanna County, Virginia, on July 4, 1812, the youngest of twenty-four children born to Phillip and Tina Jasper. His father, also a slave preacher, died two months before John was born, but he prophesied that his son would become a famous preacher.

Bennett, Louise, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Louise Bennett, affectionately called Miss Lou, is Jamaica's most beloved folk poet, performer, and collector; she was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on September 7, 1919. Her father, a baker, died when she was seven years old, and her mother worked as a dressmaker to provide for her only child. She was educated in Jamaica at Calabar Elementary School, Excelsior High School, and St. Simon's College, after which she received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England.

Practical Ecocriticism (Review Essay), Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ezra Pound And His First Chinese Contact For And Against Confucianism, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Lorenzo Thomas (31 August 1944 – 4 July 2005), John Gery

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Robert Scholes. Paradoxy Of Modernism, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

Readers familiar with Scholes' The Rise and Fall o/English should find his latest book equally engaging. Cyril Connolly's characterization of the work of Dornford Yates, quoted with admiration by Scholes in Chapter Six of this book, might apply equally well to Scholes' own work, as it exhibits "a wit that is ageless united to a courtesy that is extinct." What Scholes finds so admirable in the phrase is "not merely its elegant syntax, but the way that the syntax balances against each other and thus emphasizes the words 'ageless' and 'extinct'-suggesting that the admirable quality of Yates' work derives from …

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 …