Arts and Humanities Commons^™

‘The Future’S Not Ours To See’: How Children And Young Adults Reflect The Anxiety Of Lost Innocence In Alfred Hitchcock’S American Movies., Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

Introduction:

In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Ambassador, while plotting to kill the Prime Minister, orders the kidnapped American child Hank McKenna killed, telling his would-be gunman, Edward Drayton: “Don’t you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Earlier in the movie, Jo McKenna entertains her son and husband by singing “Que Sera Sera,” and its playfulness becomes darkly ironic when she sings “the future’s not ours to see” on the eve of her son’s kidnapping.
The movie unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game in which the McKennas desperately try to locate and save their kidnapped son, …

Review Of Rethinking The South English Legendaries, Gregory M. Sadlek

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Eliza Haywood And The Narratological Tropes Of Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

Eliza Haywood’s novels and political writings are often considered in isolation from each other; however, there is a discursive thread that links her fictional and political works: her engagement with secret history. Across her career, in her novels as well as her political pamphlets and periodicals, Haywood deploys two important narratological tropes of the secret historian: the tendency to reveal the secrets of public figures while concealing the author’s own political position and the tendency to muse self-reflexively about the author’s own role as a writer of history. Haywood’s facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession …

Oakes Smith Returns To Maine, Timothy Scherman

English Faculty Publications

In June 2014, I was invited to deliver a lecture on Elizabeth Oakes Smith as part of the Gorman Lecture Series at the Yarmouth History Center, a short distance from Oakes Smith's birthplace. I took the occasion to caution those who base their readings of Oakes Smith's works (and those of other women) on their written autobiographies--as if the life of the woman writer stood as the "origin" the woman-as-author could only "copy." Calling attention to the context of Oakes Smith's writing of her autobiography (at which point her popularity was fading, her family disgraced and most of her friends …

Three Stories: "Permission," "Consolation," And "Presentation", Christopher Merkner

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Let’S Hear It For The Girls: Resilient And Remarkable Women In Today’S Ya Literature, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Alternative Contact In Native American And Chinese Encounters: Juxtaposition In Nineteenth-Century Us Newspapers, Cari M. Carpenter, K. Hyoejin Yoon

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Wood For The Coffins Ran Out": Modernism And The Shadowed Afterlife Of The Influenza Pandemic, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Here’s what we already know—during the First World War, soldiers and civilians often had remarkably different experiences of the war corpse. Dead bodies were omnipresent on the front line and in the trenches, an inescapable constant for the living soldier. As critic Allyson Booth notes, “Trench soldiers . . . inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses.”¹ In Britain and America, however, such corpses were strangely absent; unlike in previous conflicts, bodies were not returned. This dichotomy underscores some of our central assumptions about the differences between the front line and the home front: in the trenches, dead bodies and …

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 …

J. Hector St. John De Crèvecoeur’S Niagara: Redefining A Sublime Landmark, James P. Myers Jr.

English Faculty Publications

Working from Crèvecoeur’s two accounts of visits to the Niagara peninsula, together with the two maps accompanying those narratives, this essay argues that Crèvecoeur never visited the area during the years he claims, 1785 and 1789. Although the narratives thus reflect the centuries-old convention of the traveler/explorer as liar, more significantly they reveal Crèvecoeur’s substantial reworking of the received eighteenth-century response to the natural sublime. Both the 1785 Letter to his son and the longer retelling of his supposed 1789 visit in A Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York predictably record an initial, expected reaction to …

Conversion Calls For Confrontation: Facing The Old To Become New In The Work Of James Baldwin, Mckinley E. Melton

English Faculty Publications

Book Summary: The recognition and study of African American (AA) artists and public intellectuals often include Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.DuBois, and Malcolm X. The literary canon also adds Ralph Ellison, Richard White, Langston Hughes, and others such as female writers Zora Neale Hurston, MayaAngelou, and Alice Walker.

Yet, the acknowledgement of AA artists and public intellectuals tends to skew the voices and works of those included toward normalized portrayals that fit well within foundational aspects of the American myths reflected in and perpetuated by traditional schooling. Further, while many AA artists and public intellectuals …

Nashe’S Poem For Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Jennifer L. Andersen

English Faculty Publications

Of "The Choise of Valentines," editor R. B. McKerrow says, "There can, I fear, be little doubt that this poem is the work of ThomasNashe" (V, 141). From the 1590s through the seventeenth century, the poem was not printed but was circulated privately in manuscript copies among a select coterie audience. Five of six extant manuscript copies begin with a dedicatory sonnet, one of which includes a dedication "To the right Honorable the lord S." and another 'To the right HonourableLordStrainge" (Beal 356), offering clues to the specific coterie for which the poem was composed. Although some editors and critics …

Appalachian Migrant Stances, Bridget L. Anderson

English Faculty Publications

The article explores the economic and industrial opportunities for Appalachian native speakers in the industrial Midwest countries after the World War I. Topics discussed include the characteristics of migration diaspora in Appalachian migrants, the Southern migrants metropolitan area lifestyle in Detroit, Michigan and the impacts of ethnographic factors to Appalachian migrants. Other topics include the social and identifiable factors for migrants.

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly O. Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

English Faculty Publications

Information about the 79th annual meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) organized by Jennifer Cramer at the University of Kentucky on April 2012 in Lexington, Kentucky. Topics discussed at the meeting includes current state of research studies on linguistic processes in Appalachia, traditional dialectological and ethnographic. The meeting also featured panel experts including Bridget L. Anderson, Michael Montgomery and Walt Wolfram.

Illustrations And Text: Storyworld Space And The Multimodality Of Serialized Narrative, Laura Daniel Buchholz

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines the interaction between picture and text in the construction of the narrative spaces in George W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London (1844–45) and William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839) . Building on previous discussions from Gabriel Zoran (1984) and David Herman ( Story Logic, 2002) concerning the process by which space is constructed in verbal/written texts, this essay examines how such theories function in conjunction with the illustrations that often accompanied Victorian serialized narratives in their original publication. Specifically, I consider the interaction between the verbal and visual channels in the construction of interior rooms presented in …

Rewriting A Murder Pamphlet: The Perspective Of Deviance In The Changeling” Appositions, Jennifer Andersen

English Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the relationship between murder pamphlets and early modern drama. I first provide a brief overview of typical features of murder pamphlets. In the rest of the article, I examine a specific example of a play based on a murder pamphlet, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. Exploring the play in contrast to its pamphlet source reveals some of the key differences between the two genres: namely, the pamphlet stories typically follow a moralizing narrative that ensures that providence will bring murderers to a just punishment and repentance, whereas the play invites the audience to …

Asking And Understanding Questions: An Inquiry-Based Framework For Writing Teacher Development, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

English Faculty Publications

Teachers develop when they critically examine the questions they ask about their work because questions make pedagogical beliefs visible and available for critical reflection and revision. In a standards-based educational climate—a time when writing becomes a set of measurable skills rather than a complex social practice—teachers may feel that a critical examination of their questions is (at best) a luxury or (at worst) a distraction to work they need to accomplish. Therefore, writing teacher educators may find it increasingly challenging to help teachers engage in reflexive inquiry. This essay describes a Deweyian-informed framework that shows how addressing inquiries and critically …

Shots In The Dark: The Presence Of Absence In Imaginative Literature (Iw), Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

Western metaphysics and IW can be described as a search for "first" presences, not absences. With the exception of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aristotle, writers like Lord Rochester (John Wilmot), Jonathan Swift and Philip Larkin, no one, to my knowledge, has taken absence as a "first" and consequently as also a "last." This essay is a modest attempt to open the door, if only a crack, for investigations into the metaphysics and meaning of absence as a means of creating, and understanding an interesting IW—from the perspective of the presence of absence as "first" and as "last."

Prologemena To An Future Rhetoric Of Shadows, Shades And Silhouettes, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

In this essay, following the implications of "prolegomena" (Greek: "to say before"), i describe what a rhetoric constructed of textual shadows (the word "shadow" in a text) would look like. Specifically, what would be the various motives and rhetorical intentions, for a writer (of all genres) to employ the word "shadow" or a member of its semantic "family."

The Historical Formation Of Academic Identities: Rhetoric And Composition, Discourse And Writing, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) This talk originated in my work as a consultant at the University of Winnipeg, where I spent six weeks on a Fulbright Specialist grant in Spring 2011. I was invited to advise the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications on its plans for “program architecture renewal,” which included critically assessing its programs, articulating levels of the curriculum, and charting future directions for the department. The grant had larger goals as well, charging me to study the development of writing and rhetorical studies in Canada as an emerging field seeking both definition and visibility. The Winnipeg faculty hoped that …

The Rhetoric Of Appalachian Identity (Book Review), Mary Beth Pennington

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Samuel Beckett And Testimony [Book Review], Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Eat It: Sex, Food And Women's Writing [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Simply put, Eat It: Sex, Food and Women's Writing surpasses its rather immodest claims. This is no mean feat, for the editors allow that they have collected short stories, nonfiction shorts and poetry that, as the back claims offers, hinge "on the carnal." More than that, the gathered works purportedly address the ways in which experiencing food entails nothing short of "power, biology, social obligation, experimentation, nourishment, pain and pleasure." The authors treat the topics, ranging from the politics of potatoes to tricks for field dressing deer, with a blend of seriousness and humour befitting the material. What becomes clear …

Nashe’S Poem For Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Jennifer Andersen

English Faculty Publications

This article makes a case for the dedication of "The Choise of Valentines" to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, and explores some of its ramifications for the interpretation of the poem. Beyond the significance of this identification for the poem, establishing the dedication to Lord Strange and Nashe’s participation in elite literary coteries would also be more broadly significant for Nashe studies.

The Divided Reception Of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, The Help has been a pop culture phenomenon— prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the “darling of book clubs everywhere.” In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either The Help or The Hunger …

Extending An Alternative: Writing Centers And Curricular Change, Joe Essid

English Faculty Publications

When our Writing Center staked its reputation and perhaps its survival on a proposal to change our first-year curriculum, we entered territory that would have been unthinkable to those in our field a few decades ago. Writing center directors and peer tutors may not like it, but the climate now is very different from the salad days of the 1980s, when scholars such as Tilly and John Warnock argued “it is probably a mistake for centers to seek integration into the established institution” (22). In both the United States and EU nations, we face curricular change driven by emerging technologies, …