Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Dark And Middle Ages, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

For the most part only Plato's teachings supported by a limited version of Aristotelian cosmology supportive of Platonism survived the decline of ancient Greek philosophy during the Roman Empire. Christianity later prevailed, and toward the end of the Middle Ages Aristotle’s secular perspective was only taken into account by Arab philosophers such as Averroes and Avicenna. After the collapse of Arab civilization during the twelfth century, the secular concept of a double truth between belief and reason put philosophy on equal footing with religion in such universities as Cordoba and the University of Paris. After a large assortment of ancient …

Poems From I Look At My Body And See The Source Of My Shame: Ecstasy Facsimile ("Canvasbacks Will Swim In The Polluted River," "Meanwhile, Real Life," And "The River Is A Stadium"), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The three poems are part of a manuscript I'm currently working on, which is my attempt to project a mode of disclosure, even as the method of composition--which involves the liberal extraction and combination of passages from several intertexts--works against this seeming tonality. All the poems contain passages from The Life of Saint Teresa of vila (1957) by herself, translated by J. M. Cohen.

Six Poems From I Look At My Body And See The Source Of My Shame: ("We've Arranged Our Lives," "My Soul, Steeped In My Pride," "The World Is A Funny House," "My Joy From You Lives Free," "Our Hunger Like A Cockroach," And "Nothing Is Ever Clean In Me"), Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

Six Poems from I Look at My Body and See the Source of My Shame: ("We've arranged our lives," "My soul, steeped in my pride," "The world is a funny house," "My joy from you lives free," "Our hunger like a cockroach," and "Nothing is ever clean in me")

“The New Geography,” Material Science, And Narratology’S Space-Time Dichotomy: Notes Toward A Geographical Narratology, Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

This essay places narratology’s emphasis on space-time within the emergence of the discipline of geography and the rise of a materialist, hard science orientation in US institutions after WWII, ultimately arguing that a nascent geographical narratology should aspire to the broad intellectual scope of geography’s origins. “The new geography,” which emerged in 1887 and focused comprehensively on the relation of humans to the earth’s surface, subsequently contracted and fragmented with the post-war emphasis on material science. Likewise expanding in the rationalist post-war climate, classical narratology emphasized logical categories, especially the space-time dichotomy, divorced from human meanings. Today, cognitive research suggests …

Bad Harvest, Dzvinia Orlowsky

English Faculty Publications

This powerful sixth collection of poetry is like some kind of new world Genesis singing its stories with lyric, grace, comic intuition and tragic force. The poet leads us over the remains of drought, along empty riverbeds that run parallel to failure and death, but then twists to capture a more elusive truth, pluck one last grain to hold, redeeming a bad harvest to sow hope in this soiled world. Bad Harvest burns like revelation.

Ludwig Büchner: Nineteenth Century Atheist, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

Mostly forgotten today, the German physician and philosopher, Ludwig Büchner (1824-99), made a significant contribution to the theory of materialism in the mid- nineteenth century from an atheistic perspective. Described by Engels and others as a “vulgar” materialist, he was nevertheless unsurpassed in having linked science and atheism unfettered by irrelevant considerations. The son of a doctor who served as president of the local medical college, Büchner studied at four universities culminating with the University of Vienna. In 1852 he became a lecturer in medicine at the University of Tübingen with every expectation of pursuing an academic career. However, he …

Review Of Golem: Modern Wars And Their Monsters By Maya Barzilai, Temma F. Berg

English Faculty Publications

The golem crosses many borders. A popular culture icon and an enduring image of creative power, its hybridity contributes to its elusive nature. What it is and what it means shifts over time. Maya Barzilai's Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters takes a unique approach. Deeply interdisciplinary, as one must be to explore such a complex and paradoxical figure, and drawing on religious, literary, cinematic, and historical contexts, Barzilai weaves a rich tapestry of golem narratives. All the while, Barzilai keeps a clear eye on the golem's ongoing association with war, seeing its birth in the clay trenches of World …

When Basketball Was Jewish, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, describes Barney "Tiny" Sedran, born Bernard Sedransky on the Lower East Side of New York, as a quintessential Jewish basketball player: "manically energetic, compulsively alert, upending expectations, and compensating for short—really short—comings" (17). Sedransky was the "shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame," she writes, who excelled at a time "when Jews ruled basketball — and lest you think those last three words are a misprint, let me repeat: Jews ruled basketball" (17). Indeed, in the modern era it is easy to forget …

Expanding To The Edges: Central Numic Dual Number, John Mclaughlin

English Faculty Publications

The Central Numic (Uto-Aztecan) dual number marking system on nouns and pronouns is of interest because even though most of the component morphemes involved in the system are reconstructible to Proto-Numic, the system itself is not. Indeed, while the reconstructible Proto-Numic system is rudimentary, the Central Numic system is robust and has expanded to the point that there are few environments where dual is not marked on equal footing with singular and plural. The Central Numic system is of further interest because it involves cycles of grammaticalization and not just a single diachronic event. This contrasts with the other two …

Subjectivity And Methodology In The Arch'i'Ve, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Faculty Publications

This article explores methodologies from the fields of library archival science, human geography, composition and rhetoric, and established editorial practices in English studies. By elaborating on the role of a researcher’s subjectivity in archival creation, this work expands the conversation regarding methodology and archives, especially how archives present us with new ways of seeing and making narratives during the editorial decision-making involved in their creation. Writing about my own experience, I privilege the researcher’s point of view with a narrative about my construction of a digital archive. With archival research, we should promote the revelation of methods and methodology to …

Poems From "Sentence", Mark Anthony Cayanan

English Faculty Publications

The three poems are from a sonnet sequence titled "Sentence."

The Letters, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

“You know, your grandmother only wrote me once during the war?” he says, sipping his scotch, staring out at the Chesapeake Bay which he can no longer see. I look at him with her eyes. It was the first I heard of it. He wouldn’t lie to me, but I wonder how this could be true.

Review: Time, Domesticity And Print Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Katherine Malone

English Faculty Publications

This is review of Time, Domesticity, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjaer was published on the website Review 19.

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.

Student-Centered Pedagogy In The Chinese Classroom: Let’S Talk About Sexual Empowerment, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at the politics of teaching sexuality education, healthy and comprehensive focusing on issues specific to female sexuality, in the context of a Chinese university ELL classroom. Through feminist pedagogical approaches and feminist beliefs in healthy sexuality, this article explores how a university ELL classroom was transformed. As with their U.S. peers, many Chinese young people rely on unhealthy and inaccurate information about human sexuality through pornography or dubious internet searches. Through feminist pedagogical approaches that focus on student-centered learning, critical thinking, and open debate, teachers can integrate controversial topics into a classroom setting to benefit the health …

Iconic Loss: Global Civil Society And The Destruction Of Cultural Property, Michael Galchinsky

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Burden Of Ambiguity: Writing At A Cooperative, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

Purpose: While many organizations use ambiguity to strategically build a "unified diversity" around an organization's mission, democratically managed organizations need to tread a narrow path between necessary ambiguity (which allows flexibility) and dysfunctional ambiguity (which causes disarray). To illustrate, I report a subset of findings regarding occasions when ambiguous documents had a significant impact on a democratically managed organization.

Methods: I conducted a three-phase study of a democratic cooperative. Using a mixed-methods approach, I sought to uncover the ways technical and professional communication (TPC) concerns like ambiguity and clarity function in a democratic business. In my analysis, I looked for …

Lazarillo De Tormes And Rhetorical Paradox, Robin Mcallister

English Faculty Publications

Picaresque novel as a genre is usually traced back to the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, but mystery surrounds the origin of this paradoxical narrative that appeared in 1554. In particular, the techniques of irony and paradox employed in Lazarillo as vehicles for moral and social satire are influenced by an extremely widespread classical tradition, the rhetorical paradox, recently revived and made popular by Erasmus in his Praise of Folly. Lazarillo’s ties with a humanist revival of literary genres suited to social satire and self-inquiry extends to other forms of Menippean satire of which the rhetorical paradox and mock oration are …

Sankofa; Or ‘Go Back And Fetch It’: Merging Genealogy And Africana Studies, Kameelah L. Martin, Elizabeth J. West

English Faculty Publications

In recent years, advancements in digitized records, online ancestry communities, and advancements in DNA testing have paved the way so that almost anyone with the knack and patience for archival research can easily follow a familial line back to the slave-owning or original purchaser of an enslaved relative.

A.S. Byatt And The ‘Perpetual Traveller’: A Reading Practice For New British Fiction, Nicole Flynn

English Faculty Publications

While most readers enjoyed, or at least admired A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize-winning novel Possession, many are puzzled by her work before and since. This essay argues that the problem is not the novels themselves, but rather the way that reader approaches them. Conventional reading practices for experimental or postmodern fiction do not enable the reader to understand and enjoy her dense, dizzying work. By examining the intertexts in her novella “Morpho Eugenia,” in particular two imaginary texts written by the protagonist William Adamson, this essay demonstrates how the novella generates a different kind of reading practice. Using Byatt’s metaphor, the …

Review Of W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’S Religious Past, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

Bruno: Modern Europe's First Free Thinker, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph: By most accounts Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was by far the most controversial Renaissance philosopher. He published at least sixty texts upon a large variety of topics including mnemonics, hermetic religion, Copernican astronomy, and the renewed possibility of materialism as suggested by this major breakthrough in astronomy. For the most part his notoriety resulted from his defense of heliocentric theory, but also from his pursuit of its theoretical implications toward a modern renewal of ancient secular philosophy. Just as Bacon bridged the gap between Aristotelian philosophy and modern science, Bruno no less effectively served the same purpose between ancient …

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 …

Gameful Engagement: Gamification, Critical Thinking, And First-Year Composition, Sarah Dwyer

English Faculty Publications

Students often struggle with the transition to writing in college, both in first-year
composition (FYC) and in the disciplines. This report describes a curriculum that addresses this problem by turning the FYC course into a Role-Playing Game. This style of gamification, grounded in bell hooks’ concept of an engaged pedagogy, can help facilitate the critical thinking skills that are key elements of learning transfer from FYC to writing in the disciplines.

Dialogical Numbers: Counting Humanimal Pain In J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Mike Piero

English Faculty Publications

This essay argues that J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello stages numerical sequences strategically, dialogically, and parodically in order to call attention to the ideological weight involved in counting. Focusing on how one counts - and accounts for - human and nonhuman animal pain, I contend that the repetition of numbers in the novel works to subvert the neoliberal faith put in numbers, quantification, and data. Without succumbing to some religious-mystical numerology, this reading attempts to expose the fiction involved in the act of counting and the need to pay more attention to numerical discourse in literary fiction. In tracking these numbers …

"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article details a project that involved collecting the necessary items to produce a set of wedding pictures. While photographs have long been understood as indexical signs, the process of collecting the items via trips to thrift stores reveals a host of additional indexical signs through the set of underlying contextual cultural constraints surrounding the difference between the rituals of the marriage rite and the wedding as a public, performative practice. Indeed, the second hand items leave indexical and material traces of the excess and the disposability of weddings, while the pictures offer the material connection to the ostentation of …

The Sky Of Our Manufacture: The London Fog In British Fiction From Dickens To Woolf, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Spectators, Sponsors, Or World Travelers? Engaging With Personal Narratives Of Others Through The Afghan Women's Writing Project, Bethany Mannon

English Faculty Publications

This article studies the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and proposes three conceptual tools for examining the ways readers and editors of digital storytelling projects interact with writers and texts. The author advances discussions of personal narrative and the role this form of writing plays in transnational feminism and forms of humanitarian activism that increasingly take place online. Digital storytelling projects effectively circulate these personal accounts, but they benefit from scholarship that advises self-critical approaches to representing their subjects.