Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Opinion: Too Many Veterans With Children Are Still Homeless, Christopher R. Fee, Joshua L. Stewart

English Faculty Publications

Don’t ignore homeless veterans.

As we pause this Veterans Day to reflect on those who have sacrificed in the service of our country, let us not neglect to address the plight of those who have returned to a civilian life with far less promise than they have every right to expect. [excerpt]

Burbage's Father's Ghost, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

Unwrapping The Comfort Of Sameness With Spanish Immersion Elementary School, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

I watched my 6-year-old hover around the periphery of the table, unable to find somewhere to sit. The cafeteria was a cacophony of little voices, Spanish and English, tumbling over each other, her classmates sitting close and waiting to be dismissed to homeroom.

I couldn’t help but notice how different Noelle looked from most of the children, with her liquid blond hair and saucerlike blue eyes. [excerpt]

Lament As Transitional Justice, Michael Galchinsky

English Faculty Publications

Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the United States, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the …

Where Is The Girl Power? The Search For Authentic Portrayals Of Female Athletes In Ya Lit, Emilee Hussack, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Writing In The Cone Of Uncertainty: An Argument For Sheltering In Place, Doreen M. Piano

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

We’Re Not Kidding: Nonfiction Texts To Use Across The Curriculum, Emilee Hussack, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"The Color Purple" Takes Us On Emotional Journey Of Self-Discovery (Performance Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Extraordinary. That's the only way to describe the Virginia Repertory Theatre's musical version of "The Color Purple." Based on Alice Walker's classic novel, this Broadway-class show takes the audience on a moving, soulful journey of self-discovery with the heroine, Celie.

To Be A Man: A Re-Assessment Of Black Masculinity In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun And Les Blancs, Julie M. Burrell

English Faculty Publications

The first Black woman to pen a Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry scripted a majority of male protagonists. Critics tend to see Hansberry’s depiction of Black men as either an unfortunate departure from her feminist concerns, or as damaging representations of Black masculinity. In contrast to such views, this essay maps the trajectory of Hansberry’s career-long project of scripting positive visions of Black masculinity, from the politically progressive, while still patriarchal, structures of masculinity in A Raisin in the Sun, to the heterogeneous performances of revolutionary masculinity in Les Blancs. Further, in her role as public intellectual, Hansberry questioned prevailing assumptions …

Editorial Cartoons: Is Michael Sam Gay? Or Is He Black?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

A lot of media attention has been paid lately to the case of American football generally and the National Football League in particular. Recently, the NFL drafted its first openly gay man into its ranks, causing a great deal of celebration in some quarters and a high degree of consternation in others. As a fan of (American) football, I am interested in this story because of what it says about the social implications for individual players, team camaraderie, and the fans, too. I am thinking about this because I try to be mindful about and supportive of efforts to eliminate …

Tough Talk: Books About Bullying, Pauline Skowron Schmidt, Jennifer Stuntz, Emilee Hussack

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jesus Lives, But Should He Live In My Front Yard?, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

As I drove home from church, I eyed the bright foam sign my 6-year-old daughter held. “Jesus is Alive” it read in kid scrawl. “We’re supposed to put them in our yards!” Noelle beamed, eyeing her creation proudly through pink-rimmed glasses.

I imagined our wide, open yard in Pennsylvania, the green grass stretching without fences from one neighbor to the next. Our best friends in the neighborhood, secular humanists, would easily see it. I cringed. What would they think? [excerpt]

Seeing The Rebel: Or, How To Do Things With Dictionaries In Nineteenth-Century America, Tim Cassedy

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Becomes Of The Subject?, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Shaping Presence: Ida B. Wells’ 1892 Testimony Of The ‘Untold Story’ At New York’S Lyric Hall, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Ida B. Wells stood before a crowd of the social hierarchy of black women from Boston, Brooklyn, New York City, and Philadelphia at New York’s Lyric Hall on October 5, 1892.

Wells’ 1892 testimonial, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, is the founding rhetorical text in the anti-lynching movement that called for a moral, religious, and legal referendum on lynching in America. By forsaking all of the commonplace rationale for lynching and the Southern social comfort that came with it, Wells reframed the simplistic characterizations of lynching with new questions to demonstrate its structural features. With the …

Out Of Reach [Short Story], Kathleen Fowler

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Putting A Human Face On The Minimum Wage, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

What is a “livable wage,” and should we strive to raise wages for American workers?

There are lots of conflicting studies and reports. The Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs while raising the incomes of nearly 17 million Americans.

Even prominent economists like David Card and David Neumark diametrically disagree on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage, and their studies of results in New Jersey have consistently yielded conflicting results for decades. [excerpt]

How Do Song And Speech Go Together In Comics Panels?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In my last post, I wrote about simultaneous talk in comics, exploring the way that speech balloons can be positioned in a panel to convey a sense of overlapping talk. This post continues the series on the possibilities of simultaneous discourse. However, this one asks how visual and verbal cues might tell us something about the way readers are supposed to imagine hearing the production of both speech and song in the same panel.

The first example is drawn from Full Color, a graphic novel by Mark Haven Britt. I have taught this book a couple of times, …

What's So Feminist About Garters And Bustiers? Neo-Burlesque As Post-Feminist Sexual Liberation, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

The performance art of burlesque is gaining popularity in North American culture, but with many ‘neo-burlesque’ performers, critical reflection or commentary on the politics of female sexuality is glaringly absent or summarily dismissed. Neo-burlesque could be a feminist rewriting and reclaiming of a Western dance form, which showcased women simpering sexily for her audience. However, in order for neo-burlesque to have a feminist tone, it needs to do more than incorporate women of various ethnicities and body types to transcend patriarchal scripts of female sexuality. Some neo-burlesque includes disruptions of traditional scripts regarding female sexuality that demand the audience think …

How Do Comics Artists Use Speech Balloons?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This post is the first in a series on how comics artists represent talk in comics. I’ll be writing about speech balloons and how the discipline of conversation analysis (CA) helps us understand how creative these artists can be when they try to show the intricacies of everyday talk.

Consider the following two panels. These are from the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg. (Click on each of the titles to see the full comic.)

Street Art As Public Pedagogy & Community Literacy: What Walls Can Teach Us, Ashley J. Holmes

English Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes the street art project Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS) to argue that public art plays an essential, pedagogical role in enhancing literacy education and intercultural communication within our communities. Functioning as both a public pedagogy and community literacy, STWTS demonstrates the power of public art to address injustice and provoke community conversation. To conclude, the essay calls literacy educators to expand the sites of pedagogy to include the everyday literacies students encounter within local public spaces.

Introduction: John Gower's Twenty-First Century Appeal, Kara Mcshane, R. F. Yeager

English Faculty Publications

This is the introductory essay to a special issue of the South Atlantic Review focusing on John Gower. Guest editor for this issue is Kara L. McShane with the assistance of R. F. Yeager.

Social Healing In Gower's Visio Angliae, Kara Mcshane

English Faculty Publications

I argue that Gower uses metaphorical images common from vernacular romance—particularly the image of the rudderless ship—to help himself and his readers process the upheaval of the Great Rising. As a healing narrative, the Visio is meant as a public, political text that can begin healing at both personal and communal levels. The Visio is reforming, but it is not radical. In Gower’s worldview, social reform must begin with the highest levels of society and move downward.

[Review Of The Book: Migrant Modernism: Postwar London And The West Indian Novel, By J. Dillon Brown], Allyson Salinger Ferrante

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Man I Killed, Brian Duchaney

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Call Her Calamity Electrifies Man": Alp And The Movement Of Archive In Finnegan’S Wake, Ellen Scheible

English Faculty Publications

The existence of characters in Joyce’s dream world of Finnegans Wake rarely proves their singular presence in the text. As readers we are led to incorporate different characters into our interpretation of any one character; the temporal and historical circularity of the Wake is then personified in a whirlpool of characterization. Comprising both the motion and consistency of this whirlpool, Anna Livia is most certainly the nexus of activity for the otherwise sleepy Earwicker narrative. Yet, recognizing the textual motion of both the character and concept of ALP, (or even simply the potential for signifying motion within the text) as …

[Review Of The Book: Milton’S Messiah: The Son Of God In The Works Of John Milton By Russell M. Hillier], Gregory Chaplin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: Marge Saiser's Losing The Ring In The River (University Of New Mexico Press), Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

I opened up Marge Saiser's latest book of poetry, Losing the Ring in the River, with great anticipation. Familiar with her other books, Lost in Seward County and Bones of a Very Fine Hand, I expected exquisitely etched images and finely tuned phrases, and I wasn't disappointed. In Losing the Ring in the River, Saiser depicts three generations of women, Clara, Emma, and Liz, in moments that clarified or defined their lives: Clara's astute reading of domestic life, especially her sharp divisions with her husband; Emma's chase of marital happiness and coping with disappointment; and finally, Liz's spark and break …