English Language and Literature Commons^™

Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur

Publications and Research

Zitkala-Ša (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird) was among the first to write about the experiences of Native American children in the U.S. Indian boarding school program to an English-speaking audience. As a writer and political activist, Zitkala-Ša uses emotional appeals and cultural ideas she learned through her white education to expose the very boarding school institutions that taught her. In American Indian Studies (1921), Zitkala-Ša critiques the violence that the Indian boarding school system inflicts on young Native Americans. She presents these critiques through emotional appeals that take two forms: one, a more traditional sentimental appeal associated with middle-class white …

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Excerpts From An Anti-Standardized “수능”: A Design-Fictional Approach To Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Excerpts from an Anti-Standardized '수능'” experiments with design fiction to disrupt overly rehearsed ways of thinking about Korea’s past(s), present(s), and future(s).

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Productive Disruptions: Using Commonplace Books To Resist Eurocentrism, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Henry James's "Poor Sensitive Gentlemen" And The Quest For Meaning (And Happiness) In Three Late Tales: "The Altar Of The Dead," "The Beast In The Jungle," And "The Jolly Corner", Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

“Happiness” is not an emotion we immediately associate with the life of Henry James or with the characters in his fiction. It is true that some of his characters comment on the idea of happiness, but not without persistent irony. The protagonists of James’s late tales express no explicit interest in happiness; however, their desire to understand their journeys results in an important insight into the complex, and perhaps contradictory, nature of personal fulfillment. It is an experience, I argue, that offers a moment of painful joy, and it is the closest thing to happiness possible for James’s characters, and …

The Legend Of The Legion: Nihilism And The Restoration Of The Aristocracy In Ouida’S Under Two Flags, Laura Clarke

Publications and Research

Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867) is not a widely read Victorian novel today, but it is offers important insight into the philosophical concerns of a novelist who was hugely popular in her time. In Under Two Flags, Ouida explores what she saw as the epistemological problem developing in the nineteenth century, a nihilistic view that promoted scepticism, aestheticism, and idleness, which is a perspective she believed was responsible for the demise of the aristocracy. Wishing to restore the power and position of the aristocracy, Ouida sends her protagonist Bertie Cecil, a dandy who embodies the aestheticism and ennui of the …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

A Feminist Scholar Explains Why Will Smith's Words Speak As Loudly As His Actions, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

Marleen S. Barr's contribution to the American Association of University Professors Academe magazine blog links the Will Smith slap to literary criticism to explain why the words Ssmith shouted are as important as his actions. .

Feminine Performance In The Taming Of The Shrew: Final Speech And Missing Soliloquy, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Remixing The Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, And The Undergraduate Editor, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This essay explores the benefits and challenges of using digital editing as a platform for social knowledge production. First, I discuss the underlying impetus for the project, my choice of Scalar as a digital platform, and a number of specific assignments designed to develop skills toward the final edition. Next, I analyze examples from student work, considering the larger implications of students’ annotation choices and the thematic focus each of them chose for their acts. Finally, I outline some of the potential pitfalls of this course. My aim is to privilege students’ discovery, negotiation, and ownership of ideas. As a …

“’We Know What We Are, But Not What We May Be’: Student Transformation Through Commentary Blogs", Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This chapter discusses how, when students follow the online discussion practices of Sheridan Blau's Commentary Project, they can learn to embrace confusion, value questions, recognize that uncertainty is part of the learning process, and accept that what they don’t understand is often more important for them as a learner than what they do.

Queer Gothic Literature And Culture, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism And Communications Media In Violet Hunt's "Love's Last Leave.", Melissa Dinsman, Heather M. Robinson

Publications and Research

An overlooked figure of modernist circles, Violent Hunt was a suffragette, novelist, and author of ghost stories. In her second collection of haunted narratives, More Tales of The Uneasy (1925), Hunt explores the ghostliness of the Great War, both for those on the front and at home. In this essay, we focus on the third story in this volume, “Love’s Last Leave,” and argue that Hunt includes both ghost story tropes and communications media to articulate the real deadliness of the Great War. Communications technology and spiritualism share a similar historical evolution, and in “Love’s Last Leave” both types …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

The Provocative Strangeness Of Camus's L'Etranger And Coetzee's Disgrace, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (1942) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), are two of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century. Their contested and exhaustive critical reception suggests that readers continue to be hailed by these texts in complex ethical ways. In each text, a white male protagonist engages in a violent encounter with an individual identified as Other. If they initially arouse discomfort by appearing to divest others of their alterity, these characters ultimately recognize and preserve that otherness, inviting readers to consider the requirement that we privilege others over ourselves in order to become subjects.

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …

Responding To Xenophobia: Politics, Populisms And Our Teaching, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

This essay explores ways faculty in the humanities may guide students through current manifestations of populism, specifically, this movement’s encouragement of xenophobia. As a member of an English department at a public community college in the United States, I argue, first, that community college students, who often have deep personal connections to the experiences of immigrants, may respond to the anti-immigrant rhetoric in useful and provocative ways. Second, I suggest that the related history of anti-immigration sentiment in American politics since the beginning of the 20th century can provide students with a powerful context for understanding xenophobia today. Third, I …

A Journal Of The Plague Year As A Sequel To Robinson Crusoe, Ala Alryyes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Elizabeth Kent’S New Tales Of Botanical Friendship, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

Elizabeth Kent has been considered a rather minor figure in the Leigh Hunt circle. However, this examination of her previously unknown children’s tales illuminates how Kent’s generic crossings establish a common emphasis on observation in the realms of botany, pedagogy, and poetry while suggesting that what happens beyond the observable world might be equally generative. Taken as a whole, Kent’s work constitutes a previously unacknowledged challenge to the Cockney School’s almost fetishistic attachment to the social. The identification of New Tales brings into focus Kent’s efforts to systematize friendship through her writing and clarifies her ambiguous response to Cockney amiability.

Sensitive Plants And Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, And Elizabeth Kent, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

When a team of researchers in 2018 found that plants exposed to anesthesia appeared to lose consciousness, the press reported that plants might have a consciousness to lose. The ensuing debate revealed a gap between scientific and literary approaches to human and nonhuman consciousness that this article traces back to the botanical writing of the Romantic period. These concerns, I argue, are central to Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) and Sylvan Sketches (1825), both botanical works that double as literary anthologies in order to expose a productive gap between literary and scientific knowledge. In a time when the distinction between …

Fantastic Borderlands And Masonic Meta-Religion In Rudyard Kipling’S “The Man Who Would Be King”, Lucas Kwong

Publications and Research

This article examines Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King” through the lens of Freemasonry’s interreligious ideology. In British India, members of “The Craft” offered what scholar James Laine calls a meta-religion, a fraternity whose emphasis on interreligious tolerance masks power relations between colonizers and colonized. When he became a Freemason, Kipling’s lifelong fascination with India’s religious diversity translated into enthusiasm for the sect’s unifying aspirations. In this context, “The Man Who Would Be King” stands out for how sharply it contests that enthusiasm. The story’s Masonic protagonists determine to find glory and riches in Kafiristan, a borderland region known …

Debility And Disability In Edith Wharton's Novels, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia

Publications and Research

This article locates Fantomina in a literary tradition that proposes all-female communities, such as convents and monasteries, as liberating and empowering spaces. I argue that the novella implies a virtual community rather than an actual one, as the heroine collectively embodies many different women, all of distinct social ranks: the heroine is both one woman and a variety of women brought together under the auspices of a single body, much the way discrete individuals together compose a community. Then, too, Beauplaisir, the object of the heroine’s desire, treats all the personae the same, no matter their social station. This emphasis …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

The White Album As Neo-Victorian Fiction Of Loss, Lucas Kwong

Publications and Research

Although much has been written about the Beatles' celebration of Victorian culture on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, little scholarship, if any, has focused on the White Album’s relationship to the late Victorian period. This paper examines the White Album through the lens of what Victorian studies scholar Stephen Arata has called “fictions of loss,” a body of late Victorian texts depicting intertwined processes of “national, biological, [and] aesthetic” decline. Through examining songs like "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution Number 9," I argue that the White Album deserves consideration alongside Dracula and She as a “fiction of loss,” …

Creating And Using Open Educational Resources (Oer) In Reading And Writing Classes, Christine E. Hutchins

Publications and Research

Creating her own assignments using openly licensed course materials allows this professor and her students to be more creative and to take greater advantage of digital resources.

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.