English Language and Literature Commons^™

December 30, 2015: Mckittrick Keynote Opens Ellis Series Spring Season, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series WMU Faculty Keynote Lecture Casey McKittrick

State Funding Unfair To Traditional Schools, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The present budget crisis in Pennsylvania has brought many lingering tensions to bear as school districts scramble to pay their bills without any support from the state. Notably, there has been a lot of talk about holding back payments to charter schools, which naturally sparks controversy. In order to make sense of the situation - and in order to understand the passionate debate which surrounds it - it's worthwhile to know something about the history, theory, and funding of charter schools. [excerpt]

From “A New Hope” To No Hope At All: “Star Wars,” Tolkien And The Sinister And Depressing Reality Of Expanded Universes: When Fantasy Sagas Never End, We See The Cycles Of Brutality And Totalitarianism That Fuel Them Don't, Either, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Post-Racial Or Racial Plateau?: Pym’S Revisions Of Arthur Gordon Pym’S Racism, Alyssa Amaral

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

“Chippy Bits Periodicals” And The Middlebrow: Holbrook Jackson, T. P.'S Weekly (1902–1916) And To-Day (1917–1923), Louise Kane

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article investigates two early twentieth-century British periodicals, T. P.'s Weekly (1902–16) and To-day (1917–23), through the perspective of the perceived modernism/middlebrow dichotomy and the editorial practices of Holbrook Jackson. Exploring the history of these two diachronically linked periodicals (To-day incorporated T. P.'s Weekly in 1916), I argue that key moments or “intersections” in the editorial history of T. P.'s Weekly and To-day coincide with distinct and definite “branchings” away from the tenets of the middlebrow culture that largely defined T. P.'s Weekly as part of Jackson's objective of creating a thoroughly modernist periodical.

December 17, 2015: 2016 Green Rose Prize From New Issues, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The 2016 Green Rose Prize Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum by Nadine Sabra Meyer

December 16, 2015: The Gwen Frostic Reading Series Spring 2016, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Gwen Frostic Reading Series Schedule for Spring 2016 Semester

December 12, 2015: Spring 2016 Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Events, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Living Between The Lines: Intersectionality And Self-Actualization In Shakespeare's Plays, Morgan L. Green

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

More than four hundred years after his death Shakespeare is still the most performed playwright in the English-Speaking World, and even in some cultures vastly different from Shakespeare’s England. Theatre companies continue to make him relevant by exploring new themes and tailoring the productions to the social mores of contemporary audiences. One particular theme being examined more and more by both scholars and theatre artists is diversity and the role of identity in Shakespeare’s works. Three works in which this can be easily examined are Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello with particular attention paid to …

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …

Poems For My Woofie The Story Of Lt. Wilfred V. Michaud, 1st Parachute Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Allison Orr

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

My senior capstone project is the creation of a book of investigative poetry. The subject of the work is my grandfather, Wilfred V. Michaud. He was a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps during World War II. The poetry addresses the history of Michaud’s battalion and the battles it fought, as well as personal stories of Michaud’s life and experience in the service. Several secondary sources were used to gain historical context for the poetry. Additionally, primary sources were used to provide information about Michaud’s personal experiences. The combination of primary and secondary sources established the necessary background and …

Portraits Of Children Of Alcoholics: Stories That Add Hope To Hope, Meagan Lacy

Publications and Research

This literary analysis examines the emergence of children of alcoholics narratives and their growth from "resource" texts to literary subgenre. While early texts offer useful information about parental alcoholism, they are also limited. Namely, they do not adequately mirror the diversity of children, families, and problems associated with parental alcoholism nor do they offer alternatives for children whose parents do not, or cannot, seek treatment for their addiction. Literature, on the other hand, in inviting what philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as "narrative play," can help children learn to understand and empathize with others, nourish their inner curiosity, and, most …

Back To The Future: Student Time Period Analyses, Jordan Barge, Sarah Ebert, Anna Gaskin, Renay Gladish, Quinn Hamilton, Morgan Hanson, Hannah Markham, Mark Mclean, Callie Smith, Bertha Vega, Shelby Watkins, Jamie Weihe, Jillian Whitney

Student Publications

This newsletter began with the Fall 2015 Honors English class. These students were challenged to initiate research over a topic they thought was interesting and show how it related to our campus, Stephen F. Austin State University. It is our hope that this cumulative research will help readers look at SFA a little differently.

Catholic Guilt : Longing And Belonging In The Fiction Of François Mauriac And John Mcgahern, Eamon Maher

Articles

No abstract provided.

To The Contrary, Beth Daniell

Faculty and Research Publications

Author of one of the most important volumes on literacy and spiritual practice finds that four key insights have guided her work, all of them consonant with AEPL members’ practices.

The Fictionality Of Topic Modeling: Machine Reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Series, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstruction of the topics out of which a given set of novels have been created allows for a denaturalizing and unfamiliar (though crucially not “objective” or “unbiased”) view. In other words, topic models are fictions, and scholars of literature should consider …

The Broadsheet- Issue 14, Merrimack College

The Broadsheet

Merrimack College's English Department newsletter.

This issue features:

• English Career Night
• Nordic Noir
• Windy and Cold New England Shore
• Alice Sebold Interview/Reading
• Writers House Informal Writing Sessions

A Supplication For The Beggars: The Arguments Of Simon Fish And The Cultural Relevance Of His Writing In Sixteenth Century England, Charlotte Mcfaddin

Student Research

No abstract provided.

Tasting And Testing Books: Good Housekeeping’S Literary Canon For The 1920s And 1930s, Amy Blair

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Carrying On Like A Madman: Insanity And Responsibility In Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Increases In Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even With Typical Text Presentation: Implications For The Reading Of Literature, D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Michael Holquist

English Faculty Publications

Reading fiction is a major component of intellectual life, yet it has proven difficult to study experimentally. One aspect of literature that has recently come to light is perspective embedding ("she thought I left" embedding her perspective on "I left"), which seems to be a defining feature of fiction. Previous work (Whalen et al., 2012) has shown that increasing levels of embedment affects the time that it takes readers to read and understand short vignettes in a moving window paradigm. With increasing levels of embedment from 1 to 5, reading times in a moving window paradigm rose almost linearly. However, …

“Carried In The Arms Of Standing Waves:" The Transmotional Aesthetics Of Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, Native, Indigenous, First Nations, and Aboriginal scholars and writers have forged alliances to initiate and support decolonization efforts and the reassertion of native survivance. Native and non-Native scholars have responded to modern challenges by reconceptualizing notions of peoplehood, identity, and nationalism. Following these intellectual contours, rather than conceiving of native culture as totalizing, static, and/or incommensurable—as always already foreign—responsive readings informed by the critical work of Gerald Vizenor can support more sophisticated understandings of native literary production while revealing sites of native transmotion. Through a thusly informed examination of the work of the Tlingit poet, Nora Marks …

He, Jessica Bourget

Honors Projects

This small collection of essays addresses the author's relationship to men in her life, in particular her father and stepfather. In "Somewhere Else," she writes about her often changing and unstable relationship with her biological father. She continues this exploration in "What They Don't Tell You" in a different way, addressing her father and mother's relationship and comparing it to an unhealthy dating relationship in her own life. In her last piece, she writes about her stepfather dealing with the death of his brother and simultaneous adoption of his nephew, while also coming to terms with the reality of her …

The Linguistic Market Of Codeswitching In U.S. Latino Literature, Marilyn Zeledon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary study that brings together the fields of literature, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies in order to understand the motivation and meaning of English-Spanish codeswitching or language alternation in Latino literature produced in the United States. Codeswitching was first introduced in Latino literature around the time of the Chicano Movement in the 1970s and has been used as a distinctive feature of Latino literary works to this day. By doing a close linguistic analysis of narratives by four different authors belonging to the largest Latino communities in the country (Chicano, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, and Cuban Americans), …

"The Whole Foundations Of The Solid Globe Were Suddenly Rent Asunder": Space Place And Homelessness In Poe's "The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym" And Melville's "Benito Cereno", Francis H. Hill

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the phenomenon of the hazy spaces on the periphery of the antebellum imagination that, while existing geographically at the very fringes of daily American life, are nonetheless active in the conceptualization, production, and representation of an idiosyncratic American sense of space: an anxiety of spatial fragmentation, formlessness, and modulation. In particular I am interested in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and Melville's “Benito Cereno,” both of which deal with American transoceanic travel to the proximity of Antarctica and its surrounding seas. These gothicized nautical fictions demonstrate an important dialectic playing out in these extreme spaces: …

Zora Neale Hurston And The Narrative Aesthetics Of Dance Performance, Jennifer M. Sittig

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston’s literature involves dance and performance. What makes this a viable topic of inquiry is her texts often exhibit the performative, whether portraying culture or using dance and associated folk rituals to create complex meaning. Hurston’s use of black vernacular and storytelling evokes lyrical expression in "Their Eyes Were Watching God." African and Caribbean Diasporas in Hurston’s literature reflects primitive dance performances and folklore. This novel requires lyrical analysis. The storytelling feature of performance arts and reclamations of the body are present in Hurston’s text. In recent academic settings, the body has come to occupy a crucial place …

Opinion: Housing Our Homeless Vets Is A Duty We’Ll Always Owe, Christopher R. Fee, Joshua L. Stewart

English Faculty Publications

As we celebrate Veterans Day across America, we are reminded of President Abraham Lincoln’s powerful admonition in the Gettysburg Address regarding what we owe to those who have sacrificed and given of themselves in the defense of the common good. [excerpt]

An Evening With Emily Dickinson, Meryl Altman

English Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

Frankenstein In The Twenty-First Century, Haley C. Ochs

Honors Program: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Analyzes the science and ethics of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It utilizes historical and literary analyses, as well as a close reading of the text, to demonstrate the impact of eighteenth century science and how it leads to Frankenstein's immorality.

Darren Glass, Associate Professor Of Mathematics, Musselman Library, Darren B. Glass

Next Page

In this new Next Page column, Darren Glass, Associate Professor of Mathematics, shares where he discovers new fiction to read (it includes a tournament and a live rooster!) and which work of foodie fiction he considers to be the gold standard.