English Language and Literature Commons^™

Othello And The Political Theology Of Jealousy, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay revisits Othello’s jealousy to detail the politico-theological significance of this dramatic affect. In the Hebrew Bible, jealousy maintains a covenant between God and a holy nation. When Pauline teaching defines marriage as an index of Christ’s love, this redefinition promises to replace exclusivity with a supposedly universal truth. Yet jealousy persists to reveal a clash between individual realities and corporate truths. Jealousy performs this by underscoring the fictive nature of the identification of a husband with Christ. Before The Winter’s Tale relates the problems of jealousy to a hereditary monarchy, Othello locates them within a republic. The Venetian …

Diasporic Longings, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

Using diaspora as a framework for reading Asian American literature expands the geographical and temporal contours of what it means to be Asian American. Although late-twentieth-century US popular culture was marked by multicultural ideologies of American citizenship, “diaspora” captures another way of thinking about Asian Americans: as immigrants who are subject to multiple projects of nationalism, and who embody diverse forms of citizenship. Whereas writers like Bharati Mukherjee reproduce dominant ideologies of US exceptionalism and multicultural citizenship, for writers such as Meena Alexander, the production of diasporic locality ripples across generations, as she ties together South Asia with North America, …

African American Celebrity Auto/Biographies, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

Anthony Foy’s chapter asks how do we approach the overdetermined narrative of the African American celebrity as a modern variant of African American autobiography, rather than simply dismissing it for its lack or artistry, activism, or authenticity? Foy observes that (1) the Black celebrity narrative recounts the emergence, circulation, reception, and transformation of the star’s image while also registering the synedcochic function of the star’s racialized body; (2) it features the sites, activities, practices, and products of consumer culture in order to ratify the star’s status as exemplary consumer and alluring commodity; and (3) it commodifies authenticity by promising to …

Contending Discourses Of Black Autobiography: Respectability, Authenticity, And Masculinity, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced …

Slow Metadata, Rachel Sagner Buurma, J. Shaw

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Teaching Archive: A New History For Literary Study, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered …

Soul-Error, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

Freud, in his essay on The Uncanny, explores a spatial confusion: a state of mind in which one sees "out there" something palpably shaped from "in here." Freud's most striking vignette in the essay rehearses how, some years earlier, he found himself wandering through an unknown Italian village, looking for the train station. He perused his map, made the appropriate right and left turns--and found himself in the red-light district. Here, Weinstein returns repeatedly to the traffic that unpredictably occurs between us ("in here") and the world ("out there"). Because we are endowed with stunningly intricate minds, we move through …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad", Amelia Tomei , '19, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. Learning Goals. Students will: understand how the narrator guides reader's interpretation of the story; understand how to read dialogue and how it contributes to characterization; explore the complexity of the themes present in the story and the characters Whitehead has created; understand how to annotate key references to things outside of the text and apply these back to the main text. Necessary Preparation: The teacher should have familiarized him or herself with Whitehead's The Underground Railroad before the first lesson. It is also important that the …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Keyan Shayegan , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. After completing the lesson plan, students should have an enhanced understanding of the following learning goals: the similarities between different types of internal and external migration, and the effects migration has on individuals and their senses of identity; why nativism is so prevalent, the negative impact it has on humanity, and how it can be overcome by shared experiences between people; how authorities such as governments and mass media corporations use technology to deter immigration, via both force and influencing the public, in ways that dehumanize immigrants; how …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Ruby Guerrero , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to high school grades 11-12, community college, and/or college and university students. This lesson is planned for three weeks and three times a week, but I recommend that teachers revise these plans as needed in order for the lesson to fit their class schedules. Learning Goals: students will be able to identify stereotypes of migrants and refuse to accept these as proper understandings of people; students will be able to reclaim their identities using the novel as a basis for this outcome; students will learn to identify the different types of narration, how …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “The Poet”, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan, including discussion questions, for teaching Emerson's essay "The Poet" (1844).

Victorianists And Their Reading, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter investigates how the most recent batch of new literary-critical interpretive methods takes inspiration from Victorian readers and reading. We consider the institutional context in which recent method debates have unfolded before turning to survey new methods, including distant reading, surface reading, curatorial reading, reparative reading, referential reading, literal reading, and affective reading. We show that these apparently very different interventions in literary scholarship’s method all have in common their attraction to the nineteenth century not just as an object of study but as an inspiration for method. And these nineteenth-century-inspired methods also seek to reconfigure the boundaries of …

"Black Panther:" Some Thoughts On Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, And Black Pixels In The Film (With An Aside On Ava Duvernay’S "A Wrinkle In Time"), Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Menippean Satire In The Digital Era: Gary Shteyngart’S "Super Sad True Love Story", Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Howard Weinbrot argues that Menippean satire tends to be produced in eras of "broken or fragile national, cultural, religious, political or generally intellectual values" (7). It protests cultural decadence and decline by incorporating contradiction into its form, using "at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy" (6). Although it may feature memorable characters, the Menippean mode primarily targets diseased and dangerous ideas or habits. It is encyclopedic in range and ambition, absorbing and parodying different discourses and genres while constructing a narrative via debates, fantasies, annotations (either …

Burning The Breadboard: A New Approach To "The Optimist’S Daughter", Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

This paper takes several angles of approach towards more deeply understanding central tensions in The Optimist’s Daughter. Goaded by Fay, the novel’s heroine struggles between her need to control and defend a past she feels is under attack and her intimation that her family’s life and values can’t truly be honored by such methods. The narrator also tells us that Laurel seeks to be “pardoned and freed” (OD 179)—but why, and from what? Welty’s text explicitly connects the possibility of pardon with Laurel forgiving her parents. How might we understand this tie between forgiving others and being pardoned oneself? Key …

Byron's Ambivalent Modernity: Touring And Forced Migration In "Don Juan", Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Epigraphs, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Hannah Cowley, "A Day In Turkey; Or, The Russian Slaves" (1791), Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

Perhaps one of the most intriguing documents of women’s place in the theatre in the 1790s, Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey uses Eastern despotism to explore women’s relation to the French Revolution and to the public sphere. A complex blend of proto-feminist critique, orientalist voyeurism, and Francophobic homophobia, Cowley manipulates the stock material of the late eighteenth-century theatre to generate a fantasy of feminine directorial power. In the play’s most remarkable scene, Cowley’s alter ego manipulates the political and sexual plots of the comedy from the isolation of the seraglio, thereby providing a model not only for women’s political …

Lesson Plan For Teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald's "An Alcoholic Case", Samantha Martin , '21, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this story to high school or college and university students. Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Samantha Martin, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Four Stories Featuring Multi/Mixed Identities, Sierra Sweeney , '21, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Sierra Sweeney, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Fiction as a genre is well known for its ability to discuss a wide range of topics in a way that is both entertaining and empathetic. But while fictional pieces, especially the short story, are famous for creating narratives that help readers understand experiences unlike their own and characters unlike themselves, I would argue that fiction can also serve as a medium of self- reflection. As someone who identifies as multi-ethnic …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", Lauren Hee Won Chung , '20, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A teacher's aid for introducing this deservedly famous story to students, including teaching some basic principles of good reading and interpretation. With a special focus on high school teachers, but applicable to many kinds of classrooms, including community colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities, etc. Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Lauren Hee Won Chung, in consultation with Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Review Of "Milton, Materialism, And Embodiment: One First Matter All" Edited By K. J. Donovan And T. Festa, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Search And Replace: Josephine Miles And The Origins Of Distant Reading, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Classroom In The Canon: T. S. Eliot’S Modern English Literature Extension Course For Working People And "The Sacred Wood", Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

Literary critics have long imagined that T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920) shaped the canon and methods of countless twentieth-century classrooms. This essay turns instead to the classroom that made The Sacred Wood: the Modern English Literature extension school tutorial that Eliot taught to working-class adults between 1916 and 1919. Contextualizing Eliot’s tutorial within the extension school movement shows how the ethos and practices of the Workers’ Educational Association shaped his teaching. Over the course of three years, Eliot and his students reimagined canonical literature as writing by working poets for working people—a model of literary history that fully …

South Asian American Visual Culture And Representation, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

South Asian American visual culture is a diverse field of visual art, created by artists who are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, among other diasporic locations (e.g., Kenya). South Asian American artists work in a range of media forms, including photography, sculpture, installation, video, painting, and drawing. Collectively, these artworks are frequently exhibited in museums and galleries as depictions of contemporary South Asian immigrant life. However, a close reading of individual works produces a more dynamic picture. Instead of viewing South Asian American visual culture solely in terms of artists’ own immigrant biographies, scholarship and …

Review Of "The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, And Gender" By E. Z. Kolkovich, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Solomon Northup’S Singing Book, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay examines the musical score included at the end of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), a setting of a song called “Roaring River” that Northup earlier recounted enslaved people singing as they patted juba. I argue that “Roaring River” stages questions that the narrative itself cannot ask about how to represent the experience of slavery once one is outside of it. In particular, it asks how to love what’s made in the shadow of slavery—the intimacies forged, and especially the music borne of them.

The Preparation Of The Topic Model, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Dead Doll, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Optional Online Research Projects On Four Stories In Sandra Cisneros' "Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories", Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

For high school and college and university students and their teachers. These online and print research projects are optional, but they will supplement and deepen students' engagement with Cisneros' stories. They have been classroom tested with Swarthmore College students. Intended to be used in conjunction with Lesson Plan For Teaching Four Stories From Sandra Cisneros' "Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories."