English Language and Literature Commons^™

"And Palate Call Judicious": Paradise Lost And The Question Of Taste, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

Paradise Lost repeatedly emphasizes the taste of the forbidden fruit. This essay argues that the poem averts, for discernible religious reasons, any binding judgment concerning whether the fruit is genuinely delicious or delicious only to a palate on the brink of corruption. The divine creator's participation in sensory delight would suggest his unseemly pleasure in sacrifice. This essay argues that John Milton advances a warning against grounding shared knowledge in taste. Although this lesson would go unheeded by Edmund Burke in his project of theistic empiricism, it speaks to problems within the Kantian account of aesthetic judgment and collective reason.

Wave Or Particle?: Crossing Borders In Ruth Ozeki’S Novel A Tale For The Time Being (2013), Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Nicholasa Mohr's "The English Lesson", A. Lecuona, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this story to junior high, high school, and/or college and university students including English Language Learning (ELL) students with a variety of learning objectives, backgrounds, and challenge levels. Developed by Adriana Lecuona and Professor Peter Schmidt.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Four Stories From Sandra Cisneros' "Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories", Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) is assigned frequently in high school and undergraduate courses in English and American literature, Latinx literature, and other classes. This essay presents teaching strategies for Cisneros’ short fiction by focusing on two stories that explore childhood—“Eleven” and “Barbie-Q”—and two that treat difficult passages into adulthood, “Woman Hollering Creek” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.”

Intended to be used in conjunction with Optional Online Research Projects On Four Stories In Sandra Cisneros' "Woman Hollering Creek And Other Stories."

Review Of "Black Print Unbound: "The Christian Recorder," African American Literature, And Periodical Culture" By E. Gardner, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

And, Oh, My Heart Goes Out, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Mature Content, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Lamentations, Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

The following poem attempts to think about loss from the perspective of different religions (the Jewish prophet Jeremiah, a Christian sermon, a Buddhist tale, Muslim prayer and traditions). The piece travels through time as well as space: it looks back at the Renaissance as a period in which Jeremiah’s lamentations were set to music and forced travel/slavery between Morocco and England first occurred.

Somebody’S Saints March In, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Minding The White Horse, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Jill Gladstein: A Data-Driven Researcher, C. Rutz, Jill M. Gladstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Agency From A Stone: Shelley’S Posthumanist Experiments In "Mont Blanc", Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

This article reads Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ as an extended exploration into possible modes of relationship linking the human mind to the material world. The modes of relationship considered by Shelley anticipate many of the structures and strategies developed by posthumanist theory, including structural coupling, strategic anthropomorphism, imagistic translation, and human-nonhuman assemblages. After summarizing Kantian and post-Kantian readings of ‘Mont Blanc,’ the essay works through an extended close reading of the poem to elucidate its proto-posthumanist elements.

“Animal Spirits”, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

In “Animal Spirits” looks in some depth at several of Williams’s poems about dogs or cats written over the course of his career, from “Sub Terra” (1917); “Poem (As the cat)” (from the 1930s); the dogs of Paterson; and “To a Dog Injured in the Street,” which exemplifies the elegiac poetics and representational paradoxes of Williams’s late triadic style. Cats for Williams exemplify energy in precise control, its perfection in form—and that was his lifelong quest. Dogs, on the other paw, embodied for Williams the boundary-breaking force of uncorraled creativity breaking form. Both spirits, figured as animals, were totems central …

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 …

Beyond Bollywood: Exhibiting South Asian America, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Review Of "Empires Of Love: Europe, Asia, And The Making Of Early Modern Identity" By C. Nocentelli, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy Of Rage, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

"Born There": Faulkner, Oxford, And Lafayette County, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

"Truth So Mazed": Faulkner And Us Plantation Fiction, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Past Griefs, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Steve Martin's "Patter For The Floating Lady", Abhinav Tiku , '18, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Abhinav Tiku, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 9H, "Portraits of the Artist," fall 2014.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Tobias Wolff's "That Room", Kate L. Crowley , '16, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Kate Crowley, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2014.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", Adriana M. Obiols Roca , '16, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Suitable for high school and college and university classes. Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Adriana Obiols Roca, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," spring 2014.

Learning Objectives. Students will: understand the differences between direct and indirect characterization and be able to identify examples of each; understand the uses of irony and foreshadowing in the story as well as more generally in literature; become acquainted with Flannery O’Connor and her writing style, particularly with her use of the grotesque; explore the complexity of the themes present …

Beauty, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Rough, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Cold Hands, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Concourse, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Lawn Boys, Nathalie Anderson

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Emily Dickinson’S Teenage Fanclub, Lara Langer Cohen

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay explores the 1882 publication of “Success is counted sweetest” in the Amateur Journal, a newspaper edited by eighteen-year-old Albert E. Barker of Judsonia, Arkansas. The Amateur Journal was part of a fad that swept the United States after the Civil War, when thousands of teenage boys began publishing their own newspapers on diminutive printing presses. At its height in the 1880s, amateur journalism linked boys across the country into tightly knit virtual communities with their own distribution methods, literary conventions, social customs, and vernaculars. Barker likely reprinted “Success is counted sweetest” from the anonymous anthology A Masque of …

“And You Are ——?”: Faulkner’S Mysteries Of Race And Identity, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.