English Language and Literature Commons^™

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]

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Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources.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 …

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, …

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]

Shylock Celebrates Easter, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Way Forward On Healthcare?, William H. Lane

English Faculty Publications

In the wake of a remarkable visit from Pope Francis, is it time to ask, WWFD? What would Francis do with our half-fixed, highly fragmented healthcare system? [excerpt]

Revolution Demythologized, Jonathan Allison

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Digital Scholarship And Interactivity: A Study Of Commenting Features In Networked Books, Jenna Sheffield

English Faculty Publications

Digital scholarly publishing is moving toward the use of commenting features, which allow readers to contribute to the knowledge production of the publication and establish a community of readers within a digital text. In this article, I use theories of interactivity in order to articulate some of the potentials as well as challenges that are inherent in using commenting features within digital scholarship. In using interactivity as the main theory through which scholars understand their decisions about commenting functions, this article argues, digital scholars will better be able to frame the interactions that can occur among readers and the author …

Medicare At Fifty Needs To Grow, William H. Lane

English Faculty Publications

In America everybody has a healthcare story. A bill impossible to read, an inscrutable "additional" charge, trouble getting insurance, trouble keeping it, a friend or family member who's fallen between the coverage "cracks." [excerpt]

Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

It took 28 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 for Mary Hallock Foote to render drawings for one of the novel’s first illustrated editions, which was probably the first ever to be illustrated by a woman.(1) It took 130 years after the publication of Foote’s illustrated edition in 1878 for Project Gutenberg to digitize and disseminate Hawthorne’s novel with Foote’s illustrations.(2) It has taken seven years for Hawthorne scholarship to commence addressing and examining Foote’s edition, and theorize what her drawings suggest about the act of seeing, for the heroine’s audiences in the book, and for …

Kayardild Morphology And Syntax, By Erich R. Round (Review), Gregory Stump

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Josephine Lawrence: A Writer Of Her Time, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Defoe’S The Complete English Tradesman And The Prostitute Narrative: Minding The Shop In Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Sally Salisbury, And Roxana, Sharon Smith

English Faculty Publications

Written in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble collapse of 1720, Daniel Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman (1726) associates economic survival with the concept of mastery, or “minding the shop.” This concept had been explored in prostitute narratives published earlier in the decade, including Anodyne Tanner’s The Life of the Late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn (1721), Charles Walker’s Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723), and Defoe’s Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). When one reads The Complete English Tradesman in relation to these narratives, the figure of the female sex worker emerges …

Comics And Composition, Comics As Composition: Navigating Production And Consumption, Tammie M. Kennedy, Jessi Thomsen, Erica Trabold

English Faculty Publications

Composition has a vested interest in exploring how comics studies can inform our teaching of writing, multimodal literacies, and visual rhetoric. Composition and rhetoric has already demonstrated a growing interest in comics (including graphic literatures, graphic novels, graphic narratives, digital storytelling) as complex sites of literacy and as spaces to theorize and practice multimodal composing. Comics also provide opportunities to explore the rhetorical choices and transactions that must be negotiated between composers and readers. However, despite composition scholars’ interest in multiliteracies, multimodal composing, and visual rhetoric, the interdependent and fluid connections between images and words remain largely disengaged. For example, …

Reading Aloud: Poetry At Its Finest, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Social Class In Applied Linguistics By David Block, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As Block writes in the prologue and the epilogue, the book is primarily about erasure; his motivation for writing the book is to highlight “the substantial and sometimes complete erasure of social class in applied linguistics research due to the ways in which applied linguists frame their discussions of issues such as identity, inequality, disadvantage and exclusion” (pp. ix–x). Overall, Block achieves his goal of illustrating the widespread absence of social class in applied linguistics; however, the book itself makes some missteps in exploring the very construct it claims as its focus.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter …

The Role Of Culture In Comics Of The Quotidian, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Studies of the quotidian often start from a social sciences perspective that daily life is made up of routine practices and ingrained assumptions. This is also found in studies of literature, art and economics. The premise of the quotidian, however, must be examined through a lens of culture. This essay explores how the notion of the quotidian in comics rests on culture, which in turn comprises various nexus of practice. Drawing evidence from Exit Wounds (by Rutu Modan) and Questionable Content (by Jeph Jacques), the essay extends the notion of the quotidian from a specific reference to ‘slice of life …

Prevention Cascade: The United States And The Diffusion Of R2p, Michael Galchinsky

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Transformative Learning, Affect, And Reciprocal Care In Community Engagement, Ashley J. Holmes

English Faculty Publications

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy …

Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger

English Faculty Publications

Many a medievalist has been seduced by Chaucer. Perhaps it’s the totality of Chaucer’s enduring characters, memorable tales, elusive narrator, and fragmented whole that keeps us coming back. We are fascinated and delighted, too, by his linguistic play and the lyrical cadence of Middle English. Chaucer may have led us to graduate study in the first place and remains a treat that organizes our pedagogical lives. For some who teach in smaller programs or two-year colleges, Chaucer’s canonical status may provide the only guaranteed place for medieval texts in the curriculum and thus represents one small chance to share our …

Robert Southey On Portugal: Travel Narrative And The Writing Of History, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Robert Southey was once referred to by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch as “one of the best known of the unread poets” (9) in a study that deliberately focused on what he considered Southey’s largely failed poetic quest: “Southey’s grand failures,” he explained, “are more interesting than his modest successes and far more illuminative of Romanticism and Romantic myth-making generally” (9). In an oblique way, my focus in this essay is likewise another of Southey’s grand failures-- his planned, but never finished, History of Portugal. This ambitious project, despite remaining mostly unwritten, occupied much of Southey’s time in the early years …

[Review Of The Book "Other People's Diasporas": Negotiating Race In Contemporary Irish And Irish American Culture By Sinead Moynihan], Kathleen Vejvoda

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Slipping From Secret History To Novel, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The secret history, a genre of writing made popular as opposition political propaganda during the reign of Charles ii, has been the subject of renewed critical interest in recent years. By the mid-1740s, novelists were using markers of secret histories on the title pages of their works, thus blurring the genres. This forgotten history of the secret history can help us understand why Ian Watt and other twentieth-century critics tended to end their narratives of the rise of the “realist” Whig novel with the works of the Tory novelist Jane Austen. In particular, the blended narrative perspective that Watt praises …

Will You Go Out With Me? Why First Loves Are Painfully Important To Ya Lit, Emilee Hussack, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“The More Things Change . . .”: A New Generation Of Historical Fiction, Pauline Skowron Schmidt

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Which Side Are You On? The Worlds Of Grant Morrison, Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutovic, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Grant Morrison is a key figure among the first wave of authors of the so-called "British Generation" (Sandifer and Eklund). The works of the other two creators, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, have been the basis for a wealth of scholarly research within the field of comics studies and whole constellations of literary scholarship (Sandifer and Eklund; Sanders; Krueger and Shaeffer; Millidge). Morrison's fictional worlds, however, remain understudied, despite the fact that, as Marc Singer observes, Morrison's work and career seem to be evenly distributed along a continuum ranging from the alternative Vertigo material to the mainstream superhero comics (Singer …

"Hills Like White Elephants": Epistemic, Nonepistemic And Nonseeing, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

This essay, a though-experiment, explores the value of reading literary texts (with the example of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants") from the point of view of epistemic, nonepistemic and nonseeing. Epistemic seeing is defined as seeing with "belief-content" nonepistemic seeing without it. The technique is to examine each example of the word "seeing" (or one of the members of its family, "look, watch," "blink") and let it "lead" you to the object, its contest, and implications in the story as a whole..

Making And Breaking The Superhero Quotidian: How All-Star Superman Embodies And Revises The Everyday, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This essay explores the idea of the everyday in All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Scholars identify the everyday, or the quotidian, as including routine behaviors and ingrained assumptions (e.g., Borland and Sutton), and the construct of the quotidian as culture has been explored in comics (Bramlett). Depending on circumstances, characters may navigate the Metropolis cityscape or the Kent farm, take trips to the moon, explore the Daily Planet office building, and meet otherworldly heroes and villains. Even though much of the world of the superhero is extraordinary and wondrous to readers, the characters themselves nevertheless have a …

A Luminous Haze; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Plagiarism, Todd Richardson

English Faculty Publications

"I really was never any more than what I was," Bob Dylan writes in his autobiography Chronicles, "a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."1 I'd call his proclamation inefficient if that didn't imply that it gets a job done, albeit poorly. The sentence, rather, strikes me as grand­sounding balderdash. It begins with a promise of humility, after which it gradually evaporates into bleary images that never realize anything resembling actual meaning. On the whole, Dylan is exceedingly specific throughout Chronicles, recounting in detail the music …

The (Re)Naturalization Of Margaret Cavendish: Making Active The Relationship Between Nature And Female Subjectivity In Blazing World, Daniel P. Richards, Julie Chappell (Ed.), Kamille Stone Stanton (Ed.)

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.