English Language and Literature Commons^™

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 …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Imagining The Archive: Speculation As A Tool Of Archival Reconstruction, Marieclaire Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines a speculative methodological approach towards restoring silenced Black voices in the archive. First, I will discuss the reasons why this work is necessary, exploring the various patterns of muting, distortion, erasure, and disenfranchisement that Black communities experience within the United States in both physical and written forms. The use of speculation specifically addresses the dehumanization that has followed the Black experience in the United States from the earliest violent incarnation of slavery, and creating the foundation of this kind of silencing allows us to understand why speculation, as opposed to other methodological models for archive restoration, is …

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."

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."

Ad Hoc American Studies: Michigan And The Hidden History Of A Movement, Alexander I. Olson, Frank Kelderman

Faculty Scholarship

This essay uses the history of the American Culture program at the University of Michigan as an occasion for rethinking the early years of American Studies more generally. Our archival research has found that the program was founded in 1935—seventeen years earlier than previously thought—making it the oldest American Studies degree program in the world. These forgotten years challenge conventional genealogies tracing the field’s origins to the “myth and symbol” school at Harvard. Instead, Michigan’s history reveals a deep engagement with interdisciplinary movements in the 1930s that shared an interest in critiquing American democracy, particularly human ecology, institutionalist economics, and …

Review: The Routledge Concise History Of Latino/A Literature, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

What Is Method And Why Does It Matter?, Michael A. Elliott, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

The recent emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship—manifest in the resurgence of institutional programs like American studies and publications in cultural studies—has relocated both the literary critic and the literary text to unfamiliar territory. This new interest in broaching disciplinary limits has proved to be exciting and invigorating. Literary critics have turned their attention to media other than the written text,and nonliterary specialists,such as historians and sociologists,have used literary texts to support their own research. This book is a response to American literary interdisciplinary and attempts to raise,and address,the inevitable questions that emerge when disciplines collaborate: What can texts tell us about …