English Language and Literature Commons^™

Reviews, Ruth Berman, Joe R. Christopher, Janet Brennan Croft, Mike Foster, Harley Sims, Richard C. West

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The Making of a Mystic: New and Selected Letters of Evelyn Underhill. Ed. Carol Poston. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher.

From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend. Valerie Estelle Frankel. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft.

The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy: Wicked Wisdom of the West (Popular Culture and Philosophy, Vol. 37). Ed. Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng. Reviewed by Ruth Berman.

C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile. Edited with an Introduction by A.T. Reyes. Reviewed by Richard C. West.

The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of the Rings …

Intertextuality And The Collaborative Construction Of Narrative: J.M. Coetzee's Foe, Tisha Turk

English Publications

No abstract provided.

These Days Of Large Things: The Culture Of Size In America, 1865-1930 [Review], Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

In These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865–1930, Michael Tavel Clarke examines the Progressive Era preoccupation with size. As Clarke argues with considerable evidence, largeness was widely interpreted in this period (and, indeed, in our own) to denote progress and advancement while smallness in turn signified degeneracy and unwholesomeness. This pervasive and enduring schema, Clarke shows, had its roots in American expansionism and imperialism, enterprises underwritten by the interlocking beliefs that bigger is better and that superiority must be physically manifest.

Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha Nussbaum joins many observers in arguing that the arts and humanities are under siege, threatened by budget cuts and a growing emphasis on professional training. When budget cuts do not eliminate university programs in the arts and humanities, they swell class size to the point that the traditional hallmarks of a humanistic education—class discussion, essay examinations, research assignments demanding critical thinking—become untenable. Instead, PowerPoint lecturing and multiple-choice exercises dominate, reinforcing the rote learning that standardized testing has already made the norm in K–12 education. A recent Wall Street Journal article, …

Fabulating Romania: Review Of Filip Florian’S Little Fingers And Alta Ifland’S Elegy For A Fabulous World, Ania Spyra

English

In 2007 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania launched a public image campaign in an effort to create a new brand for the country, a brand that would build a positive image, rather than only counteract – defensively – negative stereotypes. An advertising agency created the new brand by merging the words fabulous and spirit into “fabulouspirit” – a word, which ended up sounding better in Romanian than it does in English even though it was intended for an Anglophone audience. The campaign encountered so much criticism that despite the plans to implement it over several years, the word …

"Falling Out Of A Picture": The Australian Landscape In D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, Cheryl Hindrichs

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

"[T]he mind and the terrain shape each other: every landscape is a landscape of desire to some degree, if not always for its inhabitants"

Rebecca Solnit (Landscapes 9)

Modernist writers, captivated by the work of mapping the complex terrain of desire, present a variety of encounters with, studies on, and reinventions of the landscape. Although critical attention has focused on the fláneur in the cityscape, a focus on pastoral and hybrid (suburban) landscapes can reveal the way modernism engages with these terrains in order to "make it new" in aesthetics (the mythical method T.S. Eliot identified with James Joyce's …

Censuring The Praise Of Alienation: Interstices Of Ante-Alienation In Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease, And Arrow Of God, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Interrogating Abiola Irele’s largely unchallenged praise of alienation, this essay is bold and insightful in returning to Chinua Achebe’s African trilogy to examine the subtler, equally dangerous agent of externality: ante-alienation, or social alienation within traditional African culture, which precedes race-based, colonial alienation. This ante-alienation challenges Négritude’s paradisiacal view of Africa and raises questions about Africans always being happiest with themselves within their traditional culture.

Fairy Tale Stylization Project, Dan Gleason

Modern World Fiction

The Fairy Tale project is a group project that captures the key distinctions in literary style that we analyze in our Modern World Fiction class. In that class, we look at fiction through the lens of different stylistic flavors: maximalism, minimalism, ludic (playful) style, surrealism, and magical realism. The fairy tale project helps students look back on all these different styles, reflect on them, and note their key features and differences more clearly. In this project, groups of students will rewrite a fairy tale in all (five) literary styles. Each member of the group will rewrite the tale in one …

Walden, Addison Schwaller '14

2011 Fall Semester

Nature is the source of humanity’s wisdom and philosophy. In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau mentioned nature almost constantly, which is fitting because his writing includes him immersing himself in nature for “two years and two months” (Thoreau 827). When he became more involved and intimate with nature, he managed to escape bustling society and look at it from a new perspective, which enabled him to criticize it. This new perspective makes Walden a controversial read, especially for the time it was written. Thoreau fearlessly challenged himself to see the natural world as it actually was, and to …

A View From Confinement: Persuasion’S Resourceful Mrs. Smith, Lynda A. Hall

English Faculty Articles and Research

"Mrs. Smith is a unique character type in Austen’s fiction: the superfluous female. Austen uses this character to reflect on a possible tragic life for the heroine while highlighting the plight of the poor widow and her lack of perceived value in the society reflected in Persuasion."

Footnotes, Issue 10, Fall 2011, Department Of English

Footnotes: Department of English Newsletter (2008-2012)

No abstract provided.

The Search For God: Virginia Woolf And Caroline Emelia Stephen, Kathleen A. Heininge

Faculty Publications - Department of English

As a Modernist follower of radical individualism, Virginia Woolf is thought to be antipathetic to religious thought; Woolf’s own spirituality, however, is certainly more complicated than most critics have allowed, especially in light of the influence of her aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, a well-known Quaker mystic and writer who rejected the established church in favor of a less traditional version of Christianity. The intellectual relationship between niece and aunt has been little discussed; aside from Jane Marcus’s “The Niece of a Nun: Caroline Stephen and the Cloistered Imagination” and Alison Lewis’s “A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature: Caroline Stephen …

Facial Transplantation: The Last Hope For “Monsters”, Lily Lou '13

2011 Fall Semester

For these past two hundred years I have been living in utter seclusion from the rest of humanity. Life would have lost its meaning long ago were it not for a divine occurrence. I happened to pass through a gargantuan athenaeum of sorts and I whiled my hours away devouring the intellectual delights that lay within. I read several books on a compelling issue, and one that seems to be novel, unheard-of and that has seemed to stir up quite a controversy. The issue is the surgical operation of face transplants on humans. From what I have read, a face …

Human Duplication: Miracle?, Henry Ward '13

2011 Fall Semester

My creator tossed me into this world with little semblance of foresight, displaying the recklessness of a prodigal child too blinded by his own misled intelligence to realize the implications of his path. Perhaps – nay, certainly – he owed it to his creation to have taken more time in the consideration of my being before the deed was done. Due to his abominable lack of wisdom, to call me a miracle of science is as appalling a misnomer as may be. But, perhaps modern science has unveiled a true miracle – that of the unnatural creation of a similar …

What About Walden?, Ben Rabe '14

2011 Fall Semester

In the complete and utter blackness, I strained my eyes and ears in a constant struggle to remain aware of my surroundings, as it always seems that the inhabitants of the forest are most active when one isn’t paying attention. Still in darkness, I found myself in a perpetual struggle against myself to retain my focus. Just as I began to succumb to the pressures of sleep, the first light appeared over the horizon. Within minutes, I was bathed in the gentle, forgiving sunlight that cleansed me of all desire for rest. I felt alert, connected to my surroundings and …

The Help, Morgan Ashley Craft '12

2011 Fall Semester

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help focuses on the racism that was prominent in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi. Two black maids, Aibileen and Minny, and a white socialite, Skeeter, join together, in secret and risking their lives, to write a book that tells the stories of black domestic maids working in white Southern households. Specifically, Skeeter focuses on beginning a career as a journalist, instead of finding a husband and starting a family, which was not a norm amongst the Southern women. The Help not only addresses racism in the 1960s, it also focuses on the importance of a husband and a family …

The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative & Religious Controversy In England, 1680-1750 (Review), Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Experiencing Literary Self-Consciousness In The Classroom, Dan Gleason

Modern World Fiction

This activity is a fun and even bizarre response to John Barth’s highly self-referential story “Lost in the Funhouse.” In that story, Barth comments extensively on the writing as it happens (as he makes it happen), alerting the reader to the conventions of fiction as he deploys them. The following activity brings such jarring commentary into the classroom by leading students to call out the conventions of the classroom as they happen; the activity makes students live the experience of interruptive meta-commentary and can thus lead to vibrant discussion on the commentary in the story, too.

Defoe And The Project Of "Neighbors Fare", Joanne Myers

English Faculty Publications

This article argues that Daniel Defoe’s essay, Upon Projects (1695), works to imagine and restore neighborly connections amongst people increasingly distances from one another due to social and economic changes in Restoration life. Although Defoe’s novels are often understood to promote a typically modern individualism, his social-improvement projects present an alternative view of Defoe as committed to a robust sociability.

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 1, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Lancelot Todd: A Case for Fictional Independence,” by Samuel J. Rogal, Illinois Valley Community College

“‘Another Perfect Day’: Weather, Mood, and Landscape in Sinclair Lewis’s Minnesota Diary,” by Frederick Betz, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

“American Expatriates in Interwar Europe: Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth,” by Bernhard Wenzl, Institute of Science and Technology, Vienna, Austria

“‘What If?’: The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth,” rev. of Barnaby, Conrad, The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth by Ted Fleener, Waterloo Community Schools, Waterloo, Iowa

“An Appreciation of Free Air,” by Levi Stahl, University of Chicago