English Language and Literature Commons^™

Contesting Imagined Communities: Minor Feelings, Opacity, And Spectrality In Ling Ma’S Severance, Christine Marks

Publications and Research

This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian pandemic novel Severance (2018). Emphasizing fiction’s capacity for symbolic intervention in a pandemic era, I argue that the text undermines tropes of nation-building through strategic employment of minor feelings, opacity, and spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on the Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged in the conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places her at odds with unifying ideological responses to the catastrophic upheaval of the pandemic. At the intersection of pandemic and diasporic literature, Ma’s novel constitutes a …

Psychoactive Revolution And Transnational Networks, Menglu Gao

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

The connection and clash between Asia and the Anglophone world were, in part, facilitated by what David T. Courtwright calls the “psychoactive revolution,” a process in which hunger, the need for food, was replaced by desire and addiction in the modern world. Networks between these regions deepened and proliferated as stimulants and sedatives such as tea, opium, and coffee became increasingly accessible and popular around the globe.

Transimperial Networks: East Asia And The ‘Victorian’ World: Introduction, Sophia Hsu, Menglu Gao, Waiyee Loh, Hyungji Park, Jessica R. Valdez, Rae X. Yan

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, East Asia has been on the margins of Victorian Studies, eclipsed by sites of formal imperialism such as South Asia. However, the region was deeply intertwined with the “Victorian” world through transimperial networks of trade, migration, and geopolitical competition. Rather than locating East Asia at the margins, this cluster of lesson plans explores the figurative and historical centrality of East Asia to Victorian Studies.

Joanne Kyger And “The Kook Strain” In Olson: A Reading, Patrick James Dunagan

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

Jerome Rothenberg's "that dada strain" at once hilarious grandiose epic lyric historical and ever adventurous charts the highs discovered in his reading of the dada era. In like occurrence this writing seeks to poke around in the occult cupboards of Olson's mystical leanings. Looking not only at his work and assorted readings/engagements but delving also into the works of various others (Joanne Kyger, Jack Hirschman, Paul Blackburn, Gerrit Lansing, David Meltzer, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Robin Blaser et al) who fell in alongside as well as after his work's star-eyed haul. Loquaciously gifted as a talker, how much (if …

Idiomatic Surrogacy And (Dis)Ability In Dombey And Son, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To assert that Charles Dickens possessed a mastery of language unique among nineteenth-century novelists for its vernacular inventiveness is hardly controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms lists Dickens among its most cited sources (others include the Bible and Shakespeare). Dickens’s use of ordinary, unembellished, and what Anthony Trollope termed vulgarly “ungrammatical” lower-class language sets his novels apart in style and tone from those of his famous peers (249). William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy and others – despite their many differences – generally composed their fiction in higher, more formal linguistic registers than …

Culture/Capital A Speculative Consideration Of James Joyce's Ulysses, Audrey Del Grosso

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis explores how a speculative consideration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses that combines postcolonial and Marxist and theoretical perspectives can challenge traditional critical approaches that are dogmatically one-sided. Three episodes of the work are analyzed to demonstrate the relationship between culture and economics, which aligns with the above-mentioned theoretical approaches.

The selected episodes -- “Telemachus” (episode 1), “Nestor” (episode 2), and “Scylla and Charybdis” (episode 9) -- focus on Stephen Dedalus and provide the opportunity to consider the manifestation of colonialism and imperialism in his various relationships.

Adopting a speculative approach anchored in the Hegelian-influenced philosophy of Gillian Rose, …

Centering Equity And Inclusion In Engineering Collaboration And Writing, Jennifer C. Mallette

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper focuses on preliminary findings from a study that asked students and alumni to share their stories around teamwork and communication in engineering settings. In addition to student and alumni stories of teamwork, engineering faculty were interviewed to learn more about how they approach collaborative and communication-based projects and how consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teaching. The goal was to connect the ways that instructors frame these collaborative projects and to surface how implicit biases may emerge and impact students. The findings reported here focus on what students and alumni participants shared about their positive and negative …

An Image For All: The Rhetoric For Writing Alt-Text, Sherena Huntsman

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Alternative text is a necessary part of the document design process that often becomes relegated to the work of web developers as part of the coding and tagging of digital documents for accessibility. However, alt-text is a meaning making tool that should be a normalized part of TPC document design practices. This paper uses preliminary interview data with screen reader users to understand the complex rhetorical experience of alt-text use in an effort to offer more effective alt-text investigation and practices in order to develop more inclusive environments that welcome all users.

Entry Nr. 025 Marguerite, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Entry Nr. 019 Magdalene Beulah Brockden, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Entry Nr. 180 Tomás Mandinga, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Entry Nr. 240 Vicente Bibí, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Entry Nr. 125 Francisco Alves De Souza, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Entry Nr. 308 Malade, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog Of Published Accounts By Africans Enslaved In The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African Voices.

“You Should Pray I Choose The Latter”: Rioting, Violence, & Jouissance, Gautam Basu Thakur

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the climactic scene from the film The Great Debaters (2007), James L. Framer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), speaking for the motion “Resolved: Civil Disobedience is a Moral weapon in the fight for Justice,” rebuts the opponent team from Harvard University and clinches a win for his team, Wiley College, with the following words:

St. Augustine said an unjust law is no law at all, which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

(1:52:20 – 1:55:45)

Farmer Jr.’s words receive a standing ovation from the predominantly …

The 1950 Anta Production Of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, A Facsimile Edition: Part I, Introduction, James Karman

Jeffers Studies

The introduction to this two-part study provides an account of the 1950 staging of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, starring Judith Anderson. It contains information about the friendship between Jeffers and Anderson that occasioned the production, a description of the script used for the ANTA Playhouse performance in New York, and a summary of the critical response.

Part II of this study contains a photographic reproduction of the final script used for the 1950 production of The Tower Beyond Tragedy. As the only surviving record of that failed production, the facsimile reveals the changes made by Anderson and others to …

The 1950 Anta Production Of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, A Facsimile Edition: Part Ii, Facsimile, Robinson Jeffers

Jeffers Studies

The introduction to this two-part study provides an account of the 1950 staging of The Tower Beyond Tragedy, starring Judith Anderson. It contains information about the friendship between Jeffers and Anderson that occasioned the production, a description of the script used for the ANTA Playhouse performance in New York, and a summary of the critical response.

Part II of this study contains a photographic reproduction of the final script used for the 1950 production of The Tower Beyond Tragedy. As the only surviving record of that failed production, the facsimile reveals the changes made by Anderson and others to …

“’We Know What We Are, But Not What We May Be’: Student Transformation Through Commentary Blogs", Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This chapter discusses how, when students follow the online discussion practices of Sheridan Blau's Commentary Project, they can learn to embrace confusion, value questions, recognize that uncertainty is part of the learning process, and accept that what they don’t understand is often more important for them as a learner than what they do.

Lighting Fires: Inspiring Lifelong Reading, Jessica Ashurst

The Utah English Journal

It's a real problem: to this day, I've loved every single book my English teachers have placed in my hands, falling in love with Ponyboy, cheering on Jonas when he snuck out of The Community, and crying through the pages where Billy lost both Old Dan and Little Ann.

But when I became an English teacher, I mentally braced myself that not all of my students would love reading as I do. The majority of my students consider themselves "non-readers" and they claim that the main culprit of this problem is that they are "required" to read books. I mustered …