English Language and Literature Commons^™

Becoming A Goat: Leaving Mediocracy To The Sheep, Heidi Bonkemeyer Roskelley

Tutor's Column

Many new tutors can become quickly overwhelmed by their lack of experience coupled with a driving desire to perform well in the tutoring session. This dream to become a great tutor can be quickly snuffed out by lacking the confidence and the knowledge of how to achieve our full potential as tutors. In this essay, I will discuss two specific ways that we, as tutors, can go from “good” to “great” and ultimately become the tutors we strive to be. Through adaptability and positivity, we can leave behind the anxiety-stricken herd of aimless sheep and strike out on our own …

Pictures Of Words: The Importance Of Visual Strategies In Tutoring Writing, Kylie Smith

Tutor's Column

An estimated 65% of people are visual learners. Additionally, research suggests that most people are more likely to remember learned concepts when those concepts are attached to visual aids. Unfortunately, Writing Center tutors often forget the importance of using visual strategies when tutoring writing concepts. The implementation of quick and simple visual strategies in tutoring sessions will help students retain information and help them become independent writers for life.

Gender And Yale: Where Were The Women?, Emily Stark, Patrice Collins, Claire Bowern

Yale Day of Data

Statistics on history of women scholars in Yale's English Department.

Writer Empowerment: Seeing Through The Veil Of Disinterest, Jay Paine

Tutor's Column

Students sometimes come to the writing center uninterested in their writing, however, a student’s disinterest may be indicative of not knowing how to proceed with their writing. A solution to help combat a writer’s disinterest entails asking open-ended questions. Sometimes the phrasing of open-ended questions does not resonate with the student, however, simply rephrasing an open-ended question can help the writer understand where and how they can continue writing their paper which ultimately empowers the student.

What's Another Name For Bull****?, Nicole Hurst

Tutor's Column

Pretension is present in almost every aspect of academic writing. The desire to sound “smart” or professional is a normal reaction that appears when students try to mimic a style that they don’t fully understand. Dealing with academic BS in high-level writing is as much a part of tutoring as flow and conventions. Oftentimes, students need help to recognize the importance of personal voice and author’s intent in “good” writing, as well as the role the audience plays in crafting academic writing.

Sink Hollow Volume 8

Sink Hollow

To make a magazine, we seek contrast and even the tension of contradiction.

We hunt for the words that defy experience, and experiences that defy words alone but must be captured by clever poetic contraptions and literary devices that violate the architecture of language and definitions in order to teach us what we can't know by conventional means. We crave the ingenious art of using words to drag meaning outside the semantic containment of words. There's contradiction! This is the skill of infusing words with the power to evoke emotion and connection. The work of the poet, the artist, the …

The Conclusion In Which Nothingness Is Concluded, Marissa Rimes

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is ironically most often classified as an “oriental philosophic tale,” but is rarely analyzed from the point of view of oriental philosophy. Although Buddhism’s ambiguities, inwardness, and nothingness, provoke anxiety in Western critique, Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia does something unique from eighteenth-century British thought in that it disavows this Buddaphobia by actively employing a similar line of thought. Through the lens of a Buddhist framework many of the text’s renownedly gloomy implications, in regard to its circular structure and inconclusiveness, are freed from the great sludge of …

A Review Of Annika Mann, Reading Contagion, By Michael Edson, Michael Edson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Annika Mann, Reading Contagion, by Michael Edson

Review Of Novel Ventures: Fiction And Print Culture In England, 1690-1730 By Leah Orr, Susannah Sanford

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 by Leah Orr by Susannah Sanford

Review Of Margaret Cavendish’S Poems And Fancies, James Fitzmaurice

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Liza Blake’s free website is sure to become the first stop for anyone beginning work with Poems and Fancies. Most importantly for those who want to explore Cavendish's poetry in depth is that fact that Blake’s website provides an easy means of comparison of versions of poems printed in the 1653, 1664, and 1668 editions.

The Strength Of Weak Ties: Eliza Haywood’S Social Network In The Dunciad In Four Books (1743), Ileana Baird Dr.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article uses visualizations of Eliza Haywood’s social networks, as described in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), to make visible her relations with the other characters in the poem, and the nature of these affiliations. The tools used to generate these visualizations are GraphViz, an open source visualization software that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and SHIVA Graph, an application used to visualize large sets of networks and navigate through them as through a map. In Eliza Haywood’s case, this model of social network analysis sheds new light on the nature of Pope’s attack on women …

Societal Polyphony In Burney And Austen: Using Digital Tools To Invite Students Into The Conversation, Bethany Williamson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

How can we invite our students to experience the social wit and wisdom of the eighteenth-century novel, on an interactive level? Addressing challenges faced by those who teach eighteenth-century novels in General Education surveys or seminar classes, this essay offers two lesson plans--easily adapted for different texts and courses--that use digital technology to engage students' imaginations and cultivate skills of reading comprehension and interpretation. The first, "Evelina Tweet Fest," invites students to participate in a collaborative conversation on a simulated Twitter platform, translating the literary polyphony of Frances Burney's epistolary novel into the language of our own, status-conscious milieu. …

Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies In The History Of Mary Prince, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The History of Mary Prince, a West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) is the first published woman’s slave narrative. In her History, Prince describes horrendous physical violence to which she and other enslaved peoples of African descent are subjected as well as the corresponding psychological and sexual abuse they endure. While Prince “speaks” the sexual abuse to some extent, how she knows what she knows goes unspoken. She expresses her knowledge of reading and writing and, at times, of the law, but she does not explain how she obtains this knowledge or knows what she knows. Her optimism to …

“The Tranquility Of A Society Of Females”: Mary Morgan’S A Tour To Milford Haven, Elizabeth Montagu, And The Transformative Politics Of Female Governance, Linda J. Van Netten Blimke

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This paper explores the political function of Elizabeth Montagu’s Berkshire estate in travel writer Mary Morgan’s 1795 publication A Tour to Milford Haven, in the Year 1791. The travelogue is politically invested both in problematizing radical ideologies and the British government’s wartime policies and in providing an alternative model of governance based on the relational leadership found within Montagu’s Sandleford community. Of central importance to Morgan’s political argument is the contrast she creates between the socioeconomic philosophies manifest in Montagu’s perfectly ordered estate in Berkshire and in the Duke of Marlborough’s imposing palace in Oxfordshire. Whereas Montagu’s relational approach …

Interdisciplinary Lesson Plans To Study Art And Romantic Poetry (1775-1837), Luz Elena Ramirez

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

Enhanced Pedagogy funding has supported the design of three interdisciplinary lesson plans for California State University, San Bernardino students to study the relationship between art and Romantic poetry (1775-1837). Following the scholarship of Stuart Henry, William Condee exposes the problem in academe of “disciplinary hegemony.” Henry argues that “disciplines have come to control content, pedagogy and the organization of higher learning. Disciplines. . . become systems of power that control resources and access to dissemination” (Henry qtd. in Condee 4). Disciplinary hegemony fractures lines of continuity between subjects. My project seeks to facilitate a robust engagement with art and ancient …

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …

Finding Place For Printing, Ian Duncan

Tutor's Column

This column examines the benfits and drawbacks of printed papers and digital essays in tutoring scenarios. It considers their roles in the learning of students, and it suggests a compromise by finding the value of both mediums of writing.

London Moves East: How The Olympics Impacts Host Communities, Aaron Bonsu

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

While the Olympics desire to remake its host communities through economic and housing reform to the benefit of local people, its housing legacy does not adequately serve the intended communities. By using a case study approach, the London 2012 Olympic Games was analyzed through a provisional codebook created based off of academic research on the concept of legacy and the Olympics. In this analysis, the London 2012 Games were found as not serving the needs of the local population. While there is a strong commitment to creating a tangible, impactful legacy, a lack of government focus on delivering public goods …

How To Play A Poem By Don Bialostosky, Jayme Stayer

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Don Bialostosky has long been admired as a writer of dense texts aimed at theory-minded academics and addressing Bakhtin and rhetoric. With How to Play a Poem, Bialostosky plays to a different audience, positioning himself as “something of a popular entertainer,” to use T. S. Eliot’s improbable self-description in the wake of The Waste Land. Aimed not at theoreticians but average teachers of poetry, Bialostosky’s text attempts to make Bakhtin accessible for the college and high school classroom. For my own audience here, I offer a conflict-of-interest disclosure: Bialostosky directed my dissertation over twenty-five years ago, but there is little …

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …