English Language and Literature Commons^™

Moving Up The Ladder, Sami Issa

The Diana McDonald Writer's Challenge

Due to civil war in Syria, Sami Issa decided to extend his visit to his sister in the U.S. With the U.S. being his temporary home, Sami decided to do his best to improve his English and his general academic skills. With entertaining details, Sami’s personal narrative describes his fears and confusions in his English-speaking workplace. He also describes the strategies he employed to overcome the fears and to improve his speaking and comprehension skills. (Seth Mendelowitz)

Mastering Languages, Kennedy Coffie

The Diana McDonald Writer's Challenge

Kennedy Coffie’s “Mastering Languages” is a personal essay that nicely demonstrates how our way of speaking can tie us to a community and sense of communal identity, while shutting us off from other communities and identities. Kennedy’s mother taught her children and insisted upon “proper English,” while her father was content to speak the dialect of his southern community and, once Kennedy’s mom passed away, to let his daughters speak the language of their urban Chicago community. Kennedy offers insightful reflections on her journeys between different English language communities. (Seth Mendelowitz)

Faculty Development And A Graduate Course For Pre-Service And In-Service Faculty: Finding And Enacting A Professional Identity In Basic Writing, Karen S. Uehling

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay considers the critical need for pre-service and in-service basic writing faculty to define and enact a professional identity, specifically within the context of faculty development and graduate course settings. The essay describes a graduate course in teaching basic writing offered primarily online with four in-person weekend workshops. As a result, the course has faculty development implications. Key features of the class are professional mentoring through participation in the Council on Basic Writing discussion list, which offers visibility for students as emerging basic writing professionals; creation of Composition Frequently Asked Questions wiki material on basic writing, which serves as …

Book Proposal: Evangeline: A Murder On The Cajun Prairie, Jordan Lahaye

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

An Exploration Of Female Sexuality, Class Status, And Art In Hardy’S Short Stories, Erin M. Lanza

Student Publications

In this paper, I examine Hardy’s treatment of female sexuality as mediated by art in two short stories: “The Fiddler of the Reels” and “An Imaginative Woman.” Given Hardy’s role as an artist, his noted compassion for women, and his interest in Victorian attitudes toward sexuality, my analysis of these topics in his short stories is particularly relevant. Hardy’s investment in class issues is also pertinent, as I consider how Hardy uses his heroines’ relationships with art to underline the distinct disadvantages of lower-class women. While Ella, the middle-class heroine of “An Imaginative Woman,” uses poetry to channel stagnant sensual …

Three Books, Three Stereotypes: Mothers And The Ghosts Of Mammy, Jezebel, And Sapphire In Contemporary African American Literature, Christine E. Eck

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The stereotypes of Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire are still being dealt with in contemporary African American literature. In the representation of black mothers, nonfiction is ideal to portray mothers who do not represent these stereotypes; fiction is ideal to favorably represent mothers who embody some aspects of these stereotypes. Jezmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, Margo Jefferson's Negroland, and Tracy K. Smith's Ordinary Light are used as case studies.

The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …

How Drag Culture Resolves Tensions In Victorian Shakespearean Cross-Dressing; Or, Slay, Feste, Slay, Isaac Robertson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 2017, Madame Le Gateau Chocolat, a black drag queen, sashayed onto the stage of the Globe theater to portray Feste in Emma Rice’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This bold move not only gave anxiety to its investors (eventually leading to the stepping down of Emma Rice), but also raised questions about the validity of drag performance within Shakespeare plays. Shakespeare has historically been inseparable with traditional cross-dressing (both in performance and in the narrative itself), although the relationship has not always been cordial. In Victorian England, cross-dressing was often set equal to homosexuality or moral deviance, and …

Winter 2018 Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Who Learns From Collaborative Digital Projects? Cultivating Critical Consciousness And Metacognition To Democratize Digital Literacy Learning, Julia Voss

English

Collaborative group work is common in writing classrooms, especially ones assigning digital projects. While a wealth of scholarship theorizes collaboration and advocates for specific collaborative pedagogies, writing studies has yet to address the ways in which privilege tied to race, gender, class, and other identity characteristics replicates itself within student groups by shaping the responsibilities individual group members assume, thereby affecting students' opportunities for learning. Such concerns about equity are especially pressing where civically and professionally valuable twenty-first century digital literacies are concerned. This article uses theories of cultural capital and the participation gap to (1) analyze role uptake in …

Tatyana Markus: Hero Of Ukraine, Ariana L. Martineau

Honors Projects

A dramatized telling of the story of Tatyana Markus, a young Jewish resistance fighter from Kiev, Ukraine. Under a false identity, she personally killed dozens of Nazis during WWII. Along the way she lost many people she cared about until she was captured herself. Tatyana has gone on virtually unknown throughout the world, so this play is an effort to spread word about this brave, amazing girl who was only in her early 20s. I think the themes are very relatable to today's society with the struggle of whether to stand up to injustice, or stand by. Especially since she …

Review Of Moana By Ron Clements And John Musker, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

A Slowly Starving Race: Land And The Language Of Hunger In Zitkala-Ša’S "Blue-Star Woman", Adam R, Brantley

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper proposes that the motif of starvation in Zitkala-Ša’s 1921 short story, “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” is in fact a metaphor for the dispossession of Native American lands and its disastrous effects on Native American livelihood and culture. Though much scholarship has been done on sentimental rhetoric in Zitkala-Ša’s fiction, critics have not yet explored its connection to this the most immediate Zitkala-Ša’s concerns. This essay first unpacks letters from Zitkala-Ša’s personal archives to demonstrate her individual interest in dispossession, and then examines “Blue-Star Woman’s” ever-present language of hunger through this lens of land loss. In doing …

Table Of Contents

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Bloodland: A Holistic Approach To Contemporary Reclamation Of Native Female Power, Anna Kendall

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Vol. 26, No. 2, The Sinclair Lewis Society

Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter

“Tribute to Dave Simpkins”

“Fresh Pastures: Sinclair Lewis Buys Thorvale Farm,” by Susan O’Brien

“Straight Out of South Dakota: A Review of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965 by Jon K. Lauk,” by Ralph Goldstein

“Ruth Suckow: Iowa Gem,” by Ted G. Fleener, Waterloo Community Schools (retired)

“What Were They Reading Then?: A Preface to Morals by Walter Lippmann, 1929,” by Rick Diguette, Georgia State University

“What Were They Reading Then?: Country People by Ruth Suckow, 1924,” by Ted G. Fleener, Waterloo Community Schools (retired)

Review Of Composition In The Age Of Austerity, Nancy Welch And Tony Scott, Eds., David M. Grant

Faculty Work

This review surveys the edited collection Composition in the Age of Austerity, which works at key intersections of interest to readers of Kairos: the discussion between critical and new materialisms, the debates about economics and digital humanities, and the 2016 election's significance for our future as teachers, scholars, and champions of justice. The navigation bar at the top of each page in this webtext allows for reading in any particular order. The tabs of the navigation bar reflect my own reading across the sections and chapters included in the collection, offering my thinking with and against the premises …

How Has Post Colonialism Affected Our Perception In The Novels “No Longer At Ease” By Chinua Achebe And “Samskara” By U.R Ananthamurthy?, Aaryan Manoj Nair

Publications and Research

A study in post-colonialism is a highly enticing endeavor. In the modern society, postcolonial literature is largely underappreciated in contrast to the more opulent reception of the Victorian or Elizabethan era of literature. The truth is, even today, modern perceptions of many colonial nations are largely constructed by their colonial masters. There is certainly a bias due to the influence of Western Hegemony and its monopoly on global media. The Western world still possesses a tendency to discredit anything which does not conform to its democratic liberalist ideals without glancing at other local factors. In the modern world, while the …

Murky Water, Fluid, And The Borderlands Of Language: An Exploration Of Toni Morrison’S Beloved, Julia K. Hall

Honors Theses

Centered on Toni Morrison's Beloved and her process of writing the novel, this thesis links the crossing of a river, the birthing of a child, and the creation of a text. By drawing upon theories of composition, motherhood, and genre theory, this exploration of Beloved balances discussion of writing process, genre, and textual analysis. Buttressed by a complimentary text, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the connection between creation of identity and body through the gestation period and birthing of a text is reflected in Morrison’s own process. The revolutionary splash Beloved made in the field of literary scholarship—and …

Evidence In Online Political Discourse: How Everyday Citizens Argue About Politics On Social Media, Diane Leverich

Honors Theses

This thesis project examines evidence use and participatory dynamics in political conversations on the social networking site Reddit.com. Reddit.com is a network of user-created, interest-based forums in which users, or Redditors, engage in discourse with others about any topic of their interest. I selected the politically-motivated forum, or subreddit, r/PoliticalDiscussion for examination and collected 1,000 of its most recent conversations, or threads, to compose a data corpus. I read, categorized, and analyzed these conversations in terms of how Redditors participated in the subreddit and how they incorporated evidence into their discussions of politics. Two rounds of qualitative data coding revealed …