Digital Commons Network^™

Concentrating English: Disciplinarity, Institutional Histories, And Collective Identity, Amy M. Goodburn, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Universities are increasingly pressured to model themselves after corporations. This chapter represents one effort to identify pressures that were formative in the work of a group of faculty working to develop a concentration in “Writing and Rhetoric” as part of a larger departmental initiative to revise the undergraduate major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UN-L). By examining some of the conversations associated with the process of creating the concen tration, this microethnography suggests that while the formation of curriculum can be read in terms of corporate influences, faculty can and do intervene in administrative structures that press toward increasing corporatization. …

"When I Can Read My Title Clear": Harriet Beecher Stowe And The Stowe V. Thomas Copyright Infringement Case, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe filed a copyright suit against F. W. Thomas, a Philadelphia printer who had published an unauthorized German translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in his newspaper, Die Freie Presse. Stowe brought suit in the federal circuit court in Philadelphia, thus ironically placing her claim in the hands of Justice Robert Grier, a notable enforcer of slaver-owners' interests under the Fugitive Slave Law. Grier found that Stowe's property rights in her novelistic plea for resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law were very narrow and that she could not prevent Thomas from publishing a translation without her …

"Green Confusion": Evolution And Entanglement In H.G. Wells's The Island Of Doctor Moreau, John Glendening

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Mérimée's "Carmen," The Short Story, And Image Structure, Allan H. Pasco

Short Story

No abstract provided.

An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric And The Science Of Prions., Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A significant theoretical shift in the research community examining a class of terminal, infectious neurological disorders that includes Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Kuru was assisted by rhetorical production. The local rhetoric of one laboratory, that of Professor Stanley B. Prusiner, involved first situating an heretical hypothesis within the framework of the orthodox narrative and then audaciously promoting that heresy. Another aspect of rhetorical production in this case involved situating a new language associated with the heretical hypothesis. To promote their new lexicon, the Prusiner team evoked orthodox values of consistency, efficiency, and collective ratification. Eventually, what was once …

Postmodern Intimations: Musing On Invisibility: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, And Ralph Ellison, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000, Ronny Noor

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Moving Beyond The Feminine: Feminist Critical Interpretation And The Short Story, Caryn Maureen Voskuil

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Hard Lessons Learned Since The First Generation Of Critical Pedagogy, David Seitz

English Language and Literatures Faculty Publications

Review of the following books: (1) Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition by Russel K. Durst, (2) Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald, and (3) Teaching Composition as a Social Process by Bruce McComiskey.

The Attitude Of Secondary School Students To The Use Of Pop Songs In The Esl Class, Fuziah Mustakim

Student Works (2000-2009)

This research is carried out to examine the case for the usage of pop songs as a methodological option in teaching English language in secondary school in Malaysian context. It aims to show that teenagers prefer using pop songs in language learning. It explains the place of English in Malaysians schools and its curriculum. It also discusses rationale, research questions and limitations of the study. Theories in language learning are discussed in detail and attempt to show how pop songs play a role in these theories as a material to learn English as a second language. The researcher explains the …

Notes On Contributors

Short Story

No abstract provided.

The Accidental Curriculum, Terrance Riley

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

True learning—learning which results in some permanent cognitive change—is far too unpredictable to be controlled by format curricular designs. The formal curriculum of English studies is valuable largely as a stage setting for educational accidents.

Back Matter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

No abstract provided.

Connecting, Helen Walker, Lisa Ruddick, Kathleen Mccolley Foster, Chauna Craig, Steven Vanderstaay, Meg Peterson, Linda K. Parkyn

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

No abstract provided.

Igbo As An Endangered Language, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

At first sight, the question "Is Igbo an endangered language," would appear to be grossly misplaced, since the survival of the language seems to be well guaranteed by its status both as one of the three main languages of Nigeria and one of the major languages of literature, education, and commerce in Africa. Furthermore, with its well over 25 million native speakers who live in one of the most densely populated areas of the world with an exceptionally high fertility rate and a traditional world view and culture that promote the raising of large families, it would appear that there …

The Subject Of Linguistic Analysis: Competence, Performance, Style, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

The competence and performance distinction has a complex history in linguistic theory. With this short essay, I would like to step into the flow of that complex history by posing the question of difference, which asks what difference difference makes to linguistic theory. My argument will be that the difference difference makes can be registered through the design feature of language liguistic theory dubs reflexivity. For linguistic theory, reflexivity is not just one design feature among the others inasmuch as it is reflexivity itself that motivates the question of difference.

Slang: Awful Spector Of Sloth?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Rarely is there a time when someone in America isn't worried about the state of our language. This worry generally arises in two forms: "our children don't know how to use proper English" and "there are too many immigrants who don't know how to speak English."

Often the concern about the lack of "pr per" English arises in response to that awful specter of alleged sloth - slang. Most linguists define slang as vocabulary items used in in formal settings. If a new car (wheels) is appreciated by someone's peers, then that ride or hot rod might be …

Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña And His Dangerous Border Crossings, Juan Velasco

English

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is one of the few Mexican performance artists who, since he came to the United States in 1978, has been able to create and explore the merging of visual language and text in the complexities of cross-cultural identities through controversial issues. Labeled by some as one of the most significant performance artists of the late twentieth century, he uses multiple media: video, performance, installation art, and bilingual poetry. In his "Performance Diaries" he explains the process of performance in his work as "a vast conceptual territory where my eclectic and ever-changing ideas and the ideas of my collaborators …

Raising Cultural Awareness In The Elementary Classroom Through African-American Children's Literature, Kirsten Seebeck

Graduate Research Papers

This research project topic was selected because of the need for raised cultural awareness in elementary classrooms, as indicated in current research findings. I chose African-American literature because in this region of the United States, Iowa in particular, the classrooms tend to be largely homogenous. Children who are from African-American descent find themselves to be in the minority in their classroom settings.

These children are not seeing many other children like themselves in their school community. It is therefore important that they see themselves in the literature shared within this community, in order to help them to relate to their …

To Be Or Not To Be: A Portrayal Of William Shakespeare In Children's Literature, Kathy S. Grout

Graduate Research Papers

This study analyzed how accurately authors of historical fiction portray William Shakespeare, the man and events of his life. An attempt was made to locate 25 books that contained Shakespeare as a character or dealt with events from his life. Twenty-two books were chosen that were written for children, young adults and adults with recommendations for young adults. Each book was read, summarized, reread and examined by completing a content analysis checklist designed to evaluate the portrayal of William Shakespeare and events of his life. Four hypotheses relating to known facts about Shakespeare's life, the fictionalization of his character, the …

Seven Recent Commentaries On Mark Twain, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Command Performances: Black Storytellers In Ruth Mcenery Stuart's "Blink" (1893) And Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" (1899), Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Word Is Born: Critical Gaps And The Poetics Of Hip-Hop, Kabir Hamid

Honors Papers

I grew up listening to hip-hop music. Although I lived across the country from its birthplace, I would immerse myself in its sounds during the day and especially at night when my brother would play tapes before we fell asleep in our bunk beds. At a certain point in high school, I became obsessed with the music's lyrics. I was continually astonished by the cleverness, rhyme ability and edginess of the emcees I listened to. My admiration for hip-hop music developed alongside my admiration for the great authors I was reading at that time: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Hesse and …

Romanticism's Gray Matter (Review Essay), Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

T(H)Ree Rhizome(S) On 'Close/Open' Encounters With Kinsella's Pastoralism Of The 'Radical' Kind, Klyth Tan Soo-Hong

Theses : Honours

In his elaborative Landbridge 'statement of intent', Western Australian and International poet John Kinsella - whose phenomenal rise since the '90s is now a worldwide literary success story that needs no introduction - asserts a profound interest for the 'pastoral radical' (Kinsella, ed. Kinsella, Landbridge, 1999): “I'm particularly interested in the 'pastoral radical'- in blending the so-called pastoral tradition with the lingui.stically innovative. This 'hybrid' ironises the pastoral construct but allows for genuine movement through rural spaces. Landscape is central to my project - ways of seeing, questions of occupation and space, the position and relevance of the so-called 'lyrical …

This Man's Heart: Masculinity In The Poetry Of E.E. Cummings, Willis John Whitesell Iii

Masters Theses

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which …

Information On The Assembly Line : A Review Of Information Design And Its Implications For Technical Communicators, Jason Nichols

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

Technological advances have made endless amounts of information on nearly every subject easily accessible, while at the same time fostering an economic climate conducive to international trade and partnerships. The challenge for companies then becomes one of figuring out how best to manage and use this mass of information, a task complicated by the increasingly global nature of business that requires products to be tailored to more specialized user groups in a wider array of formats and in different languages. Hence the emergence of information design, a field that technical communicators would do well to associate themselves with. Information design …

Political, National, Racial, And Imperial Unconscious In James Fenimore Cooper’S The Pioneers, Nizar Farouk Hermes

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Liberal humanist critics of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers have for a long time relegated this politically packed nineteenth-century novel to the realms of the romantic. In the course of this study, I intend to show that Cooper's romantic discourse in The Pioneers is not "innocently romantic" as these critics have postulated. To argue for the political, national, racial, and imperial unconscious of The Pioneers as the latent, but active discourse throughout this text, I rely upon the materialist theories of Fredric Jameson, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton, Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, and Edward Said.

Feminist Issues And Concerns In The Fictions Of Two Egyptian Women Writers: Alifa Rifaat And Nawal El-Saadawi, Shafiqa Anwar Fakir

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This thesis involves an examination of feminist issues and concerns in the fictions of two contemporary Egyptian women writers: Alifa Rifaat and Nawal el-Saadawi. The main focus will be on illuminating the social, sexual, economical problems that the literary female characters encounter and how they deal with these various forms of oppressions. Examination of these author's lives and works illustrates the complexity of women within the boundaries of the same nation in matters of gender justice and equality. This further, implicitly, illustrates the complexity of Arab women who tend to be viewed as a cohesive whole.

Body And Soul: Food, The Female (In) Corporeal, And The Narrative Effects Of Mind/Body Duality, Andrea Adolph

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study combines philosophical, historical, and cultural modes of inquiry in order to explore what has occurred when selected authors have attempted to "write the body." Augmented by archival and primary cultural research, the dissertation is grounded in the experiential, "everyday" qualities of women's lives. Samples of women's cultural materials such as beauty, cookery, and household management texts, and popular women's magazines serve as informative backdrops for an investigation of middle- and working-class British and Anglo-Irish women's culture during the twentieth century. This study investigates some of the ways in which women have thought about food in relation to more …