Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa

English Faculty Publications

Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see.

Why Speak Of American Stories As Dreams?, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

The term "American Dream" conjures literary images of perseverance and promise on the one hand but disillusionment and defeat on the other: Ben Franklin pulling himself up by the bootstraps, Huck Finn "lighting out" for the territories, Gatsby insisting that he can "repeat the past," Willy Loman burying his face in his hands. Whether one accepts it as a reality, punctures it as a myth, or presents it as a nightmare, the American Dream has maintained its powerful presence in scholarly conversations throughout the decades. Traditionally, scholars have referred to classic American Dream texts such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791–1790), …

Reintegrating Human And Nature: Modern Sentimental Ecology In Rachel Carson And Barbara Kingsolver, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Rachel Carson and Barbara Kingsolver were both trained as scientists and may be expected to embrace the rationalist, mechanical view of nature as something separate from, and perhaps even inferior to, the world of humans. Yet these two women both promoted a more complex approach to modernism's scientific paradigm in which nature is not merely a separate entity for dispassionate study but also an integral part of the human community. Both women display in their rhetorical choices a keen understanding of the language of community and interconnection, and their language and writing styles constantly promote the reintegration of humans and …

Writing The Northland: Jack London's And Robert W. Service's Imaginary Geography, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim.

Giehmann, Barbara Stefanie. Writing the Northland: Jack London's and Robert W. Service's Imaginary Geography. Würzburg, Germany: Könighausen & Neumann, 2011.

Nature, Domestic Labor, And Moral Community In Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours And Elinor Wyllys, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Cooper's argument for a domestic ideal situated within a rural setting reinforces the importance of community connections through a shared sense of morality, as well as understanding of the natural world. Community alone—the human connections—never seems to be enough in Cooper's formulation, but must always exist with an awareness of the world outside the narrow confines of one's own domestic sphere. Concern for one's fellow-beings necessitates a concern for the world in which these beings live, and Cooper understands that when any bonds are broken—such as the bonds that connect us to the natural world—other bonds are threatened. Thus, when …

Wolves And The Wolf Myth In American Literature, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim:

Robisch, S. K. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature. Reno, Nevada: Uniiversity of Nevada Press, 2009.

The Genesis Of The Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston, Cara E. Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim.

Hricko, Mary. The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell. London & New York: Routledge, 2009.

The Aridity Of Grace: Community And Ecofeminism In Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams And Prodigal Summer, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

In both Animal Dreams and her later novel Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver constructs narratives of community inhabited by characters with a vivid awareness of the natural world and the threats to that world; furthermore, both novels feature strong female characters who long for a more harmonious life within nature. The novels develop and present forthright ecofeminist themes, with the women in the texts representing ideals of ecologically sensitive living who seek to educate their communities about threats to the environment and the defenses against those threats.

Kingsolver's ecofeminist vision, however, is frequently complicated and contradictory; just as the desert landscape …

Using The Novel To Teach Multiculturalism, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

Description of a fourteen week course taught by Michelle Loris, professor of English at Sacred Heart University. The course, titled Recent Ethnic American Fictions, introduced students to several concepts from contemporary literary theory. The theories included New Criticism, Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Feminist Theory. The assumption was that these concepts would give students the tools to become critical readers, which would then provide them with a deeper understanding of these multicultural novels and their particular cultural contexts. For a semester, reading and thinking about these multicultural novels engaged and challenged the students' assumptions about themselves and the America …

Using The Novel To Teach Multiculturalism, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

Description of a fourteen week course taught by Michelle Loris, professor of English at Sacred Heart University. The course, titled Recent Ethnic American Fictions, introduced students to several concepts from contemporary literary theory. The theories included New Criticism, Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Feminist Theory. The assumption was that these concepts would give students the tools to become critical readers, which would then provide them with a deeper understanding of these multicultural novels and their particular cultural contexts.

For a semester, reading and thinking about these multicultural novels engaged and challenged the students' assumptions about themselves and the …

Private Fleming At Chancellorsville: "The Red Badge Of Courage" And The Civil War, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim:

Lentz, Perry. Private Fleming at Chancellorsville: The Red Badge of Courage and the Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

The Satanic Whitman: Woman, Nature And The Magic Of Four, D. J. Moores

English Faculty Publications

Had the Romantics lived in the twentieth-century and maintained their Romantic sensibility, they might have been Jungians, which is to say, there are a considerable number of parallels between Jungian theory and Romantic aesthetics. According to Jung the aim of all psychoanalytic work is to help the analysand become conscious of his or her entire Self, which includes conscious as well as disowned, unconscious elements. In Jungian theory when ego (conscious awareness) confronts and assimilates shadow (unconsciousness), the result is a revitalization and expansion of Self. Romantics longed for this expanded Self in their frequent transcendent yearnings, concerned as they …

At Home In The City: Urban Domesticity In American Literature And Culture, 1850-1930, By Betsy Klimasmith, Cara Erdheim

English Faculty Publications

Book review by Cara Erdheim.

Klimasmith, Betsy. At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930. Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005.

Mariann Russell: Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery: A Literary Analysis, Grace Farrell

English Faculty Publications

Book Review by Grace Farrell Lee.

Russell, Mariann. Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem gallery: a literary analysis. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980.

Mr. Sammler's Planet: The Terms Of The Covenant, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

For Saul Bellow the essential quest is spiritual: it is a search for humanness in a world that daily assaults and denies such a search. This struggle to be human is the author's one story and the various versions of that same story simply indicate the individual progress each protagonist—Joseph, Asa, Wilhelm, Herzog, Sammler—makes on that journey. To find the genuinely human is the hero's task.

The Rhetorical Effectiveness Of Black Like Me, Hugh Rank

English Faculty Publications

In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white Southern novelist, disguised himself as a Negro and traveled through the South to experience "what it is like to be a Negro in a land where we keep the Negro down." The brief narrative account of this experience is recorded in Black Like Me, a book which wom the Saturday Review's Anisfield-Wolf award in 1962 for its contribution toward race relations. In brief, why is Black Like Me rhetorically effective?