Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Late-Victorian Novels, Microsociology, And Bad Dialogue, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of …

Dreamland, Corey Hashimoto

Corey Hashimoto

My Blue World, Kimberly Knutsen

Kimberly Knutsen

Opal Jean, age twelve, is flying to Michigan to visit her dad, who is serving a life sentence in prison for murder. Opal hasn’t seen her father in seven years, and while she longs for the “cold blue world” of her childhood, she is also struggling to break free of her father’s dark legacy.

The trip is a disaster. Luggage is lost, her mother has to “take a seat” in the airport and rattle the benzodiazepines in her purse, her teen brother attempts to order $30 worth of Coronas from room service, and Opal’s little brother is simultaneously thrilled and …

Lying And Other Fun Habits, Emily Llerena

Emily Llerena

Review Of Humans And Paragons: Essays On Super-Hero Justice, Thomas E. Simmons

Thomas E. Simmons

No abstract provided.

Snow White, Leslie Gielow Jacobs

Leslie Gielow Jacobs

No abstract provided.

Forsaken Trust, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

Book 2 in the Luce Hansen Thriller series. Third book forthcoming.

Description from the publisher:

Wallace Lake, Ohio, takes care of their own. Unwelcoming of outsiders, the community closes ranks when four women are found murdered along the water’s edge. Agent Luce Hansen of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation must find a way in before another woman loses her life to the ruthless serial killer.

With the help of her new team—a hot rookie and a smart, beautiful medical examiner—Luce uncovers a ring of devotion surrounding the prime suspect. As Luce works to unearth the dark secrets of this …

A Particular Providence: Linked Tales Of Storms Finding Distressed Family Trees, James J. Magee

James J. Magee

No abstract provided.

A Continuous Present, Margaret L. Lundberg

Margaret Lundberg

The readers of a text are—in many ways—also its authors, with the act of reading creating a dialog between a text already written and a text generated through reader response, creating a community along the boundary between author and reader. To illustrate that boundary, I situated myself—through my research and writing—as a responding audience to nineteenth-century Iowa farm wife Emily Hawley Gillespie, as she is revealed through the pages of her thirty-year diary. Through a constructivist paradigm, the methodology of philosophical hermeneutics, new historicism, and the creative vehicle of fiction, I entered Gillespie’s text to examine the themes which emerged …

Hospital Waiting Room, Tara Thompson

Tara Thompson

No abstract provided.

Technology, Tradeoffs, And Freedom As Depicted In Postmodern Fiction, Robert M. Pallitto

Robert M Pallitto

No abstract provided.

Unbalancing Acts: Plagiarism As Catalyst For Instructor Emotion In The Composition Classroom, Ann E. Biswas

Ann E. Biswas

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors’ emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in the classroom. The author considers how and why her own emotional labor was altered in light of these findings and what this might suggest about the need for increased professional conversation in our discipline regarding the impact of emotions in the writing classroom.

Nonfiction Creative Writing 1 (1).Docx, Maura O'Neill

Maura O'Neill

No abstract provided.

Freedom Is A Good Book And A Sugar High, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

This is a creative nonfiction piece about reading literature with an inmate.

A Swath Of Poppies, Spring Ulmer

Spring Ulmer

No abstract provided.

Three Stories: "Permission," "Consolation," And "Presentation", Christopher Merkner

Christopher Merkner

No abstract provided.

Familiar Strangers: International Students In The U.S. Composition Course, Elena Lawrick, Fatima Esseili

Fatima Esseili

This chapter presents selected findings from our study of a well-established ESL writing program at a U.S. university with a large population of international undergraduate students. The study was conducted in all 13 writing sections. The instruments included demographic data from university registrars; one instructor survey, administered at the end of the semester; and two student surveys, one administered at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. The instructor survey response rate was 100% (13 teachers); the student survey response rates were 82.5% (161 students) and 88% (171 students), respectively.

The reported findings inform five areas: an …

Gina Bonakdar Nahai: Fantasies Of Escape And Inclusion, Mojgan Behmand

Mojgan Behmand

Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Caspian Rain are the enticing titles of Gina Bonakdar Nahai’s Iran-focused novels, published in 1991, 1999, and 2008 respectively. And the titles hold true: the narratives reflect the pain, melancholy and dream-like beauty conveyed in the titles as they divulge characters who strive to escape the restrictions of their community, religion, government, and gender. In the meantime, as the author depicts these fantasies of escape and attempts at flight –and frequently harshly punishes them–, the characters achieve a hitherto unknown feat, namely the depiction of Jewish Iranian main characters …

Penquest Volume 2, Number 1, Janet Collins, Judy Gozdur, Susan Reed, David Reed, Rick Wagner, Carol Groover, Linda Banicki, Helen Hagadorn, Tammy Hutchinson, Sissy Crabtree, Sandra Coleman, Ann Harrington, Mark Touchton, Bruce Warner, Tom Schifanella, Laura Jo Last, David Whitsett, Bill Slaughter, S. Trevett, Richard L. Ewart, Valerie Williams, R. E. Mallery, Modesta Matthews, David Olson, E. Allen Tilley, Joseph Avanzini, Beth Goeckel, Donna Kaluzniak, Paul Cramer, Lucinda Halsema, Maria Barry, Roger Whitt Jr., Lori Nasrallah

David E. Olson

Table of Contents for this Volume:

Untitled by Janet Collins

Untitled by Judy Gozdur

Last Hour of Light by Susan Reed

Untitled by Judy Godzur

Untitled by Rick Wagner

Untitled by Carol Groover

Untitled by R. Wagner

Only in the Portico by Linda Banicki

Untitled by Helen Hagadorn

Private Place, Pubic Place by David Reed

Untitled by Tammy Hutchinson

Untitled by Tammy Hutchinson

Madison Knights by Susan Reed

Untitled by Sissy Crabtree

The Price by Sandra Coleman

Untitled by Ann Harrington

Invasion of Privacy by Mark Touchton

Untitled by Bruce Warner

Untitled by Tom Schifanella

Untitled by Tammy Hutchinson

Bloodwork …

Differend, Sexual Difference, And The Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

The aim of this chapter is to articulate how two key feminist writers, Marguerite Duras and Luce lrigaray, engage and rewrite Lyotard's interest in the sublime as a feminist aesthetic category. Jean-François Lyotard was at the vanguard of a retrieval of the category of the sublime in contemporary aesthetic theory. A trenchantly polymorphous philosopher, he wrote of the sublime in a range of styles that rivals the old masters of aesthetics, who not only mastered the thought, but were themselves sublime in their works. Whereas the tradition of aesthetics almost unequivocally aligns the sublime with the masculine and the feminine …

Invisible Monsters And Palahniuk's Perverse Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Invisible Monsters is a novel about the search for identities — sexual, family, gender, social — that is never at ease with the search. The characters in the novel wish to put an end to the need to search for an identity and to draw to a close the need and urge to represent themselves to others. These are characters who wish to be what and who they are without apology or argument but are ill-equipped to do so. They cannot find the means by and through which to put the seeking to an end. It may be tempting to …

Mixing Mourning And Desire: Alfonso Cuarón's 'Y Tu Mamá También', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También was one of a series of hit movies from Mexico in the early years of the millennium. From the beginning, the movie generated shock and scandal for its representations of graphic sex, but more than that for its representation of queer desire between the emerging young stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. As the two established their careers, they continued to answer questions about Julio and Tenoch, the two adolescent, urban cowboys they played in Y Tu Mamá También. The road movie as coming-of-age story on its own would not produce any disconcerting …

Hiroshima, 'Mon Amour,' Trauma, And The Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Trauma ruptures the world of our daily experiences. It is an intrusion that threatens the body and psyche and affects us in symptomatic ways. That something happened is certain; what that is, however, resists comprehension and understanding. The impetus of much contemporary trauma research in the humanities derives from the coincidence of survivors' insistence on the truth of their experiences and life in a global culture that multiplies traumatic circumstances. These circumstances pose a radical threat to the fecundity of human life, to be sure, and also to the very possibility of brute survival. My aim in this essay is …

The Vanishing Mexicana/O: (Dis)Locating The Native In Ruiz De Burton’S 'Who Would Have Thought It?' And 'The Squatter And The Don', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political reform. American Indians’ presence in the novels, however marginal, and Ruiz de Burton’s rendering of them as savage, powerless, and justly shut out from the social and political life of the nation, are critical to the author’s aims. Accounting for the absence and strategic appearance of American …

Scientific Racism And Masculine Recuperation: Charles Lummis And The Search For 'Home', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

Like many of his peers who came of age during the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles Lummis (1859-1928) chafed against the constraints of what he and other antimodernists viewed as the overly civilized Eastern United States. However, in Lummis’ own estimation, one of the many qualities that distinguished him from his peers was his willingness to take the necessary action to combat the devitalizing impact of city life by heading west to experience unfamiliar lands and cultures. As he states in the opening pages of his 1892 travel narrative, A Tramp Across the Continent, “I am an American …

Weaving Transnational Identity: Travel And Diaspora In Sandra Cisneros’S 'Caramelo', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento: A Novel (2002) dramatizes the functions of travel and tourism for members of the Mexican and Chicana/o diaspora, particularly for second-generation Chicana protagonist and narrator, Lala Reyes. Caramelo showcases travel's critical role in cultural identity formation, maintenance, and contestation for diasporic peoples, while also demonstrating the variability and mutability of diasporic cultural identity as mediated through travel. My explication of the novel's representations of cultural identity formation through travel contributes to critical conversations regarding the relationship between diaspora and tourism, argues for elastic understandings of diaspora itself, and brings needed attention to the particularities …

'The Injin Is Civilized And Aint Extinct No More Than A Rabbit': Transformation And Transnationalism In Alexander Posey’S 'Fus Fixico Letters, Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

In this article I first introduce my critical approach to Posey’s life and work in conjunction with an overview of the Fus Fixico Letters, as situated in their historical and cultural context. I position my argument in relation to the ideological framework outlined by Creek/Cherokee writer and theorist Craig Womack (one of the most significant Posey scholars), and throughout the article draw upon the groundbreaking historical and archival research of Daniel Littlefield. Following an introduction to the letters and an outline of my central arguments, I analyze Posey’s conception of transformation, as it manifests in the Fus Fixico Letters, as …

The Possibilities And Pitfalls In Teaching Sherman Alexie’S 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

About the book: This book provides original essays that suggest ways to engage students in the classroom with the cultural factors of American literature. Some of the essays focus on individual authors’ works, others view American literature more broadly, and still others focus on the application of culturally based methods for reading. All suggest a closer look at how ethnicity, culture and pedagogy interact in the classroom to help students better understand the complexity of works by African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and several other sometimes overlooked American cultural groups. Abstract for Tereza M. Szeghi's essay: In March …

The Akron Offering: A Ladies' Literary Magazine, 1849-1850, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

FREE FULL-TEXT PDF DOWNLOAD From 1849 to 1850, Calista Cummings edited and published Akron's first literary magazine, The Akron Offering. At the time, Akron was a booming canal town on the verge of even greater prosperity. By turns religious, comic, romantic, and political, this extraordinary collection of early midwestern creative literature expresses a wide range of sometimes contradictory opinions on both the important questions of its day and the important questions of today: historical events such as the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the 1848 revolutions in Europe are considered alongside more timeless contemplations on truth, justice, and beauty. …

'I Second That Emotion': Minding How Plagiarism Feels, Ann E. Biswas

Ann E. Biswas

It stands to reason that when writing teachers believe their students have plagiarized, they will experience strong emotions that impact their relationships with students, their pedagogy, and their sense of professional identity. Far from being a threat to reason, understanding and acknowledging writing teachers’ emotional responses to plagiarism can lead to a deeper wisdom of its true impact. By examining the literature on emotion from psychology, sociology, education, and writing studies as well as findings from a pilot study of writing teachers’ emotional responses to plagiarism, this article argues that the work involved in managing the emotions of plagiarism reflects …