Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Repugnant Aboriginality: Leanne Howe’S Shell Shaker And Indigenous Representation In The Age Of Multiculturalism, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe’s 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts, at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. And yet, these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by pre-emptying identification through difference, an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we …

Book Review: The Mormon Menace: Violence And Anti-Mormonism In The Postbellum South, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

“Whereas anti-Mormon violence had been characteristic of virtually every northern locale of Mormon settlement during the antebellum period,” Patrick Mason writes in his history of the subject, “violent assaults on Mormon missionaries became an increasingly southern practice in the years after the Civil War” (93). What distinguishes Mason’s book from other chapters in the sad saga of religious persecution is his excellent analysis of the complexities that result when political agendas, regional norms and interests, and theories on the proper role and limits of government all collide in the face of religious heterodoxy. Virtually all late nineteenth-century citizens and politicians …

Inside And Outside Southern Whiteness: Film Viewing, The Frame, And The Racing Of Space In Yoknapatawpha, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Though neither film nor film viewing is ever named in As I Lay Dying, both the apparatus of cinema and what we might term its sociohistorical effects are evoked powerfully by and in the novel. These include the passing before the reader’s “gaze” of the discrete, separate “frames” of the various characters’ monologues, as well as, in particular section, a fascination with watching machinery that resembled the interest of early film biewers in the cinematic apparatus (see Doane 108).

If Vardaman and his family are not explicitly depicted as film viewers, they nevertheless show signs of what has been …

Trauma And Temporal Hybridity In Arundhati Roy’S The God Of Small Things, Elizabeth Outka

English Faculty Publications

Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, presents an often bewildering mix of different times: images, stories, and sensations from the past blend together with present moments and even future experiences. Critics have noted this temporal blending and have cited this feature as reflecting the novel’s magical realism, or postcolonialism, or postmodernism, which are all associated with various forms of time play.¹ Indeed, as writers from Joyce to Woolf to Rushdie remind us, time is always to some extent a mixture, as the present must be understood as a complex amalgamation and negotiation of past moments. Roy’s …

Building A Collaborative Online Literary Experience, Joe Essid, Fran Wilde

English Faculty Publications

Key Takeaways

-Educators and students collaborated in constructing an immersive literary experience at the University of Richmond and then reenacted the narrative as a team.

-Considerable planning goes into such simulations to make them effective collaboration spaces.

-In creating a simulation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a team of distributed groups negotiated different approaches to believably embody Poe's characters and period.

-Despite limitations in the software and the planning process during and after a beta test, students experienced Poe's story in a new and rewarding way.

Effective virtual simulations can embed participants in imaginary …

Book Review: Understanding The Book Of Mormon, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

With over 150 million copies in circulation, the Book of Mormon has yet to find its niche in historical, religious or literary studies. Largely ignored by scholars and berated by Evangelicals, the text may find a more successful path to a larger audience, hopes historian Grant Hardy, if historical and religious questions are bracketed in deference to the work’s surprisingly complex and interesting literary dimensions

Preface: Monsters And Mormons, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In the nineteenth century, Mormonism seemed grist for everybody's mill. Humorists like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain made hay out of polygamy; conspiracy theorists like Thomas deWitt Talmage imputed President Garfield's assassination to the Mormons; pseudo-memoirists like "Maria Ward" recounted their seduction, imprisonment, and torture at the hands of Mormon mesmerists; the Republican jump-started their political party with a promise to expunge the Mormon "relic of barbarism"; and pulp fiction writers and serious novelists alike fueled sales with stories of bloodthirsty Danites, lecherous elders, and grief maddened Mormon wives who murdered competitors.

Book Review Panel: When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence In Western Thought, Terryl Givens, James L. Siebach, Dana M. Pike, Jesse D. Hurlbut, David B. Paxman

English Faculty Publications

On October 13, 2011, BYU Studies sponsored a program reviewing Terryl Givens’s important Oxford book on the idea of the premortal existence of souls in various lines of Western philosophy and religion. Because this first volume of its kind covers literature from so many different civilizations, the editors of BYU Studies saw no way to do this book justice without involving a panel of reviewers from several disciplines. After portions of Robert Fuller’s forthcoming review in Church History were read, the program proceeded with reviews, responses, and open discussion.

Imagining Jefferson And Hemings In Paris, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic Bell Hooks argues that "no one seems to know how to tell the story" of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: "that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women." Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. Hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if …

African American Literature By Writers Of Caribbean Descent, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

They dubbed it the Port of No Return. When their ancestors left that port at Elmira Beach, Ghana – or Goree Island, Senegal, or any of a number of similar African ports – and set out on the perilous journey over the ocean to the Americas, there was no going back for the New World Negroes. That is what for most Africans in the Americas was the beginning of their history. Whether resident in a small island nation or in the American colonies, whether under the domain of a British, Spanish, French, or Dutch colonial power, and whether shuttled back …

Education, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In both Keywords (Williams 1983a) and New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005), "education" (Keywords has "educate") is primarily an institutional practice, which, after the late eighteenth century, is increasingly formalized and universalized in Western countries. Bearing the twin senses of "to lead forth" (from the Latin educare) and "to bring up" (from the Latin educare), "education" appears chiefly as an action practiced by adults on children. The Oxford English Dictionary thus defines the terms as "the systematic instruction, schooling, or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life."