Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"See Me, Touch Me, Feel Me": (Im) Proving The Bodily Sense Of Masculinity, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Ultimately, this paper stems from two cultural strands which intersect in one cultural form, self-improvement advertising aimed at men. The first of these is the figure of the "new man," which appeared in the mid-1980s. The novelty lies in the positioning of masculine bodies precisely for the purpose of being seen. The available criticism was not equipped to account for these positionings. The second cultural strand, the proliferation of technologies which alter the body itself, as opposed to its coverings, makes the gap in the criticism more apparent. The two cultural trends intersect most noticeably in the advertisements for the …

Medievalism And Literature: An Annotated Bibliography Of Critical Studies, Richard Utz, Aneta Dygon

English Faculty Publications

This annotated bibliography represents a solid first selection of critical studies discussing the creative and scholarly reception of medieval literary texts in post-medieval times.

Blood Lines, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) The salty ocean air was pleasantly mixed with smoke rising from gas grills using volcanic stones, plain old-fashioned ones using regular coals, and smokers using mesquite wood chips. As my American husband and I stepped out of our car and walked around to the back yard of the Bechars, the only African Sephardi family in Virginia Beach that Fourth of July, the aroma of sizzling hot dogs and hamburgers stirred our appetite. In her all- American neighborhood, Sonia welcomed us with a platter of spicy Tunisian meat and herbs rolled in phyllo dough and fried to perfection. I …

Termination’S Legacy: The Discarded Indians Of Utah, H. Bert Jenson

English Faculty Publications

STARTING IN 1954 the Federal Government terminated onehundred plus Indian tribe across the Unit d States. All have subsequently been reinstated, that is, with one exception: the so called mixed-blood Utes in the Uintah Basin of Northeastern Utah. It is this still disenfranchised group of people that form the stimulus driving R. Warren Metcalf's book Termination's Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. It is about these people that he writes; it is their cause he champion.

Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are my rooms now." The journey that Walcott makes from "houseboy" to master/ruler/owner of the house of literature (the Nobel Laureate is frequently acclaimed the greatest poet writing in the English language) is painstakingly detailed in Bruce King's tome Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.

'There Shall Be No Discernible Traces Left': The Invisible Butler In Ishiguro's "The Remains Of The Day", Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper draws its title from an anecdote Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day (1989), recounts to illustrate the primary attribute for servants: the ability to perform duties without leaving any discernible traces. Mrs. D.C. Webster, an American married into British “old money,” expresses astonishment at the treatment of servants during an interview for the documentary, The Secret World of Fame and Fortune. Mrs. Webster “had a staff of twelve . . . They would do everything for you. If you took a sweater off, it would disappear. If they were too loud or if they were …

Anxieties Of Impotence: Cuban Americas In New York City, Christina M. Tourino

English Faculty Publications

In her paper, "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City, " Christina Marie Tourino seeks a basis for comparison between Latin American literatures and Latino literatures of the United States. Such groups have rarely been compared in the past because they are considered part of the same literary "family." However, Tourino argues that owing to the flows of capital driven by global pressures, literatures between and among Latin Americans and Latinos hail from such culturally heterogeneous sites and are made over by so many relocations that they do call for comparative projects. Instead of comparing texts across national …

Otherness And Identity In The Victorian Novel, Michael Galchinsky

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Alan Lupack, Arthurian Literature By Women, Alison Langdon

English Faculty Publications

This is a timely volume, given the surge in scholarly and popular interest in women's voices in the Arthurian tradition. The explicit purpose of this anthology is to explore the "rich and forgotten tradition" of women writers' contributions to the corpus of Arthurian literature, sketching a female lineage of literary descent that traces "certain traditions common to women writing on Arthurian themes" (xi, 4). While the foreword provides an overview of more familiar women authors such as Rosemary Sutcliffe, Mary Stewart, and Persia Wooley, in their selections of works to anthologize Lupack and Lupack choose to focus on lesser-known texts …

Only Friendship, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) My Jewish daughter befriended a Muslim woman in her Islam class last Fall. She asked me where she could buy rosewater, saffron, and cardamom to make halwa. My kosher daughter was celebrating the end of Ramadan, Eide-fetr, with her first Iranian, her first Muslim friend.

Effects Of Slavery On Non-Slaves, David E.E. Sloane

English Faculty Publications

Prof. Sloane comments on how characters in Huckleberry Finn reflect the attitudes of white people in slave territory during the time of slavery in the United States.

The White Bed Of Desire In A.S. Byatt's Possession, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

The British novelist A. S. Byatt frequently writes about art and color theory in her fiction. In Still Life (1985) Byatt intentionally saturates her text with musings on art and color; bordering on the didactic, she devotes long passages to Van Gogh's chromatics and individual characters' theories on art. With The Matisse Stories (1996) her discussion moves into the theory of complementary colors in the story “Art Work,” through the painter Robin Dennison. Painting for Robin is “a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and color, you know” (70). In the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance …

I'Ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For many earlier southern white writers, the southern rural landscape was the repository of nostalgia for lost ways of life, whether it was the plantation fantasy that Thomas Nelson Page pined for in his stories In Ole Virginia (1887) or the segregated agrarian ideal that many contributors yearned for in I'll Take My Stand (1930). For modern southern white writers, beginning most prominently with William Faulkner, the rural landscape has conjured up unsettling guile about a way of life that flourished on the backs of the black people who tilled that land. And not surprisingly, for many black writers the …

Screening Readerly Pleasures: Modernism, Melodrama, And Mass Markets In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Although Faulkner had already, with his earlier fiction, established himself as a practitioner of a rarefied, regional modernism, in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem he addresses the reading tastes and pleasures of the commercial market. Commenting as he does on the doctor and his wife’s tastes in the novel’s opening, Faulkner reveals his disdain for people who prefer the culture industry’s generic products to something more personal or idiosyncratic. Yet as his potential audience, those people or their tastes were of interest to Faulkner in 1939, the year the novel appeared. Following extended periods working in Hollywood, as well as …

Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.

Passing As Danzy Senna, Bertram D. Ashe, Danzy Senna

English Faculty Publications

Caucasia, written by Danzy Senna, is part of a growing sub-genre of African-American novels, some of which announce their themes by their titles: White Boys, by Reginald McKnight; The White Boy Shuffle, by Paul Beatty; The Last Integrationist, by Jake Lamar; and Negrophobia, by Darius James, to name a few. Caucasia is a "Post-Soul" novel that explores the world of "mullatos" - both cultural and racial. But even though artists such as Kara Walker, photographer Lorna Simpson, and essayist Lisa Jones also explore the vicissitudes of post-Civil Rights Movement Black identity, in Black fiction its …

Book Review: The Mormon Question: Polygamy And Constitutional Conflict In Nineteenth-Century America, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Polygamy makes for fascinating social history and for best-selling potboilers as well. This study by Sarah Barringer Gordon, who teaches both law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first attempt to write a full-length legal history of “the Principle.” It turns out that even in this dry-as-dust genre, polygamy fuels a very dynamic story indeed, one that reveals the rich malleability of the Constitution, the endless resourcefulness of determined guardians of public morality, and the resilience of a peculiar people committed to the practice of plural marriage.

Seeking The Rhetoric Of Jesus, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

I come to the questions posed by this volume from a somewhat different background than one might expect. Whereas one might anticipate that I was an Anabaptist first and a scholar second, just the opposite was the case. I Before beginning my graduate studies I had never heard of Anabaptism. Indeed, I was poring over Aristotle's Rhetoric before I was even a Christian. I thus went through much of my graduate studies (not to mention all of college, high school, and elementary school) without giving a thought to how my studies were impacting my faith-never mind how my faith might …

Wordsworth's Habits Of Mind: Knowledge Through Experience (Review), Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Afterword Concerning Pound's 1935 Revisit To The Fenollosa Papers For An Edition Of 'Mori's Lectures' On The History Of Chinese Poetry, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

'Chinese Poetry: Prof. Mori's Lectures,' Recast By Pound From Fenollosa's Notes, Transcribed And Annotated By Zhaoming Qian, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

French Dirt (Prologue And Chapter One), Richard Goodman

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Medieval Lyric: Genres In Historical Context By William D. Paden, Ashby Kinch

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Institutional Invention: (How) Is It Possible?, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In this chapter I want to explore several broad questions with respect to higher education: Is institutional invention possible? What are the conditions that enable it, and how can they be created and sustained? What are the obstacles to institutional invention? How can academic leadership foster institutional invention?

Reading The Ordinary Diary, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Progay/Antigay: The Rhetorical War Over Sexuality By Ralph R. Smith And Russell R. Windes, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

When I was asked to review Progay/Antigay, I actually felt both trepidation and excitement for two reasons. First, I have a personal interest in the subject matter because I am a gay man who considers himself moderately active in both politics and the gay community. Second, I live in Nebraska, a state whose voters recently banned legal recognition of same-sex relationships, whether they be called ‘marriage’ or ‘domestic partnership’ or ‘civil union.’ For these reasons, I felt that the text could potentially elucidate the bitter struggle that we in the Midwest had just been through.

Review Of Mediated Discourse: The Nexus Of Practice. London: Routledge By Ron Scollon, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

What I like very much about this book is that it epitomizes the notion of qualitative research. It is a beautifully written exploration of the way mediated discourse gets accomplished, but it also clarifies ways of analyzing discourse with rich discussions of theory and analysis based on a number of illustrations taken from everyday events. Scollon explores an everyday practice that most people probably take for granted, and he proposes a way of examining this ‘practice’ in a new way. This practice is ‘handing’, and it serves as the centerpiece of this book. We ‘hand’ books to each other, we …

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 …