Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From David Walker To President Obama: Tropes Of The Founding Fathers In African American Discourses Of Democracy, Or The Legacy Of Ishmael, Elizabeth J. West

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Icelandic Sagas As A Subject For Undergraduate Study, John P. Sexton

English Faculty Publications

While medieval studies has dramatically expanded its scope and the texts taught as part of its subject over the past few decades, the study of Icelandic saga literature is still a fringe discipline, particularly in North American academe. Rarer still is undergraduate exposure to the sagas, despite their appeal as texts and the rich possibilities they offer to students trained in Anglo-Saxon literature (or at least Beowulf) and familiar with Norse myth and legend through Tolkien or Marvel comics. The insular nature of the culture from which the literature springs is a contributing factor, of course—there is the undeniable …

[Review Of The Book: Deception And Detection In Eighteenth-Century Britain By Jack Lynch], Thomas M. Curley

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jacob's Daughter, Betsy Johnson-Miller

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Revisions In Red, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

In this article the author reflects on her experience of researching the history of her grandfather Earl Browder, a former leader in the U.S. Communist Party, and exploring his significance both in historical and personal terms. She comments on her research regarding his status as a spy of the Soviet Union, share her views on her father's reluctance to discuss his past, and notes Browder's campaigns for President of the U.S. in the 1930s.

Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress And Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This examination of late Victorian journalism reveals that one type of clothing offered middle-class women protection from street harassment: cross-cultural dress. In appropriate ethnic attire, reporters and social investigators ventured into the immigrant communities that made up a part of England’s urban poor, exploring such trades as Jewish fur-puller or Italian organ-grinder. This incognito ethnic attire afforded women both the means and the authority to carry out their investigations into the Italian constituency of the Victorian working poor. This study also examines how costumes enabled female investigators to manipulate class- and gender-based assumptions about who had broad access to the …

A Primer On Copyright And Fair Use, Ann E. Biswas, Charles J. Russo

English Faculty Publications

One student creates a video for class using a Lady Gaga song. Another puts together a PowerPoint presentation about the Vietnam War using images she found online. A third student adds a link to a YouTube video in a blog post for an English class. One teacher photocopies and distributes articles from a national newspaper. Another teacher records a television documentary at home and shows it to her class.

Did those students and teachers violate copyright law? The complex, evolving laws governing copyright and fair use are muddied by the rapid growth and use of technology in schools, yet it's …

Training Graduate Assistants, Bryan Bardine

English Faculty Publications

This article was featured in the journal's '4Sites Post-secondary' section. Overall, the goals for summer training are threefold:

• TAs need to become familiar with each other.
• TAs need to be knowledgeable about the material.
• TAs should be somewhat at ease in a classroom environment.

Hybrid Species And Literatures: Ibrahim Al-Koni’S ‘Composite Apparition’, Susan Mchugh

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sanguine, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

Health care in America: even my doctor lines up for the community multiphasic blood screening, rather than going to the regular lab.

It costs thirty-two dollars for the usual screen, plus ten dollars for thyroid, or PSA or B-12. The blood-drawing used to be held at the local rec park building. Now it’s at the county emergency services building, outside of town on a brand-new winding country road. They could just as well hold it at the public library, or firehouse, or agricultural center—any large room usable for voting, or the traveling reptile show, could be set up for phlebotomy. …

Catharine Trotter And The Claims Of Conscience, Joanne E. Myers

English Faculty Publications

Although Catherine Trotter, later Cockburn, has begun to receive increased critical attention, the role of religious themes in her writing remains largely unexplored. A key tendency in critical accounts, in fact, has been to ally her with the secular contractarian philosophy of John Locke, whom she defended in print. Biographical evidence suggests, however, that Trotter was not unconcerned with religious questions; raised an Anglican, she converted to Catholicism in her youth and returned to the Church of England in her early thirties. Her later philosophical works remain preoccupied with theological issues, notably voluntarism. This article proposes that we can identify …

Með Lögum Skal Land Vort Byggja: ‘With Law Shall The Land Be Built.’ Law-Speaking And Identity In The Medieval Norse Atlantic, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Gwyn Jones famously posited the notion of a cogent Norse identity as manifested by common language, culture, and mythology; further, as he clarified in his landmark work A History of the Vikings, law and the practice of law in local and national assemblies was a fundamental component of such a unifying cultural characteristic: "…for the Scandinavian peoples in general, their respect for law, their insistence upon its public and democratic exercise at the Thing, and its validity for all free men, together with their evolution of a primitive and exportable jury system, is one of the distinctive features of their …

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 …

Historical Realism And Imperialist Nostalgia In Terrence Malick’S The New World, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

The promotional materials for Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) devote considerable time to detailing the extraordinary effort of the production crew to recreate Werowocomoco, the capital of the Powhatan’s paramount chiefdom, and Fort James, the first surviving English settlement in Virginia, in the period from 1607 to 1617. The hour-long documentary on “The Making of The New World” accompanying the DVD release of the film, for example, chronicles the shared work of a research team of historians, archeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and members of Virginia tribes to represent as faithfully as possible Powhatan and English agriculture, architecture, language, and …

Literature And Popular Culture In Early Modern England, Phebe Jensen

English Faculty Publications

"All students of popular culture," Tim Harris wrote in 1995, "would acknowledge the intellectual debt they owe to Peter Burke's seminal study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe." (1) Now in a third edition with substantial revisions and a new preface, the book defines "popular culture" as the culture of "ordinary people," which included "folksongs and folktales; devotional images and decorated marriage chests; mystery plays and farces; broadsides and chapbooks; and, above all, festivals...." Burke's central claim was that in 1500, the elite were culturally "amphibious," participating in this popular "little tradition" but also in the "great tradition" of the …

“I Just Wikipedia It”: Information Behavior Of First-Year Writing Students, Megan Whitney Olsen, A. R. Diekema

English Faculty Publications

First-year writing students are a very large, diverse, and ubiquitous information user group, as writing courses are typically required of all undergraduate students, regardless of major. While in their institution's writing program, students frequently must utilize research (information) in their writing assignments. While this formal, task-related information behavior is important for stakeholders in the fields of information science and the humanities to understand, little research has been done on this significant group of students. This study arrived at key exploratory findings by collecting data and context from first-year writing students through semi-structured interviews. The researchers found that students continue to …

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

Faulkner's Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, And The Accessible Past, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner's newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation's efforts to "countenance," or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner's descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, …

William Faulkner, William James, And The American Pragmatic Tradition (Review), Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

In his book's final sentence, David Evans is concerned that we "assure a future for Faulkner, and a Faulkner for the future" (236). Taken at a glance, this concern might imply a need to safeguard Faulkner's continuing relevance: pointing to the future and Faulkner together suggests that their mutuality is not, in fact, certain. And in light of shifting critical approaches to this canonical writer, not to mention the diminishing importance of author studies as well as scholarly genres like the monograph, Evans's caution makes a certain critical sense.

Yet the statement's fuller meaning within the context of this new …

The Curious Case Of Asa Carter And The Education Of Little Tree, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Little Tree was number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on October 4, 1991, when historian Dan T. Carter published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that demolished the image of the book’s author, explaining that Forrest Carter was in reality Asa Carter, and he was no Indian. Rather, Dan Carter (no relation) wrote, “Between 1946 and 1973, the Alabama native [Asa Carter] carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech …

Book Review: A Brief History Of The Soul, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A Brief History of a Soul is the story of a lively debate whose arguments, vocabulary, and even subject have evolved over millennia. In this historical narrative cum apologia, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro champion “substance dualism,” a philosophical position that asserts the ontologically distinct reality of matter and soul (or body and mind in post-Cartesian terms). They largely succeed in their efforts to be “fair and balanced” (4) and succeed in presenting a sophisticated and nuanced yet readable account of the controversy in its philosophical and, to some extent, theological and scientific dimensions. As entailed by the “Brief …

Joseph Smith, Romanticism, And Tragic Creation, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Joseph Smith, as I think historians readily recognize, has much to commend him as a Romantic thinker. Personal freedom was as sacred to him as to the young Schiller, his emphasis on individualism invites comparison with Byron and Emerson, his view of restoration as inspired syncretism is the religious equivalent of Friedrich Schlegel's "progressive universal poetry," his hostility to dogma and creeds evokes Blake's cry, "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's," and his celebration of human innocence and human potential transform into theology what Rousseau and Goethe had merely plumbed through the novel and …

The Heavenly Logic Of Proxy Baptism, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

By mid-eighteenth century, two religious titans of the Anglo-Saxon world, erstwhile allies, were at loggerheads over the question of just how many people were destined for an eternity in hell. George Whitefield attacked John Wesley in 1740 for asserting “God’s grace is free to all.” Wesley had agonized over “How uncomfortable a thought is this, that thousands and millions of men, without any preceding offence or fault of theirs were unchangeably doomed to everlasting burnings!” Some, like Francis Okely, simply abandoned the restrictive hell: “Neither doeth it damn any Man, that he hath not the Word of God, if it …

How Mormons Became American, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A century ago, it was once a simple matter to assume a norm for American culture and situate the Mormon well outside it. Polygamy was likened to slavery in the nineteenth century (as the first Republican Party platform did in 1856). Brigham Young was compared to an Asian despot. Mormon women were victims in need of mythic frontier heroes like Captain Plum and Buffalo Bill to save them. Even Joseph Smith’s martyrdom could be seen as the penalty for his violation of the right to a free press. Mormonism made available to the playwrights of the Great American Saga the …

What Is Talmud? The Art Of Disagreement, David Metzger

English Faculty Publications

Review of What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement, by Sergey Dolgopolski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

Listening For The Squeaky Wheel: Designing Distance Writing Program Assessment, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

Distance writing programs still struggle with assessment strategies that can evaluate student writing as well as their ability to communicate about that writing with peers at a distance. This article uses Kim, Smith and Maeng's 2008 distance education program assessment scheme to evaluate a single distance writing program at Old Dominion University. The program's specific assessment needs include the ability to determine how well students are developing expert insider prose and working together as a virtual community. Kim, Smith and Maeng's assessment scheme was applied to six courses within the writing program, revealing that programmatic assessment weaknesses included providing varied …

Low-Stakes, Reflective Writing: Moving Students Into Their Professional Fields, Joyce Neff, Garrett J. Mcauliffe, Carl Whithaus, Nial P. Quinlan

English Faculty Publications

This study examines low-stakes, written commentaries from a graduate counseling course to better understand the role writing plays in the transition from being a student to becoming a professional practitioner. The cross disciplinary research team used methods from Grounded Theory to analyze 60 commentaries and found that: (1) low-stakes, reflective writing revealed changes in self-awareness from Situational Self-Knowledge to Pattern Self-Knowledge (Weinstein & Alschuler, 1985); (2) low-stakes writing provided evidence of students connecting personally to learning and then connecting learning to professional practice; and (3) low-stakes writing encouraged the instructor to make mid-course adjustments to his teaching methods. This study …

Editor's Introduction: Playing For Keeps: Games And Cultural Resistance [Special Issue], Marc A. Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, …

"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin's propositions about "new" media's relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies.