American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Wild Heart: A Life. Natalie Clifford Barney's Journey From Victorian America To The Literary Salons Of Paris By Suzanne Rodriguez, Tama L. Engelking

World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Publications

Kramer's revision of his 1981 bibliography (CH, Dec'81) of novels set at American colleges adds 209 citations with annotations for novels published 1981-2002 and condenses annotations for novels carried over from the first edition for a total of 648.

The Nuts And Bolts Of College Writing, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Publications

Unusual for a style handbook, Nuts and Bolts embeds writing advice in essays that identify rhetorical structures as tools for "shaping your ideas, questions and convictions to share with others." While it offers suggestions that will help writers fine-tune their sentences and paragraphs, it has a lot to say about the machinery of college writing on a grander scale--the switches, transformers, and fans which must function well before a unit can be bolted together.

Book Reviews: Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews: Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Review Of Place, Language, And Identity In Afro-Costa Rican Literature, By Dorothy E. Mosby, And The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness, By Stephen P. Knadler, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Toni Morrison: Playing In The Dark, A Yemisi Jimoh, Phd

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Angling For Repose: Wallace Stegner And The De-Mythologizing Of The American West, Jennie A. Harrop

Faculty Publications - Department of Professional Studies

When Wallace Stegner published his first book in 1937, a stereotypical Western novel invariably included a gun-slinging cowboy hero, a near-mythical gunfight at dusk, and a formulaic, predictable plot that rarely left readers unsure of who would prevail in the end. Stegner recognized the limitations of such archetypal assumptions and sought to achieve something different with his work. In this paper, I argue that Wallace Stegner asked the nuanced questions necessary to further this nation’s understanding of western archetypes and, as a result, to begin to debunk the misleading mythologies of the American West.

In this study, I look first …

Frazier Polymetis: Cold Mountain And The Odyssey, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics Faculty Publication Series

Ever since its appearance in 1997, Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain, has been billed as a latter-day Odyssey. Separate unattributed book notes on the world wide web speak of its protagonist’s “dangerous odyssey” and his “odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South.” One reviewer styles the novel "a Confederate deserter's homeward odyssey"; another characterizes it as having “reset much of the 'Odyssey' in 19th-century America.” While such assertion of parallelism between the novel and Homer’s epic is widespread, it also tends to remain general and relatively unadorned. It evidently rests on such typically odyssean plot elements …

Review Of The Book Adirondack Tragedy: The Gillette Murder Case Of 1906, 3rd Ed., Kathryn M. Plank

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cultural-Studies Criticism, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Faulkner’s “career” within cultural studies began, within the history of the cultural-studies movement itself, comparatively late. This is not an especially remarkable point about Faulkner or any one particular writers; as a critical movement, cultural studies was never concerned more with any one figure than another, and was always concerned with an interdisciplinary and interdiscursive focus rather than a writer’s singularity. It is a point worth noting, however, because of the specific ways in which Faulkner’s work seems hospitable to cultural studies’ concerns. From his earliest stages of writing, Faulkner was aware of his work’s position within a field of …

Querying The Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness And The Sexuality Of Suffering In Faulkner And Hart Crane, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

The extended historical “moments” that Crane and Faulkner both seek to offer readers may then be defined by their affinities with pain. In the context of American history, that painfulness refers to the experience of historical subjects such as the American Indian as well as marginalized populations like Southern blacks and, as with young Thomas Sutpen, rural poor whites. What both Faulkner and Crane signal in key sections of their work is the way that historical awareness, on the part of either characters or readers, is activated by and necessitates a textual effect of suffering. It is the different valence …

Paul Laurence Who? Invisibility And Misrepresentation In Children's Literature And Language Arts Textbooks, Mary Jackson Scroggins, Jane M. Gangi

Education Faculty Publications

This article is a call-and-response-type conversation between two women—educators, mothers, lovers of words—on the representation of books about children of color in literature and language arts textbooks for preservice teachers. Scroggins shares anecdotes on the experience and real-life effects of invisibility, misrepresentation, and underrepresentation; her comments are italicized. Gangi reviews select textbooks and booklists. Both comment on the state of multiculturalism in children's literature.

Parts of this article were presented at the conference "Color, Hair, and Bone: The Persistence of Race into the 21st Century," held at Bucknell University on September 27, 2002. Other parts are adapted from Encountering Children's …

Review Of Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, Susan Naramore Maher

English Faculty Publications

At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, "[each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I'd found it all—the work, the love, and the ideal way to live—something brought change to me." Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence's Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America.

Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles L. Crow

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“The history of the intermingling of human cultures is a history of trade—in objects like the narwhal’s tusk, in ideas, and in great narratives.”

—Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

The Woman Warrior (1976), Maxine Hong Kingston’s first book, made her famous. Her arrival coincided with, and helped to fuel, an awareness of literature by women and ethnic minorities, and a change in the literature studied in high-school and college classrooms. Today Kingston is one of the most frequently taught of living American authors. Her works are studied in courses in English, women’s studies, Asian studies, ethnic studies, postmodern literature, postcolonial literature, …

Robet Roripaugh, John D. Nesbitt

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In an essay entitled “Literature of the Cowboy State” in 1978, Robert Roripaugh opened his discussion by declaring, “As far as serious literature from the American West is concerned, the least known, most neglected and uncataloged body of writing [. . .] is that of Wyoming” (26). He goes on to assert that there is little consistency “in the state’s literary output” (26). Twenty-five years later, Roripaugh’s remarks are still valid. Despite an attempt by several well-meaning scholars in the late 1980s to put together a literary anthology for the centennial of Wyoming’s statehood, and despite the recent compilation of …

Ana Castillo, Sara L. Spurgeon

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

It may seem odd to call Ana Castillo a western writer, considering she has lived most of her life in Chicago. Geographically, this city would not generally qualify as “western.” But the images, tensions, and themes that drive Castillo’s work are the same that currently challenge traditional definitions of the “west” as a place bounded strictly by geography. Historically, of course, Chicago at one time imagined itself as the prototypical western city, but the frontier moved on, and with it the American notion of what the west was, where it was located, what it looked like, and who inhabited it. …