American Studies Commons^™

Voice In Writing Again: Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow

English Department Faculty Publication Series

"Voice in writing" has fallen into a kind of limbo as a topic: it's vexed; it's discredited by most composition scholars; it's not much written about recently; and yet it remains widely used by readers, teachers, and writers. I examine good reasons for paying lots of attention to voice when we read and teach writing; and also good reasons for ignoring it. And finally insist that we can usefully do both.

Transforming English With Graphic Novels: Moving Toward Our "Optimus Prime", James Carter

James B Carter

I argue for the transformative potential of graphic novels in the English classroom.

Voice In Writing Again: Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow

"Voice in writing" has fallen into a kind of limbo as a topic: it's vexed; it's discredited by most composition scholars; it's not much written about recently; and yet it remains widely used by readers, teachers, and writers. I examine good reasons for paying lots of attention to voice when we read and teach writing; and also good reasons for ignoring it. And finally insist that we can usefully do both.

"Italians" Know Nothing About Love: The Marx Brothers As Guardian Angels Of Young Couple In Jeopardy, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

Originally published in A Century of the Marx Brothers. Ed. Joe Mills. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007

“The Marx Brothers as Guardian Angels of Young Lovers in Jeopardy.” by Marc DiPaolo

To see more or purchase works by Marc DiPaolo, visit his Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-DiPaolo/e/B004LV7W6Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Emma Adapted: Jane Austen’S Heroine From Book To Film, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"This work of literary and film criticism examines all eight filmed adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma produced between 1948 and 1996 as vastly different interpretations of the source novel. Instead of condemning the movies and television specials as being «not as good as the book,» Marc DiPaolo considers how each adaptation might be understood as a valid «reading» of Austen’s text. For example, he demonstrates how the Gwyneth Paltrow film Emma is both a romance and a female coming-of-age story, the 1972 BBC miniseries dramatizes Emma’s world as claustrophobic and Emma herself as suffering from depression, and the modern-day teen …

"A Perfect Copy": Indian Culture And Tribal Law, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

A critical area of American Indian law is the resurgence, restoration, and development of tribal law in Indian Country. Some tribal law is borrowed or transplanted, while other tribal law is based on custom and tradition, but the ultimate purpose of developing a body of law that parallels Anglo-American law is the preservation of American Indian culture. Leech Lake Ojibwe David Treuer’s recent book of literary criticism, Native American Literature: A User’s Guide, offers a startling premise that reaches far beyond literature – American Indian literature that borrows from Anglo-American literary traditions is nothing more than a “copy” of Indian …

Selected Bibliography Of Work On Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asma Sayed, Domenic A. Beneventi

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Beauty, Objectification, And Transcendence: Modernist Aesthetics In The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Pale Fire, Deborah S. Mcleod

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study compares the relation between beauty, objectification, and transcendence in two novels: Oscar Wilde's early-modernist The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Vladimir Nabokov's late-modernist Pale Fire (1962). Though written over half a century apart, the works feature similar critiques of the aesthete's devotion to beauty. While Wilde's novel offers an insider's view of aristocratic Decadence in late-nineteenth-century London, Nabokov's reflects his early influence from the Russian Symbolists and recalls that tradition in the American suburbs of the mid-twentieth-century. Both novels demonstrate the trust that many modernists held in the ability of beauty to offer transcendence over the limits …

English Only At Work, Por Favor, Natalie Prescott

Natalie Prescott

Whether or not employees can be required to speak only English at work is a very delicate question. This issue has caused considerable disagreement among courts and legal scholars and gained greater prominence in 2006, when the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals created a circuit split by allowing for the possibility that an English-only rule may violate Title VII. Some scholars have attempted to address the legality of an English-only rule, mostly arguing that the rule violates Title VII. This Article, however, explains why Title VII does not apply to an English-only rule. The Article addresses a wide range of …

Balancing Rosie And June: A Study Of Lynchburg College Postwar Alumnae And The Impact Of The Feminine Mystique, Dinah Watson

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

In 2003, the movie Mona Lisa Smile debuted describing the frustrations that many college women may have faced in the years after World War II. Wellesley College was the elite all-female institution that openly and proudly prepared its young women with the proper rules of etiquette and correctness. Despite Wellesley’s own excellent academic reputation, its close proximity to the prestigious single-sex male college, Harvard, made it even more appealing and convenient for the Wellesley girls to find a “suitable” husband. The novice young art instructor, Katherine Watson, was unique in that she wanted to offer her students not only a …

Should We Invite Students To Write In Home Languages? Complicating The Yes/No Debate, Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow

No abstract provided.

Placards: Mkr Society, Edna Saffy And Grady Johnson

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Name cards for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society event designating the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm a National Historic Landmark, March 3, 2007.

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Interview Of Emery C. Mollenhauer, F.S.C., Ph.D., Emery Mollenhauer, Matthew Deininger

All Oral Histories

Brother Emery Mollenhauer, a product of West Philadelphia, grew up in a good home where his father worked as an interior designer furnishing department stores and manufacturing curtains for the theater while his mother was a house wife. Brother Emery graduated number one in his class from Most Blessed Sacrament grade school. He attended West Catholic High School for boys under the direction of the Christian Brothers. By the time of graduation, Brother Emery was ranked third in his class and decided to become a Christian Brother. He received a Bachelor’s Degree graduating Magna Cum Laude with Phi Beta Kappa …

Trauma And Sexual Inversion, Circa 1885: Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy And Maladies Of Representation, Randall Knoper

Randall Knoper

No abstract provided.

Texts, Lies, And Changed Positions, Judith D. Fischer

Judith D. Fischer

This review of Judge Richard Posner's Little Book of Plagiarism concludes that the book adds to the discussion of plagiarism by noting the topic’s gray areas and proposing criteria for identifying plagiarism. Posner states that plagiarism occurs when a writer who copies another's language or ideas both conceals the copying and induces readers' reliance. By discussing plagiarism in different settings, including novels, court opinions, professors' work, and student work, the book shows why analysis of the offense and its consequences must be nuanced. Professors should be warned that in places Posner seems to minimize the gravity of student copying, especially …

The Body Of Light : Poems, Alicia Matheny

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This creative thesis explores the different facets of Pink Floyd and their music, drawing inspiration from albums varying from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) to Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Using images drawn from nature, the cosmos, and Pagan mythology, this thesis also incorporates biographical details found in Nicholas Schaffner’s important biography, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New York: Harmony Books, 1991). There are also experiments with form in the poems, in that in many of the poems, instead of commas, there are tab spaces. Each space expresses the silence between each word. …

Interrupting The Puppet Master: (Un)Reliability And Metatextuality In Dave Eggers’S You Shall Know Our Velocity, Suzanne R. Samples

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In 2002 Dave Eggers (who had just come off of the success of a Pulitzer Prize nominated memoir about the death of his parents and the influx of cash that ensued) published a novel titled You Shall Know Our Velocity. Within three years the novel underwent significant alterations that changed the plot’s original meaning. Most notably, some of the printings of the novel contain an additional section of text called “An Interruption” written by the best friend (Hand) of the original narrator (Will); this additional text destroys Will’s original plot and makes the reader question the reliability of the text. …

From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 2, 1859, John Brown laid siege to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, then Virginia, in an effort to seize weaponry which he planned to employ in a full scale slave insurrection. From the moment he entered the public eye during his brief trial and execution, John Brown and his legacy were figured and refigured by prominent writers and thinkers of the time. The result of this refiguring was an image under constant metamorphosis. As the image of John Brown cycled through the Civil War, it moved further and further from the actual man and became a metaphor …

I Am Prosper, I Am Ariel, I Am Caliban: A Metatheatrical Approach To Neil Gaiman’S The Sandman, Leah E. Haydu

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In this paper, I use a primarily close-reading approach to examine the metatheatrical elements of William Shakespeare’s representation in Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman. This involves examinations of individual panels throughout three different issues of the series in order to uncover how Shakespeare is presented, as well as how he, in turn, affects the presentation of other characters, and how these both affect the view which the reader might form of not only Shakespeare, but of Gaiman himself. In doing so, I establish the existence of a new, related genre: metacomics. Similar to metatheatrics, this approach relates …

Raised In The Briar Patch: Misreading Warren’S Essay On Race, Leverett Butts

Robert Penn Warren Studies

As human beings, we are prone to all sorts of misreadings: of literary works, of others, of ourselves. This scholarly and personal visit to “The Briar Patch” reveals a younger Warren subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, advocating integration in a world that in the 1920’s was not (and some might say still isn’t) ready to accept full equality.

Robert Penn Warren In The 21st Century: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, James A. Grimshaw Jr.

Robert Penn Warren Studies

Seven years into the 21st century, an informal look at the state of Warren studies reveals both reason for hope and for deep concern.

Observations On Robert Penn Warren’S “The Day Dr. Knox Did It”, James A. Perkins

Robert Penn Warren Studies

“The Day Dr. Knox Did It” may be read as Warren’s artistic response to the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. The poem repeats an important motif from Warren’s second, unpublished and untitled novel, written in the 1930’s. It also contains some interesting correspondences—and equally important contrasts—to the work of Ernest Hemingway, especially the short story “Indian Camp.”

“The Deepest And Widest Metaphor For Life” Re-Visions Of Christian Faith In Robert Penn Warren’S Later Poetry, Nicole Camastra

Robert Penn Warren Studies

While it would be foolish to assert that Warren was a committed Christian and unequivocal believer, a kind of tempered faith does exist in some of Warren’s poems from Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. Manuscript revisions of “Amazing Grace in the Back Country” and “Heart of the Backlog” reveal Warren’s struggle to find faith, not his conviction of living in it. However, “Heart of Autumn,” the final poem in the volume, points to the conscious act of surrendering to the depth of theistic conflict in its preceding counterparts.

Cass Mastern, Josiah Royce, And The Envelope Of Responsibility, Joseph Wensink

Robert Penn Warren Studies

In Warren’s All the King’s Men, Jack’s ultimate reconciliation does not come, as most readers see it, from learning to accept full responsibility for his actions where he formerly had none, but rather from his ability to define for himself, through his historical researches and creation of iconic “images,” a clear picture of the boundaries of his responsibility—its burdens as well as its limits. This envelope of responsibility is for Warren thoroughly historical—and envelope whose contours change through time, crucially dependent upon the narration of past events in the present. Jack’s “brass-bound idealism” is, despite his sarcasm, a quite sophisticated …

About The Advisory Group To The Center (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Center (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Circle (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

About The Birthplace (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

Contents (Volume 7), Robert Penn Warren Studies

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.