American Studies Commons^™

Session 3: Digital Merrill, Shannon Davis, Annelise Duerden, Heidi Lim, Joe Loewenstein, Timothy Materer

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

1:15 p.m. — Session 3: Digital Merrill

• Shannon Davis, digital library services manager, WU: The James Merrill Digital Archive: Process and Product
• Annelise Duerden, PhD candidate in English, WU — “Admit It Arguably A priori Admittedly I have failed”: Re-vision in the Merrill Archive
• Heidi Lim, PhD candidate in English, WU — To Tag or Not to Tag: The Digital Markup Process as a Form of Reading
• Timothy Materer, professor emeritus, University of Missouri — The Poem as a Netscape

Session 2: Remembering Jimmy, Stephen Yenser, Randy Bean, Judith Moffett, Rachel Hadas

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

10:30 a.m. — Session 2: Remembering Jimmy

• Stephen Yenser, distinguished professor of English, UCLA — Reading an essay about his friendship with Merrill
• Randy Bean, board member, James Merrill House Committee — Presenting on the history and initiatives of the James Merrill House
• Judith Moffett, adjunct professor emerita of English, University of Pennsylvania — Mixed Messages, an excerpt from "Unlikely Friends: A Memoir"
• Rachel Hadas, professor of English, Rutgers University — (via prerecorded video) reading an excerpt from "The Book of Ephraim," reading her poem, "Threshold and Mirror: the Biography," and recollecting her friendship with Merrill

Session 1: "Eyes Raised In Ecstasy": The Analog Merrill, Thomas Brennan, Tamara Taylor, Steven Meyer

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

9:00 a.m. — Session 1: “Eyes Raised in Ecstasy”: The Analog Merrill

• Thomas Brennan, associate professor, Saint Joseph’s University — Ecstasy Edited? Merrill’s “Days of 1971”
• Tamara Taylor, lecturer, WU — “Thinking Light” Between Spaces: Reflective Metaphor
• Steven Meyer, associate professor, WU — Eye’s Mind: The Poetry of the World

Volume 8 - Issue 1: La Créole - A Journal Of Creole History & Genealogy, Dr. Ronald Dorris, Fatima Shaik, Mary Gehhman

La Créole - A Journal of Creole History & Genealogy

The Louisiana Creole Research Association, Inc., known as LA Creole, was founded on August 21, 2004 as a New Orleans-based, non-profit family research and educational organization. Its purpose is to assist Creoles of Color in researching their ancestry, to educate the general public about Creole history and culture, and to celebrate the contributions and legacy of a unique, sometimes forgotten people. La Créole, the Association’s journal is published annually.

Keynote Address: "The Biographical Container", Langdon Hammer

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

Keynote address: “The Biographical Container” by Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf). Watch the video of the address here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BquCAmR6ANI.

Welcome Remarks, Jeffrey Trzeciak

James Merrill SymposiumOctober 22-23, 2015

Welcome remarks by University Librarian Jeffrey Trzeciak

Tearing Down Walls And Building Bridges, Melba J. Boyd

Criticism

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010 by Cherríe L. Moraga. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. 280, 9 illustrations. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

The White Screen, Casey L. Trattner

SURGE

There was laughter all around me, and I couldn’t help but join in.

I was at the orphanage, playing ball with a bunch of kids in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Despite being a little homesick and barely knowing the language, I was having few problems living here. I loved this place, with its ancient roots and friendly people. I loved hearing the morning’s call to prayer when I woke up. [excerpt]

Gordon, Charles (Fa 834), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 834. This collection of epitaphs was taken from three cemeteries located in Glasgow, Kentucky. Some epitaph examples included contain references to the Bible, children, and were often rhyming. This project was completed by Charles Gordon, a student at Western Kentucky University, for credit in a folk studies class.

Joseph Mitchell And The City: A Conversation With Thomas Kunkel And Gay Talese, Thomas Kunkel

Joseph Mitchell and the City: A Conversation with Thomas Kunkel and Gay Talese

On Oct. 07, 2015, former President Thomas Kunkel, author of Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker (Random House, 2015) and President of St. Norbert College, joined Gay Talese, journalist at Columbia University for an event called “Joseph Mitchell and the City: A Conversation with Thomas Kunkel and Gay Talese.” The two, joined by Steve Coll, staff writer at The New Yorker and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, discussed Joseph Mitchell and his status as an “icon of New York history”.

"We Are Legion": Primal Dreams And Screams In The Satanic Screen, Carrol L. Fry Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

Satan figures prominently in the Christian tradition as the ultimate Other, the enemy of our species, and he has been a central villain first in literature and now in horror films. Why viewers enjoy films that scare them is a conundrum of long standing. An explanation might come from the work of a new generation of Darwinists who have expanded on the master's findings to develop the field of evolutionary biology. Scholars in these fields believe that adaptation to the environment and survival of the fittest created not only physical forms for species but also behaviors that were adaptive for …

“I Ain’T So Sure But What The Lord Done Put These Folks In Our Path For A Reason”: Latter-Day Saints Building Communities Through Dancing In John Ford’S Wagon Master, Ian Dwayne Pettigrew

Journal of Religion & Film

One of Ford’s lesser known works, Wagon Master (1950), utilizes Mormonism’s affinity for dancing to build bonds between diverse groups, thus epitomizing the director’s optimistic vision of a united and progressive America. Through the development of the narrative and Wagon Master’s mise-en-scène, Ford displays a keen awareness of Mormon culture and the reasons dancing still holds such significance to members of the religion. Surprisingly, the film also captures a core tension of LDS culture: the desire to receive the inclusion of the rest of society whilst remaining a distinct and faithful people. For the Saints in the film, …

Archeological Investigation At Yanaguana Garden In Hemisfair Park, San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, Ross C. Fields, Aaron R. Norment, Amy E. Dase

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

This report describes archeological efforts done under six work orders for the development of Yanaguana Garden at HemisFair Park in downtown San Antonio, Texas. All of the projects were done by Prewitt and Associates, Inc. (PAI), for Adams Environmental, Inc. (AEI), and the City of San Antonio, Transportation and Capital Improvements (CoSA-TCI), under Texas Antiquities Permit No. 6846 (issued April 14, 2014). As described below, the Yanaguana Garden project is the first phase of a planned redevelopment of HemisFair Park for mixed-use purposes. Planning for how to deal with cultural resources during this redevelopment began in 2012 when PAI prepared …

October 2015, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Shabbat Dinner and Musical Shabbat Service; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements

Who Can Afford To Improvise? James Baldwin And Black Music, The Lyric And The Listeners [Table Of Contents], Ed Pavlic

Literature

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life.

The route …

Sports Fandom: Worthless Idol And Wonderful Thing, Rolf A. Jacobson

Faculty Publications

When thinking about the spectacle of sports fandom in light of the Bible, two assertions immediately come to mind. First, sports have become—for much of North American or Western society—an idol. Second, sports have also co-opted many aspects of the life of faith. These two immediate perspectives are so obvious that one is left to wonder whether there is anything more to say about sports in light of the Bible. Maybe there is.

Introduction: The 1970s, Shelly J. Eversley, Michelle Habell-Pallán

Publications and Research

Introduction to special issue, "The 1970s," of WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), edited by Shelly Eversley and Michelle Habell-Pallán.

Latinos In Rural America: Stories Of Cultural Heritage, Value, And Aspirations, Clara Roman-Odio, Amelia Dunnell, Patricia Mota Ms.

Undergraduate Research and Community Engaged Learning

No abstract provided.

"Happily Ever After": The Tragic Queer And Delany's Comic Book Fairy Tale, Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

Discusses the formulations of queer futurity and normativity in Samuel R. Delany’s autobiographical graphic novel Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, drawn by artist Mia Wolff. This love story that is depicted via an interplay of text and imagery resists clichéd homonormative recasting of existing familial templates and questions how expectations queer happiness are bounded by a persistent set of social norms (race, class, education, and income) and their intersections. Also suggests how happy endings can function as a renegotiation of the utopian impulse into something more complex and realistic.

First Report Of The National Evaluation Of Rsvp Volunteers, Annie Georges, Susan Gabbard, Ashley Wendell Kranjac

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

"In 2013, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) initiated a national evaluation of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP). The national evaluation was intended to collect the necessary information to better guide the RSVP program and to address three objectives: 1) describe the characteristics of RSVP volunteers, including how volunteers are distributed across CNCS’s performance measure categories, and how volunteers allocated their time to different service activities across the performance measure categories; 2) measure the relationship between volunteer characteristics, service activities, and volunteers’ psychosocial health; and 3) measure the impact of RSVP national service participation on volunteers’ …

Book Review: Native America And The Question Of Genocide, Amy Fagin

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Wanderer, Kommst Du Nach Pécs, Edith Borchardt

German Publications

No abstract provided.

Three Great Phonographers: Warhol, Nixon & Kaufman, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Journalists record in order to produce an article and substantiate factual assertions, but phonographers record in order to produce an audio recording. In other words, for a journalist, phonography is a means to an end, but for a phonographer, it is an end in itself.

Warhol, Nixon, and Kaufman exemplify three modes of phonography: anthropological, historical, and psychological. Warhol documented the language and self-perception of a subculture that was ignored or pathologized by mass culture. Nixon created the most comprehensive record of a presidential administration that will ever exist. And Kaufman captured moments in which ordinary people responded to violations …

‘Reclamation Road’: A Microhistory Of Massacre Memory In Clear Lake, California, Jeremiah J. Garsha

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article is a microhistory of not only the massacre of the indigenous Pomo people in Clear Lake, California, but also the memorialization of this event. It is an examination of two plaques marking the site of the Bloody Island massacre, exploring how memorial representations produce and silence historical memory of genocide under emerging and shifting historical narratives. A 1942 plaque is contextualized to show the co-option of the Pomo and massacre memory by an Anglo-American organization dedicated to settler memory. A 2005 plaque is read as a decentering of this narrative, guiding the viewer through a new hierarchy of …

Theater Matters: Female Theatricality In Hawthorne, Alcott, Brontë, And James, Keiko Miyajima

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the ways the novelists on both sides of the Atlantic use the figure of the theatrical woman to advance claims about the nature and role of women. Theater is a deeply paradoxical art form: Seen at once as socially constitutive and promoting mass conformity, it is also criticized as denaturalizing, decentering, etiolating, queering, feminizing. These anxieties coalesce around the image of the actress. In nineteenth century fiction, the image of a woman performing on stage is a powerful one, suggestive of ideal femininity, but also of negative traits including deception, artificiality and an unfeminine appetite for public …

"The Planet Is The Way It Is Because Of The Scheme Of Words": Sun Ra And The Performance Of Reckoning, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This constellatory essay is a study of the African American sound experimentalist, thinker and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial Sun Ra (1914-1993) through samplings of his wide, interdisciplinary archive: photographs, film excerpts, selected recordings, and various interviews and anecdotes. In composing this essay, I particularly consider how these fragments resonate against each other, offering insight into how Ra radically subverts the restraints imposed upon him as a black man in the United States and thus transfigures his racial alienness into a liberatory, literally alien performance. This self-transfiguration allows Ra to transform such impossible restraints into a condition of possibility for reckoning. I …

Education As A Site For Ethical Transformation And Activism, Lindsay Sudeikis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In adolescence, purpose, integrity, and wonder come to life. It is of paramount importance that ethics-in-action be taught in our high schools. There is a need for a broader vision of the purpose of education beyond instrumental uses, specifically beyond preparing young people only for the work force. In the twenty-first century, we are educating laborers, homo economicus, and not whole persons, homo sapiens. Does this mentality negate the heart, psyche, dignity, feelings, awe, and creativity of one's humanity? Likewise, does it negate one's ethical responsibility to their fellow human and to the natural world? Who has the …

American Dreamer: First-Time Homeownership And The Affective Geographies Of Dwelling, Stephen Boatright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research examines the experiences novice homebuyers in New York City and Oakland, CA have during the home search and decision-making processes. Using a mixed-method approach that combines ethnography with critical discourse analysis and non-representational theory, this work examines the ideology of homeownership as well as the tensions that stem from its emotional affordances. It addresses a lacuna in the housing literature regarding the turbulent everyday emotional tensions that buyers confront as they navigate the highly professionalized real estate industry. Homeownership is lauded for being a relatively low-risk tool for highly leveraged investment; however, using data drawn from a series …

The Heterotopia Of Flight: Resisting The Domestic, Sarah Elizabeth Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The familiar image of a woman fleeing danger is a well-worn convention of heroine-centered fiction, a plot device inevitably resolved when the heroine returns safely to her home and family. This dissertation proposes a new reading of that narrative by asserting that rather than serving as a space of protection, the home poses the greatest threat to an individual's autonomy. If we understand the domestic as a space in which bodies are ordered and, more specifically, gendered, classed, and raced, the trope of flight from the domestic can be read as an act of resistance to subjugation. This act is …

On The Threshold: Breadwinning, Capitalism And The Absent/Present Father In The Works Of Three Late 20th-Century U.S. Novelists, Nancy J. Hoch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As society industrialized in the nineteenth century and jobs moved outside the home, a figure which I call the absent/present father began to make his appearance in American literature. This figure, hovering physically or emotionally on the threshold of family life, never completely present but never completely absent either, has filled the pages of fiction from that time until recently when, as the U.S. becomes postindustrial, depictions of the absent/present father decline.

Bringing a socio-economic as opposed to the usual psychological perspective to my close readings of the fictional family, I explore the cultural work the absent/present father does in …