American Studies Commons^™

Grids And Gestures: A Comics Making Exercise, Nick Sousanis

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Grids and Gestures is an exercise intended to offer participants insight into a comics maker’s decision-making process for composing the entire page through the hands-on activity of making an abstract comic. It requires no prior drawing experience and serves to help reexamine what it means to draw. In addition to a description of how to proceed with the exercise, this piece also includes conceptual grounding in the form of a brief theoretical discussion of the ways comics convey meaning as well as personal notes on the development of the exercise and how it has been used.

The Role Of Critical Thinking In Reader Perceptions Of Leadership In Comic Books, Renee Krusemark Edd

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This study qualitatively explored how readers use critical thinking to perceive leadership in The Walking Dead comic books. Sixty-nine participants gave responses regarding their thoughts about leadership in the comic via an online survey. A majority of the participants indicated a wide range of values for comics as a learning experience. Most participants perceived leadership in the comic books as an individual who protects others and makes decisions. After completing the online survey, 22 participants gave acceptable and relevant responses about their perceptions of leadership and how they form these perceptions. Information was collected through email interviewing. The study concluded …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Revision In The Multiversity: What Composition Can Learn From The Superhero, David Hyman

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Constant and ongoing revision is the compositional tactic through which many contemporary superhero narratives negotiate the powerful struggle between reiteration of the genre’s past, and creative expression of its future. Instead of a gradual succession of improved renditions of a text, each one effacing and superseding the imperfections of its predecessors, revision is revealed as the production of multiple versions whose differences and diversities are “capable of being in uncertainties”, as Keats describes the creative attitude which he terms Negative Capability: ontologically equal textual variations that wear their inconsistencies openly, and reject the pressure to resolve their multiplicities into the …

Pim Pedagogy: Toward A Loosely Unified Model For Teaching And Studying Comics And Graphic Novels, James B. Carter

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The article debuts and explains "PIM" pedagogy, a construct for teaching comics at the secondary- and post-secondary levels and for deep reading/studying comics. The PIM model for considering comics is actually based in major precepts of education studies, namely constructivist foundations of learning, and loosely unifies constructs inherent therein with other available frames and frameworks for studying comics. As such, the article fills a dire need in the scholarly literature on comics pedagogy and paves a way for those who seek to teach comics courses in the future but who need direction and for those who seek to study/read comics …

Mallory Makes Meaning: How One 8th-Grader Made Meaning With A Graphic Novel, Aimee A. Rogers

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article presents how one 8^th-grader, Mallory, made meaning with Amulet: The Stonekeeper’s Curse by Kazu Kibuishi. Data was collected via a think-aloud procedure, a retrospective think-aloud, questions specific to the book and an interview. The data analysis indicates that Mallory was able to use a breadth of reading strategies, applied to both the visual and textual modalities, in order to make meaning with the graphic novel text.

From White City To Green Acres: Bertha Palmer And The Gendering Of Space In The Gilded Age, Barbara Peters Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout an adult life that witnessed drastic cultural upheaval between the Civil War and World War I, Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918) was continually called on to deploy her Victorian values in response to modern events. Being a woman only complicated this negotiation. But being a child of the American frontier granted her a latitude and mobility that were rare for women of her class and era – allowing her to challenge gender boundaries and occupy more than one cultural space at a time. Most of what has been written about Bertha Palmer’s life has been exceptionalist in approach and tone, …

Family Affairs Newsletter Business Directory 2015-09-15, Family Affairs

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS is a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out on the 1st and 15th of each month.

The Big Data Debate Today, Bridget Fahey

Pop Culture Intersections

"...Big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value, in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationship between citizens and governments, and more."1 Today, technology is more a part of our lives than ever before. With more and more people all over the world gravitating towards social media and using sites such as Twitter and Facebook, more of our private lives is available to others than ever before. In his article "Big Data and Privacy" Tom Price explores the …

Corporate Standardized Takeover And Wasted Tax Dollars: The Misappropriation Of Technology In Public Schools And The Unfair Burden Placed On Teachers, Rachel Jepsen

Pop Culture Intersections

Throughout this article, I will be discussing the technological integration of computer programs, iPad infrastructure, and online testing into common public school state curriculums, grades kindergarten through twelfth. I will first explain how technology does not always have a negative presence, and how when used appropriately, can provide limitless new opportunities for both students and teachers. Then I will assess what the current common method of integrating technology is and explain why it isn't working in an effective way. Following my discussion of why the current system isn't working, I will discuss how the integration of technology in the public …

Finding Common Ground: Abortion, Television, And The Changing American Culture, Meghan Shain

Pop Culture Intersections

As Oscar Wilde once said, "life imitates art far more than art imitates life", but there is a reciprocal relationship between the two. The more society talks about an issue, the more we are going to see that issue present in television, which then spurs even more discussion on that topic. Today, we use the media to understand what is important and popular in our society. Conversely, the media uses society to capture polarizing topics, such as abortion, to attract viewers. Media critics often argue that television has too large of an impact on developing societies perspectives. However, the viewpoint …

Instagram: The Real Stranger Danger, Sarina Kong

Pop Culture Intersections

A stranger, in simple terms, is best defined as a person with whom one has no personal acquaintance. Society constantly warns children from a young age to not accept candy from, get in a car with, and most importantly talk to strangers. Even after growing up, adults are still warned against going places alone, meeting people online, and putting their trust in people they have never met. The underlying message is this: strangers equal danger. Despite these frequent warnings, social media has found a way to glamorize strangers and make it socially acceptable to interact with them. Disguised under the …

Online Dating Technology Effects On Interpersonal Relationships, Anabel Homnack

Pop Culture Intersections

The trend of online dating has been around since the emergence of the Internet. In the generation before the online era, people would meet face-to-face in cafes, on streets or at bars or even on airplanes. People make initial contact based on a number of cues and preferences, getting to know one another in person. Today these coincidental or so to say "meant to be" moments seem to be non-existent. Why have they become such a rarity? Is it because we know that there is an easy way out? What will it take for people to be as straightforward and …

Morality Of Pirating Media, Matthew Holbrook

Pop Culture Intersections

This paper will explore the evolution and morality of pirating media not through accusation but by giving data and facts to decide not only the future of media but whether these pirates are actually moral versions of Robin Hood. I will explore this topic through the lens of the pirate starting with a background on the beginning of piracy; explain the illegality of copyright infringement, inform the reader about what happens to caught assailants, and the psychology of why more and more of the US population are illegally downloading media. I am investigating this topic not to point a finger …

The Impact Of Social Media On Society, Jacob Amedie

Pop Culture Intersections

It is the objective of this article to present evidence from several researches that were done by many scholars in different environment that distinctly demonstrates the negative impact of social media in three main categories. First, social media fosters a false sense of online "connections" and superficial friendships leading to emotional and psychological problems. The Second harm of social media is that it can become easily addictive taking away family and personal time as well as diminish interpersonal skills, leading to antisocial behavior. Lastly, social media has become a tool for criminals, predators and terrorists enabling them to commit illegal …

September 2015, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: High Holiday Schedule; From the Rabbi; Presidents Message; Book Group; Announcements

Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

In the nearly eighty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves ceased their collaborative endeavors there has been much speculation as to the nature and extent of their literary partnership. Graves retold the past to his biographers, constructing Laura Riding as a queen yogi figure wielding an almost sinister influence. In response to these accusations Riding returned fire with volley after volley of “corrective” letters which she sent to Graves’s biographers as well as any magazine or student that she found to be sympathizing with Grave’s account of the creative partnership. At the time of her death in 1991, Riding …

Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …

Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, And The Discourse Of Serbian National Identity, Tatjana Takševa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, and the Discourse of Serbian National Identity" Tatjana Takševa analyzes two main processes which contributed to the systematic rape and enforced impregnation of Bosniak women during the Balkan conflict: the discourse of Serbian nationalism articulated in response to the sexual violence that took place in Kosovo preceding the war and the simultaneous diminishing and downgrading of women's political and social autonomy on all territories of the former Yugoslavia. Based on statements in narratives of Bosniak women rape survivors, Takševa argues that these ideologically motivated processes combined to revive, inflame, and militarize long-standing Serbian …

Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing And Objection To The War, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing and Objection to the War" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses the Hungarian author's poems, diary entries, and fictional texts. While Kaffka's importance as one of the most influential writers in modern Hungarian literature is recognized, her oeuvre as proto-feminist writing has only been studied only since the 1990s. Further, Kaffka's anti-war writing has not been explored except in a few isolated instances. Tötösy de Zepetnek elaborates Kaffka's objection to the war as seen in her poetry published in 1914 and in her diaries and correspondence and argues that Kaffka's objection to the war …

The War Memoirs Of Rachel Maccabi, Ilana Rosen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The War Memoirs of Rachel Maccabi" Ilana Rosen analyzes the memoirs of Rachel Maccabi (1915-2003) about her sacrifices to fulfill the Zionist creed. Raised in a well-off Zionist family, Maccabi moved to Israel/Palestine in the mid-1930s, served in the Haganah pre-State military organization, and later became an army officer. Her first husband fell in the 1948 War of Independence and her son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Between 1964 and 1992 Maccabi published five memoirs. Rosen focuses on Maccabi's last three memoirs, in which she responds to the deaths of her husband and son in Israel's …

Post 9/11 And Narratives Of Life Writing, Conflict, And Environmental Crisis, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Post 9/11 and Narratives of Life Writing, Conflict, and Environmental Crisis" Simon C. Estok argues that there are four seemingly disparate and disconnected topics — war, migration, ecophobia, and life writing — which need to be discussed in tandem in order to produce deeper understandings of both the production and effects of post 9/11 narratives. Estok argues that narrative landscapes changed radically since the beginning of the twenty-first century and that this results in a combined effect both of terror reportage and of environmental crisis narratives. The pace and character of reportage blurred, erased, and expanded various …

Women's Wartime Life Writing In Early Twentieth-Century China, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China" Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to …

"Being Singular Plural" In Chi's 巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River), Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "'Being Singular Plural' in Chi's巨流河 (The Great-Flowing River)" Tsu-Chung Su explores the way Pang-yuan Chi organizes her life stories in her 2009 autobiography. Born in Mainland China, Chi is a renowned Taiwanese editor, scholar, and writer who started her autobiographical novel at age 81. In her text Chi describes life stories in a war-torn era, features her migration from the north to the south (1930 to 1950), her experiences in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950) culminating in her successful academic career in Taiwan (1950-). Chi's life stories are infiltrated with …

En-Gendering Memory Through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "En-gendering Memory through Holocaust Alimentary Life Writing" Louise O. Vasvári aims to underline the cultural and gendered significance of the sharing of recipes as a survival tool by starving women in concentration camps during the Holocaust and the continuing role of food memories in the writing of Holocaust survivor women she considers a genealogy of intergenerational remembrance and transmission into the postmemory writing of their second generation daughters and occasionally their sons. Vasvári argues that the study of multigenerational Holocaust alimentary life writing becomes important today because as direct survivors of the Holocaust disappear there is a …

Negotiating War And Peace In Chân Không's Learning True Love And Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace, Christopher Kocela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Negotiating War and Peace in Chân Không's Learning True Love and Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace," Christopher Kocela analyzes Sister Chân Không's autobiography and Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as examples of women's transBuddhist life writing about cultural differences and transnational communities in the wake of war. Kocela argues that Chân Không's autobiography advocates a form of community building based on a nondiscriminatory practice of empathy that supersedes the need for forgiveness or vindication among participants in the Vietnam War. Kingston's memoir, by contrast, advocates Chân Không's teaching while raising questions about the political implications of …

Introduction To Life Writing And The Trauma Of War, Louise O. Vasvári, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …

Mapping Memory In Tran’S Vietnamerica, Mary A. Goodwin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Mapping Memory in Tran's Vietnamerica" Mary Goodwin explores the use of maps, landscape paintings, and other topographic images in Gia-Bao Tran's graphic memoir chronicling the "postmemory" of the US-American son of wartime refugees. Tran's family immigrated to the United States in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. Tran knew nothing of his parents' hardships and struggle to escape Vietnam until he returned for relatives' funerals in his 20s. Similar to Spiegelman's Maus, Vietnamerica is a mixed-media memoir containing photographs, maps, and comics in various styles. Following Hirsch's lead in demonstrating the special historical value of photographs …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvari, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.