Creative Writing Commons^™

The Odyssey And Its Odyssey In Contemporary Texts: Re-Visions In Star Trek, The Time Traveler’S Wife, And The Penelopiad, Mary Economou Bailey Green

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Homer’s The Odyssey is the archetypal quest story. The dialogue began with Homer, and contemporary texts and popular culture media have continued the tradition of deconstructing and recreating stories, addressing issues related to the human psyche. As Hardwick and Stray note, the relationship between ancient and modern is “not merely inherited but constantly made and remade,” one that we see in the following varied genres and versions that retell the Odyssean myth, relating re-visions of characters, relationships, structures, and themes. The original Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais” is an allegory of the Odyssean quest for human knowledge, while …

Ways Of Decoloniality By The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’S Katara Demonstrates How To Revive A Community In Ecological Distress Brought By The Colonial Expansion Of The Fire Nation, Jose Santos P. Ardivilla

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, the “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as …

Examining Adolescence And Agency In The Midst Of International Crisis: Pandemics, Pandemonium, And Zombie Young Adult Literature, T. Hunter Strickland

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-22 brought an abundance of changes to secondary education as students transitioned across the country to virtual and hybrid learning contexts. Teachers flexed quickly and frequently to support the learning that students acquired in these new, digital spaces even as school, district, and state demands on teaching increased. The English/Language Arts classroom pivoted along with others as teachers sought out digital reading and writing resources for students to engage in. In the midst of a national crisis, a metaphorical monster that sought to destroy, much like Beowulf ’s dragon did, adolescent readers, despite the discourses of …

Revisiting Paradise Lost Through K-Pop: A Global Approach To Teaching Writing, Nayoung Bishoff

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The short film series Wings (2016) by the Korean musical group BTS (Beyond the Scene) revisits John Milton’s Paradise Lost. BTS reinterprets Adam and Eve’s leaving of Eden as youths’ self-discovery process, overcoming a binary mindset. BTS emphasizes how experiences—trials, pains, and the struggle of youths to walk out of black-and-white perspectives—turn out to be “all so beautiful” as resources to grow. Wings demonstrates how the themes and elements in Paradise Lost can be used as a tool not only to explore Biblical concepts, but also to understand what pedagogical environments youths need to fully express themselves as writers. …

The Rhetorical Interlude In Alfonso Cuarón’S Gravity: Suggesting A Model For Examining Rhetorical Discourse In Film, Brent Yergensen, Scott Church

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay advances the concept of the “rhetorical interlude,” a means by which scholars and teachers may examine how rhetorical messages are embedded in films. To illustrate, this study includes an examination of the rhetorical interlude in the film Gravity (Cuarón, 2013) as the film’s protagonist, Ryan Stone, is visited by the apparition of her dead colleague, Matt Kowalski, who instructs her on survival in space and on the significance of moving on from personal tragedy. In a pattern of ghostly apparitions appearing in perplexing outer space situations, Gravity situates scientific complexity as capable of being transcended with the help …

Will The Odds Ever Be In Her Favor? Katniss Everdeen And The Female Athlete, Tony Kemerly

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that allows the author to write in a highly personalized style, drawing on his or her experience to extend understanding about a specific issue. One subset of autoethnography, critical autoethnography, combines the narrative or storytelling aspect of autoethnography with critical theory approaches in order to gain illustrate for the reader a specific site of oppression within one’s culture. Through an examination of the books and films of The Hunger Games’ saga, this paper will examine the interaction between students and professor in regard to the journey of the female athlete through the power …

Halfies, Half-Written Letters, And One-Eyed Gods: Connecting The Dots Of Communicative Cultures, Gregory Stephens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay distills the theory of communicative cultures as a tool for cultural analysis. Nadine Gordimer’s line about the difficulties of returning to “half-written letters” is used to frame anthropology’s critique of “bounded culture” or “container cultures,” predominat in Cultural Studies. Anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Kirin Narayan have described “halfies” as in-between peoples who can help us understand fluid, processual cultures as normative. Building on this stance, and the work of rhetorical genre scholars, Stephens defines communicative cultures as “a set of shared commitments expressed through cultural means.” This approach to cultural analysis, in which literature is viewed as an …

Experimental Forms And Identity Politics In 21st Century American Poetry, Ronnie Stephens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

“Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry” explores the function of form in American poetry and its proximity to whiteness. Through an analysis of experimental and nontraditional forms I argue that poets Fatimah Asghar, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Ilya Kaminsky, and Danez Smith challenge traditional notions of what a poem is; these authors use graphics and co-opt familiar text objects to challenge larger assumptions about gender identity, ableism, and the immigrant experience. These experimental forms are grounded in a larger poetic tradition that alters traditional forms, such as the sonnet, to disrupt and further dialogue …

Guiding Students Down That “Old Town Road:” Writing Pedagogy, Relatability And The Sitch, Lynn D. Zimmemran

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This study draws on media literacy to suggest pedagogical techniques that aim to combat boredom and enhance student engagement in freshman writing classes. Students often complain they cannot relate to course work; they maintain that course materials do not connect to their real lives and are therefore uninteresting. Because writing classes can serve as an introduction to academic discourse and skillful writing promotes academic success, negative attitudes about writing matter. Instructors craft courses to achieve learning outcomes but also to foster the habits of mind effective writing demands. I contend that discussing and writing about timely, controversial topics from students’ …

Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto (GTA): San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine, and simulate as well as prepare. …

Unmasking Male Voices In Woman Hollering Creek: Contributions To Pedagogy And Masculinity Studies, Ramón Javier Guerra, Joan Latchaw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In teaching Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek to undergraduates, we have developed a sociocultural and historical framework, beginning with the theoretical work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and the concept of transfrontera feminism. With incidents of seduction and sexual abuse of women, spousal abuse, and patriarchal family structures, the collection of stories strongly indicates the oppressive representation of machismo. Scholars and teachers have drawn important critiques of Cisneros’s work based on destructive sociocultural forces on women. However, in rereading the text with an intended focus on the representations of male characters, we have surmised that Cisneros structured the stories in the …

Renegade Or Paragon?: Categorizing Narrative Choice In Video Game Storylines, Graham Oliver

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Choices made during video game gameplay set the stories told in that media apart from other media. Narrative-affecting choices have existed since the earliest games, from character creation in role-playing games to performance-based narrative changes in Metroid to morality-based choices in Ogre Battle. In the contemporary gaming landscape, some games derive a significant portion of their gameplay from character decisions: exploration, dialogue options, quick-time event reactions, etc. In this article, I give a history and breakdown of how choices have existed and evolved in gaming narratives since their inception. I then propose three categories for significant narrative choices: aesthetic, …

The Tin Woodman, Captain Fyter, And Chopfyt: L. Frank Baum’S Portrayal Of Body Image And Prostheses In The Wake Of World War I, Marie Gethins

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s literature frequently depicts characters with disabilities as flat stereotypes — villains or saintly invalids. L. Frank Baum’s The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) provides a sharp contrast to these typical portrayals, as well as contemporary “socio-cultural” beliefs on physical normalcy and sense of self. Written as the U.S. entered World War I and details of trench warfare reached the home-front, it presents an interesting exploration of society’s response to physical disability and prostheses. In addition, it highlights the psychological devastation associated with body changes.

During Baum’s formative years, disabled Civil War veterans returned to New …

Zombie Literature: Analyzing The Fear Of The Unknown Through Popular Culture, T. Hnter Strickland

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper will focus on how the rise in popularity of zombie literature in the 21st century is reflective of a western cultural need to address the fear of the unknown through popular culture. Through the flesh-eating zombie, we enter a parallel world where everything familiar in our communities becomes evil. The genre reflects the fear in Western society of the neighbor who has turned against you, survival in the midst of government collapse, and the monster within. Zombie fantasy literature allows society a venue to deconstruct what is known while dealing with these fears and the unbridled hate of …

Consider The Dementor: Discipline, Punishment, And Magical Citizenship In Harry Potter, Tracy Bealer

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In his 2004 essay “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace investigated the ethics of boiling alive an aesthetically unappealing, yet sentient and perceiving, creature to augment the pleasure of a human consumer. In the Potterverse, dementors are described by our human heroes as “terrible things” with “rotting” bodies, “unseen” mouths, and characterized as “among the foulest creatures that walk this earth” . Their occupation as guards of Azkaban Prison does little to improve their reputation among wizard-kind. However, how much of the dementors’ evil is ontological? Is it possible that these beings have been actively constructed as villains by wizarding …

If Androids Dream, Are They More Than Sheep?: Westworld, Robots And Legal Rights, Amanda J. Dipaolo

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The robot protagonists in HBO’s Westworld open the door to several philosophical and ethical questions, perhaps the most complex being: should androids be granted similar legal protections as people? Westworld offers its own exploration of what it means to be a person and places emphasis on one’s ability to feel and understand pain. With scientists and corporations actively working toward a future that includes robots that can display emotion in a way that can convincingly pass as that of a person’s, what happens when androids pass the Turing test, feel empathy, gain consciousness, are sentient, or develop free will? The …

“Every Time I Write A Rhyme / These People Think It’S A Crime”: Persona Problems In Catullus And Eminem, Jesse Weiner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay interprets Eminem’s song, “Criminal” (2000, The Marshall Mathers LP, Track 18), as a Catullan project in establishing distance between the poet and poetic persona, accomplished through Catullan invective. Drawing upon pedagogical experience, I argue that Catullus (a Roman poet of the 1st Century BCE) and Eminem use analogous rhetorical tactics and structures to challenge accusations (real or imagined) of poor character stemming from their poetry. Catullus and Eminem vociferously articulate a separation of art from artist, using common transgressive poetics. Each poet disavows his own self-constructed stance of authenticity with similar threats of violence and postures of …

Constraining The (Im)Possible: Improvisation And Violence In Rafi Zabor’S The Bear Comes Home, Hannah Ianniello

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper will explore the role of jazz improvisation in the characterization of the protagonist in Rafi Zabor’s 1998 jazz novel, The Bear Comes Home. I suggest that Zabor represents the process of improvisation to not only enhance the enigma of The Bear’s ability as a jazz musician, but also to enhance his capacity towards violence.

Through the exploration of the actual process of improvisation in the research of Paul Berliner, Ingrid Monson and Alyn Shipton, Improvisation in a real jazz context is collaborative and exploratory. However, Zabor, like many other authors (such as Michael Ondaatje, James Baldwin and …

Power, Labor, And Hierarchies: Deconstructing Work In Speculative Fiction, Joseph Kevin Sebastian

Library Faculty Research

In discussions of literary and speculative fiction, a persistent divide emerges regarding the modes and aims of each genre. Literary fiction generally aims to reflect the human condition in familiar, “realistic” terms, exploring characters, relationships, and narratives within existing social structures. In contrast, speculative fiction is characterized by what Darko Suvin identifies as the “the strange newness” of the novum: a radically new element or phenomenon that reshapes the fictional world. This paper argues that the novum in science fiction provides a unique framework for interrogating the relationships between labor, knowledge, and power, revealing how these constructs are contingent upon …

More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, And True Detective’S Terrestrial Horror, Jonathan Elmore

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” …

Review Of Love Between The Covers By Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015), Lexey A. Bartlett

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

A review of Love Between the Covers by Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015).

“High Culture As Entertainment”: Hybrid Reading Practices In A Live Book Club, Magnus Persson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The Bushwick Book Club (BBC) is a live book club in which invited pop musicians perform musical interpretations of a predetermined literary work in a nightclub environment. What can a typical BBC show, with its strong emphasis on popular music and performance, teach readers about the uses of literature? This case study will investigate which reading practices are at work and in what ways they challenge traditional ideas of the forms, functions, and values of reading. Another important aspect concerns how the borders between high and popular culture, and between the printed word and other media are renegotiated. Based on …

Reflections On Building A Popular Writing Course, Emily Howson, Chris Massenburg, Cecilia Shelton

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Composition pedagogy has typically employed traditional academic texts in the instruction of first-year writing courses. In this article, three first-year writing instructors reflect on their experiences employing popular culture artifacts in lieu of more traditional academic texts in writing classrooms at a small, private, historically black institution (HBCU). By retrospectively analyzing the intersections between theory and practice, the instructors’ autoethnographic reflections explore the utility of popular culture artifacts as tools for teaching and learning writing, with an emphasis on rhetorical knowledge and transfer. Though preliminary, their conclusions point to the potential of popular culture for integration into traditional best practices …

" A Beautiful Maiden Shot My Heart" By Antar Bin Shadad:, Yasser K. R. Aman

Comparative Woman

This is a translation of an Arabic poem from Pre-Islamic poetry written by Antara Bin Shadad. This poem is an example of appropriation in literary translation. When the meaning is not only cultural but when it is ambience- bound as well, appropriation is difficult but not impossible to achieve. " رمتِ الفؤادَ مليحة عذراءُ" " A Beautiful Maiden Shot My Heart" is an example of a hard choice whether to translate a poem into classical or modern poetry. However, the best I have done was to appropriate between both choices. Images are almost kept the same, but the classical style, …

How Seamlessly...., Pulkita Anand

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Living Losses, Courtney A. Brown Phd

Comparative Woman

Contextually, I am from a line of strong black women. I am from a community of strivers and survivors who’ve accomplished great things through the blanket of patriarchy and civil injustices. I stand on the shoulders of many who took literal and figurative hits so that I could have opportunities they only dreamed of. I have followed in this legacy shattering glass ceilings into unrecognizable pieces for those who will come next.

However, breaking through has not come without cuts, bruises, scrapes and wounds. The celebration of smashing stereotypes should at least be balanced with the acknowledgement of the formidable …

Texts, Affects And Teenagers: (Im)Material Transmissions Across France And Ireland, Taylor Still

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

This article examines the circulation of texts between people, spaces and cultural perspectives, addressing disparate mediums from virtual transmission, including social media channels; to physical or material transmission in public space(s). Central to the internationalised transmission of texts, the recent emergence and popularity of channels such as TikTok and Instagram have allowed for more innovative, creative and collaborative literary practices. Focusing on young publics in particular, we interrogate how “viral” transmissive practices can work to re-produce, re-appropriate, and re-interpret literary texts. This article also focuses on the affective experience of these transmissive textual practices, and how the (non-)human interactions can …

A Recipe For Pumpkin Bread, Tyler R. Sheldon

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Waking Up Before We Die: Aging And Spirituality, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

In retirement, I have more time for prayer and reflection, to rest in the Lord, and hence to have my spirit renewed. We choose how we interpret our situations. Positive, spiritual aging ideas enhance our sense of well-being. Of course, the loss of loved ones decreases our sense of self-worth at times, but the Spirit can renew us. As Genesis reminds us, God was still working in the lives of Sarah and Abraham in old age, and they can serve as models for us. Indeed, Sarah laughed at the angels and shows us how humor exists even as we age. …

Full Issue

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.