English Language and Literature Commons^™

“So That The Nations May Become Genuine Indian”: Nativism And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Ceremony, Dennis Cutchins

Faculty Publications

Leslie Marmon Silko’s (mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo) Ceremony is a powerful novel that tells the story of Tayo, a mixed-blood Pueblo war veteran who returns to Laguna mentally crippled by his wartime experiences. As Tayo struggles to overcome the alienation his military service has created, he must also face the shame of his own mixed heritage. His suffering eventually leads him off the pueblo to a Navajo healer, Betonie, who helps Tayo create a new historical paradigm based on Navajo and Laguna mythology. Betonie’s fictional re-vision of history is, perhaps, the novel’s most important accomplishment. Through Betonie, Silko creates an alternative …

Ruling Powers, Scot A. Hanson

Theses and Dissertations

While the fantasy genre is one of the most widely read modes of writing, literary criticism and academic discussion of the genre takes place at a much lower level. This imbalance has developed in part because of a misconception that fantasy genre writings cannot accomplish significant, literary purposes. This thesis first offers an argument for why the fantasy genre should receive more attention in scholarly circles, then presents an excerpt of a fantasy novel. The argument draws from the limited amount of existing criticism to highlight the strengths of the fantasy genre, building a case that, in most respects, works …

Can Reading Help?, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

I've not slept well for many months. Until recently l had assumed that my fitful nights were merely the combined effects of impending writing deadlines, ALAN presidential duties, middle age, a long list of incomplete house and yard chores, a six-digit mortgage, my university students and classes, a neurotic and noisy cat, and two teenage daughters.

Some nights are worse than others, and I've supposed that when stress goes up, sleep goes down. But I've also noticed lately that when things go bump in the night, I jerk awake wondering if it was just wind, the dog, a neighbor's car …

Reading African American History And The Civil Rights Movement, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

At this time of year, English teachers have two excellent opportunities to use YA literature to help students understand the Civil Rights Movement and to gain an appreciation of African American culture in the United States. The first opportunity comes up soon, January 20, 2003: Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In addition to discussing the important role Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played in changing American societv, the class days immediatelv before and after this holiday can be devoted to reading fiction and nonfiction about the Civil Rights Movement. The second date to remember is all of next month, February …

Unfinished Business, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

This is my thirtieth and final YA literature column for English Journal. Beginning with the next issue of EJ, Donald R. Gallo, one of the leading experts in YA literature today—and the leding YA short story anthologist in America—will take my place. Don has some terrific ideas, and in the future this column, which will be renamed "Bold Books for Innovative Teaching," will provide EJ subscribers with useful and thought-provoking insights into books for teenage readers.

Turbulent Times: Epic Fantasy In Adolescent Literature, Karie Eliza Crawford

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a development of the theories presented by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim concerning archetypes, the anima/animus concept, the Hero Cycle, and identity development through fairy tales. I argue that there are vital rites of passage missing in Anglo-Saxon culture, and while bibliotherapy cannot replace them, it can help adolescents synthesize their experiences. The theories of Jung, Campbell, and Bettelheim demonstrate this concept by defining segments of the story and how they apply to the reader. Because of the applicability, readers, despite their age, can use the examples in the book to help reconcile their own …

The Secret Wife, Jill Elena Sharland

Theses and Dissertations

This master's thesis project is the first half of a historical novel concerning the involvement of Elvira Field Strang Baker, the first plural wife of James Jesse Strang, with the "Beaver Island Mormons" who followed Strang from Nauvoo shortly after the death of Joseph Smith in 1844. The events portrayed are historical, although fictionalized. This portion of the novel contains a brief introduction to her childhood in Chapter One and follows her involvement with the Strangite movement beginning in April 1847 to the coronation of her husband in. Elvira was the first plural wife of James Jesse Strang who to …

An Antidote For Testosterone Poisoning: Ya Books Girls—And Boys—Should Read, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Today's world is loaded with dangers and dangerous people; it's a place where kids-good and bad, naive and worldly, cautious and reckless-are at risk. The sources of these risks are sometimes masked in the mixed messages children learn from society-messages about gender roles, about behavior, about what's right and what's not.

Some of the fuzzy messages that concern me most are the ones that influence the behavior of young adult males. All teachers know that teenage boys can be some of the most obnoxious creatures on earth. I know this from personal experience as a former obnoxious boy and as …

De Facto Ya Literature And False Expectations, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

When I was in the later grades of elementary school and the first year of junior high school, I spent many leisure hours reading stories that had heen written for and marketed to kids like me. Series novels like The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and comic books by DC and Marvel provided me with plenty of reading material. Those series books, some sports novels, and, when I was in sixth and seventh grade, science fiction novels—especially anything by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells—pretty much accounted for the sum total of my personal knowledge of book-length fiction.

What To Do For Your Summer Vacation: Resources For Recharging Your Ya Literature Batteries, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

The saying, "Too many books, so little time," describes the feelings of most English teachers and librarians, especially during the busy school year. Fortunately, summer vacation is just around the corner, and if you've not already committed to projects that will eat up June, July, and August, here are some resources you can use to catch up on YA literature.

Ya Boundary Breakers And Makers, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Vincent van Gogh. Pablo Picasso. Georgia O'Keefe. Jackson Pollock. Andy Warhol. These painters, all incredibly famous now, were at one time on the fringe of the art world, creating their own kind of art, work that pushed back the boundaries of artistic conventions, broke traditional rules, and produced paintings that redefined "art." Their paintings are so well known now that it's easy to take for granted the impact these artists had on the art world, but their challenges to existing standards and forms have had a lasting impact on modem art.

Young adult literature has also had its share of …

Glorious Reality: Presidential Fretting About The Alan Workshop, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Reality is cruel.

When I was nominated to run for president of ALAN, I was flattered and briefly entertained dreams of grandeur. If I were lucky enough to win, I thought, my friends, family, and colleagues would be so very proud. If I won, I dreamed, I would be lavished with presidential perks and presents. If I became president of ALAN, I imagined, I would get to wallow in the glory of presiding over a glorious ALAN Workshop.

So far, this is what reality has taught me:

Proud? My local friends, family, and colleagues barely even noticed when the election …

The Problem With Ya Literature, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Despite their incredible success, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, which, now that Hariy is fourteen years old in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire can be comfortably considered YA literature, have had plenty of criticism. The cited faults of the Potter books are many, ranging from pedestrian writing to occult content.

Attacks on YA books are nothing new. For more than a century there have been vocal parents, teachers, and librarians who have attacked books written specifically for teenagers.

Sports Literature For Young Adults, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

A few days ago, I sat in a dark theater trying to wipe the tears from my eyes vvithout either of my teenage daughters noticing. We were watching Remember the Titans, a fine movie about Coach Herman Boone's first year as head football coach of the newly integrated football team at T. C. Williams High School in 1971, and several scenes in the movie touched the old high school coach/high school jock heart that still beats in my chest and brought tears to my eyes.

\Vhen I considered my reaction to the film, I assumed that I was caught up …

Ap And Ya?, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Perhaps the most traditional, conservative bastions of literature in America are those that are home to the thousands of high school Advanced Placement English classes throughout the United States. In these classrooms, diligent students and teachers study "literature of enduring quality" in preparation for the rigorous AP English literature examination given each spring. Typically the curriculum of these courses relies heavily on the classics: works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hugo, Austen, Hawthorne, Hemingway, and the rest of the authors enshrined in literature's pantheon. Of course, in recent decades the literary canon has loosened up enough to accept a handful of works …

Grammar Without Grammar: Just Playing Around, Writing, Deborah Dean

Faculty Publications

When I first started teaching, grammar education was specifically addressed in my district's learning objectives: students will identify adjectives and adverbs; they will diagram subjects and direct objects. As a new teacher, I did my best to meet the objectives. I tried to make the content interesting and, somehow, connected to writing: we wrote clues for treasure hunts using prepositional phrases and descriptions of our own 'wild things" (a la Maurice Sendak) with elaborate adjectives. Once, I spent a week teaching verbals with comic strips to a ninth grade honors class, only to receive a scathing letter from a parent …

Dear Knucklehead: Wise Up, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Dear Chris:

I am a dear friend writing to you from the futurethe year 2000, in fact-to share some hindsight that will go a long way in helping to get your brand-new career off to a better start. Trnst me on what I'm about to tell you, pal; I know you better than anyone does.

Let me get right to the point: You are a Knucklehead.

You're twenty-three years old, the ink on your diploma is barely dry, you're about to start your career as a high school English teacher, and you are too naive, obtuse, and self-conscious to know …

Muddying Boundaries: Mixing Genres With Five Paragraphs, Deborah M. Dean

Faculty Publications

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch is a charming children's picture book. Part of its charm lies in its ability to anticipate the conventions of the fairy tale genre, creating expectations for readers, then pushing the boundaries of the genre in novel ways. As the story moves outside traditional expectations with its unexpected reversals (the princess fights the dragon to save the prince, and the fight is more mental trickery than physical battle), the boundaries of the genre are muddied, making my secondary students smile when I read to them. But it is the ending that surprises them most. …

Starting With Dora V: A Genealogy Of Ya Literature Specialists, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

This is another of those Year 2000 articles, but instead of gazing into my crystal ball to predict what the future of YA literature will be, I'm looking backward, tracing the genealogy of the people who established, refined, defended, and maintained the study of literature for adolescents.

When I was a graduate student at Arizona State University in 1982, I enrolled in Ken Donelson's adolescent literature course. I had met Donelson a few times before, and, frankly, he intimidated me. I was a lowly high school English teacher, and he was coeditor of English Joumal and one of the Big …

Peace-Keeping Forces: Ya War Books, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

My family and I lived in Hawaii when the Gulf War began, and during the early clays of the war, when the daily news announced the results of US bomb raids over Baghdad, my daughter Carrie, who was then six years old, often had trouble sleeping at night.

Going Public: Letters To The World, Deborah Dean

Faculty Publications

When we consider why most of us write, the reasons tend to focus on expressing ourselves, particularly to an audience. We want our voices to be heard, our thoughts to be given substance and weight. We want someone to know and care about what we have to say In essence, we want to be published. Because of that, we are willing to spend time with our thoughts, to wrestle with them as we try to shape them into a form that will have meaning for others, and we are willing to revise/ reshape/rethink what we write so that it becomes …

Rescuing Reluctant Readers, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Let me tell you about Jonathan.

He's a tall, intelligent, handsome high school junior who's taking Japanese, calculus, physics, English, and a handful of other colleg preparatory courses. While he's not a perfect student, he is diligent, usually spending two hours or more a night on homework. After school, he plays the drums for the marching band, and after that he works a couple hours each day, as a custodian at the local elementary school. He earned his Eagle Scout award about two years ago, and now in his spare time he lifts weights, practices his drums, and hangs out …

Bilingual Creativity, Multidimensional Analysis, And World Englishes, Wendy Baker, William G. Eggington

Faculty Publications

Research in world English literatures has concentrated on qualitative measures of analysis in order to understand what is meant by `bilingual creativity.' These measures demonstrate that there are differences in rhetorical and literary style within world English literatures both in the inner and outer circle. Using Biber's multidimensional analysis (1988) to examine a large corpus of world English literatures written in Indian, West African, Britain, Anglo-American and Mexican American varieties of English, this paper examines whether quantitative analyses can also be insightful and useful in the examination of world English literatures in expanding our understanding of what `bilingual creativity' entails. …

Atticus, David, And Raymond: Role Models For Ya Males, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

I can't listen to Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses," a sentimental song about a father and his daughter without crying. Every time I hear it, I want to pull my nearest daughter onto my lap, hold her tight, and bury my face in her shoulder while I cry about the eventual loss of my little girl. Unfortunately—or fortunately, if you're one of my daughters—my maudlin reaction to the song prompted my three teenage daughters to ban the recording from our home, so I rarely got to listen to it—and weep—anymore.

Dear Teachers: Please Help My Kids Become Readers, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Dear Mr. or Ms. English Teacher:

I hope that by the time this arrives the hectic first days and weeks of school are behind you and that you are settled into the work that you and I both love teaching young people about writing, language and of course, literature. I have a keen interest in your work this year, not just because I, too, am a teacher, but also because three of my children are in your English classes. Joanne, my youngest, is in eighth grade and looking forward to her last year of middle school. Carrie, a ninth grader, …

English Teachers Are From Mars, Students Are From Venus (But Ya Books Can Help Interplanetary Understanding), Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

When I was a kid, people blamed the misunderstandings and tensions between grown-ups and teenagers on the "generation gap." Adolescents and adults butted heads because they were born in different times, into different circumstances. As a teenager with limited experience and understanding, I accepted that explanation as the reason why I didn't think or act the way my parents and teachers did.

Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates And The Cultural Work Of Home Literature, Lisa Olsen Tait

Theses and Dissertations

The few studies of Mormon home literature that have been published to date dismiss it as inferior artistry, an embarrassing if necessary step in the progression towards true Mormon literature. These studies are inadequate, however, because they divorce the texts from their context, holding them up to standards that did not exist for their original audience. Jane Tompkins' theory of texts as cultural work provides a more satisfactory way of looking at these narratives.

Home literature is thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural discourse of its day. Beneath the surface, these didactic stories about young Mormons finding love with their foreordained …

Finding Common Ground: Multicultural Ya Literature, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Unfortunately, I made little headway with my students. From their perspectives, people living on the other side of the world, especially "enemies," were so abstract they hardly seemed real. Because my students knew almost nothing about Soviet or Chinese people, the idea of exterminating all the "Commies" seemed about as horrifying or realistic to them as a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Part of their naivete resulted from the fact that they were typical teenagers: egocentric, unfamiliar with many of the ugly realities of the world, and prone to simplistic notions of right and wrong, good and evil.

Dear Father, Rochelle A. Fankhauser

Theses and Dissertations

Dear Father is a memoir of one year of the life of Shelly Fankhauser. Experiencing the death of her grandfather and husband, she is forced to reexamine her basic belief system as a New Zealand Maori LDS woman. Through her losses and the process of her grief, she discovers the identity that she was struggling to find did not come from her culture or her religion as she had once thought, but from within herself.

Dear Father is an autobiographical account of finding inner strength and discovering hope.

What Is Young Adult Literature?, Chris Crowe

Faculty Publications

Have you ever wondered what exactly can be considered young adult literature (YAL)? If you've paid much attention to the book world around you lately, you've probably noticed that there seems to be some misunderstanding about what fits the YAL label and what doesn't. Unfortunatelv, this confusion has led some teachers and parents to beliew that YAL is little more than cheap, pulp novels—the kind of stuff English teachers ought to teach their students to avoid. I understand some of the causes of this confusion and, in the space of this issue's column, plan to set things straight.