English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay asks, when does our effort to avoid offending students interfere with our ability to teach them? Rehearsing conflicts over language and terminology, over who can speak and what can be said, from my four-decade career as a literature professor, critical theorist, and gender scholar, I confront contemporary efforts to censor certain words, to prohibit certain kinds of inquiry, and to limit who can speak about certain subjects by placing recent incidents in relation to previous debates in academia and the public sphere. The university classroom and scholarly peer-reviewed journals have long served as spaces where established viewpoints can …

It’S Complicated: Some Irregular Line-Ending Morphosyllabic Sequences In Piers Plowman B, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recent scholarship on the meter of fourteenth-century English alliterative verse demonstrates that lines end with a trochaic constituent. Piers Plowman is a recognized anomaly, yet there is disagreement about the extent of the differences. In this article, I examine long final dips, the vocalic quality of syllables in the final dip, and the placement of word divisions. Throughout, my focus is on the B version of the poem. I make a survey of lines with a word division after the final lift and of lines ending in -ly adverbs, compounds in -man, compounds in -nesse, nouns in -(i)oun …

Queer(Ly) Lingering In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Emily Datskou

Dissertations

This dissertation is a critical critique of Queer Theory as an academic field. It argues that queer theory’s establishment as an academic discipline and as a periodizing and historicizing force through the bibliographies that make up its canon has upheld and supported the very normative models of temporality and progression that the field claims to resist. As a result, I argue, queer theory has focused most heavily on modernism and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has positioned the nineteenth century as the precursor to the queer strategies and representations that we see more fully fleshed out in the twentieth …

Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

From a visual standpoint as well as a semantic and functional one, Middle English lyrics were often absorbed into their co(n)texts. In what sense, then, is a “Middle English lyric” a thing? I seek in this essay to show what metrical analysis may contribute to that question. Context is not all. If contextual analysis has tended to dissolve the presumed thing-hood of Middle English lyrics, metrical analysis shows that verses are robust enough to sustain that. Metrical structuration sets verse apart from its surround; it defines the verse object as a distinct entity, distinguished by a specifiable compositional craft.

Langland Parrhesiastes, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ancient Greek word parrhēsia designates speech that is bold, frank, and free, holding nothing back; a parrhēsiastēs is a person who gives voice to such speech. Although the word was little used in Latin literature and had no precise Latin equivalent, the concept was transmitted to medieval western Europe in rhetorical theory and the New Testament. In this essay I propose that the concept of parrhēsia may help to register the irruptive force, pointedness, risks, and complexity of certain acts of saying in Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century English vision poem. For most of this essay, I focus on a …

Viruses, Vaccines, And The Erotics Of Risk In Latinx Hiv Stories And Covid-19, Dr. Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2019, I published Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism (University of Illinois Press), in which I discuss contagion as a metaphor for embracing our shared materiality with others. Six months later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, neighbors were crossing streets to avoid each other. Social distancing is, counterintuitively, asking us to view separation and seclusion as forms of solidarity. But how can we be solid if we are oriented against each other? Isolation itself has become contagious: sharing repulsion and rejection, measuring six feet of “social” distance from others. These spaces are made up of a variety …

Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …

Take This Work Global, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History elaborates a general program for the study of literature centered on the question, “What is the thing read?” Concepts of document, text, and work are parsed with care, generating many valuable insights and clarifications, but there is need for more thinking about the linguistic medium of literature. To textual studies, bibliography, and book history — the trio of foundational disciplines advocated by Eggert — one should add philology, or the study of literary language.

The Text Of The "Abc Of Aristotle" In The ‘Winchester Anthology’, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Middle English ABC of Aristotle is an alliterative abecedary poem that survives in fifteen manuscript copies dating between the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The most eccentric copy, bearing the greatest number of unique textual variants, is in London, British Library, Additional 60577, a commonplace book and miscellany of verse and prose known today as the ‘Winchester Anthology’. The Winchester copy of the ABC of Aristotle is distinguished from all others by changes to vocabulary, idiom, and prosody. The result is a unique redaction, illustrating the kind of literary composition that could be expected to grow out of late …

The Intricacies Of Counting To Four In Old English Poetry, Ian Cornelius, Eric Weiskott

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The metrical theory devised by Eduard Sievers and refined by A. J. Bliss forms the basis for most current scholarship on Old English meter. A weakness of the Sievers–Bliss theory is that it occupies a middle ground between two levels of analytic description, distinguished by Roman Jakobson in an influential article as ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’. Metrists in the Sievers–Bliss tradition employ a concept of metrical position (a key component of verse design), yet the focus of attention usually remains on the contours of stress of individual verses. Important exceptions are the studies of Thomas Cable and Nicolay Yakovlev. …

Hanna (Ed.), Richard Rolle: Unprinted Latin Writings, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Upstart Peril In The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Lydia Craig

Dissertations

Responding to the French Revolution (1789-1799) with his widely read text Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), conservative Whig politician Edmund Burke influentially accused an ambitious bourgeoisie of inciting the lower classes to revolt against the aristocracy and Bourbon dynasty. He also insinuated that only the class hierarchy and feudal respect prevented a similar upstart peril in England from occasioning revolution. For the English middle classes, this demonization of upstarts, or parvenus posed an ideological challenge to their public consolidation as a political and cultural force. Bourgeois authors from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens utilized an upstart rivalry device …

Mcmullen/Weaver (Eds.), The Legacy Of Boethius In Medieval England, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The International Life Of A Russian Colonial Document: The Russian-American Company, The Kashaya Pomos, The Bodega Miwoks, And The 1817 Métini Protocol, Jeffrey Glover

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In September 1817 officials of the Russian colony of Ross drafted a protocol of a meeting held with the Kashaya Pomos, the Bodega Miwoks, and other Native Americans. The protocol described how the Russians had promised gifts and military protection to their Native American allies in exchange for the right to continue occupying Métini, a Kashaya Pomo–controlled territory about eighty-five miles north of San Francisco. Soon, reports of the meeting had made their way up and down the coast and across the Pacific, as Native Americans, Russian imperial ministers, and diplomats from Russia's imperial rivals debated its significance. This essay …

Christopher Bigsby, Twenty-First Century American Playwrights, Verna Foster

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Utopian Discourse In Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Casey Alan Jergenson

Dissertations

I argue in this dissertation that utopianism is a vibrant form of cultural production in the post-Cold War period, despite the paucity of recent texts depicting €œgood€ societies. Most literary historical accounts of the genre place the decline of the utopian narrative in the early twentieth century, with a brief resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. Contemporary culture has since become inundated with dystopian and post-apocalyptic visions of the future. If we take this generic distribution at face-value, it seems symptomatic of the utopian idea's retreat from cultural production since the 1980s. Influential critics have resisted this narrative by demonstrating …

Reforming Sensory Disability In Early Modern England, Mary Lutze

Dissertations

Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England traces early modern literary depictions of blindness and deafness during the Reformation. the project proposes an inherently dynamic early modern religious model of disabilities: first characterized by its initial rejection of England's prior faith tradition, then by doctrinal negotiation among reformed dissenters. It analyzes the shift in disability representation in popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century before culminating in an examination of seventeenth-century deaf education. Finally, the project proposes that the seventeenth-century advent of deaf education should be read as a concrete ideological shift in English society's perception of the disabled.

A Poetics Of Violence: Representations Of Violence As Storytelling And World-Building Tools Of The Theater, Richard Gilbert

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how representations of violence do dramaturgical work in theatrical production. Playwrights write scenes of violence, and directors and designers stage them, with specific dramaturgical goals in mind. The project of this work is to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how productions use representations of violence. Ideally, that framework will be of use both to critics seeking to analyze productions with violence and to practitioners who want to more consciously shape their own use of violence.

Representations of violence create a sudden change in the audience's affective experience of the fictional world. I call that sudden change …

Fragmented Spectatorship And Artistic Beholding In The Red Badge Of Courage, John Kerkering

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Leonard Diepveen. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception, Jayme Stayer

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Diepeveen has spent a considerable part of his career chasing after the tricky concept of intent, how authors or works signal it, and how interpretive communities respond to it. With his most recent book, he has brought a systematician’s rigour to the question of how modernism addresses, offends, or accounts for its various audiences. One of the most engaging elements of Modernist Fraud is how Diepeveen rescues authorial intention from the New Critical and Barthesian dustbins, revealing its centrality in the evaluation and understanding of art, in spite of its unpindownable nature. The paradox of intent is that its ‘evidentiary …

How To Play A Poem By Don Bialostosky, Jayme Stayer

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Don Bialostosky has long been admired as a writer of dense texts aimed at theory-minded academics and addressing Bakhtin and rhetoric. With How to Play a Poem, Bialostosky plays to a different audience, positioning himself as “something of a popular entertainer,” to use T. S. Eliot’s improbable self-description in the wake of The Waste Land. Aimed not at theoreticians but average teachers of poetry, Bialostosky’s text attempts to make Bakhtin accessible for the college and high school classroom. For my own audience here, I offer a conflict-of-interest disclosure: Bialostosky directed my dissertation over twenty-five years ago, but there is little …

Review Of The Penn Commentary On 'Piers Plowman', Vol. 4: C Passūs 15--19; B Passūs 13--17, By Traugott Lawler, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Thorlac Turville-Petre. 2018. Description And Narrative In Middle English Alliterative Poetry. Exeter Medieval Texts And Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Viii + 222 Pp., £ 85.00., Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Evincing Criticism And Collegiality In Scholarly Reviews, Joseph Janangelo

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

How Lawrence Launched His Career In London, Joyce Wexler

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Susan E. Deskis, Alliterative Proverbs In Medieval England: Language Choice And Literary Meaning, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Charles Harpur Critical Archive: A History And Technical Report, Paul Eggert, Desmond A. Schmidt

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is a history of and a technical report on the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales from the 1830s to the 1860s. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and manuscript form have been recovered. In order to manage the complexity of his often heavily revised manuscripts traditional encoding in XML–TEI, with its known difficulties in handling overlapping structures and complex revisions, was rejected. Instead, the transcriptions were split into simplified versions and layers of revision. Markup describing textual formats was stored externally …

Disability, Decoloniality, And Other-Than-Humanist Ethics In Anzaldúan Thought, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing has been read as decolonial based on her resistance to dominant national, racial, and cultural formations. This essay turns to unpublished documents from the Gloria Anzaldúa archive that are decolonial at a more fundamental level. In autobiographical writings about her own experiences with disability, as well as doodles and figure drawings, the alternate forms of human life that Anzaldúa depicts defy the logics of identification and differentiation that underlie colonial hierarchies. Refusing to fix bodies with labels, Anzaldúa accepted mystical encounters and inter-species minglings without judgment. She experienced her own disabling conditions (including a severe hormone imbalance …

Ralph Hanna, The Penn Commentary On "Piers Plowman", Volume 2: C Passūs 5-9; B Passūs 5-7; A Passūs 5-8, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Present, The Past And The Material Object, Paul Eggert

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Before Thomas Hardy rose to fame as the author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and then later as a poet, he had pursued a professional career as an architect and, for a time, as a restorer of medieval church buildings. When he could afford to do so he gave up his professional life for writing, but an abiding attitude toward the past and its material manifestations links the two phases of his life. In his literary works he frequently returned to the possibility of recovering the past, to the conditions of that recovery and thus to the nature of its …