English Language and Literature Commons^™

Degrees Of Emotion: Judicial Responses To Victim Impact Statements, Mary Lay Schuster, Amy Propen

English

Emotional standards and hierarchies in the courtroom may affect judicial reactions to victim impact statements. Based on judicial conversations and courtroom observations in two judicial districts in Minnesota, we suggest that judges contrast emotion with reason in order to maintain control of their courtrooms; when faced with emotional expressions in victim impact statements, judges appreciate expressions of compassion and tolerate expressions of grief but are uncomfortable with expressions of anger. These judicial responses to emotional expression, however, must be contextualized; for example, the judges we spoke with often articulated different reactions to impact statements given by victims of sexual assault, …

Neither A Wife Nor A Whore: Deconstructing Feminine Icons In Catherine Breillat's Une Vieille Maîtresse, Douglas Keesey

English

This article undertakes a close reading of Catherine Breillat’s recent film Une vieille maîtresse (2007) to show why this, her first heritage film, is nevertheless strongly relevant to the gender politics of today. The author argues that Breillat’s cinematic deconstruction of differences between women is designed to undo the polarising effect of patriarchal representations of women as madonnas or whores — media images still prevalent even in these days of mixité and parité. Despite a tendency on the part of some reviewers to take the film’s gender images at face value, the author argues that Breillat’s interest lies not …

Understanding Genre Through The Lens Of Advocacy: The Rhetorical Work Of The Victim Impact Statement, Amy D. Propen, Mary Lay Schuster

English

Through interviews with judges and victim advocates, courtroom observations, and rhetorical analyses of victims’ reactions to proposed sentences, the authors examine the features that judges and advocates think make victims’ arguments persuasive. The authors conclude that this genre, recently imposed upon the court, functions as a mediating device through which advocates push for collective change, particularly for judicial acceptance of personal and emotional appeals. This study understands genres as responsive to changes within the activity systems in which they work and extends knowledge about genres that function as advocacy tools within internal institutional systems.

Dickinson And Smith: Years Apart But Not So Different, Nicole Day

English

Even though there were sixteen years separating them, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson had much in common. They both use death as a theme to explore and mock life. Their small poems have a lot to say about life and death.

Strangers In Blood: Relocating Race In The Renaissance, Jean Feerick

English

Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks …

"I'Ve Only To Say The Word!": Uncle Tom's Cabin And Performative Speech Theory

English

No abstract provided.

Authentic Education: The Example Of Hrotsvit Of Gandersheim, Phyllis Brown

English

The Emmeram-Munich manuscript, produced around 980, contains nine of ten surviving verse narratives by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim arranged with her six plays, a poem depicting scenes from the apocalypse, and several prayers in verse, all contextualized by a series of prefaces, dedicatory poems, epilogues, and a letter to learned patrons ("sapientes. . . fautores"), who had read her work and encouraged her. Nearly everything we know about Hrotsvit's life, education, and intentions as a writer must be gleaned from this manuscript, in which she names herself multiple times. In her preface to the legends she also names two teachers, Riccardis …

Phillis Wheatley’S Abolitionist Text: The 1834 Edition, Eileen Razzari Elrod

English

The problem presented to readers by the late eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley is nearly as well known as her poetry. Alongside many readers’ expressions of admiration, others have registered suspicion and disapproval, first in the eighteenth and then again in the mid- and late twentieth centuries. And nearly all of Wheatley’s critics acknowledge the centrality of the poet’s life in responses to her poetry. Whether the questions were framed in terms of literary authorship in the context of racist assumptions (as they were in the eighteenth century) or racial (as well as gendered) authenticity in the context of assumptions about …

The Colonizing Impulse Of Postcolonial Theory, John C. Hawley

English

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses …

Everything Is Permitted: Three Essays In The Spirit Of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground, Gina Nichole Caprari

English

No abstract provided.

Psychoanalysis Of A Sequel: The Disinterment Of Pet Sematary Two, Douglas Keesey

English

No abstract provided.

The Bustin' And Bitchin' Ethe Of Third-Wave Zines, Brenda M. Helmbrecht, Meredith A. Love

English

Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the …

Grades 2-4 Publishing Writing, Maria Cirello

English

This is an English language arts lesson for second through fourth graders (Grades 2-4) on publishing writing. Through this lesson, students will be able to respond to literature by socially interacting with their peers, gain an understanding of a tagline story through this lesson. In addition, they will come up with their own tagline story/poem/song/script. The lesson is tiered into three levels where students are grouped by ability. In each level students will receive a task card and can choose the activity that is of most interest to them.

Life Stories From The Holocaust: Bringing Oral History Into The Digital Classroom, Jill Goodman Gould, Gail Gradowski

English

This paper focuses on one of our current upper-division writing courses, Visual Media and Holocaust Narrative, which we have just finished teaching for the second time. We will explain our pedagogy in using oral history testimonies and digital stories to teach students about the Holocaust because we think it is an effective way to bring young students closer to the tragic event that is receding in history - to bring them closer through affective, emotional engagement with the powerful life stories of survivors. We also believe that a high level of learning is taking place and that the students' work …

“A Woman’S Story At A Winter’S Fire”: Gender Performativity And The Intrinsic Power Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S Macbeth, Whitney Sperrazza

English

No abstract provided.

Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye

English

You are standing at the doorway of a church in Philadelphia. Looking in, you see a mass of heads, all turned toward the podium, waiting for someone to get behind that podium. Then you see her. She is an attractive African American with “a fair figure, long, lustrous hair, and facial features pleasant to behold” (Logan 49). You overhear one person comment that she looks like “a bronze muse” (Logan 31). A reporter will later write that she has “a strong face, with a shadowed glow upon it, indicative of thoughtful fervor, and of a nature most femininely sensitive, but …

Review Of Politics And Awe In Rudyard Kipling's Fiction, John S. Mcbratney

English

No abstract provided.

Matthew Dimmock (Ed). William Percy's Mahomet And His Heaven: A Critical Edition, Jonathan Burton

English

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley

English

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …

Review Of Removing Barriers: Women In Academic Science, Technology Engineering And Mathematics (Bystydzienski And Bird, Eds.), And Women, Gender, And Technology (Fox, Johnson And Rosser, Eds.), And Science And Social Inequality: Feminist And Postcolonial Issues (Harding, Ed), Mary A. Armstrong

English

No abstract provided.

Making Academic Work Advocacy Work: Technologies Of Power In The Public Arena, Amy Propen, Mary Lay Schuster

English

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group …

Biafra As Heritage And Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, Iweala, John C. Hawley

English

Eddie Iroh made the observation that writers of his generation, who had lived through the Biafran conflict, were too close to the suffering to write the definitive accounts of the war, and that the task would fall to later generations. This essay looks at three later accounts Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005) to assess the war’s impact on Nigerian cultural expression in the twenty-first century. As the eldest of the three writers, Mbachu lingers more on the war itself than do the other …

Introduction: Unrecorded Lives, John C. Hawley

English

When anthropology student (and later, novelist) Amitav Ghosh set out from Oxford to Egypt in 1980 to find a suitable subject for his research, he may not have suspected the impact the trip would have on his life. He succeeded in completing the required tome for his degree and then went on to write In an Antique Land (1992), an unusually constructed book that deals with themes of historical and cultural displacement, with alienation and something we might these days, under the influence of postcolonial theory, call "subaltern cosmopolitanism." Others might recognize the genre in which Ghosh is writing as …

Stable Identity: Horses, Inversion Theory, And The Well Of Loneliness, Mary A. Armstrong

English

No abstract provided.

Teaching Lolita In A Course On Ethics And Literature, Marilyn Edelstein

English

The late 1980s saw a resurgence of interest in ethics and literature, with the publication of new books on the subject by major scholars like J. Hillis Miller and Wayne Booth. In recent years, many critics and theorists (including some Nabokov scholars) have (re)turned to ethical questions about literature: Does literature imitate life, and will readers, in turn, imitate the actions (whether virtuous or ignoble) of characters in literary texts? How and why can literary works be ethically beneficial or harmful for their readers? Are authors responsible for any ethical effects-positive or negative-their works may produce in readers? What are …

Of Þam Him Aweaxeð Wynsum Gefea”: The Voyeuristic Appeal Of Christ Iii, Paul Dustin Stegner, Timothy D. Arner

English

Christ III’s representation of the rewards offered to the blessed in Heaven raises this question: Why would anyone offered the opportunity to enjoy the beatific vision turn his gaze toward the suffering of the damned in Hell? The poem’s emphasis on vision has conventionally been interpreted as indicating its didactic purpose of effecting repentance in the reader. Critics such as Frederick Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and, most recently, Sachi Shimomura have connected the poem to standard theological interpretations of the Last Judgment and the penitential tradition.1 However, the unique, and perhaps troubling, issue of how and why the blessed choose …

Rewriting The Passing Novel: Danzy Senna's Caucasia, Kathryn Rummell

English

No abstract provided.

The Making Of ‘American’: Race And Nation In Neurasthenic Discourse, Brad Campbell

English

This paper considers the underexamined racial and nationalistic components of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neurasthenic discourse to propose that neurasthenia was as much a discourse of modern American identity as it was a discourse of disease. By closely reading the medical and general texts which helped to popularize it, and by scrutinizing the context of its vogue and supposed subsequent decline, this paper shows how neurasthenia was intimately bound up with the era’s politics of race, nationalism and citizenship. Countering traditional understandings of the disease, this study suggests that neurasthenia did not simply anticipate but was pre-eminently preoccupied with …

Giving Grades, Taking Tolls: Assessing The Impact Of Evaluation On Developing Writers, Brenda Helmbrecht

English

This article uses one basic writer’s experience with assessment as a vehicle to explore whether the assessment practices struggling writers encounter on their essays effectively usher them into academic discourse or simply scare them away from that ambition entirely

World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations In Film And Performance. [Review], Douglas M. Lanier

English

World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Edited by Sonia Massai. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xiv + 199. $110 cloth, $34.95 paper.

Reviewed by Douglas M. Lanier