English Language and Literature Commons^™

So What's Your Point? Relevancy In Conversation, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Every rare once in a while, I find myself caught in a conversation where the person I'm talking to goes off on a tangent. And I don't mean a little aside. I mean a "What the hell are you talking about!?" tangent.

Luckily, for the other 99% of conversations, there are some general guidelines for engagement that help us avoid making mistakes like this one. H. Paul Grice, a language philosopher, is the scholar credited with first writing about these rules in a widespread way. Grice theorized that participants in conversation operate by an overarching approach that we now call …

A Different Kind Of Bilingüismo, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In last month's column, I wrote about the presence of Spanish in Omaha, attested by its occasional appearances in the broader English-speaking market. I also mentioned the phenomenon of people speaking two or more languages, called bilingualism. When a person has command of two languages, then that person is considered bilingual.

Considering that one language (like Swahili) might be called a code, and another language (Arabic) is another code, and a third language (like English) is another code, then conceivably a person who lives in Tanzania might carry on a conversation with another speaker from Tanzania in three different languages …

Painting, Photography And Fidelity In The Tragic Muse, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

Photographs can approach the elegance of paintings, but reproductions can show the distortion of photographs - so The Tragic Muse (1890) suggests, complicating critical understandings of James and visual art. Dramatizing artists' fidelity, James resists assuming that families, races, and genders provide similar options. Fidelity in art can mean 'infidelity' in life, lead to 'adulterated' reproductions, and impugn understandings of inherited and performed identities - concerns which resurface in The American Scene (1907) when James contemplates immigrant populations and in A Small Boy and Others (1913) when a family daguerreotype becomes evidence of his own fidelity.

Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism And The Materiality Of Nature, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

A Review by James C. McKusick. In Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, Onno Oerlemans embarks upon an ambitious project to re-situate Romantic poetry in the hard, physical reality of the material world. This study endeavors to place several of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, within the larger intellectual and material contexts of their period, attending not only to the social and cultural currents that shape poetic discourse, but also to the concrete physical substrate of poetic production.

What Part English, What Part Spanish?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

Back in July, I was sitting in my office at school, working on a syllabus for a new sophomore- level class on language and society. I was exploring the U.S. Census Bureau website to get a sense of the most current information we have about language communities in the United States. I had the radio on, too, and while I was browsing census data about Nebraska, I heard an advertisement on one of the FM stations. The ad was primarily an English-language ad, but it also had a few Spanish words. It turned out to be a job advertisement for …

Pynchon's Age Of Reason: Mason & Dixon And America's Rise Of Rational Discourse, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal …

What Are Functional Shifts?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In last month's column, I wrote about variety in word formation processes, the phenomenon of having more than one word form lo represent the same concept, illustrated by word pairs like analysis/analyzation, summary/ summarization, and intensity/intenseness. There is, of course, the other side of the coin. We also use single word forms to represent an array of meanings.

Introduction: New Directions John Clare Studies, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

The John Clare Conference, organized by the John Clare Society of North America, March 21-22, 2003, was held at the Belmont Conference Center. The program explored new directions in Clare scholarship and celebrated the completion of the Oxford English Text edition of John Clare's poetry.

What Really Makes A Word, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

On the 2003 season finale of the HBO drama "Six Feet Under," viewers are left wondering whether Keith and David will be able to stay together as a couple. They were sitting at the kitchen table and eating cake, getting into one of their ritualized tiffs where David feels Keith picks on him. The substance of their conversation, though, turned to the silly when David said 'adjacently." Keith said, "Adjacently is not a word." They soon realized how petty they sounded and sort of laughed it all off.

Often, people can get very worked up about whether something is …

Inscribing Ordinary Trauma In The Diary Of A Military Child, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

Using her own diary as a case study, the author examines how the life writing of a military child inscribes ordinary trauma, defining ordinary trauma as a response to extraordinary events masked as ordinary. For the military child, the possibility of war is made ordinary and rendered such in her writing.

Y'All Better Ask Somebody, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

One of the ways that linguists think about language is through geographical distribution, commonly known as dialects. It's very easy to think about geography because of the wide range of locales in which English is spoken. Due to conquest and colonization, English is now a world language. There's British English, Australian English, and Nigerian English, among many others. In the continental U.S., most people readily identify a number of regional dialects: “Midwestern," "New England," "Southern." While some people might call them accents, linguists distinguish between dialect and accent. The term accent refers solely to the way words are …

Sentence Forms' And Corporate Responsibility, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

On Monday 10 March, National Public Radio aired a story by Jack Speer about corporate America’s financial situation. Speer said that since some companies have had cl difficult time with their profit margins, they reduced retiree benefits - in other worth, people who had worked for many years and had retired from the company lost some of their hard-earned benefits to ensure healthy stock performance.

Lately, we have heard several of these stories. A CEO/CFO takes home a record-setting multimillion dollar paycheck because he fired workers for profit, a practice epitomized by ENRON and WorldCom. What caught my attention, though, …

What Are Conversation Systems?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

The study of conversation as a serious field of inquiry began in the1970s when sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson first turned our attention to the way people talk to each other. Interestingly, they began looking at talk not for the sake of talk itself but instead as a way to understand social interactions. They collected samples of conversations and analyzed them to help answer questions that sociologists (not necessarily linguists) are interested in answering. For instance, how do people manage their daily lives through talk? How do people establish, maintain, improve and end relationships with each other …

Name Trouble - Part Two, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

While Shakespeare was busy with names in Romeo and Juliet, Europeans began exploring and settling the New World and immediately ran into the problem of naming. For instance, what should they call those enormous mammals that look sort of like cows but are larger, stronger, and furrier? Buflalo? Bison? Tatanka? And what should they call all the people they kept running into? Tradition holds that Christopher Columbus started it. He was confused because of geography; he thought he had found India, so he called the native people he met by the Spanish word indios, the English …

Name Trouble - Part One, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

I hereby re-christen thee ..

The slate of Nebraska recently witnessed a controversy surrounding the names of several geophysical features, like rivers or creeks. According to a February 191 2001, Omaha World-Herald article by Todd von Kampen and Nichole Aksamit, the push was to change all the place names that contain the word "squaw" to more appropriate, less offensive names. The movement was strictly voluntary; no law required the changes. However, there was a good deal of resistance, even from some lawmakers. According to the article, Bellevue City Councilman John Stacey said, “I don’t have any problem with the name …

Africans, Indians, Arabs, And Scots: Jewish And Other Questions In The Age Of Empire, Michael Galchinsky

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In The Beginning There Was Death: Spiritual Desolation And The Search For Self In Jamaica Kincaid's "Autobiography Of My Mother", Elizabeth J. West

English Faculty Publications

This is a book review of Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother. (1996). New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Transported Traditions: Transatlantic Foundations Of Southern Folk Culture, John Burrison

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Power Of The Passive Self In English Literature, 1640-1770 By Scott Gordon (Review), Rachel Carnell, Scott Gordon

English Faculty Publications

Reviews the book 'The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770,' by Scott Paul Gordon.

Donne, Doubt And The Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Mill On The Floss, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The Mill on the Floss was the second novel Marian Evans published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Born in 1819 to a prosperous estate manager, Marian Evans spent her youth much as her heroine did, in reading and outdoor activities. In 1850 Evans moved to London where she worked as a translator and editor, and fell in love with the writer and editor George Henry Lewes, a married man. Contemporary marriage law prevented Lewes from obtaining a divorce from his adulterous wife; the law held that, having condoned the adultery previously, he now had no grounds for divorce. Knowing this, …

Marianne Moore And The Tao Of Painting, Zhaoming Qian

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Heritage Arts Imperative, Barre Toelken

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries And Cultural Book History, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

Circulating library catalogs offer one of the most revealing views available of book publishing and reading in eighteenth-century Britain, since those catalogs and the libraries they document were put together by book traders whose livelihood depended upon giving an unprecedentedly wide range of British readers the books they wanted. Of course, the perspective on eighteenth-century British book culture provided by their catalogs is nowhere near as comprehensive as the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalog (ESTC) or the recently published first volume of The English Novel 1770– 1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (TEN), which “seeks …

Galway Arts Festival, 2003: Focusing On Home, Still Delighting, Christie L. Fox

English Faculty Publications

For twenty-six years the Galway Arts Festival has “morphed” the city of Galway into its natural logical conclusion: the city already boasts a young, artistic community, but for two weeks each summer, the festival brings the spotlight and the crowds to Galway for a celebration of the arts. Of late, however, the festival has suffered from decreased government expenditures on the arts—as have all the arts in Ireland. Recent festivals have been far more subdued than the extravagant Millennial Festival in 1999, during which the city teemed with outdoor events and more than one hundred thousand people gathered to watch …

Creating Community: Macnas’S Galway Arts Festival Parade, 2000, Christie L. Fox

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Masquerade And Identities: Essays On Gender, Sexuality, And Marginality By Efrat Tseëlon, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In the introduction to this collection of essays, the editor discusses ‘issues of masquerade as identity construction and as identity critique through a range of styles and narrative forms’ (p. 4). All of the scholarship here relies on a performative viewpoint to explore a range of symbolic and literal ‘masks’ in different social settings. In fact, the book’s blurb prepares us to delve into ‘the role of disguise in constructing, expressing, and representing marginalised identities, and in undermining easy distinctions between “true” identity and artifice.’

Cartoons And Pronoun Trouble, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In a relatively famous linguistic exchange, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd are trying lo determine who is going to be shot. First, the question of whether it's duck season or rabbit season has to be answered. Second, Elmer has to suffer through a barrage of claims and counter-claims in which Bugs and Daffy try to avoid being Elmer's target.

Although I couldn't find a copy of this video, I believe it is Chuck Jones's "Rabbit Seasoning" (1952), and the premise is very similar to 1951's "Rabbit Fire" which I was able to rent on video. At any rate, …