English Language and Literature Commons^™

Are More Countries On Their Way To Having A Culture Of Comic Book Readers?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

his week (starting Monday 10 June 2013), CNN is broadcasting stories every day in a series called Comic Book Heroes. The series will ‘take a look at the writers, artists, films and characters in this global industry.’ The first video in the series is called ‘The Booming World of Comic Books,’ and it is a rather wide-ranging look at the relationship between superhero comic books and the movies that are based on them.

Several men** are interviewed for this piece. Stan Lee describes superhero stories as ‘fairy tales for grown-ups. [Fairy tales] were stories about monsters and witches and …

Moral Reform In Comedy And Culture, 1696-1747 & Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, And The Rise Of Sensibility, 1670-1730. (Review), Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

The article reviews the books "Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696-1747" by Aparna Gollapudi and "Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730" by Laura Linker.

Review: Childress, Alice. Selected Plays., Julie M. Burrell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Are The Properties Of Editorial Cartoons That Heal?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

On 23-24 April 2013, I attended a conference called “Images of Terror, Narratives of Insecurity: Literary, Artistic and Cultural Responses.” The conference was held by Project CILM–City and (In)security in Literature and the Media, and the organizers “aim to examine how literature, art and culture have dealt with notions of insecurity and to what extent they have provided significant challenges and responses to hegemonic discourses.” Visit this website for more information about the project and visit this site for more information about the conference.

The faculty at the University of Lisbon are not alone in their quest to understand how …

Clarissa: An Abridged Version (Review), Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

John Evelyn: The Forestry Of Imagination, James C. Mckusick

English Faculty Publications

John Evelyn was appointed as a founding member of the Royal Society in 1662, and in this capacity he published Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber (1664). Evelyn's Sylva foreshadows the development of a conservationist ethic in the management of forests and wildlands throughout the English-speaking world. In this treatise, Evelyn advocates the replanting of woodlands that had been devastated during the English Civil War as a means of restoring the nation's defenses, particularly its navy and merchant marine. The book describes the various kinds of trees, their cultivation, and the best use for each …

Juba’S “Black Face” / Lady Delacour’S “Mask”: Plotting Domesticity In Maria Edgeworth’S Belinda, Sharon Smith

English Faculty Publications

In Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth forges parallel subplots between Juba, a former African slave residing in England, and Lady Delacour, a wealthy and dissipated London socialite, both of whom undergo a process of domestication during the course of the novel. The connection Edgeworth creates between these characters allows her to explore a version of womanhood that promotes domesticity by negotiating the boundary between domestic and public life; at the same time, however, it reveals the anxieties surrounding this understanding of womanhood. Edgeworth’s novel configures Lady Delacour as a plotting woman who bridges the public/private divide, revealing domesticity to be as …

Is There A New Kind Of Hero In Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

As a linguist, I am professionally devoted to the scientific study of language. But I have a confession: I used to be a literature major. As an undergraduate, I studied in a traditional English department, and I only accidentally found out about linguistics when I took a grammar class. In those literature courses, professors lectured about the different kinds of hero that have been discussed for thousands of years. In Greece, Aristotle wrote about the hero, and in the Middle Ages, the hero was construed differently. In the twentieth century, the notion of the anti-hero became possible, and writers in …

How Do Comics Talk About Love?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In recognition of Valentine’s Day, I decided to write a post about love in comics. But not any kind of love, of course, will do for this post—it should be about love across boundaries and the language that instantiates it.

Scenes from a Multiverse is a web comic by Jon Rosenberg that began appearing on the web in 2010. It explores social situations from an extraordinarily wide-ranging perspective of a multiplicity of worlds. As a satirist, Rosenberg often borrows from current events or internet memes and adapts them for his own purposes, making commentary about what he sees as social …

Being [T]Here, Dustin B. Smith

English Faculty Publications

When you awoke from the dream, in your early thirties, you knew, as you’ve never known anything else in all your seventy-plus years, that what you’d found was real. The dream began with you sitting in a church, head bowed in prayer. Your eyes opened slowly, and you noticed that you were wearing brilliantly colored, beaded moccasins. You stood abruptly, pushed open the mahogany gate that separated the pew from the center aisle of the church, and began to run. The dream then proposed a seemingly endless and entirely quotidian set of difficulties in The City, and led eventually to …

Which Is Frank’S Favorite Post By Roy?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

For my part in the retrospective, I have the pleasure of revisiting Roy’s questions to choose my favorite from. One of my top three is ‘Does the Joker Have Six-Inch Teeth?,’ and another is ‘What the $#@& is Happening to 1986?’ The post about the Joker’s dentition is a great example of Roy’s thinking about the characteristics and conventions, the very nature of comics. On the other hand, the post about 1986 dwells centrally on the relationship that comics have with audiences and, especially, the…uhm…business practices that for good and for ill run alongside.

But for …

Of Ladybugs, Low Status, And Loving The Job: Writing Center Professionals Navigating Their Careers, Anne Ellen Geller, Harry Denny

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

[Review Of The Book Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays On The Plays And Other Works Edited By Philip C. Kolin], Heidi R. Bean

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale And Boccaccio's Decameron X.10, Jessica Harkins

English Faculty Publications

Many readers find that Chaucer's Clerk's Tale profoundly critiques Petrarch's methods of translation, but hesitate to claim that Chaucer knew the text Petrarch was translating: Boccaccio's version of the Griselda story from the Decameron. This hesitation goes back to J. Burke Severs's assertion that Chaucer did not know Boccaccio's text. David Wallace began to undermine this argument by drawing attention to shared textual traits of these two versions of the story, but only John Finlayson has advanced the case directly against Severs by arguing that Boccaccio must be a source. What has perhaps most prevented a shift in our reading …

Open Peer Review: Collective Intelligence As A Framework For Theorizing Approaches To Peer Review In The Humanities, Jenna Sheffield

English Faculty Publications

In this NANO note, I focus on online commenting functions and how they have been—and can be—used for open peer review to help improve the quality of an author’s scholarly work and change the way publishers go about their peer review processes. While open peer review is not necessarily digital, digital technologies allow for a broader range of participants and faster dissemination of knowledge, which is why this article focuses on online open peer review. I focus on commenting functions because they are becoming the niche technology through which open peer review is occurring in digital spaces. In addition, commenting …

Review: Twyla M. Hansen & Linda M. Hasselstrom's Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, Christine Stewart-Nunez

English Faculty Publications

Poems of place emerge so intimately from an intersection of landscape and culture that they couldn't exist someplace else. i Twyla M. Hansen and Linda M. Hasselstrorn's Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet, Winner of the 2012 Nebraska Book Award, poetically embodies the Great Plains. These writers transport readers through high skies and over sprawling ranches and one-tavern towns, pinning stories and memories to creeks and kitchens, pies and opossums. Yet they resist "provincial" poetry; this book's emotional range-nostalgia, loss, joy, serenity-reflect broader human concerns. With its crisp subject matter, conversational writing styles, and exquisite renderings of place, Dirt Songs should …

Reading Austen's Lady Susan As Tory Secret History, Rachel K. Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Theatre Of The Mind: Hardy The Dynasts And The Question Of Form, Suzanne J. Flynn

English Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes Hardy’s rarely discussed epic-drama, The Dynasts, especially in relation to trends in the early twentieth-century drama. Hardy’s work is a hybrid of epic, drama, and lyric and was, at the time, thought to be unstageable.

The Impact Of Canadian Social Discourses On L2 Writing Pedagogy In Ontario, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

This paper attempts to illustrate the impact of Canadian social, political, and academic discourses on second language writing pedagogy in Ontario schools. Building upon the views that regard teacher knowledge as teachers’ sociocultural interactions and lived experiences, and not merely intellectual capabilities gained within teacher preparation, this article proposes that the impact of dominant social discourses on classroom practice might be more profound than teachers’ creativity and initiative. This idea is demonstrated by examining the findings of a grounded theory study of frequently employed strategies that can deal with intercultural rhetoric in EAL (English as an additional language) academic writing. …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …

Othello's "Malignant Turk" And George Manwaring's "A True Discourse": The Cultural Politics Of A Textual Derivation, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

A critique is presented of the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare, focusing on a reference from Othello's final speech to an incident in Aleppo, Syria that the author attributes to the manuscript essay "A True Discourse" by George Manwaring, a companion of English adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley. Early 17th century British history, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Queen Elizabeth I are mentioned, as well as references in the works to Turks and the censorship of English literature.

Anticipating The Neoliberal Nation: Philip Larkin And The Displacement Of Englishness, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Serialization, Ethnographic Drag, And The Ineffable Authenticity Of Nikki S. Lee, Todd Richardson

English Faculty Publications

This essay reads the photographer Nikki S Lee’s Projects, a series of pictures in which the artist poses as a member of various subcultures and folk groups from an ethnographic perspective. Focusing on how folklore scholars might employ Lee’s representational strategies, the essay suggests that two aspects of Projects are especially instructive for folkloristic ethnography. First, Lee’s use of drag as camp highlights the performative aspects of identity, showing how individuals express themselves both through and against shared expressive standards. Second, the serialized presentation of the photographs provides a model for the ethnographic representation of multiple folk identities performed …

From Russia With Love: Souvenirs And Political Alliance In Martha Wilmot’S The Russian Journals, Pamela Buck

English Faculty Publications

Although virtually unknown in literary studies today, Martha Wilmot's The Russian Journals remains an important text on the material circulation of things in an increasingly global eighteenth-century world.The Russian Journals describes her stay in Russia from 1803 to 1808 with family friend and powerful political figure Princess Dashkova. In particular, the souvenirs that she exchanges with Princess Dashkova shed light on how cultural and political connections were formed between Russia and Britain as well as how national identity was redefined on a more global scale.

R.A., Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Medieval Dark Horse: Challenge And Reward In The Middle English Lyric, Andrew S. Marvin

English Faculty Publications

“The Medieval Dark Horse: Challenge and Reward in the Middle English Lyric” explores the genre’s history and literary merits while addressing the question of why this valuable and extensive body of literature has largely gone untapped by scholars.

The introductory sections detail the historical and modern contexts of the lyric, including the state of scholarship, manuscripts, editions, dating issues, purpose, audience, types of lyrics, and themes. This background informs a discussion of the genre’s difficulties and offers solutions with which to counter them. Close readings of eight poems are included to exemplify the lyric’s thematic range, stylistic diversity, and literary …

Are Rage Comics Really Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

A couple of years ago, some of my undergraduate students and I were talking about comics, and one of them mentioned rage comics. I hadn’t heard of that before, so I was grateful to learn about them. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a Redditor, and I don’t ever spend time on Reddit. But in August 2012, when I finally upgraded to a smart phone from my previous dumb phone, I downloaded the Rage Comics app. Every now and again, when I’m on the bus headed to work, I scroll through some of these comics.

Most of …

Demystifying The Cowboy Through His Song: How Cowboy Poetry And Music Create A Common Language Between Multiple-Use Conservationists And Forever-Wild Preservationists To Meet The Goals Of Sustainable Agriculture, Kristin Y. Ladd, Roslynn Brain

English Faculty Publications

Though multiple-use conservationists (use the land for multiple purposes) and forever-wild preservationists (solely set aside land for non-human species) seem to be at odds, this article argues that key figures such as Gifford Pinchot and John Muir discredit this perceived discordance. As well, it probes into the unexplored arena of cowboy music gatherings as productive places for cooperation between the two groups. First, mystique of the cowboy is examined and unraveled through true stories of cowboy-environmentalist collaboration. The article addresses how cowboy poetry festivals function as entertainment and meeting places to support sustainable behavior through communitybased social marketing techniques.

What Can Found Art Teach Us About Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

When I first learned about found poetry, I was taught that we could encounter poetry anywhere we went. Any text could be considered poetry even if it weren’t meant to be seen as such. Later on, I learned that found poetry is also poetry that is cobbled together from other kinds of texts. There is even poetry constructed out of the speech of Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Likewise, everyday objects that weren’t meant to be art can be transformed into art, one very famous example being a urinal ‘made into’ a fountain.

Writers And Critics At The Dinner Table: Tristram Shandy As Conversational Model, Cynthia N. Malone

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.