English Language and Literature Commons^™

Generation(Al) Matters: Story, Lens, And Tone, Louise Weatherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

This essay tells a story of how “generation” came to matter in rhetoric and composition/writing studies; analyzes and advocates for “generation” as a lens through which to examine disciplinary studies and activities; and considers how we can productively engage in generational relations between individuals and groups. It adopts a framework of “hospitality” (adapted from Richard and Janis Haswell) to develop a concept of “cross-generational relations” as an aspirational category. An ethic of hospitality is proposed to facilitate respectful, productive relations among generational groups, which recognize and enact interdependence but allow for a wide range of stances and strategies of interaction …

Children’S Literature At Fifty: Pedagogy Under The Covers, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Like so many scholars of children’s literature, I came to children’s lit- erature through teaching. Trained as a Victorianist, I saw a gap in my department’s course offerings and somewhat naively offered to fill it with a children’s literature course, banking on my work on childhood in the Victorian novel and my pedagogical skills to carry me through. The Children’s Literature Association and Children’s Literature were my mentors during those years—as they continue to be—teaching me how to teach and think about children’s literature both as a genre and as a course of undergraduate study.

Francelia Butler’s entrée into the …

Autopoetics, Market Competence, And The Transnational Author, Maria Gabriela Martin

English Faculty Publications

Although materialist analyses have critiqued the institutionalization of postcolonial studies and its emergence in global capitalism, only few have addressed the role of creative writing in standardizing migrant novelistic production to what Mark McGurl has designated as ‘program fiction’ whose trademark is the practice of “involuted self-reference”. In filling this gap, this paper looks into Gina Apostol’s writings and their reception by international audiences as exemplary of the cultural capital of program fiction. While Apostol’s autofictions/ficto-criticism points to the influence of creative writing in her novels — she studied under John Barth in the MFA program in Johns Hopkins University, …

Teaching Philippine Literature And Illness: Finding Cure In Humanities, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

Health and illness as themes are uncommonly being touched in literature classrooms. Other than the lack of interdisciplinary studies or specialists in this field in the Philippines; often teachers are also confronted with tons of materials that they are either overwhelmed to teach or find it difficult to deliver on their classes. This is the goal of this paper; help teachers gain confidence and basic knowledge of teaching literature that discusses health and illness especially at this time of history. Helping both teachers and students to understand and appreciate literature as a space for developing empathy while also honing their …

Internet Memes: Leaflet Propaganda Of The Digital Age, Joshua Troy Nieubuurt

English Faculty Publications

Internet memes are one of the latest evolutions of “leaflet” propaganda and an effective tool in the arsenal of digital persuasion. In the past such items were dropped from planes, now they find their way into social media across multiple platforms and their territory is global. Internet memes can be used to target specific groups to help build and solidify tribal bonds. Due to the ease of creation, and their ability to constantly reaffirm axiomatic tribal ideas, they have become an adroit tool allowing for mass influence across international borders. This text explores the link between internet memes and their …

The Digital Gaze: Anthropomorphic Reflections Of Future Posthuman Reality, Joshua Nieubuurt

English Faculty Publications

The human world continues to be ever more entangled with the nebulous realms of the digital. The digital lives of humans are constantly viewed, analyzed, and organized by the use of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as tools of governments, institutions, and corporations. Digital-machines are able to harvest massive swaths of data from users the world over including discursive elements and biometrics; accumulating the essences of what it means to dwell in a digital world. Although such digital-machines, and the algorithms on which they operate, are becoming more and more complex, they are still viewed as a tool …

Review Essay: "America's Hometown" Revisited, Drew Lopenzina

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

I Told You That To Tell You This: Metagaming And Metacognition In The Hybrid Classroom, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper theorizes the use of play and gamified methods to foster metacognition, or strategies for learning and learning about learning, in online graduate instruction. In the process, it calls into question the determinism of “serious” games as being the only means of facilitating metacognition. Ultimately, by adopting metagame approaches—that is, approaches based on0 goals and achievements that are external to the game and/or are developed by the players themselves—metacognition can and does occur because students participate in the development of the rewards. Moreover, any metagame feature ultimately becomes a commentary so that an approach based on metagaming offers its …

"The Most Glorious War Recorded In The British Annals”: Portugal In British Figurations Of The Peninsular War, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

“THE MOST GLORIOUS WAR RECORDED IN THE BRITISH ANNALS,” AS ROBERT Southey described it in the dedication of his History of the Peninsular War,1 the conflict that brought together Portugal, Spain, and Britain against Napoleon’s armies between 1807 and 1814 was a dominant preoccupation of the British public in general, and of the first generation of Romantics in particular.2 Many critics have shown the extent to which the Iberian uprising against the tyranny of Napoleon galvanized the British people, united the British nation, and afforded Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge a renewed opportunity to sympathize with the cause of …

The Vernacular As Method For Memory And Time: A Philological And Cultural Exploration Of Filipino Concepts For Memory Studies, Jocelyn Martin

English Faculty Publications

This article proposes the vernacular as a discursive methodological entry point to Memory Studies. A bottom-up approach, this article theorizes memory and time starting from a close-reading of signifiers from the Filipino language, thus allowing its culture to be considered in its own terms first. The first part of the essay examines a set of terms that show equivalences with Western conceptions of memory. The second set of signifiers—(ma)tandà(an), agam, limot/limót and panahon—reveal that they are actually more illustrative of the current trend of movement in Memory Studies; and that they translate more accurately both the non-linear and …

Fruit Fly, Amie S. Reilly

English Faculty Publications

A fruit fly has been hovering around my face for days, though maybe it isn’t the same fruit fly, since I’ve been told that fruit flies only live for twenty-four hours, yet there it is ...

Family Influences And Intersections: Adelaide F. Samuels Bassett And Susan Blagge Caldwell Samuels Marcy (Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels), Deidre Johnson

English Faculty Publications

A number of women who created children's series came from writing families – generally, mothers and daughters (like the two Elizabeth Stuart Phelpses) or sisters (like Julia A. Mathews and Joanna Hone Mathews). Adelaide F. Samuels and Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels offer a somewhat different example of this category in that they were sisters-in-law rather than biological relatives. Both women wrote professionally for only a short period: Susan Samuels is also among those authors who produced only one series before abandoning the genre. (Adelaide penned two and a standalone sequel.)

Talent, Tensions, And Tragedy: The Life And Writings Of Sarah E. Chester Logie, Deidre Johnson

English Faculty Publications

Demographically, Sarah E. Chester (who also wrote as Sallie Chester) shares several traits with other women who created girls' series. A minister's daughter, she lived in the Northeastern United States and had several family members who also wrote for publication. Like several of her counterparts with close associations to the clergy, she worked primarily with religious presses. And, like many married series authors, she found the shape of her life affected by her husband's actions and decisions – in her case, quite drastically. Although her fiction has distinctly religious elements, a number of Chester's stories are more notable for the …

The Enlightenment: John Messlier, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph: Today many exceptions seem obvious relevant to the historic advance of secularism from the Renaissance to the Reformation followed by the Enlightenment. However, a basic transition seems to have sustained itself over many decades in the modern recovery of religious disbelief ultimately derivative of pre-Socratic philosophy consolidated by Aristotle. For example, the two years of 1610-1611 seem to have set the stage for all three of the later historic epochs, the Renaissance followed by the Reformation and Enlightenment. The King James translation of the Bible in 1611 might have been a major achievement of the English Reformation just …

Suffering In Medical Contexts: Laughter, Humor, And The Medical Carnivalesque, Lisa Gabbert

English Faculty Publications

This article argues that a primary context for medical humor is a culture of suffering that permeates the medical profession and suggests that this laughter–suffering connection is part of a broader phenomenon called the medical carnivalesque that is found in medical culture.

Connecting Our Pedagogical Questions And Goals: An Exercise For Writing Teacher Development, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

English Faculty Publications

In this article, the author argues writing teachers can more fully inquire into their questions about teaching writing by paying closer attention to the ways their goals for teacher development shape their engagement in pedagogical inquiry. To explain these connections and illustrate these possibilities, the author shares findings from a narrative-inquiry study that examined the development of pedagogical inquiry in the lives of four teachers of writing. Using the participating teachers' shared goals for teacher development, the author demonstrates how writing teachers can reflect upon the development of pedagogical inquiry, stretch themselves to practice other aspects of pedagogical inquiry, and …

“Fantastic Tricks Before High Heaven,” Measure For Measure And Performing Triads, Emily Bryan

English Faculty Publications

Reading Measure for Measure through the logic of substitution has been a long-standing critical tradition; the play seems to invite topical, political, and religious parallels at every turn. What if the logic of substitution in the play goes beyond exchange and seeks out a triadic logic instead? This insistent searching for the triad appears most notably in the performance of Measure for Measure by Cheek by Jowl (2013–2019). Cheek By Jowl’s strategies of touring, simplicity, movement, and liberation create a dynamic and ever-evolving performance. This article puts Cheek by Jowl’s performance of Measure for Measure in conversation with C.S. Peirce’s …

After The Golem: Teaching Golems, Kabbalah, Exile, Imagination, And Technological Takeover., Temma F. Berg

English Faculty Publications

The golem is an elusive creature. From a religious perspective it enacts spirit entering matter, a creation story of potential salvation crossed with reprehensible arrogance. As a historical narrative, the golem story becomes a tale of Jewish powerlessness and oppression, of pogroms and ghettoization, of assimilation and exile, and sometimes, of renewal. As the subject of a course in women, gender and sexuality studies, the golem narrative can be seen as a relentless questioning of otherness and identity and as a revelation of the complex intersectionalities of gender, class, sexuality, race, disability, and ethnicity. As a philosophical motif, the ambiguous …

Full Disclosure / Now What?, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

New Possibilities For Field Experiences: Learning In Practice In A University Writing Center, Michelle Fowler-Amato

English Faculty Publications

In this article, I discuss an initiative to support preservice and practicing English language arts teachers in their growth as teachers of writers through a field experience in a university writing center. In addition, I highlight how I modified these plans when our campus transitioned to online teaching and learning in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Demonstrating how teachers grew, despite the challenges we faced, I argue the importance of teacher educators considering new possibilities for field-based teaching learning, particularly during a time in which preservice teachers may have limited access to learning in practice in K-12 schools.

Introduction: The Politics, Praxis, And Performativity Of Teacher Neutrality, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reader Response Theory: Students’ Encounter And Challenges With E- Literature, Ma. Junithesmer D. Rosales, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

This paper investigated the overall experience of learners with e-literature (e-lit). E-lit as a new form of economy in the field of literature and humanities prompted authors and scholars to create newborn sites of learning — videograph fiction, kinetic poetry, text tula (hyperpoem), and hyperfiction. Thus, the digitization of resource materials in literature led the researchers to investigate the outer circle of some of these new born sites by focusing on the following: readers and their experiences on understanding and learning through e-lit; textual which is concerned with performance and complexities of using this new form of literature; and cultural …

Black Feminists In Serialized Dramas: The Gender/Sex/Sexuality/Race Politics Of Being Mary Jane And Scandal, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

Starring representations of African-American women on television are rare. The versions of Black feminist characters on Scandal (ABC) and Being Mary Jane (BET) create a juxtaposition between a white supremacist Black feminism (Scandal) and an Afrocentric, female-centered rendering of Black feminism (Being Mary Jane).

“His Appearance Is Against Him”: Race And Criminality In Dorothy L. Sayers’S Unnatural Death, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This essay places Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel Unnatural Death (1927 ) in the context of heightened xenophobia and racism in interwar Britain, arguing that Sayers attempts to challenge prevalent cultural associations of blackness and criminality. Like Wilkie Collins, Sayers works to critique and undermine racist assumptions and to generate sympathy for the colonial Other.

Milton, Jerome, And Apocalyptic Virginity, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

Milton’s youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady’s movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton’s understanding of virginity’s poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise …

Together We Know A Lot: Consensus Decision Making In The Classroom, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

Student group work is common practice in many courses whether they are focused on writing theory or application. The purpose of this review is to introduce one strategy for teaching cooperative teamwork. It is easy to say to a group of students, “decide as a group…” It is less common, and I am certainly guilty of this, to provide clear directions on how to decide as a group.

Consensus decision making (CDM, or sometimes known as CBDM, consensus-based decision making) is a common strategy for making decisions as a group in collective and community organizing. Used in the classroom, CDM …

Joanna Hone Mathews And Julia Anthon Mathews: Sisterhood And Sunday School Books, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

A number of women who authored children’s series came from writing families, with parents, siblings, cousins, or other relatives also publishing in some fashion. Another group had connections to the clergy, with fathers or husbands (or both) serving as ministers or teaching religious studies. One small subset of this population was sisters who wrote girls’ or children’s series and who had ministers as fathers. The earliest such pair were Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815-1852) and Sarah Stuart Robbins (1817-1910), daughters of Andover theologian Moses Stuart (1780-1852). The most successful – in terms of series fiction ‑- were probably the Mathews sisters, …

Queering Consent: Design And Sexual Consent Messaging, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

For decades, sexual violence prevention and sexual consent have been a recurrent topic on college campuses and in popular media, most recently because of the success of the #MeToo movement. As a result, institutions are deeply invested in communicating consent information. This article problematizes those institutional attempts to teach consent by comparing them to an alternative grounded in queer politics. This alternative information may provide a useful path to redesigning consent information by destabilizing categories of gender, sexuality, and even consent itself.

Cocaine + Surfing: Reviewed By Jack Ryan, Gettysburg College, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

If you seek a conclusive answer to the question that seems to anchor Chas Smith's Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair, "Did surfing and cocaine start together in Peru and never leave each other's embrace?," you will be disappointed. In his preface, Smith discusses the death of Andy Irons, the three-time world surfing champion from Hawaii who died November 2, 2010, alone in a Dallas hotel room of cardiac arrest brought on by cocaine abuse. Irons was thirty-two years old. According to Smith, no one in the cosseted surfing world was surprised: "Drugs and …

The Black Bruins: Reviewed By Jack Ryan, Gettysburg College, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West opens with a nearly wordless fifteen-minute sequence in which three gunmen do nothing more than wait for the arrival of a train at a remote frontier station. Leone, Dario Argento, and Bernardo Bertolucci constructed the film's screenplay out of portions of their favorite classic westerns, and the opening is a homage to High Noon; however, Leone's three gunmen look nothing like the actors in High Noon. Jack Elam and Al Mulock look like they emerged directly from the desiccated landscape surrounding them, and Woody Strode emits a dusty elegance. …