English Language and Literature Commons^™

"I Thought Perhaps The Reaper Was Going To Do Something To You": The Serpent's Kiss And The Issue Of Reverse-Objectification, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

In this discussion, I examine the continual problem of female representation in the movie narrative. Movie narratives often rely on female characters situated in roles that find them objectified by males, allowing us to hypothesize--as the body of feminist film criticism has done since at least the mid- I970s--that she also becomes objectified by her viewing audience. Then calling for a sweeping change in the mindsets of both male and female filmmakers, Sharon Smith precisely points out the problems of female representation:

"The role of the woman in a film almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating …

"Drive-By English": Teaching College English To High School Students Via Interactive Tv, Alan Blackstock, Virginia Norris Exton

English Faculty Publications

This paper outlines challenges in and essential criteria for the success of dual-credit or concurrent-enrollment writing and literature courses delivered via interactive video technology and suggests specific strategies for administrators, instructors, and classroom facilitators regarding student selection, appropriate technology, and classroom management.

Rhizome National Identity: "Scatlin's Psychic Defense' In Trainspotting, Jennifer Jeffers

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Pale: Women, Cultural Contagion, And Narrative Hysteria In Kipling, Orwell, And Forster, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Now You're A Man [Book Review], Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Short Fiction By Women In The Victorian Literature Survey, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

The first time I taught a Victorian Literature survey, fresh out of a curriculum integration workshop in graduate school, I taught ten authors: five male and five female. One student evaluation after the course was over complained that despite the promise of “great” Victorian writers, half of those on the syllabus were women. While this did take place in the dark ages of the early nineties, I still find myself, as I design my syllabi, caught in the familiar conundrum as to what to teach, what to cut, and why. In my case, it seems simple: The Victorian period is …

More Borrowing From Bellegarde In Delarivier Manley's Queen Zarah And The Zarazians, Rachel Carnell

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Marlin, Jennifer Sinor

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Charismatic Iranian American Engineer, Jane Meehan

English Faculty Publications

This is the story of Iranian engineer Mostafa Jamshidi and his twenty-five years in Nebraska: his student days, his experiences with the immigration department and his eventual citizenship, his work history, and his personal life as told by his English teacher and surrogate mother. His language skills, soccer playing, and personality enabled him to combat his homesickness and the harassment of the immigration officials. The University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Nebraska Department of Roads gave him a place to learn and grow despite the time and geography in which he was born. The Great Plains, with its friendliness, …

David Finkelstein. The House Of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations In The Victorian Era, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

This book combines and expands on three articles previously published independently in journals of textual criticism. Though the added material on the rise and decline of the House of Blackwood from 1804 to 1912 will interest primarily readers concerned with the history of Blackwood's, the three core chapters presenting case studies of the relations of the firm with particular authors-John Hanning Speke, Charles Reade, and Margaret Oliphant-provide valuable insights into the ways in which Victorian editors and authors manipulated one another for both commercial and ideological ends.

Reading As A Criminal In Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Ethnography In The Post-Process Writing Classroom, Jennifer Sinor, Michael Huston

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Shaping A Body Of One’S Own: Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron Mills And Waiting For The Verdict, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Shaping A Body Of One’S Own: Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron Mills And Waiting For The Verdict, Adam Sonstegard

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The "Beyondness Of Things" In The Buccaneers: Vernon Lee's Influence On Edith Wharton's Sense Of Places, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since its publication in 1938, readers have been at odds in their assessment of The Buccaneers, Edith Wharton's only novel set in England. While her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, and many early reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw great promise in the unfinished novel, a few critics like Edmund Wilson wrote the work off as 'an old-fashioned story for girls' and judged Wharton's skill 'dulled' in this her last book. In the 1980's, however, feminist critics found much to value in the novel: from protagonist Annabel St. George's self-actualization to the comradeship of the American girls and the …

A Conversation With Velma Pollard, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Noted poet, novelist, linguist, and educator, Velma Pollard was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, during the fall semester of 2001 when I conducted the following interview. John Martin, my graduate assistant at the time, assisted me in videotaping and transcribing our conversation, which took place in her cottage at the University on December 3, 2001.

Transitions: From Nell Cody To Nancy Drew, From Bungalow Outline To Book, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, Susan Naramore Maher

English Faculty Publications

At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, "[each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I'd found it all—the work, the love, and the ideal way to live—something brought change to me." Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence's Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America.

A Review Of Cyberactivism: Online Activism In Theory And Practice, Kevin Eric De Pew

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Redefining Intimacy: Carver And Conversation, Frank Bramlett, David Raabe

English Faculty Publications

Raymond Carver's short story "Intimacy," a poignant exploration of the relationship between an ex-husband and ex-wife, paints for the reader a picture of this ex-couple's rocky history and their current estrangement. The ex-husband narrator, a relatively well-known writer of fiction, arrives unannounced at his ex-wife's home, and she lets him in. While this scene is ordinary enough, Carver's telling of the story is unique. The story itself consists largely of dialogue; there is precious little in the way of action, setting, or exposition. In comparison to most fiction, the proportions of this dialogue are highly skewed: the ex-wife unequivocally dominates …

Review Of Jack Santino’S Signs Of War And Peace, Jeannie Thomas

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …