English Language and Literature Commons^™

"She Had Ceased To Offer Her Stories For Publication": Louise M. Thurston And The Unfinished Charley Roberts Series, Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

One of the unsolved mysteries of series fiction is that of Louise M. Thurston, a promising author who wrote part of a series about siblings for Lee & Shepard -- then, apparently, just stopped writing. Thurston's brief career covers the four years between 1868-1872 and intersects with two significant trends in 19th-century children's publishing, the growth of Sunday-school libraries and the practice of issuing children's books in series. Her career illustrates in microcosm the markets for beginning writers, and its early termination raises questions about some of the problems they might have encountered. Entwined with Louise's history is that of …

Everything Is Relative: Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow (Aunt Fanny) And Sarah Leaming Barrow Holly (Aunt Fanny's Daughter), Deidre A. Johnson

English Faculty Publications

For more than forty years Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow's name – or, rather, that of her pseudonym, "Aunt Fanny" – remained before the public. In the 1850s and 1860s, she published five quirkily-titled series combining humor, moral instruction, and social awareness. By the 1870s and 1880s, her name was associated with children's charities and with club activities and literary salons. When she died in 1894, one obituary characterized her both as an author whose children's books "delighted the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present day" and as "a social star, known to everybody as 'Aunt Fanny.'" Yet even though her …

Prayer, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Lara Crowley, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne’S Poetry And Prose In Early Modern England, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Reese, Sam V. S., Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, And Loneliness, Louisiana State Up, Christina M. Tourino

English Faculty Publications

A book review by Christina Tourino, English faculty, of Sam Reese's book Blue Notes and is in Volume 4 of the Wachtung Review in July 2021.

Psychoanalysis, Dignity, And Life: An Introduction, David Metzger

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Twisting Facts To Suit Theories: In Defense Of Sherlock, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

In August 2011, the Albemarle County school board unanimously voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet from the sixth-grade curricula. Over twenty students beseeched the board for the book to remain, and they were ignored. Teachers were afraid to voice their opinions on the matter. The novel has not been taught since in Albemarle, on any grade level, nor any other Sherlock Holmes texts.

Lexical Complexity Of Academic Presentations: Similarities Despite Situational Differences, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

The present study examined the lexical complexity profiles of academic presentations of three groups of university students– native English speaking, English as a second language, and English as a lingua franca users. It adopted a notion of lexical complexity which includes lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication as main dimensions of the framework. The study aimed at finding out how the three academically similar groups of presenters compared on their lexical complexity choices, what the lexical complexity profiles of high quality students’ academic presentations looked like, and whether we can identify variables that contribute to the overall lexical complexity …

Writing "Under The Most Trying Circumstances": The Life And Interrupted Career Of Harriet Putnam Hill Nowell (May Mannering, Harriet Putnam), Deidre Johnson

English Faculty Publications

Harriet Putnam Hill Nowell is one of several authors who fall into two of the general categories for this study – wives of ministers and women responsible for only one series. Like other ministers' spouses, she wrote to supplement the family income and submitted some of her work to denominational publishers; unlike her counterparts, she had a husband who left the ministry after less than a decade, though that did not deter her from sending stories to religious periodicals. Like several of the other women with only one series, she found a publisher in Lee & Shepard during the firm's …

“The New Geography,” Material Science, And Narratology’S Space-Time Dichotomy: Notes Toward A Geographical Narratology, Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

This essay places narratology’s emphasis on space-time within the emergence of the discipline of geography and the rise of a materialist, hard science orientation in US institutions after WWII, ultimately arguing that a nascent geographical narratology should aspire to the broad intellectual scope of geography’s origins. “The new geography,” which emerged in 1887 and focused comprehensively on the relation of humans to the earth’s surface, subsequently contracted and fragmented with the post-war emphasis on material science. Likewise expanding in the rationalist post-war climate, classical narratology emphasized logical categories, especially the space-time dichotomy, divorced from human meanings. Today, cognitive research suggests …

Review Of Golem: Modern Wars And Their Monsters By Maya Barzilai, Temma F. Berg

English Faculty Publications

The golem crosses many borders. A popular culture icon and an enduring image of creative power, its hybridity contributes to its elusive nature. What it is and what it means shifts over time. Maya Barzilai's Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters takes a unique approach. Deeply interdisciplinary, as one must be to explore such a complex and paradoxical figure, and drawing on religious, literary, cinematic, and historical contexts, Barzilai weaves a rich tapestry of golem narratives. All the while, Barzilai keeps a clear eye on the golem's ongoing association with war, seeing its birth in the clay trenches of World …

When Basketball Was Jewish, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, describes Barney "Tiny" Sedran, born Bernard Sedransky on the Lower East Side of New York, as a quintessential Jewish basketball player: "manically energetic, compulsively alert, upending expectations, and compensating for short—really short—comings" (17). Sedransky was the "shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame," she writes, who excelled at a time "when Jews ruled basketball — and lest you think those last three words are a misprint, let me repeat: Jews ruled basketball" (17). Indeed, in the modern era it is easy to forget …

Expanding To The Edges: Central Numic Dual Number, John Mclaughlin

English Faculty Publications

The Central Numic (Uto-Aztecan) dual number marking system on nouns and pronouns is of interest because even though most of the component morphemes involved in the system are reconstructible to Proto-Numic, the system itself is not. Indeed, while the reconstructible Proto-Numic system is rudimentary, the Central Numic system is robust and has expanded to the point that there are few environments where dual is not marked on equal footing with singular and plural. The Central Numic system is of further interest because it involves cycles of grammaticalization and not just a single diachronic event. This contrasts with the other two …

Review: Time, Domesticity And Print Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Katherine Malone

English Faculty Publications

This is review of Time, Domesticity, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Maria Damkjaer was published on the website Review 19.

Student-Centered Pedagogy In The Chinese Classroom: Let’S Talk About Sexual Empowerment, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

This paper looks at the politics of teaching sexuality education, healthy and comprehensive focusing on issues specific to female sexuality, in the context of a Chinese university ELL classroom. Through feminist pedagogical approaches and feminist beliefs in healthy sexuality, this article explores how a university ELL classroom was transformed. As with their U.S. peers, many Chinese young people rely on unhealthy and inaccurate information about human sexuality through pornography or dubious internet searches. Through feminist pedagogical approaches that focus on student-centered learning, critical thinking, and open debate, teachers can integrate controversial topics into a classroom setting to benefit the health …

The Burden Of Ambiguity: Writing At A Cooperative, Avery C. Edenfield

English Faculty Publications

Purpose: While many organizations use ambiguity to strategically build a "unified diversity" around an organization's mission, democratically managed organizations need to tread a narrow path between necessary ambiguity (which allows flexibility) and dysfunctional ambiguity (which causes disarray). To illustrate, I report a subset of findings regarding occasions when ambiguous documents had a significant impact on a democratically managed organization.

Methods: I conducted a three-phase study of a democratic cooperative. Using a mixed-methods approach, I sought to uncover the ways technical and professional communication (TPC) concerns like ambiguity and clarity function in a democratic business. In my analysis, I looked for …

A.S. Byatt And The ‘Perpetual Traveller’: A Reading Practice For New British Fiction, Nicole Flynn

English Faculty Publications

While most readers enjoyed, or at least admired A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize-winning novel Possession, many are puzzled by her work before and since. This essay argues that the problem is not the novels themselves, but rather the way that reader approaches them. Conventional reading practices for experimental or postmodern fiction do not enable the reader to understand and enjoy her dense, dizzying work. By examining the intertexts in her novella “Morpho Eugenia,” in particular two imaginary texts written by the protagonist William Adamson, this essay demonstrates how the novella generates a different kind of reading practice. Using Byatt’s metaphor, the …

Exporting America Via Leipzig, Germany: Tauchnitz Editions And The International Popularization Of American Literature, Charles Johanningsmeier

English Faculty Publications

In the twenty-first century, making a literary work readily available and potentially famous worldwide can, via the internet, be accomplished quite easily and almost instantaneously. During the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, however, because works of fiction were published only in paper formats, and the existing means for distributing such materials and information about them were quite limited, this process was much more difficult and took considerably longer. Somewhat surprisingly, the companies that in the past actually made American literary works available to readers outside the United States have thus far received comparatively little scholarly attention. Understanding these …

Reverse Engineering The First Humanities Computing Center, Steven E. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, is often called the founder of humanities computing. In fact, starting as early as 1949, he collaborated with IBM to perform experiments using suites of punched-card machines. These punched-card data systems—with their plug-board setups, clacking machinery, and flurries of perforated rectangular cards—were developed for business accounting and tabulating, and adapted for government censuses, defense calculations, archival management, and information processing of all kinds. The first decade of humanities computing can more accurately be described as an era of humanities data processing—in the historically specific and contextually rich sense of the term. This essay describes an …

Review Of W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’S Religious Past, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Sky Of Our Manufacture: The London Fog In British Fiction From Dickens To Woolf, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Afterword: Horizons Of Transformation: When Age, Literacy And Scholarship Meet, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dialogical Numbers: Counting Humanimal Pain In J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Mike Piero

English Faculty Publications

This essay argues that J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello stages numerical sequences strategically, dialogically, and parodically in order to call attention to the ideological weight involved in counting. Focusing on how one counts - and accounts for - human and nonhuman animal pain, I contend that the repetition of numbers in the novel works to subvert the neoliberal faith put in numbers, quantification, and data. Without succumbing to some religious-mystical numerology, this reading attempts to expose the fiction involved in the act of counting and the need to pay more attention to numerical discourse in literary fiction. In tracking these numbers …

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

Growing Pains: The Transformative Journey From A Nascent To A Formal Not-For-Profit Venture, Avery C. Edenfield, Fredrik O. Andersson

English Faculty Publications

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the …

Social Justice Across The Curriculum: Research-Based Course Design, Rebecca Walton, Jared Sterling Colton, Rikki Kae Wheatley-Boxx, Krista Gurko

English Faculty Publications

This Programmatic Showcase describes why and how Utah State University redesigned our Technical Communication and Rhetoric program to incorporate considerations of social justice across the curriculum. After describing our programmatic vision, we describe in detail the design of a pedagogical study informing our curricular redesign and then share strategies for course design and university-community partnerships. The course-design strategies include 1) explicitly framing courses around broad issues of social justice, 2) incorporating hands-on practice to connect conceptions of social justice to professional practices, and 3) facilitating opportunities for both students and clients to reflect upon these connections. The strategies for facilitating …

Emily Dickinson's Funeral And The Paradox Of Literary Fame, Paul Crumbley

English Faculty Publications

In the months preceding her death on May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson requested that Emily Brontë's poem "No coward soul is mine" be read at her funeral, thereby enlisting Brontë's defiant declaration of immortality in what can be interpreted as Dickinson's own equally defiant final statement on the relation of fame to enduring art. Dickinson expressed the logic behind this request four years earlier in an 1882 letter to Roberts Brothers editor Thomas Niles in which she refused his request for a "volume of poems" (L749b) and instead sent him "How happy is the little Stone" (Fr1570E), a poem in …

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Died Today. Or, Maybe, Yesterday; I Can't Be Sure..., Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

50 years on, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead continues to captivate and to entertain audiences with its darkly comic examination of existential themes of life, death, and indecision drawn from the pages, situations, and characters of Hamlet. First produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the play opened at the Old Vic in London in 1967, and has been reprised there this season to rave reviews, with none other than Harry Potter in a leading role.

Review Of "Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies And Baseball's Unwritten Code", Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

This is a review of William C. Kashatus's Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies and Baseball's Unwritten Code, an account of the misfit bunch that almost returned World Series glory to the City of Brotherly Love.

Review Of "Masters Of The Games", Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

A review of Joseph Epstein's Masters of the Games, a collection of essays, profiles, short stories, and opinion pieces about sports.