English Language and Literature Commons^™

Breaking The Silence, Allison Schuette

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

World War I, Anti-German Hysteria, The “Spanish” Flu, And My Ántonia, 1917–1919, Charles Johanningsmeier

English Faculty Publications

At first glance, My Ántonia might seem to have nothing to do with World War I. Despite the fact that Cather’s fourth novel was written between the fall of 1916 and June 1918, the war is nowhere mentioned in it, and no evidence exists to suggest that Cather consciously intended to embed any type of commentary about the war within its pages. Nevertheless, My Ántonia is inextricably connected to the war, chiefly because its early sales and reception among American readers were very likely heavily influenced by the xenophobic attitudes that the war exacerbated.

Rule Conflation In An Inferential-Realizational Theory Of Morphotactics, Gregory Stump

English Faculty Publications

In intuitive terms to be sharpened below, the micromorphology hypothesis is the hypothesis that an affix can itself be morphologically complex. This is a widespread assumption in descriptive accounts of the morphology of individual languages; yet, with only the rarest exceptions (e.g., the proposals of Bauer 1988; Bochner 1992 and Luís & Spencer 2005), morphological theory has tended to reject this hypothesis, most often tacitly. My objective here is therefore threefold. I begin by characterizing the micromorphology hypothesis in more precise terms, exemplifying it with the analysis of nominal inflection in Noon (Niger Congo/Atlantic; Senegal) presented by Soukka (2000) and …

A Study In The Humor Of The Old Northeast: Joseph C. Neal's Charcoal Sketches And The Comic Urban Frontier Studies In American Humor, David E.E. Sloane

English Faculty Publications

Joseph C. Neal pioneered the urban frontier of the Old Northeast in depicting what he called "hard cases" from the Philadelphia slums in the long-overlooked Charcoal Sketches, first published in book form in 1838. His characters' inability to change with the times, their false and vulnerable toughness, and their urban vernacular language look forward to the humor of Mark Twain, political commentators, and radio and TV sitcoms. In Neal's work, the cash economy, the lightly ironic euphuistic character study, and metaphors of the city are used to describe the new social and ethical paradoxes of the urban-industrial world already emerging …

Forty-Five Minutes That Changed The World: The September Dossier, British Drama, And The New Journalism, George Potter

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Expanding Transnational Frames Into Composition Studies: Revising The Rhetoric And Writing Minor At The American University In Cairo, James P. Austin

English Faculty Publications

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include …

This As Theory In The Context Of The London School Stylistics: A Prolegomena To A Longer Note, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Boxed Wine Feminisms: The Rhetoric Of Women’S Wine Drinking In The Good Wife, Tammie M. Kennedy

English Faculty Publications

Two contending narratives about the drinking culture of women in the twenty-first century are represented by these opening quotations. On one hand, many feminists have distanced themselves from temperance rhetorics, opting instead to disrupt a traditional gender role associated with abstinence. On the other hand, the myriad of choices afforded by feminism and the increase in alcohol consumption among women have suggested that drinking practices are a reflection of the complexities of women’s roles in the new millennium. Some other critics go as far as blaming feminism for the increase in drinking. Regardless, drinking practices function rhetorically, pointing to “questions …

Oxymoronic Whiteness: From The Whitehouse To Ferguson, Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, Krista Ratcliffe

English Faculty Publications

THIS COLLECTION ESPOUSES a rhetorical lens for employing theories and methods of whiteness studies to analyze twenty-first-century texts and contexts; as such, it argues for the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century. In particular, this collection identifies new sites for analyses of racialized whiteness, such as digitized representations of whiteness on the web and implicit representations of racialized whiteness in educational policies and politics. In the process, this collection exposes how seemingly progressive gains made in representing nonwhites in various cultural sites often reify a normative, racialized whiteness.

Ophelia's Desire, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

Psychoanalytic criticism renders Ophelia anomalous, no longer Hamlet's erotic object in her own right but a refraction of his cathexis on the Queen. This approach obscures how profoundly Ophelia, the only daughter in William Shakespeare to renounce the lover her father forbids, violates generic norms, and how structurally similar Hamlet's two examples of madness are. Hamlet and Ophelia go mad after sacrificing the independent (and expected) aims of adulthood at the commands of fathers whom the play links to figures of murderous aggression against children: the biblical Jephthah and Seneca's filicidal ghosts. Hamlet is a play haunted by fathers who …

I Need A Prince To Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning "Happily Ever After" In Gloria Naylor's Women Of Brewster Place, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 23

I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

"That Irate Pornographist": Gender And Nature In Mina Loy's "Songs To Joannes", Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Public Fallout Of The Humanities Crisis: Critiquing The Public Turn In Rhetoric And Composition Studies, Mary Beth Pennington, Tonya Ritola, Belinda Walzer

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

RECENTLY, KENTUCKY GOVERNOR Matt Bevin stated unequivocally that college students majoring in electrical engineering were more deserving of state funding than those majoring in French literature (Cohen). In a primary debate for the election of 2016, Republican presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio cautioned philosophy majors that they would be better off learning how to weld (Rappeport), and within the last two years, the Obama administration proposed that we begin ranking US colleges and universities on earnings after graduation—a proposal that rankled colleges and universities and sent humanities scholars into an even deeper tailspin (Shear).

Aging Athletes, Broken Bodies, And Disability In Jack London's Prizefighting Prose, Cara E. Kilgallen

English Faculty Publications

Jack London's name often conjures up images of dogs plowing through Alaska's desolate wilderness, or of robust men journeying into the wild; however, pictures of broken bodies struggling for survival in a boxing ring less readily come to mind. Few think of London as a sports writer, yet his illustrations of prizefighting reveal an author interested not only in able bodied athletes but in disabled and weakened ones as well. Although he is best known for his Klondike stories, nautical adventures, and socialist sentiments, the author's fascination with fitness shows that sport and the body are just as central to …

On John Wilmot (Lord Rochester) "Upon Nothing": A London School Stylistics Account, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Multisensory Tristram Shandy, Cynthia N. Malone

English Faculty Publications

An absorbed reader typically pays little conscious attention to the visual, tactile, and sometimes aural sensory experiences of reading. Unexpected formal and visual features of Laurence Sterne’s nine-volume fictional narrative, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, startle readers out of absorption and call attention to familiar operations like decoding black figures on white paper and turning pages. My edition of Volume I is designed to engage the senses through its visual structure, textures, and unexpected materials (buttons, marbled paper strips, and ribbons) and through formal surprises (interpolated documents, accordion-fold inserts, and paper lace). In its structure …

Review: Walt Whitman 'S Selected Journalism. Ed. Douglas A. Noverr And Jason Stacy, Martin T. Buinicki

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

From The Perspective Of Eternity, Robin Mcallister

English Faculty Publications

This is a partial history of the literary topos “sub specie aeternitatis”. The Latin phrase means “from the perspective of eternity”. Eternity is the way God sees the universe, not as a succession of moments in time from past, to present, to future, but as a simultaneous present which includes the past and future as if they are already and always present. This temporal simultaneity is accompanied by a spatial totality and simultaneity. In both Chaucer and Dante the protagonist ends life’s wanderings and struggles by being carried up into the heavens and looking back on earth from the point …

Lessons For A Young Critic: Immersing Yourself In The Generosity Of Henry James Toward Balzac, Richard Goodman

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Virtue Is As Much Debased As Our Money”: Generic And Economic Instability In Love’S Last Shift, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

In January 1696, Colley Cibber’s first comedy, Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion, debuted to great success at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The play was a hit and immediately entered the repertory, where it remained for decades. It inspired a sequel, John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), which debuted the following season and also became a stock play. Despite early audiences’ appreciation for Love’s Last Shift, however, modern critics have shown less enthusiasm. For scholars of British drama, the play is frequently a symbol of the shift from the rakish, witty, aristocratic comedies of the …

Poor, Pitiful Monsters From Homer To Borges, Robin Mcallister

English Faculty Publications

This article reviews famous monsters in Western literature that reveal a hidden humanity or affinity with the hero that elicits compassion or emphasizes their bestiality in surprising ways. Their monstrosity is often a distorted mirror image of the hero’s humanity. Shakespeare’s Caliban is a famous example of the affinity between monster and protagonist. Homer’s Polyphemus, the first monster in Western tradition establishes certain traits that persist through later literature: lawless, barbarian, cannibal, and giant. Polyphemus hates men, but loves his old ram. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon in Beowulf are giants, lawless, cannibals. The dragon Beowulf dies fighting anticipates …

‘How Little I Cared For Fame’: T. Sparrow And Women’S Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the work of an overlooked female journalist, T. Sparrow, arguing that her career reveals the difficulties female journalists faced when negotiating between the expectations of middle-class gentility and the demands of investigative journalism.

Sparrow asserted her gentility rhetorically, in part because female reporters who took up investigative reporting were vulnerable to criticism for assaying beyond domestic subjects. Moreover, incognito investigative reporting often brought celebrity to its practitioners, which challenged the convention of middle-class female modesty.

Sparrow, therefore, strove for a delicate balance in her career—assuming the stance of a middle-class woman who lived among the poor, someone …

Entertaining Angels: Homelessness And The Hospitality Of Faith In Adams County, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I first volunteered at a soup kitchen in the frigid depths of winter in very late 1981 or very early 1982, in the heart of the Rust Belt in the midst of a terrible recession. I should emphasize right from the onset that I didn’t want to be there: I was next to useless and very intimidated, forced to be there by the tradition of service at my all-boys Catholic high school. Still, the experience made quite an impression on me, and I tell that story to my students so that they will understand that I know what’s like to …

Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics With An Ethic Of Care, Jared Sterling Colton

English Faculty Publications

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment …

Three Ways In: Approaches To Teaching Visual Rhetoric Through Infographics Programs, Marisa Sandoval Lamb, Jenna Sheffield, Kristin Winet

English Faculty Publications

In this Kairos PraxisWiki webtext, we use Hill's three-part framework to address concerns like those espoused by Handa about rhetorical illiteracy in relationship to visual rhetoric and design, and we share three assignments of varying scope and sequence that respond to these challenges. Besides learning opportunities to explore and practice visual rhetoric, design, and writing, each assignment offers opportunities for students to explore Piktochart, a web-based drag-and-drop infographic program, which can be used to create infographics, posters, and presentations. Because of its drag-and-drop capabilities, our students generally find it easy to learn. With minimal guidance, students may learn program basics …

The Return Of The Poor Man: Jude The Obscure And Late Victorian Socialism, Suzanne J. Flynn

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines Hardy's decision at the end of his career as a novelist to return to the "striking socialistic" themes which had defined his first (unpublished) novel. Jude the Obscure is Hardy's exploration of the spiritual and intellectual deprivation that attends the condition of the working-class poor. While the novel was reviled at the time as blatantly "anti-marriage," its fiercest polemic is reserved for the soul-destroying economic and social systems which continued to keep the class structure rigidly intact. While Hardy was never a socialist himself, his final novel has much in common with the numerous socialist and radical …

Will They Read It?, William H. Lane

English Faculty Publications

The Pennsylvania Health Care Plan Saves Money, But Will Legislators Take Time to Read the Bill?

Al the new year begins, it's time to hitch up our britches and take a look at how things are going with healthcare insurance reform. [excerpt]

Contract Grading In A Technical Writing Classroom: A Case Study, Lisa M. Litterio

English Faculty Publications

The subjectivity of assessing writing has long been an issue for instructors, who carefully craft rubrics and other indicators of assessment while students grapple with understanding what constitutes an "A" and how to meet instructor-generated criteria. Based on student frustration with traditional grading practices, this case study of a 20-student technical writing classroom employed teacher-as-researcher observation and student surveys to examine how students in a technical writing classroom in the Northeast collaborated together to generate criteria relating to the quality of their writing assignments. The study indicates that although students perceive more involvement in the grading process, they resist participation …

Plotting The “Female Wits” Controversy: Gender, Genre, And Printed Plays, 1670–1699, Mattie Burket

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comics And Linguistics, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

However we define comics, it is safe to claim that in general they consist of two main components: images and language. With some exceptions, the vast majority of comics include linguistic elements: speech balloons, thought balloons, narrative boxes, sound effects, and ambient language (language used in the background, as on store fronts, t-shirts, restaurant menus, and the like). Comics scholarship examines the language used in comics to say something about narrative, character development, even the nature of comics themselves. And while fitful linguistic analysis of comics began in the early 20^th century, only recently has the academic discipline of …