English Language and Literature Commons^™

Building A Communication-Integrated Curriculum In Materials Science, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

With the need to meet ABET outcomes around professional skills, such as communication and teamwork, engineering programs have long explored approaches to ensure their graduates are able to participate in the workplace in ways that employers demand. While approaches vary and success depends on a number of factors, research demonstrates that an integrated approach to professional skill development is the most impactful for student learning. How can an engineering program build an integrated approach that provides meaningful communication education?

This paper shares the experiences from faculty in a material science and engineering program that has created an integrated approach to …

An Image For All: The Rhetoric For Writing Alt-Text, Sherena Huntsman

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Alternative text is a necessary part of the document design process that often becomes relegated to the work of web developers as part of the coding and tagging of digital documents for accessibility. However, alt-text is a meaning making tool that should be a normalized part of TPC document design practices. This paper uses preliminary interview data with screen reader users to understand the complex rhetorical experience of alt-text use in an effort to offer more effective alt-text investigation and practices in order to develop more inclusive environments that welcome all users.

“You Should Pray I Choose The Latter”: Rioting, Violence, & Jouissance, Gautam Basu Thakur

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the climactic scene from the film The Great Debaters (2007), James L. Framer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), speaking for the motion “Resolved: Civil Disobedience is a Moral weapon in the fight for Justice,” rebuts the opponent team from Harvard University and clinches a win for his team, Wiley College, with the following words:

St. Augustine said an unjust law is no law at all, which means I have a right, even a duty, to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

(1:52:20 – 1:55:45)

Farmer Jr.’s words receive a standing ovation from the predominantly …

Centering Equity And Inclusion In Engineering Collaboration And Writing, Jennifer C. Mallette

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper focuses on preliminary findings from a study that asked students and alumni to share their stories around teamwork and communication in engineering settings. In addition to student and alumni stories of teamwork, engineering faculty were interviewed to learn more about how they approach collaborative and communication-based projects and how consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teaching. The goal was to connect the ways that instructors frame these collaborative projects and to surface how implicit biases may emerge and impact students. The findings reported here focus on what students and alumni participants shared about their positive and negative …

Addressing Workplace Accessibility Practices Through Technical Communication Research Methods: One Size Does Not Fit All, Sherena Huntsman

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Accessibility of digital materials within workplaces continues to be an issue that is not readily and completely addressed through legal compliance and institutional policy. Despite the lack of marked improvement in digital accessibility, many continue to pursue a policy approach to accessibility, including checklists and guidelines. Literature review: Despite the attention paid to accessibility and surrounding issues by scholars in the field of technical and professional communication, little direction has been given to help practitioners advocate for accessibility in the workplace. Research question: Can common ground between institutional values and accessibility be discovered and leveraged to motivate value-driven accessibility? …

Sounding Two Notes: Re-Reading Virginia Woolf And Elizabeth Bishop, Cheryl Hindrichs

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Near the end of the first part of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse (1927), "The Window," the Ramsay family and their invited guests have withdrawn for the evening after a feast of boeuf en daube—the children to bed, the guests to their rooms, and finally Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay to sit across from each other reading. Conscious of her husband's attention, Mrs. Ramsay wishes that he would not disturb her in this pleasant moment of reading but allow her to go on perusing lines of poetry at random and dreaming over them, that he would for once, for …

Publishing In The Teaching Linguistics Section Of Language, Kazuko Hiramatsu, Michal Temkin Martinez

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The mission of the Teaching Linguistics section of Language is to publish high-quality peer-reviewed articles in the area of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Publications in the section focus on issues that relate not only to the direct teaching of linguistics, but also to the application of linguistic concepts and theories and the insight it provides about teaching and education more broadly.

Burying The Body: Pandemic And Public Health In Hawthorne's The House Of The Seven Gables, Tom J. Hillard

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article discusses Hawthorne's engagement with discourses of public health, disease, and burial practices in The House of the Seven Gables. The recurring descriptions of the decayed house and its stifling air, coupled with the frequent imagery of bodies/corpses within it, evoke contemporary historical concerns related to “miasma,” disease, and public health, as well as changing burial practices during the first half of the nineteenth century. These issues were made even more pressing, especially in urban centers, by the devastating 1832 and 1849 cholera pandemics, and Hawthorne's experiences with these events make their way into his writing. The fearful …

Northern Paiute, Ruth Hoodie Lewis, Timothy Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Northern Paiute (ISO 639-3, pao) is a Numic language of the Western branch and represents the northwestern-most extent of the Uto-Aztecan family. The language is described as consisting of two major dialects and numerous subdialects. Nichols (1974) refers to the southern Northern Paiute dialect as Nevada Northern Paiute (NNP, historically also called Paviotso) and the northern variety represented here as Oregon Northern Paiute (ONP, which includes Bannock). Speaker estimates are somewhat anecdotal but generally fall within the 400–700 range. Speakers are unevenly distributed across various reservation communities of the northern Great Basin region of the western United States. Speakers of …

Creating Presence Through Video In Teaching Shakespeare Online, Jennifer Black

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article focuses on Community of Inquiry model that is a framework for creating meaningful learning experiences such as defines three kinds of presence that contribute to an effective online course such as teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Topics include examines that social presence describes the ability of instructors and students to trust and connect with each other as human beings.

“Almost Unknown To The General Reader”: Biographical And Conceptual Contexts Of Melville’S Marginalia In Thomas Warton’S The History Of English Poetry, Steven Olsen-Smith, Cheyene Austin, Denise Holbrook

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Herman Melville’s copy of Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (1871) both epitomises the fate of Melville’s dispersed library and illustrates the challenges and importance of his reading and marginalia to research on his life and writings. This 1032-page volume left Melville’s library following his death in 1891; it was discovered in the 1930s, subsequently lost, and rediscovered in 1999. Twice rebound and missing its original endpapers, the extremely brittle volume has now been digitised at Melville’s Marginalia Online. Melville’s markings and annotations reveal his preoccupation with Warton’s attention to subjects “almost unknown to the general reader”: lost …

A Credited Support Course: Corequisite Writing Course At Boise State University, Karen S. Uehling

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1981, when I began teaching at Boise State University, the institution still filled the community college function, the teaching load was heavy (five or even six courses per term), and preparing students for first year writing was the goal of basic writing. I felt immersion in a full, rich writing and reading experience, not primarily grammar review, was essential. I entered Boise State with experience teaching at a small college in western North Carolina where I first encountered Mina Shaughnessy; I admired how she took basic writing seriously. After four years in North Carolina, in 1980-81, I participated in …

Toidɨkadɨ (Cattail-Eaters) Of Stillwater Marsh, Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wuzzie George (b. ~1880, d. December 20, 1984) was, by all accounts, a true keeper of traditional knowledge. Over the course of more than three decades, she provided detailed ethnographic information about her people, the Toidɨkadɨ (Cattail-Eaters), for ethnographer Margaret Wheat (1967) and anthropologist and historical linguist Catherine S. Fowler (1992). Wuzzie also had an ongoing working relationship with the intrepid folklorist Sven Liljeblad, as evidenced by this prayer, which she composed for him in Fallon, Nevada, during a time of illness.

Duck Valley Reservation (Owyhee, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Shoshone-Paiute community of Duck Valley includes reservation territory that straddles the Idaho-Nevada border. Recordings of the Duck Valley communolect were made at the home of the speaker’s niece in the presence of several extended family members, including speakers, passive bilinguals and non-speakers alike, as well as children. The speaker was 60 years old at the time and clearly enjoyed recounting Coyote stories. That said, a few of the stories were considered by her family to be a bit too lurid to include here.

Northern Paiute Texts: Introduction, Tim Thornes, Maziar Toosarvandani

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This volume of Northern Paiute texts is the result of continued collaborative relationships between members of several Northern Paiute (Western Numic; Uto-Aztecan) speech communities and two linguists who have nearly 30 years of combined experience working on the language. The resulting documentary resource provides varied samples of naturally occurring speech—narratives recorded and analyzed by the editors as part of their own fieldwork as well as materials recorded of earlier generations of speakers. In one case, materials from three generations of speakers from the same speech community are provided. By providing access in a single volume to previously inaccessible texts from …

Bannock (Fort Hall, Idaho), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Bannock, whose precontact territory centered around the Snake River plain of southwestern Idaho and the Boise River valley, speak the variety of Northern Paiute most influenced by its close linguistic relative, Shoshoni. This influence may be due to a combination of factors, including the overlapping nature of aboriginal territories, the acquisition of the horse and buffalo-hunting culture, and the later impact of a one-way bilingualism that was present on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, whereby nearly all Bannock speakers also spoke (and speak) Shoshoni, but not the reverse. The number of Bannock speakers, currently, may be no more than …

Wadadɨka’A (Burns Paiute Reservation, Oregon), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Harney Valley, or tibidzi yipɨ (the True Valley), region of southeastern Oregon is a rich and varied landscape consisting of all the extremes one expects to find in the Great Basin—vast marshlands, high-elevation grasslands, alkali basins, pine forest, and ephemeral lakebeds and rivers. This high desert area attracts hundreds of thousands of water and other fowl (as well as birdwatchers) on their seasonal migration. Water has been, and remains, a source of tension in the region, as does the management of federal land more generally, including, in particular, the allocation of grazing rights. The occupation of the headquarters of …

Fort Mcdermitt Reservation (Mcdermitt, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The McDermitt reservation straddles the Oregon-Nevada border and is the home of the majority of all remaining first language Northern Paiute speakers. Like the Duck Valley Reservation, it is quite isolated, lying approximately 90 miles northeast of the town of Winnemucca, Nevada (population > 7,000). The following stories are two of the many texts collected in the early 1960s by Sven Liljeblad from Pete Snapp, a fluent speaker from McDermitt. Mr. Snapp was in his early nineties at the time of this recording, which was made on reel-to-reel tape and archived as part of the Sven Liljeblad Collection in the Special …

Yahooskin (Beatty, Oregon), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although it is clear that the term “Yahooskin” is not a native term (likely originating from the Sahaptin (Ichiskiin) language), it has been in general use as a reference to disparate Northern Paiute bands (e.g., YapatɨkaɁa, ‘wild carrot-eaters’) around any of several lake basins of south-central Oregon, including the Silver, Summer, and Abert lakes, and the Warner Valley region. These bands were brought together after the formation of the Klamath Reservation and the signing of the treaty at Yainax in 1864. The “Yahooskin Band of Snake Indians,” as they had come to be called, were most closely tied to the …

Kuiyuidɨkadɨ (Pyramid Lake Reservation, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Pyramid Lake Reservation is about an hour’s drive northeast of Reno, Ne- vada. As such, it lies close to the major isogloss boundary that separates Oregon Northern Paiute (including Bannock) from Nevada Northern Paiute (Paviotso). The lake, a remnant of ancient Lake Lahontan, is home to the endemic Lahontan cutthroat trout, known locally as kuiyui, and is a popular fishery.

Building Student Agency Through Contract Grading In Technical Communication, Jennifer C. Mallette, Amanda Hawks

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The scholarship on contract grading has focused on the impacts in first-year writing, but little work explores how contract grading is used in other writing contexts, specifically technical communication. In fact, a focus on contract grading can align with the social justice turn in technical communication if viewed as a way to enact feminist and antiracist pedagogies. In this reflection, we--an instructor of an introductory technical communication service course and a student who took that class--share our experiences around contract grading. After providing an overview of the course and institutional context, we reflect together on our experiences around student perceptions …

Elizabeth Bishop's Perspectives On Marriage, Jeffrey Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.
- Martin Buber

In a number of texts, both published and unpublished, Elizabeth Bishop addresses the themes of marriage, love, and courtship. Such issues were vexed ones for her. As a young woman, she rejected Robert Seaver’s marriage proposal (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 112). Later, her friend Pauline Hemingway wondered in a letter whether she and Tom Wanning were engaged (Millier, Elizabeth Bishop 201), and Robert Lowell famously confessed to her that she was the …

The Trial Of The (Eighteenth) Century: Active Learning And Moll Flanders, Ann Campbell

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Like every professor of eighteenth-century British literature I know, I find it challenging to fill undergraduate courses in my field. The English majors who have satisfied the prerequisites for 300-level period-based courses tend to gravitate to classes they assume will straightforwardly address their concerns and reflect their experiences. Consequently, courses on eighteenth-century authors such as Daniel Defoe often get cancelled while surveys of post-modernism thrive. I have tried obvious tactics, such as revising the title of a typical eighteenth-century literature course to “Hellions and Harlots in Eighteenth-Century Novels” or teaching episodes of Survivor alongside Robinson Crusoe, to increase enrollment …

Gothic Nature Revisited: Reflections On The Gothic Of Ecocriticism, Tom J. Hillard

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The 2017 ‘Gothic Nature I’ conference in Dublin, Ireland, and the launch of the new journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic present an occasion to reflect on how the entangled fields of ecocriticism and Gothic literary studies have developed and evolved over the past decade. While ecocritics have historically been slow and at times reluctant to embrace Gothic texts and approaches, in recent years that has begun to change. This essay argues that the development of ecocriticism itself can been read as a type of Gothic story. If imagined figuratively as if it were a horror …

Using Reflection To Facilitate Writing Knowledge Transfer In Upper-Level Materials Science Courses, Jennifer C. Mallette, Harold Ackler

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

When students enter upper-level engineering courses, they may bring with them unclear or inconsistent approaches to writing in engineering. Influenced by their past experiences with writing, students encountering engineering genres such as reports and proposals may struggle to write successfully. They may struggle in part because of the messiness inherent in writing knowledge transfer: a student who successfully completed freshman composition may still be unable to transfer skills, habits of mind, and approaches to writing from that setting to engineering because the rhetorical situations look drastically different. Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak define transfer as a “dynamic rather than a static …

Administration, Emotional Labor, And Gendered Discourses Of Power: A Feminist Chair’S Mission To Make Service Matter, Michelle Payne

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Michelle Masse’ and Katie Hogan’s edited collection, Over Ten Million Served (2010), argues that “complaining about service is not the same as critically analyzing service as a significant dimension of academic labor” (15). Nor, as Phillips and Heinert argue, is the admonition to “just say no” an ethical solution to the gendered inequity of academic labor. In this essay, I not only illustrate the consequences of saying yes to service and analyze its significance, but I illustrate the ways that service positioned me to advocate for change at my own institution. More specifically, I focus on the unique administrative role …

Story, Discourse, And The Voice Of The Other In W. S. Merwin’S The Folding Cliffs, Jeff Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In The Folding Cliffs, a narrative poem with a novelistic scope, W. S. Merwin reflects on poetic thinking by availing himself of the tools of narrative. He not only depicts historic injustice against indigenous Hawaiians but also tropes the form of his storytelling to assess the history it relates and its ethical implications. To promote this assessment, Merwin inculcates a judicious self-questioning in his readers by means of his narrative structure, which emphasizes the discrepancy between plot and story. By making readers keenly aware of the mechanics of his storytelling, Merwin offers a model of narrative ethics that respects …

"A Vision Of Greyness": The Liminal Vantage Of Illness In Heart Of Darkness, Cheryl Hindrichs

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

In Heart of Darkness, illness and physical vulnerability provide a sense of defamiliarization that enables what Virginia Woolf described as the exile's perspective, which in turn allows for a critique of normative regimes. Marlow's outsider perception of the physical qualities of imperialist Europeans in contrast to subjugated native Africans suggests an ambivalent aesthetic morality that is characteristic of modernist irony. This ambivalence is particularly significant in the frequently overlooked scene in which Marlow falls ill and nearly dies. The perspective Marlow acquires in his own experience of illness ultimately frames both his final encounter with Kurtz and with the …

Repression, Renewal And 'The Race Of Women' In H.D.'S Ion, Jeff Westover

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Steven Yao has called H.D.'s Ion her 'most ambitious feat of translation' (2002a: 83). Two contexts are relevant for thinking about H.D.'s work on this project. One is psychoanalysis, and the other is the scholarship which interprets myth as a narrative reflection of ritual practice. Both contexts are significantly tied to H.D.'s personal life and writing career. Matte Robinson even claims that one of the major characters in the play, Kreousa, 'becomes an extension of H.D.' (2013: 270). This claim may be overstated, but Kreousa's quest for recognition from Apollo does resemble H.D's effort to supply her daughter, Perdita, with …

Wallaceward The American Literature Survey Course Takes Its Way, Ralph Clare

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Finding a comfortable fit for David Foster Wallace's work in the American literature survey is a challenge that raises a host of questions regarding Wallace and American literature itself. Wallace criticism has tended to situate his oeuvre in relation to postmodernism in general and, more specifically, to postmodern metafiction. This is an important critical task, to be sure. Like many, I have taught Wallace's stories, essays, and novels in an array of courses, including twentieth-century American literature, postmodernist literature, and the single author course, all formats in which I had a luxurious amount of time to get students acquainted with …