English Language and Literature Commons^™

Only A Rite, David Lee Miller

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 …

Midwife And Mother: Maternal Metaphors In The Composition Classroom, Cynthia Britt

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examines the maternal metaphors of midwife and mother used to describe instructors and teaching practices in the composition classroom. In the introduction the author describes her interest in the topic based on her own experiences as a mother and as a beginning composition instructor. The paper explains the initiation of the metaphors, what the metaphors and maternal pedagogy mean in terms of classroom practices and philosophies, criticisms of maternal practices, and the relevancy and legitimacy of the metaphors and maternal pedagogy in classrooms today. Section one explores the development of the metaphors to describe composition teachers related to …

James Russell Lowell, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

A-Z entries detail the lives, works, and critical reception of more than 70 American writers of the 19th century.

The American literary canon has undergone revision and expansion in recent years, and our notions of the 19th-century renaissance have been reevaluated. Mainstream anthologies have been revised to reflect the expanding literary canon, yet resources for readers have remained widely scattered. This book expands earlier definitions of the 19th-century American Renaissance as represented by canonical writers such as Emerson and Poe, covering writers who published popular fiction and dominated the literary marketplace of the day. Included is generous coverage of women …

John Milton, Blackfriars Spectator?: "Elegia Prima" And Ben Jonson's The Staple Of News, Timothy J. Burbery

English Faculty Research

In the spring of 1626 John Milton was temporarily expelled from Cambridge University, perhaps over a quarrel with his tutor William Chappell, and sent home to London, where he remained for at least several weeks. There, the seventeen-year-old poet composed his first elegy, a Latin verse-letter to his closest friend, Charles Diodati. In it, Milton claims to be enjoying his unexpected holiday by reading, girl watching, and attending the theater. Milton scholars have never reached consensus about his alleged playgoing, for while the young man speaks as a spectator, the plots and characters he mentions-these include comic types such as …

Merton's New Novices: The Seven Storey Mountain And Monasticism In A Freshman Seminar, David A. King

Faculty and Research Publications

Offers observation on Thomas Merton's book "The Seven Storey Mountain." Experience in teaching an introductory literature course to sophomore students at Kennesaw State University in Georgia; Reflections on monastic life; Description of Merton on Trappist monasteries.

Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework For Studying Intellectual Property, Sarah Robbins

Faculty and Research Publications

To probe one case of free-ranging textual circulation, and to address issues associated with producers' rights to textual ownership and authorial credit, Robbins examines the Americanized versions of British writer Anna Barbauld's Lessons for children. Robin states that examining multiple specific cases of distributed authorship, and linking them to contemporary textual ownership issues, may well lead to nuanced extensions of the basic framework for understanding intellectual property that pioneers in the field have already formulated.

Several Letters By Tennyson And His Family, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"In the years since Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon edited Tennyson's letters (1981-1990), I have been able to acquire for my collection several letters by Tennyson and by other members of his family. I print those here, along with some other material relating to Tennyson..."

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 …

Mother Courage And Its Abject: Reading The Violence Of Identification, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

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.

Can The Cosmopolitan Speak: The Question Of Indian Novelists’ Authenticity, John C. Hawley

English

The marketing of books is often beyond the control of their authors; nonetheless, dust jackets sometimes offer amusing evidence of the audience that publication houses, if not authors, wish to reach. Thus, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain ( 1995), Vikram Chandra apparently offers readers the sto1y of "an eighteenth-century wan-ior poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America ... [and] ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV." By way of context, consider Lee Siegel's academic novel, Love in a Dead Language …

Departures From Karachi Airport: Some Reflections On Feminist Outrage, Ambreen Hai

English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications

Prefatory Note: This essay revisits an experience - my encounter with an airport border control official as I was leaving Pakistan - that occurred in October 2000. At First, this otherwise trivial incident seemed to me illustrative of several postcolonial and/feminist concerns, such as the regulation of national and gender identities at sites of border crossing, or the patriarchal oppressiveness of state power and practices. But as I retold the story, I began to realize that there were additional dimensions to it that called for something else, that required me to re-examine, though not altogether repudiate, my initial indignation. This …

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.

Chocolate Bunnies And Pork For Passover: The School And Home: A Symbiosis For Family Literacy, Karen C. Waters

Education Faculty Publications

This article explores the literacy partnership between school and family when intergenerational stories are made public.

Un Glossario Bernense, Scott Gwara

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Forming The Collective Mind: A Contextual Exploration Of Large-Scale Collaborative Writing In Industry, By Geoffrey A. Cross., Barbara Couture

Department of English: Faculty Publications

We have come a long way in studies of writers in professional settings, learning with each exploration how these behaviors differ from and relate to the processes we have taught beginning writers in our classroom. Studies of these processes have become increasingly more sophisticated since Selzer (1983) treated researchers to his intriguing account of a technical writer’s composing processes. Next, we saw case studies of writers designed to produce real-world writing contexts for students—such as Cases for Technical and Professional Writing, which I coauthored with Rymer Goldstein (1985)—and then more detailed descriptions of how writers learn to become proficient communicators …

An Evening To Remember, Ivan Davis

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Current State Of Composition Scholar/Teachers: Is Rhetoric Gone Or Just Hiding Out?, Krista Ratcliffe

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Natural Trouble, Scott Hightower

Poetry

Natural Trouble continues Scott Hightower’s investigation begun in Tin Can Tourist. Themes of inheritance extend through changes of landscape and bad weather to hungers, urgencies, inequities, and bereavements. Hightower also reminds us that the practice of writing is at the core of democracy: poetry seeks a foundation in the truth of the individual, guaranteed and restored through the integrity of language.

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 …

Review Of Perspectives On American Book History: Artifacts And Commentary, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Perhaps the best place to begin a review of this excellent new book is where the editors themselves begin in their preface, by defining what the book is not. Namely, it is not "a reader that merely reprint[s] scholarly essays" on the history of the book (that niche has recently been filled by The Book History Reader [2002] from Routledge), nor is it "a definitive history of the book and print culture in North America" (Cambridge University Press and the American Antiquarian Society aim to fill that niche with the multi-volume History of the Book in America, currently in …

Personalism In John Donne's Art, Phillip Shaw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examines personalism in John Donne's art: to what extent his poems are a product of his personality over and above conscious invention and artifice. It argues that Donne writes the way he does because, for the most part, he fails to attain distance from his work. The subjects that he writes about regularly are straight from his own life, and his take on them is highly personal. This paper brings in some biographical details but in general is concerned with scrutinizing Donne's writings in order to understand his imagination. Its primary method is to trace the repetition, resonance, …

Eng 3804-001, Olga Abella

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.

Eng 1000-001, English Department

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-002-029-036: Composition And Language, Carol Jean Dudley

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-004-019-038: Composition And Language, Elise Hempel

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.

Eng 1001g-005-023: Composition And Language, Janelle Carey

Fall 2003

No abstract provided.