English Language and Literature Commons^™

What Could A Trans Book History Look Like? Toward Trans Codicology, J D. Sargan

Criticism

This article draws on critical trans studies and queer archival practice to propose a book historical mode that extends what we know about the premodern trans experience beyond the recovery of individual biographies. Instead of turning to textual sources for the identification of transness, the author looks to Susan Stryker’s call for the “recuperat[ion of] embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of knowledge production.” Bibliography, he suggests, makes claims of objectivity that engender a particular reluctance to respond to such calls. But the lived reality of archival research is one of affective embodiment. Affect theory is an area that, …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Citing Seeds, Citing People: Bibliography And Indigenous Memory, Relations, And Living Knowledge-Keepers, Megan Peiser Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma

Criticism

By turning the page or reading further, you are accepting a responsibility to this story, its storyteller, its ancestors, and its future ancestors. You are accepting a relationship of reciprocity where you treat this knowledge as sacred for how it nourished you, share it only as it has been instructed to share, and to ensure it remains unviolated for future generations.

This story is told by myself, Megan Peiser, Chahta Ohoyo. I share knowledge entrusted to me by Anishinaabe women I call friends and sisters, by seed-keepers of many peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, and knowledge come to me from …

Acts Of Disruption In The Eighteenth-Century Archives: Cooperative Critical Bibliography And The Ballitore Project, Danielle Spratt, Deena Al-Halabieh, Stephen Martinez, Quill Sang, Joseph Sweetnam, Stephanie Guerrero, Rachael Scarborough King

Criticism

This essay outlines a method of intersectional feminist book history that we call “cooperative critical bibliography,” a practice of engaging faculty and students at different ranks and at different institutions in the act of collaboratively transcribing and digitizing historical archives of understudied communities, often those that comprise the quotidian and domestic daily lives of everyday people. Cooperative critical bibliography’s non-hierarchical method centers the shared expertise and scholarship of students as they participate in broadening the accessibility of historical knowledge and revising standards of the historical literary canon through transcription, digitization, and shared reflection. By creating a pedagogical space that resituates …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

Craftivism And Cottonian Bindings: “The Handiwork Of Greta Hall”, Helen Williams

Criticism

Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibrantly printed dress fabrics, creating a collection that came to be called “the Cottonian Library.” This article is a manifesto for Cottonian bookbinding to be studied as feminist literary activism. It argues for the importance of looking beyond the book trades to the domestic and unremunerated ways in which women contributed to Romantic period book design, suggesting that the new feminist Craftivism can prompt us to historicize and to acknowledge the significance of Cottonian bookbinding as a practice that cannot be omitted from any history of …

Surface Reading Paper As Feminist Bibliography, Georgina Wilson

Criticism

This article models a mode of feminist bibliography by “surface reading” paper. Taking Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1605) as a case study, this article reads watermarks as reminders of paper’s three-dimensional materiality, whose surfaces and depths model the more and less legible forms of labor which contribute to paper’s making. Watermarks here become a creative and critical prompt to recover the interventions of John Spilman (the papermaker whose output was used for Sejanus), Spilman’s workers, and especially his female ragpickers. This article fuses close reading of literary texts and archival sources with bibliography and theory to demonstrate fresh …

Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta

Criticism

This article posits that John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891), the illustrated compendium on animals that mixes discussions of colonial cross-species entanglements with personal reflections on transforming local arts and crafts in India in the service of imperial power, is a multiauthored book. Centering the presence of Indian illustrators as central to Beast and Man’s texture, this essay uses the term “imperial citation” to highlight the range of strategies Kipling uses to overtly and covertly appropriate the labor of Indigenous creators within the fabric of this volume. By placing the material text within the context of colonial …

Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes

Criticism

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, interpret his famous mourning speech, “Logan’s Lament,” as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan’s words and deeds such as Jefferson’s book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan’s speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

Preparing Humanities Students For Employment: Reimagining Career Exploration And Education Through Ignatian Spirituality And Discernment, Elizabeth L. Angeli, Serina Jamison, Susan E. Jones-Landwer

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

Graduate students in the humanities are hungry for career exploration as they face limited academic career options and feel called to work beyond the academy. Career preparation is typically left to graduate advisors, and then, the focus tends to be on academic career preparation. This article details how a required, introductory graduate class was reimagined to integrate career exploration using a framework at the heart of Ignatian spirituality and education: discernment. The authors outline the course and two assignments that can be adapted and applied to any graduate course. The authors share reflections on how the class has impacted their …

"A Shadow Of A Magnitude": The Parthenon Marbles Through The Eyes Of Keats And Byron, Annie Griffin

Honors Projects

In 1817, The British Museum put on display a collection of sculptures taken by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Greece, and the controversy of the so-called “Elgin Marbles” began. The event of the marbles’ removal from Greece and display in Britain inspired poets such as John Keats and Lord Byron, who wrote of the beauty of the sculptures and the loss for Greece. The subject of the Marbles and the poets have been critically discussed at length—one need only type “Elgin Marbles” into a search bar to be met with countless recent articles about them. On the other hand, …

Austentatious Aspirations: How Janeite Women Writers Create And Expand Their Own Cultural Communities Through Recounting And Adapting Jane Austen's Original Works In Literature And Film, Kerri L. Bennett

Student Theses and Dissertations

In comparison to Jane Austen’s purportedly quiet, unassuming life, her six novels have had an ostentatious and extensive impact upon Anglophone literature, culture, and history, particularly through the innumerable adaptations that have been created, written, and produced by her most ardent admirers. As such, this research explores the ways that their various literary and filmic adaptations of Austen’s original narratives both create and expand their communities. Additionally, this project situates Janeite cultural production within the framework of Jacques Derrida’s theory of archival expansion, as well as the scholarship of Claudia Johnson, Abigail Derecho, and Sarah Glosson, among others. The texts …

Novela Negra Y Rol: Adaptación Del Género Hacia Nuevas Narrativas, Daniel Romero Benguigui

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

En sus orígenes, la novela negra llegó a presentarse como una experiencia lúdica, donde se invitó a los participantes a resolver el caso antes de finalizar la velada. De igual manera, los juegos de rol también proponen un desafío para los jugadores, también mediante un conjunto de reglas que aseguran el juego limpio.

Además, estos han demostrado su vinculación a lo literario al adaptar diferentes géneros a los sistemas empleados para el juego, ya fuera la fantasía épica (Dungeons and Dragons, Anima: Beyond Fantasy), el terror cósmico (Llamada de Cthulhu, Rastro de Cthulhu) o …

How To Grow Blurry: Poems, Nathaniel Metz

Canterbury Scholars

In this collection of poems, Nathan D. Metz explores the distance between the word for a thing and the touch or feeling of a thing. Using a variety of forms both established and innovative, as well as free verse and ekphrastic response, these poems are a celebration of art, color, and the sounds of words. After the collection is a series of poems translated both from the original Japanese and Haitian Creole.

The Politics & Poetics Of Audience Creation In Contemporary Epistolary Memoir, Sarah M. Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy as works of life writing that leverage the epistolary form to engage their direct maternal addressees and audiences beyond them in revision and reconstruction of identity. Secondary audiences are considered in light of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics,” and the social affordances of the epistolary form and self-constructive affordances of life writing are analyzed in tandem as a hybrid epistolary memoir form. Specifically, this project explores how the epistolary memoir form affords Vuong and Laymon opportunities for the process of personal, relational, and communal identity construction, …

The Queer Ecology Of Clouds In Nineteenth-Century British Poetics, Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, British writers were interested in the emergent science of meteorology, and their lyrical writing (their “poetics”), from poetry to creative and scientific prose, often turns to clouds as both meteorological formations and as material metaphors for human-environment interactions. These writers frequently invoke clouds to disrupt or “queer” depictions of human-environment relationships built on human domination of environmental beings. Clouds, in poetic writing, help writers (and readers) instead experience subject-subject relationships of reciprocity—a collaborative, non-hierarchical way of existing with and learning from our ecological relatives.

Dwelling in the confluence of literary studies, queer studies, and ecology, The …

Historical Realism And Stoic Heroes In The Work Of John Williams, Cameron Sepede

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how John Williams’s three major works of fiction — Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus — are narratively structured around three main characters who embody the tenets of stoic and Emersonian transcendental philosophy, respectively. Williams uses these characters to promote and critique preconceived notions of heroic masculinity as structured within these philosophies. Through an analysis of form, this thesis will explore how Williams scaffolds his three main characters around the language and ideas present within each philosophical school. Williams’s portrayal of heroic masculinity, as seen through a feminist perspective, questions the ideal masculine hero, which will be …

Exploring Friendships In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Novels And Adaptations: A Study In Social Media, Fandoms, And Variations, Ashley D. Anderson

Student Theses

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and their adaptations all reveal the importance of friendship and fandom. Utilizing theorists Walter Benjamin and Henry Jenkins the friendship theme is seen in the various stylistic elements in the films and novels; additionally, a look into the fandom presence on social media, their knowledge, and merchandise reveals why the stories have continued to interest audiences over many generations.

Romanticism’S Fellow Creatures, Alastair Hunt, Ron Broglio, Katey Castellanos, Mario-Ortiz Robles

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This panel opens up innovative ways of thinking about Romanticism and “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” Over the last couple of decades, the crisis in human relations with animals has deteriorated to the point that it has become increasingly recognized as a constitutive part of the global environmental crisis. Like the climate crisis, the “animal crisis” originates with the emergence of the industrial form of capitalism in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. Appreciation of this historical constellation can and should become the basis of a renewed Romantic animal studies. However, reading Romanticism as …

Feminist Critique And John Updike's 'Holes', Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

Feminism, John Updike

Envisioning A World Without Rape In Late Fifteenth-Century Dream Narratives, Boyda J. Johnstone

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Recent scholarship has been preoccupied with questions of rape and consent in late medieval literature, partly influenced by the Me Too movement while we continue to grapple with Geoffrey Chaucer’s allegation of raptus. In such a climate, medieval texts that likewise challenge the normalization of rape in literature and society require renewed attention and critical interest. The three fifteenth-century poems I examine in this article, The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and The Isle of Ladies, push Chaucer’s dream vision tradition in a new direction, presenting us with female-centered models of cooperation, care, and governance. …

Holy Matter Making Holy Meaning: Fashioning Memory, Community And Dissimilar Similitude In Middle Dutch Sister-Books And The Book Of Margery Kempe, Godelinde G. Perk

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle Dutch sister-books and The Book of Margery Kempe are fifteenth-century vernacular texts by women chronicling their female subjects’ conversion and arduous attempts at a holy life. They share an (auto)hagiographic enterprise and formal and thematic features, including a display of rags and riches by the vitae’s subjects and a desire for mnemonic engagement on the part of the readers with the text. This article is the first to present the Diepenveen and Deventer sister-books and the Book as conversation partners. I draw on two main conceptual tools: 1) medieval memoria and 2) the notion of “dissimilar similitude” …

A Tejano Story: Resisting Anti-Mexican Violence And The Texas Rangers, Jose Andres Yznaga Jr

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Tejano Story: Resisting Anti-Mexican Violence and The Texas Rangers Writing about Los Tejanos cannot be told without including the Texas Rangers. It only complicates the narrative when writing a screenplay for the big screen. The story cannot be told without acknowledging historical facts; the Texas Rangers came hard against the Tejanos after the battle for Texas Independence even though many Tejanos fought in that war and shared the same vision as their Euro-American counterparts of breaking their ties with the Mexican government. Just However, like lynching across this country, that history cannot be erased, nor can the exploits of …

Attitudinal Study Of Users Of Japanese English, Chisato Oda

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

This paper examines the developmental stage of Japanese English as one of the expanding circle varieties from the attitude perspective. The literature review presents the theories of World Englishes, what Japanese English is, and the previous attitudinal studies on Japanese English. The questionnaire survey was conducted to assess the linguistic attitudes of Japanese English users towards the forms and use of their English. The result suggests that a higher frequency of English use positively affects the acceptability of some of the features of Japanese English, yet at the same time more frequent users of English tend to see the characteristics …

Virginia Woolf & Ecologies: An Introduction, Laci Mattison, Shilo Mcgiff

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.

Between Concealment And Revelation: Oblique Modes Of Female Self-Expression In Eighteenth-Century Literature And Life Writing, Sophia N. Sunseri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the social landscape of eighteenth-century Britain as one that was especially inimical to women and analyzes instances in literature and life writing in which female characters and historical figures negotiated the various restrictions they faced in social settings by “hiding in plain sight” and devising alternative strategies by which they might be seen and heard: by engaging in what I am referring to as a play between concealment and revelation. I explore texts where female characters who have been silenced and forced to conceal their presence in social situations craft diffuse strategies through which they express themselves …

Gaps Of Speculation: Refusing Representation In Queer And Postcolonial Fiction, Sarah Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how queer and postcolonial novels respond to the archive as a determiner of what stories we can and cannot tell through formal experimentation that omits expected elements. Focusing on the subject- and object-making power and the tekhne of inclusion and exclusion that shape the modern archive, I analyze how novels spanning the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century refuse to mimetically reproduce bodies that were traditionally made the object of that knowledge in ways legible to the familiar archival forms. Instead, these novels turn the exclusion of the archive back on itself by manifesting lacunae …

Mood: A Zine Exploring The Value Of Youth-Oriented Media, Patricia K. Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Media is a constant, persistent force in human lives that informs and influences through published, broadcasted, and digitally mediated formats. Mass media industries produce and distribute content consumed by diverse audiences, though the facilitators represent only a fraction of the demographics they serve.

Youth denote one of the most frequently misrepresented groups, with very few practical opportunities for young people to make decisions about the texts available to them. A jarring absence of youth participation in media creation at all levels suggests cultural contributions through art exclude young people's authentic perspectives and desires. Moreover, media portrayals of youth cannot adequately …