English Language and Literature Commons^™

Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, And Constructing Selves: The Preface As Autobiographical Space, Julie A. Eckerle

English Publications

The preface is a unique textual space, one that demands very particular kind of rhetoric because of its generic constraints and yet allows ample room for an author's manipulation and creativity. Perhaps the best articulation of the prefaces paradoxical nature appears in Barbara Johnson's playful response to Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. The autobiographical details summarized here paradoxically depict Speght as the heroic defender of all people and, simultaneously, a woman who clearly knows her place. In her work on French Renaissance women writers, Anne R. Larsen reveals the value of this kind of study: Early women writers exploited the prefaces marginality …

The Rise And Legitimization Of The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey

English Publications

No abstract provided.

Orna Me: Laurence Sterne’S Open Letter To Literary History, Celia B. Barnes

Faculty Publications

This essay considers the curious way Laurence Sterne communicates with and reflects on his literary predecessors, most often Alexander Pope, by writing love letters to women. Focusing primarily on his correspondence with Elizabeth Draper, Barnes contends that, even as Sterne looks back to Pope to guarantee himself a place in literary history, he looks forward to women like Draper to ensure his name will survive. Thus, erotic correspondence becomes an important way of ensuring Sterne’s literary estate, or as he terms it, his “futurity.” “Orna Me”—a phrase that means, roughly, “ornament me” or “set me off,” and that Sterne got …

Exploring The Collection Of Swedish-American Children’S Literature, Katie Hanson

Swenson Center Faculty Research Stipend Reports

For five days I examined resources related to children’s literature held in the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center collection. Initially, I proposed that I would examine anything having to do with children's literature. I ended up looking at lots of immigration stories as well as the holdings in the children's collection.

Rebels From The Waist Down: An Exploration Of Sex And Love In 1984, Charles R. Vaught Jr.

2016 Symposium

In 1984, George Orwell depicts a dystopian vision of London. The novel, published in 1949, is a depressing and unhopeful look at the future. However, at its core 1984 is much more than just a futuristic science fiction tale, it is a sexually tragic love story. Throughout the novel, Orwell represents sexuality in this dystopian society as something that has to be suppressed and ultimately warped into a forced love for Big Brother. The very act of sex for fun is viewed as an act of revolt, and those who participate in it are depicted as insurgents. This distorted …

“Do No Harm”: An Exploration Of Medicine In William Shakespeare’S Writings And Modern Filmic Adaptations, Nicholas A. Shortreed

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has, as its frontispiece, two epigraphs that frame and set the stage for the fraught condition of its protagonist, Asa Leventhal, as he navigates a tortuous course through the physical and psychic landscape that threatens to be his undoing. The novel’s first epigraph narrates the brief but portentous “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a lone merchant, traveling on business and oppressed by the heat, takes shelter beneath a tree. There he breaks fast, relieving his weariness and his hunger with bread and dates. …

Book Review: A Jewish Life On Three Continents: The Memoir Of Menachem Mendel Frieden, David B. Levy

Touro University Libraries Publications and Research

The author reviews the book A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden.

Rendering That Darkness At The Heart Of Priesthood : The Strangled Impulse By William King, Eamon Maher

Articles

No abstract provided.

John Mcgahern : His Time And His Places, Eamon Maher, Paul Butler

Articles

This article arose out of a collaboration between the two authors, Eamon Maher, a McGahern “expert,” and Paul Butler, a photographer who moved to Leitrim in the 1990s and who has been accumulating a pictorial narrative of McGahern’s home county ever since. As part of the Red Rua book festival in 2013, the authors decided to do an illustrated talk on McGahern’s work that would go alongside Paul’s exhibition, Still, which is a combination of images and text revolving around the writer’s native county.

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

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

English Department Newsletter 2016, English Department, University Of Southern Maine

Department of English Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Veiling With Abjection: Carson Mccullers' Reflections In A Golden Eye, Sarah Beth Gilbert

The Corinthian

I will argue that in Reflections of a Golden Eye, Private Williams is a projection of McCullers, due to his being a representation of the abject desire that McCullers experienced for women, and that the abjection is the very reason why his character comes off as strange, impersonal, and uncanny. Opposing critics would say that Williams’ impersonal nature disqualifies him from being McCullers’ representation; however, while McCullers purposefully uses the uncanny feelings she creates around Williams to distance herself from him, we should see through this.

Whiteness, The Real Intermediary Agent: Harriet E. Wilson’S Medium For Amalgamation In Our Nig; Or, Sketches In The Life Of A Free Black, Hannah Miller

The Corinthian

I intend to present a reading of Wilson’s text that demonstrates when and how she manipulates the voice of her text, only permitting the protagonist, Frado, to speak through her intermediary agent—or medium—the white family that she works for, the Bellmonts.

All Is Not Fair In Love And Shakespearean Comedy, Shelby Nguyen

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Carmita Cerda Aprende A Cocinar, Alexandra Christian Burkley

Open Access Books

Carmita Cerda aprende a cocinar was written and illustrated in 2016 by Alexandra Christian Burkley. The original text was edited and translated by Mackensy Asbell and Madeline Strelec. New, original illustrations were created by Rina Sato.

Playing With Play: Machinima In The Classroom, Wendi Sierra

English Faculty/Staff Publications

“So, machinima is really a genre, and not a medium?”

The students in my Digital Media and Rhetoric course are grappling with both how to define machinima and how to evaluate whether one is “good” or not. I frustrate them by refusing to provide a definitive answer to this and other similar questions they have asked about the form. This intentional frustration continues as, after watching a few examples they ask me what grade I would give those machinima, if they were turned in for this assignment. Rather than providing a simple answer I redirect, asking them what criteria they …

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 …

Mother Knows Best: The Overbearing In Coriolanus And Psycho, Mikaela Lafave

The Corinthian

Psychoanalytic critics have focused on the mother-son relationship throughout its criticism, stemming from Freud’s reinterpretation of the Oedipal myth. These relationships have dominated popular culture, showing up in modern contexts as recently as this year. With the current fascination with these relationships at the forefront, this paper chooses to examine two texts formative in establishing these relationships – Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Hitchcock’s Psycho.

“That Paradox Of Unjoyful Joyousness” Or Pure And Impure History: Retrospection And The Past In Robert Penn Warren’S A Place To Come To, Noah Simon Jampol

Robert Penn Warren Studies

No abstract provided.

The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, And The Art Of Mingling Races In Henry V And Cymbeline, Jean Feerick

English

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars and writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that …

Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by explicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

Beyond Embracing A Multicompetent Self: An Autoethnography Of A Nnest, Seullee Talia Lee

MA TESOL Collection

This article represents the identity transformation process of a non-native English- speaking teacher (hereafter NNEST) in the format of an autoethnography. Through the vignettes of the author, the evidence that English language plays a vital role as cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991) in expanding circle countries (hereafter ECCs) (Kachru, 1985, 1986) such as South Korea (hereafter Korea) becomes apparent. Also, her narrative adds more credence to how the newly imagined identity options such as multicompetent self and English language teaching (hereafter ELT) professional have a tremendous constructive impact on the personal and professional development of NNESTs. Lastly, this study proposes the …

Big Shot, L S. Klatt

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 106

Bruges, Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 127

The Nature Of Nature, Rebecca A. Spears

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 130-131

Theodicy, Brandon Courtney

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 63-64

Lunch Line, Ashley Warner

Birmingham Poetry Review

p. 149

Birmingham Poetry Review 43 (Front Matter), Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

No abstract provided.

Featured Poet: Barbara Ras, Birmingham Poetry Review Staff

Birmingham Poetry Review

pp. 1-2