English Language and Literature Commons^™

Civil Religion, Nativist Rhetoric, And The Origins Of Washington National Cathedral, Richard Benjamin Crosby

Faculty Publications

Set atop the highest point in the nation's capital, The Washington National Cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world. It has become a central site for the high holy rituals of American civil religion, hosting presidential funerals, National Day of Prayer services, and the tombs of national luminaries. Drawing on archival research, this essay situates the cathedral within a history of religious competition and national tension. The essay concludes that the cathedral's roots lie largely in the fecund rhetorical soil of nineteenth-century nativism, the cultural prejudice that emerged in reaction to Roman Catholicism's remarkable growth during that period. …

Seeing Harry Potter As An At-Risk Student: Critical Literacy, Cultural Capital, And The Wizarding World, Dawan Coombs, Jon Ostenson, Whitney Sommerville

Faculty Publications

Despite his celebrity status in the wizard community, Harry’s lack of familiarity with its culture, language, social structures, and institutions constantly causes him to question his competence and magical potential. Although most muggle teens will never deal with the challenges Harry confronts as he tries to sort out Quidditch from Slytherin and Hufflepuff on his first visit to Diagon Alley, they can empathize with Harry’s attempts to acculturate into the social, academic, and political norms of a very unfamiliar world. Many students in secondary schools exist on the margins because of disconnects between their own cultures, languages, and social practices …

Dodging Marshmallows: Simulations To Teach Ethics, Justin Weidman, Dawan Coombs

Faculty Publications

Students had just participated in an experiential learning exercise where they played dodgeball using marshmallows. But the unique context of the game introduced ethical dilemmas that integrated ethics education into a technical education classroom setting.

Research shows that “Engineering curriculum and activities at the K-12 level should be designed to expose students to [ethical considerations inherent in the practice of engineering], and as a result students should be aware of the importance of these issues in the field of engineering” (Moore, Glancy, Tank, Kersten, Smith, & Stohlmann, 2014). But how do STEM teachers teach students to think about ethical issues …

An Irishman's Diary On John Mcgahern And 1916 : What Was It All For?, Eamon Maher

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Many Transformations Of Albert Facey, Ffion M. Murphy, Richard Nile

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth [...].

[Introduction To] In Search Of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid's Mother And Muse, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

There is perhaps no other person who has been so often and obsessively featured in any writer’s canon as Jamaica Kincaid’s mother, Annie Drew. In this provocative new book, Daryl Dance argues that everything Kincaid has written, regardless of its apparent theme, actually relates to Kincaid’s efforts to free herself from her mother, whether her subject is ostensibly other family members, her home nation, a precolonial world, or even Kincaid herself. A devoted reader of Kincaid’s work, Dance had long been aware of the author’s love-hate relationship with her mother, but it was not until reading the 2008 essay "The …

[Introduction To] Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms And Curriculum Studies, Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, Zofia Zaliwska

Bookshelf

This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that re-configure our sense of what a human person is and how that person relates to the more-than-human ecologies in which it is nested. Ignited by an urgency to disrupt the dangers of anthropocentrism and systems of domination in the work of curriculum and …

Shakespeare And The Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender And The British Nation In The Bbc’S Hollow Crown, L Monique Pittman

Faculty Publications

As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrating both the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, the BBC launched a season of programs, entitled Shakespeare Unlocked, most notably presenting the plays of the second tetralogy in four feature-length adaptations released under the unifying title The Hollow Crown. These plays so obviously engaged with the question of English nationalism suited a year in which the United Kingdom wrestled with British identity in a post-colonial and post-Great Recession world. Through its adaptative and filmic vocabularies, however, The Hollow Crown advances a British nationalism unresponsive to the casualties — often women and …

Margaret Wise Brown Papers, 1938-1960., Beth S. Harris

Finding Aids: Guides to the Collections

Materials related to the career of children's author Margaret Wise Brown. The collection includes literary manuscripts, correspondence, legal papers, biographical information, periodical publications, sound recordings, ephemera, and clippings

The Make Cook Do Book, University Of Northern Iowa. Department Of Languages And Literatures., Jennifer Cooley, Caitlin Agrosinger

Make Cook Do Book Project

During the spring and fall semesters of 2016, UNI students collaborated with adult Learners in English classes at the YWCA in Waterloo, Iowa as language partners. The stories below are just a sample of all the different backgrounds and talents that the adult English Learners brought to the collaboration. At the end of the fall 2016 semester, the YWCA students were invited to write about their past, present and/or future and, if they wanted to, about their family as well. (The document that prompted them to share their ideas is on the first page!) UNI students offered assistance, as needed, …

Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman And The American City, 1830-1900, Jordan L. Von Cannon

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900, I explore urban narratives of female non-development. In city novels featuring female protagonists, there are two normative arcs of development: either women find new opportunities for marriage, work, and, in some cases, independence in the city, or they fall prey to threats of seduction, poverty, and even death. However, these two plotlines fail to accommodate stories of women who wait to develop, fail at it, or otherwise resist what might be considered character growth. By problematizing distinctions between idleness and the American “work ethic” often tied to the industrialized …

Arts: Fiction And Fiction Writers: The Americas, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay by Rachel Norman, which originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, discusses contemporary Muslim fiction published in the United States with a particular focus on three novels: Mojha Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, and Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home.

"A Bastard Jargon”: Language Politics And Identity In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay explores Junot Díaz's only full-length novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, through the theoretical lens of sociolinguistics and examines the ways in which Díaz has attempted to overcome the publishing industry's complicity in maintaining the nation's ethnocentric expectations in regards to English as the only acceptable language of publication. By introducing the work of several sociolinguists into the discussion, examining the use of African American Vernacular and “nerdish” alongside the Spanish, and reviewing Díaz’s relationship with his editors, I provide a more nuanced reading of the ubiquitous code-switching throughout Oscar Wao and suggest that beyond …

The Cultural And Rhetorical Elements Of American Picaresque, Cory James Dahlstrom

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The picaresque is a literary genre with a long and rich history. Although protean in nature, it is essentially the fictional autobiography of a likeable delinquent or rogue, who survives a series of adventures and a life of hardships by his or her wits and affinity for trickery. Stemming from a long line of tropes dating back to Greek mythology, the picaresque comes into its own fruition towards the end of the Spanish Golden Age with the anonymous publication of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Since then, the antihero of the picaresque, the picaro, has become a literary figure across a …

The New Gatekeepers: How Blogs Subverted Mainstream Book Reviews, Rebecca E. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and …

The Snake-Bit Boy, Will Watson

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

Noise Complaint, Megan Wilkinson

Coastlines

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Coastlines Issue 4 - Editors' Acknowledgements

Coastlines

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The Orphan, Therron Ducharme

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

Coastlines Issue 4 - Front Matter

Coastlines

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Once Upon A Streetcar, Elaine Mcdermott

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

Wild Air, Harriet Hornblower

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

I Asked That They Let Me Be Great, Joma Shelby

Coastlines

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A Reminder, Judy Davies

Coastlines

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The Case Of The Stolen Jackpot, Phillip Levin

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

Horse-Medicine-Seeing: Predilections Of Hawks-Mice, James Inabinet

Coastlines

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The Crossing, Holly Rutledge

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

Poems: Yellow Warbler’S Songbook, The Garden--An Ordinary Wednesday, Reaching For The Moon, Elaine Mcdermott

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

The Dancer, Cristin Williams

Coastlines

No abstract provided.

The Field, Justin Miller

Coastlines

No abstract provided.