Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Three Nahuatl Hymns On The Mother Archetype: An Interpretive Commentary, Willard Gingerich

Willard Gingerich

On February 23, 1978, in a large dig just off the central Zocalo (plaza) of Mexico city, within 300 yards of the great Cathedral, one of the most significant archeological finds of the decade came to light. It is a circular slab of pink stone, measuring three meters in diameter and estimated to weigh over eight tons, upon which is carved a mutilated female figure with arms, legs, and head severed from the torso.

Armand Schwerner: An Interview, Willard Gingerich

Willard Gingerich

In an interview, writer and educator Armand Schwerner discusses his recent and earlier Tablets, the creation of the icons in them, and his Scholar/Translator. Schwerner projects another 21 Tablets.

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

Visionaries Of The American West : Mari Sandoz And Her Four Plains Protagonists, Lisa Rae Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

The authorial reputation of Mari Sandoz has long rested in the shadow of other writers of her era. First of all, Sandoz wrote from and about a relatively remote region of the United States. In addition, she firmly refused to produce popular works at the expense of sacrificing the truth she perceived and wished to express. Consequently, Sandoz has often been classified as a regional writer and her works have been overlooked by many readers and critics. Her status as a woman, her unconventional writing style, point of view, and subject matter, and the blending of historical and fictional elements …

Symbolic Geography And Psychic Landscapes: A Conversation With Maya Angelou, Joanne M. Braxton

Joanne Braxton

No abstract provided.

Autobiography And African American Women’S Literature, Joanne M. Braxton

Joanne Braxton

No abstract provided.

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

The Learning Analytics Readiness Instrument, Meghan Oster, Steven Lonn, Matthew D. Pistilli, Michael G. Brown

Matthew Pistilli

What Did He Just Say? Did She Really Just Say That?: Vignettes Of Racism In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen: An American Lyric, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

No abstract provided.

Claudia Rankine And The Poetry Of Protest, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

No abstract provided.

Mediated Processes In Writing For Publication: Perspectives Of Chinese Science Postdoctoral Researchers In America, Mimi Li

Mimi Li

Sociocultural theory provides an explanatory framework for understanding human activity in the community of practice. This paper aims to address science researchers’ scholarly writing for publication processes from a sociocultural perspective. The author conducts a study via in-depth reflective interviews with three Chinese science postdoctoral researchers in America in an attempt to find their specific mediated actions and dynamic processes in writing for publication. In light of Engeström’s (1987, 1999) activity system, this paper, drawing on the interview data, explores the four mediating factors: objects/goals, artifacts, community, and roles, which afford and constrain the goings-on in the researchers’ writing for …

American Studies Journal: Ralph Ellison Issue, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd, Et Al

A Yęmisi Jimoh

Special issue of journal

Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez

Colin Enriquez

Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. After the turn of the century, the tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic, selfish, and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic mulatto label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of the mixed race character of Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on instances of train, automobile, and boat travel, the study establishes a distinct relationship between the character, transportation, and technology …

Bibliography For Work In Digital Humanities And (Inter)Mediality Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

No abstract provided.

Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven & Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0534-3 299 pages, bibliography, index. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents a framework of comparative literature based on a contextual (systemic and empirical) approach for the study of culture and literature and applies the framework in audience studies, film and literature, women's literature, translation studies, new media and scholarship in the humanities and in the analyses of English, French, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and English-Canadian modern, contemporary, and ethnic minority texts. Copyright release to the author in 2006.

“What Did She See?” The White Gaze And Postmodern Triple Consciousness In Walter Dean Myers’S Monster, Tim Engles, Fern Kory

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.

"Redeemed From The Curse Placed Upon Her": Dialogic Discourse On Eve In The Woman's Exponent, Boyd J. Petersen

Boyd J Petersen

Some fifty years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own, many Mormon women not only had a room of their own, but they also had their own printing press, acting as proprietors, editors, and sub-editors. Within the pages of the Woman's Exponent, an independent Mormon periodical published between 1872 and 1914, Mormon women engaged in a spirited defense of two seemingly contradictory issues: women's suffrage and polygamy. Yet for these early Mormon suffragists, polygamy was a key to their liberation; and Eve, seen as the prototypical woman, was a central symbol in this debate. Despite the fact that …

John Marrant Blows The French Horn: Print, Performance, And Publics In Early African American Literature, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

No abstract provided.

Duplicities Of Power: Amiri Baraka’S And Lorenzo Thomas’S Responses To September 11, John Gery

John R O Gery

No abstract provided.

An Oblique Blackness: Reading Racial Formation In The Aesthetics Of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, And Wayde Compton, Jeremy D. Haynes B.A.H.

Jeremy D Haynes B.A.H.

This thesis examines how the poetics of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand and Wayde Compton articulate unique aesthetic voices that are representative of a range of ethnic communities that collectively make-up blackness in Canada. Despite the different backgrounds, geographies, and ethnicities of these authors, blackness in Canada is regularly viewed as a homogeneous community that is most closely tied to the cultural histories of the American South and the Atlantic slave trade. Black Canadians have historically been excluded from the official narratives of the nation, disassociating blackness from Canadian-ness. Epithets such as “African-Canadian” are indicative of the way race distances …

A Thousand Splendid Suns: Sanctuary And Resistance, Rebecca A. Stuhr

Rebecca A Stuhr

In his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, author Khaled Hosseini provides a vivid portrait of a country shattered by a series of ideological leaders and wars imposed on it by foreign and internal forces. The narrative, which spans several decades, is driven by the stories of two women, Laila and Mariam, who, despite starkly different beginnings, find themselves intimately connected and dependent upon one another. Hosseini’s women, much like the country of Afghanistan itself, appear to be propelled by the whims of outside forces, familial and societal, with little chance of influencing their own lives and futures Yet Laila and …

William Plomer, Transnational Modernism And The Hogarth Press, John K. Young

John K. Young

William Plomer (1903–73), a self-described Anglo-Afro-Asian novelist, poet, editor and librettist, spent only the early years of his lengthy career as a Hogarth Press author but still ranks as one of the Woolfs’ most prolific writers, with a total of nine titles issued during his seven years with the Press. Like Katherine Mansfield, Plomer made his mark with Hogarth before signing with a more established firm, but the depth and breadth of Plomer’s career with the Woolfs is significantly greater: his five volumes of fiction presented Hogarth’s readers with groundbreaking portraits of South African, Japanese and (British) working class cultures. …

Jim Crow In The Soviet Union, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

"Collective Commerce And The Problem Of Autobiography", Andrew Kopec

Andrew Kopec

This essay partakes in an ongoing conversation about the importance of economics to Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative. I argue that Equiano's text links the singular autobiographical subject to a future collective of Africans schooled in the protocols of international commerce. Equiano's text, I suggest, imagines this collective commerce as a solution to the evils of chattel slavery.

Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’S Neo-Afrofuturism, Daylanne English, Alvin Kim

Daylanne English

No abstract provided.

Teaching Texts Materially: The Ends Of Nella Larsen’S Passing, John K. Young

John K. Young

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

Telling God’S Sanction : Storytelling In The Narrative Journalism, Memoirs, And Creative Nonfiction Of Rick Bragg, Jennifer Nicole Sias

Jennifer N Sias

Self-described paid-storyteller and Pulitzer-Prize-winning-narrative-journalist, Rick Bragg has used the storytelling techniques he learned from his people to write two best-selling memoirs that redefine the boundaries of the genres of memoir and creative nonfiction. His speakerly texts combine the voices of the working class of the Alabama foothills of Appalachia, his own voice as a member of this culture, and his narrative journalistic voice. In his works, Bragg has managed not only to carve a place for the voice of the working class, but also to celebrate and preserve the oral culture, history, and beautiful language of his people, the working …

Angel Island Poetry: Reading And Writing Cultures, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Object of a darker chapter in American history, the Angel Island Poems (as they have become known) are a recently discovered body of over 135 poems, written primarily in Chinese. These were literally carved into the walls at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese immigrants were detained, sometimes indefinitely, between approximately 1910-1940. This lesson demonstrates how history and culture can be integral to our understanding of poetry, even poetry that is deeply reflective and personal in nature; by requiring students to model and produce their own poetry, it also makes evident that writing poetry is a creative instinct and …