Modern Literature Commons^™

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The idea that women in past centuries withheld their names because they experienced their own authorship as shameful or scandalous has achieved the character of received wisdom. Ask a typical lower-level undergraduate what she knows about women's authorship in the United States during the years of Sedgwick's greatest productivity (the 1820s through the 1840s), and she will tell you: "It wasn't considered respectable for women to write back then, so they didn't give their names, or they took male pseudonyms." I argue instead that Sedgwick's anonymity was a market strategy for constructing an authorial persona rather than an absence of …

Developing Pedagogies: Learning The Teaching Of English, Shari J. Stenberg, Amy Lee

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Consider the following scenario: You arrive at graduate school in time for the three-day orientation, which consists of a series of workshop "training" to be a scholar. One half-day session covers the conference proposal and presentation; another trains new students to write seminar papers; a third focuses on the prospectus and dissertation; yet another teaches the composition articles for refereed journals. At the end of three days, you are ostensibly "trained" in the basics required to contribute to your profession as a scholar and researcher. While you might continue to develop these "skills" as you advance through exams, dissertations, and …

A Trove Of New Works By Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc Service News Rediscovered, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Early in 1960, after having graduated from Cornell and while writing V., Thomas Pynchon moved to Seattle and began working for the Boeing Airplane Company. What Pynchon did while working at Boeing has puzzled scholars almost from the moment of the very private author's literary debut. When we try to delve into his stint at Boeing first mentioned by Lewis Nichols and Dick Schaap--we reach dead ends or find conflicting information. Yet Pynchon's time at Boeing is perhaps the most documented period of his life, and over the years a number of interesting (though not always accurate) bits of information …

The Costs Of Scholarly Teaching And Learning, Amy M. Goodburn

Department of English: Faculty Publications

At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) I come to SoTL work from several different locations: As an English professor in composition and rhetoric; as an associate dean for faculty within the College of Arts and Sciences; and as cocoordinator of a faculty teaching development program. This past spring was especially challenging as the country’s economic free-fall led to a year filled of budget-planning exercises, which then turned into budget-cut proposals, and now impending--but still not determined--budget cuts. In many ways, UNL has fared better than most other universities nationwide. The state of Nebraska received national attention when it was named …

Reading Through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish And The Experience Of Reading, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei’s Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes …

Reading Space As Time In Great Plains Recollective Architecture, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

It is a long way from Black Elk's tipi to the Stuart building. Clearly most cultures and periods impose one or more narrative plots on time and space (I have written of four that were part of the recent past of this state). It may be that we will need soon to return again to a celebration of the cyclical in our architecture. If the ethos of domination that goes with linear, progressive notions of time is as destructive to our environment as the Club of Rome (and other successor study groups looking at the future of the planet) have …

"Searching For The Route Of Inventions": Retracing The Renaissance Discovery Narrative In Gabriel García Márquez, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

If, as Harold Bloom suggests. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a "supreme fiction," it achieves that status as it reformulates early modern narratives of self-discovery and dominion. Garcia Márquez signals his intention of rewriting the great Renaissance narratives of discovery when he begins his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech with an account of Antonio Pigafetta's Viaggio attorno al mondo (1522). As a navigator aboard Magellan's 1519–21 voyage around the world, Pigafetta kept a log that Garcia Márquez categorizes as an ancestor "of our contemporary novels." Where many Latin American writers might describe their work as postcolonial. García Márquez …

Journeying And Wandering In The Narrative Of The Knight's Tale, William Thomas Hill, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

An essay on the journeying and wandering in the Knight's Tale found in the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.

School At The Center: Mending Breaks In The Broken Heartland, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Some years ago I was teaching a course called "The Literature of Agriculture," accounts of how farmers and rural people made a living over time. Hesiod, Virgil, Chaucer's rural tales, George Eliot, Great Plains modem farm novels, and Wendell Berry's writings about the unsettling of America were the fare. One of my students remarked in passing, "Don't know if I can read this stuff. I only went to a small high schooL" He knew nothing of the literature about smallness and quality in education and had no pride of community. Later I asked the rural class if they planned to …

Review Of The Mysteries: Creation, A New Adaptation, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Review of Nicholas Rudall and Bernard Sahlins, editors. The Mysteries: Creation, A New Adaptation by Bernard Sahlins of the Medieval Mystery Play Series: Plays for Performance. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1992. $7.95. Elephant Paperbacks EL 412.

Placing The Places In Wordsworth's 1802 Sonnets, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Wordsworth's political sonnets of summer and fall 1802 recount the sights and sounds the poet encountered during the brief respite provided by the Peace of Amiens, which enabled him to return to France and to the woman and child who were the physical reminders of the time he had spent there ten years earlier in the spirited days following the French Revolution. Published together in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, they juxtapose the dispirited and pathetic state of France in 1802 with the ebullience Wordsworth recalled from that earlier time. More important, the sequence documents his "return" to England, …

Preface And Introductory Materials To Approaches To Teaching Cather’S My Ántonia, Susan J. Rosowski

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The aim of this volume is to provide background and ideas others have found most helpful in teaching My Antonia. The portion presented here describes Cather's role in preparing the text and supervising the physical design of My Antonia, and reviews other writing by Cather relevant to My Antonia, as well as biographical studies and criticism recommended most often by instructors who teach it. It includes also a selective introduction to materials recommended for instructors' libraries: reference works on Cather, general background, biographical studies, and critical commentary. Finally, it surveys aids to teaching: pedagogical articles and non-print …

My Ántonia As Plains Epic, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

When I assign My Antonia, I teach it to the sons and daughters or more distant relatives, in blood or spirit, of the people it treats. I have had relatives of Mrs. Pavelka in my classes, citizens of Red Cloud and Wilber, Czechs who still retain their Czech culture, and classicists at the University of Nebraska who study what Cather studied here. It is thus impossible entirely to make the work of art defamiliarize the experience, as Shklovsky would have it do, nor would I want it to remove the students from their pasts and knowledge of family or …

The Romanticism Of My Ántonia: Every Reader's Story, Susan J. Rosowski

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Romanticism is fundamental to My Antonia, shaping the attitudes that control its structure, style, and narration, as well as its expectations of a reader. I immediately face a dilemma in teaching this romanticism, however, for most of my students haven't even the most rudimentary understanding of what romanticism is. They have negative associations of something emotional, irrelevant, and backward-looking; asked for details, they describe surface features that vaguely concern poets brooding about nature. Almost none understands romanticism as a way of knowing, by which individuals use their imaginations to create value in an otherwise meaningless world (Rosowski, Voyage). …

Lamberton, Robert. Homer The Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Readings And The Growth Of The Epic Tradition. Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1986. (Review), Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This book is excellent both for classicists and Spenserians, for the latter not only because Homer is the (direct or indirect) source for many episodes in The Faerie Queene but because the modes of understanding epic which Lamberton explores are crucial to the comprehension of Spenserian allegory. The work continues the tradition of examination of classical myth and allegory begun by Felix Buffiere, Jerome Carcopino, Franz Cumont, and Jean Pepin. Beginning with the early Neo-Pythagorian allegorists, it proceeds to cover Homeric commentary in 'apostolic' and 'post-apostolic' times: that of Philo, Numenius, Clement and Origen in Jewish-Christian tradition; and that of …

Credentialism As Monopoly, Class War, And Socialization Scheme: Some Historical Reflections On Modern Ways Of Determining Who Can Do A Job, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Social theorists in earlier periods have looked at credentialing from the perspective of its service to the economic or social system as opposed to its “protection of the public interest.” Adam Smith regarded the long education and the performance tests that the guilds required as monopolistic constraints on production; Karl Marx saw the same guild system as controlled by the propertied classes and uselessly exclusionary; and Emile Durkheim, unlike both Smith and Marx, regarded the occupational group with its entrance requirements as central to the stability of modern society. The application of the principles of Smith, Marx, and Durkheim, in …

Black Elk Speaks As Epic And Ritual Attempt To Reverse History, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Modern Siouan storytellers make a distinction in speaking of the difference between bedtime and sacred stories. Moreover, Lakota masters of the sacred arts are inveterate constructors of figural or allegorical systems. They interpret, apply, and reapply the iconological resources of their culture through ritual, myth, storytelling, symbolic action, and clothing. This Sioux symbolic tradition is one context in which John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932) must be understood. Conceptualizing it as an epic may assist both Western and non-Western readers to clarify the uses to which a culture's symbol system may be put in mediating conflicting values, especially those …

Doubtful And Visionary: Review Of Leonard Nathan, Dear Blood, University Of Pittsburgh Press, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Review of Leonard Nathan, Dear Blood, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Review Of Mona E. Mcalpine, The Genre Of 'Troilus And Criseyde,' Ithaca And London: Cornell University Press, 1978, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Review of Mona E. McAlpine, The Genre of 'Troilus and Criseyde.' Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978.

The Book Of The Pawnee: Pawnee Stories For Study And Enjoyment, Marge Critcher, Carolyn Boyum, Patti Huff, Paul A. Olson, Rosemary Bergstrom

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I. Meeting the Pawnee ............................... 1

II. Pawnee Beliefs .................................. . 3

The Pawnee Creation Story ...................... 3

The Boy Who Was Sacrificed ..................... 8

III. Pawnee Hero Stories ............................. 14

Lone Chief ................................. 14

Little Warrior's Counsel. ................ . . . .... 27

IV. Pawnee Folk Tales ............................... 30

The Snake Brother ........................... 30

Mosquitoes ................................. 37

V. Boy Stories .................................... 39

The Boy Who Talked with Lightning .............. 39

The Boy and the Wonderful Robe ............... .42

The Boys, the Thunderbird, and the Water Monster .. 50

VI. Coyote Stories .................................. 54

Coyote and the Blind Buffalo ................... …

A Few Great Stories Of The Santee People, Edna Peniska, Paul Robertson, Robert Frerichs, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Told by Many Nineteenth Century Santee and by Edna Peniska and Paul Robertson of the Modern Santee.

Gathered and Edited by Robert Frerichs and Paul A. Olson.

The fact that every known culture and civilization has acquired some sort of set of sacred stories is important. The eleven sacred stories in this work have multiple purposes. They possess a value as sheer entertainment; they also tell truths and lessons which explain the meaning of existence. Thus the Santee listener could fmd his place in the world and achieve an inner harmony through hearing stories. The characters in these stories are …

The Book Of The Omaha: Literature Of The Omaha People, Paul A. Olson, Wallace Wade Miller (Thio-Um-Baska)

Department of English: Faculty Publications

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ..................................... ix

I. The Creation .................................. 1

II. When Man Came to the Earth .................... .4

III. The Bringing to the Creation of a New Life ........... 5

IV. The Osage Creation Story ........................ 7

V. The Child is Placed in the Cosmos, in the Tribe, and in the Tribe's Fight .............. 9

VI. The Sacred Pole ............................... 15

VII. The Divisions of the Tribe and Colors .............. 19

VIII. Corn ....................................... 22

IX. The Buffalo Hunt ............................. 27

X. Ponca Buffalo Ritual (related) ................... .46

XI. The Corn Song

XII. Another Osage Creation Story .................... …

Chaucer's Epic Statement And The Political Milieu Of The Late Fourteenth Century, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Sets Knight's Tale in the tradition of political verse, and argues that the tale encourages peace in the domestic and foreign affairs of Chaucer's England. The hortatory, heroic style of the tale presents Theseus as a peace-making ideal, pertinent to the French wars of the time. The juxtaposition of the Miller's Tale with the Knight's Tale encourages placid relations with the peasant class.

Several critics, both neoclassic and modern, have observed that) as to kind, the Knight's Tale is an epic fiction. Characteristically, the poems we call medieval epics are what Ezra Pound also says an epic must be in …

Polishing The Sherds [Review]: Martin Booth, The Knotting Sequence, The Elizabeth Press, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Review of Martin Booth's The Knotting Sequence, published by the Elizabeth Press.

The Hollow Of Echoes, Kathleen Danker, Felix White Sr.

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The Hollow of Echoes is the result of collaboration between Mr. Felix White, Sr. and myself. Mr. White, who resides in Winnebago, Nebraska, is knowledgeable in many areas of traditional Winnebago culture including language, history, legends and law. During the spring of 1973, he recounted to me a number of Winnebago legends of which I made recordings. I have incorporated these legends into a fictional account of a present-day Winnebago grandfather using the stories to instruct his grandchildren in traditional ways of viewing situations they encounter in their daily lives. Almost all of the views of the grandfather in the …

The Crux Of Merging Deltas: A Note On Alan Sillitoe, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

The English Writer Alan Sillitoe is, to most Americans, a man of two books (or movies): Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (with Albert Finney); and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (with Tom Courtenay). Indeed, most Americans do not know that he has produced a book a year since 1959 (when The Long Distance-Runner came out), including eight other novels, three books of poems, two collections of short stories, one book of travel, one play, and one children's book. They know little about his life or the progress of his career, about his international connections or his present …

0078: John Mckernan Papers, 1967-1975, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

John Joseph McKernan (11 May 1942 – 17 April 2025) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and taught at Marshall University from 1967 to 2010. He arrived with a M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas and earned two additional degrees while teaching full-time: a M.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in English from Boston University.

McKernan published poetry widely, including in the Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Ohio Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review. He published four collections: Walking Along the Missouri River (Lost Roads …

The Future: Create Or Inherit, Charles W. Case, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This training document was prepared by the Deans Committee of the Study Commission on Undergraduate Education and the Education of Teachers and does not represent an official position of the Study Commission. The book is a study document for distribution to those associated with the work of the Commission.

Introduction, Paul A. Olson

The Educational Significance of the Future, Harold G. Shane

Educational Research and Development Priorities to Create the Future, Charles W. Case

Riding the Apocalypse: Education and the Future of Humanity, Robert Bundy

DIALOGUE: Futures Planning and its Methodology

Teacher Education: A Future of Declining Need—Toward the Redefmition …

Graduate Education And New Jobs In Education, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Teacher education has too largely concerned itself with a study of schooling rather than a study of education. In the next generation, given the concerns that I’ve talked about, we’re going to have to look much more intensively, on the one hand, at how much human beings learn as biological creatures and, on the other hand, at all the cultural and legal constraints on learning that exist. We will look at education in industry, in the community, in community action programs, in the tribal council, education through ritual, and through play, as well as through public schooling. The job of …

The Presuppositions Of Name-Calling In English, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I have offered evidence that name-calling is a linguistic act which correlates the assumption of a status-relation between speaker and addressee with the use of terms marked (+abusive). To call someone a bastard, for.this reason, is not understood as the attempt to categorize him according to some term whose meaning, in the ordinary sense, is a list of lexical features. Rather it is the attempt to categorize him as without status in relation to the speaker himself, in defiance of his expectations, and because he has himself deserved it by himself invoking such a right over the speaker. This understanding …