Reading and Language Commons^™

Review: Architectural Involutions: Writing, Staging, And Building Space, C. 1435–1650. Mimi Yiu., Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Mimi Yiu’s Architectural Involutions is an expansive, impressive, and largely interdisciplinary study. Many recent books have touched on related topics—probably most relevantly Henry Turner’s The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630—but this one reads from architecture and space forward rather than seeks answers about the theater foremost. The book’s main focus is to theorize the “inward journey” made possible by modes of understanding, building, and reading space in early modern Europe, although England is central to much of the work’s concerns. As Yiu explains in her introduction, the book “suggests a method for spatial mapping …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

Willa Cather On A “New World Novelist”: A Newly-Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair Essay, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The ability to quote from and publish Willa Cather’s letters is a relatively recent development for scholars. However, the republication of her critical prose began shortly after her death, when Cather’s partner, Edith Lewis, appointed literary executor in her will, facilitated the publication of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949). In line with Cather’s own approach to her early career, which she often dismissed or mischaracterized, this volume collected only her critical prose published from 1920 forward, including magazine essays, prefaces, and one previously unpublished fragment. This volume supplemented Cather’s own collection encompassing critical …

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

Read Or Perish: Reading Habits Among Students And Its Effect On Academic Performance: A Case Study Of Eastbank Senior High School - Accra., Samuel Kwame Ameyaw, Sylvester Kwabena Anto

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The paper was to examine reading habit among students and its effect on academic performance: using Eastbank Senior High School in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana as a case study.

A questionnaire was employed for data gathering. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to analyze the collected data. The findings of the study revealed that 45.19% of the respondents recognized the importance of reading in their studies. The study revealed further that reading habits have affected the majority of students in their learning. The findings reported that the lack of conducive home environment hinders their reading …