College English

60 articles
Year: Topic: Clear
Export:
genre theory ×

September 2023

  1. Review Essay: Administrative Cookbooks: The Evolving Genre of How-To Academic Leadership
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Review Essay: Administrative Cookbooks: The Evolving Genre of How-To Academic Leadership, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/86/1/collegeenglish32662-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202332662

July 2020

  1. Sociomaterial Paradoxes in Global Academic Publishing: Academic Literacies at the Intersection of Practice and Policy
    Abstract

    The creeping dominance of Anglophone-center journals as the most viable publication venues worldwide has resulted in the ubiquity of English as “the language” for academic publishing as well as the preeminence of Western forms of genre and research conventions. Citing 2004 data from Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, Lillis and Curry note that 74% of the periodicals listed that year were published in English. Drawing from the Institute for Scientific Information, they cite that 90% of social science articles were published in English (“Interactions with Literacy Brokers” 4). Clearly, academics who write outside of the centralized Anglophone center, which includes the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, have experienced increasing pressure to publish in English (Canagarajah, Geopolitics, “‘Nondiscursive’ Requirements”; Horner et al.; Lillis and Curry, Academic Writing, “Interactions with Literacy Brokers”; Tardy). Such increased pressure is exacerbated through ties to increased rewards, as publishing in English can yield higher salaries and/or increased research funding because economic and disciplinary mobility are often tightly linked with English language publications. Thus, functioning like an economy of English, this “academic marketplace” (Lillis and Curry, Academic Writing 1) of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie), privileges an Anglophone center over multilingual peripheries as scholars perform the ongoing intellectual work of literacy brokers to succeed (Lillis and Curry, “Interactions with Literacy Brokers” 5). These sets of conditions have implications for both the particular topic of Anglophone publishing regimes as well as the changing nature of academic literacy in the churn of globalization. In this article, we turn to Ukraine as an exemplar case for how literacy is changing for research writers in what we are terming global “edge” countries who are driven to join the Anglophone publishing center. This drive is sometimes personal but more often political and economic as writers’ livelihoods are tethered to the outcomes of publishing in English, and research universities’ funding is tied to large-scale output in pre-defined Anglophone publication venues. We define “edge” countries as those operating within a transitional, liminal, and often contradictory set of regulations, expectations, and norms around (a) the local use and politics of mono and multilingualism and the increasing ubiquity of an expectation of English fluency for job candidates in the workforce; (b) educational mandates that seek to drive a local knowledge economy to an Anglophone center; (c) de facto if not de jure participation in larger economic and political entities such as the EU or other forms of regional, Anglophone consolidation; and (d) internal economic volatility that delimits a writer’s even access to literacy’s social practices and technical skills.

    doi:10.58680/ce202030806

September 2018

  1. “Share Your Awesome Time with Others”: Interrogating Privilege and Identification in the Study-Abroad Blog
    Abstract

    The genre of the study-abroad blog prompts students who are studying abroad to identify with marginalized populations they encounter during the travel experience, a practice that is particularly exigent amid the increasing commercialization of the studyabroad industry. To understand the conventions and ethical implications of the genre, the author examines an advice column on blogging abroad and students' reflections on their own writing from a recent studyabroad course. The blog conventions show that students are encouraged to use the misfortune of others to affirm their own privilege, while the interviews suggest that students need more support in responding to the complex cultural conditions of study abroad. To challenge the conventions of the studyabroad blog and ultimately the ideologies that contribute to the genre, faculty members leading students abroad should undertake pedagogical practices that encourage “empathic unsettlement. Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

    doi:10.58680/ce201829791
  2. Remembering Freedom Songs: Repurposing an Activist Genre
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Remembering Freedom Songs: Repurposing an Activist Genre, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/81/1/collegeenglish29793-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce201829793

January 2018

  1. Composing Crisis: Hardship Letters and the Political Economies of Genre
    doi:10.58680/ce201829445

March 2017

  1. “Classbook Sense”: Genre and Girls’ School Yearbooks in the Early-Twentieth-Century American High School
    Abstract

    In the early twentieth century, students produced and used a variety of texts to commemorate their school experiences and foster a sense of community among themselves. Through the compositional practices and values associated with these texts“particularly those of school literary annuals and memory books”the genre of the modern school yearbook emerged. This article draws on primary sources to trace the emergence of the yearbook as a form and practice at one Louisville high school for girls, where yearbooks both reflected and shaped the experience of high school for students who manifest complex genre knowledge and identity work in their compilations and inscriptions.

    doi:10.58680/ce201728972
  2. Consumption, Production, and Rhetorical Knowledge in Visual and Multimodal Textbooks
    Abstract

    Grounded in a multimodal turn in composition studies, this article reports findings from a quantitative taxonomy analysis of four visual rhetoric and multimodal composition textbooks. This analysis reveals that while theories privilege the production of visual and multimodal compositions, the practices encapsulated in these textbooks promote the consumption of such compositions more so than production. As a result, instructors will have to be mindful about their uptake of visual and multimodal textbooks if they want to teach in ways that are theoretically grounded and rhetorically rich.

    doi:10.58680/ce201728971

May 2016

  1. Feminist CHAT: Collaboration, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Clubs, and Activity Theory
    Abstract

    This article merges feminist methods with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in order to present a systems-theory method that can account for power and difference. After an explication of Feminist CHAT, the article applies the method to the archives of three women’s clubs in order to analyze their collaborations, theorize collaboration, and illustrate the use of Feminist CHAT. By weaving the stories of these three clubs together with Feminist CHAT, this article mediates two often conflicting contemporary approaches to English studies: those that emphasize objects of discourse and those that emphasize bodies and difference.

    doi:10.58680/co201628526

January 2016

  1. Beyond the Genre Fixation: A Translingual Perspective on Genre
    Abstract

    This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

    doi:10.58680/ce201627655

November 2015

  1. Anxious Uptakes: Nineteenth-Century Advice Literature as a Rhetorical Genre
    Abstract

    In this essay, I build on current work in rhetorical genre theory to read a historical genre for the affective uptake(s) it generates. Medically authored child-rearing advice literature developed as a genre in Britain between 1825 and 1850; this new genre instantiated anxiety as the central affect of middle-class maternal subjectivity. This rhetorical genre analysis both extends our understanding of this period and the history of motherhood; it also contributes to the developing affective turn in rhetorical genre studies by offering a way to begin reading for affective uptakes.

    doi:10.58680/ce201527548

July 2015

  1. Personal Writing in Professional Spaces: Contesting Exceptionalism in Interwar Women’s Vocational Autobiographies
    Abstract

    This essay draws on genre theory and recent conceptualizations of the personal as rhetorical in order to investigate the collective stakes of writerly self-representation. Contextualizing and analyzing a widely published early twentieth-century genre, the vocational autobiography, I argue that female professionals made use of the rhetorical resources available in the genre to personalize their professional identities, counteracting a widespread discourse of exceptionalism and flouting widespread advice about the necessity of strict separation between personal and professional identities. By using personal narratives to depict their gendered and embodied presence in powerful professional spaces such as laboratories and newsrooms, female writers made use of this genre to normalize their presence and to open up access to such spaces for other women.

    doi:10.58680/ce201527373

July 2014

  1. Writing Material
    Abstract

    This essay focuses on new materialist reconfigurations of social theory that alter understandings of agency, identity, subjectivity, and power. This research lends itself to recognizing writing as radically distributed across time and space, and as always entwined with a whole host of others. After overviewing new materialist efforts to draft a robust concept of matter, I explore the value of this work for twenty-first-century writing studies through the lens of acknowledgments, a genre wherein relationality is dramatized.

    doi:10.58680/ce201425459

September 2013

  1. The Daw and the Honeybee: Situating Metaphors for Originality and Authorial Labor in the 1728 Chambers’ Cyclopædia
    Abstract

    This article examines natural metaphors for authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia, an influential precursor to and source for today’s encyclopedias. Carefully situating Chambers’s chosen metaphors of the honeybee and the daw within both historical and genre contexts reveals important nuances of authorial originality in reference texts that are most often understood as explicitly non-original and uncreative. His decisions concerning intellectual property were driven by his understanding of the transformative aspects of encyclopedic authorship and his ethical positioning of the encyclopedist as a gatherer and distributor of knowledge. His use of the honeybee as a metaphor for encyclopedic authorship demonstrates a rhetorical astuteness that draws from England’s rich apiary tradition as well as deeply British symbolism that positioned the honeybee as royal, moral, and virtuous. Taken together, Chambers’s argument demonstrates the need for careful attention to situated, historical factors in discussions of authorship and ownership.

    doi:10.58680/ce201324195

March 2013

  1. Digitizing Craft: Creative Writing Studies and New Media: A Proposal
    Abstract

    This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the “craft” of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers’s (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies: process, genre, author, and institutionality. Using research from composition studies and literary studies, the article examines the concerns each of these categories is beginning to confront as more and more creative texts recruit digital technologies. As such, the argument outlines four tiers that each work as a line of inquiry regarding the valuable—indeed necessary—ways to imagine concerns regarding craft in twenty-first- century creative writing studies.

    doi:10.58680/ce201322954

November 2012

  1. Emerging Voices: Resituating Expertise: An Activity Theory Perspective on Representation in Critical Ethnography
    Abstract

    Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

    doi:10.58680/ce201221640

May 2012

  1. Review: The Matter of Assignments in Writing Classes and Beyond
    Abstract

    Works Reviewed: Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines. Mary Soliday. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 146 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8093-3019-9.$32.00. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Jody Shipka. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. 173 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8229-6150-4. $24.95.

    doi:10.58680/ce201219333

January 2011

  1. Discourse of the Firetenders: Considering Contingent Faculty through the Lens of Activity Theory
    Abstract

    Drawing on work logs kept by participants, the authors report and analyze a project at their university in which contingent faculty recorded the amount of work they actually performed during a week. The authors also recommend ways to enhance the working conditions of such faculty.

    doi:10.58680/ce201113518

March 2010

  1. Writing an Empire: Cross-Talk on Authority, Act, and Relationships with the Other in the Analects, Daodejing, and HanFeizi
    Abstract

    The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist.

    doi:10.58680/ce20109970

September 2009

  1. Review: Not Your Parents’ Curriculum: Multiple Genres, Technologies, and Disciplines in the Life Writing Classroom
    Abstract

    Reviewed is Teaching with Life Writing Texts, edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.

    doi:10.58680/ce20097954

March 2008

  1. Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, and Why They Belong in the Literature Classroom
    Abstract

    Through analyzing specific examples, the author identifies recurring themes of the genre known as the food memoir, calling attention in particular to its value as multicultural literature

    doi:10.58680/ce20086355

January 2008

  1. Reviving the Thirties: The Case for Teaching Proletarian Fiction in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom
    Abstract

    Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not fall simply into either camp. Such texts include John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Fielding Burke’s novel Call Home the Heart.

    doi:10.58680/ce20086346

November 2007

  1. Texts of Our Institutional Lives: Accessibility Scans and Institutional Activity: An Activity Theory Analysis
    Abstract

    Drawing on activity theory, the author describes and analyzes how he uses software to determine whether websites administered by his university are accessible to disabled people. He argues that, ultimately, accessibility is a rhetorical construct, in the sense that it is defined by communities rather than by sheer technical measurements.

    doi:10.58680/ce20076343

July 2006

  1. Response: Taking Up Language Differences in Composition
    Abstract

    The author reads the essays in this issue from the perspective of work in rhetorical genre theory on the concept of “uptake” in order to examine some of the challenges and possibilities teachers as well as students face as they engage in the work of identifying and deploying multiple languages and discourses. He suggests that the essays allow us to see uptake both as a site for the operations of power and a site for intervening in those operations, as well as allowing us to see a number of such interventions underway.

    doi:10.58680/ce20065043

January 2006

  1. Cross-Racial Voicing: Carl Van Vechten's Imagination and the Search for an African American Ethos
    Abstract

    In the critically acclaimed movie 8-Mile, Future, a host for the rap battles held in a Detroit neighborhood, proffers the above encouragement to his charge, an aspiring white rapper, played by recording sensation Eminem. Aside from the connections, real and imagined, between the emergence of Bunny-Rab bit, the character Eminem portrays, and his actual rise in the hip-hop community, the movie evokes a number of interesting quandaries about discursive strategies? voices historically ascribed to and inscribed by African Americans. Facets of Eminem's language appear to resonate with that of African American rappers, not to mention the larger oral tradition from which hip-hop discourse derives, though his existen tial experience surrounding that language cannot. Moreover, rappers speak of neigh borhoods plagued by economic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that some whites, like Eminem, have experienced as well. Still, Future's exhortation raises at least two questions: can a language performer (irrespective of genre) of one race truly participate in the discursive community of another? Given the material op pression that has accompanied the socially constructed denigration of African phe notypic features, can the sound of blackness be ultimately divorced from the sight of blackness?1

    doi:10.2307/25472153

May 2005

  1. Animated Categories: Genre, Action, and Composition
    doi:10.2307/30044647
  2. Review: Animated Categories: Genre, Action, and Composition
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, by Anis Bawarshi; The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, edited by Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko; and Writing Genres, by Amy J. Devitt.

    doi:10.58680/ce20054087
  3. The Economics of Exposition: Managerialism, Current-Traditional Rhetoric, and Henry Noble Day
    Abstract

    Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

    doi:10.58680/ce20054086

July 2004

  1. Revealing Secrets: Experiments in Academic Genres
    doi:10.2307/4140745
  2. REVIEW: Revealing Secrets: Experiments in Academic Genres
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, by Beth Daniell; Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman; and Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions, by Merrill Joan Gerber.

    doi:10.58680/ce20042859

March 2004

  1. The Daughter’s Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss
    Abstract

    This essay suggests that Harrison’s representation of father–daughter incest in The Kiss draws on literary elements of two seemingly distinct genres, memoir and fairy tale, to tell a story of violence and violation in the white middle–class family. Through memoir, it argues, Harrison revises the moral and behavioral edicts that cultural narratives, especially traditional fairy tales dealing with father–daughter incest, seek to impose.

    doi:10.58680/ce20042843

May 2003

  1. Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/65/5/collegeenglish1301-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce20031301
  2. Materiality, Genre, and Language Use: Introduction
    doi:10.2307/3594247
  3. Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/65/5/collegeenglish1303-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce20031303

September 2001

  1. Twentieth Century Literature in the New Century: A Symposium
    Abstract

    The arrival of the new century marks a significant, yet still unknown, transformation for scholars of twentieth century literature. What was once contemporary and ongoing has now become historical. While it is unlikely that scholars will divide themselves on those terms, it is perhaps time to begin a long-needed overhaul of the category “Twentieth Century Literature.” The study of twentieth century literature has been divided into genres, subgenres, into cultures and subcultures, by geography, and even by authors, but perhaps the time is coming where, much like specialists of nineteenth century literature, those scholars of twentieth century literature will be required to have a broader range of knowledge of the century’s literary works. The impact on the profession can only be speculated. The educated guesses provided here in this symposium are the results of a panel that convened at the 1999 MLA Convention.

    doi:10.58680/ce20011237

July 2000

  1. Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre
    Abstract

    Claims scholars in English, as a field of study, share a common object of study, specifically the study of discourse. Compares and attempts to integrate the scholarship on one part of discourse--genre--from two subdisciplines of English, literary and composition study.

    doi:10.58680/ce20001189

January 2000

  1. The Genre Function
    Abstract

    Explores the notion that genres not only help define and organize kinds of texts, they also help define and organize kinds of social actions. Investigates the role genre plays in the constitution of the contexts of texts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them.

    doi:10.58680/ce20001170

February 1998

  1. Magic and Memory in the Contemporary Story Cycle: Gloria Naylor and Louise Erdrich
    Abstract

    Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine” and Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place.” Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and celebrate the diverse realities of spirituality, magic, and communal memory.Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich’s "Love Medicine" and Gloria Naylor’s "The Women of Brewster Place." Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and celebrate the diverse realities of spirituality, magic, and communal memory.

    doi:10.58680/ce19983676

April 1990

  1. Reperiodization: The Example of Emily Dickinson
    Abstract

    One of the most obdurate institutional restraints in literary criticism is the periodization of literature for purposes of teaching, of analysis, and of specialization. These periods, created by a male-dominated literary establishment for a predominantly male literary tradition and sanctioned by a chronological inevitability, may be fictions, but they have the tenacity of convenience and convention. Even after feminist critics have worked successfully to recover neglected women writers and to place established women writers in the canon, the old periodization of literary studies holds firm. For example, when Modernism is stretched to include women and blacks, the new term High Modernists arises to relegate the additions to what presumably would be the status of Low Modernists. In reconsidering the question of periodization from a feminist perspective, the best place to start is with a major woman writer. For this purpose, Emily Dickinson is ideal because her writing life spanned literary periods and her poetry dominates the century in which she wrote. Generally credited as the greatest woman poet and a major influence on all subsequent women writers, Dickinson is nonetheless set in the literary period of American Transcendentalism, not as the jewel in its crown, but rather as a writer in the Emersonian and Romantic male tradition (see Homans and Diehl). Yet the genre in which she exclusively writes distinguishes her from the American Transcendentalists, and the attitudes she takes toward the lyric I, her art, and her audience are all quite different from theirs. In this statement, I draw no revolutionary conclusions: Dickinson is generally considered so far outside the main currents of the period that she is not always included in major studies of the time (see Matthiessen and Irwin). She does not fit in, I want to argue, because she belongs to a later period, and the reason she belongs to a later period is that she did not fit into her own. In this situation, she may be typical of many women writers who look forward to the next literary period-the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, for example, who has a certain Romantic strain in her poetry, or the Modernist Gertrude Stein, who exemplifies the experiments of Post-Modernism. My reasoning about Dickinson is not so circular as it might at first appear, and it is pertinent to the problems that women writers pose to periodization.

    doi:10.2307/377657

November 1989

  1. Literacy and Genre: Towards a Pedagogy of Mediation
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Literacy and Genre: Towards a Pedagogy of Mediation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/51/7/collegeenglish11269-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce198911269

October 1989

  1. Yellow Wood, Diverging Pedagogies; Or, the Joy of Text
    Abstract

    The battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people is long since lost, but a different sort of battle involving hearts and minds has been joined in our undergraduate literature courses. An influential and increasingly vocal element in our profession is suggesting that these courses should be organized around questions raised by critical theory rather than around the texts themselves in their traditional groupings by genres, themes, and historical periods. Not surprisingly, the suggestion is being met with something less than enthusiasm on the part of those who believe, Stanley Fish notwithstanding, that there are numerous texts in their classes, and that some sort of minimally mediated encounter with each should be the starting point of literary education. These textophiles are alarmed over what seems to them a potentially fatal neglect of heart, of emotional immediacies and humanistic sympathies, in the introductory process, while the theorophiles brood over the slight rendered to mind if the presence of unacknowledged preconceptions is condoned at any stage. Since such preconceptions are inevitably present and can be demonstrated by a rigorous logic not suited to matters of the heart, it would seem that the strategic prospects of the text-defenders are bleak. Nonetheless, I would like to enlist myself in their ranks, and see whether there might not be valid arguments for a provisional privileging of the text over its theoretical contexts, at least for students unfamiliar with either. In a casual conversation some years ago with William Gass, who has managed-like Iris Murdoch-to combine the careers of novelist and philosophy teacher, I asked whether he also taught occasional literature classes. His unequivocal no was followed by an explanation that I find apropos of some of our current professional dilemmas. He didn't care, he said, whether his philosophy students liked Plato or not; he was concerned only that they understand Plato's thought. But when some sophomoric ephebe-or words to that effectannounced that he didn't like Henry James, he felt an immediate, visceral surge Dwight Eddins is a professor of English at the University of Alabama. His articles have appeared in such journals as ELH and Modern Language Quarterly. He has just finished a book on Thomas Pynchon.

    doi:10.2307/377941

January 1989

  1. The Verse Novel: A Modern American Poetic Genre
    Abstract

    Preview this article: The Verse Novel: A Modern American Poetic Genre, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/51/1/collegeenglish11326-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce198911326

October 1986

  1. Connecting English Studies
    Abstract

    The future of the English department and the among its various parts are much-debated issues, with special attention now given (as it will be here) to the problem of connecting literature and composition. If English departments have a future (besides the one we are often asked to go back to), will that future combine or separate lit and comp? There are among us many who propose or announce the death of the English department altogether; indeed, one often finds its obituary in the more exciting journals. Others, given to slightly less drastic cures, argue for the separation (amputation?) of composition from literature, with composition forming an independent department. A more difficult problem faces us when we presume that English departments will continue to exist, that composition should be a part of them, and that literature and composition can and should cooperate in some way, not go about their work independently. I want to explore the possibilities of such cooperation, focusing on the key terms, the figurative devices, and to some extent the genres we use in formulating our visions of a connected English Studies. I should say right off that I will be looking closely at our rhetoric of connections for my own rhetorical reasons. I will be arguing for an antifederalist view of such a union, a Jeffersonian and not Hamiltonian notion of the English department and the profession. Like Jefferson, I think that certain ways of defining the union can be tyrannical, that some disconnections can be constitutionally healthy, and that in every generation we must be prepared, indeed eager, to rethink and rearrange our relationships. In this generation, there is certainly much to arrange and rearrange. Just a random sample from what I assure you were entirely unsolicited brochures sent

    doi:10.2307/376708

April 1981

  1. Gender Studies: New Directions for Feminist Criticism
    Abstract

    The essays in Gender Studies explore relationships between gender and creativity, identity, and genre within the context of literary analysis. Some of the essays are psychoanalytic in approach in that they seek to discover the sexual dynamic/s involved in the creation of literature as an art form. Still others attempt to isolate and examine the sexual attitudes inherent in the works of particular authors or genres, or to determine how writers explore the sensibilities of each gender.

    doi:10.2307/377125

December 1978

  1. The Fabled Functions of Fiction
    Abstract

    RECENTLY I WRAPPED UP a lecture on a modern American novel with the statement, underlying theme of the book, then, is that in a universe shorn of transcendental values, of codes divinely ordained, each person must necessarily work out his own destiny. When one of the graduate students in my class raised his hand, I prepared either to repeat or to amplify my somewhat grandiloquent assertion. But the student proved less perplexed than querulous. He said, That's about all I got out of it, too. What it took this author four-hundred pages to get across, a good philosopher could convey, and less ambiguously, in a chapter. I think novels are basically a waste of time. It was the kind of challenge that the English professor is trained to meet, and indeed my first impulse was to let loose traditional arguments that must at last pummel the young iconoclast into an admission of the inimitable sweetness and light of belles-lettres. The hovering presences of Sidney, Shelley, Arnold, and a host of descendent apologists beckoned me to verify my professional mettle by exonerating darling poesy (using the word in its broad Aristotelian sense) from the charge of inessentiality. Instead, I sided with the heretic. With something of a guilty thing surprised, I dismissed the imagined importunities of my venerable judges, and to the student said, You may have a point. The student's plaint crystallized my own vague yet persistent dissatisfaction with fiction. Years before, I had been an avid consumer of novels of all sorts-an enthusiasm that partially accounted for my decision to pursue studies in language and literature-but as time wore on I became progressively less attached to fiction, the whole of belles-lettres in fact, and simultaneously more oriented to philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The evolution in taste finally reached a stage where the time I spent on such disciplines was tenfold what I devoted to fiction. The disparity of attention was significative not merely of an English professor's attempt to balance his knowledge of genres, but reflected instead an intrinsic preference for analytical writing. Though I do not maintain that novels are a waste of time for everybody-each person must arbitrate his or her own tastes-they do seem virtually so for me. Given my occupational affiliation with belles-lettres, I flinch at the admission, for my fancy teems with visions of colleagues and students disdaining one so foul as to besmirch what he teaches. While my academic training and associations increase the difficulty of appraising in a disinterested fashion the bases for my literary prefer-

    doi:10.2307/376256

September 1978

  1. Teaching Milton's Early Poetry
    Abstract

    TEACHING MILTON'S POETRY raises difficult problems. More than the work of most literary figures, Milton's poetry demands a familiarity with its literary, cultural, and historical milieu. A knowledge of classical mythology, Christian theology, Puritan controversy, and seventeenth-century history is often central to an understanding of Milton's work, and, as every teacher of Milton knows, today's students rarely come to a Milton course with such background. Another teaching problem results from Milton's reputation. Not only do most students consider Milton a difficult and a remote poet, but they also think of him as a Puritan. For them, all too often to be a Puritan is to be a religious fanatic, a kill-joy, or, worst of all, a sexual prude. More serious than either of these problems is that of aesthetic taste. Milton is a master of the long poem; we live in an era that values short poetic forms and fiction. Milton is a lover of ornamentation; we live in an era that favors directness in style. Milton is a writer of grandiloquent poetry (my students pejoratively refer to it as flowery); we live in an era that prefers simplicity and understatement. Milton is a skilled user of the remote, the impersonal, the public voice; we live in an era that values the psychological, the personal, the private voice. And Milton is an experimenter in genres that are no longer viable today-the descriptio, the classical pastoral, the court masque. The least accessible of all of Milton's poetry, it seems to me, is the early poetry, for whereas Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes have narratives, psychological concerns, and thematic issues which interest the contemporary student, the earlier poems seem more remote, more ornate, and less obviously relevant to students today. The first time I taught a course in Milton, in the fall of 1975, I became painfully aware of these problems and how they interfered with the students' enjoyment and understanding of Milton's work, especially the early poems. In that course, I took a fairly standard major author approach to Milton's art, an approach patterned after my own undergraduate Milton course. I began by delivering introductory lectures on Milton's life and on seventeenth-century historical and philosophical background. I then assigned the early poems in their chronological order of composition, beginning with On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, and gave traditional close readings of these short works before moving on to Paradise Lost. The results of this thorough, well-researched, tightly-organized approach were poor at best. Although the better students were interested, involved, and learning, the majority of

    doi:10.2307/376174

April 1976

  1. Sentimentality and the Academic Tradition
    Abstract

    What are we former students of the New Critics to think of Catch-22 and all the praise heaped on it, for more than a decade now, by English professors? If sentimentality means what we thought it did (invitation to unexamined response, indulgence of inappropriate emotion) and as bad as we thought it was (an insult to serious readers, an abomination to people in universities) then, if we are still able to read as we were taught to read, Catch-22 thoroughly sentimental and not worth teaching. But apparently most college teachers, like most American intellectuals, do not see the book this way. I have in my office three collections of Catch-22 criticism that have been offered to me, in the last two years, for classroom use. They hardly acknowledge that a reaction like mine, like ours, possible. The editor of one of them, Robert M. Scotto (Joseph Heller's Catch-22: A Critical Edition, New York: Dell, 1973), tells me in his first sentence that Catch-22 is our contemporary classic, and appends eight critical essays that show no sign of disagreement. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, editors of A 'Catch-22' Casebook (New York: Crowell, 1973), declare in their second sentence that they feel, without reservation, that Catch-22 a masterpiece. Of the forty-six entries in their collection only three or four, by my reckoning, could be called seriously unfavorable. This in a genre commonly devoted to dialectic. The third editor, James Nagel (Critical Essays on Catch-22, Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1974), advertises controversy in his collection, and says that nearly all the key issues remain unresolved and continue to be vigorously debated, but the controversy we see mainly over what the novel really about, or whether the disjointed time scheme functional or not, or whether Yossarian an epic or an existentialist hero, and so on. Though there some debate over how bad the writing and how stereotyped the characters are, and some discussion of how functional these crudities and stereotypes may be, Nagel's introduction heavy with respect for Heller's art, and only two of the nineteen essays he collects are unfavorable. One of these a one-page review. Through all these collections the student will hear little debate on the kind of question that seems, that once seemed, vital to me, to us-whether the novel will stand up to and reward a hard, critical reading, or whether it will break down, whether it sentimental. Instead he will hear many tributes and claims that link the novel to the questions he finds vital in our time: that Catch-22 a brilliantly comic attack, long before the Vietnam war, on all the stupidity and

    doi:10.2307/376010

March 1976

  1. Getting Freshman Comp All Together
    Abstract

    IN SEARCH OF A MORE EFFICIENT, effective, and individualized way to teach composition, I have been experimenting for several years with first-sight, in-class reading of students' writing as the entire business of classroom meetings. The exact reproduction of students' papers, necessary for profitable in-class reading, has been, until rather recently, so burdensome that it made fulltime in-class reading impractical, but recent technological innovations have made it easy. This several years' experience has convinced me that fulltime, in-class reading serves the teacher, the student, and the discipline so much better than any other way I know that I offer it here for the consideration and criticism of other teachers in the hope that it might help them and they might improve it. During the first meeting of a term, I explain the purpose of the course, the types of writing we will be doing, the style levels we will be attempting, the final manuscript form required, and give the first of the eighteen weekly writing assignments. I specify only the style level and expository genre and leave choice of specific topic to the students, encouraging them to write on something interesting that they know more about than we, their classmates and I, do. During the second meeting, we discuss the use of the two reference works used in the course: Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 8th ed., and Perrin's Writer's Guide and Index to English, 5th ed., this last to be read a chapter a week and selectively according to the needs of individual students. During the third meeting, I explain and demonstrate how we will read their writing in class, and I collect their first papers. After the third meeting, I take their typed papers and make a thermal transparency and a thermal ditto-master of each page of their writing and run off a ditto copy of each page for each student. At the beginning of the fourth meetingand every third meeting after that-I distribute the dittos for the week. Then I project the transparency of the first page, so the students can easily follow where the changes are being made, and we begin reading, all but the writer of the paper for the first time. A teacher could read the papers before class, but I find my responses fresher, the classes more interesting, and the whole process most efficient if I read them with the students for the first time in class. We read with one question and one restriction in mind: How could we write this better? and, Let's read sympathetically and change the form and content of the author as little as possible. Students participate freely in the reading and discussion, and we read every paper as a whole against the assignment, dealing with

    doi:10.2307/376465

March 1975

  1. Who Buried H. D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in "The Literary Tradition"
    Abstract

    is A MAJOR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POET who all too often receives the response H.D.?-who's he? When people are reminded that H.D. was the pen name for Hilda Doolittle, it is generally remembered that she was one of those imagist poets back in the beginning of the century who changed the course of modern poetry with their development of the image and free verse. Her early poems, like Oread or Heat, still appear regularly in modern poetry anthologies, but the more difficult epic poetry she went on to write is seldom studied or taught. The canon of her major, largely unread work is considerable: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) are the three long poems of her war Trilogy, which has recently been reissued; Helen in Egypt (1961) is the work she called her own Cantos; the newly published volume Hermetic Definition (1972) contains three more long poems, the title poem, Winter Love, and Sagesse; and Vale Ave is another, as-yet-unpublished epic poem. While poetry was undoubtedly the genre giving fullest expression to her creative energies, she also published numerous translations, acted in a movie whose script she wrote (Borderline, with Paul Robeson, 1930), experimented with drama (Hippolytus Temporizes, 1927), and wrote several novels (Hedylus, 1928; Palimpsest, 1926; Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal), 1960; and the largely unpublished The Gift), interesting at the very least for her own style of rendering stream of consciousness. Her memoir of Freud, Tribute to Freud (1956), is both an impressionistic record of their sessions together and a serious reevaluation of his impact on the twentieth century; it too has been recently reissued in expanded form. Caged in a literary movement that lasted all of six or seven years, the magnificent poet of these epics and the writer who experimented in a wide variety of genres is like the captured white-faced Scops owl in her poem Sagesse. While the onlookers at the zoo chatter about his comical whiskers and

    doi:10.2307/375177

March 1974

  1. International Literature for American Students
    Abstract

    In 1972, to complement the international education requirement at Goshen College, the English Department added International Literature to its course offerings. The course was deliberately titled to distinguish it from traditional courses in comparative or even literature, which seldom move beyond the classic masterpieces of the European tradition. Embracing a world wide literary terrain, however, immediately raised the crucial question of how best to bring both comprehensiveness and coherence to such an exotic, amorphous study. Should the course focus on a single writer? a national literature? a regional literature? a genre? an archetypal theme? past, recent, or even future Nobel Prize winners? Because the students preferred to study works from many parts of the world (thus ruling out the geographically limited alternatives), and because we wanted to attract students majoring in

    doi:10.2307/375254

December 1972

  1. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre
    doi:10.58680/ce197218271