Laura L. Behling

3 articles
  1. Formalizing Curiosity
    Abstract

    Abstract Faculty and students in English and other humanities disciplines engage in undergraduate research and scholarship. Administrative support ensures institutional practices, policies such as those focused on tenure and promotion, and rewards are in place to encourage students as scholars, mentored by faculty. Such administrative leadership demonstrates an inclusive recognition that all disciplines engage in undergraduate scholarship; contributes to recruitment and retention efforts; positively impacts on student learning; and effectively promotes the institution, faculty, and students.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-9385420
  2. "Generic" Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts
    Abstract

    onsider Pauline Hopkins's short story Talma Gordon (1900), first published in the Colored American Magazine. Like many Hopkins's writings, Talma Gordon takes up the issue the tragic mulatto and the larger theme miscegenation. In this text, however, she frames these social issues in the form detective fiction, the locked-room mystery structure that Edgar Allan Poe inaugurated with Murders in the Rue Morgue. The story opens at the Canterbury Club Boston, a private club composed wealthy, well-connected white men who gather monthly to discuss questions of vital importance to the life the Republic, such as that evening's topic, Expansion: Its Effect upon the Future Development the Anglo-Saxon throughout the World (4). The speaker, Dr. William Thornton, argues that despite the efforts to thwart intermarriage among races, it is inevitable, even between the white Boston Brahmins and the far-off tribes dark-skinned peoples (5). If are not ready to receive and assimilate the new material which will be brought to mingle with our pure Anglo-Saxon stream, Thornton warns, we should call a halt in our expansion policy (5). Arguing that man is powerless to combat both fate and the laws the Omnipotent, Thornton avers that

    doi:10.2307/3594242
  3. “Generic” Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts
    Abstract

    Argues that issues of generic hybridity embody multicultural literature while promoting another kind of multiculturalism that reflects the current debates about literary canons in general and the field of American literature in particular. Considers how a reading of texts that relies on all of their component parts allows literature to perform a vital function, to foster an informed and compassionate vision of the different.

    doi:10.58680/ce20031294