DeCiccio, A., Abate, M., Noone, H., Pereira, H., Coyle, W., & Kirby, A. (2021, February 17). Tutoring high school writers in early access university writing courses. PeerCentered. https://www.peercentered.org/2021/02/tutoring-high-school-writers-in-early.html
Abstract
Tom Deans and Jason Courtmanche have described how a college or university writing center can help change “incoming student attitudes toward writing” (58). This brief piece presents tutor and tutee evidence for their assertion. Tutors from the Salem State University Writing Center have reflected on their experiences tutoring early access Salem High School students enrolled in the University’s first-year writing course and a first-year history course. The high school students have also reflected on the tutoring they received.
Nixon, J. V., & Constantini, M. (Eds.). (2021). Becoming home: Diaspora and the anglophone transnational. Vernon Press.
Abstract
“Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational” is a collection of essays exploring national identity, migration, exile, colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, race, and gender in the literature of the Anglophone world. The volume focuses on the dispersion or scattering of people in exile, and how those with an existing homeland and those displaced, without a politically recognized sovereign state, negotiate displacement and the experience of living at home-abroad. This group includes expatriate minority communities existing uneasily and nostalgically on the margins of their host country.
The diaspora becomes an important cultural phenomenon in the formation of national identities and opposing attempts to transcend the idea of nationhood itself on its way to developing new forms of transnationalism. Chapters on the literature or national allegories of the diaspora and the transnational explore the diverse and geographically expansive ways in which Anglophone literature by colonized subjects and emigrants negotiates diasporic spaces to create imagined communities or a sense of home. Themes explored within these pages include restlessness, tensions, trauma, ambiguities, assimilation, estrangement, myth, nostalgia, sentimentality, homesickness, national schizophrenia, divided loyalties, intellectual capital, and geographical interstices. Special attention is paid to the complex ways identity is negotiated by immigrants to Anglophone countries writing in English about their home-abroad experience. The lived experiences of emigrants of the diaspora create a literature rife with tensions concerning identity, language, and belongingness in the struggle for home. Focusing on writers in particular geopolitical spaces, the essays in the collection offer an active conversation with leading theorizers of the diaspora and the transnational, including Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft, William Safran, Gabriel Sheffer, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Benedict Anderson.
This volume cuts across the broad geopolitical space of the Anglophone world of literature and cultural studies and will appeal to professors, scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students in English, comparative literature, history, ethnic and race studies, diaspora studies, migration, and transnational studies. The volume will also be an indispensable aid to public policy experts.
Nixon, J. V. (2021). Forbidden fruit: The economy of food in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. In S. Antosa, M. Constantini, & E. Ettore (Eds.), Transgressive Appetites: Deviant Food Practices in Victorian Literature and Culture (pp. 121-136). Italy: Mimesis/AngloSophia.
Peary, A. (Ed.). (2021). COVID spring II: More granite state pandemic poems. Hobblebush Books.
Abstract
When COVID Spring was published in 2020, there were no intentions of compiling a second volume. And yet, as the pandemic dragged on, the writing never stopped. On April 30, 2020—the end of National Poetry Month—COVID deaths in the United States reached 63,000; on April 30, 2021, that number exceeded 575,700. Last year, vaccines seemed a distant dream; this April, nervous neighbors and hopeful strangers idled in tidy rows, all waiting to receive their first or second “jab.”
“This trajectory is mirrored in the movement of poems in this anthology, from the melancholy and depression of isolation in 2020 to the resurrection of hope in 2021,” writes New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary in her introduction. “These poets have written with tremendous heart and skill, their craft evident in couplets gone awry, fitting for the time, in surreal and realistic imagery, in prose poems, in neologism and tanka, and in final lines and posed questions.”
Fifty-one poets are represented in COVID Spring II: More Granite State Pandemic Poems, each showcasing their own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic in New Hampshire. Read the anthology on its own for a slice of history, or experience it alongside the first volume for a broader picture of how our state has been affected during these unprecedented times.
Peary, A. (2021, May 28). Mantra of intention. New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2021.1925305
Abstract
The single most impactful intention a writer can set isn't to work every day, or finish a draft by a circled date on the calendar, or keep submitting work in the face of editorial rejection. It's to prioritize observing the present moment above word count, above stylistic concerns, above reaching a target audience, above any other aspect of composing. From this one simple intention to remain mindful desk-side cascades a series of alterations in our approach to process that causes minor to major stressors to fall to the wayside, leading to increased verbal output and a more positive outlook toward writing. Prioritizing the writing Now annuls our fixation on product or outcome that stunts invention; it helps us better appreciate the nuances of prewriting and the nonverbal; it casts a spotlight on the chimerical nature of the audiences who constrain us; it honours our writing body and our writing emotions.
Peary, A. (2021). Battle of Silicon Valley at daybreak. Pangyrus. https://www.pangyrus.com/poetry/battle-of-silicon-valley-at-daybreak/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=battle-of-silicon-valley-at-daybreak
Peary, A. (2021). Deca-meron. Broadkill Review. https://www.broadkillreview.com/post/deca-meron-by-alexandriapeary
Peary, A. (2021). Chopin nocturne No. 2 in e flat, op. 9, no. 2. Main Street Rag, 26(2), 59-60.
Peary, A. (2021). Wild apple. Terrain. https://www.terrain.org/2021/nonfiction/wild-apple/
Peary, A. (2021). Scissors of the air. Green Mountains Review. 32(1), 69-77.
Peary, A. (2021). Title covered in flies. Plume. https://plumepoetry.com/five-per-page/
Peary, A. (2021). 5 per page. Plume. https://plumepoetry.com/five-per-page/
Peary, A. (2021). 2021 dear poet project. Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/dear-alexandria-peary-2021
Scrimgeour, J. D. (2021). Banana bread: Mandarin pandemic diary. Nixes Mate Books.
Valens, K. (2021). Caribbean eco-poetics: The categorial imperative and indifference in the Caribbean environment. In R. Cummings & A. Donnell (Eds.), Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020 (pp. 371-385). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274.027
Abstract
Caribbean eco-poetics takes the categorial imperative – the culmination of the long history of Western separation of human and nature in the Enlightenment/colonial mandate to categorize and systematize, to collect and enclose, to divide and conquer – as part of the violence of colonialism. Caribbean eco-poetics offers ways of articulating the endless transitions, the perpetual revolutions, and the inextricable imbrications of humans with not only nature, animals and things but also of all those with spirits, folk figures and divine forces that are endemic in the Caribbean. This essay examines how Caribbean eco-poetics return to the colonial archive to examine the naturalization of the categorial imperative and to recuperate its victims, reconfigure the garden and gardening as ways to reinhabit and reconfigure the categorial imperative, write worlds where indifferences of human, animal, spirit, genre are manifest, and include indifference to binary gender and heteronormativity.
Valens, K., & Delgado, D. (2021). Institutionalizing (in)equality: The double-edged sword of diversity requirements. In J. Cohen & D. Mack (Eds.), Teaching Race in Perilous Times. SUNY Press.
Introduction
The turn of the twenty-first century has been marked by US institutions of all types moving to implement an array of “diversity-aware” practices and policies, targeting everything from bathroom access to universal design. In 2012, the Black Lives Matter movement refocused attention and energy across the United States, and across US universities, on the persistence of racism and on the power dynamics and social injustice that both feed and result from it. An increase in pro-diversity rhetoric, we were reminded, does not suffice to address institutionalized racism and inequity. At many colleges and universities, students have been the ones demanding, vocally and visibly, that classrooms and curricula must address diversity, power dynamics, and social justice in substantive ways from the micro-level of interpersonal interactions to the macro-level of examining structural inequalities and ways to dismantle them. An increasing number of colleges and universities have responded by adding courses and requirements focused on the study of “diversity.” [...]
Valens, K. (2021). Home cooking: Diaspora and transnational Caribbean cookbooks. In J. Nixon & M. Constantini (Eds.), Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational, Vernon Press.
Valens, K. (2021). Caribbean Jewish crossings: Literary history and creative practice. In S.P. Casteel, & H. Kaufman (Eds.), New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 95(1-2), 154-155. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-09501051
Valens, K. (2021). Book review: Patricia Powell’s Me Dying Trial. Journal of West Indian Literature, 29, 183-185.
Valens, K. (Trans.) (2021). Walking: yesterday I dreamed I was traveling, by Sharling Hernández. Bi Women Quarterly. 39(2), 3-5.
Walker, P.A. (2021). Social Darwinism, feminism, and performative identity in Wharton’s “The last asset.” In F. Asya (Ed.), Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction (pp. 179–195). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52742-6_12
Abstract
This chapter reads Wharton’s story, “The Last Asset,” from the perspectives of literary naturalism and social Darwinism, feminism, and performativity. The chapter highlights the use of close reading, especially for figurative language of predation, the military, business, and the theater. The close reading shows that the story raises questions about social predation and manipulation, about women’s limited career options at the beginning of the twentieth century, and about identity. As very little scholarship exists on “The Last Asset,” one of the innovations of this chapter is to draw attention to the story by demonstrating its appropriateness for inclusion in a variety of literature courses. The chapter also provides an insightful interpretation of the story that helps to make the case for greater attention to “The Last Asset” by relating it to Wharton’s better-known novels and stories. Another innovation is in the section that examines identity, which relies on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity.
Walker, P.A. (2021). Henry James and music. In L. Buonomo (Ed.) The Sound of James: The Aural Dimension of Henry James’s Work (pp. 1-15). Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste. http://hdl.handle.net/10077/32298
Introduction Excerpt
Henry James’s copious writing on the sister arts of drama, sculpture, and painting is exceeded in quantity, among his non-fictional writing, only by his extensive writing on literature.1 He was an enthusiastic follower, reviewer, and critic of the dramatic and the visual arts, and both his fiction and the scholarship on James and the sister arts reflect these interests in drama and art. From The American to The Ambassadors, the theatre, with a particular emphasis on Paris’s Théâtre Français, is a recurring reference point. From “The Madonna of the Future” to “The Real Thing,” by way of Agnolo Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi in The Wings of the Dove and the Lambinet landscape in The Ambassadors, the pictorial arts play a central role, though perhaps never so much as in The Tragic Muse, where life in the theatre and the studio are as central as can be to the novel’s setting and subject. James scholars, from Viola Hopkins Winner and Adeline Tintner to Joseph Litvak and Kendall Johnson, have studied James and the visual and the dramatic arts. [...]
Walker, P.A. (2021). Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion. Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 46(2), 267–270. https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.46.2.267
Young. S. (2021). Bodies of evidence: Memory, forensics, and “documentary” literature about former Yugoslavia. In Schwartz, M., Weller, N., & Winkel, H. (Eds.), After Memory: Rethinking Representations of World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures, Media and Cultural Memory Series (pp. 35-60). De Gruyter Publishers.
Book Abstract
Even seventy-five years after the end of War War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up 'after memory'. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area's contested heritage.
Young, S. (2021). Boundary-aesthetics: Obscured scenographies of violence at the U.S./Mexican border. In Popuscú, L. (ed.) Performing Human Rights: Contested Amnesia and Aesthetic Practices in the Global South. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. 207-240.
Book Abstract
The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting “performance” as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices—such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived—this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.