English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Below you may find selected books and book chapters from English faculty in the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

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Program Profile 8: Chapman University: Bridging the Gap with Action Research

Ian Barnard, Matthew Goldman, Sarah K. Robblee, Natalie Salagean, Daniel Strasberger, and Candice Yacono

"In the English Department at Chapman, all graduate students are eligible to apply for positions as GTAs after they have completed a graduate seminar in teaching composition. Those who are offered and accept GTA positions take a second graduate seminar, composition pedagogy and research practicum, simultaneously with their first semester of teaching. In order to encourage GTAs to develop identities as teacher-scholars, GTAs develop IRB-approved action research projects (Buyserie; Hawkes; Hudson et al.; Souleles) as their major work in this second seminar. These action research projects allow GTAs to research a question they have about the teaching of composition, using their own students as the sources of their data. Thus, they are learning how (their own) teacher-knowledge can be a source of expertise in the fields of pedagogy and composition, and the action research project becomes a central component of and bridge between their teaching (their identities as teachers, since they initiate, shape, and undertake the research as the instructor of their first-year composition class) and their scholarship (their identities as students, since they are learning how to undertake an action research project and are completing it as a graduate student assignment). Many GTAs have gone on to use their action research projects as the basis for MA theses and conference papers."
The (Selfish) Power of Book Reviews: Reading, Citizenship, and Platform

Anna Leahy

"Indeed, writing book reviews can further one's professional goals both inside and outside academia, not only as a service to others but in sustaining a lifetime of writing and in building a record of publication. Publishing reviews supports three distinct, interconnected areas of a writer's work: attentive, writerly reading to keep up with one's field; thoughtful engagement in the field's conversation; and connection with editors and readers... As such, this type of writing bridges academic and public writing, critical and creative impulses, and modes of writerly reading and creative writing."
Untheories of Fiction: Literary Essays from Diderot to Markson

Mark Axelrod-Sokolov

This book takes a closer look at the diversity of fiction writing from Diderot to Markson and by so doing call into question the notion of a singular “theory of fiction,” especially in relation to the novel. Unlike Forster’s approach to “Aspects of the Novel,” which implied there is only one kind of novel to which there may be an aspect, this book deconstructs how one approach to studying something as protean as the novel cannot be accomplished. To that end, the text uses Diderot’s This Is Not A Story (1772) and David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel (2016) as a frame and imbedded within are essays on De Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room (1829), Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs Of Braz Cubas (1881), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (1945).
Interrogating What We Mean by "Making": Stories from Women who Make in Community

Bibhushana Poudyal, Tetyana Zhyvotovska, Estefania Castillo, Nora Rivera, Ann Shivers-McNair, Joy Robinson, and Laura Gonzales

"In recent years, innovation, entrepreneurship, and globalization have become popular concepts in relation to technology design. While some major corporations and other entities continue pushing for globalization through the design and dissemination of digital technologies, researchers also caution against the biases and oppression that can be embedded in US culture’s 'near-ubiquitous use of algorithmically driven software.'¹ Countering some previously established orientations to globalization and entrepreneurship, this chapter highlights the importance of building technological innovation with (rather than just for or about) historically, structurally, and systematically marginalized and underrepresented communities. The overall purpose of this chapter is to showcase how technological innovation, when it is made and developed through reciprocal mentorship networks,² can disrupt a chain of signifiers of a privileged structure and create makerspaces for and with community knowledge and information."
Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions

Ian Barnard

In Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions, Ian Barnard makes the counterintuitive argument that contemporary “sex panics” are undergirded by queerphobia, even when the panics in question don’t appear to have much to do with queerness. Barnard presents six case studies that treat a wide range of sex panic rhetorics around child molesters, sex trafficking, transgenderism, incest, queer kids, and pedagogy to demonstrate this argument. By using examples from academic scholarship, political discourse, and popular culture, including the Kevin Spacey scandal and the award-winning film Moonlight, Barnard shows how homophobia and transphobia continue to pervade contemporary Western culture.
Is It ‘A Marriage of True Minds’? Balanced Reading in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

Lynda A. Hall

Jane Austen often uses reading as a way to develop her characters. For instance, in Persuasion, Captain Benwick‘s melancholic disposition is revealed through his partiality for Romantic poetry, but Anne Elliot’s value for balance is expressed when she recommends moral essays. Other times, and not unfrequently, characters’ reading choice falls on the works of William Shakespeare—such as Hamlet, which Willoughby reads to Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and the excerpts from Elegant Extracts we learn that Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland has memorized.

Some of Austen’s characters read Shakespeare with seductive intent, but others show their maturity through the critical thinking that comes with balanced reading—understanding nuance and context rather than memorizing “bits and scraps” of published excerpts. Looking carefully at eighteenth century reading practices as well as characters’ reading in Austen’s last two published novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, this chapter aims to determine the value of reading within Austen’s novels.
Notions of Otherness: Literary Essays from Abraham Cahan to Dacia Maraini

Mark Axelrod-Sokolov

‘Notions of Otherness’ is a collection of literary essays that approaches the idea of alterity politically, aesthetically, ethically, culturally and sexually in a diachronic manner.
Madness in Fiction: Literary Essays from Poe to Fowles

Mark Axelrod-Sokolov

This book examines one work dealing with madness from each of five prominent authors. Including discussion of Fowles, Hamsun, Hesse, Kafka, and Poe, it delineates the specific type of madness the author associates with each text, and explores the reason for that - such as a historical moment, physical pressure (such as starvation), or the author’s or his narrator’s perspective. The project approaches the texts it explores from the perspective of a writer of fiction as well as from the perspective of a critic, and discusses them as unique manifestations of literary madness. It is of particular significance for those interested in the interplay of fiction, literary criticism, and psychology.
Theology, Phenomenology, and the Divine in King Lear

Kent R. Lehnhof

"In what follows, then, I would like to think through Levinas's ideas on transcendence and ethics in such a way as to map out a new pathway for approaching Shakespeare's great tragedy. As unorthodox as it may sound, I propose to shed light on the darkling religiosity of King Lear by turning-not to the theological doctrines of early modem Christians-but to the postmodern ethics of a twentieth-century Jew."
Bohemians: Greenwich Village and The Masses

Joanna Levin

"This chapter traces the convergence of 'the revolt against puritanism' and 'the revolt against capitalism' in the 1910s, focusing on the most celebrated American bohemia Greenwich Village - and on The Masses, the Village periodical that provided the most influential expression of the double-edged bohemian revolt. The effort to combine the personal and the political, the artistic and the social helped fuel a host of interconnected movements and alliances within the bohemian milieu, and the bohemians called upon both Marx and Freud in the effort to promote revolutionary change. Often riddled with internal contradictions and susceptible to forces of cultural co-optation and containment, the quest for bohemian liberation in the 1910s inevitably fell short of the Villagers' ambitious, utopian ideals; nevertheless, the bohemians were astute social critics, recognizing that liberation required them to confront interlocking oppressions based on class, gender, nationality, and race. They sought a more inclusive, egalitarian America, and their art and writing - and their legendary exploits, recounted in numerous memoirs continued to inspire later generations of left-leaning artists, writers, and intellectuals."
"It's Such a Good Feeling": Self-Esteem, the Growth Mindset, and Creative Writing

Anna Leahy

"Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about grading for Can It Really Be Taught? that was actually about self-esteem. I asserted then, as I do now, that 'our common terminology, the prevalent workshop model, and popular notions of creative writing as unteachable, unacademic, or undisciplined lead to self-esteem in a way that other college classes do not.' By that, I meant that the issue of self-esteem is more likely to be evident in the field of creative writing than in other disciplines and to play a discernible role in dynamics and learning in creative writing classrooms, though I now see how my statement might mistakenly be considered a call to use creative writing classes to boost self-esteem or as a criticism of foundational pedagogical approaches in the field of creative writing."
The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans

Joanna Levin

"This essay focuses on The Double Dealer, the literary journal that the New York Times called 'the heart and backbone of the Quarter.' The offices and pages of the journal provided the stage for bohemian self-fashioning and community building... The lively, engaging, frustrating, and often offensive 'talk talk talk' (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues of Faulkners roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia."
Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels: Settling, Speculating and Superfluity

Lynda A. Hall

Jane Austen’s minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed. Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austen’s minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries. Austen’s minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence. These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing women’s limited choices. This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.
Poetics of Prose: Literary Essays from Lermontov to Calvino

Mark Axelrod

This creative yet scholarly book discusses prose's important relationship to close literary analysis, showing how such an approach can be beneficial for readers, scholars, and writers alike. Bringing together a literary history that consists of writers such as Lermontov, Chekhov, Camus, and Calvino, Mark Axelrod masterfully interweaves discussions of structure, context, genre, plot, and other key elements often applied to poetry but seldom applied to various forms of prose in order to offer bold and surprisingly fresh claims about the writer's purpose. By peeling back these layers of technique and style, this book opens up discussions to better understand and appreciate great dramatists, writers, and poets throughout time by returning back to the core elements that originally comprised their writing crafts.
A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad

Richard Ruppel

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, especially on the latter’s critique of what he called “the grand narrative,” A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad shows how Conrad’s politics were always radically contingent on audience, contemporary events, and, especially, genre. While the political perspective in each of his stories and novels may be more-or-less coherent and consistent, there is no consistency throughout his work. A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad is the first book devoted exclusively to Conrad’s politics since the 1960s.
Community Colleges and First-Generation Students: Academic Discourse in the Writing Classroom

Jan Osborn

Community Colleges and First-Generation Students examines how first-generation students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds are initiated into what is known as academic discourse, particularly at the community college. Osborn systematically looks at specific classroom discourses through detailed evidence provided by the diversities represented by the students, and how the students negotiated their identities in terms of the ideological directionality in play.

The download link above only contains chapter 2 of Dr. Osborn's book, "Identities: A Context of Multiplicity".
No Symbols where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett

Mark Axelrod

In Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, he writes: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." The essays in No Symbols Where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett use Nabokov's stylistic approach to well-known texts (fiction, drama and criticism) as a point of departure. Notions of style and structure link the three prose pieces discussed in the text, (Beckett, Smart, and Turgenev,) to the fiction and drama of Ibsen and Strindberg. Mark Axelrod joins a wide and deep conversation on writers on writing.
Theories of Creativity and Creative Writing Pedagogy

Anna Leahy, Mary Cantrell, and Mary Swander

The authors examine the history of creative writing, the dominant approaches to creative writing and creative writing pedagogy, and the applications of theories and approaches to classroom teaching.
Train : Riding The Rails That Created The Modern World: From The Trans-Siberian To The Southwest Chief

Tom Zoellner

A revelatory, entertaining account of the world's most indispensable mode of transportation Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new book he chronicles the innovation and sociological impact of the railway technology that changed the world, and could very well change it again. From the frigid trans-Siberian railroad to the antiquated Indian Railways to the futuristic MagLev trains, Zoellner offers a stirring story of man's relationship with trains. Zoellner examines both the mechanics of the rails and their engines and how they helped societies evolve. Not only do trains transport people and goods in an efficient manner, but they also reduce pollution and dependency upon oil. Zoellner also considers America's culture of ambivalence to mass transit, using the perpetually stalled line between Los Angeles and San Francisco as a case study in bureaucracy and public indifference. Train presents both an entertaining history of railway travel around the world while offering a serious and impassioned case for the future of train travel
Upsetting Composition Commonplaces

Ian Barnard

In Upsetting Composition Commonplaces, Ian Barnard argues that composition still retains the bulk of instructional practices that were used in the decades before poststructuralist theory discredited them. While acknowledging that some of the foundational insights of poststructuralist theory can be difficult to translate to the classroom, Barnard upends several especially intransigent tenets that continue to influence the teaching of writing and how students are encouraged to understand writing.
A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America

Tom Zoellner

This book is an account of the state of Arizona, seen through the lens of the Tucson shootings. On January 8, 2011, twenty-two-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Tucson meet-and-greet held by U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The incident left six people dead and eighteen injured, including Giffords, whom he shot in the head. The author, a fifth generation Arizonan and longtime friend of Giffords's and a field organizer on her Congressional campaign, uses the tragedy as a jumping-off point to expose the fault lines in Arizona's political and socioeconomic landscape that allowed this to happen. He discusses the harmful political rhetoric, the inept state government, the lingering effects of the housing market's boom and bust, the proliferation and accessibility of guns, the lack of established communities, and the hysteria surrounding issues of race and immigration. He offers a revealing portrait of the Southwestern state at a critical moment in history, and as a symbol of the nation's discontents and uncertainties. Ultimately, it is his rallying cry for a saner, more civil way of life.
Acting Virtuous: Chastity, Theatricality, and The Tragedie of Mariam

Kent Lehnhof

Given the interrelation of female chastity and female theatricality in early modem discourses, it comes as no surprise that both figure importantly in what is believed to be the first original English drama to be written by a woman. As Elizabeth Cary explores a Jewish queen 's sexual purity in The Tragedie of Mariam, she does so by concentrating on questions of performance. Cary's title character explicitly abjures theatricality even as she embraces chastity, creating a fissure in Renaissance discourses on women that threatens to swallow up the antifeminist idea that female chastity is always an act.
Colonial Fiction

Richard Ruppel

An encyclopedia entry about colonial fiction, defined as "fiction set in what was once the colonial world, the world that European powers colonized in the 'Age of Discovery'… In this fiction, typically, white, male protagonists leave Europe as explorers, adventurers, soldiers, traders, administrators, or, occasionally, exiled criminals to encounter a foreign world of jungles, deserts, illnesses, and, especially, peoples and cultures."
Uranium : War, Energy, And The Rock That Shaped The World

Tom Zoellner

Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust, and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order. Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse. Slave labor camps in Africa and Eastern Europe were built around mine shafts, and America would knowingly send more than 600 uranium miners to their graves in the name of national security. Fortunes have been made from this yellow dirt; massive energy grids have been run from it. Fear of it panicked the American people into supporting a questionable war with Iraq and its specter threatens to create another conflict in Iran. Now, some are hoping it can help avoid a global warming catastrophe.
A Thought on the Prudishness of Marianne Moore

Brian Glaser

Marianne Moore's prudishness is of a particular kind. While Moore was sensitive and averse to sexual innuendo, she was fascinated by animality and pointed out traits both humans and animals shared in that regard. She was "careful to prevent the theme of human sexuality from obscuring glimpses of the larger but less obvious theme of human animality".