Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was one of the most prolific and gifted polymaths of the twentieth century. Long before such a thing was thought respectable, and almost a century before any university established a chair in the public understanding of science, McCabe made a living as a populariser of science and a critic of philosophical and religious…

Francisco Rojas Gonzalez's 1944 novel "La negra Angustias" is recognized as the only novel of the Mexican Revolution that features a black woman military officer. Critics have observed that, although this semi-biographical novel portrays Angustias as a gender nonconformist who seeks justice for women and the poor, the conclusion ushers…

This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological…

This article presents the author's response to Mary Lou Rasmussen's critical analysis of a piece the author completed in its original form more than a decade ago. She opens this response with the words which Shakespeare gives to Hamlet. There were many reasons why she settled on Hamlet's soliloquy. First, his words stand as a fitting response…

In May 2007, the faculty book club that the author facilitates read Chris Bohjalian's novel "The Double Bind" (Shaye Areheart: Harmony, 2007). Bohjalian, a local author, agreed to meet them in Burlington for drinks and conversation. When he arrived, the author and her class introduced themselves, passed around some nachos, and began their…

Because video on the web has spread almost virally, video crafted out of an amateur aesthetic has contributed to a disruption of professional communication economies as it prompts us to ask: Can we use digital video to make work-related communication cool? Professional writing pedagogies are beginning to respond to new student expectations about…

Edgar Allen Poe, Langston Hughes, Louisa May Alcott, and Stephen King are just a handful of famous authors who began their publishing careers in their teens. Many young adults would like to write and publish but few know where to begin. While there are many books on how to write and how to get published, none are written specifically for teens.…

Modern critics do not consider science fiction and mystery novels to be "serious reading", but Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis questioned the boundaries between "popular" and "serious" literature. Both Christian writers critically discuss the spiritual crisis of the modern world in each fiction genre. This paper…

Rarely do students and teachers see themselves as people who have the authority to talk back to the gatekeepers; instead, they are on the receiving end of a conversation begun by others. But the conversation about young adult (YA) books--like the authors who write them--is a living thing. Students and teachers can help to shape it. In this…

This paper, drawing upon multidisciplinary studies such as critical and cultural studies, literary criticism, intercultural communication and second language acquisition, suggests a specific literary genre--"migratory literature"--to support intercultural competence for learners of Chinese. We begin by elucidating key…

The religious thought of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is a well documented but often overlooked example of unorthodox Christianity. This paper uses the example of Tolstoy's religious thinking to question the integrity of the current representation of Christianity in UK schools. It also uses Tolstoy's criticism of orthodox Christianity to suggest a…

During the eighteenth century, amateurs as well as philosophers ventured critical commentary on the arts. Talk concerning taste or beauty or the sublime was so much a part of general discourse that even novelists of that era incorporated such subjects in their work. So it would not be surprising to find that perspectives on aesthetics are…

When Nickie Dobo wrote a column in 2003 for her college newspaper--"The Daily Collegian" at Pennsylvania State University--decrying the "hook-up culture" on the campus, she never expected it to resurface years later in an attack on her professional credibility. But that's what happened when Ms. Dobo, now a reporter for the…

Diane Ravitch's book, "The death and life of the great American school system," is an exploration and critique of educational change in the United States since the report "A Nation at Risk" in 1983 and more specifically since the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation in January, 2002. Arguably, there are several…

This article analyzes in the novel Balun Canan by Rosario Castellanos the pain caused by the persistence of neocolonialism in the Comitan region of Chiapas during President Cardenas's land reforms of the 1930s. In this work, the author lays bare personal wounds through the discourse of the variously gendered characters of a culturally mixed…