Early in the year, the students of history and government at Mountain View High School in Stafford, Virginia, began to devise hand motions to help memorize the 27 amendments to the Constitution for government class. Three students in the school who are interested in hip hop music then suggested composing a rap song about the topic. Working with…

By exploring the categorical similarities between popular models of science, political economy, psychology, and sexuality, this dissertation addresses modern U.S. poetry's obsession with conjuring the unsayable. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the social and conceptual landscape that came to align the sayable with the cognitive and credible, while…

Unexpected, dramatic stories of death have left deep marks on the physical landscape and in the cultural psyche since humans first began to weave narrative from the Plains. When scholars and writers converged in Omaha, Nebraska for the 34th Interdisciplinary Symposium of the Center for Great Plains Center, many stories received scholarly and…

This article places youth spoken word (YSW) poetry programming within the larger framework of arts education. Drawing primarily on transcripts of interviews with teen poets and adult teaching artists and program administrators, the article identifies specific benefits that participants ascribe to youth spoken word, including the development of…

The opening lines of Shakespeare's sonnet on the destructive power of sexual desire are equally potent as a description of the emotions aroused by warfare. Poets are the best witnesses to the dark connection between violence and the erotic, the link between sexual desire and military aggression. Initially justified by perjured claims about weapons…

Research on syllable weight in generative phonology has focused almost exclusively on systems in which weight is treated as an ordinal hierarchy of clearly delineated categories (e.g. light and heavy). As I discuss, canonical weight-sensitive phenomena in phonology, including quantitative meter and quantity-sensitive stress, can also treat weight…

The theory of literary translation has been plagued by a disregard of the comprehensive aspect of the task since its inception, largely focusing on the challenges of the expressive aspect instead. This development throughout the history of translation--with the notable exceptions of Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher--has led to…

Among the responsibilities of international educators is to help students begin the process of identifying the foreign in their new environments in order to learn from it. The major obstacle for Americans studying abroad in developed economies, especially in English-speaking countries, is to become sensitive to the subtleties of foreignness. The…

This article describes a classroom art project inspired by the work of Robert Frost, one of the most acclaimed and beloved American poets of all time. Using tints and shades in a composition, this project demonstrates how quality literature may be incorporated into elementary art lessons in a very useful way, making art an important complement to…

Begun as an investigation of the linguistic and paleographic evidence on the Old Saxon Leipzig "Heliand" fragment, the dissertation encompasses three analyses spanning over a millennium of that manuscript's existence. First, a direct analysis clarifies errors in the published transcription (4.2). The corrections result from digital…

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

This paper considers the educational and theoretical implications of an analysis into the artistic movement of poetry slam. Slam is a successful and growing global phenomenon, which both directly and indirectly sets itself against the dominant literary world. As such, it could be viewed as presenting a challenge to dominant literary conventions…

Last year, the author and his students received word that their beloved professor of queer and American ethnic studies was going on terminal leave. He and his students were suddenly thrown into the position of making the case for queer studies to the broader campus community. In this article, the author shares how their professor's departure--and…

In a column for the "Lincoln" [Nebraska] "Courier", a newspaper that actively covered the city's political and artistic scenes in the mid-1890s, William Reed Dunroy writes, "Young poets write what they know; what life has taught them." If his own poetry and imaginative prose are any indication, what Dunroy himself…

Malaika Favorite's "Furious Flower Poetry Quilt" (2004) is an acrylic painting that depicts 24 portraits of leading poets of the African Diaspora. Commissioned by Dr Joanne Gabbin, English professor and director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the painting is part of a larger programme of poetry…