Exceptional scale: metafiction and the maximalist tradition in contemporary American literary history

This dissertation reexamines the narrative practice of self-reflexivity through the lens of aesthetic size to advance a new approach to reading long-form novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whereas previous scholarship on the maximalist tradition relies on the totalizing rhetorics of endlessness, exhaustion, encyclopedism, and excess, I interpret the form’s reflexive awareness of its own enlarged scale as a uniquely narrative “knowledge work” that mediates the reader’s experience of information-rich texts. Thus, my narrative and network theory-informed approach effectively challenges the analytical modes of prominent genre theories such as the Mega-Novel, encyclopedic narrative, the systems novel, and modern epic to propose a critical reading method that recovers the extra-literary discourses through which scalarity is framed. Following this logic, each chapter historicizes prior theories of literary scale in postwar U.S. fiction toward redefining cross-national differences that vary across the boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Chapter two addresses the scholarly discourse of encyclopedism surrounding the Mega-Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph McElroy. Posing an ethical challenge to popular critiques of metafictional aesthetics, both authors, I argue, contest one of the critical orthodoxies of realist form—the “exceptionality thesis”—which rests on an assumed separation between an audience’s experience of fictional minds in a literary work and its understanding of actual minds in everyday life. In constructing a suitably massive networked platform on which to stage identity as a pluralistic work-in-progress, Gravity’s Rainbow and Women and Men, I contend, narrativize those operations of mind typically occluded from narrative discourse, and so make literal their authors’ meta-ethical visions of a “multiplying real” as much a part of our world as the novel’s own. Chapter three focuses on the mise en abyme as a discursive practice in the labyrinthine narratives of Samuel R. Delany and Mark Z. Danielewski. My analysis posits The Mad Man and House of Leaves as immersive case studies on the academic reading experience by interrogating the satirical strategy of “mock scholarship,” in which a textual object at plot’s center is gradually displaced by the intra-textual reception history that surrounds it. Subtly complicating an increasingly imperceptible line between fact and its fictional counterpart, Delany and Danielewski, I assert, propose new forms of knowledge production through a multiplicity of potential “research spaces” that micromanage the interpretive process while exceeding the structural contours that frame it. Chapter four considers the problem of literary canon formation in the polemical epics of Gayl Jones and Joshua Cohen. Across vast surveys of the stereotypes that mark their marginalization, Jones and Cohen transgress the metaphorical borders constructed between individual voice, collective identity, and the literary institutions that reify “ethnoracial diversity” as a belated form of cultural capital. Explicitly foregrounding the ideological gaps, errors, and omissions against which canonical classification is typically defined, Mosquito and Witz, I suggest, promote not so much a representative widening of the canon’s historically restrictive archive as a complete dissolution of the exclusionary practices it honors and preserves

JAEPL, Vol. 22, Winter 2016-2017

Editors’ Message Essays SPECIAL SECTION: DEEP READING STRATEGIES Jane Thompkins - Deep Reading Vajra Watson - Life as Primary Text: English Classrooms as Sites for Soulful Learning Tisha Ulmer - Using Pre-reading Strategies to Provide Historical Context in a Literature Course Grace Wetzel - ‘The Most Peaceful I Ever Felt Writing’: A Contemplative Approach to Essay Revision TEACHING AND LEARNING Kate Chaterdon - Contemplative Neuroscience and the Teaching of Writing: Mindfulness as Mental Training Ondine Gage - Resisting a Restrictive Discourse Policy J. Michael Rifenburg - The Performance of Literate Practices: Rhetoric, Writing, and Stand-up Comedy Rosanne Carlo - Getting Centered: A Meditation on Creating Pottery and Teaching Writing Robbie Clifton Pinter - The Transformative Practice of Writing and Teaching Writing Out of the Box Pamela B. Childers - Rattling Cages Book Reviews Julie Nichols - Threshold Concepts. Brad E. Lucas, et al. - Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Elizabeth Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2015. Maureen Hall - Waxler, Robert P. The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gae Lyn Henderson--Goodson, Ivor, and Scherto Gill. Critical Narrative as Pedagogy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Connecting Christy Wenger—Risks and Rewards of Purposeful Vulnerability Christina Martorana - Embracing Vulnerability in Teaching Jacquelyn E. Hoerman-Elliot - Writing as a Sea of Oms: A “This I Believe” Essay for Contemplative Writing in First-Year Composition Beth Godbee and Adrianne Wojcik - Decoding Each Other through Coding: Sharing Our Unlikely Research Collaboration Laurence Musgrove—Dress Up Laurence Musgrove—Tree

Techniques to improve concurrency in hardware transactional memory

Transactional Memory (TM) aims to make shared memory parallel programming easier by abstracting away the complexity of managing shared data. The programmer defines sections of code, called transactions, which the TM system guarantees that will execute atomically and in isolation from the rest of the system. The programmer is not required to implement such behaviour, as happens in traditional mutual exclusion techniques like locks - that responsibility is delegated to the underlying TM system. In addition, transactions can exploit parallelism that would not be available in mutual exclusion techniques; this is achieved by allowing optimistic execution assuming no other transaction operates concurrently on the same data. If that assumption is true the transaction commits its updates to shared memory by the end of its execution, otherwise, a conflict occurs and the TM system may abort one of the conflicting transactions to guarantee correctness; the aborted transaction would roll-back its local updates and be re-executed. Hardware and software implementations of TM have been studied in detail. However, large-scale adoption of software-only approaches have been hindered for long due to severe performance limitations. In this thesis, we focus on identifying and solving hardware transactional memory (HTM) issues in order to improve concurrency and scalability. Two key dimensions determine the HTM design space: conflict detection and speculative version management. The first determines how conflicts are detected between concurrent transactions and how to resolve them. The latter defines where transactional updates are stored and how the system deals with two versions of the same logical data. This thesis proposes a flexible mechanism that allows efficient storage and access to two versions of the same logical data, improving overall system performance and energy efficiency. Additionally, in this thesis we explore two solutions to reduce system contention - circumstances where transactions abort due to data dependencies - in order to improve concurrency of HTM systems. The first mechanism provides a suitable design to apply prefetching to speed-up transaction executions, lowering the window of time in which such transactions can experience contention. The second is an accurate abort prediction mechanism able to identify, before a transaction's execution, potential conflicts with running transactions. This mechanism uses past behaviour of transactions and locality in memory references to infer predictions, adapting to variations in workload characteristics. We demonstrate that this mechanism is able to manage contention efficiently in single-application and multi-application scenarios. Finally, this thesis also analyses initial real-world HTM protocols that recently appeared in market products. These protocols have been designed to be simple and easy to incorporate in existing chip-multiprocessors. However, this simplicity comes at the cost of severe performance degradation due to transient and persistent livelock conditions, potentially preventing forward progress. We show that existing techniques are unable to mitigate this degradation effectively. To deal with this issue we propose a set of techniques that retain the simplicity of the protocol while providing improved performance and forward progress guarantees in a wide variety of transactional workloads

Difficult Work: The Politics Of Counter-Professionalism In Post-1945 Transnational American Fiction

This dissertation reads American and Asian American fictions that instigate feelings of discontent about American work. While literary scholars of white-collar work have examined anti-work sentiment as an unquestionably American phenomenon, they have yet to acknowledge the continuing global repercussions of the postwar American economy. I read transnational figures of work that query the ideology of American professionalism by mixing anti-work and anti-imperial feeling into the performance of white-collar work. Drawing from four forms of the novel that address a crisis of American domesticity—the postwar crime novel, the middlebrow travel novel, the multi-ethnic bildungsroman, and the post-9/11 finance novel—the dissertation reads low-grade, ambient affects, like anxiety or hesitation, to find a sideways reappraisal of a national work ethic. Minor feeling opens a new tendency in transnational American writing that I theorize as “counter-professionalism,” where the prefix “counter” produces multiple forms of resistance: Bartlebyian refusal, dilettantism, strategic negotiation, and reluctant conscription. This dissertation brings together sociological discourses of work, affect theory, and transnational American literature to hypothesize the rise of American Anglophone culture. The postwar crime novels of Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith provide a genealogical origin for the decline of the welfare state through the deviant work of the hard-boiled detective or the international conman. Meanwhile, rejecting American triumphalism for dilettantism and espiocracy, the internationalism of Richard Yates and Paul Bowles enters downward states of depression and acedia that disrupt the suburban novel. The turn to internationalism necessitates a consideration of the centripetal movement of Cold War immigration. The contemporary novels of Susan Choi and Jhumpa Lahiri reappraise the ignored case of postwar Asian American knowledge workers, where political feelings of evasion and willfulness unsettle the sociological trope of the model minority. The case of the foreign student reveals that the immigrant body is shunted into racialized forms of both manual and reproductive labor under the pretext of knowledge work. Finally, post-9/11 finance novels of Pakistani writers Mohsin Hamid and H.M Naqvi harken back to postwar criminality by confronting the accusation of terroristic subjectivity through feelings of regret, precipitating a comprehensive exit from American work

Using Hashtags to Disambiguate Aboutness in Social Media Discourse: A Case Study of #OrlandoStrong

While the field of writing studies has studied digital writing as a response to multiple calls for more research on digital forms of writing, research on hashtags has yet to build bridges between different disciplines\u27 approaches to studying the uses and effects of hashtags. This dissertation builds that bridge in its interdisciplinary approach to the study of hashtags by focusing on how hashtags can be fully appreciated at the intersection of the fields of information research, linguistics, rhetoric, ethics, writing studies, new media studies, and discourse studies. Hashtags are writing innovations that perform unique digital functions rhetorically while still hearkening back to functions of both print and oral rhetorical traditions. Hashtags function linguistically as indicators of semantic meaning; additionally, hashtags also perform the role of search queries on social media, retrieving texts that include the same hashtag. Information researchers refer to the relationship between a search query and its results using the term aboutness (Kehoe and Gee, 2011). By considering how hashtags have an aboutness, the humanities can call upon information research to better understand the digital aspects of the hashtag\u27s search function. Especially when hashtags are used to organize discourse, aboutness has an effect on how a discourse community\u27s agendas and goals are expressed, as well as framing what is relevant and irrelevant to the discourse. As digital activists increasingly use hashtags to organize and circulate the goals of their discourse communities, knowledge of ethical strategies for hashtag use will help to better preserve a relevant aboutness for their discourse while enabling them to better leverage their hashtag for circulation. In this dissertation, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Twitter discourse that used #OrlandoStrong over the five-month period before the first anniversary of the Pulse shooting, I trace how the #OrlandoStrong discourse community used innovative rhetorical strategies to combat irrelevant content from ambiguating their discourse space. In Chapter One, I acknowledge the call from scholars to study digital tools and briefly describe the history of the Pulse shooting, reflecting on non-digital texts that employed #OrlandoStrong as memorials in the Orlando area. In Chapter Two, I focus on the literature surrounding hashtags, discourse, aboutness, intertextuality, hashtag activism, and informational compositions. In Chapter Three, I provide an overview of the stages of grounded theory methodology and the implications of critical discourse analysis before I detail how I approached the collection, coding, and analysis of the #OrlandoStrong Tweets I studied. The results of my study are reported in Chapter Four, offering examples of Tweets that were important to understanding how the discourse space became ambiguous through the use of hashtags. In Chapter Five, I reflect on ethical approaches to understanding the consequences of hashtag use, and then I offer an ethical recommendation for hashtag use by hashtag activists. I conclude Chapter Five with an example of a classroom activity that allows students to use hashtags to better understand the relationship between aboutness, (dis)ambiguation, discourse communities, and ethics. This classroom activity is provided with the hope that instructors from different disciplines will be able to provide ethical recommendations to future activists who may benefit from these rhetorical strategies

Bostonia Magazine. Volume 58

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs

Postmodern Paletos: The city and the country in the narrative and cinema of international Spain

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese, 1998.Tensions between rural arcadias and urban blight and between enlightened civilizations and primitive wastelands have informed the stories we have told each other from the beginning of time. In the last half-century, such tensions have come to the forefront of the Spanish narrative imagination. Writing novels and directing movies in a society torn by the contradictions of official policies promoting rural life in the midst of a lived reality of starvation and immigration, authors and directors turned often in the Franco years to themes of city/country contact. In the years of the democracy, traditional rural/urban tensions have subsided. They have given way, nevertheless, to equally powerful center/periphery tensions pitting Madrid versus Spain's various regions and globalizing impulses against renewed localist fervor. Authors and directors continue to recur to traditional city/country imagery to portray these tensions. This dissertation studies how the traditional struggle between urban and rural has inspired the artistic imagination in the last fifty years, and in turn, how this struggle has correspondingly been shaped by these very representations. The study is based on close readings of the following works: from the 1950s, José Nieves Conde's movie Surcos and Jesús Fernández Santos's novel Los bravos; from the 1960s, Pedro Lazaga's movie La ciudad no es para mí and Luis Martín Santos's Tiempo de silencio; from the 1970s, Carlos Saura's La prima Angélica and Carmen Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás; from the 1980s, Pedro Almodóvar's ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! and Luis Landero's novel Juegos de la edad tardía; and from the 1990s, Julio Medem's Vacas and Suso de Toro's Calzados Lola

Digital Storytelling in Primary-Grade Classrooms

abstract: As digital media practices become readily available in today's classrooms, literacy and literacy instruction are changing in profound ways (Alvermann, 2010). Professional organizations emphasize the importance of integrating new literacies (New London Group, 1996) practices into language-arts instruction (IRA, 2009; NCTE, 2005). As a result, teachers search for effective ways to incorporate the new literacies in an effort to engage students. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate the potential of digital storytelling as participatory media for writing instruction. This case study was conducted during the fall semester of 2012 in one first-grade classroom and one second-grade classroom in the Southwestern United States. The study addressed ten interrelated research questions relating to how primary-grade students performed in relation to the Common Core writing standards, how they were motivated, how they formed a meta- language to talk about their writing, how they developed identities as writers, and how they were influenced by their teachers' philosophies and instructional approaches. Twenty-two first-grade students and 24 second-grade students used the MovieMaker software to create digital stories of personal narratives. Data included field notes, interviews with teachers and students, teacher journals, my own journal, artifacts of teachers' lesson plans, photographs, students' writing samples, and their digital stories. Qualitative data were analyzed by thematic analysis (Patton, 1990) and discourse analysis (Gee, 2011). Writing samples were scored by rubrics based on the Common Core State Standards. The study demonstrated how digital storytelling can be used to; (a) guide teachers in implementing new literacies in primary grades; (b) illustrate digital storytelling as writing; (c) develop students' meta-language to talk about writing; (d) impact students' perceptions as writers; (e) meet Common Core State Standards for writing; (f) improve students' skills as writers; (g) build students' identities as writers; (h) impact academic writing; (i) engage students in the writing process; and (j) illustrate the differences in writing competencies between first- and second-grade students. The study provides suggestions for teachers interested in incorporating digital storytelling in primary-grade classrooms.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Curriculum and Instruction 201