Issue 304; May 31-June 14, 2018

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/tlv/1054/thumbnail.jp

Scouting for a Tomboy: Gender-Bending Behaviors in Harper Lee\u27s To Kill A Mockingbird

In Harper Lee\u27s To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch challenges gender stereotypes in her determination to remain a tomboy. Scout interacts with five parental characters (Atticus, Calpurnia, Aunt Alexandra, Miss Maudie, and Boo Radley), who offer models for Scout\u27s behaviors. Though primarily unconventional in terms of gender, these parental figures fluctuate between ideals, demonstrating that gender is an unstable standard that alters according to each individual. Lee depicts characters who resist conforming to the paradigms of masculinity and femininity and instead fill middle positions between the stereotypes, as Scout\u27s tomboyism exemplifies. After encountering different models, Scout consistently exhibits these genderbending inclinations. Scout\u27s exploration of her identity as a tomboy functions as her coming-of-age journey

The Mockingbird

Marlane Agriesti [The Place Between; Flasher; No Revelations; The Executive]; Ted Aguirre [Photograph]; Rebecca Bates [Print]; Annaleah Brown [Metamorphosis; Birthday Ode/Birds in Crystal]; Jon Buchanan [Two Photographs]; Tony Clark [A Family History; An Old Man, At Nightfall; Hate Sonnet, to the Alleged Witch Who Moved from Our Neighborhood When I Was Ten]; Eydie Cloyd [Lines or Maybe Seeing My Soul]; Raymond Goodfellow [Print; Untitled Artwork]; Michael Griffin [Drawing]; Jerry Hagaman [Two Untitled Artworks]; Dennis Hoback [The Torn Veil]; Katherine Honour [Autumn]; Brian Knave [The Many Once, the Many Never]; Cheryl Light [Official Space]; Ted Lindsay III [Print]; Ellen Markland [Mother Life\u27s Birthday; The Ballad Of Jake Merritt, a Railroad Man]; James Mintz [Sunday Entertainment]; Sherri Nealy [Untitled Artwork; Photograph]; Lee Nutting [Photograph; Untitled Artwork]; Rita Quillen [Discovered]; Ginger Renner [City in My Womb; Gold]; Kaye Sanders [Drawing; Untitled Artwork]; Ralph Sanders [Drawing]; Bonny Stanley [Only Nuns Fret Not; Margot]; Lyn Thompson [Two Untitled Artworks]; Amy Tipton [For Wesley Weems---A Christening in Two Traditions; Untitled Poem]; Ruth E. Waller [Of You]; Charles Warden [Untitled Artwork]https://dc.etsu.edu/mockingbird/1034/thumbnail.jp

Touchstones of Popular Culture Among Contemporary College Students in the United States

This report is based on survey research. The survey was sent out to collect popular culture items from Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) students to see if there were popular culture items relevant enough to teach to English Learners (ELs) in order for them to be successful. The research showed that there are several genres of popular culture that should be taught to ELs for them to be successful academically and other to have successful interactions with their peers. This report leaves room for further research to be done in the subject as well

The Mockingbird

Maja Savic [Yuko, No. 2]; Brian Bowman[Circadian]; Tina Kitty Michael [Comperhension]; Kellye Evans [The Seven Crows]; Whitney L. Ellison [Deej]; Robert Kottage [Attention Deflicit Dingo]; David Mazure [Door]; Samantha Gregory [Education???]; Matthew Israel Byrge [Reading Beckett: A Fragment]; Reese Chamness [Lines in Space IA]; Meara Bridges [Your Words are like the Ocean]; Amanda Kate Rigell [Crossing Over]; Seth Arnall [HIV Baby Rattle]; Kimberly Foli [Oburoni Reflections]; Nicole Osborne [Starting Resist]; Jasen Bacon [The Office of Tipton, Hersch, and Long, Plastic Surgeons, No Smoking]; Shanon Kelley [Round Trip on the Rainbow Tail]; Isaac Wilson [Converstion Sur la Terrasse]; Hailey Eaton [Untitled]https://dc.etsu.edu/mockingbird/1007/thumbnail.jp

A Child's Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence

“Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” Scout Finch calls to the single familiar face in a crowd of white men as she stands at the door of a jail that wrongly incarcerates a Black man for a crime that she does not understand. This famous scene from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) where an eight-year-old stops a lynch mob is both object and emblem of my dissertation project. “A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence” draws on critical race theory and cognitive approaches to literature to show how contemporary American writers focus on child characters as instruments for narrating violence and violation, and how these children’s voices call adult characters and actual readers toward a heightened sense of social responsibility. While Scout’s pleasantries move the adult characters toward an everyday responsibility of caregiving, other such child protagonists face insurmountable barriers: in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), all adults fail to hear the cry of ten-year-old Pecola Breedlove, and many, such as the white storekeeper fail to “see” her. Despite their differing political analyses and aesthetic projects, both Lee and Morrison trust a child with the task of reimagining the world and realigning our ethical responsibilities. The figure of the child leads me through two genres that constitute community through narration: the United States’ variation on the bildungsroman, the coming of age novel, and an emerging genre I term the “braided narrative”— novels in which multiple narrators tell distinct, often incommensurate, stories that form a complicated constellation in the same storyworld. When Morrison pairs Claudia and Pecola with The Bluest Eye’s other narrators, she begins to forge this new genre that diverges from the style of Mockingbird’s single narrative voice. Like Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Ana Castillo, Nicole Krauss, and many others take up this strategy of casting child narrators among a chorus of raconteurs who narrate different, conflicting stories. “A Child’s Call” proposes a developmental relationship between the coming of age novel and the braided narrative for the reading of American literature. My project proposes a feminist and anti-racist progression of ethical positions staged in these two genres; the relationship between the reader and the protagonist develops from one of identification, to one of maternal care, and finally, to one of empathy that both acknowledges and requires difference

Washington University Record, September 8, 2000

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1870/thumbnail.jp