Into the Parlor: the Persona of Mark Twain as Architect and Satirist of the Genteel Tradition

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard Colleg

Using eclectic digital resources to enhance instructional methods for adult learners

Purpose – To demonstrate that adult learning can be improved through the use of eclectic digital resources to enhance instructional methods rather than through learning skills in isolation. Design/methodology/approach – During the past two decades, a significant research has focused on adults as learners. Many adults take classes for skills improvement, job advancement, and personal understanding. The demand for training programs to help workers keep current and competitive is growing. It is likely that more adults from all walks of life will be continuing their education in a variety of settings. For example, librarians do instruction for their communities in the areas of internet searching, electronic database use, and personal computing skills. Many of their students are adults, including other library staff members, community members, and non-traditional students. Findings – A learning program that includes digital resources helps provide the opportunity for instructors to help their students make connections and form relationships across the boundaries of classroom, discipline, skill, and background. By incorporating an eclectic assortment of digital resources into computer/internet-related training an instructor ensures that adult learners are better able to connect what they have learned in life and are learning in the classroom. Research limitations/implications – Relies on availability of internet access. Practical implications – Librarians are frequently in the position of providing computer/internet-related training for a wide variety of audiences, including adults. Originality/value – Librarians are perfectly poised to combine sound pedagogy with their expert knowledge of available digital resources to promote adult achievement in technology education. An instruction program integrated with evocative digital resources provides the opportunity for instructors to reduce anxiety and to help their students make connections and form relationships across the boundaries of classroom, discipline, skill, and background

“History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd’nhead Wilson and The President’s Daughter”

Post print version deposited in accordance with SHERPA RoMEO guidelines. Copyright © 2009, Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters Vol.32(3) pp 809-821. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature

The word kaleidoscope comes from a Greek phrase meaning to view a beautiful form, and this report makes the leap of faith that all scholarship is beautiful (Ayers 2005b). This review is divided into three major sections. Part I offers a sampling of the types of digital resources currently available or under development in support of American literature and identifies the prevailing concerns of specialists in the field as expressed during interviews conducted between July 2004 and May 2005. Part two of the report consolidates the results of these interviews with an exploration of resources currently available to illustrate, on the one hand, a kaleidoscope of differing attitudes and assessments, and, on the other, an underlying design that gives shape to the parts. Part three examines six categories of digital work in progress: (1) quality-controlled subject gateways, (2) author studies, (3) public domain e-book collections and alternative publishing models, (4) proprietary reference resources and full-text primary source collections, (5) collections by design, and (6) teaching applications. This survey is informed by a selective review of the recent literature, focusing especially on contributions from scholars that have appeared in discipline-based journals

From Huckleberry Finn to The Shawshank Redemption: Race and the American Imagination in the Biracial Escape Film

In a Los Angeles Times review of Stephen King’s tetralogy of novellas, Different Seasons (1982), Kenneth Atchity offers what has become almost a cliché of high praise: “To find the secret of his success, you have to compare King to Twain…. King’s stories tap the roots of myth buried in all our minds.”  To approach Mark Twain, it is suggested, is to approach something truly universal or at least something quintessentially American. H. L. Mencken echoes the sentiments of some of the most influe..

Recontextualizing \u3cem\u3ePudd\u27nhead\u3c/em\u3e: Minstrelsy, Race, and the Performance of Progress

This thesis examines how Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson does much more than simply bridge the recurring racial and cultural behaviors of the antebellum South with the reality of late-19th century America; instead, I argue that Twain’s novella acts as a performative text, participating in a dialogue with a number of cultural forces—literature, theatre, politics, and commercialism—as a way of commenting on popular conceptualizations of late-nineteenth century social progress. Using the critical perspective of Performance Studies, it is clear that Twain’s novel is demonstrating how nineteenth century America used certain sets of symbols and signs to perform race, ultimately critiquing the arbitrary nature of these signs and identifiers. From minstrelsy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1893 World’s Fair, Twain’s text both references and reenacts popular and nostalgic 19th century performances of race and gender while showcasing how these same tropes and stereotypes are being reconfigured at the end of the century, foreshadowing the sleight of hand that presented Jim Crow and the American eugenics movement under the moniker of progress

(Un)decidable Stereotypes: Anti-Racist Satire in Popular American Literature from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Mid-Twentieth Century

This dissertation examines the satirical strategy that employs racial stereotypes to critique racism. I read the work of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles W. Chesnutt, Dorothy Parker, and Langston Hughes and explore how this strategy effectively functioned in specific situations. The satirical pieces I selected represent racial others in a seemingly stereotypical manner. However, their stereotypical characters often contradict the public's images of racial minorities. Thus, by using (un)familiar stereotypes, anti-racist satire reveals the contradictory nature of racist stereotypes and encourages its audience to unlearn racial biases. This strategy can be particularly effective in the realm of popular literature which helped produce and circulate stereotypical images of racial others. The selected satirists, who were typically deemed popular writers, published their work in popular literary venues such as literary magazines, theaters, and newspapers. Their work might have disrupted the chain of racist stereotypes from within the literary industry. To infer how they were read by their contemporary readers, I also explore contextual and relevant materials such as magazines and contemporary reviews and reconstruct the specific reading situations. By doing so, I discover how the satirical texts are designed to effectively address the specific audiences. Such specificity helped mitigate the risk of backfiring and teach the audiences how the racial issues illustrated in the texts were relevant to them. At the same time, the contemporary audiences did not necessarily acknowledge the ironies in the satirical pieces. As a result, the stereotypes that were meant to be ironic possibly circulated as racist entertainment. This finding provides insights into how the ironic stereotype could also be an unstable means to satirize racism. Therefore, even if an anti-racist text only mentions or ironizes racial stereotypes for a critical purpose, there remains the risk of backfiring. This is the dilemma this dissertation repeatedly encounters: Is the ironic stereotype an effective tool for anti-racist purposes? Or is it just another racist stereotype

The river and the margins : marginality and escclusion in mark twain's old south

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressã

ROGER CASEMENT E O CONGO BELGA: O TRAUMA DO IMPERIALISMO NA FICÇÃO

  A vida extraordinária e controversa do revolucionário irlandês Roger David Casement (1864-1916) foi e continua sendo fonte de inspiração para a escrita de prosa, poesia, drama e ensaios críticos. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar a maneira pela qual Roger Casement revela os traumas causados pelo imperialismo através da escrita de viagens nas seguintes obras de ficção que giram em torno do boom da borracha no Congo Belga: Coração das Trevas (1902) de Joseph Conrad, King Leopold’s Soliloquy/Solilóquio do Rei Leopoldo (1905) de Mark Twain e Os Anéis de Saurno de WG Sebald (1999). A hipótese deste estudo é que essas obras revelam as conexões entre a Grã-Bretanha e o Congo Belga, e o papel desempenhado pelo Relatório Congo para derrubar o regime do terror do rei Leopoldo II no Estado Livre do Congo. O arcabouço teórico consiste em biografias sobre Roger Casement, especialmente The Eyes of Another Race (2004), do antropólogo irlandês Seámas Ó Síocháin, e teorias sobre trauma literatura de viagem. &nbsp