Bodies of work: B.S. Johnson’s pages, Alasdair Gray’s paragraphs, and interventions into the anatomy of the book

This thesis is made up of five parts: a critical dissertation, a video essay, a novel and two short stories. The first part, the dissertation, is on what it terms body texts: literature that makes deliberate, creative use of its form. This is literature that can’t be considered as simply (to use Genette’s definition of a literary work), ‘a more or less long sequence of verbal statements, more or less endowed with significance,’ [Paratexts, p1] but is inseparable from its incorporate existence, whether that existence is physical or digital. Using the work of B.S. Johnson and Alasdair Gray – as authors who have creatively occupied typesetting and production to create fiction that extends beyond the purely verbal – the dissertation considers the antagonistic responses that can often attend to formal devices (such as Johnson’s) and how small departures from convention, for example the formatting of paragraphs (in the work of Gray), can have a meaningful aesthetic impact on the work. It considers the difficulties that can accompany attempts by the author to occupy the paratext of their work; how the rise of digital reading environments both encourage formal experimentation, by introducing new capacities to the work, and discourage it, by creating a marketplace in which a work is expected to be disembodied and transposable; and it argues for the pleasures of the body text. It also positions these concerns in the context of my own creative work, including in some of the fiction included in the thesis. There is then a video essay, B.S. Johnson vs. Death, made using footage from Johnson’s film work. Following this is the novel, Muscle, and the two short stories: ‘Shark’ and ‘The Brain Drawing the Bullet’, a digital short story created to be read in a web browser

News from Now/here: Ed Dorn, Lawrence, Kansas, & the Poetics of Migration - 1965-1970

The stylistic variety of Edward Dorn's poetic career, from the 1950s through the 1990s, has been criticized as lacking cohesion, and deemed his work's fundamental shortcoming. The earlier poetry's somber lyricism has been pitted against the caustic epigrams of the later writing, and these modes are set on either side of Gunslinger, Dorn's mock-epic of the "sicksties," which has received disproportionate scholarly attention, to the detriment of Dorn's manifold, contemporaneous work. While formal experimentation and the development of a multi-voiced perspective might provide a context for approaching Dorn's stylistic diversity, instead those objectives have been critically cemented to an embittered tendentiousness, a resistance, insufficient to address either the biography or the writing. Due to the fragmentary displacements of these assumptions, this thesis seeks an integrated reading that celebrates, rather than condemns, discrepancies in Dorn's unmoored political/poetic identity. Through unpublished archival materials, it reexamines the Gunslinger era--part of which Dorn spent among the countercultural tumult in Lawrence, Kansas--when Dorn's interest in geography expanded to address both "the landscape of the imagination," and the inevitable constraints of an ideologically-infused language

The impact of competition on the ability of public schools to develop resiliency in abused and neglected children

"The dissertation will use an auto-ethnographical approach to the issues that surround the development of resiliency in abused and neglected children, with a focus on competition in schools and its effects on these children. An autoethnography is a genre of writing that features first-person accounts, aesthetic descriptions, dialogue, and self-consciousness to connect the personal and the cultural within a particular social context. Competition is best described as the elevation of one child over another, creating adversarial relationships that threaten cooperation and ideal learning conditions. Abused and neglected children's needs are not met in environments where they are forced to compete with children from more stable, nurturing homes. Comprising an estimated 10 to 15 percent of all students, abused and neglected children need communication and cooperation to establish resiliency, the network of protective factors that all need to overcome adversity. Because educational leaders and politicians never question the assumptions around competition, competitive practices such as awards ceremonies, high-stakes testing, athletics, and other forms of student differentiation are challenged. The reader is introduced to abused and neglected children from the author's perspective as an abused child and school administrator and asked to rethink how our competitive school system is leaving so many needy children behind. Support from numerous sources, pedagogical practices, teacher training, and curricular modifications are presented."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

Southern Accent September 2008 - April 2009

Southern Adventist University\u27s newspaper, Southern Accent, for the academic year of 2008-2009.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/southern_accent/1086/thumbnail.jp

The Viet Nam Generation Big Book

An anthology of essays, narrative, poetry and graphics published in lieu of a 1993 issue of Viet Nam Generation, intended to be used as a textbook for teaching about the 1960s. Edited by Dan Duffy and Kali Tal. Contributing editors: Renny Christopher. David DeRose, Alan Farrell. Cynthia Fuchs, William M. King. Bill Shields, Tony Williams, and David Willson

State v Hall Clerk\u27s Record Dckt. 40916

https://digitalcommons.law.uidaho.edu/not_reported/2394/thumbnail.jp

Worth Their Salt, Too

A follow-up to the highly successful Worth Their Salt, published in 1996, Worth Their Salt, Too brings together a new set of biographies of women whose roles in Utah\u27s history have not been fully recognized, despite their significance to the social and cultural matrix, past and present, of the state. These women-community and government leaders, activists, artists, writers, scholars, politicians, and others-made important contributions to the state\u27s history and culture. Some of them had experiences that reveal new aspects of the state\u27s history, while others simply led lives so interesting that their stories beg to be told. This new collection demonstrates, as Worth Their Salt did, the diversity of Utah\u27s society and the many different roles women have played in it. All sixteen biographies are original pieces by many noted authors from around the state, including Jeffery, Johnson, Kristen Rogers, Carma Wadley, Patricia Lynn Scott, and Judy Dykman. As with Worth Their Salt, Colleen Whitley has been asked again to be a guest lecturer for the Utah Humanities Council for the 2000 calendar year. All royalties from the sale of Worth Their Salt, Too will be donated to the Utah Historical Society Library.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1102/thumbnail.jp