Civilization: Rereading Austen’s Constructed Utopia

In her book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks relates meeting “a group composed of female Holocaust survivors. They convened at regular intervals, year after year, to read Jane Austen aloud to one another. When they finished a novel, they’d go on to the next one; when they finished them all, they’d start over. Why Austen? [she] asked one of them. Because, [her] informant said, she represents civilization” (55). This paper explores how Austen “represents civilization” in Sense and Sensibility by exploring how her characters attempt to create and live in their own utopian worlds—one sister in a world of rationality or “sense” and the other in a world of romanticism or “sensibility.” Austen depicts the danger inherent in pursuing utopian ideals and confusing them with reality. These utopian worlds are set up only to be broken down, and her characters learn that they cannot represent reality with idealization and that individuals who try to live these unrealistic visions will fail. The novel, however, offers a critique of itself: Austen’s fiction works by careful construction of universality, dependent on few specifics of its physicality. Instead, her prose depends heavily on nominalizations which presuppose a number of indispensable idealized forms. The paradox Austen creates is one that offers generalities that demand the reader to supply the specifics. She universalizes the themes embedded in her plot by insisting on the reader’s personalization of the experience to create a utopian vision of the world. Although fictional, the experience offers a civilization which at once displaces the reader yet at the same time offers refuge in its utopian construction, a tension that invites constant rereading

Contribute a Verse

In response to the Affordable Learning Georgia initiative, Dr. Tanya Bennett and ten colleagues from the University of North Georgia have written Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First Year Composition. This peer reviewed textbook, published by the University of North Georgia Press, combines a composition rhetoric manual with grammar and documentation instruction and resources, components that can be flexibly arranged to fit instructors’ classroom plans. It includes a standard rhetoric instruction, information and practice for Standard English Grammar, and guidelines for the four most common documentation styles. Its reader compiles essays compiled for English 1101, focused for thematic discussion and selected for use in rhetorical analysis. The textbook also includes a glossary of pertinent terms and ancillary instructor resources. Its contents include Reading Critically/Engaging the Material; Rhetorical Situations; Effective Argument; Introductions and Conclusions; Logic of Assertion, Evidence, and Interpretation; Documentation; Visual Rhetoric; Multi-Modality; Inter-disciplinary Writing; and Grammar. A print version of this book is available for $29.99 Contact the University of North Georgia Press for details and ordering information. [email protected] | 706-864-1556https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/books/1002/thumbnail.jp

Red Sparrow: Cold War Redux and the Treatment of Corruption

Examining why many U.S. citizens fail to see President Trump as corrupt, Peter Beinart, in a recent Atlantic article, argues “what the president’s supporters fear most isn’t the corruption of American law, but the corruption of America’s traditional identity.” With this concept of corruption, American viewers of the Russian-set film Red Sparrow may recast our interpretation of the film to examine how it comments on current U.S. politics, even in light of its overt critique of current Russian politics. As an example of the wave of second Cold War films, Red Sparrow suggests that, in a time with traditional identity values at stake, the two current governments of Russia and the U.S. seem more alike than different, both operating at the expense of the individual. Viewers familiar with first Cold War films are initially comforted by familiar images of Russia. However, soon we realize that Dominika Egorova, a disabled former ballerina turned spy, is acting out values we associate with ourselves: a free-thinking individual, she exhibits a larger sense of patriotism and duty to family. These values force her to protect herself by combating the corruption of the Russian government made personal in the criminal actions of her uncle, the Deputy Director of Russia’s external intelligence agency. Because her values align with our dearly-held notions of American ethos, viewers identify with Dominika and, in the process, must confront the inferred necessity of maintaining our values by fighting corruption in our own government. Thus, this essay argues that Red Sparrow compels American viewers to look not outward but inward. Like a mirror, it manipulates our longtime fascination with Russia to direct our gaze at ourselves, to evoke a reevaluation of how we maintain traditionally held values, including concepts of duty and patriotism, even if that loyalty demands contesting our own corruption

The [Latinx] Darling: Lorraine López Reads the Canon

Judith Ortiz Cofer describes “a migrating consciousness” that is explored in a “liminal space” that involves “linguistic decoding” of experience to find that freedom. These concepts can be employed to explain how Lorraine López’s The Darling works to demonstrate how its heroine, Caridad, attains the freedom of selfhood, through both literary and real-life experiences, by exploring, challenging, and then ultimately transcending the oppression faced by females living in male-dominated cultures

Contribute a Verse: An Introduction to First-Year Composition (all rights reserved)

This textbook is not an open textbook. Affordable Learning Georgia has a special agreement with the University of North Georgia Press to make this text free to download for a limited time. Remixes and mass redistribution are not allowed in this agreement. Author\u27s Description: In response to the Affordable Learning Georgia initiative, Dr. Tanya Bennett and ten colleagues from the University of North Georgia have written Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First Year Composition. This peer reviewed textbook, published by the University of North Georgia Press, combines a composition rhetoric manual with grammar and documentation instruction and resources, components that can be flexibly arranged to fit instructors’ classroom plans. It includes a standard rhetoric instruction, information and practice for Standard English Grammar, and guidelines for the four most common documentation styles. Its reader compiles essays compiled for English 1101, focused for thematic discussion and selected for use in rhetorical analysis. The textbook also includes a glossary of pertinent terms and ancillary instructor resources. Its contents include Reading Critically/Engaging the Material; Rhetorical Situations; Effective Argument; Introductions and Conclusions; Logic of Assertion, Evidence, and Interpretation; Documentation; Visual Rhetoric; Multi-Modality; Inter-disciplinary Writing; and Grammar. Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/1012/thumbnail.jp

Peace Pedagogy from the Borderlines

This chapter is about our combined experience teaching about peace in a course that was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities focused on “Enduring Questions.” One enduring question is “What is peace?” It may seem that the answer is self-evident, only its path to realization tangled, obscure, and impossible to sustain. That is certainly the assumption of our students. Yet the question “what is peace” is an enduring one, without a single answer. Therefore, the underlying assumption of the course we have developed is that concepts of peace are mutable: they change with time, as well as with cultural, religious, and geopolitical perspectives. Our challenge is to resist the urge to arrive at a final definition, or even to develop a map for constructing peace in a modern conflict. Rather, we and our students repeatedly ask ourselves what peace is as we try to unpack its variegated meanings. Our task together is critical, made acute because this will be the only course about peace our students will ever encounter during their tenure at our university. Our goal, at once modest and ambitious, is to instigate thought about peace; to provoke discussion, and exploration; to render peace worthy of seriousness, challenging the old-fashioned stereotypes many of our students may share that peace is a mere relic of a bygone Vietnam “hippie” era or an unobtainable fantasy