The Crowded Page

The Crowded Page is an Internet-based humanities computing project whose goal is to create data-mining and visualization tools that will allow researchers to map out the intricate connections between the members of artistic and literary communities. In most accounts of literary and art history, a work of art or literature is said to be the product of a single creative mind. In an effort to make visible what is often obscured in traditional histories of art and literature, The Crowded Page seeks to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the digital medium to foreground the ways in which a complex network of friends, editors, neighbors, lovers, and fellow artists and writers informs the creative process

Illegal Recruitment: A Self-Implosion and Corruption of the NCAA

Today’s high school/amateur athletes continue to get bigger, faster and stronger with every collegiate recruiting class. It would be easy to assume with more and more athletes having this type of ability that colleges would be on a more level playing field. That assumption is terribly wrong. The death penalty/capital punishment as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary can be defined in short as: being sentenced to execution by a court of law for crimes committed (Capital Punishment). In collegiate sports, the death penalty has been enacted once and only once because of the ramifications that it had on the program. Why was the program given such a harsh penalty? Two words: illegal recruitment. Illegal recruitment, in short, can be defined by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) as athletes receiving improper benefits from colleges, boosters (wealthy alumni donors to the university) or coaches to influence potential athletes to come and play for their respective athletic teams. Another thing destroying the NCAA are professional sports agents and scouts for professional sports teams. They continue to convince these young athletes to become a professional athlete at younger and younger ages. In this world money talks and when an agent or scout puts money in front of these young athletes’ faces, it is very often hard for them to turn it down. Often, these athletes do not come from the best situations, so they want to provide their respective families with the lives they have always wanted. Part of the NCAA’s mission statement is to provide fair opportunities to all athletes at all levels and illegal recruitment, as well as professional scouts and agents, are contributing to a tear down of not only a destruction of the NCAA’s mission but also selfimplosion of the NCAA as well. With student- athletes wanting more, it gives these boosters, scouts and agents giving these illegal gifts, that support bigger universities, more opportunities to recruit high profile athletes with ease, which is giving smaller colleges and universities no chance to compete (especially at the division one level) and is causing corruption in the NCAA and is not keeping the playing field level.Kayla SiddellHonors DiplomaHonors CollegeCunningham Memorial Library, Terre Haute, Indiana State UniversityUndergraduateTitle from document title page. Document formatted into pages: 55

How the Great Do Tumble : Mark Twain\u27s Later Articles in the San Francisco \u3ci\u3eDaily Alta California\u3c/i\u3e

On November 20, 1867, Mark Twain wrote the San Francisco Daily Alta California to say that he had come home to America. It was the end of his tour of Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, the trip that produced dozens of letters to the Daily Alta and, eventually, a book, The Innocents Abroad. These writings were enormously successful for Twain, as many papers picked up the series written to California, and the whole country knew about him; he was, upon his arrival, a “national figure (Kaplan 57). It was, for Mark Twain, a moment of major transition in his life and career: he moved beyond the provincial fame he had known as a journalist in the far western United States and literally moved out of the West altogether, for after coming ashore in New York City, he stayed on the eastern seaboard, going to Washington, D.C., to stay a month or two--possibly longer (20 November). This trip to Washington was a step in Twain\u27s effort to define himself as a writer. His success as a colloquial western voice in Nevada and California as a writer from the margins of the American states, the Wild Humorist ofthe Pacific Slope, was unsatisfying to him. He wanted to be more than an amusing writer of specialized genre-pieces, yet he could not easily foresee the next step. This unsettled period in Twain\u27s life produced, among other writings, fourteen letters to the San Francisco Daily Alta California. These articles, written and published between November 20,1867, and August 1, 1869, have received almost no attention from Twain scholars. Yet, the letters demonstrate Twain\u27s authorial maneuvering in this moment of literary identity crisis. Written from Washington, D.C., Connecticut, and Boston, these articles are examples of how Mark Twain negotiated the northeastern American world, a world considerably at odds with Western experience. The articles, written not just by a westerner, but by an emerging author of national fame, are the work of a writer who understood that the Northeast was the hub of the American literary market. Twain wanted entré into that market. The letters to the Alta demonstrate Twain\u27s interaction with this establishment on avariety of levels. First, he is the outsider awed by the emblems of American cultural life. He is also the westerner endowed with enough \u27horse sense to see the hypocrisy of politics and “culture. At the same time, he uses humor to establish a position of power for his perspective, creating an authorial voice that can see the upper crust from within and report the foolishness of it back to a western readership, He attains, in the words of Don Florence, a humor that offers fluidity, that grants him power and freedom (7-8). And, with this freedom, he entertains a San Francisco readership trying to live a border life between frontier grit and metropolitan style

THE 2012 GREAT PLAINS DISTINGUISHED BOOK PRIZE

Selecting a single book to win a prize is a tremendous challenge. There can be something unsatisfying about ranking creative scholarly works knowing there is no such thing as a sole best book in a group of quality titles. And yet, each year that I\u27ve been a part of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize committee, it has happened relatively easily: a book is chosen as the prize winner. The ease does not emerge from a casual attitude toward the selection. On the contrary, the many people involved with choosing the Book Prize winner take it very seriously. I also know that the ease does not come from a lack of quality books to choose from, as each year there are numerous terrific submissions that get very serious consideration for the prize. No, I think the selection of the prize-winning book has been fairly straightforward during my tenure on the committee because of both the thoughtful, systematic process by which the books are chosen and the collegiality of the committee members and their subcommittees of readers

Why Obscure the Record?: The Psychological Context of Willa Cather\u27s Ban on Letter Publication

This essay provides an explanation for American author Willa Cather’s confounding decision to ban the publication of her letters, arguing that one must understand the specific personal and psychological contexts of the execution of her final will in 1943. Since the ban on publication has now been lifted by Cather’s executors, the essay uses ample direct evidence from the letters themselves to analyze the concerns that led to Cather’s choice. I argue that Cather’s ban emerged from a time of grief, physical pain, and growing hopelessness about the future while the world was at war

Experimenting with the Future of American Literary Study

As digital Americanists, we are in the exciting but somewhat unfortunate position of having to give new ideas a try. Some of us will succeed and alter the paradigms of American literary scholarship; some of us will, like Lucius Sherman, one day look a little ridiculous. Though I think we can trust the value of some of our digital work, like making important but hard to find texts rigorously edited and fully accessible, we cannot finally predict which experiments will succeed and which will fail. As academics with tenure and review committees in our future, many of us do not feel that we have the luxury to fail, or, more appropriately, that we do not have the luxury to have our successes be unrecognizable to the wizened members of the committee. Therefore, it is important that we begin to make our work, and the digital work of our peers, more fully recognized by the profession. We need to offer one another the security to innovate, for digital media can be a new and powerful way to discover and articulate fresh ideas about American literature and culture. The prospects for digital American literary study are, I think, quite good, but a true flowering of this work will only happen when digital projects are more securely supported by professional structures, when, for example, there are ample mechanisms for peer review, serious considerations of digital projects in the pages of established American literature journals, and tenure committees and departments fully supportive of non-print publications and of thoughtful risk-taking. We do not know what will ultimately be accepted as the most valuable kinds of digital scholarship, so we must help create a profession that allows interesting ideas to be pursued, even if there are no assurances for their success

New Engagements with Documentary Editions: Audiences, Formats, Contexts

This paper is an effort to think about something different than the creation of documentary editions. It is an effort to think about the reading of them. Specifically, I want to think about the ways the reading of documentary editions is changing, or how it might change. First, however, a caveat: much of what I say is speculative and anecdotal. Though others’ research has been consulted, I’m heavily influenced by what I observe is happening with readers of my own editing project, The Willa Cather Archive, a digital thematic research collection dedicated to the life, work, and environs of the American author. That said, I want to consider existing trends more broadly, guess about future practices, and contemplate how we, as documentary editors, might respond to the altering modes of readership

Review of \u3ci\u3eNew Essays on My Antonia\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Sharon O\u27Brien

In her introductory essay, Sharon O\u27Brien correctly claims that My Antonia\u27s critical history illustrates the indeterminacy of meaning, for even in this relatively short book one is struck by the variety of responses evoked by Willa Cather\u27s novel. From the first essay, suggesting the sweetness of Cather\u27s narrative, to the last, recording the violence of Jim Burden\u27s hegemonic presence, this collection gives readers a fresh, if sometimes unconvincing; look at one of the most famous novels of the Great Plains. Miles Orvell\u27s essay Time, Change, and the Burden of Revision in My Antonia gives us the first argument of many about literary influence, connecting the novel to the three works Cather labeled as American books with a long, long life : The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. Orvell makes several interesting connections between the works, particularly Jewett\u27s, and ultimately concludes that Cather wanted to propose a sweeter, more optimistic narrative. The collection\u27s most compelling essays Elizabeth Ammons\u27s My Antonia and African American Art and Anne Goodwyn Jones\u27s Displacing Dixie: The Southern Subtext in My Antonia -illustrate the richness of influence that informed Cather\u27s writing. Ammons\u27s contention that Cather\u27s book is deeply indebted to and shaped by African American music, though she was conflicted by such a debt, will surprise many readers. But the essay intriguingly takes on the novel\u27s troubling Blind d\u27 Arnault passage, refusing to write it off as either simple racism or benign characterization. Instead, Ammons offers a complex vision of Cather\u27s engagement with African American culture, suggesting that the very structure of My Antonia is based (subconsciously) on ragtime. Jones\u27s essay, too, illustrates that one of the novel\u27s largest silences can be a source of important analysis. Writing about the ghostly presence of Jim Burden\u27s southern roots, Jones notes that his first nine years in Virginia, all but ignored in the book, subtly influence his perceptions. The essay ably suggests the deep and lasting effect of region on imagination. The collection\u27s final essay, Marilee Lindemann\u27s \u27It Ain\u27t My Prairie\u27: Gender, Power, and Narrative in My Antonia, is its least satisfying. Though making an important point concerning Cather\u27s ambivalen[ce] about female artistic and cultural power, the piece tends toward extended harangue about the control Jim Burden wields as the story\u27s narrator. On the whole, New Essays on My Antonia provides fresh avenues of Cather research, though all lines of thought are not equally rewarding

Review of \u3ci\u3eNew Essays on My Antonia\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Sharon O\u27Brien

In her introductory essay, Sharon O\u27Brien correctly claims that My Antonia\u27s critical history illustrates the indeterminacy of meaning, for even in this relatively short book one is struck by the variety of responses evoked by Willa Cather\u27s novel. From the first essay, suggesting the sweetness of Cather\u27s narrative, to the last, recording the violence of Jim Burden\u27s hegemonic presence, this collection gives readers a fresh, if sometimes unconvincing; look at one of the most famous novels of the Great Plains. Miles Orvell\u27s essay Time, Change, and the Burden of Revision in My Antonia gives us the first argument of many about literary influence, connecting the novel to the three works Cather labeled as American books with a long, long life : The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. Orvell makes several interesting connections between the works, particularly Jewett\u27s, and ultimately concludes that Cather wanted to propose a sweeter, more optimistic narrative. The collection\u27s most compelling essays Elizabeth Ammons\u27s My Antonia and African American Art and Anne Goodwyn Jones\u27s Displacing Dixie: The Southern Subtext in My Antonia -illustrate the richness of influence that informed Cather\u27s writing. Ammons\u27s contention that Cather\u27s book is deeply indebted to and shaped by African American music, though she was conflicted by such a debt, will surprise many readers. But the essay intriguingly takes on the novel\u27s troubling Blind d\u27 Arnault passage, refusing to write it off as either simple racism or benign characterization. Instead, Ammons offers a complex vision of Cather\u27s engagement with African American culture, suggesting that the very structure of My Antonia is based (subconsciously) on ragtime. Jones\u27s essay, too, illustrates that one of the novel\u27s largest silences can be a source of important analysis. Writing about the ghostly presence of Jim Burden\u27s southern roots, Jones notes that his first nine years in Virginia, all but ignored in the book, subtly influence his perceptions. The essay ably suggests the deep and lasting effect of region on imagination. The collection\u27s final essay, Marilee Lindemann\u27s \u27It Ain\u27t My Prairie\u27: Gender, Power, and Narrative in My Antonia, is its least satisfying. Though making an important point concerning Cather\u27s ambivalen[ce] about female artistic and cultural power, the piece tends toward extended harangue about the control Jim Burden wields as the story\u27s narrator. On the whole, New Essays on My Antonia provides fresh avenues of Cather research, though all lines of thought are not equally rewarding

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age

Essays reflecting on the development of the first wave of digital American literature scholarshi