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1 | Author(s) (Last, First) | Title | Date | Theme(s)/Course (1500, 4000) | Abstract or Summary | |||||||||||||||||||||
2 | Dickey, Colin | The Fate of His Bones | 2007/8 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Medical Humanities (or ethical concerns?) | The article provides a brief history of the act of cranioklepty in the 19th century, or the act of stealing a skull from the grave with the primary goal of analyzing it phrenologically or preserving it in a museum. Dickey pays special attention to Thomas Browne, who, despite his express wishes against it and distaste for the practice while living, was a victim of cranioklepty after his death. Likely to be read in conjunction with Browne's "Urn Burial." | |||||||||||||||||||||
3 | Levi, Primo | Carbon | 1919 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Medical Humanities, Nature and Ecology | "Levi's story “Carbon” is a poetic fantasy about the life of a single carbon atom. The story is filled with images that animate the chemist's world. To a chemist, the molecular world is real, and the invisible events that power the world around us may escape our vision, but they do not escape our notice." Likely to be read in conjunction with Motola's "Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction No. 140." | |||||||||||||||||||||
4 | Motola, Gabriel | Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction No. 140 | 1995 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Medical Humanities, Nature and Ecology | The article, from The Paris Review, details the life of Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor and chemist. Likely to be read in conjunction with Levi's "Carbon." | |||||||||||||||||||||
5 | Rankine, Claudia | Citizen: An American Lyric | 2014 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Gender and Identity, Conflict and Social Justice | This is an excerpt of Rankine's Citizen, pages 10-37. "Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society." | |||||||||||||||||||||
6 | Pogue Harrison, Robert | The Dominion of the Dead | 2005 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Faith and Doubt (?) | This is an excerpt of Harrison's book, pages 13-33. "How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us. " | |||||||||||||||||||||
7 | Browne, Sir Thomas | Urn Burial | 1658 | ENGL 1500 or 1900 | "'Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk' is a work by Sir Thomas Browne, published in 1658 as the first part of a two-part work that concludes with The Garden of Cyrus. Its nominal subject was the discovery of a Roman urn burial in Norfolk. The discovery of these remains prompts Browne to deliver, first, a description of the antiquities found, and then a survey of most of the burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, of which his era was aware. The most famous part of the work is the apotheosis of the fifth chapter, where Browne declaims: 'But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.'" Likely to be used in conjunction with Dickey's "The Fate of His Bones." | |||||||||||||||||||||
8 | Lerner, Ben | 10:04: A Novel | 2014 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Medical Humanities, Nature and Ecology, Tech and Media | An excerpt of the novel 10:04, pages 6-9. "In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater... Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past." | |||||||||||||||||||||
9 | Cole, Teju | Open City: A Novel | 2012 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Medical Humanities, Gender and Identity | An excerpt of the novel Open City, pages 7-12. "A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul." | |||||||||||||||||||||
10 | Sebald, W. G. | The Rings of Saturn | 2016 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Medical Humanities | Two excerpts from the novel, pages 5-20 and 51-71. "The Rings of Saturn―with its curious archive of photographs―records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants." | |||||||||||||||||||||
11 | Thoreau, Henry David | Walking | 1862 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Nature and Ecology | "Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist, philosopher, and author of such classics as Walden and 'Civil Disobedience,' contributed a number of writings to The Atlantic in its early years. The month after his death from tuberculosis, in May 1862, the magazine published 'Walking,' one of his most famous essays, which extolled the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and lamented the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness." | |||||||||||||||||||||
12 | Abbey, Crystal N. | Agents of Change: How Police and the Courts Misuse the Law to Silence Mass Protests | 2015 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from CS) This article tracks police responses to mass assemply and peaceful protests. Abbey pays special attention to police use of chemical agents despite a global wartime ban on such chemicals; the fatal efficacy of non-lethal ammunition and crowd control measures; applications and misapplications of First and Fourth Ammendment rights; and the difficulty of bringing criminal charges to bear on police officers believed to have practiced deliberate excessive force. Ultimately, Abbey calls for courts to "promote the Spirit of the First Amendment" by allowing that amendment to be used as a defense in proceedings where a protestor has been brought up on criminal charges, and by punishing officers whose employment of deliberate excessive force threatens to deprive protestors of their First Ammendment Rights. | |||||||||||||||||||||
13 | Alexander, Michelle | "Introduction," The New Jim Crow | 2020 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from CS) In the introduction to her text, The New Jim Crow, Alexander offers an autobiographical account that tracks the development of her notion that the U.S. prison system effectively perpetuates Jim Crow-era anti-black government policies, and repackages these policies to make them more palatable for public consumption while, dusting the away footprints that trace modern 'merican inceration back to its JC roots. Alexander pays special attention to the way that certain significant events - namely, the election of President Barack Obama - threaten to innoculate the public against recognizing, acknowledging, and combatting systemic iterations of anti-black racism in the twnety-first century U.S. Ultimately, she sees the U.S. prison system as a tool or industry of social control, dispropportionately depriving black lives of the right to vote, of access to gainful employment, of access to housing, and of the full enjoyment of a litany of other opportunities. | |||||||||||||||||||||
14 | Foucault, Michel | "The Means of Correct Training," Discipline and Punish | 1975 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (excerpts from Sparknotes) "The chief functioning of disciplinary power is to train. It links forces together to enhance and use them; it creates individual units from a mass of bodies. The success of disciplinary power depends on three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination." "Power does not exclude or repress. Instead, it creates the reality and rituals of truth. The individual and knowledge about him belong to this production. The individual is the functional atom of political theory, but is also constituted by the technology of power that Foucault calls a "discipline." But how could disciplines achieve such effects?" | |||||||||||||||||||||
15 | Gordon, Colin | "Introduction: Our House," Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City | 2008 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from Dan Trudeau's review) "In Mapping Decline, Colin Gordon chronicles the historic causes and contemporary conse-quences of the urban crisis in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Students of U.S. urban history willalready be familiar with St. Louis’ story. It follows the archetypal narrative of decline in the postwarera: government programs for urban renewal fail to revitalize the central city while public subsidiesfor development at the urban fringe enable centrifugal forces that strip the urban core of investment,population, and tax revenue. Underlying this transformation is the dual process of White flightto the suburbs and the containment of Blacks in the urban core. Mapping Decline thus follows thepath worn by Hirsch (1998) and Sugrue (2005) in their respective examinations of urban crisis inChicago and Detroit. While Gordon’s explanation is not new, he adds a visual dimension to thenarrative by including an extensive battery of maps and figures. Furthermore, Mapping Declinecontributes to the empirical urban literature by tracing the trajectory of St. Louis’ decline to the endof the 20th century.This political history of St. Louis’ urban crisis unfolds over five chapters, which are organizedthematically. The introduction lays the groundwork for the following chapters by outlining the eco-nomic and demographic contours of change since 1940 in the greater St. Louis area. | |||||||||||||||||||||
16 | Langford, Catherine L. and Montene Speight | "#BlackLivesMatter: Epistemic Positioning, Challenges, and Possiblities" | 2015 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from the Abstract) The social media campaign #BlackLivesMatter presents an ideology counter to the historical and contemporary framing of African Americans that strips them of social value. The hashtag attempts to alter the epistemic paradigm that exists in American discursive and material actions by drawing attention to the habitual violence against Blacks in America while infusing a positive message about the individual and communal worth of Black lives. Black citizens are not aggressive, criminal, or inconvenient in the rhetorical contstruction of #BlackLivesMatter; Black lives should be celebrated and protected. Although multiple counter movements have arisen in an effort to invalidate the social critiques #BlackLives Matter presents, they are not successful. The hastag teaches auditors th[at] Black persons have a positive presence, that violence against the Black body is news, that white privilege exists, and that colorblind rhetoric does not help bring about equality or justice | |||||||||||||||||||||
17 | King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther | Letter from Birmingham Jail | August, 1963 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (From LitCharts: https://www.litcharts.com/lit/letter-from-birmingham-jail/summary) Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in response to criticism of the nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963. In the letter, King responds specifically to a statement published in a local newspaper by eight white clergymen, calling the protests “unwise and untimely” and condemning to the “outsiders” who were leading them. He begins his letter by calling the clergymen people of “genuine goodwill” and acknowledging the sincerity of their concern, setting a tone of reasonable dialogue. He then responds to the claims that he is an outsider by informing his critics that as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was invited to Birmingham to support the African American residents fight for their civil rights. Beyond that, he argues that he is in Birmingham “because injustice is here,” and like the Apostle Paul and other early Christians, he must answer the call for aid. King also rebuts the critics’ argument that segregation laws should be fought in the courts and not on the streets, explaining that only through direct action can they force the white majority to confront the issue of racism and enter into true dialogue. While the protesters are breaking laws—which is precisely why King must write his letter from the Birmingham City jail—those laws are immoral and unjust, and civil disobedience is thus a patriotic response. In addition to responding directly to the criticisms brought forth by the clergymen, King uses his letter to make his own judgments as well. He expresses his extreme disappointment at white moderates, whom he considers more detrimental to the cause of racial equality than the Ku Klux Klan. He condemns the fact that the moderate claims to support the mission while rejecting all attempts at direct action. He would rather be considered an extremist “for the cause of justice” than stand by and passively allow those injustices to persist, as the white moderate has done in the South. King then extends his criticism to the leadership of the white church for championing the status quo. He expected more of the church, an institution that once “transformed the mores of society,” but laments the fact that the contemporary church has fallen far from its early Christian origins to become “an irrelevant social club” rather than a source of inspiration. Yet with all of his concern about the lack of support for the cause of racial equality and desegregation, King closes his letter on a hopeful note, expressing his belief that African Americans will achieve the freedom and equality they are fighting for. | |||||||||||||||||||||
18 | McIntosh, Peggy | "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," Racial Formation in the United States | 1986 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from CS) In this short piece, McIntosh begins with her ruminations on the difficulty some folks have in identifying and unpacking male privilege. Then, with the realization that oppressive hierarchies often interlock, she attempts to examine and articulate the tools and benefits of white privilege, which she compares to an invisible and weightless knapsack filled with maps, tools, provisions, etc. that facilitate survival in an otherwise hostile environment like the wild. She examines the implications of white people's inability to see and acknowledge their own privilege, and she goes on to state that whereas privilege (even when it is seen) is considered an unearned benefit or advantage, certain privilege go beyond benefiting the holder of the privilege, and actively confer dominance over those who do not benefit from privilege. McIntosh also provides a list (although surely not an exhaustive one) of all the activities and behaviors are her privilege allows her to engage with. | |||||||||||||||||||||
19 | Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant | "Racial Formations," Racial Formation in the United States | 1986 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from CS) Using the case of Susie Guillory Phipps vs. the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Records as a launching point, Omi and Winant discuss race as a social construct, the quanitification of race, the biology of race, and the historical development of the concept of race. Phipps initially sued the LBVR to have the race recorded on her birth certificate from "black" to "white," citing that the state law which decreed that persons born with one-thirty-second "Negro blood" or more be desginated black. Despite professional testimony to the law's inaccuracy and unconstitutionality, Phipps lost the case; however, the fact that the case was tried at all raises questions when it comes to defining, quantifying, and tracking race and racialization. | |||||||||||||||||||||
20 | Orbe, Mark | "#AllLivesMatter as Post-Racial Rhetorical Strategy" | 2015 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from the Abstract) #BlackLivesMatter was created following the acquittal of the man who killed Trayvon Martin; the movement's call to action is against the "virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society." Shortly after #BlackLivesMatter became a nationally recognized symbol, it was re-configured, co-opted, and/or replaced by some with the more inclusive and racially neutral alternative, #AllLivesMatter. This analysis utilizes the core elements associated with a critical race theoretical frame to argue that #AllLivesMatter is akin with larger rhetorical devices - like the notion of a color-blind society - that are used to promote post-racism, something that was not possible with other political slogans during earlier civil rights struggles. | |||||||||||||||||||||
21 | Sokhi-Bulley, Bal | "Performing Struggle: Parrhesia in Ferguson | 2015 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from the Abstract) "The enigma of revolts." You can almost hear the sigh at the end of this sentences. Foucault is making a statement here, published under the title "Useless to Revolt," on that "impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, "I will no longer obey". In this short piece, I question the two sides of the enigma - how to label the revolt - is the act of rioting, such as what we witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 "proper resistance" - and, how to understand the ethos of the rioter. The label of counter-conduct, I argue clarifies the enigma as it allows us, challenges us even, to see the event as political. Counter-conduct provides a new framework for reading spontaneous and improvised forms of political expression. The rioter can then be seen as political and rational, as demonstrating ethical behavior. The ethos of this behavior is represented as an ethics of the self, a form of parrhesia where the rioter risks herself and shows courage to tell the truth, the story of her community. | |||||||||||||||||||||
22 | Tatum, Beverly Daniel | Selection from "Defining Racism'" | 2013 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | Tatum begins with the assertion that we are all, regardless of demographic, affected by racism. She then attempts to track the sources of prejudice (stereotypes, omissions, and distortions), while defining key concepts in the psychology of racialization. Such concepts include internalized oppression, the difference between racism and prejudice, white privilege, and active vs. passive racism. | |||||||||||||||||||||
23 | Wolfe, Scott and Justin Nix | "The Alleged 'Ferguson Effect' and Police Willingness to Engage in Community Partnership" | 2015 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, Conflict and Social Justice | (from the Abstract) In response to increasing violent crime rates in several U.S. cities over the past year, some have pointed the finger of blame at de-policing, a result of the so-called "Ferguson Effect." Although the Ferguson Effect on crim rates remains an open question, there may also be a Ferguson Effect on other aspects of police officers' jobs, such as willingness to partner with community members. This study used data from a cross-sectional survey of 567 deputies at an agency in the southeastern U.S. to accomplish 2 objectives: (a) to determine whether the Ferguson Effect is associated with de-policing in the form of decreased willingness to engage in community partnership, and (b) to determine whether such an effect persists upon accounting for perceived organizational justice and self-legitimacy. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression equations revealed that the Ferguson Effect (as operationalized by reduced motivation stemming from recent negative publicity) was associated with less willingness to engage in community partnership (b = -.10; Cl = -.16, -.05). However, upon accounting for organizational justice and self-legitimacy, the Ferguson Effect was rendered insignificant (b .01; 95% Cl= -.05, .07). The findings suggest that officers who have confidence in their authority or perceive their agency as fair are more willing to partner with the community to solve problems, regardless of the effects of negative publicity. | |||||||||||||||||||||
24 | Lane, Belden C. | "Giving Voice to Place: Three Models for Understanding American Sacred Space" | 1988 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From Lane's book, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality. "Lane maintains his approach of interspersing shorter and more personal pieces among full-length essays that explore how Native American, early French and Spanish, Puritan New England, and Catholic Worker traditions has each expressed the connection between spirituality and place." This excerpt from Chapter 2 defines what Lane considers a sacred space and gives distinctly American examples. | |||||||||||||||||||||
25 | Buber, Martin | "The Eternal Thou" | 2001 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Taken from Exploring the Philosophy of Religion, this section is an introductory piece to an small excerpt from Buber's book, I and Thou. Buber analyzes the religious experience and the relationship between Man and God. Buber argues that we establish our selfhood in relationship to the eternally present "though," God. | |||||||||||||||||||||
26 | Bush, Harold K. | "'Kissing the Bricks' and Fly-Fishing for God: Teaching Literature as Spiritual Discipline" | 2010 | Pedagogy | One of our own! In his article, Hal writes about spirituality as a mode for exploring life and literature, noting its lack of appearance on college campuses. He relates students' readings of texts to conecting to a divine being or some other transcendent concept, in addition to discussing the reasons why we teach (or should teach) literature, spirituality, and love in the classroom. He discusses how he teaches literature spiritually, and encourages others to do the same. | |||||||||||||||||||||
27 | Bass, Diana Butler | Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution | 2015 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | An excerpt from a longer book, this PDF includes chapter 1, "Dirt," and chapter 2, "Water." In a summary from Amazon: "Diana Butler Bass, leading commentator on religion, politics, and culture, follows up her acclaimed book Christianity After Religion by arguing that what appears to be a decline actually signals a major transformation in how people understand and experience God. The distant God of conventional religion has given way to a more intimate sense of the sacred that is with us in the world. This shift, from a vertical understanding of God to a God found on the horizons of nature and human community, is at the heart of a spiritual revolution that surrounds us — and that is challenging not only religious institutions but political and social ones as well. Grounded explores this cultural turn as Bass unpacks how people are finding new spiritual ground by discovering and embracing God everywhere in the world around us—in the soil, the water, the sky, in our homes and neighborhoods, and in the global commons. Faith is no longer a matter of mountaintop experience or institutional practice; instead, people are connecting with God through the environment in which we live. Grounded guides readers through our contemporary spiritual habitat as it points out and pays attention to the ways in which people experience a God who animates creation and community. Bass brings her understanding of the latest research and studies and her deep knowledge of history and theology to Grounded. She cites news, trends, data, and pop culture, weaves in spiritual texts and ancient traditions, and pulls it all together through stories of her own and others' spiritual journeys. Grounded observes and reports a radical change in the way many people understand God and how they practice faith. In doing so, Bass invites readers to join this emerging spiritual revolution, find a revitalized expression of faith, and change the world." | |||||||||||||||||||||
28 | Berling, Judith A. | "Is Conversation About Religion Possible?" | 1991 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Berling discusses why the teaching of religion or even merely the discussion of it is uncomfortable, relying on her own experience as an instructor. She discusses the role(s) of religion in society and how this alters the classroom. She finally gives instruction for how to procede with religious conversation with professionalism and cultural sensitivity. This would likely be a good reading toward the beginning of the class to help set boundaries. | |||||||||||||||||||||
29 | Carter, Stephen L. | "God as a Hobby" | 1993 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From his book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, Carter writes on "how we can preserve the vital separation of church and state while embracing rather than trivializing the faith of millions of citizens or treating religious believers with disdain. What makes Carter's work so intriguing is that he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends. Explaining how preserving a special role for religious communities can strengthen our democracy, The Culture Of Disbelief recovers the long tradition of liberal religious witness (for example, the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements). Carter argues that the problem with the 1992 Republican convention was not the fact of open religious advocacy, but the political positions being advocated." (Summary from Amazon) | |||||||||||||||||||||
30 | Robinson, Marilynne | "Darwinism" | 1998 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From her book, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Robinson writes a religious critique of darwinist, capitalist world economics. From Amazon's book summary: "In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bible and Darwinism, Marilynne Robinson repeatedly sends her reader back to the primary texts that are central to the development of American culture but little read or acknowledged today." | |||||||||||||||||||||
31 | Dawkins, Richard | "Why There Almost Certainly is No God" | 2007 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From a collection of "essential readings" titled The Portable Atheist, Dawkins's highly controversial essay creates an argument against God by posing it as a scientifc hypothesis. The New York Times writes that: "The nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a 'brave and splendid' aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a 'pernicious' one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'" | |||||||||||||||||||||
32 | Smith, James K. A. | Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation | 2009 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | This PDF is an excerpt of Smith's introduction, focussing on the section under the heading "Making the Familiar Strange: A Phenomenology of Cultural Liturgies." In it, he poses a shopping mall as a liturgical and pedagogical site, in order to better see "what's at stake" in its practices and design. He goes on to define what "an education" is and questions it as religious. | |||||||||||||||||||||
33 | Gopnick, Adam | "Bigger than Phil: When Did Faith Start To Fade?" | 2014 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Gopnick argues that in the last 20 years, the public has taken on a "contemptuous tone" towards faith. Contrasting it against godlessness, Gopnick goes on to write that "articulate atheism" is responsible for this new attitude. He condemns the attitude of popular atheism and science that is so against faith, and ultimately argues that when prosperity (read: wealth) increases, faith decreases. | |||||||||||||||||||||
34 | Hart, David Bentley | "Gods and Gopniks" | 2014 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | This article is written in response to the one above by Adam Gopnick. He writes that he does not mean to insult Gopnick, but that we have culturally reached a point where religion is unable to be academically discussed, especially when we don't read and understand each other's work. The article turns into a roast of Gopnick and his position representing "popular secularist thinking." | |||||||||||||||||||||
35 | Lamott, Ann | "Shitty First Drafts" | 1994 | All English courses, especially beginning writers in ENGL 1500 and 1900 | Very quick piece, could work in any writing class. "In the following section taken from Lamott's popular book about writing, Bird by Bird (1994), she argues for the need to let go and write those 'shitty first drafts' that lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and third drafts." | |||||||||||||||||||||
36 | Larkin, Phillip | "Church Going" | 2007 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Also from the collection The Portable Atheist, Larkin's poem reflects on what will happen to churches and cathredals in mass when they are no longer in use. | |||||||||||||||||||||
37 | Miller, Lisa | "Why Harvard Students Should Study More Religion" | 2010 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Miller's argument advocates for a broad knowledge of religions, if for no other purpose than to aid in the solving of world conflicts. She criticizes Harvard for its outright avoidance of religion and discrediting its serious study, arguing that religious studies are necessary, along with the sciences and other humanities, for human understanding. | |||||||||||||||||||||
38 | Oppenheimer, Mark | "When Some Turn to Church, Others Go To CrossFit" | 2015 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | This brief article reviews what it means for something to be "religious," referring to multiple examples of things that could fit a religious definition, like CrossFit, football, and the Star Trek fandom. He asks a deeper question about what makes something religious and why it is a special community experience. | |||||||||||||||||||||
39 | Pew Research Center (no author specified) | "America's Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffilliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow" | 2015 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | This is a 200 page report from the Pew Research Center about religion in America. From their page: "This is the first in a series of reports highlighting findings from the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, the centerpiece of which is a nationally representative telephone survey of 35,071 adults. This is the second time the Pew Research Center has conducted a Religious Landscape Study. The first was conducted in 2007, also with a telephone survey of more than 35,000 Americans." | |||||||||||||||||||||
40 | Pinker, Steven | "Less Faith, More Reason" | 2006 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Pinker reflects on what was then a recent report released by Harvard about general education goals, which included some policies that caused Pinker concern. He believes that the report places too much emphasis on the money-making and research-forward goals of science, and not enough on the principal of knowledge as an inherit value. He also objects to the inclusion of a clause on "reason and faith," arguing that faith has no place next to reason, and no place anywhere but religious institutions. He writes that "For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it." | |||||||||||||||||||||
41 | Darsey, James and Joshua R. Ritter | "Religious Voices in American Public Discourse" | 2009 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Darsey and Ritter analyze the ways in which American rhetoric has always been religious at its core, starting with John Winthrop and continuing through to Raegan and George H. W. Bush. They define what religious rhetoric is and then break it up into different genres: the sermon, the jeremiad, prophetic rhetoric, and apocalyptic rhetoric. They discuss religious ethos, the rhetoric of reform, and what the possible future of relgious rhetoric in the United States could look like. | |||||||||||||||||||||
42 | Rorty, Richard | "Religion as Conversation-Stopper" | 1994 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Rorty argues that the change in human character in 1910, as identified by Virginia Woolf, was that most humans no longer believed they had souls (and continue not to). Religion is now looked on as a traditional belief, and one that we need to work to move past, an idea harkening back to the Enlightenment. Rorty goes on to argue for a continuing of the privatization of religous beliefs, as opposed to them being in the public sphere. | |||||||||||||||||||||
43 | Tompkins, Jane | "The Cloister and the Heart" | 1998 | ENGL 1500 or 1900, also pedagogy | Tompkins writes on how today's undergraduates are haunted by the shadowy figure that is their future - a constant anxiety that contrasts her own earlier experience. She found through her teaching that her students felt they were not the acting agents of their own life and career choices. Tompkins writes about how the classroom has become warped with hierarchies, competitions, and performances - "Higher education... cuts students off from both their inner selves and the world around them... it prepares them to enter professional school but not to develop as whole human beings." | |||||||||||||||||||||
44 | Vaos, David and Mark Chaves | "Is the United States a Counter-Example to the Secularization Thesis?" | 2016 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Abstract: "Virtually every discussion of secularization asserts that high levels of religiosity in the United States make it a decisive counterexample to the claim that modern societies are prone to secularization. Focus- ing on trends rather than levels, the authors maintain that, for two straightforward empirical reasons, the United States should no longer be considered a counterexample. First, it has recently become clear that American religiosity has been declining for decades. Second, this decline has been produced by the generational patterns underlying re- ligious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive cohort is less religious than the preceding one. America is not an exception. These findings change the theoretical import of the United States for debates about secularization." | |||||||||||||||||||||
45 | Warner, Michael | "Tongues United: Memiors of a Pentacostal Boyhood" | 2004 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt or Gender and Identity | Warner reflects on the way that his childhood religion shaped his ideas of the world, even though he no longer identifies with any part of it. He relays his experience growing up in a devoutly religious home and the inevitable strife he felt when coming to terms with his sexuality. His memior goes all over the place, and truthfully is hard to summarize, but ends on a note of interest: religious groups have to think of themselves as the oppressed minority because of their performative identity. He writes that "No other culture goes as far as ours in making everything an issue of identity." | |||||||||||||||||||||
46 | Deming, Will | "What is Religion" | 2005 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | Deming writes that reductionist definitions of religion, such as those often at first supplied by students, don't do it justice. He settles on a definition of religion that is "Religion is orientation to ultimate reality." He goes on to explain why this is the perfect definition, relying chiefly on things that other definitions tend to exclude. | |||||||||||||||||||||
47 | Lewis, C.S. | Excerpts from Miracles: A Preliminary Study | 1947 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From Amazon: "In the classic Miracles, C.S. Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century, argues that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in his creation. 'The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this.' Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of hte unique presonal involvement of God and creation." | |||||||||||||||||||||
48 | Merton, Thomas | "What is Contemplation?" | 1981 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | In 4 pages, Merton attempts to define what contemplation is and why it is essential for intellectual and spiritual thought. Among other things, he defines it as "spiritual wonder" and "vivid awareness of infinite being." | |||||||||||||||||||||
49 | Rolheiser, Ronald | "What is Spirituality?" | 1999 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From Google's book description: "Ronald Rolheiser probes the question “What is spirituality?”, cutting through the misunderstanding and confusion that can often surround this subject with his trademark clarity. Using examples and stories relevant for today, and with great sensitivity to modern challenges to religious faith, he explains the essentials of spiritual life, including the importance of community worship, the imperatives surrounding social action, and the centrality of the Incarnation, to outline a Christian spirituality that reflects the yearning and search for meaning at the core of the human experience." | |||||||||||||||||||||
50 | Smith, Christian | "The Cultural Worlds of Emerging Adults" | 2009 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt, possibly Gender and Identity? | From Amazon's description: How important is religion for young people in America today? What are the major influences on their developing spiritual lives? How do their religious beliefs and practices change as young people enter into adulthood? ...The book vividly describes as well the broader cultural world of today's emerging adults, how that culture shapes their religious outlooks, and what the consequences are for religious faith and practice in America more generally." This chapter looks in particular at the ways in which a culture is formed and its individual pieces, but still maintains a religious perspective. | |||||||||||||||||||||
51 | Wuthnow, Robert | Excerpts from After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s | 1998 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | From Google's book description: "The evolution of American spirituality over the past fifty years is the subject of Robert Wuthnow's engrossing new book. Wuthnow uses in-depth interviews and a broad range of resource materials to show how Americans, from teenagers to senior citizens, define their spiritual journeys. His findings are a telling reflection of the changes in beliefs and lifestyles that have occurred throughout the United States in recent decades." | |||||||||||||||||||||
52 | Woolf, Josephine | "Losing Our Fourth Amendment Data Protection" | 2019 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt or Tech Media | This article asks the question, "what happens when we stop believing" that our online information is private? If your data is available to a third party, the government can also have it. The supreme court has mores say than you may think. | |||||||||||||||||||||
53 | Nwaubani, Adoabi Tricia | "My Great-Grandfather, The Nigerian Slave Trader" | 2018 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt or Gender and Identity | Nwaubani reflects on her family name and her ancestor, who achieved glory through his role in the African slave trade. Nwaubani eloquently grapples with what it is like to know, now, that the anscestor's actions were wrong, and the change in her family that allowed them to acknowledge the past, pray, and find relief from the great-grandfather's actions, which they felt hung over their heads - either a literal or metaphorical curse. | |||||||||||||||||||||
54 | Glausser, Wayne | "The Rhetoric of New Atheism" | 2016 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | "ABSTRACT: New atheists base their arguments on scientific reason, but scientific reasoning by itself cannot provide a causal explanation for the ultimate cosmological question: why does the world exist? Faced with this impasse or aporia, new atheists tacitly deploy a number of rhetorical tropes to supplement the science proper. The most effective devices include paralepsis, the sarcasm cluster (apodioxis, tapinosis, diasyrmus), pathopoeia, and the linked tropes of catachresis and metalepsis. These tropes bolster the persuasiveness of new atheist arguments by devaluing and ridiculing theist positions, but also by appropriating the pathos and prestige of the religious discourse they hope to supplant." | |||||||||||||||||||||
55 | Bowles, Nellie | "These Millenials Got New Roommates. They're Nuns." | 2019 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt | "A project called Nuns and Nones moves religion-fee millenials into a convent." The millenials work and live normal lives during the weekday, but have scheduled activities and trips with the Nuns in the evenings and on weekends. Both groups learned a great deal about each others lives and reflected on shared experiences and rituals with new perspectives. | |||||||||||||||||||||
56 | Beinart, Paul | "What the Measles Epidemic Really Says About America" | 2019 | ENGL 1900, Faith and Doubt or Medical Humanities | "The return of a vanquished disease reflects historical amnesia, declining faith in institutions, and a troubling lack of concern for the public good." Fewer Americans are receiving the vaccine, and the odd thing is that it does not appear to be a strictly partisan issue. Skepticism in science and in public institutions is evolving. | |||||||||||||||||||||
57 | Rich, Adrienne | "Trying to Talk With a Man" | 1973 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | From her collection The Fact of the Door Frame, this poem recounts the experience of trying to talk with a man as leaving many good things behind to take a trip to a lonely desert. | |||||||||||||||||||||
58 | Ahmed, Leila | "The Discourse of the Veil" | 1992 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | From her own description: "Qassim amin’stahrir al-mar’a(the liberation of woman), published in 1899, during a time of visible social change and lively intellectual ferment, caused intense and furious debate. Analyses of the debate and of the barrage of opposition the book provoked have generally assumed that it was the radicalness of Amin’s proposals with respect to women that caused the furore. Yet the principal substantive recommendations that Amin advocated for women—giving them a primary-school education and reforming the laws on polygamy and divorce—could scarcely be described as innovatory." | |||||||||||||||||||||
59 | Ginsberg, Allen | "America" | 1956 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "'America" is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, written in 1956 while he was in Berkeley, California. It appears in his collection Howl and Other Poems published in November 1956. The poem is presented in a stream of consciousness literary format. America is a largely political work, with much of the poem consisting of various accusations against the United States, its government, and its citizens. Ginsberg uses sarcasm to accuse America of attempting to divert responsibility for the Cold War and makes numerous references to both leftist and anarchist political movements and figures. The poem ends with Ginsberg putting his 'queer shoulder to the wheel'" | |||||||||||||||||||||
60 | Butler, Judith | "Introduction: Acting in Concert" | 2004 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | This is the introduction to Butler's Undoing Gender. Here, she gives a summary of her own previously explained theory of gender performativity, in a condensed version. A fitting quote: "If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one's knowing and without one's willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not 'do' one's gender alone. One is always 'doing' with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary." | |||||||||||||||||||||
61 | Butler, Judith | Gender Trouble, "Chapter 1: 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism" | 1990 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | A summary from CourseHero: The category of "women" is the subject of feminism. Feminism seeks to secure women's representation in society and politics. According to Butler, however, both the notion of a stable, universal category of "women," as well as the very notion of a "subject" under the law, are now open to question. Butler suggests that the very notion of a "subject," represented and regulated by the law, is troublesome. She puts forth the premise that this very subject cannot exist apart from the law, because the law itself defines or constructs the subject, which it then seeks to regulate. This is a problem of the "ontological integrity of the subject before the law." Having created a "subject," the juridical structures of power—which regulate social norms through prohibition—hide the fact that they have done so. While the "subject" appears to have a natural existence that predates the law, Butler claims this is a "foundationalist fiction." Assuming there exists a feminist subject, defining this subject is also problematic. Femininity and the workings of the patriarchy—the social and legal structures that ensure the domination of men over women—are not universal. Gender roles and the power structure of patriarchy vary widely across cultures. These experiences are modified by their intersection with "racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities." Feminism must not exclude by "universalizing" these concepts. The response to these problems is not to seek universal criteria for the category of "women" nor to try to discover a subject that exists outside the law. Butler's task is to conduct a "feminist genealogy" to investigate the various ways these categories have been constructed. This investigation will expose the nature of these concepts as historical constructions. | |||||||||||||||||||||
62 | Gay, Roxane | Bad Feminist, "Introduction" | 2014 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | Roxane Gay claims to "openly embrace the label of 'bad feminist'" because like the movement, she too is flawed and makes mistakes. But she still states that for her, feminism gave her ground to stand on and a way to move forward through the world that still demeans and is violent toward women. She does a good job of combatting early feminist stereotypes, and it's a very quick read at only 6 book-sized pages. | |||||||||||||||||||||
63 | Smith, Gwendolyn Ann | "We're All Someone's Freak" | 2010 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | As part of the collection Gender Outlaws, Smith writes about life as a member of the transgender community. In this piece, Smith raises the all-too-well-known issue of finding the courage to be yourself despite the “hierarchical order of who is acceptable and who is not.” She writes that “We can worry about who is this and who is that, we can argue about who does or doesn’t belong. We can talk about how much more legitimate one or another of us is. In the end, we’re all somebody’s freak – and basic human dignity is not a privilege of the lucky superior few, but a right of all or none.” | |||||||||||||||||||||
64 | Serano, Julia | "Performance Piece | 2010 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | Part of the collection Gender Outlaws; Serano writes, of her own article, "In 'Performance Piece'... I deliver a harsh critique of these then-popular slogans “all gender is drag” and “all gender is performance,” and go onto show how they are often used to undermine the identities and perspectives of transsexuals, as well as other gender and sexual minorities. Even though I do not cite Butler at all in the text, I added the following clarifying information in the first endnote to that chapter: The notion that “all gender is performance” or “all gender is drag” is frequently attributed to Judith Butler, and specifically to her book Gender Trouble (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). However, on numerous occasions, Butler has argued that these catch phrases are gross misinterpretations of what she was actually trying to say..." | |||||||||||||||||||||
65 | Sedaris, David | "Go Carolina" | 2000 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | Sedaris's short story parallel's a young boy's lisp with his budding awareness of his homosexuality. Interestingly, it connects his speech disorder with his gay identity, noting that the other boys in speech therapy were also "future homosexuals." He notes that speech therapy didn't work for any of them - it just made them quieter or try to find ways to hide their lisps. Good for discussion with students and working on implied meanings. | |||||||||||||||||||||
66 | Anzaldúa, Gloria | "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" | 1987 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "'How to Tame a Wild Tongue' is a fascinating piece by writer Gloria Anzaldua in which she analyzes the social and cultural differences between Mexican culture and American culture and how immigrants fall in between. Not only does she explore this but she also delves into topics such as racism, and sexism." | |||||||||||||||||||||
67 | Jack, Jordynn | "Objects in Play: Rhetoric, Gender, and Scientific Toys" | 2015 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | Abstract: In the last 25 years, feminist scholars have worked tirelessly to recover women’s rhetorical theories, productions, and actions that were historically excluded from histories of rhetoric. Rhetoric scholars, many of them feminist scholars, have also worked to address others who have been excluded from the rhetorical traditions. Here, I argue that children have also been largely excluded from rhetorical study. As the next step in the search for more inclusive rhetorical histories, I call here for feminist rhetors to consider rhetoric by children, rhetoric about children, and rhetoric for children. This article examines, in particular, how gendered identities develop in childhood. By studying childhood, we can see how gender and other hegemonic systems that constitute identities work, and we can identify potential disruptions and fissures in them. Since these systems are multivalent, to study them means to examine not only discourse and language but also material, temporal, and spatial arrangements. In this webtext, I conduct a comparative analysis of scientific toys and their marketing. I examine how these toys seek to inculcate a gendered habitus (visual, manual, or bodily ways of doing and being that are typically associated with a particular sex/gender), how marketing materials offer particular gendered roles for boys and girls playing with toys, and how toy makers have sought to develop social networks for boys and girls to participate in as users of the toy. I argue that, insofar as boys and girls are encouraged to play with different types of toys based on assumptions about their sexed abilities and gendered interests, they develop different kinds of knowledge, different ways of perceiving the world, and different kinds of skills. Yet, children’s material compositions offer evidence of how children at play have the potential to disrupt, reproduce, or reconfigure a gendered habitus even as they are first learning them. | |||||||||||||||||||||
68 | Butler, Judith | "Gender Regulations" from Undoing Gender | 2004 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "Butler begins by posing the question of gender’s origin: whether it precedes or follows the formation of regulation and at what point subjection is engendered. She early on invokes Foucaultian concepts of regulatory power’s ability to legislate and produce subjects. She begins to speak to the phrase “gender is a norm” and continues to define a norm as distinct from a law and a rule and that it lends an individual social intelligibility. Though norms demarcate that which is un/acceptable within social bounds, one can never escape these classifications and exist outside of the norm since individuals are defined by its terms. Butler determines that “gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes” (42). Restrictive notions of gender that create a binary system of masculine/feminine endeavor to naturalize such distinctions and to eradicate any sort of disruptions to the system as transgender and gender blending. She concludes that this attempt to undermine the binary system has been met with resolutions that provide for a multitudinous array of gender as well as the Irigarayian notion of gender escaping quantitative description." | |||||||||||||||||||||
69 | Killerman, Sam | "Chapter 4: The Cycle of Oppression" | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | "The Cycle of Oppression" is from A Guide to Gender: The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook, and it basically does just what it claims to do: it is a handbook that provides helpful and beginner-level definitions of stereotype, predjudice, internalized oppression, etc. | |||||||||||||||||||||
70 | Killerman, Sam | "Chapter 6: Understanding Intersections of Identity" | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | "Understanding Intersections of Identity" is from A Guide to Gender: The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook, and it basically does just what it claims to do: it is a handbook that provides beginner-level information on intersectionality and privilege, showing the former as a recipe for a "you soup," and the latter as different forms of checklists and how to avoid using them. | |||||||||||||||||||||
71 | Killerman, Sam | "Chapter 5: The Corruption of the Golden Rule" | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | From A Guide to Gender: The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook, and it basically does just what it claims to do: it is a handbook that provides beginner-level information on how the golden rule isn't always true and offers the "platinum rule" instead, "Do unto others as they would have done unto them." | |||||||||||||||||||||
72 | Killerman, Sam | "Chapter 14: Gender Identity Explored" | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | From A Guide to Gender: The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook, and it basically does just what it claims to do: it is a handbook that provides beginner-level information on the difference between gender roles and gender identity in addition to definitions of what it means to be agender, genderqueer, etc. | |||||||||||||||||||||
73 | Berlant, Lauren | "Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)" | 1995 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "An analysis of the US' law on pornography reveals a double standard on sexuality. It claims to protect the little girl from the 'zone of privacy' of the adult world. In this zone, that which she is protected from is also under the protection of the state in the name of free speech. This protection is in force until the time she would become an adult woman and a citizen. In reality, the law reinforces the patriarchial infantilization of women in their status as a second class citizens." | |||||||||||||||||||||
74 | McMillan, Laurie | "Mixed Messages: Slut Shaming in Mean Girls and Easy A" | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | Abstract: "Problems with slut shaming have received increased attention since the late 1990s, but actually changing rhetorics associated with the word “slut” is tricky. Two teen comedies that address slut shaming, Mean Girls (2004) and Easy A (2010), show how feminist conversations can become warped when translated into a mass market genre. The movies explicitly condemn slut shaming, but changing rhetoric involves addressing not simply the term “slut” but also underlying cultural narratives. The movies successfully challenge heteronormative competition and sexual double standards; however, they undo their positive messages as they rely on good girl/bad girl dichotomies that perpetuate slut shaming. These movies thus illustrate the difficulty in adopting feminist messages for commercial venues that are invested in wide public appeal." | |||||||||||||||||||||
75 | Goffman, Erving | "On Cooling Down the Mark Out: Some aspects of Adaptation to Failure" | 1952 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "As a starting point, Goffman described how those practitioners of criminal fraud known as 'confidence men' would operate their racket. The 'mark' would be allowed to win a little money in a rigged game and then be convinced to invest a larger amount. Suddenly, there would be some 'accident,' the mark would be left penniless, and the 'operators' would disappear. This is familiar ground for anyone who has ever watched a 'sting' movie. Yet, Goffman observed that the con men had a further strategy to deal with the mark who was not willing to keep quiet about the whole embarrassing affair and 'squawked' or 'beefed' to the police. When the con men were confronted with such an angry mark, an additional step called 'cooling the mark out' was added to the game: 'one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions … and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation.' This 'cooler' tries to define the situation for the mark 'in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.' Goffman abstracted the 'cooling out' concept from the setting of the confidence game and applied it to human interactions more generally. He noted that, although there are relatively few victims of the con game in our society, there are plenty of persons in other social settings who need cooling out. Typically, cooling out is called for when a person is involuntarily deprived of a role in some circumstance that implies he was not capable of it. Examples of such assaults on sense of self are abundant. At the non-institutional level, there is the person who considered himself 'lover' but is involuntarily relegated to the status of 'friend.' In a bureaucracy, there is also the long-serving bureaucrat who believed herself entitled to a promotion but who is passed over by management. If the institution does not provide a means to pacify the humiliated person in such situations, the victim may make a scene, become violent, or sue." | |||||||||||||||||||||
76 | Royster, Jacqueline Jones | "Introduction: A Call for Other Ways of Reading" from Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change in African American Women | 2000 | ENGL 1500 or ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "Traces of a Stream offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women." | |||||||||||||||||||||
77 | Morrison, Toni | "Strangers" | 1998 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | "Morrison's short essay, Strangers, explores the preconceived notions that people make of others, and questions why this is. The narrator meets an old woman by a river one day and they instantly connect. She is old and wise, and he grows to be very fond of her in the fraction of a day they spend together." | |||||||||||||||||||||
78 | Sollée, Kristen J. | Introduction and multiple un-numbered chapters from Witchs, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | From the Amazon book description: "Witch, Slut, Feminist: these contested identities are informing millennial women as they counter a tortuous history of misogyny with empowerment. This innovative primer highlights sexual liberation as it traces the lineage of “witch feminism” through art, film, music, fashion, literature, technology, religion, pop culture, and politics. Juxtaposing scholarly research on the demonization of women and female sexuality that has continued since the witch hunts of the early modern era with pop occulture analyses and interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and practitioners of witchcraft, this book addresses and illuminates contemporary conversations about reproductive rights, sexual pleasure, queer identity, pornography, sex work, and more. Author Kristen J. Sollee elucidates the ways in which women have been persecuted for their perceived connection with witchcraft, and how they have fought back, harnessing the legacy of the witch for revolutionary means." | |||||||||||||||||||||
79 | Beard, Mary | "The Public Voice of Women" from Women and Power: A Manifesto | 2017 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "As far back as Homer's Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women's relationship to power and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template." | |||||||||||||||||||||
80 | Holmes, Janet | "Women Talk Too Much" from Language Myths | 1998 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | "In 'Women Talk Too Much,' Janet Holmes talks about how many just assume that women talk too much and talk more than men. ... Holmes comes to the conclusion that women talk more than men in situations when they are comfortable and trying to build personal relationships." | |||||||||||||||||||||
81 | Monzyk, Natalie | Teaching Gender, Identity, and Rhetoric: WP Orientation Fall 2019 | Pedagogy | Natalie wrote out a helpful guide for new teachers of Gender and Identity to use when they are planning their class. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
82 | Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi | Transcript of "The Danger of a Single Story" | 2009 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | Adiche "argues that inherent in the power of stories, is a danger—the danger of only knowing one story about a group. ... 'The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.'” | |||||||||||||||||||||
83 | Crenshaw, Kimberle | "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics" | 1989 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | Summary: "Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 'intersectionality' in her insightful 1989 essay, 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex...' The concept of intersectionality is not an abstract notion but a description of the way multiple oppressions are experienced. Indeed, Crenshaw uses the following analogy, referring to a traffic intersection, or crossroad, to concretize the concept: Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. . . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. Crenshaw argues that Black women are discriminated against in ways that often do not fit neatly within the legal categories of either 'racism' or 'sexism'—but as a combination of both racism and sexism. Yet the legal system has generally defined sexism as based upon an unspoken reference to the injustices confronted by all (including white) women, while defining racism to refer to those faced by all (including male) Blacks and other people of color. This framework frequently renders Black women legally 'invisible' and without legal recourse." | |||||||||||||||||||||
84 | Beauvoir, Simone de | "The Second Sex: Introduction" | 1952 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity | From Spark Notes's Summary: "The Second Sex is one of the earliest attempts to confront human history from a feminist perspective. It won de Beauvoir many admirers and just as many detractors. Today, many regard this massive and meticulously researched masterwork as not only as pillar of feminist thought but of twentieth-century philosophy in general. De Beauvoir’s primary thesis is that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the Other, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her. This distinction is the basis of all de Beauvoir’s later arguments." | |||||||||||||||||||||
85 | Diangelo, Robin | Multiple Chapters from White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism | 2018 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | "White Fragility... is a 2018 book written by Robin DiAngelo about race relations in the United States. An academic with experience in diversity training, DiAngelo coined the term 'white fragility' in 2011 to describe any defensive instincts or reactions that a white personexperiences when questioned about race or made to consider their own race. In White Fragility, DiAngelo views racism in the United States as systemic and often perpetuated unconsciously by individuals. She recommends against viewing racism as committed intentionally by 'bad people.'" | |||||||||||||||||||||
86 | Berg, Jacob | "Googling Google: Search Engines as Market Actors in Library Instruction" | 2016 | Pedagogy / Any ENGL 1500 or 1900 course | This is a lesson plan that encourages student exploration of Google's supposed neutrality, exposing hidden biases in the search engine. | |||||||||||||||||||||
87 | Tetrault, Lisa | "Woman's Day in the Negro's Hour" from The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement | 2014 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | Summary: "The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War. The founding mythology that coalesced in their speeches and writings--most notably Stanton and Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage--provided younger activists with the vital resource of a usable past for the ongoing struggle, and it helped consolidate Stanton and Anthony's leadership against challenges from the grassroots and rival suffragists. As Tetrault shows, while this mythology has narrowed our understanding of the early efforts to champion women's rights, the myth of Seneca Falls itself became an influential factor in the suffrage movement. And along the way, its authors amassed the first archive of feminism and literally invented the modern discipline of women's history." | |||||||||||||||||||||
88 | Walker, Alice | "Saving the Life that Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life" | 1983 | ENGL 1900, Gender and Identity or Social Justice | Summary: "In the piece, Alice Walker discusses a key problem that she and other womanists and black woman writers have faced in writing creatively. She mentions Toni Morrison’s famous advice to write the kind of books that you, the writer, want to read. Walker takes this advice a step further, detailing how many of Toni Morrison’s works are without a clear influence because of the canon’s marginalization of black women’s stories, told from their own perspectives. Walker digs deeper, recalling her own discovery of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which had been out of print by the early 1970s. This discovery sparked a need in her to uncover other black woman writers and storytellers to help establish a literary tradition that subverted a canon that is ultimately sexist and racist." | |||||||||||||||||||||
89 | Gould, Stephen J. | "The Median Isn't the Message" | 1991 | ENGL 1900, Med Hum | In this essay, Gould relates a personal story of learning he had cancer and then learning the statistics behind his liklihood of living. This scenario is used to amplify his claim that most people see statistics as factual and impartial, when really there is a great deal of interpretation being used when they are relied on. When it comes to medicine, they can be used in both discouraging and encouraging ways for patients. | |||||||||||||||||||||
90 | Jamison, Leslie | "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" | 2014 | ENGL 1900, Med Hum or Gender and Identity | "In her 2014 essay, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison names it: the problem of truth-telling in a culture that has decided that being in pain, particularly for a woman, is saccharine and passé. ... Jamison uses pain to spark a war between unabashed sharing and apathetic irony." Jamison poses the problem of talking about female pain and injury without romanticizing it and discusses the idea of performed pain as separate from legitimate pain. | |||||||||||||||||||||
91 | Metzl, Jonathan M. | "Why Against Health?" from Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality | 2010 | ENGL 1900, Med Hum | "Against Health argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good. And, that disparities in the incidence and prevalence of disease are closely linked to disparities in income and social support. To be clear, the book's stand against health is not a stand against the authenticity of people's attempts to ward off suffering. Against Health instead claims that individual strivings for health are, in some instances, rendered more difficult by the ways in which health is culturally configured and socially sustained." | |||||||||||||||||||||
92 | Skloot, Rebecca | "Prologue" from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | 2010 | ENGL 1900, Med Hum | "The author, journalist Rebecca Skloot, describes the tattered photo of an African American woman that she has on her wall from the late 1940s. The author warns us, however, that the woman in the photograph doesn’t know that she has a tumor growing inside her body that will 'leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine.' The photo is labeled, 'Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane, or Helen Larson.' The author relates that this picture has been used hundreds of times by scientists and teachers, even though they don’t even know her name. Instead, they refer to her as HeLa, the code given to cells from her cervix that became the world’s first immortal human cell line. Rebecca describes staring at this photo, wondering about Henrietta and her family, and contemplating how Henrietta would feel about cells from her cervix being 'bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions' all over the world in the name of scientific progress. Skloot ...explains that one scientist estimates that all the Henrietta cells ever grown would weigh more than 50 million metric tons, and that if they were ever wrapped end-to-end, they would go around the Earth over three times..." | |||||||||||||||||||||
93 | Brophy, Brigid | "The Rights of Animals" | 1966 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | Abstract: "In 'The Rights of Animals,' [Brophy]... argues one of her favorite causes--the responsibility of the superior species (human beings) to behave decently toward the inferior species (animals).' | |||||||||||||||||||||
94 | Carson, Rachel | Silent Spring | 1962 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | Silent Spring poses challenges the notion of human supremacy over nature in its sustained meditation on pesticides. Carson begins with a review of common pesticides employed by farmers and maintenance companies contemporary to her, re-fashioning pesticides as "biocides" on the basis that the toxic impact of pesticides is not localized to insect life, but can be felt across an entire biome. She then turns her attention to an analysis of pesticide (or biocide) delivery systems, with a heavy focus on industrial spraying mechanisms. Key features of this work are: the concept of a "deep ecology," which posits an innate interconnectedness among all living things, especially within local ecological systems; a challenge to the notion that human life and enterprise is set above and outside of animal and plant life; a prediction of a silent ecological dystopia in which pesticides new and old coalesce in unpredictable ways to destroy the planet; DDT (a popular pesticide that, among other deadly outcomes), rendered Louisiana's Brown Pelican population semi-infertile by compromising the structural integrity of their egg shells); a critique of pesticide marketing strategies that exaggerate beneficial outcomes of pesticide use; and a call for humanity to adopt a praxis of cooperative stewardship with nature, as opposed to stewardship over nature. | |||||||||||||||||||||
95 | Austin, Mary | "The Land of Little Rain" | Originally Published 1903 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | A short narrative tour of Death Valley that pushes back against the misconception that "desert" equals "dead." Austin briefly mentions that Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone communities inhabit the frontiers of Death Valley, and penetrate as far into the hostile environment as far as the Valley will allow. I use "hostile" and "allow" here with purpose: Austin's vibrant prose weaves a naturalist narrative that forgoes Romantic naivete, choosing instead to wrest the right to assessment beauty and ugliness from the grip of the human gaze. Death Valley is shown to be adverse to human life, full of bitter dark water on the one hand, and fertile, adaptable, flourishing plant life on the other. In the end, the landscape is full of life, yet indifferent to human life, and ultimately determinist: Death Valley is a land where "not the law, but the land sets the limit" (321). | |||||||||||||||||||||
96 | Dungy, Camille (Editor) | Black Nature (selections) | 2009 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | Black Nature is an anthology spanning 400 years of nature poetry by black poets. This selection includes: "The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches," by Audre Lorde; "Lament for Dark Peoples," by Langston Hughes; "mulberry fields," by Lucille Clifton; "American Light," by Claudia Rankine; and "Root," by Terrance Hayes | |||||||||||||||||||||
97 | Buell, Lawrence | "Thoreau and the Natural Environment" | 1995 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | Buell's critical treatment of Thoreau's Walden posits that reading Walden as a work in progress is crucial for grasping Thoreau's own dynamic understanding of and relationship with the natural world. Buell focuses on the author's life in the decade during which Walden was in its long-lived drafting and revising stages. The work, apparently, encapsulates Thoreau's "struggles of a lifetime," and contains between its lines of text a testiment to Thoreau's maturation (or "conversion") from "romantic poet to natural historian and environmentalist" (172). Key features: comparison between Emerson and Thoreau; spiritual vs. material; empiricism and philosophy; natural structuralism. | |||||||||||||||||||||
98 | Cronon, William | "The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," from Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature | 1995 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | Cronon calls his reader to rethink wilderness. He posits that wilderness, the wild, is not that which exists outside of and independent from civilization, but is in fact shaped by it. Cronon traces the evolution of the wild's appeal, drawing attention to a cultural/ontological shift: from wilderness-as-desolation as early as 250 years ago, to wilderness-as-appealing-locus-of-transformation-and-refuge in more contemporary experiences and narratives. Essentially, what civilizations call "wilderness" is a dynamic concept that is shaped by a civilization's relationship with those ecological areas that have not been domesticated; as such, civilization and wilderness are not mutually exclusive concepts, but ebb and flow into one another. Ultimately, Cronon calls for a reinvigorated respect for and cooperation with the natural world. | |||||||||||||||||||||
99 | Kroeber, Karl | Ecology and American Literature: Thoreau and Un-Thoreau | 1995 | ENGL 1900, Nature and Ecology | ||||||||||||||||||||||
100 |