The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

This essay describes the popular Bechdel Test—a measure of women’s dialogue in films—in terms of social network analysis within fictional narrative. It argues that this form of vernacular criticism arrives at a productive convergence with contemporary academic critical methodologies in surface and postcritical reading practices, on the one hand,…[Read more]

Easily the least-mentioned (and read) of Ernest Hemingway’s works (proven by its lack of critical attention), The Torrents of Spring merits rereading for its intertextual play. Hemingway’s use of embedded author’s notes throughout the text guides readers to a more fully aware young writer who offers critiques of composition, authorship, pri…[Read more]

A group editorial from the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Over the course of his career Ernest Hemingway wrote introductions for a number of writers. These pieces have been largely forgotten, but study and analysis of Hemingway’s introductions offers additional insight into the well-known author. The process of creating and marketing these pieces allowed Hemingway to manipulate and refine his public p…[Read more]

Though already famous, wealthy, and squarely established as a popular chronicler of the early
twentieth century, humorist Ring Lardner’s foray into a serious literary career with Charles Scribner’s
Sons Publishing Company is best characterized as an act of authorial resistance. Rather than evolve into
the “serious” author the firm had hoped f…[Read more]

Thoreau’s relation to print culture was complicated and at times contradictory, but from his writing life to his family business, he was shaped by it. Scholars note that he was both successful and a failure as a professional author. He published books and articles made possible by technological changes in papermaking and printing to his west on t…[Read more]

This paper explores the extent to which whiteness is represented in the Fall 2016 issue of Brevity. I suggest that the authors’ representation of whiteness manifests in the forms of both white privilege and white supremacy, and thus serves as the predominant theme of this issue of the magazine. I also consider the ways in which distant reading t…[Read more]

This handout serves as a guide for student peer-reviewers to provide useful feedback to the writer. The open-ended questions walk the reviewer through the rhetorical analysis essay and provide a structure for evaluating the thesis, organization, rhetorical strategies, and use of pathos, ethos, logos, and kairos in the paper. The Rhetorical…[Read more]

A detailed description of an innovative, but short-lived, graduate training program for two-year college faculty that began in 1975 at Carnegie Mellon University may offer possibilities for new programs that can benefit both two-year colleges and universities.

The Trump presidency has fueled growing apprehension about a media landscape rife with lies, bogus news, and conspiracy theories. These concerns can be situated within a discourse of archival silence which questions the ways in which knowledge may be concealed, misappropriated and exploited in the service of governments, corporations and…[Read more]

This paper revises book history’s historiography to account for feminist inquiry.

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate
negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne … pas, and then
to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of
ne … pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function
(Kroch 198…[Read more]

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate
negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne … pas, and then
to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of
ne … pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function
(Kroch 198…[Read more]