This essay explores the challenge to the chivalric myth of the aviator in Willa Cather’s One of Ours and William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay. Revived during the First World War, this romantic myth cloaked the aviator in idealism and hid the actual body of the flyer in rhetoric. In this war of increasing mechanization, the air war was the last basti…[Read more]

This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written in experimental prose by the Black avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker that appears at the end of The Roots’ critically acclaimed rap album, Do You Want More??!?. By using the aural to disrupt expec…[Read more]

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single con…[Read more]

This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke’s early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better…[Read more]

Explores Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” as almost a Gen Xer’s “version of John Updike’s Couples”; that is, as, a place where, like Updike’s book, friends create a community isolated only to themselves. Though unlike Updike’s work, where — considering the time it was written in, the ’70s, where a generation succeeded in overtly contesting and…[Read more]

Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

This chapter details a credit-based orientation & information literacy course taught with local archival and special collections materials.

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither “history of the book” nor “media studies,” this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio.

Digital scholarship, particularly with digital monographs, requires a great deal of work that traditional scholarship does not. The presenter has authored a digital monograph (published 2017) and written and co-written web texts on the methodologies of digital scholarship and critical making (both currently under review). While digital tools can…[Read more]

Digital scholarship, particularly with digital monographs, requires a great deal of work that traditional scholarship does not. The presenter has authored a digital monograph (published 2017) and written and co-written web texts on the methodologies of digital scholarship and critical making (both currently under review). While digital tools can…[Read more]

One of the most salient aspects of DH projects is that they are fun to create. DH scholars love to make amazing new tools that solve tangible problems. This makes teaching DH a joy: students work harder on DH assignments because the assignments demand and reward their attention. When work is fun, it doesn’t feel like work. Rather than being a…[Read more]

One of the most salient aspects of DH projects is that they are fun to create. DH scholars love to make amazing new tools that solve tangible problems. This makes teaching DH a joy: students work harder on DH assignments because the assignments demand and reward their attention. When work is fun, it doesn’t feel like work. Rather than being a…[Read more]