A review of Richard Kegler’s, The Aries Press of Eden, New York.

Aggregate larp rules are a type of code that runs on humans. Code can be thought of as a linguistic form that is both declarative and imperative; it is both truth and command (Buswell 2009). In aggregate larp, elements of the game’s
diegesis are rendered codic, or playable, allowing players a degree of autonomy from game staff. Through the m…[Read more]

Selected Topics in Applied Linguistics: How to Choose a Theory. I offer a critical exploration of some of the conditions involved in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA), as well as of the paradoxical approaches in the theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives of ISLA.
The discussion proceeds with a very short…[Read more]

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

Prepared for session 366 on the 2017 convention program, Shapes of the English Major Today, arranged by the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major, this presentation summarizes trends in bachelor’s degree completions using time series degree completions data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS), as compiled by the National…[Read more]

Panel Title Writing Studies at the MLA: The Past and Future of English Studies

Panel Title Writing Studies at the MLA: The Past and Future of English Studies

Panel Title Writing Studies at the MLA: The Past and Future of English Studies

Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and…[Read more]

In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk’s approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk’s tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell…[Read more]

In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk’s approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk’s tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell…[Read more]

The attached syllabus was written for my Honors undergraduate seminar “The Art of the Book in the Digital Age,” taught Fall 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. Here is an excerpt from the course description: “The book’s role and significance within literary culture is being scrutinized today with an intensity unseen for five centuries. Nowhere is this quest…[Read more]