Colleges and Department Research
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Browsing Colleges and Department Research by Department "English"
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Item A Postmodern Iconography: Vonnegut and the Great American Novel(Cambridge Scholars, 2008-01) Tally, Robert T., Jr.No abstract prepared.Item “[A]n Exterior Air of Pilgrimage”: The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2020-10-08) Morrison, Susan SigneWhile the Beats can be seen as critical actors in the environmental humanities, their works should be seen over the longue durée. They are not only an origin, but are also recipients, of an environmentally aware tradition. With Geoffrey Chaucer and Jack Kerouac, we see how a contemporary American icon functions as a text parallel to something generally seen as discrete and past, an instance of the modern embracing, interpreting, and appropriating the medieval. I argue that The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer influenced Kerouac’s shaping of On the Road. In the unpublished autograph manuscript travel diary dating from 1948–1949 (On the Road notebook), Kerouac imagines the novel as a quest tale, thinking of pilgrimage during its gestation. Further, Kerouac explicitly cites Chaucer. His novel can be seen not only in the tradition of Chaucer, but can bring out aspects of pilgrimage ecopoetics in general. These connections include structural elements, the spiritual development of the narrator, reliance on vernacular dialect, acute environmental awareness, and slow travel. Chaucer’s influence on Kerouac highlights how certain elements characteristic of pilgrimage literature persist well into the modern period, in a resilience of form, language, and ecological sensibility.Item Accuracy of Cited “Facts” in Medical Research Articles: A Review of Study Methodology and Recalculation of Quotation Error Rate(Public Library of Science, 2017-09) Mogull, ScottPrevious reviews estimated that approximately 20 to 25% of assertions cited from original research articles, or "facts," are inaccurately quoted in the medical literature. These reviews noted that the original studies were dissimilar and only began to compare the methods of the original studies. The aim of this review is to examine the methods of the original studies and provide a more specific rate of incorrectly cited assertions, or quotation errors, in original research articles published in medical journals. Additionally, the estimate of quotation errors calculated here is based on the ratio of quotation errors to quotations examined (a percent) rather than the more prevalent and weighted metric of quotation errors to the references selected. Overall, this resulted in a lower estimate of the quotation error rate in original medical research articles. A total of 15 studies met the criteria for inclusion in the primary quantitative analysis. Quotation errors were divided into two categories: content ("factual") or source (improper indirect citation) errors. Content errors were further subdivided into major and minor errors depending on the degree that the assertion differed from the original source. The rate of quotation errors recalculated here is 14.5% (10.5% to 18.6% at a 95% confidence interval). These content errors are predominantly, 64.8% (56.1% to 73.5% at a 95% confidence interval), major errors or cited assertions in which the referenced source either fails to substantiate, is unrelated to, or contradicts the assertion. Minor errors, which are an oversimplification, overgeneralization, or trivial inaccuracies, are 35.2% (26.5% to 43.9% at a 95% confidence interval). Additionally, improper secondary (or indirect) citations, which are distinguished from calculations of quotation accuracy, occur at a rate of 10.4% (3.4% to 17.5% at a 95% confidence interval).Item African American Experiences in the Historic Dunbar Neighborhood in San Marcos, Texas: A Case Study of Counter-Life Stories(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2020-10-03) Ashford-Hanserd, Shetay; Sarmiento, Eric; Myles, Colleen C.; Rayburn, Steven W.; Roundtree, Aimee K.; Hayton, Mary-Patricia; Ybarra, Edward; Benitez, Sarai; Clifford, Theresa M.; Pierce, Christopher; Williams, Chad D.; Maleki, ShadiThe purpose of this participatory research project is to examine the lived experiences (counter-life stories) of current and former Dunbar residents and congregants of Dunbar churches to demonstrate how local stories counter the dominant perspective about the experiences of American Americans in the Dunbar community. Once a thriving community at the center of civil rights activities in Hays County, Texas, the neighborhood has evolved in many ways in the past several decades, contrary to popular belief. This case study employs counter-life story methodology to uncover the hidden truths about Dunbar residents and congregants’ experiences to generate new knowledge about the experiences of African Americans in San Marcos, Texas, and Hays County. Thematic analysis of unfiltered commentary from Dunbar community members revealed three emergent themes: history of racism and slavery, impact of environmental and social racism, and rebuilding and restoring the community. Individual and shared strengths make the community unique and resilient. In-migration of new community members has been outpaced by outmigration. Finally, issues of taxation, representation, and the ongoing deterioration of neighborhood infrastructure are forefront in community members’ minds. In sum, the bedrock of personal and community values and hard work has not changed, but external forces continue to affect the community and compel it to pivot and make plans for change. Personal and communal strengths make the community unique and resilient. Future work will enlist geographic data and methods to help further investigate changes over time.Item Anti-Ishmael: Novel Beginnings in Moby-Dick(Taylor & Francis, 2007-01) Tally, Robert T., Jr.No abstract prepared.Item Attitudes toward Hepatitis B Virus among Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean Americans in the Houston Area, Texas(Springer, 2012-10) Hwang, Jessica P.; Roundtree, Aimee K.; Suarez-Almazor, Maria E.Objectives: We explored attitudes about prevention, screening and treatment of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese communities. Methods: We use qualitative methods in 12 focus groups (n = 113) of adults who self-reported their ethnicity to be Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese. We use grounded theory (i.e., consensus-building between co-coders about recurring, emerging themes) for analysis. Results: Diet, nutrition, fatigue and stress were misidentified as HBV causes. Improving hygiene, diet, exercise, and holistic methods were misidentified as viable HBV prevention methods. Common screening problems included not affording test and not understanding test results. Participants shared reasons for using complementary and alternative medicine--when Western medicine fails or becomes unaffordable. Participants sought information from medical providers and fellow community members, but also from the internet. Conclusions: Many of the attitudes and opinions that emerged may deter participation in HBV screening, prevention and treatment, insofar as community members may factor them into healthcare decision-making, choose alternative but ineffective methods of prevention and treatment, and undervalue the benefits of screening. More patient education in both traditional and new media is necessary for clarifying transmission, screening and treatment misunderstandings.Item Believing in America: The Politics of American Studies in a Postnational Era(American Studies Center, 2006-12) Tally, Robert T., Jr.No abstract prepared.Item Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World: Fantasy, Alterity, and the Postnational Condition(Northwestern University Press, 2015-04) Tally, Robert T., Jr.No abstract prepared.Item Bleeping Mark Twain? Censorship, Huckleberry Finn, and the Functions of Literature(Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice (TALTP), 2013-05) Tally, Robert T., Jr.The most recent controversy over the use of that word in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn highlights the interactions among writing, editing, teaching, and reading, and this serves as a point of entry into a discussion of the function of literature itself. For many, works like Huckleberry Finn are touchstone texts for both enjoying and studying literature, inasmuch as the delights and the lessons of the novel spark an interest in further reading. NewSouth Books' publication of an edition of the novel that substitutes the word "slave" for the famously offensive epithet has been roundly criticized by scholars and laypersons alike. However, as editor Alan Gribben explains, the intent of this "censorship," as it is most often called, is to expand the readership and extend the influence of the novel. In his introduction, Gribben emphatically endorses the use of other, non-expurgated editions, but insists that this NewSouth Edition is intended to bring new and younger readers to Twain's masterpiece, a worthy goal, as most critics would agree. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. examines the controversy over censoring Huckleberry Finn as part of a larger debate over the role of literature in education and in the world.Item Commencement Speeches of the 75th Anniversary Year Southwest Texas State University(Southwest Texas State University Learning Resources Center, 1980-01) Houston, Ralph H.Commencement Speeches 1978-1979 Southwest Texas State University.Item Crossing the Border: The Depiction of India in Ian McDonald's River of Gods and Cyberabad Days(SF-TH Inc., DePauw University, 2016-11) Banerjee, SuparnoIn this article I argue that Northern Irish author Ian McDonald's works, River of Gods (2004) and Cyberabad Days (2008), set in India deviate from the prevalent Orientalism of mainstream Western science fiction. Drawing on Shameem Black and Peter Heehs's theories of cross-cultural representation, I claim that despite its flaws the empathetic approach McDonald employs is very appropriate for border-crossing literature in this era of globalization. In this context, I posit that while a deep understanding of the culture is necessary for effective representation, overdependence on "native informants" may actually lead to fallacious expectations.Item Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2019-03) Tally, Robert T., Jr.A seemingly inescapable feature of war is the demonization of the enemy, who becomes somehow less human and more deserving of death in times of military strife, which unsurprisingly helps to justify the violence against them. This article looks at the development, character, and role of the orcs—creatures that are in some senses, literally demonized—in J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings in connection with the ideological need to demonize the enemy in World Wars I and II. Yet, in creating an enemy whom the heroes could kill without compunction, Tolkien also betrayed his own sympathy for the devils, perhaps owing to his own experiences as a soldier. This ambiguity pervades Tolkien’s writings, even as his demonized orcs are dispatched by the thousands, thus shaping the sense of warfare and our experience of it according to the desire to simplify, and make more comprehensible, the martial narrativeItem Detestable as Joint-Stock Companies or Nations: Melville and the International(Brill Academic Publishers, 2009-01) Tally, Robert T., Jr.Tally reviews Loren Goldner’s Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner’s argument, while interesting, is limited by its persistent belief in an American exceptionalism that prevents it from recognizing the postnational force of Melville’s novels.Item “Es lässt sich nicht lesen”: Poe and the Inscrutable(American Literature Association, 2008-01) Tally, Robert T., Jr.Poe begins and ends his enigmatic study of the man of the crowd with the phrase, applied to a German book, “it does not permit itself to be read.” The same observation might apply to much of Poe’s own work, in which inscrutability becomes the very mode of reading. Poe’s work actively defies interpretation, at times subtly and at others overtly undermining the reader’s assumptions that the story’s meaning will reveal itself. Poe’s texts frustrate the desire for comprehension. In his first tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the unnamed narrator’s thrill of “discovery” descends into the unknown and unknowable. In tales of terror, Poe deliberately puzzles his readers, leading them to imagine a stable meaning that then will not hold. The horror of Poe’s tales lies not in a particular fright, but in a general mood of uncertainty. Again and again, Poe presents the arcane, exotic, otherworldly, unique, but he refuses to play the anthropologist, explicating the unknown and bringing it into a safe and familiar intellectual archive. Rather than offer a puzzle where one finds pleasure in figuring it out, Poe insists on the insoluble puzzling. The tales’ inscrutability is at the very heart of the reading. We, like Poe’s narrator in “The Man of the Crowd,” can marvel at the enigma before us, but we cannot understand. It may be that this is for the best; as that narrator notes, “perhaps it is one of the great mercies of God that es lässt sich nicht lesen.”Item Formed by Place: Spatiality, Irony, and Empire in Conrad's 'An Outpost of Progress'(Flinders Humanities Research Centre, 2016-11) Rutledge, Thais; Tally, Robert T., Jr.In its ironic narrative and distinctive geography, Joseph Conrad’s 1897 short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ is well suited for geocritical analysis, insofar as Conrad demonstrates the degree to which space and place affect both the characters in the story and style of the text. Focusing on the unique setting – the ‘outpost’ – in which the events take place, we argue that Conrad’s tale employs an ironic narrator in order to highlight the tale’s distinctive spatiality, particularly with respect to a geopolitical system that too neatly divides the spaces of the globe into civilised and barbaric regions. The spatiality of ‘An Outpost of Progress’ can be seen in the geographical aspects of the narrative, with the specific site or heterotopia of the ‘outpost’ situated at the edge of a territory coded as ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilised,’ thus connecting the colonised domain in central Africa to the metropolitan society of northwestern Europe, largely unseen, but implicitly present throughout the story. But this spatiality may also be observed in its formal or stylistic elements, especially in the point of view and voice of the narrator, as the perspective shifts from omniscient overseer to ironic commentator and then to a free indirect style in which the distance between narrator and subject is dramatically reduced. In this way, Conrad produces an ironic, spatial narrative that highlights, in both content and form, the absurdity of the imperialist ‘civilising mission’ in Africa.Item Geocriticism and Classic American Literature(Modern Language Association, 2008-11-08) Tally, Robert T., Jr.“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man in America.” At the beginning of Call me Ishmael, Charles Olson categorically established space as a key concept for American Studies. Yet, for the most part, this concept has not been central to studies of nineteenth-century American literature. Space has made a timely reemergence in literary and cultural studies in recent years, as the discourse of postmodernism has especially emphasized its importance, and excellent work on cartography and literature is being done in early modern studies, especially in the history of colonization and conquest of the Americas. Right in the center of these two moments of modernity, the early and the post, the mid-nineteenth-century United States faced critical changes to its imaginary and real social spaces, typified by industrialization and urbanization, the emergence of a world market, the breakdown of traditional communities, westward expansion, and a looming national catastrophe. As in the baroque and postmodern eras, these crises called for new ways of seeing the world and of representing oneself in it: new narratives, new maps. The texts of so-called “classic” American literature are such literary maps. I argue that geocriticism – a critical framework that focuses on the spatial representations within the texts, specifically looking at the overlapping territories of actual, physical geography and an author’s or character’s mental mapping in the literary text – makes possible a productive reading of classic American literature in light of the spatial peculiarities of the age.Item Geocriticism: Mapping the Spaces of Literature(John Hopkins University Press, 2009-10) Tally, Robert T., Jr.Literature abounds with the description and exploration of spaces. The writer maps the world, combining a representation of real places with the imaginary space of fiction. In some cases, what I have elsewhere called literary cartography serves to map a well known space (e.g., Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg or Twain’s Mississippi River); in others, the places mapped may be wholly imaginary (More’s Utopia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth). Most often, the two combine, as the literary representation of a seemingly real place is never the purely mimetic image of that space. In a sense, all writing partakes in a form of cartography, since even the most realistic map does not truly depict the space, but, like literature, figures it forth in a complex skein of imaginary relations.Item Getting and Communicating Thought(Southwest Texas State Teachers College, 1933-01) Thomas, GatesA tentative endeavor to assist first-semester students in Freshman Composition to attain more easily there putative proficiency-level in the subject, by supplying them with such supplemental materials as they need at this stage--material the average composition text does not supply.Item Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs: Simple Humanity in Tolkien's Inhuman Creatures(Mythopoeic Society, 2010-01) Tally, Robert T., Jr.In J.R.R. Tolkien’s sprawling legendarium, Orcs provide a seemingly endless supply of enemies to challenge the mettle of the noble Elves, Men, Dwarves, and Hobbits. As every reader of the books (and every viewer of the blockbuster films) knows, Orcs are the inevitable foot soldiers of “evil,” employed by both the traitorous wizard Saruman and the Great Enemy Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, forming the infantry of Morgoth’s vast armies in The Silmarillion, and being the one race against which all others unite in The Hobbit’s Battle of Five Armies. For the most part, good and evil are strictly demarcated in Tolkien’s world (with a few interesting exceptions), but, even by that almost Manichean standard, Orcs are presented with surprising uniformity as loathsome, ugly, cruel, feared, and especially terminable. Yet, as dedicated readers discern, Tolkien could not resist the urge to flesh out and “humanize” these inhuman creatures from time to time. In such examples as those I discuss in this essay, Tolkien presents Orcs who have human—even humane—qualities, notwithstanding their generally negative characteristics. This fact makes it a bit disturbing, then, that Tolkien’s heroes, without the least pang of conscience, dispatch Orcs by the thousands. Indeed, letters and unpublished manuscripts reveal that Tolkien himself struggled with the metaphysical and moral problems he had set up by inventing and using Orcs as he does. Orcs may just be deserving of a bit more respect than we've given them.Item Literary Cartography: Space, Representation, and Narrative(2008-05) Tally, Robert T., Jr.No abstract prepared.
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