English Faculty Bookshelf

A gallery of books by faculty in the English Department, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.

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Unexpressed Subjects in English: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative and Conversational Discourse
2020
Amy M. Lindstrom

Unexpressed Subjects in English: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative and Conversational Discourse challenges previous assumptions of what is grammatically possible in English through an examination of contexts in which speakers omit subjects, demonstrating how language structure is influenced by communicative needs.

Through corpus-based analysis of both interactive conversations and monologic narratives, Amy M. Lindstrom reveals how the discourse/pragmatic factors of accessibility and chronological ordering, the prosodic effect of linking, and the mechanical effect of priming intersect to provide a rigorous account of subject (un)expression in spoken American English. Higher degrees of linking, cohesion, and connection lead to more unexpressed subjects. Lindstrom also analyzes frequent constructions with unexpressed subjects vis-à-vis paths of grammaticalization. The author presents a measurement of discourse connectedness that shows how the intersection of prosody and pragmatics illustrates the powerful effect of spontaneous discourse in shaping grammar. This study adds to our understanding of language and cognition by contributing to our knowledge of the conceptualization, categorization, and representation of experience and memory. [Amazon.com]
The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration
2020
Courtney Adams Wooten (Editor), Jacob Babb (Editor), Kristi Murray Costello (Editor), Kate Navickas (Editor), and Laura Micciche (Forward)

Emotional labor is not adequately talked about or addressed by writing program administrators. The Things We Carry makes this often-invisible labor visible, demonstrates a variety of practical strategies to navigate it reflectively, and opens a path for further research. Particularly timely, this collection considers how writing program administrators work when their schools or regions experience crisis situations.

The book is broken into three sections: one emphasizing the WPA's own work identity, one on fostering community in writing programs, and one on balancing the professional and personal. Chapters written by a diverse range of authors in different institutional and WPA contexts examine the roles of WPAs in traumatic events, such as mass shootings and natural disasters, as well as the emotional labor WPAs perform on a daily basis, such as working with students who have been sexually assaulted or endured racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise disenfranchising interactions on campus. The central thread in this collection focuses on "preserving" by acknowledging that emotions are neither good nor bad and that they must be continually reflected upon as WPAs consider what to do with emotional labor and how to respond. Ultimately, this book argues for more visibility of the emotional labor WPAs perform and for WPAs to care for themselves even as they care for others.... [From the publisher]
Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations
2020
Alla Zareva

This book examines student presentations as a genre of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and analyses the elements of speech and audience accommodation which make a successful presentation. Offering an antidote to the audience-centric approach to presentation design and delivery promoted by numerous books and manuals on the subject, each chapter tackles an under-researched aspect of student presentations, and presents data-based evidence for practical recommendations within the genre. The language analyses presented in the book are based on a real-life corpus of student presentations, providing clear examples of successful oral academic discourse. This book will be of interest to students of applied linguistics, EAP, TESOL and language education. [From the back cover]
Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters
2019
Felice Blake (Editor), Paula Ioanide (Editor), and Alison R. Reed (Editor)

Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it. While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as ‘authentic’ antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism. Antiracism Inc. therefore considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The collection focuses on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, the collection focuses on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. These aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles. [From the back cover]
Early Morning Koffee Klatch at the Egg 'n Hash Sitdown
2019
Philip Raisor

These poems of Philip Raisor’s consider our daily bread, broken around the table, broken as we are also broken, aging and approaching the dark, in communion.
Nurse Practitioners and the Performance of Professional Competency: Accomplishing Patient-Centered Care
2018
Staci Defibaugh

This book examines the interactional practices of nurse practitioners (NPs) and the delivery of health care in the US. The author takes a discourse analytic approach, examining the linguistic resources that NPs employ in their interactions with patients. These linguistic features are connected to the concept of professional competency with specific focus on the enactment of the patient-centered approach. Analytic focus is placed on how NPs address organizational responsibilities during medical visits with patients, the form and function of patient education, the use of indirect speech, and the role that small talk plays in health care encounters. The book explores the understudied professional field of nurse practitioners and examines their linguistic practices with an eye on crossing disciplinary boundaries, integrating research from linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication. It will appeal to those interested in medical discourse analysis and health communication, as well as applied linguistics scholars. [Amazon.com]
Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication
2018
Kristen R. Moore (Editor) and Daniel P. Richards (Editor)

This collection, aimed at scholars, teachers, and practitioners in technical communication, focuses on the praxis-based connections between technical communication and theoretical movements that have emerged in the past several decades, namely new materialism and posthumanism. It provides a much needed link between contemporary theoretical discussions about new materialisms and posthumanism and the practical, everyday work of technical communicators. The collection insists that where some theoretical perspectives fall flat for practitioners, posthumanism and new materialisms have the potential to enable more effective and comprehensive practices, methodologies, and pedagogies. [From Amazon.com]
Through an Indian's Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot
2017
Drew Lopenzina

The life of William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its "Indian question" in favor of extinction. Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess's key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess's own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity. [From Amazon.com]
Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile
2015
Farideh Goldin

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in 1979, Farideh's family was forced to flee. They arrived in Israel as refugees. Farideh's father was a well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz. During his last visit to the United States in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir that chronicled the years of his life after exile. Leaving Iran knits together his story of dislocation and loss with Farideh's own experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home. [Amazon.com]
Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction
2015
Beth L. Hewitt (Editor) and Kevin Eric DePew (Editor)

This is an Open Textbook available through the Open Textbook Library: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/foundational-practices-of-online-writing-instruction. Reviews are available there.

Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) addresses the questions and decisions that administrators and instructors most need to consider when developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field (members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in OWI and other experts and stakeholders).... The editors believe that the field of writing studies is on a trajectory in which most courses will be mediated online to various degrees; therefore the principles detailed in this collection may become the basis for future writing instruction practices. ... [Amazon.com]
Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism
2015
Joyce Hoffmann (Editor)

[This] is an anthology of stellar work by 17 seventeen great female literary and investigative reporters whose newspaper writing has garnered awards over the past quarter century. Each chapter features a bio, a selected story, and an author's afterwords prepared especially for this book. A large percentage of college and graduate school journalism students are women. Yet textbooks and resource material available is decidedly male centric. ... [This book] includes the work of women journalists who wrote for top newspapers and alternative weeklies during the golden age of newsprint journalism.
Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism
2014
Peter Adams

In 1862, in the only instance of a Jewish expulsion in America, General Ulysses S. Grant banished Jewish citizens from the region under his military command. Although the order was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, it represented growing anti-Semitism in America. Convinced that assimilation was their best defense, Jews sought to Americanize by shedding distinctive dress, occupations, and religious rituals… In Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism, Peter Adams recounts the history of the American Jewish Community’s assimilation efforts, organization, and political mobilization in the late 19th century, as political and cultural imperatives crafted a new, American brand of Judaism. [From Amazon.com]
Headhunting and Other Sports Poems
2014
Philip Raisor

Headhunting and Other Sports Poems, Philip Raisor's third collection, explores how sports enters our lives through front, back, and side doors, while we are asleep or dying, arguing, praying, or running hell-bent from memories that won't let go. Knee injuries end an athlete's career, a wife prefers the opera to a husband's hockey night, war and domestic violence haunt games played by sons, daughters, and fathers, Phil Mickelson and Wilt Chamberlain make cameo appearances, a life-long sports addict petitions for entrance to heaven. Raisor digs at the dark areas in sports experience to pry loose principles worth preserving, games worth celebrating. He honors American sport for its joy, pain, and what it says about us. [Amazon.com]
The Oxford Handbook of American Drama
2014
Jeffrey H. Richards (Editor) and Heather S. Nathans (Editor)

When one thinks of American Drama, names like Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams readily come to mind. However, as The Oxford Handbook of American Drama shows, the U.S. has a deep and varied tradition that extends back to the years before the Revolutionary War. The essays gathered here trace U.S dramatic history, ranging from plays by Mercy Otis Warren to Tony Kushner… [From Amazon.com]
Loving The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus
2013
Dana Heller (Editor)

The complete and groundbreaking The L Word is now out on DVD and this book makes the perfect companion, covering the series in its entirety. Loving The L Word picks up where Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (I.B. Tauris, 2006) left off. With new, updated chapters by many of the same television writers and scholars who contributed to the first volume, as well as essays by some newcomers, Loving The L Word explores the series' quantum contribution to the ongoing evolution of queer television. [Amazon.com]
Hoosiers: The Poems
2013
Philip Raisor

Winner of the 2013 Palooka Press Chapbook Contest, Philip Raisor's book is fire in your hands. The war of sport. The having of dreams and the loss of them, dropped from the same hands that palm basketballs, carry rifles, attempt to erase the squiggly race lines of the '50s and '60s. He played with Wilt Chamberlain and against Oscar Robertson, but the real story here is in the flame of words, the way they burn in your stomach, in your mind, in your heart for so long after reading them. [from Palookamag.com]
Swimming in the Shallow End: Poems
2013
Philip Raisor

Swimming in the Shallow End is narrative poetry at its best, a verse memoir that examines the archetypal American conflict between the desire to stay and the passion to go. Take any community; every street, in and out, is crowded with the dreams and frustrations of characters who seek their identities on the road or in their favorite diners. In an exchange of stories between the narrator who returns like the prodigal son and his wayfaring friend, the worlds of the Bronx and Paris and Hanoi are not far from Muncie, Indiana. Like William Carlos Williams' Rutherford, New Jersey, and B.H. Fairchild's Liberal, Kansas, Philip Raisor's Middletown is a neighborhood pool that never seems long or deep enough, but grows in memory and the imagination... [Amazon.com]
Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period
2012
Drew Lopenzina

Reexamines the writings of early indigenous authors in the northeastern United States. The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. ... In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective. [Amazon.com]
Hairspray
2011
Dana Heller

By reconsidering assumptions about mainstream popular culture and its revolutionary possibilities, author Dana Heller reveals that John Waters' popular 1988 film "Hairspray" is the director's most subversive movie. Represents the first scholarly work on any of film director John Waters' films Incorporates original interview material with the director Reveals meanings embedded in the film's narrative treatment of racial and sexual politics. [Amazon.com]
Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters
2009
Mercy Warren Otis, Jeffery H. Richards (Editor), and Sharon M. Harris (Editor)

This volume gathers more than one hundred letters-most of them previously unpublished-written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay… [From Amazon.com]
Migration, Accommodation and Language Change: Language at the Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity
2008
Bridget L. Anderson

This work marries qualitative ethnographic methods to quantitative acoustic methods. The analysis describes how internal and external factors in phonological change differ and demonstrates how these two forces interact to structure the phonological systems of Appalachian and African American Southern Migrant speakers in the Detroit, Michigan area. [Amazon.com]
Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings
2008
Sarah A. Appleton (Editor)

While it is often acknowledged that Margaret Atwood's novels are rife with allusions from the oral tradition of myth, legends, fables, and fairy tales, the implications of her liberal usage bear study. The essays in this volume have been written by some of the most influential Margaret Atwood scholars internationally, each exploring Atwoodâs use of primal, indeed archetypal, narratives to illuminate her fiction and poetry. These essays interact with all types of such narratives, from fairy tales and legends, to Greek, Roman, Biblical, and pagan mythologies, to contemporary processes of myth and tale creation. And, as the works in this collection demonstrate, Atwoodâs use of myths and fairy tales allows for an abundance of old, yet fresh material for contemporary readers. By reconciling, yet by also revisioning, the archetypal motifs, characters, and narratives, Atwoodâs writings present a familiar, yet unique, reading experience. [From Amazon.com]
Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible
2008
Imtiaz H. Habib

Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed. [Amazon.com]
On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam
2008
Joyce Hoffmann

Over three hundred women, both print and broadcast journalists, were accredited to chronicle America’s activities in Vietnam. Many of those women won esteemed prizes for their reporting, including the Pulitzer, the Overseas Press Club Award, the George Polk Award, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for History. Tragically, several lost their lives covering the war, while others were wounded or taken prisoner. In this gripping narrative, veteran journalist Joyce Hoffmann tells the important yet largely unknown story of a central group of these female journalists, including Dickey Chapelle, Gloria Emerson, Kate Webb, and others. Each has a unique and deeply compelling tale to tell, and vivid portraits of their personal lives and professional triumphs are woven into the controversial details of America’s twenty-year entanglement in Southeast Asia. [Amazon.com]
Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning
2008
Joyce Magnotto Neff and Carl Whithaus

Writing Across Distances and Disciplines addresses questions that cross borders between onsite, hybrid, and distributed learning environments, between higher education and the workplace, and between distance education and composition pedagogy. This groundbreaking volume raises critical issues, clarifies key terms, reviews history and theory, analyzes current research, reconsiders pedagogy, explores specific applications of WAC and WID in distributed environments, and considers what business and education might teach one another about writing and learning. Exploring the intersection of writing across the curriculum, composition studies, and distance learning, it provides an in-depth look at issues of importance to students, faculty, and administrators regarding the technological future of writing and learning in higher education. [From Amazon.com]