In Print

Angelo Restivo's The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Duke UP, 2002) concerns the Italian art cinema of the 1960s. Restivo argues for a completely new understanding of that cinema as "a negotiation between a national aesthetic tradition of realism and a nascent postmodern image culture." Restivo studies numerous films of the period, focusing mainly on the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Resa Crane Bizzaro's essay, "Making Places as Teacher-Scholars in Composition Studies: Comparing Transition Narratives," appeared in College Composition and Communication, 53.3 (February 2002). This essay was revised from Bizzaro's 1999 presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which won a Scholar for the Dream Award.

Laura Micciche's "More Than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work" appeared in the March issue of College English. The essay focuses on the climate of disappointment in English Studies generally, made especially apparent by the collapse of the job market in the humanities, the national abuse of adjunct teachers, and the general devaluation of the humanities as the academy develops into more and more of a corporate entity. Her essay examines the specific case of writing program administrators (WPAs) and argues that, despite the frequent exploitation of WPA labor (often not conceived to be intellectual work), people in these positions often find strategic ways to use disappointment as a framework for effecting change.

Seodial Deena's essay, "Alice Walker's Decolonization of Traditional Love in The Color Purple," was collected in Afro-American Literature edited by R.K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2001).

Philip Rubens and Sherry Southard's "What Do We Really Know about Audience and Online Information" was printed in Proceedings of the International Professional Communication Conference (2001). According to Southard, "For the past few years, we observed online information behaviors in two different audiences: a student population from behind the Digital Divide and a professional group on technology's leading edge. Although we expected to illustrate how these audiences differ, we found, instead, a surprising commonality in their interactions. This paper reviews the difficulties discovered, offers some suggestions to help identify the source of such problems, and provides a heuristic for solving similar difficulties encountered in typical web designs."

Sherry Southard and Philip Rubens also published "Students' Technological Difficulties in Using Web-based Learning Environments" in the Proceedings of Society of Technical Communications 48th Annual Conference (2001). Rubens and Southard maintain, "To provide quality education when using emerging electronic technologies, TPC faculty must continually re-conceptualize what constitutes a classroom and what characterizes their roles as effective teachers. To explore these issues, we focus on the technological difficulties students encounter when learning in a web-based environment that includes using websites for course content, email to interact and send attachments, instant messaging, and listservs or threaded discussions. How do students with little experience in using these types of computer technology learn to complete successfully the tasks required by their courses? How do faculty prevent them from becoming so frustrated with the technology that they give up or transfer that frustration to course content, creating a barrier to their learning?"

Lida Dutkova-Cope published two studies in the Southwest Journal of Linguistics (2001): "The Language of Czech Moravians in Texas: 'Do you know what Párknu káru u hauza means?'" and "Texas Czech: The language of Texans who say they speak 'a different type of Czech.'" In these studies, Dutkova-Cope uses data from ethnolinguistic fieldwork in two historically Czech Moravian communities of Central Texas to analyze typical features of Texas Czech. The linguistic analysis has identified specific structural features that show relatively high attrition rates, as well as those that are much less susceptible to change. The data are assessed in light of findings for immigrant Czech in the US and other language contact situations.

Michele Turner Sharp's "Elegy Unto Epitaph: Print Culture and Commemorative Practice in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'" was published in Papers on Language and Literature 38:1 (2002). Sharp argues that "the substantial generic deviations that the 'Elegy' makes from the conventions of pastoral elegy, notably its inclusion of the death of the author and his appended epitaph within the frame of the elegy, are best explained against the backdrop of the incipient professionalization of literature. The 'Elegy' implicitly registers concomitant changes in the status of the writer and an explicit revaluation of lyric as a written artifact. In the process, Gray's 'Elegy' sets the stage for a new contract between authors and their audiences in which the immortality of authors is sealed within the pages of their own books and the hands of their readers."