In Print

Ken Parille's "'What Our Boys Are Reading': Lydia Sigourney, Francis Forrester, and Boyhood Literacy in Nineteenth-Century America" appears in the current volume of Children's Literature Association Quarterly 33.1 Spring (2008).  According to Quarterly editor Richard Flynn: "Ken Parille's 'What Our Boys Are Reading' reveals the limitations of our received view of boys' reading as reinforcing 'notions of male authority and privilege,' in contrast to the disciplinary function of girls' reading.  By examining Lydia Sigourney's writings about boyhood literacy alongside her biography of her son, Andrew, who died at the age of nineteen, Parille investigates Sigourney's critique of the 'harmful norms' of 'boyhood masculinity' perpetuated by the idea of 'heroic imitation' in antebellum literary culture.  Parille demonstrates that Sigourney's insistence that reading should cultivate boys' 'domestic virtues' is echoed in later fiction for boys, such as Francis Forrester's Dick Duncan. Modern critics' tendency to divide nineteenth-century children's literature into 'boys' books' (Twain) and 'girls' books' (Alcott) obscures the complexity of both boys' reading and authors' attitudes toward the young. By questioning our reliance on 'familiar classification of authors . . by gender or perceived literary seriousness,' Parille asks us to re-examine our 'long-held beliefs' about boyhood."

Danielle Suarez's research paper "Keeping Up With the Joneses: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" and Ryyan Joye's site study "The Coffee Virgin," two essays from Chandra Cerutti's English 1200 class, will appear in the forthcoming edition of From Idea to Essay: A Rhetoric, Reader, and Handbook by Jo Ray McCuen and Anthony C. Winkler published by Houghton Mifflin (2008).

Brent Henze, Jack Selzer, and Wendy Sharer's new book 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition has been published by Parlor Press (2008).  According to the publisher: "A product of extensive archival research and numerous interviews, 1977: A Cultural Moment In Composition examines the local, state, and national forces (economic, political, cultural, and academic) that fostered the development of the first-year composition program at one representative site, Penn State University, in the late 1970s.  Sidebar commentaries from Stephen A. Bernhardt, Hugh Burns, Sharon Crowley, Lester Faigley, Janice Lauer, Elaine Maimon, Jasper Neel, and John Warnock -- many of whom were just beginning in the field in 1977 -- enrich and complicate the story.  In the emerging tradition of program-based histories, such as Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo's Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration (Parlor Press, 2005), 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition offers a counterpoint to broader institutional histories of composition by investigating how local phenomena can be explained by larger movements and how larger movements can be understood through local contexts."

Mikko Tuhkanen's "Foucault's Queer Virtualities," first published in Rhizomes 11/12 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006), has been translated into Turkish by Emre Koyuncu and appears as "Foucault'nun Queer Virtuellikleri" in Tesmeralsekdiz 1:2 (2008).

Will Banks's chapter "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (co-authored with Ken Lindblom and Rise Quay) was published in Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition, U of Pittsburgh P (2008).  According to Banks: "The chapter investigates the impact of Albert Stetson on the early work of teaching writing in a state teachers' college.  Specifically, we argue that the 'normal school ethos' operating at ISNU may have created an anti-democratic educational movement wherein teachers were produced from the working class and those teachers would go on to set themselves against the children of the working classes."

Ron Hoag's essay "Dejection or Joy, As You Like It: Schiller, Shakespeare, and Thoreau" has been published in Thoreau Society Bulletin 261, Winter (2008).  Co-authored by Malcolm Ferguson, the article, according to Hoag, "identifies and interprets two previously unremarked allusions in Thoreau's Walden epigraph, 'I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.'  Friedrich Schiller's ode 'To Joy' and Shakespeare's As You Like It (specifically Act II, Scene 7, Lines 12-43) underlie both the phrasing and the philosophy of Walden's epigraph and otherwise figure importantly in Thoreau's best known book."