Department of English Faculty Bookshelf

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  The Anxiety Workbook

  Christina Olson

  Georgia southern faculty member, Christina Olson published The Anxiety Workbook.

  
  

  The Anxiety Workbook explores contemporary anxiety, grief in its multitude of forms, and complicated familial dynamics via the lens of science and history while utilizing the language of therapy. These poems grapple with the ever-evolving collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as seek answers and lessons from the natural world. The termination of a pregnancy, a distant father, the untimely death of a friend, our society’s obsession with Dateline and missing white girls, the estivation of the West African lungfish—The Anxiety Workbook covers these topics and much more in poems ranging from the hypernarrative to the highly lyrical, rich in voice and description.

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  Journal of Second Language Writing: Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age

  Jinrong Li and Mimi Li

  The Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age was edited by Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li and Mimi Li.

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  Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat

  Joyce White

  Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat: Crossroads as Ritual examines employs nature, literary tradition, and the cosmogram to examine Danticat's fiction as textual sites imbued with ritual and conducive for healing and clarifying Africana diasporic consciousness.

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  Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television

  Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts

  With an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde premise, the CW dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a surprising choice for critical analysis. But, loyal viewers quickly came to appreciate the show’s sharp cultural critique through masterful parody, and this strategy has made it a critical darling and earned it several awards throughout its run. In ways not often seen on traditional network television, the show transcends conventional genre boundaries—the Hollywood musical, the romantic comedy, the music video—while resisting stereotypes associated with contemporary life.

  The essays in this collection underscore the show’s ability to distinguish itself within the current television market. Focusing on themes of feminism, gender identity, and mental health, contributors explore the ways in which the show challenged viewer expectations, as well as the role television critics play in identifying a show’s “authenticity” or quality.

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  The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler

  Gregory Jerome Hampton and Kendra R. Parker

  Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables, this is the most comprehensive Companion to Butler scholarship available today.

  
  The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including:
  
  · Cyborgs and the posthuman
  · Race and African American history
  · Afrofuturism
  · Gender and sexuality
  · New perspectives from Religious Studies, the Environmental Humanities and Disability Studies
  · New discoveries from the Butler archives at the Huntington Library
  
  The book includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by Butler and secondary scholarship on her work as well as an afterword by the novelist Tananarive Due.

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  Deep River Blues

  Tony R. Morris

  When the body of a young girl washes up on the shores of the French Broad River, Cord McRae, newly elected sheriff of Acre County, Tennessee, suspects her death might be connected to the Glad Earth Farm, a commune just outside the small town of Falston. Guru/leader Levon Gladson and a group of a hundred and twenty-five followers have moved into an old farm that butts up to the Smokies, and Cord suspects they may be growing something more profitable than sorghum cane up in the hills. The mystery's complicated by Cord's investigation into a second recent murder, of an Afghan vet; the growing power of a local "hillbilly" mafia operated by the wily Thorn Reevers; and Cord's own marriage, which is teetering on the edge of divorce over past violence and his on-again, off-again love affair with liquor. With echoes of WINTER'S BONE and the novels of James Lee Burke, DEEP RIVER BLUES will be a worthwhile addition to the regional crime thriller genre.

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  After Life as a Human

  Laura Valeri

  Located off of Florida's Forgotten Coast, Dog Island is a wild twin of St. George Island, a popular resort destination. Unlike St. George, however, Dog Island hosts less than 100 residents and a large nature preserve. Accessible only by boat or airplane, the island's pristine state attracts those who seek reprieve from the noise of modern life and those drawn to an ancient paradise untouched by commercial enterprises. Yet, with sea-level rising, industrial spills poisoning the wildlife, and climate change increasing the frequency of hurricanes, Dog Island is swiftly becoming a paradise lost, another casualty of humanity's reluctance to acknowledge its interconnectedness to all living things. The seven essays in this collection braid local history, environmental research, and spiritual meditations to reflect on the island's wild beauty and the heartbreaking destruction of its fragile ecology.

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  American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations

  Lisa A. Costello

  The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift our orientations toward others. Using gender, performance, and rhetoric as a frame, Lisa Costello questions public memory as gender neutral while showing how new forms of memorialization like digital archives, YouTube posts, hybrid memoirs, and small films build emotional connections that bring us closer to the past.

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  Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe

  Amanda Konkle

  Book Summary:

  Although she remains one of the all-time most recognizable Hollywood icons, Marilyn Monroe has seldom been ranked among the greatest actors of her generation. Critics have typically viewed her film roles as mere extensions of her sexpot star persona. Yet this ignores both the subtle variations between these roles and the acting skill that went into the creation of Monroe’s public persona.
  
  Some Kind of Mirror offers the first extended scholarly analysis of Marilyn Monroe’s film performances, examining how they united the contradictory discourses about women’s roles in 1950s America. Amanda Konkle suggests that Monroe’s star persona resonated with audiences precisely because it engaged with the era’s critical debates regarding femininity, sexuality, marriage, and political activism. Furthermore, she explores how Monroe drew from the techniques of Method acting and finely calibrated her performances to better mirror her audience’s anxieties and desires.
  
  Drawing both from Monroe’s filmography and from 1950s fan magazines, newspaper reports, and archived film studio reports, Some Kind of Mirror considers how her star persona was coauthored by the actress, the Hollywood publicity machine, and the fans who adored her. It is about why 1950s America made Monroe a star, but it is also about how Marilyn defined an era.

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  The Last Mastodon

  Christina Olson

  In summer of 2017, Christina Olson was invited to serve as poet-in-residence for apaleontology conference and exhibition (“The Valley of the Mastodons”) at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. These poems, exploring the nature of history, assembly, and ownership, were inspired by that time spent among the paleontologists as well as Olson’s observations of the museum’s collections of fossils, particularly Max the Mastodon.

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  L’Isola del Silenzio

  Laura Valeri

  Non occorre spostarsi troppo per viaggiare molto. Sette miglia, appena, nelle acque verdeazzurre del Golfo del Messico, a bordo di un traghetto che fa la spola tra il villaggio costiero di Carrabelle e la sottile striscia di terra di Dog Island. In questo lembo quasi intatto della Florida meridionale, battuto da ricorrenti uragani, privo di negozi, refrattario a connessioni internet e abitato da un centinaio di coraggiosi residenti, approdano una scrittrice americana di antica stirpe mediterranea e il suo compagno fotografo. È il contesto ideale per lasciarsi alle spalle l’esasperato efficientismo del Sogno Americano e ascoltare il silenzio, scoprendo quel che rimane di se stessi nello specchio della natura incorrotta. Tra conchiglie rarissime, tartarughe marine, sciami di pellicani impettiti e sornioni, pesci guizzanti e coyote dall’ululato simile al grido della mitica strolaga, il ricordo del soggiorno sull’isola restituisce tutta la meraviglia di un paradiso perduto, che tuttavia non basta a far dimenticare la fragilità di un universo minacciato dalla criminale incoscienza della specie più forte e rapace.

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  Chivalry in Westeros: The Knightly Code of A Song of Ice and Fire

  Carol Parrish Jamison

  George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has sparked a renewed interest in things medieval. The pseudo-historical world of Westeros delights casual fans while offering a rich new perspective for medievalists and scholars. This study explores how Martin crafts a chivalric code that intersects with and illuminates well known medieval texts, including both romance and heroic epics. Through characters such as Brienne of Tarth, Sandor Clegane and Jaime Lannister, Martin variously challenges, upholds and deconstructs chivalry as depicted in the literature of the Middle Ages.

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  Assessment Across Online Language Education

  Stephanie Link and Jinrong Li

  Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li co-authored Assessment Across Online Language Education.

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  The Dead Still Here

  Laura E. Valeri

  Book Summary: Mapping stories set in Europe and America, The Dead Still Here skillfully paces through eleven short stories about friends-with-benefits typed relationships, vicious divorces and thievery, the loss of a child, the loss of a mother, and the Coast Guard and the Navy rescuing refugees from a bad storm at sea. Laura Valeri writes one single breathtaking sentence about sex, Dear John emails, and Christmas presents in “Liabilities of a Love Misguided” and displays a sharp sense of paranoia based on everyone looking at the narrator, laughing, whispering in “What They Know.” Along with characters that are irrevocably locked in their heads, Valeri includes a guide on how to take medication in “Prescription for Life,” which subtly points to the other hallucinatory narratives. This collection is at once provocative and lucid, and it offers various angles of characters looking for a relationship to hold.

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  The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

  Jared Yates Sexton

  "An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race . . . Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate's presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election . . . This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville . . . His] dispatches are bracing." --The Washington Post

  When he agreed to cover the 2016 election season, journalist Jared Yates Sexton didn't know he was stepping into what would become--for both political parties--the most rageful and divisive political circus in U.S. history.

  His initial dispatches showed Democrats at war with their establishment, coming apart at the seams over the long-gestating ascendancy of Hillary Clinton and the upstart momentum of Bernie Sanders, whose grassroots campaign provoked uprisings of people desperate for change. Then, on June 14, Sexton attended a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to witness these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over 1 million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for The New York Times. Sexton gained more than 18,000 followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassments, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever.

  The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that divided both parties and powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization--a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.

  Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer--books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life--The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.

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  I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World

  Jared Yates Sexton

  Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.

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  WOVENText: Georgia Tech’s Custom Bedford Book of Genres

  Lisa Dusenberry

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  Bring Me The Head of Yorkie Goodman

  Jared Yates Sexton

  “Who’s Yorkie Goodman?” asks Wallace, an enforcer for an East Coast drug cartel. “Just a fella” says his boss, who goes by the name Boss. Just a fella … but Boss wants Yorkie Goodman taken out. He wants it so badly, he’ll risk sending Wallace into Wallace’s own past where a beautiful woman he abandoned years before still holds a bewitching power over him like some ancient siren song. He wants it so badly, he's sending along his deadliest assassin, Carp, to make sure the job is done right. And he wants proof … proof in the form of Goodman’s head delivered in a portable cooler. So begins Wallace’s twisted, violent odyssey into the American heartland - an odyssey that inevitably forces him to choose between love and gangland loyalty. Written in spare, gritty prose, Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman takes you on a page-turning, Tarantinoesque ride to the end of the road.

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  The Hook and The Haymaker

  Jared Yates Sexton

  In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for good.

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  Safe in Your Head

  Laura E. Valeri

  Book Summary: A middle class Italian family finds reason to immigrate to America when Italy is threatened by the Red Brigades’ terrorist movement of the 1970s. The family patriarch manages a transfer to the United States, certain of better prospects and of a more secure future for his family, but each of the family members experiences a deeper kind of upheaval, negotiating personal losses and estrangement. A grandmother, a mother, and a granddaughter each discovers the many insidious ways in which war warps and defines life, even at a distance of decades.

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  An End to All Things

  Jared Yates Sexton

  When Jared Yates Sexton finished his MFA and returned to his hometown in Indiana, he found a population plagued by the kind of turmoil and tension usually reserved for fiction. Unemployment and uncertainty lurked everywhere he looked. In his debut story collection, this pervasive turbulence tilts into the fantastical as we observe the inspired, absurd, and even horrific moments in the lives of lost and luckless Midwesterners looking for something to believe in.

  Through language that's both striking and unassuming, Sexton creates a dangerous and disturbing world in which everything and everyone teeters precariously on the edge of total chaos; a world that bears a startling resemblance to our own.

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  Making Meaning: Literature and the Research Process

  H. Elizabeth Howells

  Literature: Reading to Write masterfully weaves critical thinking skills, writing, and reading instruction using writing prompts, literary selections, and intriguing discussion points. Students transition from active readers to critical writers through a series of reading prompts and unique writing exercises. This process helps students find meaning in a broader context by forging connections between literature and their personal experiences.

  Additionally, the book features an eclectic array of classic and contemporary voices in literature as well as sections devoted to newer genres such as graphic novels. This interactive approach leaves students with the knowledge and confidence to write research papers and essays that are thought-provoking, engaging, and authentic to their true writing voice.

  
  

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  The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems

  Theresa Malphrus Welford

  Book Summary: As Gertrude Stein might have put it, a cento is a collage is a mix tape is a video montage.

  This hypothetical description is fitting in a number of ways. Although the cento form is ancient - in existence since at least the days of Virgil and Homer - it was also used to striking effect in the Modern era: consider, for example, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's Cantos.

  More recent centos include John Ashbery's ""The Dong with the Luminous Nose,"" Peter Gizzi's ""Ode: Salute to The New York School 1950-1970"" (a libretto), Connie Hershey's ""Ecstatic Permutations,"" and the ""Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Cento, March 23, 2008"" (a collaborative protest poem delivered in front of the White House).

  The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford and with an introduction by David Lehman, features an extensive sampling of centos, collage poems, and patchwork poems written by Nicole Andonov, Lorna Blake, Alex Cigale, Allan Douglass Coleman, Philip Dacey, Sharon Dolin, Annie Finch, Jack Foley, Kate Gale, Dana Gioia, Sam Gwynn, H. L. Hix, David Lehman, Eric Nelson, Catherine Tufariello, and many others.

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  Instructor’s Manual for textbook Literature: Reading to Write

  H. Elizabeth Howells

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  Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication

  Timothy D. Giles

  Examination of the work of scientific icons-Newton, Descartes, and others-reveals the metaphors and analogies that directed their research and explain their discoveries. Today, scientists tend to balk at the idea of their writing as rhetorical, much less metaphorical. How did this schism over metaphor occur in the scientific community? To establish that scientists should use metaphors to explain science to the public and need to be conscious of how metaphor can be useful to their research, this book examines the controversy over cloning and the lack of a metaphor to explain it to a public fearful of science's power.The disjunction between metaphor and science is traced to the dispensation of the Solar System Analogy in favor of a mathematical model. Arguing that mathematics is metaphorical, the author supports the idea of all language as metaphorical-unlike many rhetoricians and philosophers of science who have proclaimed all language as metaphorical but have allowed a distinction between a metaphorical use of language and a literal use.For technical communication pedagogy, the implications of this study suggest foregrounding metaphor in textbooks and in the classroom. Though many technical communication textbooks recommend metaphor as a rhetorical strategy, some advise avoiding it, and those that recommend it usually do so in a paragraph or two, with little direction for students on how to recognize metaphors or to how use them. This book provides the impetus for a change in the pedagogical approach to metaphor as a rhetorical tool with epistemological significance.