Faculty Publications

 

Lily Wright


An engaging memoir from the road updates the tradition of the picaresquetraveler's tale.  With unflinching honesty and refreshing wit, she captures the torn emotions, comic misfires, and inevitable trade-offs felt by young people everywhere

 

 

Jacket Design by Margaret M. Schwabe
Jacket Photograph by Peter Code
Image bank Map Courtesy of Phillip's Maps, Lond. Scwabe

Barbara Bean


These Gorgeous, sensuous stories explore the dark corners of the heart, where secrets and yearning reside.  Characters long for one another, they find ways to reach out, sometimes they transgress.  Always the results are surprising.  Reading Dream House is like slipping with shocked joy into a dream, a place where every aspect of human life is charged with mystery and desire."                                                            

 Erin McGraw, author of Lies of theSaints
Jacket design by Laurie Dolphin
Published by University Press of Colorado (March 2001)

TOM CHIARELLA 


His first short story collection Foley's Luck garnered critical praise and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and Story. A winner of a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts award.Published by Knopf (October 1992)

 

 

 

Characters need to speak to each other.  Tom Chiarella shows you how.  Whether it's an argument, a love scene, a powwow among sixth graders or scientists in a lab, this book demonstrates how to write dialogue that sounds authentic and original.
You'll learn ways to find ideas for literary discussions by tuning in to what you hear every day.  You'll Learn to use gestures instead of speech, to insert silences that are as effective as outbursts, to add shifts in tone, and other strategies for making conversations more compelling.  Nuts and bolts are covered, too--formatting, punctuation, dialogue tags--everything you need to get your characters talking.

Published by Story Press Books (1998)

 

 

   Tom Chiarella is the serious amateur, the humbled hacker, and the appreciative fan all rolled into one.  Golfers everywhere will identify withhis tales of low-grade frustration centered on a dimpled ball and a fairway filled with traps.  But these affectionate, tee-in-cheek reminiscences and respectful rantings are balanced by memories of those sublime--and all to seldom--moments when the shot rises like a rocket, straight and true, carrying over a long stretch of treacherous real estate to settle at last onto the cool comfort of the green

Published by Emmis Books (2004)
Dust jacket designed by Stephen Sulliva

 

Eugene Gloria


 

Eugene Gloria
His collection of poems, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 1999 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin Books. 

 

Drivers at the Short Time MotelEugene Gloria's Drivers at the Short-Time Motel is propelled by an imagistic sincerity and paced lyricism. Each poem seems to embody the plain-spoken as well as the embellishments that we associate with classical and modern Asian poetry. Though many of the poems address the lingering hurt of cultural and economic imperialism, worlds coexist in the same skin through magical imagery.  Gauged by a keen eye, history is scrutinized, but through a playful exactness. These wonderful poems are trustworthy." --Yusef Komunyaaka 

 

Published by Penguin Books (June 2000)
Cover painting by Richard Diebenkorn

 Hoodlum Birds

""Gloria gets better and better. His new work practices a profound care for the particulars of an individual life and the world at large, integrating the values of philosophical inquiry, reverie, and imagination. Poem after poem enacts a yearning for a wider and deeper sense of human belonging, using language that has all the luminosity and intensity of a spiritual pilgrimage, and the melancholy of racial, cultural, and spiritual alienation. These elegant, intelligent, and passionate poems hurt and reward us." --Li-Young Lee 

--Published by Penguin Books (March, 2006)
Cover painting by El Greco

 

Bill Little


 
The Waste Fix: Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to "the Sopranos"
(Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

 by Bill Little

Published by Routledge: 1st edition (September 2002)

Wayne Glausser


Locke and Blake:
A Conversation across
the Eighteenth Century

Locke and Blake is a composite critical biography of two giants of 18th-century culture. Organized by topics of cultural significance for the period, it weaves together two lives, focusing on critical topics as opposed to biographical details, in order to illuminate ideas of Locke and Blake and the cultural contexts and transformations of the "period" they shared. Glausser begins each chapter by sketching a biographical connection between the two men, which in turn leads to a broader discussion of textual as well as cultural significance. From their shared experience of having had paintings stolen by a friend, for instance, Glausser details the two men's angry responses and then explores the larger social issue of private property at each end of the 18th century. Other points of correspondence include mothers and lovers, charges of sedition, medicine and the body, slavery, and printing. Glausser's new approach to the lives and ideas of Locke and Blake offers a more balanced treatment of their relationship than has been available in the past. Through this juxtaposition and re-thinking of the two traditional "antagonists" of the period, he moves beyond adversarial caricatures of temperament, faculty, ideology, and intention and illuminates both the century and the two intellectual giants who stood at either end of it.


Published by University Press of Florida
(February 1998)

 Vanessa Dickerson


"A highly original and very informative collection of essays that theorizes the complicated intersection of the black female body and its Western symbolic meanings.  The collection is essential for anyone interested in the tensions between post-structuralist and humanist understandings of subject formation, social agency, and performative identity."      
--Claudia Tate, Princeton University

Deborah R. Geis


Edited by
Deborah R. Geis
Associate Professor of English and
author of Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama

 

Ten scholars explore many aspects of Art Spiegelman's two-volume illustrated novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale, including Spiegelman's use of animal characters, the influence of other "comix" artists, the role of the mother and its relation to gender issues, the use of repeating images such as smoke and blood, Maus's place among Holocuast testimonials, it's appropriation of cinematic technique, its use of language and styles of dialect, and the implications of the work's critical and commercial success


Published by The University of Alabama Press
Published by Rutgers University Press (2001)
Cover photo Bill Gaskins Cover design: Trudi Gershenov

Rick Hillis 

In addition to his many published stories, including work in best Canadian Stories, Descant, Prism International, and the Alaska Quarterly Review, he is the author of the 1988 poetry collection, The Blue Machines of Night

 

"A wonderful book . . . in the rarified company of the best of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff, without imitating any of them . . . Five or six of these stories are worth the price of five or six entire collections of stories."
--Russell Banks



Photo by
Richard Clements
Jacket design by Margot Barbour
Published by University of Pittsburgh Press

Harry Brown


What does it mean to be a "mixed-blood," and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending? Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, thought too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness?

In "Injun Joe's Ghost," Harry J. Brown addresses these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of "hybridity" from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood's exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing.

Because the myth of the demise of the Indian and the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxon is traditionally tied to America's national idea, nationalist literature depicts Indian-white hybrids in images of degeneracy, atavism, madness, and even criminality. A competing tradition of popular writing, however, often created by mixed-blood writers themselves, contests these images of the outcast half-breed by envisioning "hybrid vigor," both biologically and linguistically, as a model for a culturally heterogeneous nation.

"Injun Joe's Ghost" focuses on a significant figure in American history and culture that has, until now, remained on the periphery of academic discourse. Brown offers an in-depth discussion of many texts, including dime novels and Depression- era magazine fiction, that have been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This volume also covers texts such as the historical romances of the 1820s and the novels of the twentieth-century "Native American Renaissance" from a fresh perspective. Investigating a broad range of genres and subject over two hundred year of American writing, "Injun Joe's Ghost" will be useful to students and professionals in the fields of American literature, popular culture, and native studies.

 

 Injun Joe's Ghost
Published June 1, 2004
by University of Missouri Press
ISBN 0-8262-1530-0

Istvan Ciscsery-Ronay


Istvan


This book contains all the articles on Philip K. Dick published in Science-Fiction Studies through 1991--with the term "article" defined broadly enough to include notes, reviews, and letters to the editor.

Coyright 1992 by SF-TH Inc.
ISBN 0-9633169-1-5

On Philip K. Dick

Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams
Edited by:
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., professor of English at DePauw University
Christopher Bolton, assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College
Takayuki Tatsumi, professor of English at Keio University in Tokyo

Since the end of the Second World War--and particularly over the past decade--Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual, from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s, while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Covering a remarkable range of texts--from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyusaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy--this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams

 




Cover design by Percolator
Published by Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 978-0-8166-4974-7