Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
42
result(s) for
"Lockard, Joe"
Sort by:
“I dreamt that the world was on fire”: Boston King’s Memoirs, Visionary Discourse, and Colonial Salvation
Memoirs of Boston King, a Black Preacher appeared in serial form in The Methodist Magazine between March and June 1798. King escaped slavery in South Carolina, joined the British army to fight in the Revolutionary War, eventually resettled in Nova Scotia, and emigrated to Sierra Leone. This essay argues that readings of King’s Memoirs solely as a historical document are inadequate. The essay first summarizes King’s biography and contextualizes it within early Methodist history; a second section reads epiphanic visionary moments in King’s narrative; and a third section considers how colonial and white supremacist thought in the early Methodist church employed King’s narrative as a conversionary instrument.
Journal Article
US Death Row Literature and Public Mobilization against Capital Punishment
The paper introduces a question of how narrative studies can contribute to abolition of the death penalty in the United States. A second section maps a history of Death Row narratives from incarcerated people and witness memoirs, including early American narratives, Sacco and Vanzetti, Caryl Chessman, and contemporary writers such as Albert Woodfox. This historicization lays a foundation for treating Death Row literature as a coherent witness genre. A third theoretical section argues that the major work of narratives opposed to the death penalty lies in humanization of condemned prisoners and assertion of a human right to life, yet this is an insufficient and flawed argument. Death Row literature from incarcerated people represents an inherent claim on citizenship and protection of a right to life, not sentimentalism. The paper closes by arguing that to have credibility and effect, writing from observers outside prisons demands an encircling link between witness and activism.
Journal Article
Teaching Mars Literature
The paper describes an upper-division university course in Mars literature taught online since Fall 2013. The course readings comprise six novels relating to Mars. Authors include H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick, Greg Bear, and Kim Stanley Robinson. After an introduction, sections of the paper discuss course organization and syllabus, Americanist conceptual approaches, anti-colonialism, habitat sustainability, and pedagogical possibilities for future discussion of Mars literature. The paper argues for a fiction-based approach to understanding historical and potential future relationships with Mars and Mars science.
Journal Article
Herminio Serna and Death Row Childhood
Herminio Serna (1966-2018) was an incarcerated Chicano / Indigenous writer on San Quentin State Prison’s Death Row for twenty-one years, most of which were spent in solitary confinement. His sole volume of prose poems, Whisperings from Death Row, appeared two years prior to his death from a drug overdose. Like nearly all incarcerated writers, Serna’s work has received no critical notice. Serna’s writing describes a hellish psychological landscape within death row. The first section of this paper introduces Serna briefly, then explores questions relating to dialogism in prison writing and the exclusion of incarcerated writers such as Serna from public dialogue. A second section discusses Serna’s “deathbound childhood” as a function of death-bound subjectivity created by social terror regimes. A third and final section analyzes the transformation of Serna’s cell into a psychological purgatory, filled with darkness and pain. The context of writing under prolonged state terror in the imposition of capital punishment generates imagery, content, and a death row style.
Journal Article
Lucy Larcom and the Poetics of Child Labour
The height of political concern over child labour occurred between the 1890s and the 1920s, with the establishment of the National Child Labor Com- mittee; the documentary photography of Louis Hine; initiatives from Congress and state legislatures; the creation of the Child Labor Office within the U.S. Bureau of Labor; and legal contests over child labour taxes. Childhood at the mill ends with the realization that its products are part of a system that demands life-denying human exploitation for its maintenance. [...]the \"defect\" and \"blot\" (stanza 8)-Larcom appropriates textile terms to refer to the social defect of slavery and the blot on national honour-prevent social salvation by their presence. Bloodiness suffuses both the mill room and landscape outside, a surrealistic realization of historical violence and violations: [...]sunset fills the dusty room, And makes the water redly glow, As if the Merrimack's calm flood Were changed into a stream of blood. (lines 69-72) The 1868 Poems collection contained such numerous invocations of blood as Larcom turned to blood imagery repeatedly in her nationalistic poetry from the Civil War period, as well as a counterpoint in her gentler nature poetry.12 Standing weary in a weaving room, an imagination-seized teenage mill girl encounters both the horror of war and a feminist political conscious- ness that enjoins her with the words \"Thy sister's keeper know thou art\" (line 78).13 This line instances a realization that a radical new ethics of responsibility for liberation are necessary to confront the blood-powered monster of the mill. 9 There is no record of the publication of \"Weaving\" prior to 1868. Since this collection contains poems from prior to and during the war (for example, \"A Loyal Woman's No!\"), it appears that the poem may have been written before or during wartime. 10 The original reads \"So schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit / Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid \" (1866, 22).
Journal Article
\NO POSSESSIONS BUT RAGES\: VINDICATION, SALVATION, AND EARLY KENTUCKY PRISON LETTERS
Testimonies of salvation, popular in contemporary faith-based prison programming, have a lengthy history in US prison literature. Yet accounts of private spirituality can as easily frame an epistemic insufficiency of topical avoidance, concealment, and falsification. To illustrate the pitfalls of such narratives the paper historicizes and analyzes the unpublished 1793—94 prison letters of John Shaw, held in a Kentucky jail for seven years on unknown grounds. By claiming a divine mantle in his letters, Shaw avoids confronting himself. While he writes that he has laid his \"soul naked\" before readers, in fact he does the opposite and obscures himself. This double motion—both to participate in the world and to hide from it—relies on fabulation and a vindication narrative based on Christian faith.
Journal Article
Chinese Anthologies of American Literature, Multiculturalism, and Cultural Import-Export
Discussions of the anthology genre need to emphasize the genre's scale of importance. Understanding the centrality of the anthology genre as a foreign language and cultural teaching vehicle can illuminate that importance. For many non-native readers encountering English or American literatures, the anthology is either the basic or an exclusive means of access, using selected short texts or excerpts rather than complete novels, dramas, or non-fiction prose volumes. For these readers, a literature anthology replaces the variety of texts that native English speakers would ordinarily employ in their studies. The anthology genre mediates foreign-ness to readers for whom Englishlanguage narrative is alien. The importance of anthologies grows as the likelihood of classroom exposure to a wider range of literature diminishes. Contemporary American literature anthologies have paid particular attention to cultural groups that have been denied citizenship or equal rights, have been economically or socially marginalized, or have been suppressed by means of law.
Journal Article
The Right to Education, Prison-University Partnerships, and Online Writing Pedagogy in the US
The essay addresses the right to education for inmates and the disappearance of postsecondary education from US prisons; prison-university educational partnerships; and the potential of online programmes toward realization of education rights for US prisoners. As practical address to these issues, the article discusses an English department initiative to provide a partnership with prisons. As a creative example of how to reach all prison populations, this essay illustrates an online writing internship between undergraduate writing majors with primarily maximum-security inmates at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. By using online technology common on university campuses in the United States and elsewhere, the project has created a prison-university bridge and educational service that can be replicated and scaled upward. Such digital work spurs new social activism within university communities.
Journal Article