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Articulator Features and Portuguese Vowel Height
Wayne J. Redenbarger
Harvard University Press, 1981
This generative phonological study brings together for the first time an exhaustive treatment of the Portuguese data relating to changes in vowel height and the several descriptive frameworks and distinctive feature systems available for their codification. A detailed acoustic phonetic analysis of the Portuguese vowel data is followed by a review of the history of confusion between secondary and primary tongue-body height. The author then argues for a set of Articulator Features’—an extension of the Chomsky and Halle ‘SPE’ distinctive feature system in which all SPE place-of-articulation features are replaced by strictly binary articulator-based features. This framework is then applied to the previously problematic Portuguese vowel-height data and is shown to be capable of both elegant and explanatory codification of the data. Finally, it is shown that these new explanatory rules render simple certain previous solutions on the basis of which it has been erroneously argued that vowel height in Portuguese is not binary.
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Passive Sentences in English and Portuguese
Milton M. Azevedo
Georgetown University Press, 1980

This study analyzes passive sentences in English and Portuguese which result from a post-semantic transformation applied when a nound, which does not play the semantic role of actor, is chosen as syntactic subject. Choice between a passive and its non-passive or active counterpart reflects differences in the distribution of information in the sentence as regards the relative importance of the latter's constituents for communication. Such distribution is analyzed in terms of Praque school theory, especially that involving the notions of communicative dynamism and the distribution of theme and rheme.

The book concludes with a contrastive analysis of English and Portuguese passive sentence patterns which serves as the basis for observations on the teaching of Portuguese passives to native speakers of English.

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Portuguese Memory Book
A New Approach to Vocabulary Building
By William F. Harrison and Dorothy Winters Welker
University of Texas Press, 1996

Mnemonics is an age-old device for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. The Portuguese Memory Book, by William F. Harrison and Dorothy Welker, makes use of this reliable memory help in a series of mnemonic jingles that are by turns playful, sardonic, touching, and heroic to help both students and independent learners acquire and remember Portuguese vocabulary.

The mnemonic jingles present both the sound of the  Portuguese word (indicated by syllables in underlined boldface type) and its English meaning (given by a word or phrase in boldface type):

noite (f.) night

Don't annoy Chihuahuas in the night.
If you ignore their bark, you'll feel their bite.

This innovative approach to vocabulary building is simple, effective, and entertaining. The authors also include a general pronunciation guide to Brazilian Portuguese, particularly to the Carioca dialect of Rio de Janeiro.

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Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese
The Pragmatics of Politeness
By Dale April Koike
University of Texas Press, 1992

"Give me the salt" and "Please pass the salt" make the same request, but in a polite situation the first utterance may give offense, while the second may not. How and why such differences in wording and intonation, in a particular context, produce different effects is the concern of pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with how speech is used in interaction. In this innovative study of pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese, Dale Koike analyzes the politeness phenomenon, specifically in the context of speech acts known as "directives."

As acts intended to get someone to do something, directives bring into play a variety of sociocultural factors, depending on the relationship between the participants. Using empirical data obtained through natural language observation and from questionnaires of over one hundred adult native speakers, Koike identifies factors—such as age, education, and gender—that influence the strategies of politeness a given speaker is likely to use in making a directive. This research clarifies the unwritten language rules and assumptions that native speakers intuitively follow in phrasing their directive utterances.

Koike also includes important material on the acquisition of strategies for politeness by children and adult second-language learners, as well as on gender differences in politeness forms. Her research proposes important additions to the theory of speech acts as conceived by Austin and Searle, particularly in the application of deictic organization to account for a hierarchy of pragmatic forms.

Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese will be of interest to a wide audience in diverse fields, including linguistics, anthropology, interaction analysis, communications, semantics, sociology, psychology, and education.

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Cartas e Cronicas
Leitura Jornalística
Elisabeth P. Smith and Phillip H. Smith, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1990

Cartas e Cronicas contains three dozen selections form Brazilian newspapers accompanied by vocabulary lists and comprehension exercises.

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The Genesis of Lachmann's Method
Sebastiano Timpanaro
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Until the modern period, the reproduction of written texts required manual transcription from earlier versions. This cumbersome process inevitably created errors and made it increasingly difficult to identify the original readings among multiple copies. Lachmann's method—associated with German classicist Karl Lachmann (1793-1851)—aimed to provide scholars with a scientific, systematic procedure to standardize the transmission of ancient texts. Although these guidelines for analysis were frequently challenged, they retained a paradigmatic value in philology for many years. In 1963, Italian philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro became the first to analyze in depth the history and limits of Lachmann's widely established theory with his publication, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann.

This important work, which brought Timpanaro international repute, now appears in its first English translation. The Genesis of Lachmann's Method examines the origin, development, and validity of Lachmann's model as well as its association with Lachmann himself. It remains a fundamental work on the history and methods of philology, and Glenn W. Most's translation makes this seminal study available to an English-speaking audience. Revealing Timpanaro's extraordinary talent as a textual critic and world-class scholar, this book will be indispensable to classicists, textual critics, biblical scholars, historians of science, and literary theorists.
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The Germanic Languages
Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations
Hans Frede Nielsen
University of Alabama Press, 1989
A revised and translated version of De germanske sprog. Baggrund og gruppe'ring (Odense University Press, 1979), which has been out of print for several years

The book is especially concerned with the grouping of the Germanic languages: with the research history of this much-debated question and with a discussion of the methods applied to past attempts and indeed applicable to future research in the field.
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General Characteristics of the Germanic Languages
Antoine Meillet
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Classics on Indo-European languages.
 
Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) is one of the most important linguists of all time. A French linguist and Indo-Europeanist, he was the author of over two dozen books and reference works that are still widely consulted, including The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics and General Characteristics of the Germanic Languages. Meillet was a student of Ferdinand de Saussure, intellectual father of structuralism, at the Sorbonne. He spent most of his career at the College of France, teaching a generation of students who would be influential in their own right.


 

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Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax
Edited by W. Detmar Meurers and Tibor Kiss
CSLI, 2001
A wealth of research has been conducted on the various linguistic phenomena found in Germanic languages. But these studies were restricted by their use of only one theoretical perspective to analyze one particular language. Inspired by the need to expand the research base of Germanic languages while broadening the empirical coverage of constraint-based linguistic approaches, a handful of researchers are employing various constraint-based theoretical perspectives to study multiple Germanic languages.

This volume begins with an introduction to the recent research performed on Germanic syntax using constraint-based frameworks. It then goes on to investigate the linguistic phenomena found in the grammar of the German and Danish languages. Using such approaches as Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, contributors shed a different light on theoretical issues addressed by past studies, including semi-free word order, partial front phenomena, and complex predicate formation. While alternative approaches have assumed that meaning (semantics) is dependent on form (syntax), various analyses presented in this volume explore the idea that both form and meaning are equally constitutive for grammatical descriptions.
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The Languages of Scandinavia
Seven Sisters of the North
Ruth H. Sanders
University of Chicago Press, 2017
From fjords to mountains, schools of herring to herds of reindeer, Scandinavia is rich in astonishing natural beauty. Less well known, however, is that it is also rich in languages. Home to seven languages, Scandinavia has traditionally been understood as linguistically bifurcated between its five Germanic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese) and its two Finno-Ugric ones (Finnish and Sámi). In The Languages of Scandinavia, Ruth H. Sanders takes a pioneering approach: she considers these Seven Sisters of the North together.

While the two linguistic families that comprise Scandinavia’s languages ultimately have differing origins, the Seven Sisters have coexisted side by side for millennia. As Sanders reveals, a crisscrossing of names, territories, and even to some extent language genetics—intimate language contact—has created a body of shared culture, experience, and linguistic influences that is illuminated when the story of these seven languages is told as one. Exploring everything from the famed whalebone Lewis Chessmen of Norse origin to the interactions between the Black Death and the Norwegian language, The Languages of Scandinavia offers profound insight into languages with a cultural impact deep-rooted and far-reaching, from the Icelandic sagas to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s internationally popular Millennium trilogy. Sanders’s book is both an accessible work of linguistic scholarship and a fascinating intellectual history of language.
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A Handbook of Scandinavian Names
Nancy L. Coleman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Are you looking for
•    A Scandinavian name for your baby?
•    The names of Norse gods and heroes?
•    The history and meaning of Scandinavian first names?
•    Variations and alternate spellings for common Scandinavian names?
•    Naming traditions and customs in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark?

A Handbook of Scandinavian Names includes a dictionary of more than fifteen hundred given names from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, plus some from Iceland and Finland. Each entry provides a guide to pronunciation and the origin and meaning of the name. Many entries also include variations and usage in the Scandinavian countries and famous bearers of the name.
    Adding engaging context to the dictionary section is an extensive comparative guide to naming practices. The authors discuss immigration to North America from Scandinavia and the ways given names and surnames were adapted in the New World. Also included in the book is a history of Scandinavian names, information on “Name Days,” and discussion of significant names from mythology and history, including naming traditions in royal families.

Winner, Reference Book of the Year, Midwest Book Awards

Finalist, USA Best Books Award for Parenting/Family Reference


 

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Studies in Upplandic Runography
By Claiborne W. Thompson
University of Texas Press, 1975

Studies in Upplandic Runography is a detailed treatment of the runic inscriptions from the province of Uppland, Sweden, where runic art reached a high point in A.D. 1200 and where runic inscriptions are most numerous. Most of the runic monuments discussed are from the eleventh century, an important period when Sweden was making the transition from paganism to Christianity.

The names of nearly fifty rune-carvers (runographers), professional and amateur, are known. However, many of the inscriptions were left unsigned. Claiborne Thompson examines the major problem of how an unsigned inscription is attributed to a known carver. Since each carver had a distinctive style which must be delineated, the book contains an exhaustive survey of the norms of Upplandic runography. In order to match the inscriptions with their carvers, Thompson analyzes the entire corpus of inscriptions from Uppland, their formation, the artistic designs they bear, the shapes of the runes on them, the orthography and language on them, and the manner in which they were carved.

Thompson then establishes a set of criteria for determining the authorship of a runic monument, stressing rune forms. All of the criteria are used in an extensive discussion of the carvings of Asmund Karasun, an interesting and influential carver from the first half of the eleventh century.

In addition, Thompson’s review of research describes scholarly interest in the problems of runography beginning in the early seventeenth century. The book includes an introductory sketch of the cultural background of Uppland and relates the runic tradition to historical and cultural traditions in eleventh-century Sweden.

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North American Icelandic
The Life of a Language
Birna Arnbjornsdottir
University of Manitoba Press, 2006
North American Icelandic evolved mainly in Icelandic settlements in Manitoba and North Dakota and is the only version of Icelandic that is not spoken in Iceland. But North American Icelandic is a dying language with few left who speak it.North American Icelandic is the only book about the nature and development of this variety of Icelandic. It details the social and linguistic constraints of one specific feature of North American Icelandic phonology undergoing change, namely Flámæli, which is the merger of two sets of front vowels. Although Flámæli was once a part of traditional Icelandic, it was considered too confusing and was systematically eradicated from the language. But in North America, Flámæli use spread unchecked, allowing the rare opportunity of viewing the evolution of a dialect from its birth to its impending demise.
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Lærerveiledning til Norsk, nordmenn og Norge 2, Antologi
Teacher's Manual for Intermediate Norwegian
Kathleen Stokker
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

This teacher's guide to the intermediate anthology and workbook suggests a variety of classroom communicative activities for both pairs and small groups.


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Norsk, nordmenn og Norge 1
Textbook for Beginning Norwegian
Kathleen Stokker and Odd Haddal
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981

This introduction to Norwegian helps students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure and use that knowledge to learn about Norway and Norwegian culture.
    Once students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure, they will use their knowledge of the language to learn about Norway. Students will learn about the cities of Oslo and Bergen, how to converse when eating in a Norwegian home or restaurant, and about Norwegian schools. Emphasis is also given to travel and communications, as well as the seasons of the year and Norwegian holidays.
    The present edition of the text features a short grammar summary, a reference for review to assist in drawing together aspects of the grammar that are presented throughout the text. To aid in developing good pronunciation and intonation habits, as well as to internalize certain items of vocabulary and structure, most chapters contain a practice dialogue for students to practice repeatedly while studying the chapter.

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Norsk, nordmenn og Norge 2, Antologi
Textbook for Intermediate Norwegian
Kathleen Stokker
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

This intermediate-level anthology offers a lively collection of writingsfor students learning Norwegian. Introductions to selected Norwegian authors, vocabulary lists, and maps promote discussions of Norwegian history, culture, geography and literature.

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Norwegian-English Dictionary
A Pronouncing and Translating Dictionary of Modern Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) with a Historical and Grammatical Introduction
Editor-in-Chief Einar Haugen
University of Wisconsin Press, 1974

For more than forty years, the Haugen Norwegian–English Dictionary has been regarded as the foremost resource for both learners and professionals using English and Norwegian. With more than 60,000 entries, it is esteemed for its breadth, its copious grammatical detail, and its rich idiomatic examples. In his introduction, Einar Haugen, a revered scholar and teacher of Norwegian to English speakers, provides a concise overview of the history of the language, presents the pronunciation of contemporary Norwegian, and introduces basic grammatical structures, including the inflection of nouns and adjectives and the declension of verbs.

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Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish
Peter Sells
CSLI, 2001
Very little research has been performed on the grammatical structure of sentences in Swedish. Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish is one of the first books to explore the Swedish sentence structure, presenting an account of the order of the words and phrases within the sentence. The book uses the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which provides syntactic analysis in terms of subject, object, topic, and focus, as well as part-of-speech analysis in terms of noun phrase and verb phrase. The book also uses Optimality Theory, a theory of constraint interpretation that allows constraints to conflict by allowing the satisfaction of certain constraints or requirements to lead to a grammatical structure even if less important constraints are violated.
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Prisma’s English-Swedish Dictionary
Prisma
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Prisma’s Swedish-English Dictionary
Prisma
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Essays and Explorations
Studies in Ideas, Language, and Literature
Morton Bloomfield
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Scenes of Instruction
A Memoir
Michael Awkward
Duke University Press, 1999
Scenes of Instruction is the memoir of noted scholar of African American literature Michael Awkward. Structured around the commencement ceremonies that marked his graduations from various schools, it presents Awkward’s coming-of-age as a bookish black male in the projects of 1970s Philadelphia. His relationships with his family and peers, their struggles with poverty and addiction, and his eventual move from underfunded urban schools to a prestigious private school all become parts of a memorable script.

With a recurring focus on how his mother’s tragic weaknesses and her compelling strengths affected his development, Awkward intersperses the chronologically arranged autobiographical sections with ruminations on his own interests in literary and cultural criticism. As a male scholar who has come under fire for describing himself as a feminist critic, he reflects on such issues as identity politics and the politics of academia, affirmative action, and the Million Man March.

By connecting his personal experiences with larger political, cultural, and professional questions, Awkward uses his life as a palette on which to blend equations of race and reading, urbanity and mutilation, alcoholism, pain, gender, learning, sex, literature, and love.

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In Search of Susanna
Suzanne L. Bunkers
University of Iowa Press, 1996

 On a summer day in 1980 in Niederfeulen, Luxembourg, Suzanne Bunkers pored over parish records of her maternal ancestors, immigrants to the rural American Midwest in the mid 1800s. Suddenly, chance led her to the name Simmerl and to the missing piece in the genealogical puzzle that had brought her so far: Susanna Simmerl, Bunkers' paternal great-great-grandmother, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1856 before coming to America. Finding Susanna was the catalyst for Bunkers' intensely personal book, which blends history, memory, and imagination into a drama of two women's lives within their multigenerational family.

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To the Boathouse
A Memoir
Mary Ann Caws
University of Alabama Press, 2008
A neat and lavish, if constricting, childhood in the lush landscapes of North Carolina. Summers at a calm, remote beach house. A proper and religiously influenced prep school in Washington. Years at Bryn Mawr, an impulsive study trip to Paris, further education at Yale, married life, and divorced life. These are the settings for Mary Ann Caws’s passionate memoir, in which she recounts the highs and lows of her journey through life. Marked by complicated relationships and a passion for learning, Caws’s story is one that resonates not only with writers like herself, but with all who have struggled with determining their path within the surrounding world.

Caws writes of her formal, stylish parents, her rebellious and deeply admired sister, and her artistic grandmother, whom she respected and idolized more than anyone else. She describes her marriage and subsequent divorce, her bouts with therapy, her children, and her growth as a student and writer. Throughout the memoir is evidence of her love for writing, teaching, art, and poetry as well as her deep respect for the people in her life that ultimately guided her into her career.

Mary Ann Caws describes Southern society and her own life with fondness, nostalgia, and a tinge of honest criticism. The carefully selected details and delicate balance of sentiment and fact bring readers into the fascinating, complicated, and all-too-real world of Caws’s—and our own—past.
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You've Got to Be Carefully Taught
Learning and Relearning Literature
Jerome Klinkowitz. Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Drawing on his own experience in the profession, veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based “story of English” is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing. Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach draws on the same strengths and inspirations writers use in the creation of literature. He involves students in the literary work as production.

            

Despite almost universal agreement that literary studies fail both writers and students, solutions have been limited to suggestions by superstar theorists teaching cream-of-the-crop students at elite universities. Klinkowitz aims not at the elite but at the ordinary student in an introduction to literature class. His goal is to introduce teachers to a new philosophy of teaching literature and to further deepen students’ natural love for the subject. He also seeks to revive the love of fine writing in those whose joy in the subject fell victim to obtuse teaching methods. Uniquely, his is not an esoteric theory developed by the best academics for elite students but a commonsense approach that works well in the kind of schools most students attend.
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A Writer Reforms (the Teaching of) Writing
Donald Murray and the Writing Process Movement, 1963–1987
Michael J. Michaud
University Press of Colorado, 2024
In this archival investigation, Michael J. Michaud examines the life and work of Donald M. Murray, an important disciplinary and educational reformer who has for too long been misunderstood, caricatured, and dismissed by many writing studies theorists and historians. Focusing on Murray’s work at the University of New Hampshire from the 1960s to the 1980s, Michaud offers a corrective intended to establish a new legacy for Murray. Grounded in an understanding of the significance of his personal backstory to his reform efforts and narrated through the lens of a close reading of the day-to-day details of his work during the heady years of the writing process movement, A Writer Reforms (the Teaching of) Writing recounts the numerous innovations Murray contributed to composition pedagogy and traces the impact of his work on the growth of the field during a critical period in its development.
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Waltzing the Magpies
A Year in Australia
Sam Pickering
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Praise for Sam Pickering:

"The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble."
---The New York Times Book Review


"Reading Pickering . . . is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend."
---Smithsonian

"What a joy it is to 'mess around' with Professor Sam Pickering!"
---The Chattanooga Times

"Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived."
---Kirkus Reviews


The movie Dead Poets Society is where most Americans first met Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor. Robin Williams plays the lead character (loosely based on Pickering), an idiosyncratic instructor who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters. Like the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you can spot Pickering's writing a mile away; there's no mistaking the Pickering pen. As an ample demonstration of the author's literary gifts, Waltzing the Magpies is his unabashedly lush and Technicolor travelogue from Down Under.

On the face of it, Waltzing is the chronicle of a sabbatical year spent with family in Australia. Yet beneath the surface Pickering's big themes-family, nature, seizing the moment-move in a powerful current that frequently bursts out in moments of ecstatic revelation and intense sensual flourish. Through it all Pickering weaves stories from his fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, especially when the goings of the outside world get rough.

Waltzing the Magpies is classic Pickering at the height of his literary powers, and places him in the company of such great American essayists as E. B. White and James Thurber, but with an irony and observational prowess that is pure Pickering.
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Teaching Life
Letters from a Life in Literature
Dale Salwak
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Part epistolary memoir, part handbook, Teaching Life reflects on more than three decades of teaching literature and touching the lives of students. Both a reflection on a life in literature and a primer on teaching as a vocation, this soul-stirring work also provides behind-the-scenes stories of many of the authors who have influenced Dale Salwak’s career.

Written in response to the sudden death of one of his students, who died tragically in an automobile accident on her way to Salwak’s office to talk over her career plans, Teaching Life is an effort to impart lessons to the next generation of teachers: “It was the suddenness of her death, I think, along with the utter loss of so much potential, which struck me forcibly, and I found myself wondering if anything I had said in class had made a difference in her too-short life or, for that matter, in the lives of any of my students.”

By turns analytical, reflective, and exhortatory, Teaching Life unselfconsciously captures the fascination, enlightenment, and sheer joy that literary studies can offer professors and students. It also implicitly speaks to society's prevailing—and disturbing—prejudice against the profession.
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The Life and Legacy of Fred Newton Scott
Donald C. Stewart
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
By the end of the nineteenth century, rhetoric had not yet been established as a legitimate discipline. Fred Newton Scott (1860-1931) spent his life broadening the scope of rhetoric studies through his imaginative, interdisciplinary research. Scott was both a pragmatic reformer and a visionary scholar who used empirical methods and cognitive psychology to expand this field. In this study, Donald Stewart and his wife Patricia examine Scott's essays, speeches, and books to write the first comprehensive biography of the man who became one of the most influential figures in language studies during the early twentieth century.
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Meatless Days
Sara Suleri Goodyear
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; and of her own passage to the West.

"Nine autobiographical tales that move easily back and forth among Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. . . . She forays lightly into Pakistani history, and deeply
into the history of her family and friends. . . . The Suleri women at home in Pakistan make this book sing."—Daniel Wolfe, New York Times Book Review

"A jewel of insight and beauty. . . . Suleri's voice has the same authority when she speaks about Pakistani politics as it does in her literary interludes."—Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The author has a gift for rendering her family with a few, deft strokes, turning them out as whole and complete as eggs."—Anita Desai, Washington Post Book World

"Meatless Days takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author's similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader . . . hungering for more."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

"Dazzling. . . . Suleri is a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon."—Henry Louise Gates, Jr., Voice Literary Supplement
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Incidents in an Educational Life
A Memoir (of Sorts)
John M. Swales
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Incidents in an Educational Life chronicles the educational journey of John M. Swales. A leading scholar in the field of Applied Linguistics and its subfield of English for Specific Purposes, Swales has taught across the globe in places such as Italy, Sweden, Libya, the United Kingdom, and the University of Michigan. His memoir offers a rare glimpse into the professional journey of a prominent scholar and educator.
 
Incidents in an Educational Life explores the lessons Swales learned by teaching and by being taught.  The story follows his gradual transformation from an English as a Second Language teacher to one of the leading international figures in his field, stopping along the way to tell the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful anecdotes that have made him the recognized educator he is today. His entertaining prose make this volume a must-read for anyone considering the field, or the many ways in which we all become teachers.
 
John M. Swales is one of the leading international scholars in the field of English for Specific Purposes. He retired in the summer of 2006 from the University of Michigan after teaching at multiple universities overseas. He is the co-author of the international bestseller Academic Writing for Graduate Students (3rd ed.).
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Interrogating Privilege
Reflections of a Second Language Educator
Stephanie Vandrick
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Interrogating Privilege is a welcome combination of personal essays and academic research, blending theory, analysis, and narrative to explore the function and consequences of privilege in second language education.

While teachers’ focus on the learning process and class goals are quite important, there is not enough attention paid to the types of privilege—or lack thereof—that individuals bring to the classroom.  Through chapters that can either stand alone or be read together, with topics such as gender, age, and colonialism (the author is the daughter of missionary parents) in second language teaching, this book seeks to address the experiences of teachers, scholars, and students as “whole persons” and to observe the workings of identity and privilege in the educational setting.

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Back Talk
Teaching Lost Selves to Speak
Joan Weimer
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Joan Weimer had spent three years researching the life of nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson for a critical biography when a devastating back injury left her virtually immobile. Pain reshaped her research as she discovered more about Woolson's writing, family, and grief. The imaginative relationship she developed with Woolson—chronicled in this heart-felt book— helped Weimer to escape her physical disability as she wrestled with the question of how to redefine herself.

In this elegant, humorous, and brutally frank memoir, Weimer's discoveries—documentative and imaginative, historical and personal—reveal much about what motivates research, and what motivates healing.
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The Evolution of College English
Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns
Thomas P. Miller
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out “four corners” of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations.


Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the “penny” press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy.  In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today.


For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature.  According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.

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front cover of English after the Fall
English after the Fall
From Literature to Textuality
Robert Scholes
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Robert Scholes’s now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from identifying where the discipline has failed to providing concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline.
With the self-assurance of a master essayist, Scholes explores the reasons for the fallen status of English and suggests a way forward. Arguing that the fall of English as a field of study is due, at least in part, to the narrow view of “literature” that prevails in English departments, Scholes charts how the historical rise of English as a field of study during the early twentieth century led to the domination of modernist notions of verbal art, ultimately restricting English studies to a narrow cannon of approved texts.
After tracing the various meanings attached to the word “literature” since the Renaissance, Scholes argues that the concept of it that currently shapes the work of English departments excludes both powerful sacred documents (from the Declaration of Independence to the Bible) and pleasurable, profane works that involve the performance of roles like those of clown and teacher in many media (including popular musicals, opera, and film)—and that both sorts of works should be studied in English courses. English after the Fall is a bold manifesto for the replacement of literature with what Scholes calls textuality—an expansive and ecumenical notion of what we read and write—as the primary object of English instruction. This concise and persuasive work is destined to become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the humanities.
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front cover of Motives For Metaphor
Motives For Metaphor
Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English
James E. Seitz
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Despite urgent calls for reform, composition, literature, and creative writing, remain territorial, competitive fields. This book imagines ways in which the three English camps can reconnect. Seitz contends that the study of metaphor can advance curriculum reform precisely because of its unusual institutional position. By pronouncing equivalence in the very face of difference, metaphor performs an irrational discursive act that takes us to the nexus of textual, social, and ideological questions that have stirred such contentious debate in recent years over the function of English studies itself. As perhaps the most radical (yet also quotidian) means by which language negotiates difference, metaphor can help us to think about the politics of identification and the curricular movements such a politics has inspired.
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front cover of The Formation of College English
The Formation of College English
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces
Thomas P. Miller
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces.  Professorships of rhetoric and belles lettres were established just as print was reaching a growing reading public and efforts were being made to standardize educated taste and usage.  The provinces saw English studies as a means to upward social mobility through cultural assimilation.  In the educational centers of England, however, the introduction of English represented a literacy crisis brought on by provincial institutions that had failed to maintain classical texts and learned languages.

Today, as rhetoric and composition have become reestablished in the humanities in  American colleges, English studies are being broadly transformed by cultural studies, community literacies, and political controversies.  Once again, English departments that are primarily departments of literature see these basic writing courses as a sign of a literacy crisis that is undermining the classics of literature.  The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.

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front cover of The Vocation of a Teacher
The Vocation of a Teacher
Rhetorical Occasions, 1967-1988
Wayne C. Booth
University of Chicago Press, 1989
This critically acclaimed collection is both a passionate celebration of teaching as a vocation and an argument for rhetoric as the center of liberal education. While Booth provides an eloquent personal account of the pleasures of teaching, he also vigorously exposes the political and economic scandals that frustrate even the most dedicated educators.

"[Booth] is unusually adept at addressing a wide variety of audiences. From deep in the heart of this academic jungle, he shows a clear eye and a firm step."—Alison Friesinger Hill, New York Times Book Review

"A cause for celebration. . . . What an uncommon man is Wayne Booth. What an uncommon book he has provided for our reflection."—James Squire, Educational Leadership

"This book stands as a vigorous reminder of the traditional virtues of the scholar-teacher."—Brian Cox, Times Literary Supplement
 
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front cover of Between Politics and Ethics
Between Politics and Ethics
Toward a Vocative History of English Studies
James N. Comas
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

For nearly twenty-five years, English studies has been focused on two terms: politics and ethics. However, the institutional emergence, development, and relationship of these two concepts have yet to be examined. Between Politics and Ethics: Toward a Vocative History of English Studies traces the development of politics and ethics in contemporary English studies, questions the current political orientation of the discipline, and proposes a rethinking of the history of English studies based on a “vocative” dimension of writing—the idea that writers form a virtual community by “calling to” and listening to other writers.

In a series of interrelated discussions, James Comas examines the historical trends leading to recent confusion regarding ethics and its relation to the politics of English studies. Through close, rhetorical readings of texts by Judith Butler, Stephen Greenblatt, Edward Said, and others, Comas argues that this confusion is largely the result of a “political turn” that resists theorizing itself. In addition, he argues that work on ethics by Wayne Booth, Geoffrey Harpham, and J. Hillis Miller reflects an uneasy dialectic between the ethics and politics of reading and writing. In response to this discord, Comas turns to the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, as well as to the examples of Georges Bataille and Kenneth Burke, and proposes a vocative approach to assessing English studies and its history. In doing so, this volume offers a thoughtful reassessment of English studies that affects our understanding of the rhetoric of disciplinary histories.
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front cover of The Professor and the Profession
The Professor and the Profession
Robert Bechtold Heilman
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.

In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.

In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.

A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.

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