This collection features books and book contributions written by faculty in the Department of English at Fairfield University.
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The Jukebox Queen of Malta
Nicholas Rinaldi
The Jukebox Queen of Malta is an exquisite and enchanting novel of love and war set on an island perilously balanced between what is real and what is not. It's 1942 and Rocco Raven, an intrepid auto mechanic turned corporal from Brooklyn, has arrived in Malta, a Mediterranean island of Neolithic caves, Copper Age temples, and fortresses. The island is under siege, full of smoke and rubble, caught in the magnesium glare of German and Italian bombs. But nothing is as it seems on Malta. Rocco's living quarters are a brothel; his commanding officer has a genius for turning the war's misfortunes into personal profit; and the Maltese people, astonishingly, testify to the resiliency of the human spirit. When Rocco meets the beautiful and ethereal Melita, who delivers the jukeboxes her cousin builds out of shattered debris, they are drawn to each other by an immediate passion. And, it is their full-blown affair that at once liberates and imprisons Rocco on the island. In this mesmerizing novel, music and bombs, war and romance, the jukebox and the gun exist in arresting counterpoint in a story that is a profound and deeply moving exploration of the redemptive powers of love. – Publisher description.
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Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820-1885
Elizabeth A. Petrino
Book description: An interdisciplinary examination of the poet, her milieu, and the ways she and her contemporaries freed their work from cultural limitations. For many years, Emily Dickinson's cryptic verse was viewed as an isolated phenomenon, the poet herself an enigma whose motivations and influences were shrouded in mystery. Eschewing such stereotypes, Elizabeth A. Petrino places the Belle of Amherst within the context of other nineteenth-century women poets and examines the feminist implications of their work. Dickinson and contemporaries like Lydia Sigourney, Louisa May Alcott, and Helen Hunt Jackson developed in their writing a rhetoric of duplicity that enabled them to question conventional values but still maintain the propriety necessary to achieve publication. To demonstrate these strategies, Petrino examines both Dickinson's poetry and a range of "women's" genres, from the child elegy to the discourse of flowers. She also enlists contemporary magazines, unpublished professional correspondence, even gravestone inscriptions and posthumous paintings of children to explain what Petrino calls the most significant fact of Dickinson's literary biography, her decision not to publish. In the end, we see how, "these poets create a kind of cultural palimpsest, writing and rewriting central tropes about death, marriage and motherhood, and the power and function of consolatory verse, barely visible under the erasures of literary history. Set against a new and recently recovered tradition of female verse writing, Dickinson's central place in the canon and her position as a consummate artist are clearly affirmed."
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Freedom’s Just Another Word
Whitney Scott and Sonya Huber
Sonya Huber is a contributing author, "Breath."
Book description: Third in the "black and white" series, this is a richly textured mosaic of fiction, poetry and essays from authors across the nation and the world. The writings in this collection celebrate and question freedom and its responsibilities —challenge our concepts about "being free" and making choices—show us prisoners of war, of governmental policy, of societal prejudice, of jealousy and greed, of lies and laws and memories—and those who have made their way to freedom.
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Sharing Pedagogies: Students and Teachers Respond to English Curricula
Gail Tayko, John Tassoni, C. Ann Ott, Elizabeth H. Boquet, and C. Mark Hurlbert
Elizabeth Boquet, with C. Ann Ott and C. Mark Hurlbert, is a contributing author, “Dinner at the Classroom Restaurant: Shared Pedagogies in a Graduate Seminar.”
Book description: This is a book about the passion, risk, and promise of sharing power in the classroom. It is a quest for something students and teachers need and may yet win: a culture of democratic authority in our classrooms. The essays collected here show students and teachers reconstructing power relations by asking: Who has the right to speak in the classroom? Whose voices, what content, and which processes should be deployed? How can we overcome entrenched teacher-talk? It addresses one of the central concerns of democratic teaching: Where does subject matter come from and what do we do with it to become empowered, critical, and more humane?
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Literacy and computers: The complications of teaching and learning with technology
Susan Hilligoss, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Betsy Bowen
Betsy Bowen is a contributing author, “Telecommunications networks: Expanding the contexts for literacy”, pp. 113-129.
Book description: Computers, this collection of essays suggests, are transforming texts, language, and literacy itself. In easy-to-understand language, Literacy and Computers discusses computer-related issues within several larger contexts: the politics, social implications, and economics of literacy education; the roles of authors and readers; the nature of interpretation and subjectivity; and the ways in which human beings construct meaning. The first three parts of the volume examine: how computers have become part of the classroom; how electronic networks function as tools for reading, writing, and interpreting texts; how hypertext, a specialized genre of computer programs, relates to traditional notions of text. The fourth part pulls together the multiple voices of the previous contributions and urges readers to venture beyond early studies of computers in composition classrooms.
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Hearing Ourselves Think: Cognitive Research in the College Writing Classroom
Ann M. Penrose, Barbara M. Sitko, and Betsy Bowen
Betsy Bowen is a contributing author, "Using conferences to support the writing process", pp. 188-200.
Book description: In Hearing Ourselves Think, cognitive process research moves from the laboratory to the college classroom, where its rich research tradition continues and an important new set of instructional approaches emerges. Each chapter moves from research results to classroom action, providing a direct and important link between research, theory, and practice. The book develops the concept of the research-based classroom in which students actively examine the processes and contexts of reading and writing and then turn their observations into principles for practice. Hearing Ourselves Think contributes to a lively new tradition of socio-cognitive research in writing and reading, exploring the dynamics of cognitive processes as they interact with dimensions of the academic context.
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Students Teaching/Teachers Learning
Amanda Branscombe, Dixie Goswami, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Betsy Bowen
Betsy Bowen is a contributing author, "Student teachers as researchers: Response", pp. 293-295.
Book description: This book focuses on shared inquiry. The research projects detailed in these chapters show how classroom dynamics change and more active learning takes place for both teacher and student when collaboration is involved. The projects here range from elementary through graduate school in both rural and urban, public and private settings.
Section One, "Students Teaching," raises questions about what happens when students and teachers share authority in and out of the classroom, empowering each other with the kind of authentic learning that can't be measured on standardized tests. As students become more responsible for how as well as what they learn, a bond of negotiation and trust is formed with the teacher. Expertise is no longer the sole domain of the teacher, but is shared by all as student voices are not only encouraged but respected. The projects include an account of the emergent curriculum in an elementary school in Vermont, students as teachers in a foreign language class in Greece, students as co-researchers on a telecommunications project in Pittsburgh, community research in Kentucky, student-sustained discussion, cross-age tutoring, and a follow-up study ten years later of a former student co-researcher.
Section Two, "Teachers Learning," focuses on teachers who have been changed by listening to their students. As in the first section, the roles of student and teacher are not easily defined. When teachers learn in these chapters, contradictions and problems are examined, not ignored. This is teacher research extended beyond the lonely office of the solitary instructor. The projects include a university school collaboration in urban Michigan, portfolio assessment, learning through talk in teacher preparation, and cross- visitation among teachers in the Philadelphia public schools.
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Plain Language: Principles and Practice
Erwin Steinberg, Betsy Bowen, and Thomas Duffy
Betsy Bowen (with Thomas Duffy and Erwin Steinberg) is a contributing author, "Analyzing the various approaches of the Plain Language laws", pp. 19-28.
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Collaboration through writing and reading: Exploring possibilities
Anne Haas Dyson, A. Rosebery, L. Flower, B. Warren, Betsy Bowen, B. Bruce, Ann Penrose, and M. Kantz
Betsy Bowen (with A. Rosebery, L. Flower, B. Warren, B. Bruce, M. Kantz & Ann Penrose ) is a contributing author, "The problem-solving processes of readers and writers: Similarities and differences", pp. 136-163.
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Word Processing in a Community of Writers: An Introduction to Composition
John Elder, Betsy Bowen, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Dixie Goswami
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The Lüftwaffe in Chaos: Poems
Nicholas Rinaldi
Author’s note: I was quite young, still in elementary school, during World War II, but I do have vivid memories. My cousin Mario was in the army, and we exchanged letters often. I recall the time when he was caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, that long, horrific struggle when the German army made a fierce attempt to turn back the allied armies that were heading for Germany. It lasted about a month and a half, and I remember how I rushed home after school hours, eager for the latest radio reports. Mario survived that battle, and he survived the war. But many, some who had lived in the neighborhood where I grew up, never returned. Throughout the war, our local movie house usually showed a brief News-of-the-World report before the feature film. I remember the hissing and booing whenever the face of Hitler appeared on screen. And the awesome silence, the sense of horror, when we saw images of the concentration-camp victims, the living and the dead, filmed when American soldiers reached the camps and liberated those who were still alive. More than half a century has gone by since those terrible times, yet I’m quite aware that some of the scenes in The Lüftwaffe in Chaos will be difficult for those who lost relatives during Hitler’s violent persecution of the Jews. My intention, in writing these poems, was not to add to anyone’s grief, but to contribute, in the small way that poetry can, toward the prevention of such horrors in the future. More than a century ago, George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Or, as others say, those who forget the devils of the past, are condemned to fall victim to the devils of the present.
