Research & Innovation

Orrin Wang specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge.

Kullervo, son of Kalervo, is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters. “Hapless Kullervo,” as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural powers and a tragic destiny.
 
Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and tried three times to kill him when he was still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanōna, and the magical powers of the black dog Musti, who guards him. When Kullervo is sold into slavery he swears revenge on the magician, but he will learn that even at the point of vengeance there is no escape from the cruelest of fates.
 
Tolkien himself said that The Story of Kullervo was “the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own,” and was “a major matter in the legends of the First Age.” Tolkien’s Kullervo is the clear ancestor of Túrin Turambar, the tragic incestuous hero of The Silmarillion. Published with the author’s drafts, notes, and lecture essays on its source work, the Kalevala, The Story of Kullervo is a foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien’s invented world.

By retrospectively  analyzing  the  intersections  between  theory  and  practice, the instructors’ autoethnographic reflections explore the utility of popular culture artifacts as tools for teaching and learning writing, with an emphasis on rhetorical knowledge and transfer. Though preliminary, their  conclusions  point  to  the  potential  of  popular  culture  for  integration  into  traditional  best  practices  in  first-year writing pedagogy.

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• The book focuses on the key themes to emerge from Spivak’s work, such as ethics, literature, feminism, pedagogy, postcoloniality, violence, and war.
• Assesses Spivak’s often contentious relationship with feminist and postcolonial studies
• Considers the significance of her work for other fields, such as ethnography, history, cultural studies and philosophy.

2016-2021.

On the cover of the 2007 edition, DAVID FOSTER WALLACE avers, “No one who is invested in any kind of art … can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” JONATHAN LETHEM agrees: “Few books are such life-changers as The Gift: epiphany, in sculpted prose.” ZADIE SMITH regards Hyde’s life-changing, epiphany-dealing book as “[a] manifesto of sorts for anyone who makes art [and] cares for it.” And MARGARET ATWOOD regards The Gift as “[t]he best book I know of for talented but unacknowledged creators.” It is nothing less than “[a] masterpiece.” It’s easy to discount these endorsements. Book jackets are so frequently little more than heaps of breathless exaltation that one might regard such praise with understandable skepticism. Yet Hyde’s blurbs invite closer consideration for two reasons. First, the caliber of the writers who endorse the book is surprising.

Frederick Douglass’s fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are put side by side and consideration is given individually to their rhetorical strategies and historical moment, what emerges is a fascinating collage of Robert S. Levine’s elusive subject. The Lives of Frederick Douglass is revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.

Hobart was founded in 2001 by Aaron Burch. Initially, Hobart was a web journal, coedited by Mike McGowan.