Research & Innovation

Popularized by Donald Norman, reflective design promotes critical inquiry over usability and exploratory prototyping over fully realized productions. We highlight four projects undertaken by the authors that embody reflective design, including three that explore the crossed codes of print and electronic books. A larger aim of the essay is to position bibliotextual scholarship and pedagogy as design-oriented practices that can be used to imagine the future as well as reconstruct the past.

While it is true that American fiction has become increasingly insular and that the New York City-based publishing industry systematically fails to translate non-English works into English, I argue that critiques of the whole literary field, based on the close reading of individual texts, overlook the systemic and institutional grounds of American unworldliness. David Foster Wallace’s 2004 novella, “The Suffering Channel,” offers critics of American literary parochialism a text that is difficult to assimilate neatly into current interpretive practices. “The Suffering Channel” depicts a cast of characters who work for Style magazine in the months immediately preceding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Focused on these characters’ attempts to write a human-interest story about a man who is able to defecate perfectly formed sculptures made of shit, “The Suffering Channel” satirizes the insularity and narcissism that plagues Americans, even those who, like the interns who work at Style, imagine themselves to be cosmopolitans. Wallace also insists on the necessity of exploring that insular perspective in its own terms. Wallace’s novella invites its reader to simultaneously identify and disidentify with an unworldly American perspective and, in doing so, to create a negative map of the world. This is both a political and literary project for Wallace. At the same time that he critiques the postmodern parochialism of the US culture industries, he uses his proleptic style to force his readers into experiencing dread when encountering American consumer culture. Ultimately, Wallace takes himself to be an example of the sort of limited perspective he seeks to critique, suggesting that the solution to American unworldliness requires not individual changes in consciousness or literary habit but a wholesale transformation of US educational and cultural institutions.

This volume brings together a distinguished group of international critics, scholars, and historians that includes several of the world’s leading narrative theorists. Together, they survey many basic areas of narrative studies from an unnatural perspective: story, time, space, voice, minds, narrative levels, “realism,” nonfiction, hyperfiction, and narrative poetry. Rarely have these fundamental concepts been subjected to such an original and thoroughgoing reconceptualization. Much of the book is directed toward an investigation of experimental and antirealist work. Each essay focuses on texts and episodes that narrative theory has tended to neglect, and each provides theoretical formulations that are commensurate with such exceptional, albeit neglected, works. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative articulates and delineates the newest and most radical movement in narrative studies. This anthology will be of great interest to students and scholars of narrative studies and of the history and theory of modern fiction. Other Books by Richardson, Brian:

In Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies, author Scott Wible explores the significance and application of two of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s key language policy statements: the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy. Wible draws from a wealth of previously unavailable archived material and professional literature to offer for the first time a comprehensive examination of these policies and their legacies that continue to shape the worlds of rhetoric, politics, and composition.

Wible demonstrates the continued relevance of the CCCC’s policies, particularly their role in influencing the recent, post-9/11 emergence of a national security language policy. He discusses in depth the role the CCCC’s language policy statements can play in shaping the U.S. government’s growing awareness of the importance of foreign language education, and he offers practical discussions of the policies’ pedagogical, professional, and political implications for rhetoric and composition scholars who engage contemporary debates about the politics of linguistic diversity and language arts education in the United States. Shaping Language Policy in the U.S. reveals the numerous ways in which the CCCC language policies have usefully informed educators’ professional practices and public service and investigates how these policies can continue to guide scholars and teachers in the future.

Read more at the publisher's website.

2013 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (awarded 2012)

Williams’s once-popular autobiography chronicling his experiences as a fugitive slave and California gold miner knits together stories from the Underground Railroad with firsthand observations on Chinese labor migration and Indian resettlement in the West. This essay reads Williams’s narrative alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave its narrative shape (and to which Williams addressed his text), including California Governor John Bigler’s anti-coolieism campaign (1852), the California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Hall (1854), and the widely publicized Modoc War (1872–73). It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference honed in US race and ethnic studies to help illuminate Williams’s literary efforts to formulate an early politics of comparative racialization.

At the heart of Joshua Weiner’s new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet’s point of view with Walt Whitman’s to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC. For Weiner, Rock Creek is the location of myriad kinds of movement, streaming, and joining: personal enterprise and financial capital; national politics, murder, sex, and homelessness; the Civil War and collective history; music, spiritual awakening, personal memory, and pastoral vision. The questions that arise from the opening foundational poem inform the others in the collection, which range widely from the dramatic arrival of an uncanny charismatic totem that titles the volume to intimate reflections on family, illness, and dream visions. 

During the 18th century, American Puritans introduced migrant and enslaved Africans to the Exodus story. In contrast to the ways white Americans appropriated the texts to defend the practice of slavery, African migrants and slaves would recast the Exodus in defense of freedom and equality, creating narratives that would ultimately propel abolition and result in a wellspring of powerful writing.

Drawing on a broad collection of Afro-Atlantic authors, Rhondda Robinson Thomas shows how writers such as Absalom Jones, Daniel Coker, and W.E.B. Du Bois employed the Exodus metanarrative to ask profound, difficult questions of the African experience. These writers employed it as a literary muse, warranting, Thomas contends, that they be classified and studied as a unique literary genre. Through an arresting reading of works renowned to the largely unknown, Claiming Exodus uncovers in these writings a robust foundation for enacting political change and a stimulating picture of Africans constructing a new identity in an unfamiliar homeland.

Though consisting of only twenty-three poems, Rotary Phones and Facebook is a complex book, sure to draw criticism. This is not because it courts controversy but because the issues it deals with are too multifaceted for facile answers, and, despite the breezy surface, Eden does not try to provide answer to them. In the nature/nurture debate, she comes down on neither side, though assigning blame to both.

Troubled young men and boys scarred by their gritty surroundings animate this careful sophomore effort from Hoch (A Parade of Hands), much of it focused on the city and the blue-collar suburbs of Philadelphia, where the poet grew up. The well-handled 22-part central poem, Bobby Almand, takes its name and subject from a gruesome murder case: the titular boy becomes both hoodlum and victim, a sacrificial representative for the tough teens who run through the rest of the book—Like wild dogs, we were raised/ in packs, by packs. A wry lyric opens Stoned, I go into a gas station; an ode about playground basketball evokes The air-guitar/ player, the air-baller, half-court rim-clanger... talking trash, snatching loose balls to eclipse or evade their grim, marginal lives. Hoch's weighty, short lines suggest Linda Gregerson's, but his moods (and occasionally his allusions) instead conjure American singer-songwriters—doomed and sensitive Elliott Smith, blue-collar laureate Bruce Springsteen, whose Jersey shore territory crops up here too. Neither Hoch's scenes nor his moods seem terribly original—and yet he makes them memorable even so: a...boyhood// shotgun cocked against your head. (Publisher's Weekly)