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Ghost and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends
Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken
The Japanese have ambivalent attitudes toward death, deeply rooted in pre-Buddhist traditions. In this scholarly but accessible work, authors Iwasaka and Toelken show that everyday beliefs and customs--particularly death traditions--offer special insight into the living culture of Japan.
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Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement
Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser
An important new resource for WPA preparation courses. In Going Public, Rose and Weiser moderate a discussion of the role of the writing program vis-a-vis the engagement movement, the service learning movement, and the current interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetoric and composition. While there have been a number of publications describing service-learning and community leadership programs, most of these focus on curricular elements and address administrative issues primarily from a curricular perspective. The emphasis of Going Public is on the ways that engagement-focused programs change conceptions of WPA identity. Writing programs are typically situated at points where students make the transition from community to college or from college to community, and are already dedicated to developing literacies that are critically needed in communities. As institutions begin to include more explicit engagement with citizen and stakeholder groups as an element of their mission, writing program administrators find themselves with an opportunity to articulate ways in which writing program goals and purposes can significantly contribute to achieving these new institutional goals.
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Hammered Dulcimer
Lisa Williams
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 2, with foreward by John Hollander. Lisa William's poems are infused with what John Hollander calls "a guarded wonder." A poet of unique vision, she seems always to be "looking at," with special attention to the experience of the senses. Moreover, Williams is equally concerned with epistemology—the how of seeing. And it is perhaps this quality of attention that informs her interest in the formulations of poetry itself, in its constructed dimension. Her control of the line, of rhythmic possibilities, of structures both formal and free, is evident in every poem. Together, William's original voice and her poetic finesse allow her to create those harmonies of wonder evoked by the very instrument, the hammered dulcimer, that gives her collection its name. Judge for the 1998 May Swenson Poetry Award was John Hollander, poet, critic, professor. Long a major figure in American letters, Hollander was a personal friend to May Swenson, and has influenced the work of many of our best emerging poetic voices.
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Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore
Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie B. Thomas
Ghosts and the supernatural appear throughout modern culture, in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts. Popular media's commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from what people believe about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Belief and tradition and the popular or commercial nevertheless continually feed off each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from multiple angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously. They draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes the basis of belief in experience and the usefulness of ghost stories. And they look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. Together, they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
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Haywire
Utah State University Press
May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 10, with foreward by Edward Field. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn't fall for anything phony—his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy.... Coming from one of the ethnic, industrial cities, his work has a gritty element. He recalls all the sorrows of a life—the drunken father, the parents' divorce, his mother's death, his unremitting horniness, his own divorce—nothing special, just what we all have to deal with one way or another. And yet he ends on an almost contented note. Haywire is remarkable for being an essentially happy book, though with an ironic eye cast on such happiness while children are starving. And when he arrives at this, we're glad for him. Here, I felt, was an irresistible, not-so-easy, engaging humanness. Bilgere is a damn good poet." —Edward Field, Judge of the 2006 Swenson Award
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Healing Logics
Erika Brady
Scholars in folklore and anthropology are more directly involved in various aspects of medicine—such as medical education, clinical pastoral care, and negotiation of transcultural issues—than ever before. Old models of investigation that artificially isolated "folk medicine," "complementary and alternative medicine," and "biomedicine" as mutually exclusive have proven too limited in exploring the real-life complexities of health belief systems as they observably exist and are applied by contemporary Americans. Recent research strongly suggests that individuals construct their health belief systmes from diverse sources of authority, including community and ethnic tradition, education, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, the influence of popular media, and perception of the goals and means of formal medicine. Healing Logics explores the diversity of these belief systems and how they interact—in competing, conflicting, and sometimes remarkably congruent ways. This book contains essays by leading scholars in the field and a comprehensive bibliography of folklore and medicine.
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Hear Him Roar
Andrew Wingfield
A cougar attacks a jogger in the suburbs of a western city. Charlie Sayers, facing retirement as a wildlife biologist at a downsized state agency, is drawn into the search for the lion. He gets caught up in the conflict between wildlife habitat and an increasingly developed environment as, teetering between crisis and farce, he tries to piece together the puzzle of his own life.
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Highway 12
Christian Probasco
Highway 12 is undoubtedly one of not only America's but the world's most scenic highways. From its intersection on the west with Highway 89 south of Panguitch, Utah, it runs up through Red Canyon onto the Paunsagunt Plateau and across Bryce Canyon National Park. It then drops into the Paria River Valley, passes through several tiny villages, crosses some extraordinary (for anywhere but this region) badlands, and descends the Escalante River into Potato Valley. While a driver may justifiably feel she has seen some scenery by that point, the highway is just getting started, for in the next stretch, it crosses a labyrinth of multicolored sandstone humps and corridors, climaxed by a narrow hogback with steep slickrock drops to each side, all within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Reaching the oasis of Boulder within this desert of rock, the road then climbs across the flank of the Aquarius Plateau, providing spectacular vistas and terminating at the gateway to Capitol Reef National Park. Along the way side roads and trails access the vast wilderness of the Paria and Escalante Rivers and the high plateaus they drain. Congress acknowledged the unequaled splendor of Highway 12 by designating it one of a handful of All-American Roads. To travel with Christian Probasco this road and its spurs, which lead deep into some of the wildest, most broken-up and stunning landscapes anywhere, can put a unique twist on an already singular experience. He knows the region as well as anyone and brings an original, edgy, youthful view to it. His opinions and his language may challenge you. His approaches to and perspectives on the land may sometimes surprise you. His understanding of the area's history and its people will likely teach you a thing or two.
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High, Wide, and Handsome: The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills
Roy Webb
When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he was called the Fast Water Man. Boatmen he trained went on to found their own competing operations. Always controversial, Nevills had important critics and enemies as well as friends and supporters, but no one can dispute his tremendous impact on the history of western rivers and recreation. Nevills's complete extant journals of those river expeditions are published for the first time in High, Wide, and Handsome. They contain vivid stories and images of still untamed-by-dams rivers and canyons in the Colorado River system and elsewhere, of wild rides in wooden boats, and of the few intrepid pioneers of adventure tourism who paid Nevills so they could experience it all. They have been transcribed and edited by river historian Roy Webb, author of If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners and Call of the Colorado.
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Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education
Bronwyn T. Williams
How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. They emphasize how identity comes into play in education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession. Contributors include: James Zebroski, Patricia Harkin, Shannon Carter, Tara Pauliny, Mary Hallet, William Carpenter and Bianca Falbo, Janet Alsup, James R. Ottery, Robert Brooke, Sally Chandler, Lynn Worsham, Min-Zhan Lu
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I Heard the Old Fisherman Say: Folklore of the Texas Gulf Coast
Patrick B. Mullen
I Heard the Old Fishermen Say is both a lively collection of folk beliefs, magic belief legends, tall tales, buried treasure legends, and other folk narratives and a scholarly analysis of the context and function of these oral accounts from Texas Gulf fishermen. As such, it is an important contribution to the study if regional and occupational folklore.
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Imagined States
Luisa Del giudice and Gerald Porter
An international ensemble of folklore scholars looks at varied ways in which national and ethnic groups have traditionally and creatively used imagined states of existence-some idealizations, some demonizations-in the construction of identities for themselves and for others. Drawing on oral traditions, especially as represented in traditional ballads, broadsides, and tale collections, the contributors consider fertile landscapes of the mind where utopias overflow with bliss and abundance, stereotyped national and ethnic caricatures define the lives of "others," nostalgia glorifies home and occupation, and idealized and mythological animals serve as cultural icons and guideposts to harmonious social life.
Italian Canadian Luisa Del Giudice looks at the rich Italian variants of the traditional gastronomic utopia called Il Paese di Cuccagna, the Land of Cockaigne, "a mythic land of plenty where rivers run with 'milk and honey' (wine, beer, coffee, or rum), food falls like manna from heaven, work is banished, and no one ever grows old" and considers its persistence in immigrant worldview. From New Delhi, Sadhana Naithani examines the "preface-d space" that as India, colonial British authors imagined and passed on to readers in formulaic prefaces to collections of Indian folklore. Reimund Kvideland, of Norway, and Gerald Porter, an English scholar teaching in Finland, show how nineteenth-century Norwegian and English railway navvies (itinerant laborers) idealized their low-status occupations in song. In a second essay, Gerald Porter demonstrates through broadside ballad texts the role of caricatures of the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish in constructing "Englishness." Turks were among the "others" Germans demonized, as Tom Cheesman, who teaches in Wales, explains in his paper on their historical representations in German street ballads. Cozette Griffin-Kremer of France paints a sweeping picture of the landscape of the mind that written and popular traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales built around bovine bodies, the human-cow partnership, and the mysteries of domestication, thereby providing conceptions of transcendence of the human condition. Finally, Vaira Freibergs, a scholar and the current president of Latvia, explains the images of longing for idealized childhood homes that married women, exiled by a patrilocal culture, expressed in Latvian folksong.
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In Another Time
Harold Schindler
An illustrated collection of historical articles originally published in the Salt Lake Tribune from 1993 to 1996, In Another Time provides both an entertaining introduction to Utah and a distinguished and popular historian's summary views of the state's peculiar history. Harold Schindler is well known to readers of the Tribune as a columnist and feature writer. He is also widely respected as a historian and author, especially of the popular biography Orrin Porter Rockwell: Man of God, Son of Thunder. The essays published here come from two series he wrote for the Tribune, and they include some of the longest feature articles ever printed in that paper. Schindler prepared one series in conjunction with Utah's 1996 statehood centennial, giving readers a dramatic and kaleidoscopic overview of Utah history. During the same period and earlier, the Tribune also ran many of Schindler's more-focused sketches of specific historical figures, events, and topics. Interspersed in the book with the overview articles, these pieces recount some of the more picturesque tales from Utah's colorful past. Both formats demonstrate the wide range of the author's knowledge of little- and well-known threads in Utah's story. Schindler shows again and again, with vibrant images of the past, why readers of the Tribune and his books have come to admire his skills as a writer. In Another Time will entertain and inform newcomers seeking an introductory understanding of what has made Utah different, old hands wanting to know more about the rich complexity of the state's past, and anyone who enjoys well-told historical tales.
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Indian Self-Rule
Kenneth R. Philp
Now back in print, this important collection of first-hand accounts from individuals who had leading roles in Indian-white relations is a necessary reference for anyone interested in the modern Indian experience.
Reviewing fifty years of Indian history since the Indian Reorganization Act was passed during FDR's New Deal administration, the contributors include Indian leaders and activists from a wide cross-section of America's varied native communities.
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Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication
Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, and Richard Selfe
Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communica- tion offers a variety of activities, projects, and approaches to energize pedagogy in technical communication and to provide a constructive critique of current practice. A practical collection, the approaches recommended here are readily adaptable to a range of technological and institutional contexts, as well as being theoretically grounded and pedagogically sound. Throughout the collection, its editors and contributors demonstrate the importance of critically engaging students through creative and innovative pedagogies. Programs in technical writing, technical communication, and/or professional communication have recently grown in enrollment as the demand among employers for formally prepared technical writers and editors has grown. In response, scholarly treatments of the subject and the teaching of technical writing are also burgeoning, and the body of research and theory being published in this field is many times larger and more accessible than it was even a decade ago. Although many theoretical and disciplinary perspectives can potentially inform technical communication teaching, administration, and curriculum development, the actual influences on the field's canonical texts have traditionally come from a rather limited range of disciplines. Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication brings together a wide range of scholars/teachers to expand the existing canon. The editors and authors in this volume suggest that, for various reasons, the field has not been as flexible or open to innovation as it needs to be. Given pervasive technological and workplace changes and changing cultural attitudes, they say, new and more dynamic pedagogies in technical communication are warranted, and they are addressing this collection to that need. Contributing authors include a number of scholars with a strong record of work in composition, technical writing, professional communication, and allied areas (e.g., Selfe, Wahlstrom, Kalmbach, Duin, Hansen), who deliver a variety of approaches that are grounded in current theory and represent pedagogical creativity and innovation.
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Jack London on the Road The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings
Richard W. Etulain
For twenty years after returning form the road, Jack London wrote sporadically about his life as a hobo, illustrating not only the impact of these experiences on his life and thought, but the cultural and intellectual changes occurring throughout America at the turn of the century.
Jack London on the Road is a collection of the writer's shorter works about his tramp days, with an insightful analysis and notes by historian Richard Etulain.
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Japanese Demon Lore
Noriko T. Reider
Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism, they also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctivly gendered social and cultural meanings.
Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, They remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reiderýs book is the first in English devoted to oni. Reider fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as "others" to the Japanese.
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Jesus in America
Claudia Gould
Claudia Gould draws on fieldwork she conducted, as an anthropologist, in North Carolina, where she earlier spent large parts of her childhood, among a net of paternal relations. From that ethnography and from lifelong observation, she crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist Christian belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them pull us into the complicated, variable core of religious experience among southern American Christians. Jesus in America, a perceptive work rich with cultural insight, is a singular addition to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction.
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Junius and Joseph: Presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet
Robert S. Wicks and Fred R. Foister
"Junius and Joseph examines Joseph Smith's nearly forgotten [1844] presidential bid, the events leading up to his assassination on June 27, 1844, and the tangled aftermath of the tragic incident. It... establishes that Joseph Smith's murder, rather than being the deadly outcome of a spontaneous mob uprising, was in fact a carefully planned military-style execution. It is now possible to identify many of the key individuals engaged in planning his assassination as well as those who took part in the assault on Carthage jail. And furthermore, this study presents incontrovertible evidence that the effort to remove the Mormon leader from power and influence extended well beyond Hancock County [Illinois] (and included prominent Whig politicians as well as the Democratic governor of the state), thereby transforming his death from an impulsive act by local vigilantes into a political assassination sanctioned by some of the most powerful men in Illinois. The circumstances surrounding Joseph Smith's death also serve to highlight the often unrecognized truth that a full understanding of early Mormon history can be gained only when considered in the context of events taking place in American society as a whole." Beginning with this provocative thesis from the introduction, Wicks and Foister engage in a thorough reexamination of Joseph Smith's 1844 presidential candidacy, its political context and implications, and its probable connection to his murder. While their work asserts controversial conclusions about what and who were behind that murder, its import extends further since it provides unprecedented, detailed portraits of political Mormonism, politics in 1844 Illinois and the Midwest, the web of connections and personalities that linked the two, and the events of June 27. ---Book Review can be found in: The Western Historical Quarterly Winter 2006, by: Stephen C. Taysom.
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Keywords in Creative Writing
Wendy Bishop and David Starkey
Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience. Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. This approach makes the book ideal for the college classroom, and unique in the field, combining the pragmatic accessibility of popular writer's handbooks, with a wider, more scholarly vision of theory and research.
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Landscape of Desire: Identity and Nature in Utah's Canyon Country
Greg Gordon
Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.
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Landscaping on the New Frontier: Waterwise Design for the Intermountain West
Susan E. Meyer, Roger K. Kjelgren, Darrel G. Morrison, and William A. Varga
A practical volume for the home or business owner on landscaping with native, drought-tolerant plants in the Rocky Mountain West. Filled with color illustrations, photos, and design sketches, over 100 native species are described, while practical tips on landscape design, water-wise irrigation, and keeping down the weeds are provided. In this book you will learn how to use natural landscapes to inspire your own designed landscape--around your business or home and yard. Included are design principles, practical ideas, and strong examples of what some homeowners have already done to convert traditional "bluegrass" landscapes into ones that are more expressive of the West. Landscaping on the New Frontier also offers an approach to irrigation that minimizes the use of supplemental water yet ensures the survival of plants during unusually dry periods. You will learn how to combine ecological principles with design principles to create beautiful home landscapes that require only minimal resources to maintain. In the Mountain West, a place of rugged terrain and long-term droughts, it is time for a new kind of pioneering. Rather than continuing to mimic the moist English garden in our home landscapes--and spend substantial resources on maintenance--it's time to celebrate the unique attributes of where we live. Landscaping on the New Frontier will show you how to create a striking home or office landscape that reflects the place we live, in both its roughness and it subtleties. Your starting point, your inspiration, lies in the rich array of plants, patterns and process around us: on the mountainsides, in the deserts, salt flats and canyons, in the valleys and along the meandering streams.
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Leave the Dishes in the Sink: Adventures of an Activist in Conservative Utah
Alison Comish Thorne
Alison Thorne provides a small-town Utah perspective on the progressive social movements that in the mid to late twentieth century dramatically affected American society. A born activist, Thorne has fought for women's rights, educational reform in public schools and universities, the environment, peace, and the war on poverty. Her efforts have been all the more challenging because of the conservative social and cultural environment in which she has undertaken them. Yet, Thorne, who has deep personal and familial roots in the politically conservative and predominantly Mormon culture of Utah and much of the West, has worked well with people with varied political and social perspectives and agendas. She has been able to establish effective coalitions in contexts that seem inherently hostile. She demonstrated this through her election to the local school board and through her appointment by both Republican and Democratic governors, eventually as chair, to the statewide Governor's Committee on the Status of Women. Alison Thorne's background prepared her to challenge restrictive social contexts, see the broader picture, and encourage progressive change. Educated in the field of consumption economics, which studies those aspects of consumption that operate outside the market system, especially government services and unpaid household production, primarily by women, she received a Ph.D. in economics after graduate study at the University of Chicago and Iowa State, a first for a woman at the latter. Moving with her husband after he was hired at Utah State University, she soon discovered that her education and abilities were undervalued and that tight nepotism rules kept her out of an academic position. She devoted herself to research and writing about alternatives to the narrow definitions of a housewife's role and duties prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. Both her scholarly work and her personal inclinations prepared her for the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Her participation in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment honed her skills as an activist, which she applied to multiple other causes. But Alison Thorne's style has never been mere protest of injustice; she has always been fully engaged with her communities, directly working for social change and betterment. Rather than be discouraged by initial rejection, she found ways to contribute to education on the USU campus, eventually achieved academic standing, and helped create women's studies programs and a women's center. She met other challenges in her city and state similarly, by taking her gloves off, reaching out to others, building coalitions, and getting to work.
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Listening for a Life
Patricia Sawin
In one sense a folklorist's portrayal of a notable folk artist's life and art, Listening for a Life is equally a rethinking of the processes involved in such work, not only in how the folklorist conveys her subject but in how her subject constitutes and performs herself into being through dialogue with others: those present, those once present, those imagined and anticipated.
Drawing on Bahktinian and feminist theory, Sawin pushes forward our understanding of the interactive roles of ethnographer and subject and in the process gives us a deeper understanding of folk singer and storyteller Bessie Eldreth and her greatest art, herself.
