MUsings - The Graduate Journal for Made in Millersville Spring 2021

MUsings THE GRADUATE JOURNAL Made In Millersville EDITION

SPRING 2021

SPRING 2021

Welcome from the Dean Welcome to Millersville University’s Spring 2021 edition of MUsings: The Graduate Journal. Our journal continues to be a creative and scholarly outlet for our graduate students as they explore unique topics and share their expertise with a broad audience of peers, the wider Millersville community, and the academic disciplines represented by our graduate students.

PUBLISHER James A. Delle, PhD, Dean College of Graduate Studies and Adult Learning Millersville University Millersville, PA GRADUATE EDITORS Skyler Gibbon, English William N. Artz, Jr., English Hayley Billet, English

This edition of MUsings once again shows the high quality of intellectual inquiry of our student authors. I applaud each of them for having the confidence to publish their work in these pages. The process of sharing results of research and creative work is a critical part of becoming a professional.

GRAPHIC DESIGN Cheryl Lockley, University Marketing

I am particularly impressed with the resilience our graduate students have shown during this difficult year. Many graduate students are working adults who must balance their studies with their professional and family obligations. Work-life balance presents challenge for students pursuing graduate studies in the best of times. The Covid-19 pandemic has added many layers of complexity to our daily lives. The articles published in The Graduate Journal serve as evidence of the excellent work our graduate students continue to complete even in the face of these unprecedented challenges.

DIGITAL DESIGN Kelly Herr, University Marketing PUBLICATIONS COORDINATOR Cindy Darin, Graduate Studies ADVISORY BOARD Jill Craven, English Leslie Gates, Art and Design Krista Higham, Library Katarzyna Jakubiak, English Lucie Lehr, Graduate Studies Janice Moore, Graduate Studies Marilyn Parrish, Library A. Nicole Pfannenstiel, English Michele Santamaria, Library Yufeng Zhang, English

Despite the difficulties we have all faced this year, our dedicated students and faculty continue to make graduate studies a vibrant part of Millersville life. For those moving on to careers and more advanced study, this publication will be the first step in your journey toward success.

I offer my sincere appreciation to the faculty, student editors, and all of our nowpublished authors who contributed to this edition of MUsings. The College of Graduate Studies and Adult Learning is fortunate to have so many talented people committed to expanding the opportunities for graduate student research.

FOUNDING EDITOR Joyce Anderson, English

Be EPPIIC,

MUsings: The Graduate Journal is available online at blogs.millersville.edu/musings/

James A. Delle, PhD Dean, College of Graduate Studies and Adult Learning Associate Provost for Academic Administration

MAILING ADDRESS MUsings: The Graduate Journal College of Graduate Studies and Adult Learning Millersville University P.O. Box 1002 Millersville, PA 17551-0302 All rights reserved. 2021 ISSN 2475-9449

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MUsings THE GRADUATE JOURNAL Made In Millersville EDITION

We Are Family: Growing Up in an Interracial Family | CHELSEA BORROR-MASTANDREA | A Social Problem and Policy Exploration of Housing Discrimination | CHANNEL LOWERY |

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Duras (re)Naissance | WILLIAM N. ARTZ, JR. | Living Memory | SKYLER GIBBON |

20 26 34 36 42 46 52

Advocating for Foster Care Youth in Higher Education | ABBY GABNER, ASHLY DUIN, JOSEFA HERNANDEZ, DANIELLE HORNUNG, AND DANIELLE MCFADIEN | Counter-Discourse in Native American Literacy Practices | CLARK FENNIMORE | The Hat Closet: A Reflection on Nursing Education | JUSTIN MCFAIL | A Social Perspective of Constructed Languages | CLARK FENNIMORE | Signs of Weakness in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 | KRISTY DANIEL |

The Paradox of Female Agency in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Novels | TERESA BONDS |

Non-Traditional Learning: Video Games for Teaching Reading | RACHEL WISNOM |

ON THE COVER Image Credit: “I’m Okay With Being Alone” by Lily Klos. Media: Acrylic Paint on Canvas.

Lily is a graduate student in the Master of Art Education Program and completed the requirements for K-12 certification in art in Spring of 2021. This piece was in response to an art-making prompt in one of her courses about Intangible Losses.

ISSN 2475-9449 (print) ISSN 2475-9457 (online)

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WE ARE FAMILY: Growing Up in an Interracial Family

BY CHELSEA BORROR-MASTANDREA

I was born in 1991, 27 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed in the United States. Being born into a family with two black grandfathers, a black uncle, and numerous black cousins, I never considered them different than me (a very pale white woman). We are family. It wasn’t until I took a course on American Ethnic Literature that I ever really thought, especially when thinking of my maternal grandfather, that he could have been treated in a way similar to Richard Henry in Blues for Mister Charlie having lived before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. Living within an interracial family, much of the tensions of race relations were irrelevant and moot because we were family.

In Blues for Mister Charlie, while the focus is on the killing of Richard, there are hints of the tensions and the taboo nature of interracial relationships. In Act II, the antagonist, Lyle, his wife, Jo, and a family friend, Parnell, are discussing the acceptability of ‘race-mixing,’ as a minor character expresses it: Two distinct attitudes emerge because of this.

Parnell: Ladies and gentlemen, do you think anybody gives a good goddamn who you sleep with? You can go down to the swamps and couple with the snakes, for all I care, or for all anybody else cares. You may find that the snakes don’t want you, but that’s a problem for you and the snakes to work out, and it might prove astonishingly simple - the working out of the problem, I mean. I’ve never said a word about race-mixing. I’ve talked about social justice.

Lilliam: That sounds Communistic to me! (Baldwin 54) These two attitudes - who cares who sleeps with who and how could anyone even suggest white and blacks sleep together - were prevalent throughout the United States well into my own lifetime, with nearly 2/3 of the non-black adult population stating in 1990 that they would be upset if a family member engaged in a relationship with a black person (Livingston 14). Such attitudes are distinctly American in that other nations were much quicker to accept the reality of interracial relationships, which Baldwin again uses Parnell to point out when speaking about his time at college when he mentions an African prince and how he had “Swiss women, Danish women, English women, Finns, Russians, even a couple of Americans” (Baldwin 59). The women of the story are appalled that any self-respecting woman would sleep with a black man. Likewise, Jo is later disgusted at the allegation that her husband had an affair with a young black woman, and possibly slept with many other black women, before they were married. Yet it is not only that he had an affair, but that he could have loved a black woman in a way that he has never loved her.

The acceptance (or lack thereof ) of interracial relationships has often been seen as a status exchange of a Marxist nature. “Highly educated blacks would trade their educational status in order to reap the benefits associated with the racial status of a potential white spouse. Similarly, whites with low levels of education would trade their racial status for the educational status of a potential black spouse” (Gullickson 3). While another theory asserts that higher education levels lead to a greater acceptance of interracial relationships due to a greater support and understanding of racial equality.

Colloquially, it is thought that white people are often more against interracial relationships, stemming from such tropes as seen in Blues for Mister Charlie in which Jo claims she was being raped by Richard (the black man raping the helpless Southern woman) and stereotypes and stigmas perpetuated by historical facts such as “whites anxiously defended the segregation of neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and other social settings” (Doering 561). The statistics have shown, though, that overall the opposition of interracial marriage had dropped to 14% by 2016 (Livingston 14), it is still generally disapproved of by the black community, with “black women still regard[ing] intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the race” (Doering 559). The betrayal is ancestral and a reminder of white aggression towards the black community and the oppression of the black race. An interracial relationship is an affront to black nationalism and standing African-Amer-

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WE ARE FAMILY: Growing Up in an Interracial Family

ican discourse, which views “sexual acts as perverse when they do not serve the purpose of reproducing a homogenous (sexually and racially) nation” (Dunning 96).

In my experience and from speaking with various members of my own interracial family, I have found that as Child’s asserted in her book Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds “Black-white couples come together across the boundaries of race and perceived racial differences seemingly against the opposition of their communities” (109). As a whole, we’ve traversed through discrimination from both the white and black communities to be a collective and cohesive whole.

DADDY: A SHORT STORY One of the most vivid memories I have of my father: I was sitting on the living room floor, only a little girl about 3 years old or so. The carpet under my legs was a faded orange turning to brown from the small, sticky lump between my legs.

My mama had brought me the lump to say goodbye. It was my baby sister. She was smaller than even my tiniest baby doll, covered in tiny, white hairs all over her body, and wet from the blood of birth when mama lost her.

It’s funny how when you’re a little kid, it doesn’t seem like goodbye holding a baby that was never rightly born - it doesn’t seem anything at all. But I knew I should be sad, because all the fantasies I had about having a playmate, best friend, and sister got flushed down the toilet my baby sister fell into after mama pulled her out of her body.

My father came into the room, and I remember being able to smell him as soon as he entered the room. The hot, stale smell of beer that radiates off a person who drinks from sunup to sundown.

“Why you crying, girl?” he slurred to me, seeing the tears falling down my cheeks and onto my dead baby sister crumpled up on the floor.

“I’m afraid when you’re done with Mama, you’re gonna start on me.” I can hear my small voice uttering words no child should ever think let alone speak aloud. And to someone who’s supposed to protect you from harm and love you unconditionally. That night, lying in bed, I could hear him screaming at my mama while red and blue lights danced through my window and onto my bedroom wall. They almost looked like I could dance to them, but I could only creep under my blanket wishing my bed would collapse into a hole I could escape into. My eyes were closed so tightly as I burrowed down deep in my bed that I could see little stars flying around the inside of my eyelids. I prayed he wasn’t coming for me next. When the lights disappeared the house was quiet, except for mama’s weeping. That’s about all I remember of my father. His temper. His shouts. His smell. And the way he made mama weep.

Mama did give me a baby sister later. One I got to play with and fight with the way sisters do. She doesn’t remember our father. When my sister, Stacey, was still very young, Mama loaded us into the car in the middle of the night. My father was lying on the couch, looking dead, but I could hear him snoring. The last thing I remember of leaving that night was his stale smell leaving my nostrils and honeysuckle entering them. That’s all I could smell as we left Virginia. To this day, it’s one of my favorite scents - it smells like freedom and emerging happiness. Mama drove us to Pennsylvania. That’s where we grew up - right outside of Philadelphia.

When I was five, I met a man with dark chocolate skin and a voice as deep as he was tall. He towered over my short, five-year-old body. His hair was almost as black as his skin, but he was missing some of it in the middle and he had big 1970’s style glasses, just like mine. I liked that. He didn’t say much, but when he did, he hardly moved his mouth. When he laughed, though, you could hear it all the way down the block - almost like Santa Claus (he had a little belly that even shook as if he were Santa). I’d never seen a man as dark as him before when we lived in Virginia. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a man that looked like him and definitely not holding my mama’s hand. I also couldn’t remember seeing mama smile like that. Mama didn’t weep anymore once we lived in Pennsylvania.

One day, mama brought this man to meet Pop pop, and I don’t think Pop pop liked him very much. He was an old man of German stock and grew up in a time when people mama wouldn’t dare hold the hand of a man with dark skin.

And if they tried to, they were likely to be shot on the spot. Or worse. Before we left, Pop pop said to mama as he hugged her to leave “You know, Susan, some men won’t want to date you now that you’ve been with a black man. You’ve ruined your chances of a good marriage to a good man by dating him.” Mama looked at her father, kissed his cheek, and we went home.

But Pop pop wasn’t as unhappy as when the man took us to meet his family - I remember the very first time he took us to Philly to meet them. He and one of his sisters were in the kitchen and I heard her say, “We don’t want nothin’ to do with those white girls, Butch.” My sister and I were the only white girls in the house, so it wasn’t hard to figure out who she was talking about even though I was only six. I couldn’t understand what we had done wrong. Then I heard him say, in maybe the clearest voice I’d ever heard him speak in, M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 5

WE ARE FAMILY: Growing Up in an Interracial Family

“These girls are my daughters now, and my baby is going to be their brother or sister.” He sounded angry, but I didn’t really hear his anger. All I heard was that I was going to be a big sister again. And I had a daddy again.

I shuffled away from the kitchen as I heard someone’s footsteps walking towards the living room where my sister and I and the other kids were supposed to be playing. The other kids didn’t seem to mind us, which made it even harder to understand why their mama didn’t want anything to do with us. Children don’t understand the nuances of skin color or why it should make a difference. We should all be more like children. An old man walked out of the kitchen. He looked like my daddy, but he wasn’t as dark as daddy. I could feel his eyes looking at me, but I didn’t dare meet them with my own after what I had just heard. I felt almost scared and exposed - his eyes were like ants crawling on my skin. The seconds crept by with him staring at me, and then he leaned down, looked me square in the eyes, and pulled me close.

“Girl, I’m gonna have to teach you how to box. If you are gonna be part of this family, you are gonna need to learn how to protect yourself.” He wrapped his arms around me and it didn’t feel like the embrace of someone who didn’t want anything to do with me. Looking back on it, I think he was tired of the hate. Tired of the anger. Tired of the fighting. His arms felt like my mama’s or my daddy’s. I felt like he wanted to be my Grandpop Brown. And he was.

There were only a few times I met him, but he was the one who taught me to throw a punch. At the time, I thought that was just his way of getting to know me - to spend time with his new granddaughter in his own way. Grandpop Brown knew the hate and the anger I would face.

Later that year, I got one of the best early Christmas presents any little girl could ever receive - my baby brother, BJ. After he was born, my Pop pop wasn’t so angry. He loved his “Brown Bomber” and I think he had started to love my daddy, too. Something about that little boy made the disdain for my daddy melt away. Daddy’s brother, Uncle Ranger, and his sister, Aunt Lucy, loved us just like the other nieces and nephews. I learned how to braid hair (which would come in handy one day when I had a daughter of my own) and double dutch (no one on the playground was better than me) with them on the weekends. We were a family.

In 1980, on Christmas Eve flurries fell from the sky leaving a trace of snow on the sidewalk. That day, mama and daddy got married and a few weeks later, we went to the courthouse. The wood paneled walls smelled like stale cigarettes and must. It was like nothing good had ever happened in there and the sun never got a chance to shed its cleansing, warm light. But that day, even though it was freezing cold outside and the snow was falling down, there was a warmth and hope radiating from our love. For the past two years, I had called this dark-skinned man my daddy, but that day, he really became my daddy. My sister and I went from Herrings to Browns. We never felt like we were different. We were a family.

Our family moved to a new house in an Italian neighborhood in Darby, a suburb right outside of Philly. One night, I woke up to the same dancing lights I had seen years ago when Mama and I still lived in Virginia. And for a moment, I thought I could smell my father again, but it was something different. And there was something else in the lights, aside from the blue and red flickering like a disco ball, there was a golden-orange glow illuminating the entire room. Smoke.

That was the smell. I wasn’t scared like before when I hid under my blankets. Instead, I got out of my bed, feeling the cold floor shiver along my bare feet, up my legs all the way to the back of my neck. Walking over to the window, I could feel the creeping of the cold continue to encompass my heart, but I didn’t know why until I could see outside onto our front lawn.

Glaring in my face was a white cross, maybe 7 or 8 feet tall. It was on fire. Burning its image into my mind. For the first time, I understood what Grandpop Brown meant when he said I’d need to be able to protect myself. I opened my window to hear what the policemen were saying to mama and daddy, and as I did, another car pulled up. It had a small blinking light on the dash, but it was black as the night - unmarked. A tall, black man got out of the car, and fixed his police cap on his head before coming up the front walk. He stopped and stared at the cross, and to this day, I swear I saw a tear well in his eyes, and I could hear him clear his throat before continuing toward our house. Time has faded the entire conversation, but I remember him telling mama and daddy not to call the news station.

When I was a teenager, maybe 12 or 13, I remember asking mama why he would do that. Why wouldn’t the police chief (let alone a black man) not want people to know a hate crime had taken place? Didn’t he care?

“It would have been worse for us, Katie,” mama told me. And it would have. Things weren’t so bad when we were little.

Growing up has a way of taking away innocence and exposing the dark depths of humanity.

Our family did what all families did in the 1980’s - we went to see all the Star Wars movies together, we went to the roller rink, we would walk around the mall together on Friday nights - we were normal. On one Friday night, mama, Stacey, BJ, and I were at the mall together. BJ and I were looking at cassettes - I wanted Madonna. “Papa Don’t Preach” was one of my favorite songs. BJ was by my side pretending he knew what he was looking at as he flipped through the cassettes in the trays when a white boy about his age walked up to him.

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WE ARE FAMILY: Growing Up in an Interracial Family

“Are you adopted? Why is your skin so much darker than your mom’s?” he asked. I don’t think he meant much by it.

He couldn’t have been any older than 7. The innocence of children often doesn’t account for social niceties and what is considered acceptable conversation.

“No, that’s my mama. And this is my sister,” BJ answered him, sure of himself and sure of our family. Sometimes we would go to parties for someone’s birthday, or a barbeque, or a wedding. After a Fourth of July barbeque one summer, I overheard mama ask daddy why he was always so reserved at parties (not that daddy was overly outgoing to begin with). Every time I’m in a large crowd or at a party, I remember his response.

“Do you remember when we went to my dad’s funeral, and you felt out of place because most of the people there were black? That’s how I feel almost everywhere we go. Most of the places we go, most of the people are white, so I feel out of place.”

Being in the suburbs, all three of us children would walk to school. I was the oldest, then Stacey, then BJ. My sister and I were as pale as the moon - we would burn simply walking to and from school some days if the sun was just right. My brother was a caramel color brown. Most days when we would walk to school, the other kids would yell things at us. It got to the point that my sister wouldn’t walk with us anymore. Some days, my brother would come home crying because someone called him an “Oreo” or called me a “Niggerlover.” Some days, I would come home bruised up from a fight after chasing down those bigoted kids. Those were the days I was thankful Grandpop Brown taught me how to box, and those were the days I understood the most the words he had said to me the first time I met him. And when I finally got home after defending my brother, I swear I could feel Grandpop Brown’s arms around me one more time.

By the time I was 16, I thought my days of fighting and arguing were over. I fell in love with a boy with a mullet, Confederate flag on his guitar, and a grandma from the deep South proud of her family’s part in the War of Northern Aggression. I shouldn’t have been surprised when his family had reservations. One day, his grandfather drove over to the house while he was working on one of his AMC Hornet in the driveway. He pulled him inside the house and I stayed outside, but I could hear his grandfather yelling, “You can’t date her. Her dad’s a nigger.” For all his short-comings, the boy of my dreams didn’t care about what kind of family I came from.

It didn’t change the way they felt though. A few years later, when his mom remarried, we couldn’t attend the wedding for fear that our young daughter would mention that Mom Mom had married a black man. But maybe we laid the foundation for openness and acceptance. When my daughter’s father’s cousin had a child with a black man, she never got the visit we got. There were no threats. Their daughter was welcomed into the family. And at Christmas, his mom’s husband was welcome to sit at the dinner table. As the 1990’s progressed not only did their mentalities fade into acceptance, so did the rest of the world’s. I was able to raise my daughter in an interracial family. She didn’t know most of the events of this story until she began writing a paper for a graduate class. We’ve spoken about her experiences in an interracial family - having grandparents, and cousins, aunts and uncles who are black - and she never thought about it.

They were simply family.

WORKS CITED Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie. Dial Press, 1964.

Childs, Erica Chito. Navigating Interracial Borders. [Electronic Resource] :

Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds. Rutgers University Press, 2005. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05821a&AN=ecp.

EBC977461&authtype=sso&custid=s3915890&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Doering Jan. “A Battleground of Identity : Racial Formation and the African American Discourse on Interracial Marriage.” Social Problems, vol. 61, no. 4, 2014, p. 559. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1525/sp.2014.13017.

Dunning, Stefanie. “Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same Sexuality in James Baldwin’s ‘Another Country.’” MELUS, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, pp. 95–112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3185543. Accessed 8 May 2020.

Gullickson, Aaron. “Education and Black-White Interracial Marriage.” Demography, vol. 43, no. 4, 2006, p. 673. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.4137212&authtype =sso&custid=s3915890&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Livingston, Gretchen. “Intermarriage, 50 Years On.” Contexts, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017, p. 13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.26370581&authtype =sso&custid=s3915890&site=eds-live&scope=site.

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A SOCIAL PROBLEM and

Policy Exploration of Housing Discrimination

BY CHANNEL L. LOWERY ABSTRACT This policy exploration looks at the historical, political, and societal cultural factors that have contributed to the issue of housing discrimination in the United States of America. By reviewing changes in policies over the 20th century and the shift in the social climate of the United States, reasons why housing discrimination continues to persist can be better understood.

Keywords: Housing discrimination, policy.

INTRODUCTION Food, water, shelter, and clothing have long been described as basic needs of humans. In the United States, all individuals having equal access to fair and affordable housing is something that has been debated for decades. Housing discrimination is not something that is necessarily looked at as specifically as a social problem in the same way the former mentioned items have been, but it can be link to other social problems such as homelessness, access to quality education, unemployment, crime and poverty. This paper will explore and analyze housing discrimination as a social problem from a historical policy standpoint while also investigating how this problem has been constructed by our society. Important policies will be discussed as well as informal attempts to address this issue in society to gain a clearer understanding of this social issue.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HOUSING DISCRIMINATION Housing discrimination is when someone is prevented or discouraged from buying or renting housing based on their race, religion, color, sexual orientation, national origin, sex, family status or disability (HUD, 2020). One of the most significant legislative attempts to deal with this issue has been the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Along with many other civil rights legislations that were passed at that time, it was used to formally ban the action discrimination. In a report that was released in 2008 by the National Commission on Housing and Equal

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Opportunity entitled The Future of Fair Housing, it is clear that housing discrimination is still a large issue in this country, as the report points out that there are more than 4 million fair housing violations each year (p.7).

This issue has its roots in a complex web of decisions that were made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to control certain groups within the population. An excerpt below highlights some important findings: “…some local governments have used the zoning power delegated by state governments to indirectly control who may live within their boundaries. There has been a consistent pattern of exclusionary zoning and land use decisions that have been barriers to the building of affordable housing in predominantly White neighborhoods…thus effectively excluding African Americans and Latinos from living in certain neighborhoods or even entire communities.” (p. 10) Being prevented from obtaining housing has been a practice happening in the United States for some time dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During this time in history several significant events were taking place that lead to the persistence of discriminatory housing practices. Trattner (1999) points out in his work that between 1860 and 1900 almost fourteen million immigrants came to the United States.

Urbanization was taking place in major cities in the US and more people were moving into major cities.

By the year 1920, one half of American’s lived in cities (Trattner, 1999). During this time, most of the immigrant population was also living in cities doing unskilled labor jobs and living in crowded and deplorable conditions. As unskilled workers, most immigrants could barely afford their housing based on the low wages they were being paid. Restrictive covenants-agreements between whites that they would only sell or rent to other whites that were in verbal and or written-also restricted the ability of immigrants to live in certain places and made metropolitan areas very segregated by racial and cultural groups (Molina, 2017).

A SOCIAL PROBLEM and Policy Exploration of Housing Discrimination ARTICLE Title

Another major event during this time period was the ending of slavery. In 1865 the 13th amendment was passed that outlawed slavery in the US. As a result of this many former slaves who once lived on their owner’s plantation found themselves without shelter. Many decided to migrate to the northern and western states where they could possibly find jobs in the unskilled labor market like people who were immigrating from other countries outside the US (Baker, 2013). The Great Migration led to more blacks living in urban areas dealing with the effects of horrible living conditions, segregation, and discrimination not only in housing but also in the labor market as well. In response to this and other related factors, the fair housing movement started in 1940’s in communities all over the nation to advocate for open housing.

The main goals of this movement were to end discriminatory practices and work to integrate communities so they there would be integrated living patterns (Goetz, 2018). It is important to note that during this movement the racial segregation and discrimination of people of color were commonplace in society and was not an issue that was affecting most people that controlled the nation at that time; thus, it was of little importance on a large scale. The Jim Crow laws of the south, black codes and even the Federal Housing Administration supported the idea of people living in segregated areas as something that was not only preferable but safer. Some of the issues were the types of appalling conditions people of color and immigrants were being exposed to, differences in educational opportunities, poverty and other things due to the differential treatment that was taking place (Baker, 2013; Goetz, 2018; Molina, 2017).

It is important to note that other groups have and do face discrimination in housing because of their status in this country. Same sex couples, women, women with children, people with mental or physical disabilities, interracial couples, and people in poverty have all faced housing discrimination and been subject to unequal treatment (Blake, 2013; Fair Housing Report, 2008). The historical significance of this issue seemed to be most pressing during the civil rights era although it was always a concern for the groups affected by it. With the combination of media and globalization taking place it became more of an addressable concern than it had been in previous years, although the change that has taken place has been debated.

To get a better idea of society’s overall view and disposition towards different minority groups, we need to take a historical perspective and look at some of the commonly held beliefs related to integration. After slavery was abolished, there were many whites who felt that blacks were not equal to whites given that they had been previously owned by them. This idea permeated

in the southern parts of the US and led not only to discrimination but also violence and terrorism by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Immigrants that were moving into parts of the US faced similar ideologies as Molina (2017), points out in her work, referencing that the racist reaction became so strong in the public opinion, immigration policy was changed and less immigrants were allowed to come into the US. With these ideas of public opinion in mind, the next portion of this paper will explore historical policies related to housing discrimination.

HISTORICAL POLICY EXPLORATION OF HOUSING DISCRIMINATION The Great Depression had ravaging consequences on the housing and rental market in general. Housing policies that were a result of the New Deal program were geared towards helping Americans during these difficult economic times. In 1934, Congress established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) (HUD, 2020).

The FHA along with the Homeowners Loan Corporation that was established one year prior, worked together to assist people with obtaining mortgage loans and establishing a standard for lending practices.

The Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual that was produced to help people in charge of making these decisions includes language that suggest that racial and ethnic minorities should not live in the same areas. (FHA Underwriting Manual, 1938).

Money was directed towards mainly new suburban white neighborhoods and excluded integrated, older, urban, and predominantly black neighborhoods. The rationale behind this was that the latter mentioned neighborhoods were seen as risky and inherently unstable (Molina, 2017). This would set the industry standard and lead to the use of practices such as redlining and create numerous barriers for minority groups looking to purchase homes.

In a response the Civil Rights movement and advocacy efforts led by groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), National Committee Against Discrimination is Housing (NCDH), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Goetz, 2018). This legislation outlawed most housing discrimination based on race, color, sex, disability, familial status, or national origin. It also introduced enforcement mechanisms that would penalize these actions (HUD, 2020).

Although the law was passed, the racial and economic segregation persisted in communities all across the U.S. The public response to this and other civil rights legislation that was passed ranged from violent protest and cities being burned to white residents moving out M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 9

A SOCIAL PROBLEM and Policy Exploration of Housing Discrimination

of their neighborhoods that were becoming open to racial minorities-a termed called “white flight.” Another response was the breaking up of the New Deal Coalition (Goetz, 2018). Within advocacy groups there became a difference in interpretation related to the important goals of the fair housing movement due to the legislation.

Some groups felt that integration needed to be the main focus while other groups felt that equal access to housing was more important (Goetz, 2018).

Thirty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Public housing reform was presented through the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 by President Bill Clinton (Karger & Stoesz, 2013; HUD, 2020). Some of the main goals of this program were to reduce poverty in public housing, raising performance standards in public housing agencies and protecting access to public housing to the poorest families. Programs that followed such as the Moving to Opportunity program and public housing demolition sought to deal with the issue of segregation but were met with resistance from communities. People that were displaced often moved to other segregated neighborhoods as a result (Karger & Stoesz, 2013; Goetz, 2018).

In conclusion, policy efforts have been made to answer the call of advocacy groups that have been fighting against housing discrimination for decades.

The Fair Housing Act was the most cited of these legislative efforts and has set a precedent for how we discuss the issue of housing discrimination. The roots of this problem as presented in this paper are lodged in the historical geographic changing of this country’s citizens and have proven to have deep roots. The National Commission on Housing and Equal Opportunity’s report, The Future of Fair Housing, shows that although this country has made strides to correct its mistakes, we still have a long way to go. The relevance of public opinion cannot be ignored and has been shown to historically influence legislative outcomes and efforts.

Considering all these factors, housing discrimination in the United States will continue to be a battle that should be fought.

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REFERENCES Baker, B. E., & Kelly, B. (2013). After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South. University Press of Florida.

Blake, M. (2013). Housing Discrimination Research: Racial and Ethnic Minorities and Same-sex Couples. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. Bonastia, C. (2008). Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs.

Princeton University Press.

Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and Valuation Procedure Under Title II of the National Housing Act with Revisions to April 1, 1936 (Washington, D.C.), Part II, Section 2, Rating of Location Goetz, E. G. (2018). The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities. Cornell University Press.

HUD History/U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): HUD.gov / U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hud.gov/about/hud_history Karger, H.J. & Stoesz, D. (2013). American social welfare policy: A pluralist approach (Brief ed.). Boston: Allyn& Bacon.

Kimble, J. (2007). Insuring Inequality: The Role of the Federal Housing Administration in the Urban Ghettoization of African Americans. Law & Social Inquiry, 32(2), 399–434. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4465.2007.00064.x Molina, E. T. (2017). Housing America: Issues and Debates: Vol. 1 Edition. Routledge.

Silverman, R., & Patterson, K. (2011). Fair and affordable housing in the U.S [electronic resource]: Trends, outcomes, future directions / edited by Robert Mark Silverman, Kelly L. Patterson. (Studies in critical social sciences; v. 33).

Leiden; Boston: Brill.

The Future of Fair Housing: Report of National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. (n.d.) (pp. 1–99).

Trattner, W. (1999). From poor law to welfare state: A history of social welfare in America. New York, NY: The Free Press.

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DURAS (re) NAISSANCE

BY WILLIAM N. ARTZ, JR. This is an introduction of Marguerite Duras. Who was Marguerite Duras? What was Marguerite Duras?

How was Marguerite Duras? Marguerite Duras was, is, and will forever be a Writer¹, par excellence. This current study on Marguerite Duras, is the culmination of nine graduate credit hours of work, investigation, argument, bafflement, misunderstanding, illumination.

It was clear, from the very beginning, that this would be a quagmire, and a maelstrom of some density, by orders of magnitude. Like any good philosophic examination, however, the answers are within the asking of the questions, not in actual answers. Yet, this is not an exercise, exclusively, on Durassian philosophy. It is any number of things, akin to a notion Michel Foucault gave in an interview at the University of Vermont, in 1982. The interviewer, Martin Rux, asked Foucault about all of the categories used when someone tries to give Foucault an identity, e.g, Marxist, Structuralist, Historian, and so on. Foucault responded, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am” (Rux 9).

As it is, in essence, with Duras. Duras is Duras. It really is no more complicated than that, and difficult to further implicate. The study of Duras is not founded on some obtuse mathematical formulae, for example, because of that Duras is both misunderstood and classified as something Duras is not. I will, however, add at this point, rather briefly, the following: my approach is transdisciplinary in nature, and it is a way of having a fresh understanding through the history of ideas, intellectual history, philosophy, philology, sociology, pedagogy, digital pedagogy. It is very much a holistic approach to the way, in essence, Duras understood her œuvre, and its evolution.

As an aside, the following does not go without some explication, given the conclusive nature of this study. The thoughts and arguments herein, on Marguerite Duras, are no different than if I were giving these ideas and notions to a group of Duras scholars.

As the meaning of Duras, is not the same understanding for those who study Duras, and for those who only

experience the literary aspects of Duras. There is very much an affordance aspect to Durassian scholarship, and that is always reflected by those who write about Duras, and those who knew Duras AND write about Duras.

From Laure Adler, Jean Vallier, Dominique Noguez, Didier Éribon, Édouard Louis, Gilles Philippe, Patti Smith, Ocean Vuong, to name but a few, top literary figures and scholars, whose works reflect Duras. If I were writing this essay for the aforementioned, I would change nothing. This is MY understanding of Duras, this is MY interest in Duras, this is MY research on Duras. Any errata and lacunae are indeed my own.

There is a multimodal aspect to Duras, most especially because Duras, is a mode in and of herself. Duras is not autobiography, Duras is within each of her texts, because Duras is a part of the text, her life is a text, her life is the text. It did not end, the reworking of the text, the (re)fashioning of the text took place, until her death 3 March 1996.

Through an investigation of the way in which Duras understood technê, of writing: It is possible to affront this notion in a clear and precise manner; attempting, therefore, possible answers to the aforementioned inquiries. This is both a writing exercise, and an excursus, as well. An essay, that is a means of an ultimate assessment and progression for a given class. An excursus, in that it should give further detail as to the study on Marguerite Duras qua Writer, and that given output, i.e., Writing.

It is, therefore, an exercise that has a two-fold purpose; it is about a very specific topic, around which the “I” qua researcher, must argue, both objectively and subjectively. More than any of this, however, it is about a writer. A writer who has had a profound influence on my life, from many different perspectives, Duras. Again, why Duras?

My interest in Marguerite Duras started very early on in my life as a college student, after watching the

Duras is less concerned about structure/syntax/grammar than she is about actual words, there is the word, and the sentence then builds itself around that word; writer qua Writer, upper-case ‘w’ Writer.

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film Hiroshima mon amour, I did everything in my power to get in upper-division French classes, as a freshman, to continue with my interest in Duras. During the time in which I was studying in France, I read L’Amant, and it was everything that I had hoped it would be, and more. I left France in 1986, and as an area of study, I picked up L’Amant, again, and thought about Duras.

During my work as an instructional designer, I would generally spend some two months a year in France, and it afforded me the chance to pick up any number of books, in some of my favorite bookshops in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Strasbourg. As a result, I was able to get the complete works of Duras, and now Duras, my Pierre, is the foundation upon which I hope to build my thesis and advance a research regimen².

To go back to the affordance aspects of Duras, I am reminded of a very recent work by Peter Khost, there is a quote Khost uses from the French philosopher/ literary theorist/structuralist Roland Barthes. This is Barthes, as quoted and translated in Khost, Khost’s epigraph, to his recent work in toto: “Has it ever happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?” - Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Khost 3) Even though there is, thus, an intrinsic connection within (en deçà)³ literature of reader/writer, for the purposes of this Durassian study, I will mainly be focusing mostly on writing. On writing as discussed/argued/ formed during a specific timeframe, in an academic setting. Some of these ideas will appear to be very familiar given previous studies, but these are all (re) current themes that are worth (re)stating, and rehashing, in a sense. The aforementioned words of Barthes are, however, of what reading/writing is comprised, all of which needs further elucidation.

I must add, this is not a thesis defense. It is an introduction to Marguerite Duras, and I argue that one needs to know Duras, to know Duras. What does that even mean? In lieu of a very length and robust introduction to my thesis, this introduction will be expanded into a presentation for my thesis committee, in order to better hone, what will become an introductory chapter of my thesis. It will have any number of

uses, such as part of a dissertation, a presentation at a professional academic conference, an article published in a professional academic journal. It is just not one set exercise, it is indeed part and parcel of my current research interests, and variants thereof and therein.

How does one study Duras? What does it mean to study Duras?

The Face of Duras – La Photographie absolue that became L’Amant – Le visage de Duras Un jour, j’étais âgée déjà, dans le hall d’un lieu public, un homme est venu vers moi. Il s’est fait connaître et il m’a dit : « Je vous connais depuis toujours. Tout le monde dit que vous étiez belle lorsque vous étiez jeune, je suis venu pour vous dire que pour moi je vous trouve plus belle maintenant que lorsque vous étiez jeune, j’aimais moins votre visage de jeune femme que celui que vous avez maintenant, dévasté. » The opening words/paragraph of L’Amant, Duras at the true apex of her career, some 12 years later – the ultimate end of l’œuvre Duras. An opening that is both classic and iconic, an example of what Writer ought be. Though prose, it is both lyric and poetic, truly only prose Marguerite Duras could have written. My translation, in English, is as follows: One day, I was already old, in the hall of a public place, a man comes toward me. He introduced himself and he said to me: “I’ve known you forever. Everyone says you were very beautiful when you were young, I have come to tell you that for me I find you prettier now than when you were young, I like less your face of young girl, than that which you have now, devastated/destroyed.”

[Essay’s author translation] In the first version of the manuscript of L’Amant, Duras claims this man was, “[the] brother of Jacque Prévert, in the hallways of [a] television [station].” It was, obviously, changed in the final version of the manuscript that was published, as noted in the third volume of the complete works of Marguerite Duras, published by Gallimard, in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition (Endnote 1; 1868-69).

Too, at this point, briefly, it is important to mention the name Yann Andréa.⁴ It is with Yann Andréa, that Duras really starts trying to understand Desire, not just

Given Duras research and scholarship this type of explication is needed, and not a mere aside.

The idea of (en deçà) is in opposition to the (au-delà), i.e., outside/beyond. These are, in French, literary/metaphorical terms, and terms that Roland Barthes uses to his great advantage in trying to get at meaning and truth in writing, as closely as is possible..

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Yann Andréa né Lemée was the companion of Duras, from 1980, until her death in 1996. Yann Lemée was not a bisexual, he was very much a homosexual who lived with Duras, and he continued having homosexual affairs during the time in which he was with Duras.

There is ample, textual, evidence of this. The entire story of Yann Andréa is important for the later Duras, but not appropriate at this juncture on writing. Did Duras and Yann Andréa have an intimate relationship? Does it matter?

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erotic Desire, but a true level of Desire.

I will be focusing on L’Amant and Hiroshima mon amour, the film, and subsequent text published by Duras. Both of these are central to Duras as a whole, as all of her work, is inextricably linked. These two works, however, were foundational in making Duras, Duras.

This is a way of giving some structure to a formal discussion on Duras. The class was a rigorous and detailed understanding of Marguerite Duras, qua introduction to further research of Duras and her œuvre.

There is no one heuristic device that is fundamentally key in approaching Duras. One might study her alphabetically, chronologically, intertextually, philosophically, psychologically, rhetorically, ad infinitum, it is very much, par excellence, a holistic approach.

Marguerite Duras did not write from an angle, there was (is) no hidden agenda, within Duras, any number of researchers have looked for one. Which is not to give the impression that her work was not both political and revolutionary, it was. But again, what do we want from literature?

The story in Hiroshima mon amour, is exactly what one finds in L’Amant, some 30 years later, a love story of an illicit coming together, both stories are so multifaceted, yet linked. This is a way to (re)focus, through comparative literature coupled with rhetorical theory, and is a way of broadening the scope of my fundamental need/hope/wish/intention to wed the investigation of literature and writing. What is Durassian Style?

Bernard Pivot, the host of the televised literary program Apostrophes⁵, on 28 September 1984, interviewed Marguerite Duras in a live on-air, one-on-one format, episode. It was an interview that became iconic, even the day after its initial broadcast, as Marguerite Duras had not, at the time, given any type of interview in about ten years. What was even more notable, Duras was the only guest, and the program lasted some ten minutes over the allotted time. It was an important moment in the literary history of the twentieth-century France, and in the œuvre of Duras.

The chief editor and director, Jérôme Lindon, of the publishing house Minuit, with whom Marguerite

Duras published many of her works, including L’amant the work that was awarded the Prix Goncourt, stated, “L’effet d’Apostrophes fut foudroyant . . . [i]l avait été precede par un tir de barrage de la presse écrite qui, unanimement, reconnaissait le livre comme un événement,” as quoted in Laure Adler’s biography Marguerite Duras, from an interview Adler did with Lindon (787).⁶ Again, the voice of Duras is the voice of Duras. As Mourier-Casile begins her review of Duras on Apostrophes, she claims, I am quoting this as an indentation, as it deserves to be apart from the actual text of this paper, and to also lend credence to/give evidence of, the importance of Durassian voice: Il y a la voix. D’abord. Oui, bon, je sais : << Ah ! la voix de Duras . . .>> (161) There is the voice. First [it is difficult to render d’abord in English, it is as much performative, as it is textual/literal/written]. Yes, good, I know : “Ah ! the voice of Duras.” [Essay’s author translation] It is truly difficult to explicate the verve, the profound depth of these words.

The interview was a Durassian text, a text of Duras

by Duras. It truly is not possible to put too much stress on the fact that this episode of Apostrophes was truly foundational in the last decade in the (writing) life of Marguerite Duras. For the purposes of this essay, however, this is where Duras made mention of the fact, on national television, that she, Marguerite Duras, did not think [Jean-Paul] Sartre was a writer. Duras called Sartre a moralist, and was depreciative in her tone, and in following up, that what she was saying, about Sartre, was not a value judgment. Pivot was talking with Duras about her style and form, Duras reminded Pivot that she had actually given (renseignements⁷) on writing, literally had given ideas and information. In due course, what Duras meant in saying Sartre was not a writer will certainly need further elucidation. What is a Writer? What is a Durassian Writer?

In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre was selected to receive The Nobel Prize in Literature, for his contributions to philosophy AND literature. Though he declined the prize, reasons for which are not relevant to this particular exercise, the Nobel committee considered Sartre

Apostrophes was a literary program that lasted 15 years, and amounted to some 724 episodes, consisting of prominent literary figures to those involved in politics and writing. It was broadcast every Friday night at 9:30 p.m., from 1975 through 1990, and was always live. This program consistently had a viewing audience of over 400,000 each week; the Duras interview brought that total to three million. Duras gave this interview, just after her novel L’Amant, was first released. I am only focusing on her statements on Sartre in this current essay, from the interview. This is information taken from Le Monde, and Bernard Pivot interviews, where he specifically talks about his encounter with Duras. In an expanded study, there would obviously referential specifics.

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It is not clear if the interview Laure Adler had with Jérôme Lindon, was both in writing, and orally. I will translate the quote from Lindon, here, but note the use of the passé simple form of the irregular verb être, the passé simple is exclusively a literary tense, in French. “The effect of Apostrophes was explosive/stunning . . . it had been preceded by a barrage of articles from the written press that, unilaterally, recognized the book to be an (important) event.” [Essay’s author translation] 7 This word has a lot of philosophical baggage, that would be vital to investigate in a more in-depth study.

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a pre-eminent writer. Sartre even wrote specifically about literature and writing; how was it possible then, some 20 years later, Marguerite Duras could argue that Sartre was not a writer?

Even though Duras was still unable to define what writing actually was. Duras would say more than once, that she once thought she knew what writing was, but in all actuality, she claimed she did not. Duras would argue, and continued to argue, until her death in March of 1996, that she did not know what writing was. For a French writer to always argue this, especially a writer who had been writing since 1943, to continually contend that she did not know what writing actually was, was both very important, and very problematic. It was, however, emblematic of Duras.

The Durassian style is quick, precise, just, something that Pivot understood, and about which Duras talked at length. It is asyndetic, in that it is not connected by conjunctions, comprised of meaningful silences and lacunae. Duras is famous for doing that, to conveying ideas very quickly. It is a writing that goes beyond even either surrealism, or the nouveau roman.

There is something to unpack here, again, in that Duras talking about not knowing what writing actually is, it is literary, as much as it is philosophic. Not philosophic in the sense of Sartre, but in the sense of Duras.

It was notable that Duras, at the apex of her career as writer, would always maintain the question about writing? What is writing? Duras would always claim that she did not know. Again, how could a writer of this caliber and import make such a statement, yet at the same time, argue what a writer was not: Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre did not know of what, according to Duras, pure writing was comprised. Though Duras still claimed not to know what writing really was either, for Duras it was “a funny thing, writing.” True writing, what Duras understands as pure writing is something from which a Writer is unable to get away, to extract oneself, from writing. As odd as this sounds, it is Duras. At the very beginning of the interview with Pivot, Duras says the following: C’est un peu gênant. Ça a duré dix ans le silence autour de moi. Il y a un réflexe de suite qui se produit. (qtd. in Marguerite Duras 787 – quote taken from the actual interview with Bernard Pivot) It’s a bit embarrassing/awkward. This has lasted ten years, the silence about (around) me (a silence around which I am in the midst). There is a reflex that follows, which takes place. [Essay’s author translation]

What is remarkable/noteworthy here, is again, Duras talking in round numbers, everything is always ten years, that goes outside of writing. Duras spent ten years doing mostly theatre, and then ten years doing mostly film, until she went back to what she was supposed to be doing, and that was writing texts. Like with Barthes, as aforementioned, there are oddities and confusions with Duras, that occur. Yet more evidence, why one needs to know Duras, to study Duras.

To understand her voice, and to hear her voice, as aforementioned.

There are some Durassian scholars that understand the work of Duras to have a level of philosophical intrigue, and that is notable. It is key to continually (re) search the idea of Writer, a way of doing a continuing study of a very complex enterprise. It is akin to philosopher always looking for answers to theories of truth. There is no definitive answer, the answer is in the search, in investigating new and novel ways at considering, in this instance, writing.

There is an importance here, and the reason for what appears to be repetition, in that Duras does not proclaim some authoritative notion about writing.

What Duras does not claim is a definitive answer to the question about writing. Duras would never make any grand and universal claims about either writing or literature. This is one of the main reasons why I find it hard to argue the claim that what Duras was doing was nothing but a performance. Duras was very aware that it was impossible to have one without the other. This was also the reason for so much vitriol against Duras, if Duras was really écrivaine, then how is it possible for her not to have any notion about writing? Durassian silences are performative, because Duras is not able to actually write. It is certainly a position one could take.

As opposed to giving a specific definition of writing, again, what Duras did was demonstrative of her penchant toward philosophy. Writing is so fundamental, so basic, so elemental, that one must always question and search anew of what this enterprise writing is comprised. It is a question that is au-delà, as explicated above, a French word that is usually translated as ‘beyond,’ in English, but is really a beyond-ness, an idea/ notion that is not attainable, in a sense. The idea I have been trying to convey here is that Duras was not being authoritative, as I had mentioned previously. What is Writing? It truly means so much more in claiming that one is not really sure, than arguing for a very specific definition of writing and the act of writing. This, at first blush, appears simplistic, but it is not, by any means.

For Duras, there is an ever exhaustive (re)search for what writing is actually comprised, there is, again, this beyond-ness. Such that Duras knows what a writer is not, a writer is confronted/affronted/blinded by words, M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 15

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and in discussing style Marguerite Duras always talks about how words actually move through her. In doing this, actually, a Writer neither worries about style, audience, nor even the way so-called rhetorical devices are to serve as means of inspiration.

Toward the end of the interview Bernard Pivot asks Duras why she drinks: Pivot: Pourquoi buvez-vous? (Why do you drink?)

Duras: On boit parce que Dieu n’existe pas. (One drinks because God does not exist.)⁸ This was big, this is big. On national television, a close friend of the president of the French republic François Mitterrand, to admit that she [a woman] was an alcoholic, to the point she had been hospitalized, was something. It is not performative Duras, it IS Duras.

There is, in a sense, a continuity with the way in which I wrote this particular exercise; there are neither specific sections, nor specific classifications, that are generally used as boundaries and limits on language. Each area could be used as a study in and of itself, either on Marguerite Duras qua Writer, or about Marguerite Duras and her œuvre. Using Duras as the foundation to my research, in general terms, allows a certain level of both boundless freedom, and limitless growth, in many novel ways.

In understanding Duras, one quickly realizes a prominent leitmotiv, that starts in 1943, with her first work qua Marguerite Duras, Les Impudents, that stretches all the way through the Durassian œuvre until the ultimate, and final ending. Death. It is, interestingly enough, an idea of a little girl who wanted to write books; who was afraid, afraid of death; afraid of writing. Always, always, always, questioning writing, out of an interest, and an immense fear of writing. It is the main reason why Duras reworked all of the texts she wrote, because it is all the same text. Everything is linked. It is actually possible to tug on the leitmotiv, as if it were a string, in any given text/film/play. It is also something that leads many astray in trying to both explicate and understand Duras. Is it possible? Again, yes, to know Duras is to know Duras. Hence, the main tenet of my thesis. Of what does this actually entail?

It is a commonly held notion that, to approach Duras, one needs to know Duras, as trite as that may appear at first blush, it is very much a necessary statement. It is, therefore, my intention to briefly

explain, in this exercise, both the nature and the need of Durassian study, and how it might be expanded in further detail, in an investigation on writing. A few initial questions, again, are in order: What is a Writer, as opposed to just a writer? Is there a notable difference?

What if the question is considered from the French perspective of écrivain(e)/écriture? What makes this study Durassian? All of these questions, to evoke an Occidental understanding of writing, though limiting, that is both rhetorically and philosophically interesting. This is to invoke, an historical perspective, that is part of the writing process, the technê.

Barthes argues the following, in Le degré zéro de l’écriture, “[l]a diversité des langages fonctionne donc comme une Nécessité, et c’est pour cela qu’elle fonde un tragique” “Diversity of languages functions, thus/ therefore, like a Necessity, it’s for that (reason) it (the diversity/a Necessity) founds a tragic (tragedy) [Essay’s author translation] (59). Working with a text from Barthes does not come without its complexities and confusions. There is some ambiguity as to what the pronoun “elle” refers, as both “diversité” and “nécessité” are feminine, the only difference is “diversité”, here, is a concept, and used with the definite article, whereas “nécessité” is a concept, but here a noun, with the indefinite article.

I use Barthes, though obtuse, as a means of demonstration to evoke the focus on an Occidental understanding of writing, and in essence, literature.

The main point, without some sort of detailed focus on a language, it is possible to look at the concept of writing. Looking at the philosophy of writing, for the purposes of my research, in Occident. It is, more specifically, an investigation of writing through comparisons in French literature, and in English literature.

This specificity is needed, in order to avoid making assumptions, about a given culture, which is, by its very nature non-evidence based, hence anathema. A notion about which one needs be concerned, even/especially in rhetorical studies AND literary analyses. This is a notion, certainly worth further investigation.

A quote from Henri Michaux, that will set the proverbial stage for the successful completion of this exercise: “Qui cache son fou meurt sans voix.” ⁹“Who hides one’s crazy dies without voice” [Essay’s author translation] (Mourier-Casile 161). The voice of Duras is the voice of Duras, there is a more detailed explication below. This is something that is as literal, as it is

This quote is in French, as well, it is a key element in the life of Duras. There is an ethos here, in that Duras is making reference to God, an idea/example of occidental thought. This quote is a WNA transcription from the video of the interview, and WNA translation.

This merits further study.

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I use the full quote from Michaux, in French, because it is key in many different respects. Mourier-Casile begins her article with this quote, and then describing the sound of Duras speaking; it is the voice of Duras, that is the voice of Duras. The article, too, came out in December of 1984, and Michaux died in October of 1984, but most importantly, Michaux was a poet, whose work, like that of Duras, is unclassifiable. The use of Henri Michaux in this context is nothing less than monumental, as trite as that might at first blush appear.

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figurative in either hearing, or reading, or watching Marguerite Duras. The sound of Duras speaking (the voice of Duras), is as important as the voice Duras uses in her written texts. To hear Duras, is to affront Duras, knowingly. One has to know Duras, to study Duras.

What Duras did was not performative, per se, and a key reason as to why Duras should only ever be truly understood in French, i.e., read in French, listened to in French, seen in French. Translation, though key and foundational, is not of my present concern, but would certainly be needed in a more detailed investigation.

Suffice it to argue, at this point, there is a lyricism in Duras, there are silences in Duras, there IS Duras, and one is unable to translate that in any meaningful and robust way. Écrire/Écriture/Écrivain(e) encompasses so much more, than mere words, and that is the point, especially for a Writer like Marguerite Duras. Writing is a way in which, one who Writes, must lead/drag along

their solitary lives. A writing life, lived in parallel to the vulgar¹0 expression of “real” life, whatever that may mean.

Duras re(Naissance), a rebirth and new beginning.

A new of looking at Duras, and considering along the way, what we want from Literature, and what we want Literature to do. What is Durassian Writing? It is that Orphic gaze. That solitude. There is, however, an intrinsic maleness in writing, and it is certainly something against which Marguerite Duras fought, and against which it is necessary to always combat. It is beyond the simple idea of the evils of patriarchy, in that it [maleness in writing], goes either undetected, or assimilated.

Hence, the need for continued diligent work in rhetoric AND literature. A work that is truly at the avant-garde, in the strictest sense of that word, battling at the very front. That, that is Marguerite Duras.

WORKS CITED¹¹ Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras. Paris, Gallimard, 1998.

Allen, Joseph R. “The Babel Fallacy: When Translation Does not Matter.” Cultural Critique, vol. 102., Winter 2019, pp.

117-150. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/717523. Accessed 17 May 2019.

Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture, suivi de

Nouveaux essais critiques. Paris, Seuil, 1953, 1972.

---. “Le Plaisir du texte.” 1973. Roland Barthes Œuvres complètes, new edition reviewed, corrected, and presented by Éric Marty, vol. IV, Paris, Seuil, 2002, pp. 217-64. V vols.

---. “Fragments d’un discours amoureux.” 1977. Roland Barthes

Œuvres complètes, new edition reviewed, corrected, and presented by Éric Marty, vol. V, Paris, Seuil, 2002, pp. 26-296.

V vols.

Blanchot, Maurice. L’espace littéraire. Paris, Gallimard, 1955.

Breton, André. Manifestes du surréalisme. Gallimard, Paris, 1962.

Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris, Minuit, 1967.

Duras, Marguerite. “Des journées entières dans les arbres.”

1968. Marguerite Duras Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp. 833-885. IV vols.

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “Écrire.” 1993. Marguerite Duras Œuvres complètes, edited

by Gilles Philippe, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, pp.

839-906. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “Écrire.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 6-7. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/esp.1990.0014. Accessed 25 November 2018.

---. “Hiroshima mon amour.” 1960. Marguerite Duras

Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp. 1-76. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Duras, Marguerite, screenplay and dialogue. Hiroshima

10

mon amour. Janus Films, 1959. Directed by Alain Resnais, The Criterion Collection, 2015.

---. “La Douleur.” 1985. Marguerite Duras Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, pp.

1-129. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “L’Amant.” 1984. Marguerite Duras Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. III, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, pp.

1453-1525. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “L’Amant de la Chine du Nord.” 1991. Marguerite Duras

Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, pp. 589-751. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein.” 1964. Marguerite Duras

Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp. 285-388. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “Les Yeux bleus cheveaux noirs.” 1986. Marguerite Duras

Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, pp. 213-288. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. “Moderato Cantabile.” 1958. Marguerite Duras Œuvres

complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp. 1203-1258. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

---. ““The Thing.” entretien au Gai Pied, 1980.” Yagg, notre histoire, 22 Jan 2015, p. 2. yagg.com/2015/01/22/margueriteduras-the-thing-entretien-au-gai-pied-1980. Accessed 25 November 2018.

---. “Un barrage contre le Pacifique.” 1950. Marguerite Duras

Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp. 279-490. IV vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of

In the true sense of the word, i.e., common, a derivative of the Latin vulgate.

This Works Cited section is also bibliographic in nature, as there are works, herein listed, from which I do not take direct citations.

This section also gives the impression of being either padded, or reference-heavy. Without the foundational texts I use, that are referential in nature, my research would be constructed on a less than sturdy base. Either Works Cited or Bibliography, would be solely an editorial decision, for the purposes of this study I use, obviously, Works Cited. All of the works cited within are of importance and needed.

11

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the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin et al., U. of Mass Press, 1988, pp. 16-49.

---. “The Political Technology of Individuals.” Technologies of

the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin et al., U. of Mass Press, 1988, pp. 145-62.

---. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon, 1984, 101-120.

Khost, Peter H. Rhetor Response: A Theory and Practice

of Literary Affordance. PDF ed., Utah State UP, 2018. doi:10.7330/9781607327769. Purchased 22 December 2018.

Labre, Chantal. “L’Amant by Marguerite Duras.” Review of L’Amant. Esprit, vol. 96, no. 12, December 1984, pp.

175-77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24270316.

Accessed 2 March 2019.

Lucey, Michael. “The Contexts of Marguerite Duras’s Homophobia.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol. 19, no.3, 2013, pp. 341-379. Project Muse, doi:10.1214/10642684-2074530. Accessed 25 November 2018.

Mailloux, Steven. Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of

English, Speech, and Composition. Modern Language Association of America, 2006.

“Marguerite Duras.” Interviewed by Bernard Pivot. Apostrophes, hosted and presented by Bernard Pivot, Antenne 2 – France, 28 September 1984. Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, www.ina.fr. Accessed 4 March 2019.

Martin, Rux. “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin et al., U. of Mass Press, 1988, pp. 9-15.

Mourier-Casile, Pascaline. “Que je vous dise . . .” Regarding the interview of Marguerite Duras by Bernard Pivot on “Apostrophes” 28 September [1984]. Esprit, vol. 96, no. 12, December 1984, pp. 161-62. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24270309. Accessed 2 March 2019.

Philippe, Gilles. “Marguerite Duras, un nouvel art de la prose.”

Preface. Marguerite Duras Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, pp. IX-XLII. IV vols.

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? 1948. Preface

by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, Paris, Gallimard, 2008.

Searle, John R. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the

Real World. Basic Books, 1998.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. U. of California Press, 1990.

Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

Vallier, Jean. C’était Marguerite Duras: 1914 – 1945. Vol. 1, Paris, Fayard, 2006. 2 vols.

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LIVING Memory

Living MEMORY

BY SKYLER GIBBON These old red floor tiles They really warm the room don’t they?

And the red bricks hold me in a sanctuary Bricks so old they creak and break but are still breathing in oxygen I remember being young and they were still old Before then in my younger years I cried at the sound of hymns and modern gray stone But these old red bricks were familiar to me Warm like home Stay with me, remain here with me As I move with age, the brick looks the same Old, but not older Still, but alive housing abundantly fruitful fire and flowers Opening and closing its door like windpipes inhale...exhale

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BY ABBY GABNER, ASHLY DUIN, JOSEFA HERNANDEZ, DANIELLE HORNUNG, AND DANIELLE MCFADIEN ADVOCATING FOR FOSTER CARE YOUTH IN HIGHER EDUCATION Foster care youth transitioning to adulthood face multiple forms of adversity (Salazar et al., 2016). Unlike their peers, many foster care youths must go through this pivotal life transition without familial support or the support of an advocate. Conventionally, parents or guardians assist transitioning youth in navigating the obstacles associated with acquiring adult independence and autonomy; however, foster care youth must often face these obstacles on their own.

According to Courtney et al. (2001), 70-80% of American foster care youth want to continue their education past high school while only 10-20% of them actually enroll in institutions of higher education, and 3-5% successfully complete a 4-year degree (Katz & Geiger, 2019). Perhaps a reason for this disparity is the absence of social support and adult advocacy, a large determinant of success for transition-age foster care youth (Katz & Geiger, 2019). This proposal will focus specifically on the need for advocacy for foster care youth as it relates to admission to institutions of post-secondary education.

BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM Foster care is defined as 24-hour surrogate care for youth who are placed away from their parents or guardians through the child welfare system to become temporary wards of their states (United States Code of Federal Regulations, 2020). Options for youth in foster care include placement in foster homes, placement with relatives, assignment to group homes, adoption by a family member, or adoption by a nonrelative (Colvin et al., 2011). If foster care youth reach age 18-21 years (depending on geographical location) without finding a permanent home placement, the child will exit the system by way of emancipation (Batsche et al., 2012). Emancipation from foster care is commonly referred to as aging out. Youth who remain in the system until aging out are thrust into adulthood without the familial advocacy and social support traditionally provided to transition-aged adolescents. Foster care youth during this period of emancipation often suffer from significant challenges and experience the feeling of being unimportant to others.

The knowledge that someone believes in them and wants them to succeed can make a difference in an individual’s mental health and motivation (Velez et al., 2019). This knowledge or self-perception can be referred to as mattering.

The concept of mattering can be defined as the feeling of belonging or being important to someone else. This sense of mattering is a critical element in the development of one’s self-esteem (Davis et al., 2019). Foster care youth frequently lack the emotional support and advocacy needed to instill a sense of mattering.

Advocacy and support throughout the educational lifecycle may improve long-term outcomes for this population (Castillo Johnson, 2016). Furthermore, research indicates that advocacy aimed at instilling a sense of mattering can make a positive impact on the future outcomes of foster care youth by enhancing their self-worth and making them feel less marginalized (Schlossberg, 1989). Scholars have pointed out that the absence of an adult advocate is one of the largest barriers for foster youth in graduating from high school and applying to institutions of post-secondary education (Day et al., 2012).

Social workers are trained to be advocates and are distinctly qualified to help (Gabner, 2020). Social Work’s core values of service, social justice, human dignity, healthy human relationships, integrity, and competence (National Association of Social Workers, 2017) were put in place to help vulnerable populations such as emancipated foster care youth. A network of social workers connecting high school foster care students to institutions of higher

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education through structured support with an admissions advocate, should improve the students’ self- perceptions of mattering and their likelihood of admission into an institution of higher education. For the purpose of this proposal, the admissions advocate is defined as a social worker from within the setting of higher education with both knowledge of college admissions and the skills necessary to foster self-determination, instill a sense mattering, and help foster care youth uncover their choices in life.

PREVALENCE OF THE PROBLEM Children and youth are taken from their home environments most frequently due to neglect, parental drug/alcohol abuse, caretaker coping issues, physical abuse, housing issues, child behavior problems, parental incarceration, abandonment, and sexual abuse (U.S. Department of Human Services, 2020). Colvin et al. (2011) reported that 46% of youth in foster care in the United States are placed in foster homes, 23% are placed with relatives, and others are placed in group homes. In 2019, the foster care system reported 440,000 youth in care with 4.6% of them aging out as a result of reaching the legal age of adulthood in their state of residence (U.S Department of Health and Human Services, 2019).

This equates to 20,445 American foster care youth transitioning to complete independence by age 18-21 years (U.S. Department of Human Services, 2020). Most of these young people, 86%, began providing for themselves at just 18 years old (U.S. Department of Human Services, 2020). The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s share of this population was 1,074 (Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, personal communication, July 5, 2020).

Many transition-aged foster youths struggle with unemployment, living arrangements, access to health care, legal issues, and lack of education (Reilly, 2003). According to Courtney et al. (2011), approximately 64% of emancipated male foster youth experience incarceration and 24% of all emancipated foster youth experience homelessness (2010).

Statistically, seven out of ten girls who age out of foster care become pregnant by age 21 (Hasenecz, 2019). Still others face substance-abuse issues (Prince et al., 2019).

Youth in foster care experience high rates of transportability which affects their education. According to Kathryn Baron (2013), 95% of foster youth switched schools during their first year in the foster care system. Likewise, Wolanin (2005) stated that foster youth relocated to a new school approximately every six months, translating each time to an average loss of 4-6 months in academic achievement. Educational instability is a clear barrier to foster care youths’ graduation from high school and subsequently, access to higher education (Castillo Johnson, 2018).

Attaining a postsecondary degree has advantages that could potentially help these young adults improve their life trajectory. According to the College Board (2016) people holding a postsecondary degree at age 35-44 years make significantly more money than those with a high school diploma and/or some college. Adults age 25-29 years with at least a bachelor’s degree earned a median salary of $44,100, which is significantly higher than other adults of the same age range with a 2-year degree or less (Ma et al., 2016).

Nearly one-third of the U.S. population pursues and obtains a four-year bachelor’s degree (Katz & Geiger, 2019).

Most students wishing to advance their education beyond high school traditionally start planning in their 11th grade year. This planning often begins with college visits and taking student aptitude tests that are required by many colleges and universities for admission. It is not uncommon for families to spend thousands of dollars on college visits, aptitude testing, tutoring for the aptitude tests, application fees, and even educational consultants (Scott, 2013). Emancipated foster care youth may not have access to these types of financial resources or the benefit of familial support. They must deal with financial, social, and systemic barriers which could prohibit them from considering college application (Reilly, 2003).

FOSTER CARE

LITERATURE REVIEW

Sullivan-Vance (2018) stated that the child-welfare system is a complex dynamic that often includes judges, social workers, families, foster parents, and the children and youth in the system. Foster care youth that age out face many risk factors for pursuing and persisting through higher education (Sullivan-Vance, 2018). Sullivan-Vance explained that foster care exists to protect the lives of children who have experienced trauma or are deemed to be in danger.

Separation from family is traumatic for children and youth (Sullivan-Vance 2018). The goal of the child welfare system is to reunify the youth with their biological family which occurs about half of the time (Colvin et al., 2011).

If reunification is not possible, the next step is to place children with family members, which is known as kinship care.

Kinship care is beneficial to fostering connections to family and continuing the development of cultural and ethnic identity. If a kinship placement is not available, permanency planning is the next step to find the child a home (Sullivan-Vance, 2018).

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In comparison, many children in foster care experience high levels of transportability and rapid change (Colvin et al., 2011). Foster care youth, on average, spend 28 months in at least three different placement settings, increasing their risk for both social and academic deficits (Colvin et al., 2011). Piel (2018) wrote that youth in foster care experience challenges due to separation from family, disruption in friendships and school connections, and the stigma of being in care.

TRANSITIONS The transition into higher education often occurs at the same time as emancipation from the foster care system and the transition into adulthood (Sullivan-Vance, 2018). During the transition period of emancipation, foster care youth reported worrying about employment, education, living arrangements, health care, legal issues, and other preparedness variables for independent living (Reilly, 2003). Additionally, transition-aged youth reported that advocacy, information, and support is difficult to come by after being emancipated (Katz & Geiger, 2019). Youth going through impactful life transitions, struggled to access informal supports, meet survival needs, and utilize coping mechanisms (Bowen et al., 2020). These struggles often included homelessness, incarceration, poverty, and unstable employment (Reilly, 2003).

Using Schlossberg’s transition theory as a framework helps one gain a better understanding of why foster care youth struggled more than any other underrepresented group with attaining a higher education degree (Sullivan-Vance, 2018).

Schlossberg (1981) proposed that it was not so much the actual transition that was most important, but rather how an individual interpreted the transition based on their experience and sense of self. Schlossberg (1981) also suggested that adaptation to life transition depends on an individual’s resources and deficits, as well as their supports.

Research has shown that transition-age foster care youth programs or an additional year of foster care before emancipation, provided significant positive outcomes. Prince et al. (2019) discovered that foster care youth spending an additional year of adulthood in foster care experienced reduced odds of homelessness, incarceration, and substance abuse. In addition, transition-aged foster care youth that participated in a program prior to emancipation, reported an increase in skills such as responsibility-taking, forward planning, decision-making, and time management. They also reported enhanced self-esteem, growth in competency, and optimism about their future (Kirk & Day, 2011). Lee et al.

(2014) similarly reported that an extended year of foster care reduced the risk of arrest for foster care youth, which thereby improved their chances of a successful transition into independent adulthood. On the other hand, Salazar (2011) concluded that these programs are not doing enough to meet the postsecondary educational needs of emancipated foster care youth.

MATTERING Transitions can be isolating to individuals when they do not feel equipped with resources to handle change (Schlossberg, 1981). According to Schlossberg (1989), mattering is a connection where one feels as though they are valuable and ultimately, matter to another. A high sense of mattering, or feeling as though one matters to others, positively affects one’s quality of life, self-esteem, and meaning in life (Davis et al., 2019). Generally, those who had a strong sense of mattering were motivated to maintain that feeling (Lewis, 2017). One study found that those who reported a high sense of mattering to their parents, had fewer psychological problems. The opposite was true for those who reported a lower sense of mattering (Velez et al., 2019).

This increased sense of mattering to others has motivated many to pursue postsecondary education. Foster care youth who have reached postsecondary institutions have acknowledged the importance of the role of someone helping them navigate the college process (Sullivan- Vance, 2018). Steve Pemberton is an author, philanthropist, speaker, and executive officer of multiple companies. In a recent conference, Pemberton (2020) spoke on the significance of the individuals in his life who made him feel like he mattered. It was the encouragement from advocates that helped motivate him to conclude his time in foster care by pursuing higher education (Pemberton, 2020).

Perception of worth can impact how individuals learn, develop, and prosper in life. Lacking in self-care and purpose can lead to unconstructive thoughts and actions. Individuals who interact with foster care youth can help instill a sense of mattering through providing support and attention. The act of feeling understood and cared for plays an important role in the outcome of an individual’s self-view and sense of significance.

ADVOCACY According to Cohen (2004), “to be an advocate and to engage in advocacy is to adopt a stance, advance a cause, and attempt to produce a result on behalf of an interest of a person, group, or cause” (p. 9). Encouragement is a form of support which contributes to the feeling of intimacy from one person to another and is displayed in numerous ways.

Foster youth who sensed others had provided advocacy for them, felt protected and united to those who spoke up for

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them (Best & Blakeslee, 2020). Advocating takes bravery. Although advocating can feel gratifying and triumphant it can also feel frightening and worrying (Rosenwald & Riley, 2011). Pushing through barriers and taking opportunities to ensure that those requiring support receive adequate and much needed resources is an essential element of advocacy.

(Rosenwald & Riley, 2011).

Rogers et al. (2019) agreed that the definition of advocacy can be defined in the following four actions: increased awareness for another individual, constructed meaningful relationships, speaking on behalf of an individual, and performing actions an individual is unable to perform on their own. While all children need a helping hand to prosper in their educational years, foster care youth often suffer from significant challenges especially during their transition from adolescence to adulthood (Rogers et al., 2019).

EDUCATION Foster care youth tend to have academic challenges that hinder their admissibility into higher education (United States Government Accountability Office, 2016). Prior to and during their entrance into the foster care system most have endured trauma related to neglect, physical and/or mental abuse, and separation from the people and places they know best (Frerer et al., 2013). It is typical for foster youth to change schools multiple times during grades K-12 which predisposes them to poor scholastic performance (Castillo Johnson, 2018). This tendency perpetuates a cycle of abandonment and trauma that often resulted in complicated legal and educational conditions (Wolanin, 2005). Often by the time foster youth reached high school, their negative academic trajectory has been firmly established (Castillo Johnson, 2018). In a study of 4000 Californian foster care youth, only 45% of them completed high school as compared to 79% of general population students. Foster youth who passed a General Educational Development test or GED still fell substantially below the level of their peers (Wolanin, 2005). This significantly reduced their access to higher education as high school graduation directly correlates to college enrollment (Frerer et al., 2013).

For those foster youth that managed to graduate from high school, many were not financially, psychologically, or socially prepared for the rigors of higher education (Wolanin, 2005). The youth often lacked the resources needed for entrance exams, carried misperceptions regarding the financial burden of college, and lacked the necessary skills to navigate both admissions and financial aid applications (Wolanin, 2005). The forms associated with financial aid were an added obstacle to foster youth as the forms do not typically recognize the unique circumstances surrounding this population (Wolanin, 2005).

In 2019, people over age 25 years without a high school diploma had the highest level of unemployment and earned the lowest wage as compared to all other educational levels (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Conversely, higher levels of education positively correlated with higher salary earnings (United State Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019). Foster care youth must have understood this benefit as 70-80% of them desired to attend college in 2018, despite only 10-20% actually enrolling into higher education (Courtney et al., 2001). One study showed that nearly 75% of youth in foster care reported interest in pursuing a collegiate degree (Reilly, 2003). Graduation rates were also low as nationally only 2-6% of foster youth were reported to have attained a college degree (Courtney et al., 2011).

A possible reason for this disparity is the absence of formal social support and advocacy, one of the largest determining factors of success for transition-age foster care youth (Katz & Geiger, 2019). Foster care alumni have conveyed an importance in formalized social support during the identification and enrollment processes of higher education. Those who engage with foster care youth should work to convince them that they are “college material” and encourage them to strive for a postsecondary education (Wolanin, 2005).

LITERATURE REVIEW CONCLUSION The literature studied indicated that supportive programs for transition-aged foster care youth found success. These studies suggested that such programs provided support and advocacy that cultivated successful transitioning into adulthood for foster care youth. An area lacking in these transition programs was encouragement toward post-secondary education, which tends to improve employability and future salary. Foster care youth who are advocated for have a sense that someone cares for them. Their voices are being heard by those that support and speak up for them.

Supporting and advocating for foster care youth is an essential element needed for them to reach their personal goals in attaining educational success. Castillo Johnson (2018) stated that the attainment of a degree in higher education can dramatically impact the futures of foster care youth. Taking this into consideration, further research in social support and advocacy for foster care youth seems necessary. Future study should look to evaluate whether time spent with a college admissions advocate during high school would increase foster care youths’ self-perception of mattering and if so, do higher perceptions of mattering positively correlate with higher rates of college admission and student success?

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Sarı, H. I., & Karaman, M. A. (2018). Gaining a Better Understanding of General Mattering Scale: An Application of Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory. International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education, 5(4), 668–681. https://doi.org/10.21449/ijate.453337 Schlossberg, N. K. (1981). A model for analyzing human adaptation to transition. The Counseling Psychologist, 9, (2), 2-18.

Schlossberg, N. K. (1989). Marginality and mattering: Key issues in building community. New directions for student services, 48, 5-15.

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COUNTER-DISCOURSE in

Native American Literacy Practices

BY CLARK FENNIMORE

People of many ethnic groups live throughout the Western Hemisphere. However, the descendants of the indigenous peoples have become minorities. An important issue has become how they deal with this situation. There are many countries to which the issue applies, and they have different legal and cultural relations to the natives. The United States is the nation of interest here. Literature is a major area in which Native Americans deal with the situation in this country. Their use of counter-discourse expresses their identity in literature portraying many aspects of their culture. Of particular interest here is counter-discourse in their literacy practices, meaning the way they write materials of different kinds.

The definitions of two major terms form the basis of discussing this theme. First is counter-discourse, which Tiffin defines as the writings and discussions about imperialism that deviate from those that have been common historically. While the European nations tended to see their empires in a panoramic view, in which the lands were the same due to being inhabited by savages, counter-discourse looks with respect at the experiences of these lands. It looks both at the individual experiences in the lands and at larger patterns in imperialism. Furthermore, it has a general context in the aftermath of imperialism (Tiffin).

The next term is Native American, which refers to people groups who have been in the Americas since before the coming of the first European explorers. It is an interesting idea because these people groups are native to different parts of two whole continents. Based on the differences among people in Europe alone, since that was the homeland of the explorers, it is not surprising that the Americas would likewise comprise many differences. According to Mann, the use of a single term for them, such as Native American or Indian, deviates from their historic sense of identity on a tribal basis. The United States alone represents a great range in tribes with different cultures, since it ranks among the largest countries in the Americas (39).

As a result, counter-discourse is a major part of this Native American identity. Practice of ancient

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traditions keeps them separate from the dominant culture around them, connecting them instead to their own history. Furthermore, literature becomes a means of declaring that identity. The literacy ingrained in American culture as a whole brings the possibility of a wide readership of such writings, even outside of the Native American context. It makes the dominant culture aware of the natives who have been outnumbered by them. They declare that they are not the same as the majority, showing pride in their unique ways.

Furthermore, part of what is to be declared to the majority is the range of native cultures. Part of counter-discourse, as deducible from its definition, is declaring differences among groups covered by the general term Native American. Therefore, two specific authors of very different kinds of Native American background are to be discussed. First is Lesley Marnon Silko, a novelist of Pueblo background. Her tribe is native to the southwestern states. Of particular interest here is her novel Ceremony, in which she portrays many aspects of her people’s experience of being outnumbered by white people while still living in their traditional homeland. In other words, the homeland is very different from what it was (Silko, Preface).

The other author is Luis Valdez, a Chicano playwright. According to Anzaldua, a Chicana writer, the culture of interest comes from the intermarriage of Spanish settlers with the indigenous people of Mexico.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw white Americans come into the northern lands belonging to the independent Mexico, resulting first in the independence of Texas after the Battle of the Alamo, and then in the Mexican War. With Texas, California, and some surrounding lands becoming states as a result of this process, Chicanos became minorities in American culture (27-29). This is why Valdez fits into the scope of this discussion. Of particular interest is his play Zoot Suit.

These two examples of Native American experience are important because they deal with the experience of being a minority population, adding to their people’s history through literary contributions.

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This is certainly not to say that they are the only such examples. However, the two works of interest here are very influential examples with different approaches to the issue. They also deal with the issue of current Native Americans tending to be of mixed race. It has already been explained from the perspective of Valdez as a Chicano. However, Silko also addresses it by telling the story of a young man with a Pueblo mother and a white father. The issue gives a degree of social construct to the meaning of the term Native American, since people who use the designation separate themselves from other people with part of their ancestry from a tribe.

It is a matter of how such people identify themselves culturally. Actual ancestry is part of it, but there is also a cultural factor which is not the same.

Before literature is specifically discussed, an important question to consider is how the native groups of the United States have become minorities in their own homelands. Within the three centuries after Columbus’ famous first landing in the Americas, as explained by Mann, European nations colonized most of the land. A large part of how this happened is that the colonizers were carriers of diseases to which natives, but not colonizers, lacked immunity. Natives weakened by resulting epidemics were then subjugated, often violently, by European armies.

There are theories as to how it started, but it contributed to massive destruction of native societies (101-109). As a result of such widespread death from disease and violence, natives came to be outnumbered by colonists. The maintenance of meaning in their cultures is thus a challenge while they have avoided complete destruction. Literature is a major method of preservation for their cultures. The historic importance of oral tradition for them will be described later.

However, their cultures still change over time.

In specific terms of literacy, several Native American groups have a history of unique practices.

The best examples to start with are those of groups native to Mexico, since Chicanos have part of their ancestry coming from among such groups. This part of the discussion is not even coming from the Spanish influence on the groups, as that had not even begun yet. Rather, these are examples of fully native literacies as a foundation for counter-discourse in modern literacy. Part of why the cultures do not stay the same, as will be seen, is that literacy changes.

Literacy in and around Mexico started in the ancient world. It had a unique origin there, according to Mann, developing from the fixing of dates. Two notations were used together: a solar calendar, with the same basis as the modern calendar and thus having 365 days; and a religious calendar of 260 days, possibly based in the position of Venus. The combination of the

two notations gave each date a distinct designation within a fifty-two-year span. They created a Long-Count system to distinguish one era of such length from the next. An ancient artifact of the Zapotecs, a civilization of the area, has a carving of a date, foreshadowing writing (238-243).

Different scripts of several kinds, according to Mann, have been found in ancient sites within ancient Mesoamerica alone. The Nudzahui civilization has surviving examples of codices with pictographs. They even include rebuses, in which a word without its own symbol is represented by that of a similar-sounding word (243-245). The Mayans can also be seen to have writing, examples surviving on codices (303). Mexico was home to several literate societies.

Mann explains that early civilizations of Mexico included Teotihuacan, from over a thousand years ago, and then the Toltecs, from a little bit less than a thousand years ago. Ancient writings have been discovered among their sites. A better understood civilization later dominated the area: that usually called Aztecs.

They were really a coalition of three nations led by the Mexica starting by the middle of the fifteenth century.

They united to defeat another civilization that dominated them all. Literacy was still in the form of codices filled with pictographs used to tell history.

Upon victory, they erased the past of subjugation by throwing the codices of the enemy in fire. For the same reason, they then did the same to their own codices.

They started over with codices giving themselves a glorified past (126-131).

Mann also explains that the composition of the new codices was entrusted to members of a special position in the society defined by training and respect.

In their language, Nahuatl, someone in this position was called a tlamatini. Their writings were a means to instruct society. The codices were about more than just history, but also ethics. They composed a great collection of literature, which they also used while teaching the boys being trained for prestigious positions in the future (134-135).

In short, the native ancestors of the Chicano people and the people who influenced them developed literacy without any inspiration from colonists. Their writings developed in distinctive ways, forming part of their identities. The purpose of writing described in the context of the Aztecs shows it as a tool in establishing the values of society. This is part of identity, as is the history which it also conveyed. The tlamatini class represents the skill as being confined to the privileged, since it was viewed as prestigious.

There is also a curious example of literacy from after the establishment of Western rule in North M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 27

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America. It concerns the language of the Cherokee, a tribe native to the southeastern United States.

The language’s distinct writing developed after the United States had become a nation. It was developed within the first quarter of the nineteenth century by Sequoyah, a previously illiterate member of the tribe.

Though he had not learned English, he actually based many of the characters in the writing system on the Latin letters that he had seen. Based on the structure of Cherokee phonology, he decided on a syllabary system. As a result, characters borrowed from Latin do not transfer into the same values in the Cherokee script.

Major uses of the writing have included a Bible translation, the Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, and the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper (Alexander).

In short, the area of North America has seen several examples of distinct forms of literacy both before and after colonization. Literacy is shown as a valuable skill among the societies in the examples.

Cherokee writing is a unique form of decoloniality, using colonial writing to make something just for the Cherokee. Arola describes a relevant example of literacy in the information age: a social media site constructed specifically to be used by Native Americans. It failed to connect the intended community in the long-term, but it showed adaptation of a modern phenomenon for a specific culture. Many kinds of literacy, even digital, can be used as statements of identity for the Native American community (Arola). This fact reflects the history of distinct literacy in the ancient civilizations of the area.

As social media is a form of creative writing, it leads into a discussion of a novel and a play as other forms.

Another point about the digital example is that literature in English can express counter-discourse, just as literature can in indigenous languages. In fact, Silko writes in her article “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” about how she incorporates the oral tradition of her people into her writing, which is in English. Words in Pueblo discourse are considered to have their own stories. Telling a story even has some improvisation to it since the speaker decides what stories should be brought into the overall narrative (Silko, “Language”). The title of her novel, Ceremony, is just one word, reflecting this idea of a word as well as the theme of the book. It also summarizes the healing needed by the narrator, the main character, and the Native American people in general. It shows a written form of Pueblo story-telling to bring healing from traumatic experiences to all these people (Silko, Ceremony).

Part of the trauma is violence and oppression experienced by Native Americans at the hands of white Americans. The healing is shown in the novel to come from a new ceremony for the modern world. This concept is decolonial because it represents the ancient

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religion of the people adapting to the circumstances changing around it. In Ceremony, Tayo is helped by the medicine man Betonie. There is a scene when Betonie says: “At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white man came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals.”

Tayo is later healed through an adapted ceremony.

Counter-discourse is here opposed to the Western stereotype of native ceremonies staying the same, showing instead that they can change (Silko).

Silko, as explained by Park, represents a reconnection with nature as the mode of healing for Tayo in this ceremony. There is a separation from urban life, which represents white domination and transformation of land (Park). An interesting aspect of her body of work is that government ownership of land is often critiqued (Rahman). This is certainly the case in Ceremony. In one part, Tayo is working to get his family’s cattle back from a white man’s land. As he is wondering whether the cattle were stolen, a revelation of his is described: “He knew then he had learned the lie by heart—the lie which they had wanted him to learn: only brownskinned people were thieves; white people didn’t steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted.” There is soon a statement that “white people” have “a nation built on stolen land” (Silko).

By critiquing white people’s perceived ownership of the land, Silko certainly denies that right to the government.

In short, the title demonstrates the power of a word in Pueblo philosophy. This one word represents what is experienced by the protagonist, and yet it also has a deeper meaning for his people in general. At the same time, the need for a ceremony is rooted in the relationship of the people to the wider world. They have continually experienced the results of subjugation at the hands of colonizers and their descendants. Healing becomes part of how they find a place in the changing world around them. The process is important for their identity, expressed in counter-discourse. The culture adapts to the world instead of staying the same.

The Pueblo people to whom Silko and her characters belong have their own language with pragmatic characteristics, such as those already described and others that will be described shortly.

However, she adapts them into English, making them accessible to a wider readership. The characteristics thus become counter-discursive in English. Oral narration is traditional for Silko’s people, who were illiterate before colonization. She transfers speaking discourse to writing (Silko, “Language”). Once again, counterdiscourse makes something new.

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Silko describes how oral tradition has continued to be important to her people and other groups native to the United States even after the beginning of that nation. Though they now have writing as a mode of communication, they still have special respect for spoken communication. In their view, it has more life to it, including vocal inflections and often non-verbal communication when the speaker is seen. Therefore, she is trying to bring some of that life into a written format by imitating spoken discourse (Silko, “Language”).

The first element of the discourse is the “spider’s web” structure. It refers to the Pueblo tradition of mixing stories with transitions based on common themes (Silko, “Language”). Examples in Ceremony often switch back and forth between prose narrations about Tayo and poetic telling of mythical stories. There are often connecting themes shared among the stories being told, making a unified narrative in spite of different parts (Silko, Ceremony).

Another tradition of Pueblo narration is a “story within a story.” This means that the main flow of narration is interrupted by another story before it resumes (Silko, “Language”). One example in Ceremony is when Tayo has almost died before finding a pool of water, and then the story is interrupted by a poem in which the ancestors of his people have natural provision taken from them. The connecting theme is of situations when people almost died from lack, yet they survived somehow. Thus the story does not end for these people. It even shows the idea that a people group may experience the same problems many times, yet they always survive it (Silko, Ceremony).

Another element of Pueblo narration in the article is equal value given to different kinds of stories, both current and traditional (Silko, “Language”). Some examples in Ceremony have Tayo in current action as the main flow of narrative, but that is mingled with references to history. In one example, a current lack of rain is similar to a situation from about ten to twenty years earlier. In the earlier story, thinning cattle had to be sold, thus causing suspense in the idea that the same thing might have to happen this time. Mingled with these two incidents, there is also a mythical story reflecting the “mother earth” beliefs of Native Americans, especially of Pueblos in this context (Silko, Ceremony).

Another element of Pueblo narration is a lack of established time (Silko, “Language”). In Ceremony, there are poems referring to the old ways of Pueblo people.

The time referred to in such stories is vague, often describing customs practiced for a long time but no longer in practice due to the rise of the United States (Silko, Ceremony).

The final element of Pueblo narration is repetition, in which the audience is continually brought back to an important idea in the story (Silko, “Language”). The title of the novel, Ceremony, comes from a word repeated many times. The repetition, especially in one seen in which Tayo is speaking to Betonie, reminds the reader of its importance in Pueblo culture. It shows a ceremony as important for Tayo’s healing, and thus to the plot (Silko, Ceremony). This importance is that already described.

Mythology forms a part of Silko’s narrative, due to its important place in oral tradition. An important example with special meanings in the novel, as explained by Park, describes white people as formed through black magic through the prophecy of a native witch. First, it challenges the typical view in the Americas, in which white man is considered dominant in history; in its place is a view in which Native Americans are dominant and white man owes his existence to them. Second, it questions white people’s perceived right to rule other people groups, showing them instead as an ethnic group controlled by destructive tendencies; thus white people are not r ight in ruling other races (Park).

The novel is a European writing form. Silko uses it to give her people their own unique voice by using their narrative style in place of that traditional in Western society. The stream of consciousness of Tayo allows current events and conversations to remind him of the past, as shown by the narrative’s continual switches among different times.

Furthermore, his drunkenness or illness causes delusions in which he imagines that past events are happening currently. The style of narration then has many layers of meaning in the book.

While using many elements of Pueblo narration, there is something else of interest that she does with the written format. Though writing a novel, Silko skips the use of chapters as a typical feature of the genre.

Because she is imitating the verbal narration of a story, she leaves out of the writing many elements of discourse that do not occur in speech. Since chapters are one such element, she does without them. She is not unique in this part of her style; in fact, some novels by white authors have also done without chapters.

However, she is using this as an expression of Native American heritage.

Chapters are generally used to divide a narrative into parts for the Western readership. By refraining from using them, Silko represents the story as being intact instead of divided. However, she does use line spacing to separate one scene from the next. They are visual representations of verbal cues used to transition from one part of the narrative to the next. They are M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 29

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read as pauses in the flow of speech. In short, she uses divisions analogous to those in natural speech, without adding extra written divisions like chapters.

Valdez also writes in English. However, his style is very different from Silko’s because he uses the play instead of the novel. The different genre involves a different approach to literacy. The verbal recitations imitated by Silko relate to Valdez’s writing of material meant to be acted on stage. There is a connecting theme of the written word directly representing the spoken word. Of course, all writing represents words in the spoken language. The difference is that there is a style of writing supposed to have greater quality than spoken language, whereas other writing is meant to show how people really speak. Of course, a play script is an example of the later type, as is Silko’s imitation of her people telling stories verbally.

Valdez’s writing is meant for performance. In fact, he uses the play in a counter-discursive way which challenges typical ways of representing his people.

For example, throughout the play, dialogue mixes English and Spanish. According to Anzaldua, this combination represents Chicano speech (20). It challenges the historic preference of English for the writings in this country. Furthermore, while Valdez depicts a Chicano gang, he refuses to villainize the culture, even criticizing the general American culture that villainizes them.

Plays, like novels, are a common form of Western literature and entertainment. Valdez uses this form from the Spanish part of his Chicano ancestry, though of course he also connects to the general American public to whom it is popular as well. Pizatto explains that Zoot Suit presents a rendition of the true story of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. The main character is Henry Reyna, a Chicano who historically went to jail with his gang after being wrongfully arrested for the crime. The story includes references to the Aztec part of Chicano ancestry, such as the culture’s association of masculinity with violence and the symbolic character El Pachuco. The name of the character comes from a word for a man preparing to be ritually sacrificed in Aztec society—shown in the play through choreographed violence. As such a man would act as the deity Tezcatlipoca, this character represents divine characteristics through the power to change the chronology of events.

There is also a scene when his zoot suit is taken off of him, and under it he has an Aztec garment (Pizatto).

The title of the play refers to suits worn by Chicano men in the World War II era, as explained in the play (Valdez, Act 1 Prologue). It is actually part of their identity. It was based on the mainstream American fashion of suits for men, but it was adapted in a unique way by Chicanos with their own colors and flourishes.

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In other words, they took the fashion of American colonizers and made their own statement with it.

The first scene of the play describes the fashion this way: “The Pachuco style was an act in Life and his language was a new creation.” There is also a description of the zoot suit itself, with its many pieces (Valdez, Act 1 Prologue). The zoot suit was then part of a lifestyle for those who wore it. Its many pieces also show it to be quite exquisite, thus based in an idea of self-respect. Also seen in this quote, Chicano dialect was another part of identity separate from mainstream society. Furthermore, the use of the word pachuco in this quote is described by Pizatto as referring to the same people wearing the zoot suit and identifying with their Aztec ancestry, such as through the violence used by their gangs.

As for one scene referred to by Pizatto, as mentioned above, there is more important detail to examine in the play. The script says that after having the zoot suit taken off him in a mob attack, “El Pachuco stands. The only item of clothing on his body is a small loincloth.” In the same context, “an Aztec conch blows” (Valdez, Act 2 Scene 6). This scene says that if the zoot suit is taken away, the Aztec identity remains because that is what lies underneath the clothing. It is a statement of who Chicanos are.

Literacy practices are used to express many interests of Native American culture. As Rahman explains, a specific example is post-colonial ecocriticism, a specific area of themes prominent in Native American literature. There are post-colonial themes in the oppression of people. There are ecocritical themes in the oppression of the non-human.

The combination of these two themes shows the common thread of oppression to be resisted, since both have been brought by white people (Rahman).

These kinds of themes form part of the counter-discourse, as seen in the examples of Silko and Valdez.

Counter-discourse comes to be about writing against a wide perspective of domination and preserving the culture of oppressed groups such as Native Americans. Imperialism, as described by Park, seeks to control all aspects of the land being subjugated. This means both the people and the environment. Silko expresses this idea in her myth about the origin of white men, who are shown to be characterized by a lack of connection either to other people or to nature. With this lack of care, they ruin so many parts of the world (Park).

Counter-discourse is then about protecting both people and the environment from this abuse. It teaches the Native American belief in the value of both. The authors defend their people’s historic connection to the

COUNTER-DISCOURSE in Native American Literacy ARTICLE Practices Title

land against the colonizers’ gradual claiming of it. They protest many issues such as the gradual separation of the people into reservations, by which colonizers control them.

Several of the examples given earlier from Ceremony also demonstrate post-colonial ecocriticism.

References to nature in these examples and other parts of the novel always show respect for the environment as an ecocritical position. Other examples given earlier call for respect for and preservation of the ways of Native Americans in spite of the domination of white man.

This is a post-colonial position resisting the destruction brought by colonizers and their descendants. The culture is connected to the land.

Valdez takes a different perspective on postcolonial ecocriticism. Zoot Suit has an urban setting without condemning urbanization. However, it indirectly shows the cities of the white man as locations of oppression towards natives. There is post-colonial criticism of the oppression, with some implicit ecocritical themes showing the changed environment as part of the oppression. The environment, though, is not emphasized by Valdez as it is by Silko.

Counter-discourse then makes literature a form of protest. As mentioned, the literary forms and the language come from the colonizers, but Native Americans use them to resist the ways of the colonizers.

In reference to the examples discussed earlier, Silko uses the novel and Valdez uses the play. They give different expression to their respective groups.

Creative writing, which includes novels and plays, is not the only area of counter-discourse. Some other examples of counter-discourse in literacy are seen in Native American culture. In fact, it influences how they regulate their affairs. For one example, of which the significance in literacy is to follow, the American government has given legal status to 574 “Indian Nations” entitled to run the local affairs on the lands granted to them. Several states also have given legal status to other tribes, with similar rights. Nations and tribes are subject to the United States and to individual states in which their lands fall. They are entitled to pass and enforce their own laws and policies within their lands. Furthermore, they have individual citizenship, automatically accompanied by American citizenship (Tribal Nations).

In modern society, laws and policies are made in a written format. It follows that when the Indian Nations individually pass such statutes in their own lands, they are using literacy practices to regulate the activities on such lands. Since counter-discourse is about minorities using literacy to distinguish themselves from the

majority culture, the Indian Nations use counterdiscourse for legal purposes. In other words, their statutes distinguish their cultures from the mainstream American counterparts. It is interesting that the American government has legally entitled them to do so, as opposed to fighting the counter-discourse.

According to Mann, most of the groups from which the Indian Nations descended practiced a high level of freedom for their people. An interesting institution developed in the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, all of Iroquoian origin. Formed almost nine centuries ago in the northeastern United States, this confederation was governed by a set of policies called the Great Law of Peace, which formed legislative procedures. Its purpose was purely for a common f oreign policy to be formed by the great council composed of all the sachems who led the nations. It also allowed a popular vote among the nations for the most significant issues. Its operation has continued under the jurisdiction of the United States. Its historic communication included pictographs of limited use, lacking standardization for widespread use.

One important use of the pictographs was in Condolence Canes, on which they were used to list people who had sat on the council of the confederacy (370-374).

The confederacy still exists today, with its records and constitution in English. It also has a website in English, explaining its operation to other people. Its constituent Nations mostly follow the usual pattern of native relations to the United States and Canada (About the Haudenosaunee). This was a distinct organization in Native American culture, continuing to operate under colonization. It now expresses counter-discourse using English for records and for its online materials. It has taken the language of the colonizers in expressing its own culture.

One of the nations of the confederacy is the Mohawks (About the Haudenosaunee). They have taken a different kind of stance in relation to the United States.

Part of their land from before colonization was within present-day New York; starting on 13 May 1974, they reclaimed part of this land as a sovereign state called the Territory of Ganienkeh. The entity has neither sought not received any legal status in relation to the United States, which it does not see as having the right to regulate the activities of native nations. It is intentionally outside the network of reservations and Indian Nations, asserting the identity of its people independent of colonial regulation. The tribal council that governs it has implemented many policies to assert the identity of its people, including gradual economic independence and gradual reformation of their old culture such as their language. In spite of the former goal, they have M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 31

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so far had to accept the currencies of the United States and Canada for sustainability purposes (Ganienkeh).

This information about Ganienkeh comes from its website, in which they use English to express their identity and activities. The website definitely represents a form of counter- discourse, describing its resistance to the ways of colonizers around them. It does so while using the language of colonizers, as well as the structure of a website which was developed in the colonizing culture. While many tribes, as explained earlier, have sought legal status in the United States as a means to reclaim some identity, Ganienkeh is an attempt to separate from that country entirely though it admits to not yet being able to complete the process, such as in depending on the currencies around it. Its refusal even to have sovereignty granted by the United States, which most tribes have sought, is a major form of resistance to that country and to the usual position of tribes as colonized people. The website is counter-discursive in expressing a level of resistance that sets Ganienkeh apart from other groups.

Besides the modern formation of Ganienkeh, there was another important event in Native American culture in 1974. This was the original meeting of the International Indian Treaty Council, which included representatives from ninety-seven tribes. It produced some written material to be used for common goals among the tribes represented. It gave “Two Mandates” to the tribes: the gaining of international legitimacy collectively and the gaining of sovereignty individually.

A major victory was “On September 2007, when the United Nations passed the Declaration of Indigenous Rights.” In this, the tribes achieved the international legitimacy goal. The other mandate is to be achieved on the part of each tribe. A major example was the Lakotah Freedom Delegation presenting to the American government the tribe’s rejection of its past treaties with the government. This action, near the end of 2007, led to the formation of the Republic of Lakotah. Like Ganienkeh, this has not been recognized outside the nation itself as sovereign in spite of its claims to such a status (158 Year Struggle).

Since Native Americans have historically been treated as subjects to the governments established by colonizers, those represented by the International Indian Treaty Council show counter-discourse in the written documents by which they seek to redefine themselves. The Declaration of Indigenous Rights shows that they do not have to rely purely on the colonizers for their status, since it was passed on an international basis involving the nations of the world, of which only a fraction have had colonies. It is through counter-discourse that they claim the rights described in the document, such as through writing their own

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tribal policies. The Republic of Lakotah is especially counter-discursive, redefining the tribe through its own writings including its website to replace the old discourse, which was in the form of treaties with the United States. The tribe’s earlier definition through the documents written by colonizers is replaced with documents written by the tribe itself.

In 2008, the Republic of Timucua formed as a result of the Declaration of Indigenous Rights. It is intended as a sovereign nation, but it has not been recognized as such outside the nation itself. Furthermore, its leadership admits to needing a lot of progress before the structures are in place as required of a sovereign nation (A brief outline). In short, Ganienkeh, Lakotah, and Timucua all represent counter-discourse in their documents and in their websites from which the information came. In all three cases, the counterdiscourse resists the usual relationship of Native Americans to the United States. Instead of the pattern of limited autonomy under American rule, these nations seek to separate from the United States entirely. Because none of them has been either granted or refused cessation from the United States, they are effectively operating independently of what the colonizers say. Their counter-discourse then includes a redefinition of the concept of sovereignty for a nation, though Lakotah and Timucua refer to international policy for their statuses.

Counter-discourse in Native American literacy practices thus forms an expression of their identity.

They do not write the same way as the white majority around them, because they have their own cultures.

The writings are about their resistance to the common approaches to literacy around them. The counterdiscourse includes their approaches to creative writing and to governing themselves. They have become minorities, but they still maintain their own voice.

They assert the fact that the land belonged to their ancestors before it was claimed by the colonizers. They often express this in their official documents, while also expressing it creatively. While the language and many literary forms came from the colonizers, Native Americans use them in distinct ways. It is then an important part of their culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “About the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.” 2020. Retrieved from https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are/.

Alexander, Dave. “Sequoyah: Inventor of Written Cherokee.”

September, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-sequoyah/.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Arola, Kristin L. “Indigenous Interfaces.” Douglas M. Walls and Stephanie Vie, Editors. Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, Pedagogies. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse, 2017. Pp. 209-222. Retrieved from

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https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/social/.

“A brief outline of the History of the Native American Tribal Republic of Timucua.” Retrieved from http://republicoftimucua.yolasite.com/a-brief-historyof-our-nation.php.

“Ganienkeh- 33 Years Later.” Retrieved from http://www.ganienkeh.net/33years/.

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York City: Vintage Books, 2006.

“158 Year Struggle for Legal Justice.” 2020. Retrieved from http://www.republicoflakotah.com/steps-tosovereignty/158-year-stuggle-for-justice/.

Park, Jae Young. “An Ecological Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” Retrieved from http://space.snu.ac.kr/ bitstream/10371/147089/1/%5B%EB%AF%B8%EA%B5%A D%ED%95%9941-2%5D3.%EB%B0%95%EC%9E%AC% EC%98%81.pdf.

Pizzato, Mark. “Brechtian and Aztec violence in Valdez’s ‘Zoot Suit.’” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 22 June 1998. Retrieved from http://users.clas.ufl.edu/jimenez/ spw4304teatro/B2%20Zoot%20suit.Brechtian%20and%20 Aztec%20violence%20in%20Valdez.htm.

Rahman, Hanifa. “A Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead as a Post-colonial Eco-critical text.” Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 5 Issue 6. 10 June, 2017. Pp.17-20 Retrieved from http://www. questjournals.org/jrhss/papers/vol5-issue6/D561720.pdf.

Silko, Lesley Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin Books, 2006.

Kindle Edition.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” Literary Analyses. Retrieved from http://www.unm.edu/~joglesby/ Silko%20Essay.pdf.

Tiffin, Helen. “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse.”

Kunapipi, Vol. 9 Issue 3, 1987. Pp.17-34. Retrieved from https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer= https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1705&context=kunapipi.

“Tribal Nations & the United States: An Introduction.”

February, 2020. Retrieved from http://www.ncai.org/about-tribes.

Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Houston: Arte Publico, 1992. Kindle Edition.

Washburn, Franci. “A Post-colonial Perspective on James Welch’s ‘The Heartsong of Charging Elk.’” Indigenous Nations Study Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2002.

Pp. 21-30. Retrieved from https://kuscholarworks.ku. edu/bitstream/handle/1808/5784/ins.v03.n2.21-31. pdf;jsessionid=6B7E8047EA48E1B2EF4A3C8F35335C6B?sequence=1.

WORKS CONSULTED Jakubiak, Katarzyna. American Ethnic Literature, 21 January- 8 May 2020, Millersville University, Millersville, PA. Class Lectures.

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THE HAT CLOSET: A Reflection on Nursing Education

BY JUSTIN MCFAIL “I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.” - Clara Barton Hats are important to nursing. Nurses often wear many hats during their day, be they metaphorical or literal.

The white linen cap became a symbol of the healer and protector, but perhaps now it is a more archaic relic of posthumous age. In academia, some hats may take on the shape of consecrated bovines adorning the hallowed halls of ivory towers. In my journey to define my philosophy of nursing education I first had to adorn several hats only to realize my closet a burgeoning cacophony of discordant tones. Thus, in an attempt to alleviate the bedlam of the nursing hat rack I have grouped my collective sum into four main metaphorical hats: mentor, learner, innovator, and nurse.

Mentor (a gray woolen knit cap like those worn in the greater UK) Teacher, leader, servant, and counselor are all synonymous, or perhaps more aptly fragments creating the mentor’s role. As a guiding hallmark, every time I teach, I like to remember the words of celebrity food personality Alton Brown, “Laughing brains are more absorbent.” I feel that the stale structure of traditional didactic learning is best augmented with interactive activities, creative expression, or even in some cases, puppets (because everybody loves puppets).

As a mentor of nursing, it is not enough to merely educate future nurses. Still, one must also become a leader capable of guiding students through a process of continued experiential growth. Unfortunately, as a leader, it is often too easy to shift from a mentor to a boss.

I constantly remind myself that the best leadership is servant leadership or one who values their community’s needs over their personal aspirations. Finally, the role of the counselor, which is an often-underrepresented aspect

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of mentorship. Counseling can take many forms, be they active listening or sagely guidance. As a mentor, I find it essential to give mentees time to reflect on their own process of growth and development through their nursing journey.

Learner (a fashionable black beret) Academics like to use the phrase, “nursing is a constant process of continuing education,” or something to that effect. For me, it is not just a process of continued self-improvement through education but rather a state of being in which an individual is always engaged as a learner. One can easily stand behind a podium and extoll the virtues of nursing. However, if one cannot reflect on the learners’ mindset, then the proverbial sermon is all for not.

Understanding my own learning through the application of Adult-Learning Theory, Novice-to-Expert, VAK, and Multiple Intelligence Theory has better helped to understand the need to create multimodal engagement for the learner. Scholarly articles and textbooks may provide a labyrinth of words christened as knowledge, but too often, they do not engage in a way that develops neuronal connections. In essence, one might endeavor to impart the “why” of learning, i.e., the reason something has, is, or will occur, but learning cannot truly occur until one asks “what, therefore, should we do?”

Innovation (A derby chapeau pluming with a rainbow of feathers) One can search the internet and find thousands of quotes availing the buzzwords of innovation. To me, innovation is a highbrowed euphemism for change, i.e., a creative flourishing of new ideas molded into unfamiliar reality. The scientific method, the nursing process, change theory are all frameworks that rely on creativity to generate novel approaches. As a nurse, I often rely on my sense of creativity for innovative problem solving, such as playing arts and crafts to adhere to an ostomy appliance to my patient’s ever-gushing rectum. As a scholar, I use research as fuel for innovation. For me, it is not enough

THE HAT CLOSET: A reflectionon Nursing Education

to simply follow the precedents set by those before but to understand how these concepts came into being. As an innovator, I strive to understand the rules to fastidiously break them and rebel against the status quo. Or, to put in much simpler terms, I am never content with the notion of “but we’ve always done it this way.”

Nurse (a surgical cap, but with a sense of personality) As I move through the corridors of academic nursing, I find it grounding to say, “I mustn’t forget what is to be a nurse,” a memento mori of sorts. The nurse is a mosaic of personalities- caregiver, teacher, secretary, nutritionist, counselor, advocate, and above all else, healer. The multidimensional aspects of nursing cannot be entirely imparted in an academic setting. It may be impossible for me to explain what it is like to hold the hand of someone who is dying, but at the same time, have I not failed as a mentor if I do prepare my student to face those challenges? Nursing is first and foremost at the bedside.

While the task focused core of nursing may be the bane of many academics seeking to impart scholarly enlightenment upon their pupils, at the end of the day if a nurse is unable to provide the most basic needs for their patient, have I not failed as an educator? That is not to say the lofty intentions of academia are hogwash and tomfoolery; after all, should the nurse not be able to think critically, have I not doomed the patient? To me, education is a matter of balancing theory and practice while guiding students to the realization that one without the other is meaningless.

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A Social Perspective of CONSTRUCTED Languages

BY CLARK FENNIMORE

Throughout human history, many languages have developed with unique cultures attached to them. This connection is described by Anderson as part of an “imagined community.” There are, however, currently several constructed languages with origins outside of that natural process of formation. Like the languages that have formed naturally, some constructed languages have developed cultural characteristics among users as an interesting phenomenon among modern languages. In short, constructed languages have developed a distinct form of imagined community.

First of all, more detail is needed concerning Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community.” The connection between language and culture is important because it brings people out of the mere awareness of the local environment and into a larger awareness of society. It allows people to recognize their place in a people group, whether that be a nation or a group of some other kind. It allows the formation of governments and other kinds of shared society. The sharing of language is then a large part of how we share culture because we can then communicate the many things we have in common with others. The imagined community is about people connecting through language and finding many things in common (Anderson).

Next, more detail is needed as to what a constructed language is. Other terms for the concept include planned or artificial language. It has already been contrasted with most languages, of which the features resulted from gradual changes in older languages. Instead, a constructed language has features resulting from a person or small group essentially sitting down and putting together a set of features to form a new language.

Several types of reasons have inspired people to construct new languages. Two of these reasons are of primary importance here. The first is provision of a neutral language in which people of different linguistic backgrounds can speak to each other—an alternative to the necessity of one of them knowing the other’s language. The second is provision of a language as part of the credibility of settings in stories of speculative fiction— an alternative to fitting real languages into imaginary settings. Though these are the two reasons to be discussed in detail here, there are others, such as testing of linguistic hypotheses (Constructed Languages).

There are too many constructed languages for an exhaustive discussion here. The discussion is to be limited to major examples. Those examples will be shown to have an impact in the modern world. That impact relates to the concept of “imagined community.”

The term constructed language is often abbreviated conlang. The process of forming such a language is called conlanging. A person engaged in this process is a conlanger. There is a special organization for such people, called the Language Creation Society—or LCS for short. Activities include meetings and publications for those interested in the conlang world (Language Creation Society).

The first type of constructed language mentioned above is the type constructed as a neutral language (Constructed Languages). A specific term for this type of language is an International Auxiliary Language—or IAL for short (Chandler, “International Auxiliary Languages”). This type of constructed language manifested itself in Volapuk, which became a part of public consciousness before any other constructed language. The concept of constructed languages existed centuries before Volapuk, but it was not until this one’s 1880 publication—from author J.M. Schleyer—that a significant number of people wanted to learn an IAL. However, its popularity quickly waned as people found it to be far short of practical. An important point is that its vocabulary was based on similar terms throughout the languages of Europe (Chandler, “History”).

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The next major IAL was Esperanto, first introduced in publication in 1887 by Polish author L.L. Zamenhof. It was the primary IAL by 1900, though people also found it short of practical. That year, a Delegation was formed for the purpose of setting up an IAL. Esperanto was soon considered alongside Idiom Neutral—a new language from the same organization that had supported Volapuk. The resulting IAL was called Ido—based on Esperanto, but with changes made to original features that were considered defective. Idiom Neutral also had some influence in Ido (Chandler, “History”).

Ironically, Esperanto has remained the largest IAL in spite of Ido (Chandler, “History”). In fact, it has grown to the point that many couples who can speak it have raised their children with it as a native language in addition to the parents’ native languages. This fact plus its use only of features found in languages that developed naturally give it at least the potential to be classified as a natural language. Because its native speakers have at least one other native language, the other language always has an adstrate influence on the speaker’s Esperanto. Differences have developed between its native and non-native varieties (Lindstedt).

Lacking a community of regular contact, the native speakers of Esperanto have not produced any collective changes to the language. Instead there are different forms based on influence from different adstrate languages.

Because of such influence, it has features of pidgin and creole languages. Furthermore, many features have taken form in Esperanto since the death of Zamenhof, thus making unofficial rules for its grammar. This development of the language independently of any standardizing policies has provided another form of evidence for its position as a natural language (Lindstedt).

Esperanto is comparable to other languages for which the first generation of native speakers is discoverable. The example of creoles has been mentioned already, in which a pidgin—an example of the neutral type of language mentioned earlier for use between people of different language backgrounds- comes to be learned as the native language of the children of its speakers. Besides creoles, another similar situation is when a language historically ceased to have native speakers, but eventually a later generation of the descendants of its users decide to bring it back into use. The largest example of this situation is Modern Hebrew. In short, Esperanto is comparable to other languages in which a whole generation of native speakers learned it from non-native speakers. Because those other examples are classified as natural languages, Esperanto can still have the same designation in spite of its origin as a constructed language (Lindstedt).

At this point, the structure of Esperanto is worth discussing, starting with some points about origins of its features. Zamenhof incorporated features primarily from the Romance languages. However, other features were adapted from Slavic languages, as well as Yiddish. It has not gone through abrupt change, because unlike fast-changing creoles, its features were well-established by the time of the first native speakers. It is more like the beginning of Modern Hebrew in this sense. While second and first-language varieties have already been shown as different, there is also a third major variety in Standard Esperanto. A potential for future change is seen in the tendency of native speakers to drop many suffixes from the standard (Bergen).

Esperanto has relatively free word order, though the pattern tends toward SVO. While similarities to creoles have been noted already, it strays from creole patterns of using free word order to mark the topic of the sentence.

Nouns take suffixes for three cases, though of these the accusative is among the suffixes sometimes dropped. This particular case indicates direct object, and so the dropping of the suffix is compensated by SVO word order. To a degree, native speakers have different accents in Esperanto depending on the adstrate language. The difference of their Esperanto from that of their second-language parents shows that they are the ones changing those features (Bergen).

Because Esperanto has some features of creoles but also some significant deviations from them, it is considered to be more of a creoloid. When second-language speakers have taught it to their children as native language, the two parents usually have shared the same native language, so that Esperanto was not the only language they could use to speak with each other. Such parents have also tended to have fluency in Esperanto beyond that typical of a pidgin. The context in which Esperanto is the only language for communication is at conventions dedicated to the language, but these tend to meet only once a year and briefly—plus with only partial attendance from the Esperanto community (Bergen).

Some conclusions are to be reached concerning Esperanto in its social context. According to Mooney and Evans, languages and dialects form a major part of the identities of ethnic groups that use them (141). Esperanto can be seen as different from that kind of situation—not only does it lack connection to an ethnic group, but it is designed specifically to be neutral in that area. However, there is still a social group aspect to it, as represented particularly by the conventions mentioned already. This is to say that there is an element of identity that it gives to its users. There is no telling how the community could grow in this regard in the future.

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The high degree of isolation among the speakers of Esperanto does not seem conducive to the formation of an imagined community. With a natural language, the native speakers tend to live within a particular area. Even when consciousness of community is very local, as when a town or village rarely communicates with the outside world, there is still a shared language connecting that community.

Esperanto can be seen to lack communities at even that level. However, its speakers, generally using it only within the family unit, can appreciate the fact that there are other speakers outside of the limited environment in which they use it. The language then forms a connection with other people whom they do not know. That connection, based on language, has elements of imagined community and can become more solidified as the language grows.

The IALs already described are among others that have been constructed. The other major type of constructed language is that for the purpose of fiction (Constructed Languages). A major example of this type is Klingon, from Star Trek. A simple set of features and vocabulary were first constructed for the language by actor James Doohan for the series. Linguist Marc Okrand later fleshed it out for more sophisticated use in the series. Because the language is named for the alien race to which it is native in the Star Trek universe, several rare features in human languages were chosen to give it an unfamiliar quality. These features come primarily from languages indigenous to the Americas, with examples such as OVS word order and other rare options in features of the different levels of language structure (Pereltsvaig).

In 1985, Okrand’s dictionary of the language was the first written work about it made available to the public. It sold to thousands of dedicated viewers who wanted to learn about the language they were hearing on the series.

Later works in and about the language included magazines and translations of great literary works. There is even a Klingon Language Institute. With its basis in natural languages, it has been learned by many people; a few are even fluent. However it has some features that separate it from natural languages, such as only 2000 words available for use—since natural languages have much more (Pereltsvaig).

Klingon represents a different angle from Esperanto on the concept of language as part of identity. This one does not have native speakers, and is not designed for communication in a wide range of situations. However, it is still used as a source of bonding for dedicated followers of Star Trek. Speaking it is thus a form of identity for those who learn it. Its connection with Star Trek culture forms the basis of a type of imagined community, since such is based on a connection between language and culture.

A situation similar to Klingon is that of the languages constructed by J.R.R. Tolkien for his fiction set in Middle Earth—the fictional world that he invented. A major network of research on these is The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, which includes many researchers from around the world. It publishes magazines and newsletters for those interested in this area of research (The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship). Another important site for research of Tolkien’s languages is Parf Edhellen: an elvish dictionary. As the name indicates, this site lists and defines words from the languages of Middle Earth. These languages include those of the elves and other races portrayed in Middle Earth (Parf Edhellen).

One of the most well-known works which Tolkien wrote in the setting of Middle Earth is The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The trilogy concludes with The Return of the King. The narrative part of the book in followed by appendices expanding the mythology of Middle Earth. Of these, Appendices E and F give great detail about the languages of the mythology (435-466). These provide a major demonstration of how Tolkien constructed his languages. Several details are of importance in this discussion.

Of the languages of elves mentioned earlier, the ones developed extensively are Quenya and Sindarin. These two are shown to have a realistic genetic relationship under a family called Eldarin. Their differences have a realistic explanation in being native to two groups that separated from each other geographically. These groups’ common descent from the Eldar makes them closer to each other than to the descendants of East-elves, with languages of even greater difference from their own (Tolkien 452-453). Tolkien’s genius in the field of linguistics allowed him to create a sophisticated network of languages as demonstrated particularly by those he gave to his elves (Parf Edhellen).

Of course there are also humans in Middle Earth, thus leading to the presence of “Mannish” languages. Of particular importance among these is the Westron language, which became native to the other races within a large part of Middle Earth, thus being called “Common Speech” as well; only the elves maintained their own languages within the area. There are, however, other regions where men have different languages. There are languages particular to some very remote bands of humans. Other human languages include Adunaic. There is another group called the Dunedain, who have taken elvish languages as their own native languages (Tolkien 452-455).

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A Social Perspective OF CONSTRUCTED LANGAGES ARTICLE Title

A few other races are of importance in Tolkien’s stories as well. The Hobbits include several main characters, but the Common Speech is the only one attributed to them as native. Dwarves are shown to have their own language, though they use it only among themselves. Orcs are an evil race using the Black Speech of Sauron. The language of the Ents is not given great detail, but it is shown to be very distinct in sound structure and to require very long sentences (Tolkien 456-459).

In the books, Tolkien wrote quotes in the languages primarily in the Latin alphabet. However, he invented writing systems in which they are supposed to have been written in Middle Earth. In other words, what he wrote in the Latin alphabet is supposed to be an ancient language transcribed in these cases. In Appendix E, there is a description of what sounds are represented both by the characters in the invented writing and by the Latin letters used to transcribe them. The invented writing systems include alphabets and abjads. Furthermore letters, defined by writing on paper, are distinguished from runes, defined by writing in stone. The Eldarin elves are depicted as developing all the writing systems in Middle Earth. However, the languages of other races represent modifications for their own phonology (435-451).

Within this fictitious network of languages, there are many principles of real languages. Several of these are described by John Algeo. One major principle is that of a language family—a group of languages with each resulting from a unique set of changes to an earlier source language shared by all the member languages (52). In the area of writing, languages of the real world represent many writing systems of different types. Furthermore, it has been common for one civilization to take the writing system of another civilization and modify it to represent its own language. A major example is the Greek alphabet, which has been modified into many other alphabets of the modern world (35-39). Thus, Tolkien presents fictitious applications of real processes in language. There are in Middle Earth fictitious language families and writing systems. They show credible growth in language families and credible spread of a writing system to different linguistic contexts. They show a very detailed example of how constructed languages can reflect real languages.

In conclusion about Tolkien’s languages, there is a sense of community among the professionals who research them. This situation is different from the many Star Trek enthusiasts who learn Klingon to identify more closely with the series. Instead, the study of Tolkien’s languages seems to be more about an academic interest in his fiction.

This is not to deny academic study of Klingon, as such study certainly occurs. Likewise, Klingon’s original use on television parallels the use of elvish languages in the major film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. While there are parallels, Tolkien’s languages and Klingon represent different kinds of imagined communities. They show different ways that a constructed language can accumulate groups of people interested in studying them, whether for literary studies or for television fans.

A more recent constructed language is Dothraki, from the HBO series Game of Thrones. The series is based on A Song of Fire and Ice, a series of novels by George R.R. Martin. While the novels provide some vocabulary for the language, named after the fictional ethnic group that is supposed to speak it, the grand majority of its development was done specifically for the television series. Its development was the work of young linguist David J. Peterson. With the popularity of the series, Peterson published Living Language Dothraki as an analysis of the language (Dothraki).

There are several public websites used by those enthusiastic about the series. There is also a website for the language itself (Dothraki). In short, this language is a major part of discussion for those who follow the series. It is thus part of the identity of a community, in a way similar to Klingon, though on a smaller scale.

The last constructed language to be discussed here is Na’vi, from the movie Avatar. Comparable to several other languages discussed so far, it is a major point of interest for fans of the movie in which it is used. The website Learn Na’vi connects those who want to learn the language. In the fictional world of the movie, the language is named for the alien race that speaks it. It is actually still being expanded by Paul Frommer, who was hired to construct it originally for the film directed by James Cameron. Its grammar includes several features that occur rarely in real languages (Learn Na’vi).

Something interesting about these languages developed for fiction is in their relationship to the fictional worlds for which they were developed. They can often be seen to define fictional races. In this way, they are comparable to languages that have developed naturally in the real world, since those define real ethnic groups.

These constructed languages then take what real languages represent and transfer that onto fictional groups, which are supposed to have their cultures constructed along with the languages.

Several constructed languages have developed a distinct form of identity for people who study them.

Esperanto is unique as a constructed language with some native speakers. Some other constructed languages are like Esperanto in representing a distinct form of imagined community in the format of brief gatherings.

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A Social Perspective OF CONSTRUCTED LANGAGES

Furthermore, some have websites as primary forums for their communities. While lacking native speakers, those languages still provide a means by which people interact, thus forming personal connections.

With the exception of Esperanto, the others described here are connected to people enthusiastic about modern media franchises of which constructed languages form an important part. Furthermore, they include two languages that are supposed to be native to aliens, thus constructed intentionally with unusual linguistic features meant to give them unfamiliar vibes. These, plus Tolkien’s languages and Dothraki, show connections among people who follow speculative fiction franchises. Constructed languages can thus connect people in different ways, including through genre interests. The groups that use them form the subcultures which they define.

WORKS CITED

Algeo, John. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th Ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2010.

Anderson, Benedict. “Imagined Communities” (excerpt). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, Editor. New York: Norton, 2018. Pp. 1832-1839.

Bergen, Benjamin K. “Nativization Processes in L1 Esperanto.” Journal of Child Language, 2001. Pp. 575-595. Online. http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf. Accessed 30 November 2019.

Chandler, James. “International Auxiliary Languages.” International Auxiliary Languages, 2010. http://interlanguages.net/. Accessed 29 November 2019. …. “History of the International Language Ido: A Brief History of the Search for a World-Language.” International Auxiliary Languages, 2010. http://interlanguages.net/IdoHist.html. Accessed 29 November 2019.

“Constructed Languages.” Must Go. 2014-2019. https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/constructed-languages/.

Accessed 29 November 2019.

Dothraki: A Language of Fire and Blood. http://www.dothraki.com/. Accessed 4 December 2019.

Language Creation Society, 2019. https://conlang.org/. Accessed 29 November 2019.

Learn Na’vi. https://learnnavi.org/. Accessed 4 December 2019.

Lindstedt, Jouko. “Native Esperanto as a Test Case for Natural Language.” A Man of Measure: Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson on his 60th Birthday. SKY Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 19. Pp. 47-55. Online. http://www.linguistics.fi/julkaisut/ SKY2006_1/1FK60.1.5.LINDSTEDT.pdf. Accessed 30 November 2019.

Mooney, Annabelle and Betsy Evans. Language, Society & Power. 4th Ed. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Parf Edhellen: an elvish dictionary. https://www.elfdict.com/. Accessed 3 December 2019.

Pereltsvaig, Asya. “Klingon.” Languages of the World, 2019. https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/uncategorized/klingon-2.html.

Accessed 1 December 2019.

The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, 2015. http://www.elvish.org/. Accessed 3 December 2019. Tolkien, J.R.R (1956).

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Reprint. New York: Ballatine Books, 1994.

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SIGNS of Weakness

in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137

BY KRISTY DANIEL ABSTRACT The dissection of how Middle English supports the Peterborough Chronicle inspired by the rule of King Stephen allows for scholars to understand the weakness the nobility felt against the traitors. The combination of gendered-text, focus on disassociation between nobility and townspeople, and visualization of the downfall of the religious individuals warns rulers to have a strong foundation in their religion and interaction with their townspeople to maintain a strong connection across the people.

KEYWORDS Middle English, language, literary elements, theme, weakness, text analysis, history The Peterborough Chronicle 1137 is a historic account of King Stephen and his rule of England during the Middle Ages through a parable relating to the martyrdom of Saint William. The literature points to weakness of King Stephen and those involved in his reign through syntax, content, and focus. The author used feminine language during the Medieval Era to assist in symbolizing the king’s lack of involvement with the townspeople and the femininity of the traitors.

Throughout the Peterborough Chronicle 1137, the author included the visual description of the torture done by the nobles; created chaotic perspective through the desperation of the townspeople and religious members; and an exposition of destroying homes to build castles only to be used against the town as ways to show weakness in the content. Through the analysis of the Peterborough Chronicle 1137, the gendered text, focus, and literary elements intentionally reflected on the theme of weakness if someone does not have a strong foundation in religion.

Feminine language supports the theme of weakness in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 by directing the reader to understand that the subject is weak. The separation of gender can be easily identified through singular and plural possessive articles and pronouns. Hi is the third-person singular feminine pronoun for ‘me’ or ‘them’ (Burrow and Turville-Petre 25). Throughout the literature, the use of hi is based on the object receiving the action of a verb. In total, there are seventeen counts of ‘hi’ being used in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137.

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The first accounts were to identify the castles the traitors were building and repossessing against the king. The text reads, “þa þe castles waren maked, þa fylden hi mid deovles and yvel men” l. 15-16 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 77). Translated, these lines state, “which castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men.” The use of hi refers to the castles that were built by the traitors. The feminine pronoun for ‘they’ shows the weakness of the castles built due to them being run by nobles for a bad cause. Another example of hi used to signify an object of the disloyal nobles stems from the taxes on the villages (Burrow and Turville-Petre 78). The chronicle reads, “Hi laeden gæildes on the tunes ævre umwile and clepeden it ‘tenserie’” l. 36-37. Translated into Modern English, it reads, “They impose taxes on the towns repeatedly and called it ‘protected money.’ This encounter of hi refers to the nobles to show them as weak individuals who resort to crime against the town.

A common weak article that is used throughout the Peterborough Chronicles 1137 contains the use of ‘þa, þae, and þo’ which translates to ‘the’ (Burrow and Turville-Petre 26). Similar to hi, the articles are used to identify the weaker nouns used in the text. They are found used to describe the nobles and their treacherous tasks. The manuscript reads “Þa Þe wrecck men ne hadden nammore to gyven, Þa ræveden hi and brendon alle the tunes…” l.36-37 (78).

The direct translation is, “the impoverished men had nothing to give, they [traitors] took it [what the townspeople had left] and burned all the towns.” The first use of þa specifically relates to the impoverished men. The feminine use of ‘the’ parallels the weakness of poverty in the text with the description of the man coming afterwards. The second use of þa points back to the reader’s prior knowledge of how little the townspeople have to give to the traitors. It continues the theme of weakness and disrespect for the townspeople based on their inability to pay for the taxes. Articles flip gender based on the noun and syntax in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 77). Pronouns and articles are easier to spot whether they are masculine or feminine based on the spelling used and the subject to which they substitute in the text. The use of pronouns and articles are just one of many details in the Peterborough

SIGNS OF Weakness in the Peterborough Chronicle ARTICLE1137 Title

Chronicle 1137 that identify the focus on the villages and townspeople rather than King Stephen.

The use of hi and þa in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 to show weakness at the syntactical level can be counterargued as coincidental instead of deliberate.

Because we cannot ask the original author, the use of feminine language could be deemed as coincidental.

However, based on the specific placement of hi and þa in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137, it is safe to infer the femininity as intentional. The author chose to use feminine pronouns and articles to articulate the weakness of the King and nobles in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137. They do not make the literature weak as a whole, but create an illusion of what is weak in the content of the piece. Syntax plays a key role in understanding the author’s intent for the literature through the image of weak, poverty-stricken men or the castles built on weak morals. Through imagery, perspective, exposition, and symbolism, these literary elements draw attention to what is deemed important in the chronicle: the people.

The author of the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 uses three main literary elements for the focus to remain on the collection of villagers: imagery, perspective, and symbolism. Each one plays a specific part in understanding the intent of the chronicle as an historic account during the rule of King Stephen. Imagery can be defined as the ability to describe something to appeal to the senses. In the Peterborough Chronicle 1137, the author mainly uses visual sensory details to describe the torture of the townspeople. The author describes the crucethur as, “...in an ceste þat was scort and nrew and undep - and dide scærpe stanes þerinne, and Þrengde Þe man Þærinne ðat him bracon all Þe limes” l. 26-28 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 77-78). The ‘crucethur’ can be described in Modern English as ‘a short, narrow, and shallow chest - where sharp stones that crushed the men breaking all his limbs.’ The imagery details what types of torture a person would receive by the traitors of King Stephen. For nineteen years, villagers underwent this type of treatment and worse without any thought of hope for it to end. The chronicle is written for empathy for the townspeople and disturbance towards the nobles. The author added these details to invoke a negative emotional response against those who either did nothing (King Stephen) or executed the torture (the traitors). This, among other images in Peterborough Chronicle 1137 leave a question as to why King Stephen did not interfere with the continued treatment of the villagers. The image of not having a King react to the harmful treatment of his people symbolizes the theme of weakness within King Stephen. He did not have the strength to discipline the traited nobles of their actions. The imagery used to describe the crucethur is based on the perspective of the author’s experience.

The author of the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 is either a bishop, a monk, or a religiously affiliated individual that experienced the grievance of living under the rule of King Stephen based on the terrorism described (Burrow and Turville-Petre 79). Perspective is a literary element that creates the expectation of syntax and content. The author makes religious allusions as an explanation to why all the people are being maimed and mutilated during that time frame. Lines 52-55 share the religious explanation, “Warsæ me tilede, Þe erth ne bar nan corn, for pe land was al fordon mid swilce dædes; and hi sæden openlice ðat Crist slep, and his halechen. Swilc and mare Þanne we cunnen sæin we Þoleden xix wintre for ure sinnes” (Burrow and Turville-Petre 78-79). Those that survived believed the torture to be punishment for their sins and that Christ slept through all the pain and suffering they withstood.

The bishops used religion as an explanation for why they were being mistreated to give peace of mind to those impacted.

Through a religious affiliation, the author ends the chronicle with martyrdom as to bring hope and positivity after the horrid treatment (Burrow and Turville-Petre 80). After all that the people had gone through, the chronicle shifts to the light of William Malduit who gathered monks, planted new vegetation, and constituted new life in the land bringing prosperity back into the lives of those who lived there. The author uses the historical account as a biblical allegory to put the church before one’s own desire, “On his [King Stephen] time þe Judeus of Norwic bohton an Cristen cild beforen Estren and pineden him all Þe ilce pining ðat ure Drihten was pined, and on Lang Fridæi him on rode hengen for ure Drihtines luve, and sythen byrieden him; wenden ðat it sculd ben forholen” l. 75-78 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 79-80). He ends with, “King Stephen bought a Christan child before Easter and tortured him the same that the Lord was tortured, and on Long Friday (Good Friday) hanged him on the cross for the Lord’s love and then buried him; when that should have been concealed.” The child was deemed Saint William.

The author wrote the chronicle to support both history and the Bible through a parable which supports my claim the author as a bishop or monk. The perspective of the author as a religious individual gives the chronicle another layer of significance not only as to account for King Stephen’s weakness of ruling, but to also support the importance of religion and continuous practice. The parable the religious monk tells through the chronicle contains symbols of weakness for King Stephen and the individuals who place selfishness before religion.

Through perspective and imagery comes symbolism in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137.

Symbolism is the ability to allude to a common theme, idea, or object through indirect language. While the M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 43

SIGNS OF Weakness in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137

text itself is literal in context, the spirit of the text comes through in the syntax and ideology. The entire Peterborough Chronicle 1137 has a theme of weakness whether it is King Stephen, the castles built by weak traitors, or to succumb to human desire. The author uses these moments in the literature to build on the idea to be involved in religious practice in order to shun away greed by imprisoning family and become aware of the history being created in the present. These themes can be seen in the use of articles and pronouns to reinforce the concept continuously throughout the chronicle. The use of symbols reaffirms the weakness in townspeople and the castles built on weak principles.

The author uses these elements in the content of the chronicle to create a parable that is educational and historic.

The content of the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 aims to focus on the treatment of the townspeople, their livelihood, and the destruction and rebirth of the sacred grounds to advance the details formed the idea of weakness on multiple levels. After the beginning explanation of King Stephen’s actions to imprison his family, give away the royal treasures, and lack of discipline, the rest of the chronicle explains what the commoners went through for nineteen years (Burrow and Turville-Petre 78). The focus turned away from the King himself to those that were tortured and put to building castles for nobles. These castles were held against the King and then repossessed by the traitors who filled it with similarly bad men. From the castles, the focus geared towards the torture the people experienced.

The description of the people being hung by their feet, thumbs, and heads with the imagery of the crucethur, points to the main characters of the chronicle as the townsmen (Burrow and Turville-Petre 77). The author could have told the parable about the nobles and their side of history, however, that viewpoint would have humanized the nobles. Because the focus is on the villagers, it shuts out any life the traitors may have had.

The author portrays them like monsters without any light of a soul. It adds to the picture of the town being weak against their grasp. The author focuses on the people’s despair and desperation as they fled the land, “sume fugen ut of lande” l. 41 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 78). The focus empathized with the townspeople which were the clear subject of the parable within the chronicle. The transition between the commoners and sacred was seamless due to the traitors not caring what type of person they were going to maul next. They did not hold back from persecuting any person they came across no matter their status, gender, religious affiliation, or power.

The focus of the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 switched the focus from the ordinary townspeople to the sacred individuals as an introduction to the religious significance of the literature. The author tells

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of the curses the bishops placed on the evil men, “Þe biscopes and lered men heom cursed ævre, oc was heom naht þarof, for hi weon al forcursæd and forsworen and forloren” l. 50-52 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 78). None of the curses did any good due to the traitors already being ‘accursed, forsworn, and abandoned.’ The inclusion of bishops supports the traitors not caring about status or type of people, but merely were greedy looking for ways to survive through the chaos they created. The chronicle reads, “Ne hi ne forbaren bisopes land ne abbots ne preostes, ac ræveden munekes and clerekes, and avric man other Þe overmyte” l. 46-48. Every man who had power robbed one another. They did not show mercy to any type of person whether friend or foe. The traitors were out for themselves individually.

Without the specific section about the bishops being ravaged, during the Middle Ages, it would have been assumed the traitors were decent enough to leave the religious alone (Burrow and Turville-Petre 78). However, the author chose to incorporate the people of the villages and churches as a cohesive unit. Not only does combining the two groups contribute to the historical account, but it supports the weakness of the traitors that they did not have a religious moral foundation that would have prevented them from doing these acts.

The chronicle uses the destruction of sacred land as a transition point into the martyrdom of Saint William as a way to show strength after weakness. The Peterborough Chronicle 1137 shifts after “Swilc and mare Þanne we cunnen sæin we Þoleden xix winter for ure sinnes” l. 54-55 (Burrow and Turville-Petre 79). Nineteen years after the burning of the church, the monks gathered

by Martin of Bec began to reconstruct and “goded it swythe and laet it refen” l. 60. The reconstruction took time with replant their crops, opening their homes to immigrants, and showing charity to one another. This did not all happen in one night either. The author states it took “xx winter and half gær and viii daies” l. 56-57 for the community to regroup after the destruction. It took twenty and a half years and eight days to restructure after Pope Eugenius III granted protection of the land from expropriation of the kingdom or nobility. At that moment, the author gives the power to the sacred instead of the royalty. This gave the sacred an opportunity to rebuild without worry about financial obligation to the king. They were able to focus their efforts to grow internally without needing to feel obligated to return anything to the king. Without the support of Pope Eugenius III, the church and all of its inhabitants would not have been able to resurrect their livelihood without approval of the king.

The Peterborough Chronicle 1137 supports the strength of religion through the production of crops and martyrdom of Saint William (Burrow and Turville-Petre 79). The author uses imagery to include the wealth of vegetation through “he makede manie

SIGNS OF Weakness in the Peterborough Chronicle ARTICLE1137 Title

munekes, and planted winiærd, and makede mani weorkes, and wende Þe tun betere Þan it ær wæs, and wæs god munec and god man, and foÞi him luveden God and gode men” l. 70-73. The harvest was more fruitful after the reign of King Stephen because the church grew stronger with William Malduit (Burrow and Turville-Petre 79). His love for God and good workers was strong enough to encourage people to work harder and tend to the crops. The strength of William inspired the continuous growth of the community to bond as a whole and focus on their wellbeing through religion.

during the Middle Ages would provide evidence of how religion plays into the content of the literature.

WORKS CITED Burrow, J. A. and Thorlac Turville-Petre. A Book of Middle English.

Third Edition. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print.

The focus on the community ends with the martyrdom of Saint William through his strength in the community and experiences similar to Christ (Burrow and Turville-Petre 80). Without the uplifting ending, the chronicle would not have a telling story with a clear theme and purpose. This third transition ties together the theme in the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 from an event in history for a greater purpose. The focus of what good came out of the evil gives back hope for kindness and empathy. The literature explains St. William’s martyrdom by comparing his mockery and torment “pining dat ure Drihten was pined, hengen for ure Drihtines love, and ssythen byrieden him” l. 76-78 to Christ’s hanging on the cross to the hanging (Burrow and Turville-Petre 80). They were tormented for the Lord’s love and to relieve the sins of others. Saint William is compared to Christ through his “Drihtin wunderlice and manifaeldlice miracles” l. 81. William’s strong love for the Lord and his ability to work ‘miracles’ by encouraging community engagement shows strength in religion and their faith. Both Saint William’s torment and Christ’s hanging gave opportunity and freedom to the people who believe and worship through religion. Thus, the parable reaffirms the theme of weakness comes from placing personal desires before faith and religion.

I argue the theme of strength through weakness is shown throughout the Peterborough Chronicle 1137 based on the syntax used in the details of articles and pronouns, the literary elements of imagery, perspective, and symbolism; and the transitioning focus throughout to turn the chronicle into a parable with religious undertones. Through an analysis of the text, the support for weakness shows through King Stephen’s rule, the traitor’s lack of moral empathy, and the symbolism of the castle as the strength of religion for growth and harmony. The Peterborough Chronicle 1137 inspires a strong foundation of religion in order to overcome the weakness of the nobility and royalty. Further research on the background of King Stephen and the impact of the terror could provide more evidence and support for historical accuracy and preservation. An in depth look into religious practices and understanding

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The Paradox of Female Agency in

Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s NOVELS

BY TERESA BONDS In Marie View-Chauvet’s provocative triptych Amour, Colère, Folie, the author directs her aim at governmentsanctioned terror and violence, and through the use of three unconnected,revolutionary female protagonists offers a scathing and realistic portrait of life under a ruthless dictatorship.

When contemplating the importance of women’s narratives, novelist and playwright Marie Vieux-Chauvet (19161973) is considered to be one of the most influential writers to comeout of Haiti. In addition to her œuvre, her lived experience as a member of the “occupational generation”1 served as a critical examination of a politically divisive Haiti after French colonization and subsequent US occupation. Vieux-Chauvet’s body of work provided a first- hand documentation of life under totalitarian rule, with particular focus on the social inequalities in Haiti that saw a small, wealthy “mulatto” middle class ruling over a poverty-stricken black majority. This social and economic disparities became more disconcerting under the reign of populist François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who ran on a campaign that centered himself as a champion of the exploited and historically undervalued masses, shifting special attention to the country’s disenfranchised black middle class.

Though colorist rhetoric, “Duvalier strongly emphasized the color issue, exploiting the fact that in Haiti as in other parts of the Caribbean there has been, since colonial times, a general coincidence between color and class, so that most rich are mulatto and most poor are black” (Nicholls 1239-1240). This extensive cultural practice of colorism does not escape Marie Vieux-Vieux-Chauvet, either, and through her work she explores the complex and often overlooked interrelation of colorism and misogyny, using her unique tapestry of tragic and ambiguous female characters to reflect the “psychopathy of mixed-race identity in Haiti” (Asibong 147). The widespread implementation of Duvalierism further divided the already embattled nation; thestruggle between race and class relations further soured; it added new layer of fear for Haiti’s already disenfranchised women. In her masterwork Amour, Colère, Folie, Vieux-Chauvet lays bare the experience of the Haitian woman through three different, yet correlating paradigms, with each of her characters representing different aspects of gender-based persecution, state- sponsored terror, and the traumatized womanhood.

Chauvet’s status in Haiti’s elite upper echelons of Haitian society drew some criticism, and illustrated the challenges of writing about experiences related to destitution while living a life of professional and academic opportunity. Her lack of awareness and social positioning left her far removed from the political unrest of the country, and the inner turmoil of its impoverished lower-class demographic. “As a bourgeois ‘mulatto’ woman writer who claimed no explicit political affiliation, Chauvet was long placed at a remove from existing canons (anti-colonial, nationalist, and social realist, in particular)” (Glover and Benedicty-Kokken 1). Whilescholarly interest in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s texts has been renewed in recent years due to feminist interpretations of her work, her writings were notoriously absent from the Haitian literary canon, while the works of her notably male contemporaries have seen far more visibilityin the academic and scholastic sphere. “This exceptionalized status has much to do with the factof her nonparticipation in the gender-bound political culture of her time. While her narratives offer terrifically scathing portraits of Haitian society, they identify no clear ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys, and her biography suggests a real wariness with respect to activism and practical engagement” (Glover 7).

Despite her lack of performance in radical Haitian politics, Vieux- Chauvet, like many other intellectuals under Duvalier’s dictatorship, was labeled a dissident after her scathing denouncement of the government was considered a threat. As a result, Vieux-Chauvet and her family faced heavy surveillance and persecution from the regime. Scholars speculate that genderpolitics might have caused her omission from the Haitian literary canon, but despite the growing

Vieux- Chauvet was born a year after the US Invasion of Haiti, launching an occupation that would last 19 years, with President Woodrow Wilson promising to deliver on his commitment to making the world safe for democracy.

1

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THE PARADOX of Female Agency in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s NOVELS

threat, Vieux-Chauvet –a privileged member of Port-au-Prince’s elite “mulatto” bourgeoise— remained an active writer in the community, even holding meetings attended by other writers, of which she was the only female participant.

Despite her increasing popularity, she remained removed from any radial political affiliation and was unwilling to commit to a life of nationalist ideology. “Unaffiliated, though, with any of the Marxist, syndicalist, or nationalist groups active during the period, and not writing for any of the radical journals in circulation, Chauvet remained––noted by her daughter Erma Saint-Grégoire, among others––firmly at a distance fromorganized politics” (Glover 9-10).

Subsequently, she was banned from the public sphere, her work removed from the diaspora as the regime’s threats grew more persistent. Fearing further retaliation from Duvalier’sregime, Vieux-Chauvet’s husband tracked down and destroyed all the copies of Amour, Colère, Folie he could find in Haiti, with her daughters buying the remaining copies from the publisher, who had since ceased to publish any more copies of the triptych, at the author’s personal request.

Some modern scholars even argue that Chauvet’s removal from the pantheon of Haitian literature was not solely because of her refusal to participate in political activism but additionallyas a punishment for using her artistic influence as an act of female resistance. Her literary effort reframed the culturally accepted roles of women in Haitian society to transcend beyond subservience, and into the freedom of thought and movement that existed in more male- dominated positions of power.

Through seditious female-driven narratives and patent revolutionary ideology, “Chauvet criticized despotism and radicalized social hierarchies but also the reason that her book was banned was that she questioned and condemned the patriarchal and elitist structure of Haitian society” (Charles 67). The demonization of Marie Vieux-Chauvetas a female intellectual who dared to challenge the status quo, coupled with the subversive natureof her work, likely lead it being forcibly erased from the diaspora and subsequently going unnoticed for decades after her death.

Chauvet’s political critique proved to be a source of contention for Duvalier, who had already leveled a campaign of harassment against artists and intellectuals within the country. Inresponse to the novel, Duvalier employed the use of his loyal police force, the ruthless Tonton Macoutes, a special operations unit established to extinguish political opposition and answered only to the dictator. After the Tonton Macoutes murdered three of Chauvet’s family members, she fled Haiti to settle in New York City, where she remained in exile until her death in 1973. The last few years of her life saw her living in obscurity, working as a housekeeper in Queens, NY, a stark contrast to her privileged life as a mulatto elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite her worksbeing banned in Haiti and no longer in print on the global scale, there was a renewed interest in Vieux-Chauvet’s work in 2005, and in 2009, the first English translation of Amour, Colère, Folie, translated as “Love, Anger, Madness” was published.

Like Marie Vieux-Chauvet herself, the female heroines in Amour, Colère, Folie remain persistently unequivocal, and their complexity becomes the focal point of postmodern and feminist discourse. Rose, the young, dark-skinned protagonist of Colère, uses her position withinthe bourgeoise to push against oppressive binaries that focus not just on class, gender, and race—and the intersectionality of these individual oppressions—but on the way women are expected to interact within a community dominated in all relevant facets by men. This is done with a clear and critical objective, as women’s existence within Haiti’s polarizing political landscape is packed with numerous layers that construct what it means to be a liberated woman.

Amour, Colère, Folie contains three distinct narratives that place complex female protagonists into rigid social—and ultimately, unescapable—hierarchies. The beginning of Colère (Anger) introduces the Normil family, proud upper middle class landowners who findthemselves suddenly embroiled in a desperate battle to preserve their heritage when ‘men in black uniform’ descend onto their property, with intent to divide and redistribute it. Rather than confronting the source of his family’s oppression, milquetoast patriarch Louis Normil devises a plan to reclaim is family lands through bribery and negotiation, and offers the sexual service of his beautiful daughter, Rose, in exchange for the return of their property, along with protection from further harassment and abuse. It is clear these violent and nameless “men in black” who represent the background antagonists in colère also serve as the audacious representation of Duvalier’s own real-life Tonton Macoutes, who eventually forced Chauvet into exile and bannedher works from mainland Haiti.

The Normil’s property ownership serves as a pinnacle of their wealth and in addition to being a burial ground for their ancestors, establishes their highly coveted status amongst the poorer, lower-class citizens. Thus, land ownership is directly related to socioeconomic status, and Rose’s participation in this system presents her as both a casualty—and a co-conspirator. As her body, an initially her prized virginity, is commodified, introduced as a method of exchange for preservation of her father’s lands, she comes to the grim realization that her oppression and place in Haitian society will never allow her to maintain the same degree of inherited wealth thather father currently enjoys.

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“Rose’s special relationship to her father’s land reinforces her entrapment in the society’s practice of plaçage2, where women’s roles and places are prescribed in order to maintain an exploitative system of economic and social hierarchies” (Mayes 85). It isRose’s initial lack of self-awareness and political understanding that prevents her from exposing this corruption at the very start, and ultimately, she becomes consumed by the desire to preserve the ownership of something that she will never truly own, and something she will never benefit from economically, due to her gender and social standing in Haitian society. This societal incapacity has a marked effect on the young woman, and as the narrative progressive, she beginsto mitigate her own position not just within her own family, but in her communal relationships aswell. “It is from this position of power of powerlessness that Rose is developed into a heroine who controls her own body” (Mayes 86).

Rose’s motivation is a restoration of normalcy for herself and her family, and when she considers the alternative of poverty, homelessness, and lack of educational access, her sacrifice seems inconsequential. With the hope of her family lands being restored and the prospect of this return to routine, Rose endures thirty days of pain, torture, and sexual humiliation at the hands ofa government official Chauvet only refers to as “le gorille,” who brokers a grim deal with Louis Normil. In addition to a five-hundred-dollar fee, Le gorille offers to restore his family to greatness and offer additional protection from his ruffians in exchange for nonconsensual sex with his daughter.

Rose, presumably with her father’s approval, must submit herself to the sexualdepravities of le gorille, who represents the power and control that can only be derived from his maleness. After he informs Rose of the deal, he informs her of the specific terms of their arrangement, and what penalty awaits her if she disregards his authority: “If you resist, I won’t be able to do anything. You have to do what I say, without hesitation, otherwise, it’s a no go, you understand? I can only be a man with a pretty saint’s face like yours, a defeated martyr with a pretty little face. Do what I say, do it, orget out of here! But remember that no one else will ever be able to do anything for you and you will lose your land. On the other hand, if you are cooperative and do what I ask,then I promise, I swear to you on all that is most holy to me that you will have my personal protection and will have restitution of your property.” (Chauvet 244) Now aware of the deal brokered between le gorille, the lawyer, and her father, Rose is now required to play the part of his victim, and by doing so, her act of forced submission calls into question the hierarchy of organizational, gender-based violence.

Historically speaking, slaveplantation societies preserved their power through the violent domination and segregation of its enslaved population, and were structurally similar to social organizations that shared features with totalitarian autocracy. “While post-slavery Haiti continued to suffer from various forms of authoritarianism, the Duvalier era brought an increased level of corruption and intensified and institutionalized state violence” (Charles 77).

Women found themselves treated as equals under this regime, and this grim concept of equality brought repression to both men and women, whowere harassed, arrested, detained, tortured, and murdered. “Regarding the status of women, theuniqueness of Duvalier’s violence was, ironically for a country where the ideology of women’sweakness runs high, the negation of that aspect of patriarchy in the indiscriminate use of violence” (Charles 78).

In an effort to exercise some bodily autonomy, Rose approaches the family doctor, Dr. Valois and offers her virginity to him, explaining, “I knew it would come to this, I knew it. To make sure he wouldn’t be the first, I had offered myself to Dr. Valois, but he pushed me away” (Chauvet 246). Though Dr. Valois admits to his romantic feelings for Rose3, he does not comply,insisting she is “too young.” Her newly acquired knowledge with le gorille forces her to reflect on her body, and how concepts such a purity and chastity exist in proximity to it.

Because of her lack of involvement during her sessions with her rapist, Rose experiences a bodily awareness, and she rekindles the possibility of a romantic encounter with Dr. Valois: “That night, when my mother found me on the landing, she feared the worst. And yet, I felt almost purified. Once this torture is over, I’ll have even more innocence and chastity to offerhim. The soul, not the flesh, is the true seat of virginity, so I don’t know what lovemaking feels like.

I have erected a wall between my body and my soul, a granite wall” (Chauvet 246).

But for now, with her proposal rejected, Rose once again is not permitted any modicum of control over what happens to her physical body and must submit to the emotional and physically abusive systems that rely on keeping the populations terrorized and controlled. As the abuse progresses, Rose is determined to survive it, and her bodily Plaçage was a recognized extralegal system in French and Spanish slave colonies of North America (including the Caribbean) by which men of ethnic European descent entered into civil unions with native women. These women were not legally recognized as wives but were known as placées

2

3 Chauvet does not explicitly state the doctor’s personal relationship with the Normil family, and only subjective andbiased assessments from individual family members. It is unclear if Dr. Valois has genuine feelings for Rose, or if his confession was done out of sympathy for her situation.

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transformation begins, with theviolence she endures escalating over time, which Chauvet does not hesitate to portray in graphic,uncensored detail. The acts of rape and assault become progressively more brutal and outlandish,at times, borderline absurdist in nature. Rose herself begins to question le gorille’s actions, wondering silently if he is even something she should fear. Even her family’s reactions to the situation grow increasingly outlandish, to the point where productive communication between the members nearly ceases to exist.

Back at the Normil estate, older brother Paul is tortured by visions of his sister being defiled by the men who are threatening their livelihood. After confronting Rose about her meetings with le gorille, he directs his aggression towards their mother, who has chosen to turn ablind eye to the abuse, perhaps in an attempt to preserve her daughter’s honor.

Now violently frustrated by his own lack of power, Paul himself begins to collapse, as his psyche begins to splinter under the weight of his own impotent rage. Incensed by his father’s indecisiveness and seemingly lack of action, he observes Rose’s deteriorating physical state: “’Dirty coward!’ I feel like shouting at my father…My father’s face has returned to lifelessness: he knows he won’t get fired now. In any case, he has really managed to set up Rose. Was he naïve when he cast her to the vultures?

Perhaps he’s seething with remorse, rage, hatred! It would drive you to despair to admit to yourself that nothing livesbehind that impassive mask. Has he noticed Rose’s new face? Frozen, dead. That’s right, dead. What have they done to her? Not, I don’t want to know. Not now, at least. It’s too soon.” (Chauvet 231-232) However, Rose is not the only member of the Normil family selling their bodies. Chauvet approaches Louis Normil’s secret sexual engagement with a wealthy woman as it does Rose; Louis must submit himself to the protection and patronage this woman can provide for him, thus disrupting the patriarchal power matrix established at the beginning of the narrative. It is during this affair, when Louis must put aside his pride and defer to his mistress for funds to preserve hislands, that he begins to also fracture, and lose his identity as the dominant male and sole providerof the Normil family.

Near the end of Rose’s sexual servitude, she attempts to find refuge in her own mind, surrendering only her body to le gorrile’s crude and terroristic caprices, but keeping her mind detached from reality. Her struggle to distance herself from dominant forces determined to breakher down and complete her subservience do not go unnoticed by her tormentor, who proudly boasts how his attraction to her deepens as a result of her apathy. Rose herself even begins to question her own motives, and grows worried that, were she to experience pleasure from the sexual assault, she would become as tainted and evil as the man violating her: “There must be something unsettling and innocently perverse in me, and only the factthat I’ve been forced stops me from climaxing in this man’s arms” (Chauvet 249).

He even begins to regard her with a sort of misguided fondness—as it would be dangerous to categorize his feelings as anything remotely romantic—and after confessing to her that he was aware of her unattraction to him, considers her for marriage, and subsequently questions her about her love for jewelry and finer things. This attempt to buy her affection incenses Rose, and she resolves to remain even more detached during their encounters. She soon arrives at the realization of the power contained within her own mind, and as each act of rape grows more intense in its violence, she begins to experiment with disassociation. With this radical act, Chauvet attempts to remove Rose’s position not just from submission to le gorille, but from the gender inequality in which she has since become socially conscious.

Rose eventreats herself as a hollow shell, with little more value than a corpse, and with this act, her own fragmented psyche regards maleness as a sort of deficiency: “What’s it to me? I would have brought dishonor on myself only if I enjoyed it as he did, but he slept with a corpse. A corpse, and he has no idea. That is my revenge” (Chauvet 245).

She transforms this sexual ascendancy into an awakening, and through her own actions, initiates an exploration into elements of ownership, masculine dominance, and existential humanity. This newly discovered power begins to alter her consciousness, allowing her to streamline her response to the sexual torture, and she looks to the future, of the benefit the arrangement will bring to her family and the restoration of their property.

She even reconsiders her previous request to attend school abroad with her brother, and thus she begins to traverse into an amorphous entity that transcends time and space, completely removing herself mentally from the suffering she must endure if she even hopes to survive it. Her position in le gorille’s bed as a “corpse” has culminated into one glorious and rebellious act of defiance, and “she will enter her death before it happens, declare herself deceased before anyone else can, thus performing a last radical act of self-creation that will cut her off forever from the abusive systems in which she has been so intensely caught up” (Asibong 152).

Near the end of her thirty-day torment, Rose has virtually slipped into an almost solipsistic trance. Her pain became the price for her family’s freedom from oppression, and in doing so, she makes peace with the knowledge that her suffering was for the benefit of others, that the land she saved from the men in black will never be hers to claim or inherit. When her service to le gorille is concluded, Rose’s disembodied, fragmented self now embraces this newethereal M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 49

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identity, even as she lingers on the fault line between life and death. As more trauma awaited her at home, she becomes more detached, except now the disconnection transcends intothe realm of physical. Paul senses her weakness, and follows her to her room, hoping his presence will provide some comfort: They looked at each other in silence. Then Rose lifted her hand and stroked his face. Hefelt as if she were fighting off some terrible exhaustion and that at any moment she would collapse before him, flimsy and disjointed like a puppet. (Chauvet 285) Even she furiously fought to disengage from the painful conditions of her trauma, she ultimately falls victim to the generational brutalities of fascism and colonialism, and when she issecured behind the walls of her own home, with the knowledge that Paul is safe, she quietly surrenders to her own annihilation.

As Colère winds down to its inexorable climax, it embodies all the structure and atmosphere of a Greek tragedy.

With the Normil family approaches the end of their tragic predicament, nearly a month after the men in black began hammering stakes into their land, Chauvet makes it clear that no heroes will emerge from this tale. The family begins to succumb to the contagious fear building up and dividing them for years. It is this lack of cohesion that proves to be their undoing. Louis, now desperate to join the oppressors and reclaim his tarnishedreputation, begins working for the Blackshirts, all to garner favor and rise within the ranks. His wife sinks deeper into alcoholism, after coming to the profound realization that she never felt accepted by this family since wedding her husband, with whom she no longer shares an emotional connection. Grandfather and disabled young Claude begin entertaining wild fantasies of revenge against the men in black, which ultimately ends in tragedy.

While some might not consider Rose to be the gallant protagonist destined to find her own happy ending, she represents the sophisticated experiences of women in historically structured patriarchal customs and the traumatized endurance the were required to endure in a postcolonial Haiti. “In the end, all the female characters in Chauvet are agents able to navigate and negotiate the many fields of power relations; yet, they are also commodities, things that can be traded, exchanged, controlled, or excluded” (Charles 83). For Rose, her desire to return to normal meant a return to the same pyramid of nationally condoned gender oppression and degradation.

By the end, none of the members of the Normil family have achieved any interconnected solidarity; one-by-one, they become victims of their own reckless choices, ironically perpetuating the same cycle of violence and rage they sought so desperately to avoid.More importantly, as they were in the beginning, the female characters of are entombed in theirown social stations, aware of their status yet unable to carve out a new identity.

WORKS CITED Asibong, Andrew. “Three Is the Loneliest Number: Marie Vieux Chauvet, Marie NDiaye, and the Traumatized Triptych.”

Yale French Studies, no. 128, 2015, pp. 146–160., JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24643716. Accessed 4 Dec. 2020.

Bonner, Christopher T. “Staging a Dictatorship: The Theatrical Poetics and Politics of Marie Chauvet’s Colère.”

Small Axe, vol. 19 no. 3, 2015, p. 50-63. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/602410.

Charles, Carolle. “A Sociological Counter-Reading of Marie Chauvet as an ‘Outsider-Within’: Paradoxes in the Construction of Haitian Women in ‘Love, Anger, Madness.’” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2014, pp. 66–89.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24340367. Accessed 5 Dec. 2020.

Glover, Kaiama L., and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken. “Editors’ Preface: Marie Vieux Chauvet Untethered.” Yale French Studies, no. 128, 2015, pp. 1–6., www.jstor.org/stable/24643707. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

Joseph, Régine Isabelle. “The Letters of Marie Chauvet and Simone De Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction.” Yale French Studies, no. 128, 2015, pp. 25–39., www.jstor.org/stable/24643709. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020 Mayes, Janis A. “Mind-Body-Soul: Erzulie Embodied in Marie Chauvet’s Amour, colère, folie.”

Journal of Caribbean Studies (1989): 81-89.

Nicholls, David. “Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Duvalierism.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4, 1986, pp. 1239–1252.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3991713. Accessed 2 Dec. 2020.

Vieux-Chauvet, Marie. Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych. Modern Library, 2009.

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NON-TRADITIONAL LEARNING:

Video Games for

Teaching Reading

BY RACHEL WISNOM

Ever since I was a child video games have been a large part of my life, whether that be watching my brother play Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda on his Nintendo 64, or playing those games and many others myself as I got older. Just as importantly as video games are to my life, so is reading. Being a voracious reader and consumer of stories is no doubt how I ended up in thefield of English and English Education; however, I would be remiss to exclude the impact video games have played on leading me to that same career path.

I have played simple video games and complicated video games, and enjoy both, but for the purposes of this essay my experience with role-playing games is center-stage. Role-playing games are often heavy with complex plots and dynamic characters. Some, like The Elder Scrolls Series, include written story content and lore in the form of books within the game-world. Others, like the Dark Souls Series, rely on the player to discover lore naturally through exploration and extrapolation of the situations and contexts in the game-world. This situational learning (Gee, 2001, 2011) experience, by which players come to know the story-world through exploration and role-play, is similar to the experience good readers have while reading a story-book (Wilhelm, 2016). In both, the player or reader integrates themselves into the story-world, positioning themselves as a spectator and actor within it.

Although, the difference between reading a novel and playing the game is rooted in experience; or the “ability to place a player in the role of a character” and “experience the consequences of those [characters] identities as they traverse the game” (Coltrain and Ramsay, 2019, p.41). In role-playing games such as The Witcher Series for example, the main character, Geralt, is often condemned for his mutation (or race) despite the necessary services he offers by hunting the monsters no one else is willing to. Then in the third game of the series, Wild Hunt, everyone is eventually required to have documentation proving they are not witches in order to enter the city of Novigrad, or risk being killed Salem Witch Trial style. Being Geralt lets players experience prejudice in a more personal manner.

They end up “embody[ing] those actors’ [and characters’] roles and gain empathy for them through active participation” (2019, p. 41). Most importantly, it is this active participation or integration into the story-world that teacher-researchers like Jeffery D. Wilhelm find essential to the reading experience.

Wilhelm’s You Gotta Be the Book (2016) describes engaged readers as being able to respond “simultaneously” to his 10 dimensions of response (pp. 87-888 and 92-128), containinga combination of evocative, connective, and reflective dimensions. He finds that they privilege “highly reflective dimension[s] without really discussing their response on an evocative one” (p. 144), whereas less proficient readers have difficulty making use of “extratextual information” or use strategies for creating meaning such as “building relationships with characters, taking their perspectives, and imagining and visualizing secondary worlds” (p. 147). Wilhelm makes use of drama as a strategy for meaning-making with less proficient readers, which he says encourages “active participation” (p. 148), in the same vein as Gee’s situational learning. Is that not what wedo as teachers, we ask that our students take on a role within the novel, within the story-world? To engage with it?

Of course, there is the issue that some students are not readers. Not that they can’t read, but it is often difficult for them to stay focused or understand what they are reading; and so, reading becomes a struggle. If a teacher is lucky enough to have the class time and the age group to dedicate to fostering a love of reading, like Wilhelm demonstrates his book (2016), then encouraging non-traditional learners to read and understand what they read may be an achievablefeat. On the other hand, if these same non-traditional learners have made it to High School, especially 11th and 12th grade, what do you do then? At this point in their education having a High Schooler find the value in reading when they don’t and have never liked reading isunlikely. Students like this often have an

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attitude towards not only reading but school in general, and they need more than a “because I said so” to see that value; which unfortunately leads to labelling such students as lost causes and poor readers.

Consequently, the idea that students become lost causes stems from a very traditional, and somewhat outdated, view of learning, especially in English Language Arts. One where the canon, or literature that is ‘proper’ literature, is heavily policed by the government, scholarship, and school administrations. Students who cannot or will not learn from the accepted works of canon literature are often left behind. It is unfortunate because these are students who could flourish in the ELAs if they were only given the opportunity to go at it on their own terms. In today’s world, the answer to that is video games.

I do not mean video games specifically designed for educational purposes, although thoseare indeed valuable assets to teachers. No, I mean narrative video games, popular culture video games, role-playing video games, etc.

Games like The Legend of Zelda Series, the Elder Scrolls Series, The Witcher Series, the Dark Souls Trilogy, even Call of Duty. These games provide an aesthetic, yet interactive experience. They are designed like books are written, to provide a space for meaning-making and interpretation (Gee, 2011). Moreover, according to Barab, Gresalfi, and Ingram-Goble in their article “Transformational Play: Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context,” narrative-based games “create a setting that learners can act upon in a personally valued and socially significant ways” difficult to achieve in “schools and in noninteractive media” (2010, p. 525). It is in the nature of video games to be personally interactive, so a player can be a part of the story and position themselves within the narrative, aided by visual and auditory cues, automatically. Something that non-traditional readers struggle with creating in their imagination while reading (Wilhelm, 2016).

It is important to note that just because video games provide some of the aspects of interpretation which books lack without the help of an engaged reader’s imagination, does not mean they require any less literacy skills to interpret. In fact, video games require visual literacy,a form of literacy that is becoming more and more important as things move online and into visual media. Researchers Ann Morgan Spalter and Andries van Dam see the rise of digital technology as a shift in communication (2008). As a consequence, visual literacy is often more natural to current high school students, who have grown up knowing and having digital technology at their fingertips.

Furthermore, if teachers utilize their students’ affinity for visual literacy, they can use that to work backward from the visual to the written. They would start with something their students already know and understand in order to train them to take it to the page. To write and analyze games the same way they would a novel. This is already being done at the college level. In some colleges, they are beginning to teach courses on game interpretation and the scholarship si out there, simply difficult to find largely due to a complicated classification.

This difficulty with classification comes with the words games theory, which is tied moreto the study of games and economics than a game’s literary merit. Since this is the case, it might be necessary to change the search terms to literary games theory or aesthetic games theory, so that when searching for scholarship on feminist games theory the results are not a torrent on the blackspot that was #GamerGate. Instead, a game’s contribution to literary theory becomes first and foremost.

By changing the results around video game studies, perhaps we can better argue for its place as an acceptable alternative to reading. Instead of asking our students if they like to read, we will ask if they like to experience stories, thus we will not be condemning them for being badat or not interested in reading. This way no student feels less than or dumb for not conforming to the narrow view of literature K-12 schools, and most colleges, often take.

Still, it is significant that there is some idea surrounding video games which, obviously, allow and encourage the player to be a character in the game as automatically disqualifyingvideo games from a critical analysis.

Earlier in this essay, I demonstrated the necessity of both active participation (Wilhelm, 2016) and situated learning (Gee, 2001, 2011) in the critical reading experience. Perhaps, it is simply the newness of video games, but I see no difference in being able to ‘virtually’ place yourself in the story-world through technology versus identifying and engaging with a textual story-world in one’s own mind. If we consider Wilhelm’s theories concerning drama (2016) and the evidence he takes from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading (1978), it may be that some players more fully experience a story-world in a game than that of a book.

Moreover, any good book should invite the reader to be a part of the story-world, an essential part of Reader Response theory (Wilhelm, 2016; Rosenblatt, 1978), which video games do, if anything, by their nature. Or the other idea that games which include choice in any interaction leading to one player’s game experience to be different from another’s, also disqualifies it. This is discounting once again the nature of video games, which like books, M a de in M il l ersv il l e E D I T I O N | M Using s 2021 53

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havea pre-scripted version of events that occur because a game is programmed in the same way a book is written. Even in games with different endings or experiences based on a player’s choices those variations are more than susceptible to literary analysis and criticism.

So, why then shouldn’t educators view video games as valid portals to literary learning? The answer to this question is only difficult because of how games are currently viewed by the larger scholarly community, an issue that James Coltrain and Stephen Ramsay discuss in their article “Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship?”

(2019). They write “games naturally engage with subjects that lie within the conventional province of humanistic inquiry, including storytelling, architecture, music, and visual art” (2019, p. 36) and the fact that video games can fit into all of these categories, seems to be one reason for scholars’ inability to place it. Perhaps that is the beauty of video games. That they can be used to explore so many different areas of scholarship it becomes difficult to apply them to any. Coltrain and Ramsay talk about video games as “both a new genre and a new medium: one that will require its own...scholarly apparatus” (2019, p. 37), one which we do not currently have.

In the meantime, certain games contain elements ripe for literary, historical, and theoretical interpretation like that of a novel (2019). As an example, games can be a form of archeology, preserving authentic experiences of cultures and times that no longer exist or are far removed from our own experiences. Coltrain and Ramsay cite the games Never Alone, which teaches players about the heritage of the Inupiat people of Alaska, and 1979 Revolution, a retelling of the Iranian Revolution (2019). The culture of the Inupiat people and the impact of theIranian Revolution are both instances of material that a majority of people might never know about or understand without playing the video games, specifically younger generations. Here, games become an important cultural artifact, part of a genre of historical studies we may call games archeology one day.

However, historical studies are not the only way video games can fit into the scholarship. Games like those previously mentioned utilize the same dramatic techniques and literary devices that any play, novel, or poem employs to convey meaning and intention. In the same way that Shakespeare makes us laugh alongside the Fool at the foolishness of King Lear, or invite ourown sorrows to the stage in Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be,” video games use dramatic “appeals to humor, sympathy, or disgust” (2019, p. 38) in their own writing. For example, the realization that the Bloody Baron in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt abused his wife and daughter, caused his unborn child to become a monster, and lead to his own death. All of which is encountered by the player through the main protagonist that, along with the player, expresses his sympathy and eventual disgust for the Baron. Just this one questline, in a game that contains hundreds, presents a story which evokes the consequences and tragedy of parental abuse and the trauma of losing a child, and could lead to an analysis along the lines of Feminist or Reader Response Theory at the very least. What’s more, by recording the responses of players’ reactions and decisions such a game could provide empirical research data regarding a multitude of humanities studies. Hard data being something that a good portion of literary scholarship is unable to present, such as “how many people surmised through their reading that Jay Gatsby might be gay because he wore a pink shirt that one time in The Great Gatsby.” This is research that, in my experience, is not done in English literary studies, but wouldn’t it be interesting to do so?

Without a doubt, defining the scholarship of video games is a challenge, and it is goingto be even more of a challenge integrating them into the K-12 English Language Arts Curriculum as a viable alternative option to reading books and novels, but I believe it is worth it. I hope that books will never go away, that I will always be able to hold a book in my hands and read it. But, as technology moves on and kids grow up with a phone in their hands rather than a book, it only seems sensible to adapt. Furthermore, if we take all of the ways that video game theory can be molded and adapted to fit within other, more traditional, scholarship, why couldn’t video games teach our children all of the same things needed to become the critical thinkers that traditional scholarship teaches? The question remains, do we have to teach critical thinking skillsfrom the pages of a book?

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REFERENCES

Barab, S., Gresalfi, M., & Ingram-Goble, A. (2010). Transformational Play: Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context.

Educational Researcher, 39(7), 525-536. Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40963353 Coltrain, J., & Ramsay, S. (2019). Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship? In Gold M. & Klein L. (Eds.),

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (pp. 36-45). Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctvg251hk.6 Gee, J. (2001). Reading as Situated Language: A Sociocognitive Perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 714-725. Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40018744 Gee, J. (2011). CHAPTER FIVE: Reading, Language Development, Video Games, and Learning in the Twenty-first Century.

Counterpoints, 387, 101-127. Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42980948 Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Spalter, A., & Van Dam, A. (2008). Digital Visual Literacy. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 93-101.Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071529 Wilhelm, J. D. (2016). “You gotta BE the book”: Teaching engaged and reflective reading with adolescents.

New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.

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MUsings THE GRADUATE JOURNAL Made In Millersville EDITION