Rewriting deficit storylines: the positioning of one fourth-grader as comics expert

Purpose This study took place in an elementary English language arts classroom during a comics writers workshop unit and focused on one fourth-grade author. This paper aims to explain how a fourth-grade student receiving special education services positions himself and is positioned by others as an expert during a unit on comics. When students’ knowledge about multimodal composition is recognized and valued, the classroom community can become a place where students can author themselves into positions of power and authority. Design/methodology/approach Informed by sociocultural theory, social semiotics and positioning theory, the authors conducted a qualitative study to analyze the focal participant’s published comic, classroom interactions and interview data using open and in vivo coding systems. Findings The findings documented how the focal participant was positioned as an expert by others and how he positioned himself as an expert. The findings also explore how this fourth-grade comics expert left an authorial residue that extended beyond the boundaries of this particular comics unit, impacting his teachers and future iterations of the comics workshop. Originality/value Scholars have theorized multimodal approaches to reading and writing pedagogy as an equitable enterprise that values meaning-makers using a wide variety of semiotic resources. This study shows how incorporating an explicit multimodal composition opportunity allowed one fourth-grade author space to craft a comic and re-author traditional classroom positions of power.

An Education in Intensity

The chapter opens with Roth’s 1959 marriage to Margaret (Maggie) Williams, a divorced mother of two from the Midwest Roth met at the University of Chicago. The impact of the marriage on his self-esteem and mental health, and its effect on his early efforts to shape his developing publishing career, receives special attention. But at the same time, while facing personal challenges, he appeared in the Paris Review, began a new friendship with its editor, George Plimpton, and oversaw the appearance of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus. A year in Rome on a fellowship and a new publisher (Random House replacing Houghton Mifflin) furthered his advances, while he also began to teach at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writers’ Workshop and then Princeton. New friendships with William Styron and Donald Klopfer of Random House, and work with his early editor Joe Fox, soon shaped the direction of his writing. He also started psychoanalysis, necessary to maintain his mental balance as the relationship with Maggie unraveled and a divorce proved to be impossible. The chapter also examines the reception of his first novel, Letting Go.

On Inheritances

In this presentation for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Tamara K. Nopper analyzes the emergent discourses of “anti-Asian violence” and “Black-Asian solidarity” within historical and sociological contexts. She begins with a discussion of the importance of the 1980s and 1990s as formative moments in terms of post-Asian American Movement organizational infrastructure. She then discusses interracial violence, the coeval growth of hate crime data and legislation, and the hashtag #StopAAPIHate. Her primary concern in this discussion is to reveal what work these narrative framings do in service of or in opposition to anti-Blackness and carcerality.

Tracing A Room of One’s Own in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1929–2019

This chapter traces the presence of Woolf in sub-Saharan Africa from 1929 to the present day. The historic trajectory starts with the final decades of the British Empire’s colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Kenya (1929–59); continues through the half-century of the postcolonial era (1960–2010); and concludes with the age of globalisation (2011–). For the first part, I examine how Woolf, through the narrator in A Room of One’s Own, asserts that (white) Englishwomen do not have the same urge as their white brothers to possess and to convert someone into imperial property. At the time she wrote this claim, there were real-life white European women who were walking by and writing about Black women in Kenya. In the postcolonial era, when the English Departments in anglophone sub-Saharan African countries were influenced by Leavisism, Woolf’s works would not have been taught. I show how colonialism and its institutional legacies, including university curricula, libraries, and publishing, militate against Woolf’s broader appeal to sub-Saharan Africa-based writers. Finally, in the present day, through online references to A Room, one can see how Woolf’s idea of a room is transformed, throughout anglophone Africa, into a virtual writers’ workshop.

The Trouble with “Innerleckchuls”: Flannery O’Connor, Anti-Intellectualism, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

In dialogue with Eric Bennett and Mark McGurl’s work on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as Tara Powell’s work on archetypes, Jordan Cofer uses new information from the Emory Archive and The Prayer Journal to contextualize one of O’Connor’s most famous comedic devices: the antagonistic intellectual. Cofer argues that although this device may have roots in southern fiction, O’Connor’s anti-intellectual trope derives from her time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This chapter examines some of O’Connor’s juvenilia, the drafts of Wise Blood she was writing in Iowa (while simultaneously writing in her journal), and some of the short stories she wrote while enrolled at the Workshop. Finally, Cofer reconsiders the origins of O’Connor’s anti-intellectual as a potential outgrowth of her own anxieties during this time.