Abstract: With the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, higher education has witnessed a wide range of pedagogical approaches to navigating GenAI, especially within humanities and writing courses. At one end of the spectrum, scholars have identified meaningful ways to integrate AI into the writing classroom; at the other end, others have wholeheartedly rejected any use of the new technologies, whether by students or faculty, in the classroom. This essay contributes to this debate by presenting a case study of one first-year experience course—The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence—taught during the 2025 Spring Semester at Hartwick College, a small liberal arts college in New York. The results of the study were mixed in terms of whether the opinions of students were affected, but, at the least, one implication was clear: that any single approach to cultivating students' critical GenAI literacies is insufficient.
Abstract: In their rapid advancement, generative AI technologies have the potential to shape in radical ways both academic research and pedagogical practices. With any such sea change inevitably comes analysis. During late 2023 and early 2024 at Georgia College & State University (GCSU), a newly formed group named the AI Task Force as well as a workshop run by the university's Center for Teaching and Learning found that faculty members were very concerned about the accuracy of AI-generated materials and academic integrity while, at the same, desired more education on and access to GenAI. Then, over the ensuing 2024–2025 school year, the authors of this article built on such efforts by using a survey to profile not just the attitudes but the emerging practices of GCSU faculty members (primarily, those in the English Department) in how they are now using GenAI, how they see their colleagues using it, what policies they (and their departments) are developing, and what specific other resources and support they need.
Abstract: This study examines how contemplative literacy practices inform student attitudes toward AI-generated texts and explores the paradoxical relationship between embodied reading and GenAI detection. As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into writing instruction, educators face fundamental questions about the value of human authorship and the role of reading in a post-literate landscape. Drawing on contemplative pedagogy frameworks and theories of powerful literacy, the research presented here, conducted during the 2025 Fall Semester, investigates whether students can distinguish between human and GenAI-authored texts and how their disciplinary training shapes their attitudes toward the labor value of literacy. The results were perhaps surprising: first-year students demonstrated superior GenAI detection accuracy while upper-level students showed significantly stronger investment in human authorship value.
Abstract: Grounded in GenAI refusal, this essay explores the disconnect between students' growing use of GenAI in online asynchronous English courses and feminist rhetorical and pedagogical principles that support decentered teaching and learning and collective meaning-making. In this light, it offers pedagogical strategies that aim to foreground students' contributions as active and engaged learners and counter to GenAI, especially in how the technology's content is potentially reifying silencing, obscuring, erasure, and theft of intellectual property through its LLMs. As a response to these challenges and as a productive alternative to "policing" student GenAI use, this essay then provides strategies for engaging and responding to many of these challenges and for reinforcing course outcomes focused on close reading and analysis and meaningful engagement with research resources as part of scaffolded writing and research curricular activities.
Abstract: This essay will explore how writing instruction can benefit by better understanding of how GenAI impacts emotions and, in turn, how those emotions impact its use. More specifically, through a clearer understanding of the emotion and affect of writers with various neurodivergent diagnoses and how and why their emotions and affects can differ during the writing process, we can create educational interventions to meet neurodivergent graduate students' emotional needs, not just the emotional needs of the mythical "general" writing student population. To understand these affective experiences, I devised and implemented a mixed-methods study consisting of a quantitative Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) survey, an ethnographic observation of student GenAI use during the writing process for a university assignment, and a stimulated elicitation follow-up interview using the assignment the participant completed with the help of GenAI during the ethnographic observation. This resulting data, which I shall consider in this essay, trace the affective experiences of these neurodivergent graduate student participants before, during, and after their writing processes while using GenAI.
Abstract: Because little research existed in the fall of 2023 on how students use GenAI during the invention phase of writing, we decided to conduct a small-scale study in two sections of our first-year composition courses at our school, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). In our IRB-approved study, we explored two key questions. First, according to students, for which invention activity—brainstorming, summarizing, or journalistic freewriting—was GenAI most helpful? Second, what themes emerged when students reflected on their experiences in using GenAI as an early method of inquiry? Our approach was grounded in our privileging of process over product, and we hoped that starting at this stage would help students sidestep the reductive pitfalls of GenAI. In this essay, we detail our assignment design, in-class GenAI integration strategies, and both the qualitative and quantitative findings that emerged from student reflections. Our findings revealed that students felt most confident using the technology to develop ideas but were less comfortable relying on it in later stages of writing. Overall, we learned that students benefit most from face-to-face blended approaches that integrate GenAI's efficiency with traditional, reflective writing practices. Given as much we hope our study contributes to ongoing conversations about best practices for both teachers and students.
For women writers and writers of color seeking to publish in the 19th century, the use of epigraphs provided a means for gaining access to a public voice through popular print. Such use did not stop across time. This two-part study traces the origins and intertextual relationships of 290 epigraphs from five 19th-century novels-Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), Caroline Kirkland's A New Home-Who'll Follow? (1839), Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867), and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces (1900)-and, then, three 21st-century Young Adult (YA) historical fiction novels- Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793 (2000), Jennifer Nielsen's A Night Divided (2015), and Stacey Lee's The Downstairs Girl (2019)-to examine the use of epigraphs across the centuries of American literature. In particular, the tradition of 19th-century authors who used epigraphs to establish the credibility of their publications resonates in how today's YA historical fiction repurposes the epigraph genre to cultivate how readers use their critical literacy to question their situations and relationships.
Given its intimate correlation with cultural identity, nation-hood, and a sense of belonging, the theme of community frequently and prominently emerges in South African diasporic plays. Through reading of John Kani's 2014 play, Missing, this article delves into the dynamic interconnection between identity and community for the diaspora who are doubly marginalized by Western centrism and black nationalism. The tensions across traditional communities, geographical location and homogenizing myths, and transnational mobility and hybridity typical of the global era are thereby unfolded. Specifically, the play's protagonist, Robert Khalipa, finds himself in an identity dilemma that can be attributed to the context's fragmented geographical and social diaspora community. By play's end, though, a spiritual homeland in his outside-the-home third space provides a tentative solution to his crisis and a hope for the wider culture the play depicts.
This article offers a close reading of Richard Powers's 2021 novel Bewilderment, tracing the ways that machine-enabled Decoded-Neurofeedback ("DecNef") functions in the novel as a science fictional exaggeration of the power of reading fiction. By implication, Powers's dramatization of the DecNef's effects on the central character, Robin, turns Bewilderment itself into a kind of empathy machine that has the potential to heighten the feelings and thoughts of readers about problems both local and global. Structuring the discussion here will be sections involving learning from others, readers and community, "flow state" and intersubjectivity, and AI.
This article explores how Flannery O'Connor's writing strategy evolved in response to her life change and the social landscape of her time by focusing on the autobiographical elements in "The River" (1953). While "The River" is often interpreted as a religious story, its problematic worldview, which prizes the afterlife over the present, has puzzled readers. In response, I offer a new reading by examining the biographical significance of the painting and the storytelling within the narrative. By interpreting the contrast between urban modernist art and rural realist imagery as a metaphor for O'Connor's stylistic shift from modernism to realism, I hope to show how her writing strategy adapted to conservative social circumstances. This strategy necessitates a deeper reading of O'Connor's stated religious intent. It questions the religious purpose O'Connor publicly espoused by revealing a more personal motivation and drawing parallels between the story's quasi-realistic religious discourses, which are ultimately deceptive, and O'Connor's strained rationalizations regarding the child protagonist's death. By thereby situating O'Connor within her context, I aim to demonstrate her responsiveness to life changes and social realities and thereby challenge the notion that she was solely preoccupied with religious themes.
This article examines Zadie Smith's novel The Fraud specialIntscript as a multilayered critique of Victorian culture, arguing that the novel portrays not merely an isolated legal controversy but an ideological condition shap-ing 19th-century literature, politics, and visual culture. The article will first consider how the novel critiques Victorian incrementalism. From this wide political point of view, a section will then narrow the scope to the ways that Smith's characterizations of Eliza Touchet and Andrew Bogle reveal overlapping private and public fraudulence. The article's final section will narrow matters further, illustrating the ways in which Smith's use of ekph-rasis-through caricatures, prints, paintings, and sculpture-dramatizes the tension between visibility and self-deception underlying the Victorian myth of progress.
In her 1946 novel The Street, Ann Petry critiques what she sees as a misplaced desire for home. The novel's protagonist, Lutie Johnson, is a single Black mother in Harlem who works as a maid for a white family in Connecticut, where she reads shelter magazines such as House Beautiful. By counterposing images that advertise polished suburban interiors with representations of substandard urban housing, Petry illustrates tensions within the postwar dream of single-family home ownership. Lutie's desire for a home like one out of the pages of House Beautiful is thwarted by racial, class, and gender inequalities. Further, for Petry, Lutie's desire for the trappings of suburban life is dangerous because it alienates her from her family and neighbors.
This essay challenges the importance of remembrance in trauma discourse, which often equates healing with full recollection and linear narrative. Drawing on Bessel van der Kolk's research on embodied trauma and Karen Barad's theory of intra-action, it argues that forgetting is not a failure but a valid and generative process that can disrupt harmful entanglements between memory, body, and environment. Through feminist new materialist frameworks, it repositions trauma as materially and relationally constituted, showing how forgetting-whether through embodied healing practices, material reconfigurations, or intentional refusal-can serve as a radical act of autonomy and resistance. Ultimately, it advocates for the freedom to forget as essential to expanding the possibilities of trauma recovery beyond rigid demands for coherence, linearity, and recollection
The writing classroom has been dramatically affected by the introduction of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Facing immense pressure to adapt to a challenging and changing educational landscape, some writing instructors have chosen to adopt LLMs as a teaching tool. However, perceiving this technology as a potential "partner" in the writing process involves various problematic assumptions about chatbot capabilities. For one, it requires a certain degree of confidence in LLMs, which are incapable of understanding information and produce output conforming to the Frankfurtian definition of "bullshit." While some scholars have suggested chatbot interactions may still be educational in a fictional capacity, this argument presumes that students understand the limits of AI veracity, and it is inconsistent with the way LLMs are actively marketed as trustworthy personas, despite their tendency to "hallucinate." Given the current abundance of misleading AI hype and marketing, this essay argues that using LLMs in the writing classroom may be counterproductive to students' development as writers and thinkers. As such, writing educators are invited to challenge the popular narrative of AI techno-determinism and embrace their power to steer this technology's course in higher education.
This essay will explore the similarities between literary interpretation and constitutional interpretation via a close reading of the 2022 US Supreme Court decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Implementing James Boyd White's guidance to look at America's founding documents, including the US Constitution and its 27 amendments, as "highly imaginative literature," this essay will argue that judges should follow a "living constitutionalist" mode of legal interpretation (as opposed to "originalism") because it enables them to achieve the multiple constitutional meanings necessary to preserve important constitutional rights. The essay will conclude by reaffirming the reparative function of robust literary analysis and how the transfer of such analysis to legal interpretation affirms the framers' desire for a future evolution of constitutional rights.
As conventional adaptation pedagogy often focuses on specific canonical works, uses ahistorical, one-to-one text-to-film comparisons, and downplays the complexity of adaptive processes, this essay will explore teaching what Kate Newell terms the "adaptation network" as an alternative. Using George Du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby and its extensive series of adaptations as a case study, I shall examine a web of interconnected works across various media and decades. This kind of model encourages deeper critical analysis of how cultural meaning evolves, revealing adaptation as a complex, historically situated process rather than a simple, comparative transcoding.
Through employing a sociological lens to examine Kate Chopin's concept of the "mother-woman," this essay explores the persistence of antiquated social norms and economic patterns in the United States South that contribute to disproportionately high rates of stay-athome-motherhood and elevated levels of maternal depression and suicide. The shame attached to many aspects of modern maternity-guilt over desiring personal autonomy, longing to return to work, or resisting total identification with the socially dictated maternal role-has rendered many struggles of motherhood largely invisible. This essay offers a close reading of Kate Chopin's characterizations in The Awakening to examine how the story exposes the dangers of restrictive maternal ideals and advances a vision of Southern domesticity in which women's identities can extend beyond, and are not solely defined by, maternity.
This essay will explore what music made possible for Joyce in the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses. Music was, on the one hand, a tool that Joyce used to disrupt and interrupt the narrative, affording both him and his characters the freedom to play with time and to express experience beyond the logical and articulate. On the other hand, music in "Sirens" is also a limiting force, compelling the characters to play out certain roles because they are caught in its web. Here, this exploration of music and freedom in Ulysses will be grounded in an understanding of Joyce's own musical contexts and what his experience and amateurism made possible for him as a writer.
