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Book review-Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives, edited by John duffy, Julie nelson christoph, eli Goldblatt, nelson Graff, rebecca s. nowacek and Bryan trabold thomas p. miller-university of arizona Learning to read and write has taken place amid convulsive changes in economic and social life, educational expectations and communication technologies. This has been a time when the meaning of what it is to be literate has seemed to shift with nearly every new generation.-Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives s ince the 1980s, Deborah Brandt's work has helped shape the interactions between composition and "New Literacy Studies" (NLS). NLS defines literacy not as an independent variable but as a varied set of social practices that need to be examined against their cultural, political and institutional contexts, often with ethnographic methods that can provide "thick descriptions" of literacy in action. This ethnographic framework has been adopted widely in studies of translingual literacies and the rhetorical dynamics of global political economies and locally situated collective action. Converging trends in studies of literacy, composition, and rhetoric led to the founding of Literacy in Composition Studies in 2013. LiCS was created to examine "the implications of Literacy Studies research, theory, and practice for Composition Studies, " and it has featured leading contributors whose work has helped bridge literacy and composition studies. Several of those contributors are included in Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives, which examines the broader impact of Brandt's work on converging trends in composition and literacy studies. Those convergences are clearly apparent in the varied concerns of the contributors to the volume, including

Scholars of adult basic literacy curricular materials have argued that the skill-based, deficit-oriented approach of many such materials denies the interests and motivations of adult learners. Exploring why these kinds of curricular materials are prevalent in adult basic literacy education, this article focuses on the case of ProLiteracy, a nongovernmental adult basic literacy organization that grew out of missionary Frank Laubach's work in the 1930s to convert illiterate adults to Christianity and a belief in American-style capitalism. This article argues that the legacy of Laubach's evangelism continues to affect adult literacy instruction in the United States today, through the content of many of the materials in the ProLiteracy catalogue, as well as through the volunteer-based one-to-one tutoring model's positioning of low-literacy adults.

In 2009, literacy scholars Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow made the startling claim that "nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today's modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's." Thanks to the advent of blogs and social media, many people are now authoring texts reaching audiences of 100 people or more (Pelli and Bigelow's defining criterion for authorship). Yet, despite the democratizing implications of Pelli and Bigelow's widely circulated claim, the influence of most digital age authors remains slight relative to the influence of those who utilize traditional publishing processes. This disparity is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the publishing of reference books, which remain largely the province of for-profit publishers and exude a cachet and influence qualitatively distinct from content published by social media authors (Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, etc.). Reference books for writing-dictionaries, writing handbooks, grammar handbooks-are often marketed, and subsequently received as prescriptive manuals, with rules handed down on high for writers meekly to learn and follow. Though some social media authors certainly have significant influence, their credibility pales in comparison to that of "the dictionary." The credibility of these books is in inverse relationship to the prominence of the authors. Unlike social media authorship, which is dependent on individual authors' social identities, modern reference publishing practices obscure authorship-to the extent that reading publics forget, for instance, that Webster's Dictionary began as the cultural work of Noah Webster, an eccentric American nationalist in favor of remaking English, or that Ludwig Reiner's Stilfibel builds on material acquired through the questionable wartime use of Jewish author Eduard Engel's work. 1 The seeming authorlessness of reference guides suggests that the authors' advice on writing is universal, rather than historically specific. This erasure of authorial presence ironically disservices new writers, who may perceive the guides' esoteric rules as barriers to rather than avenues for their successful integration within an academic community. In this essay, we reflect on how our experiences of creating Sound Writing, a borndigital writing reference guide, enabled us to interrupt modern print reference publishing practices; to reclaim the authority and ownership so often passed off to others in a commercial publication process; and-to the benefit of ourselves as writers and our audience as readers-to refigure the notion of "correctness" itself.

We believe that every writing center director should read a new book by noted literacy scholar Deborah Brandt, best known for her award-winning Literacy in American Lives (2001) and for her influential concept of "sponsors of literacy." In her new book, The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy (2015), Brandt draws from interviews with a diverse group of nearly one hundred "workaday" writers from all walks of life to give a richly theorized portrait of the writing that people do outside of school-both in the workplace and on their own. At first glance, claiming that this book is so important for writing centers may seem hyperbolic, especially when the book does not address writing centers directly. But we are convinced that Brandt's research has a great deal to offer all of us in this field, for two main reasons. First, when interest in the humanities is declining among university students and when digital composition is changing the nature of writing, it is easy to worry, at least a little, about the future of alphabetic writing and of writing instruction. After reading Brandt's new book, we may still worry about many things-but we do not fear that writing is in decline. As her title promises, Brandt persuades us that writing is on the

Public Medievalism in the United States during the 1980’s was strongly influenced by emergent trends in popular children’s media which utilized pseudo-medieval settings. Some of the most notable media from this period were derived from the popular tabletop roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons.Although Dungeons and Dragons was originally published 1974, its popularity dramatically increased during the next decade due to various media controversies and vocal criticism from evangelical advocacy groups. In particular, these critics claimed that a number of well-publicized suicides and murders were influenced by the ‘satanic’ and ‘occult’ elements of the game. These concerns initially emerged in news media, but quickly gained traction in entertainment media and burgeoning evangelical media circles. In the media produced by critics of Dungeons and Dragons, the medieval is used to aestheticize their anxieties about the effects of violent children’s media. For these advocacy groups, especially evangelical groups, children’s media which utilized ‘Satanic’ or ‘occult’ imagery were dangerous because they exploited children’s inability to distinguish reality from fiction by infiltrating the occult into their imagination.  In their metaphysics, imagination exists as a liminal space between reality and fiction, and they claim that it is necessary to protect a child’s imagination by regulating their media consumption. While Dungeons and Dragons would cease to be a flashpoint of moral panic by the end of the decade, many of the discourses about the relationship between violence and interactive media would carry into the 90’s and beyond.

This paper looks at the changes in the denotation of the Árpád stripes during the Middle Ages (1000-1526) by analyzing royal seals, the Chronicon Pictum, and the Chronica Hungarorum. Beginning as a powerful symbol wielded by members of the Árpád dynasty, it was also used by important magnates in the Hungarian kingdom. The Angevins used the Árpád stripes to indicate their descent from the saintly Árpád dynasty and transformed it into a symbol to represent the dynasty. After the Angevins, the Árpád stripes took on a royal or territorial meaning, and were often paired with the patriarchal cross in order to indicate the Hungarian kingdom or its territory. It also plays a key role in representations of the natio Hungarica in the above chronicles, where the Árpád stripes illustrate the longevity of the Hun-Hungarian connection.

This paper looks at an oft-forgotten era in gaming history in order to provide the fundament for a historically rooted approach to video game medievalism. Looking at the transfers of medievalist Nintendo video games between Japan and North America in the 1980’s, this paper showcases how political and social controversy in North America resulted in the creation of an emergent global medievalism: one which utilized metanarrative elements in its narrative, drew its structure and narrative from Japan, and was deeply influenced by North American medievalist works. The first chapter analyses the creation of these games in Japan and notes their similarities and differences from Wizardry, a popular roleplaying game at the time. The second chapter analyses the state of public medievalism in the United States, the most economically influential member of the North American technoregion, in order to discuss the Satanic Panic and the controversy surrounding the representation of religion in medievalist media like Dungeons and Dragons. The final chapter provides a brief explanation of the economic relations between the United States and Japan during the latter half of the 1980’s and an explanation of the content changes which occurred during localization in the games discussed in chapter 1. These North American localizations would eventually serve as the basis for their European localizations, and alongside the developing global video game industry, formed the basis for a new form of global medievalism.

A literary criticism of several books including Female Quixotism by Tabitha Tenney, The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, and Angelina by Maria Edgeworth is presented. According to the authors, these novels constitute a transatlantic genre which highlights the moral and cultural complexities faced by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. Particular focus is given to the novels\u27 political contexts. Realism, the French Revolution, and republican government are also discussed

We think of reading fiction as mainly entertainment, but a recent study (Kidd & Castano, 2013) found that literary fiction, in comparison to popular fiction or nonfiction, improves Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in adults. ToM refers to the ability to accurately ascribe, predict, or understand others' perspectives, intentions, beliefs, mental states, and actions. The present study extends the previous research by examining the neurological aspects of ToM after exposure to literary or popular fiction using EEG analysis. Directly after reading either a popular fiction or literary fiction short story, college students engaged in an EEG task to measure neural activity. The results suggest that the brain areas involved in ToM skills are significantly more active not only while reading, but for some time after exposure to literary fiction compared to other types of writing. Implications of my research include the importance of reading for social cognitive development in early education and beyond, as well as potential benefits for individuals with social cognition disorders, such as those with autism spectrum disorders. No prior research has demonstrated the impact of reading literature on brain activity with respect to social cognition (e.g., Theory of Mind). This research is significant in that it ties a behavioral finding of improved social cognition after reading literature to an expansive set of neuroimaging studies related to the brain areas involved in social cognition.

Archaeologists worldwide know very little about the immense ecosystem changes already underway in the mountains and the threats that anthropogenic climate change poses to high elevation cultural resources. So how do we proceed? What do we prioritize? Is high elevation ice resilient to these changing climates, and if so, how much? How much time do we have before mid-latitude high elevation ice disappears entirely? This paper comments on the impacts of climate change to high elevation cultural resources, particularly ice patches, whose presence as a constant source of water is vital to the general appeal of high elevations for human occupation. Beyond their ecological importance, ice patches can also preserve ancient organic artifacts and paleobiological material for over 10,000 years. And they are melting rapidly thanks to anthropogenic climate change. This paper offers a case study of two groups of archaeologically productive high elevation ice patches from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, analyzing their resiliency in the face of warming temperatures and changing climates. Ultimately, I conclude that high elevation patches of ice and snow may be losing their resiliency to warmer temperatures as their ancient ice melts, making them ever more vulnerable to climate change. Ice patch researchers are in a race against time to identify productive ice patches and recover any fragile artifacts or paleobiological material they may contain before they melt completely. For many of these patches, this would be their first complete melt since the early Holocene.