11,115 research outputs found
A Conversation with Jonathan Franzen
No full textJonathan Franzen, arguably the best living American novelist, began his career in the late eighties. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, is a thriller set in his hometown of St. Louis. Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion, tells the story of the Holland family, who live in a Boston that is beset by earthquakes. But it wasn’t until 2001, with The Corrections, that the author found a wider readership. This book sets the Lambert family’s conflicts and anxieties against the backdrop of larger social issues, like the changing economy of the ’90s, and the rampant use of psychopharmaceuticals. When Franzen expressed ambivalence at having The Corrections selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, the ensuing flurry of media coverage secured his foothold in mainstream culture. The author’s fourth novel, Freedom, interweaves the story of the Berglunds with subplots that examine mass consumerism and environmental issues. Franzen’s oeuvre also includes two collections of essays, How to Be Alone, and Farther Away, and a personal history, The Discomfort Zone. His most recent book is The Kraus Project, a translation with commentary of the work of the nineteenth-century Austrian critic, Karl Kraus.
Franzen’s visit to Butler University—as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series—was three-fold: a reading for the general public, a Q&A for Butler students, and an interview with Booth. As the MFA candidate/reader for Booth who was to interview Mr. Franzen, I attended his reading and Q&A so as to get a better sense of what the author is like. Many articles profiling the novelist cast him as a cranky contrarian, but the Jonathan Franzen I saw didn’t fit into any of my preconceived ideas. During his reading he seemed intent on entertaining the crowd. Afterwards he fielded questions from the audience and responded genially. He smiled. He said thank you. When someone asked Franzen if he wanted his work to be a catalyst for social change, the novelist said he wasn’t opposed to the idea, but added, “I’m just trying to give the reader a good time.”
The undergraduates who attended the author’s Q&A had questions about The Discomfort Zone. Franzen said that the first thirty pages he wrote were awful because he was ashamed of his innocence. “Shame is the worst substance on the page, the most contagious of all feelings,” he said. After he rewrote the material using humor, casting himself as a “ridiculous figure,” he was able to let go of that shame. When Franzen was asked about his intense interest in birding, he told the crowd—most of them in their late teens and early twenties—that he didn’t start to grow up until he was in his forties. “I was so self-conscious for so much of my life, especially as a teenager,” he said, adding that it was through birding that he learned how to be in the moment and enjoy it. After the undergraduates left, Jonathan Franzen sat down with me to share some of his thoughts on literature, social media, and infamy
Interview with Jonathan Lethem
No full textThe work of Jonathan Lethem could fill a bookshelf. His novels include Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn and, most recently, Chronic City. Lethem has also penned two collections of nonfiction, three collections of short stories, and the graphic novel Omega the Unknown. In 2005 Lethem was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2011 he will begin his tenure as the Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College.
Lethem recently spoke at Butler University as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers series, after which he sat down to speak with Booth\u27s Alex Mattingly
EPICS: A Service Learning Program at Butler University
No full textIn this paper we present our experiences teaching EPICS (Engineering Projects In Community Service) at Butler University, a small, private university, from within the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. The EPICS program began at Purdue University in 1995. The idea behind EPICS is to have undergraduate students earn college credit for working on long-term, multi-semester projects to benefit charity and non-profit organizations. The projects are student-driven, under faculty supervision. There are many good reasons for having an EPICS program in an undergraduate computer science major. It is excellent for leveraging knowledge from other areas of computer science such as databases, networks, operating systems, and of course software engineering. The students are highly motivated because the project is real: there are real clients who use the software, making the software lifecycle come to life. Students practice teamwork, project management, professionalism, and communication skills. In our paper, we share feedback from our students on what EPICS means to them. At Butler, EPICS has been a success. Our EPICS program started in the Fall 2001 semester. We now have two ongoing projects: Spanish-In-Action (SIA), with Spanish middle school teachers from Crispus Attuchs Middle School in Indianapolis as clients, and Social Assets and Vulnerabilities Indicators (SAVI), with the POLIS Center at IUPUI as the client. We describe both projects in some detail in our paper. EPICS currently counts towards both the computer science major and the software engineering major as an elective at Butler. Our department has about 50 students and 4 full-time faculty, and each semester we have roughly 15 students enrolled in EPICS. We elaborate on how EPICS fits into our curriculum and provide details on how we deliver this course in our paper
Contemporary Literature. Analysis of Jonathan Bazzi's novels
No full textopenDopo una breve panoramica della letteratura italiana degli ultimi vent’anni si analizzano i due romanzi di Jonathan Bazzi "Febbre" e "Corpi minori" dai punti di vista formale, stilistico e tematico. Si discute inoltre il rapporto tra social media, autofiction e autore; nel capitolo 4 si riporta l'intervista che Bazzi ci ha gentilmente concesso, in cui questi argomenti vengono ripresi.
Si individuano alcune differenze che i testi mostrano rispetto alla letteratura moderna, e gli aspetti che hanno in comune con quella contemporanea; nel fare questo si accennano quindi alcune caratteristiche della società che li ha prodotti.The paper starts off with a brief overview of the contemporary Italian literature; then the reader is guided through an analysis of Jonathan Bazzi's novels, "Febbre" ("Fever") and "Corpi minori" ("Minor bodies"), both translated in English and published by Scribe. The relationship between author, autofiction and social media will also be discussed; in chapter four the reader will find the interview Bazzi kindly granted us
Experiences with Writing Assignments in Upper-Division Computer Science Courses
No full textWhen I arrived at Butler University in the Fall of 1991, I discovered the writing-across-the-curriculum program (WAC), directed by Dr. Carol Reeves. At Butler, all students must take a writing-intensive course during their junior or senior year. Preferably that course should be in the student’s major. At Butler, WAC’s primary duty is to approve courses as writing-intensive and to train faculty to competently offer such courses. As an eager new faculty member, I dutifully signed up for the training, despite my fears about using writing in computer science courses. I had never taught a course that involved writing, and I did not know how to grade writing assignments. I was not certain that writing could or should be used in upper-division computer science courses as it is in upper-division humanities courses. Perhaps fellow computer scientists feel the same way
To what extent is Lemuel Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift a reflection of the writer with regard to political and religious views, and attitudes toward women and the concept of family?
No full textThis extended essay is an examination of the extent to which the protagonist Lemuel Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels is a reflection of Jonathan Swift. It involves the exploration of this research question in terms of politics, religion, attitude to women and family; with references to this piece of literature and some secondary resources when necessary. The quotations from published literary criticism are either refuted by examples from the novel or supported in the light of evidence from the novel. Other secondary resources include Swift’s two other prose works, The Modest Proposal and A Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage, which are referred to briefly for clarification of the evidence. The purpose of this study is to analyse in what ways and to what extent the protagonist is an author-surrogate in the abovementioned ways.
This essay is comprised of two sections, namely “politics and religion” and “women and family”, each focusing on a particular aspect of the investigation. In the first section, Swift’s political and religious standpoint is discussed extensively in order to correctly evaluate Gulliver’s paradigm. By making connections between the beliefs of the author and those of Gulliver, the relation between the two is established to support the claim of this essay. In the second section, the female figures in the novel and Gulliver’s perception of them are inspected. The plot is also taken into consideration in this part of the inquiry although the central focus is on the persona.
In the conclusion, it is validated that Gulliver is a reflection of Jonathan Swift with regard to political and religious vision, and attitude towards women and family, by juxtaposing and assembling the main elements of personification of Gulliver and Jonathan Swift’s personal ideas and experiences
Administration and Curricula of the Introductory Graduate Music Research Course
No full textThe introductory research course is an integral part of many graduate music programs, yet there have been few studies that discuss its curricula across institutions. A questionnaire was sent to instructors of the course to identify shared pedagogical approaches among North American schools of music. The survey was divided into sections that prompted respondents to identify issues discussed in the course, including the types and titles of resources, research methodologies, and library use topics. With a response rate of over 40 percent, the survey also contains valuable data concerning the professional identifications of instructors, assignments used for grading, common textbooks, perception of the course’s efficacy, and more. Shared features of the course included the importance of electronic resources; the minimal use of Internet-mediated instruction formats; a strong preference for English-language materials; and a focus on resources such as databases, style guides, collected works, monuments of music, and thematic catalogs over and above others such as repertoire guides, discographies, directories, and iconographies.Peer reviewedThis publication first appeared in Notes Volume 71, Number 3, March 2015, pp. 448-478. This material may not be copied or reposted without explicit permission. Copyright 2015, Jonathan Sauceda
Citizen participation in news
No full textThe process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply
Molecular and structural basis of androgen receptor responses to dihydrotestosterone, medroxyprogesterone acetate and Delta(4)-tibolone
No full textData source: Supplementary material, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303720713004747#appd002Abstract not availableTina Bianco-Miotto, Andrew P. Trotta, Eleanor F. Need, Alice M.C. Lee, Aleksandra M. Ochnik,, Lauren Giorgio, Damien A. Leach, Erin E. Swinstead, Melissa A. O’Loughlin, Michelle R. Newman, Stephen N. Birrell, Lisa M. Butler, Jonathan M.Harris, Grant Buchana
Some remarks upon a pamphlet, entitl’d, A letter to the seven lords of the committee, appointed to examine Gregg. By the author of the Examiner
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