Browsing by Author "Copland, Sarah"
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Item A case study on the value of humanities-based analysis, modes of presentation, and study designs for SoTL: close reading students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language(2023) Copland, SarahClose reading has long been heralded as a humanities-specific methodology with significant potential for SoTL. This essay fills a gap in SoTL literature with a full case study demonstrating what, exactly, close reading shows us about our data that social science-based quantitative and qualitative analyses may not. Close reading-based analysis of first-year writing students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language entails attention to the interrelated form and content of students’ self-reflections. This analysis reveals nuances and complexities that, if overlooked, would result in inadvertent misrepresentation of the data. This case study responds not only to calls for humanities-specific SoTL methodologies but also to related calls for greater legitimation of diverse forms for SoTL dissemination, some of which originate in the humanities. It is therefore cast as a reflective essay based on its author’s scholarly personal narrative (SPN) as a new, humanities-based SoTL researcher. Finally, this case study demonstrates the value of flexible, deliberately unscientific study designs that are responsive to emergent conditions but foreign to SoTL’s dominant social science paradigm. As guides to instruction, pre-surveys are necessary complements to pre-quizzes: learning what students think they know about a concept or skill, their attitudes towards it, and their contexts of prior learning about it—not just their knowledge of it, which is all pre-quizzes can tell us—is an important precursor to effective instruction. But maximizing pre-surveys’ potential to guide instruction requires flexible study designs so we can change our pedagogy, including our study’s “intervention,” if necessary, on the fly.Item The ideal narratee and the rhetorical model of audiences(2022) Copland, Sarah; Phelan, JamesThis article proposes to revise rhetorical narrative theory's model of audiences in fiction (actual, authorial, narrative, ideal narrative, and narratee) by replacing the term/concept of the ideal narrative audience with that of the ideal narratee, defined as the audience the narrator wishes they were addressing. This revision calls attention to the various ways that authors can handle the relations between the actual narratee and the ideal narratee (the actual may—or may not—coincide with the ideal), and such variety, in turn, points to the need for a more general taxonomy of authorial uses of the narratee. This taxonomy identifies three recognizably distinct ranges along a single broad spectrum of degrees of alignment between actual and ideal narratees: (1) clear alignment, (2) uncertain alignment, and (3) non-alignment. The taxonomy also identifies two main variants within each category, based on how an author's handling of the degree of alignment guides their readers’ focus: is it primarily on the narrated, the narrating, or both? The essay demonstrates the interpretive payoffs of the taxonomy through its analysis of a wide array of case studies including Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist, Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” Sandra Cisneros's “Barbie-Q,” and Albert Camus's Fall.Item In flight: feminist escape in James Joyce’s Dubliners and Alice Munro’s Runaway(2019) Gartner, Lindsey; Copland, SarahI compare the feminist quests portrayed in Joyce’s short story “Eveline” and Alice Munro’s stories “Runaway” and “Passion”, focusing on depictions of ‘escape’ and ‘quest narratives’ the various and dynamic ways in which female characters attempt to depart from crippling social expectations in search for self-knowledge and authentic identity.Item 'It […] cannot do any harm to anyone whatsoever’: fictionality, invention and knowledge creation in global notifications, Joseph Conrad’s prefaces and Chance(2024) Copland, SarahChance explores the intersection of two of novelist Joseph Conrad’s life- long fascinations: fictional representations of nonfictional conversational storytelling and the relationship between truth, credibility and invention. The latter is also apparent throughout Conrad’s prefaces, in which he works through long- held anxieties about the truthfulness and credibility of his representations and about critics’ concerns on these fronts. To reconcile the relationship between invention and truth or credibility, he describes a process of constructing, via invention, fundamentally truthful and credible stories about real- world events and figures. In Chance, Conrad depicts a character narrator, Marlow, doing the same thing. There are, however, two salient differences between Marlow’s and Conrad’s undertakings: one is their distance from the events and figures they are telling about and telling to (Conrad very distant from them vs. Marlow literally living amidst them), and the other is the genre claims they make for their narratives (Conrad’s literary fictions vs. Marlow’s conversational nonfictions). Conrad depicts Marlow using invention (through fictionality and otherwise) to supplement the limitations of his knowledge about other people, their motivations and their relationships, so that he can narrate a credible and compelling nonfictional conversational tale for his narratee. But because Marlow lives amidst and communicates with the subjects of his tale and presents his communications as nonfictional, the knowledge he creates through invention is consequential for his own and others’ involvement in the unfolding action. Failure to signal must have beens and hypotheticals as invention contributes to significant outcomes for the people with whom Marlow communicates in the told. Conrad thus qualifies his portrait of the affordances of invention for knowledge creation in global nonfictions with a cautionary note related to narrating situations like Marlow’s: telling nonfictional conversational stories about and to our acquaintances.Item Same author, same stories, different unity: a close comparative reading of a selection of stories from Raymond Carver’s What we talk about when we talk about love and beginners(2023) Carter, Kaitlyn; Copland, SarahThis essay provides a close comparative reading of three stories from Raymond Carver’s short story cycles Beginners and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A working definition of short story cycles is developed and referenced in the evaluations of these stories—this definition utilizes literary scholar Gerald Lynch’s work on the sub-genre. The close comparative analyses of “Why Don’t You Dance?”, “One More Thing”, and “Gazebo” reveal that both collections meet the criteria of short story cycles, however Beginners has a stronger unity that achieved through its shared themes. This supports the argument that Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, exchanged Carver’s unity of theme in Beginners for a weaker unity of style in What We Talk About.Item Truth and reconciliation and narrative ethics, form, and politics(2021) Copland, SarahI am the Canadian daughter of British immigrants and a settler who now gratefully teaches and learns on land known as Treaty 6 territory, an area encompassing central parts of the present-day provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where a treaty between "Her Majesty the Queen" and "the Plain and Wood Cree Indians and other tribes of Indians" was signed in 1876 (Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba). (1) I have benefitted tangibly and intangibly in my life from colonial structures of power that privilege white, native English-speaking settlers and in my work from a colonial academia that privileges Western theories and methodologies for literary criticism and education in general. I begin with this self-positioning because this essay is about the narrative ethics, form, and politics in and of artistic works purporting to contribute to reconciliation for groups that face historical and present-day injustice. Acknowledging my situatedness is a critical first step in formally framing literary criticism about such artistic works in a way that reinforces--rather than undermines--that criticism's politics and ethics. As I address questions that are as pressing for theorizations of narrative ethics and politics generally as they are for specific cases hitting the media, including the peoples and communities affected by these cases, I participate in a conversation led by Indigenous scholars, writers, and activists. In this conversation, which focuses on the politics and ethics of representation, I draw on my expertise in narrative theory and narrative ethics to add a complementary engagement with the politics and ethics of form. In doing so, I address two hitherto unaddressed questions. First, what bearing do the ethics of an author's conduct in writing, publishing, and promoting a work as an act of reconciliation have on the ethics of the work itself, that is, the ethics of the dramatized and narrated events and relationships in the text's action, and the narration itself? Second, how does the interaction between what we might call text-external ethics and text-internal ethics affect the political work a text is ostensibly undertaking to support and contribute to reconciliation for groups facing ongoing inequities? (2) By bringing this conversation to an international context, I also model for scholars working with artistic responses to other Truth Commissions, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, or their equivalents, one version of what form-specific ethical political criticism might look like. (3)