Deb and I had a conversation with a friend of ours last night. She used to practice law but now teaches first grade. It was something to hear how she struggled this year to comply with teaching-reading curriculum constraints (complete emphasis on rote learning) while also trying to get kids to want to read, to love to read.

After I described some of my ideas for my thesis (on religion in the writing classroom), she also talked about her experience going from 12 years of Catholic school to Reed College in Portland where students wore t-shirts that said, “Communism, Atheism, and Free Love.” No surprise, but religious ideas were considered at best worthless and at worst juvenile. Again, not surprising. She also recalled asking religious leaders some deep questions and being given either simplistic or authoritarian answers and/or being told that her questions were a sign of weak faith. Also, sadly, not surprising.

Anyway, the conversation reminded me of how often that fear of doubt and questioning happens, as well as how fortunate I was to have almost never experienced it — one, because I didn’t grow up attending religious services or being part of a religious congregation at all, and two because it was actually reading and questioning which lead me to my faith in my early 20s (and then, as an adult, I continued to study — in the 1990s, getting a M.Div.) I almost connect “faith” with thinking, reading, and writing.

So… I was just thinking that I probably need to remind myself that my experience may be, very sadly enough, not common.

“When Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” That bumper sticker was on their car. :-)

There’s an article from AP religion writer Eric Gorski in the Yakima-Herald today: “Religious Americans: My faith isn’t the only way.” Not that much surprising. But I did smile when I read

Another finding almost defies explanation: 21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit, with 8 percent “absolutely certain.”

I have long thought that a lot of the self-identified atheists I’ve known have actually not been non-theists. They are in fact non-Christians or non-religionists. There are not philosophically against the possibility of a god or of a theistic viewpoint; they simply (often strongly) disbelieve western religious formulations of God, mainly the ones based on the (more traditional) biblical and koranic characterizations.

And I don’t blame them. I almost applaud it, this resistance to traditional western conceptions of God — in moderation. I was actually one of these kinds of atheists for about a year when I was in my second year of college. Philosophical arguments seemed to me to have disproved the possibility that the god of the old testament (it was mainly the old testament that gave me problems) could be a divine being — or, at least, could not be the divine being of the theistic philosophers or theologians. There was just too much contradiction between theists’ propositions and the old testament’s descriptions. Just didn’t work. They sounded like children’s myths.

And, looking back, the philosophy book I read was arguing for atheism not by showing that theism was untenable but that biblical characterizations of God were incompatible with theistic logic. But that argument required those philosophers to first do biblical interpretation, and to then postulate that their interpretation (basically a literal one) accurately and always represented western theism. Anyway, again, they were not arguing against theism as a philosophical construct, but against traditional biblical characterizations of God. At the time, I took their interpretations of the biblical characterizations as the same in essence as theistic arguments. Bible = theism, in other words. Or, one interpretation of Bible = theism. And probably a lot of people still do that.

Anyway! It all comes back to definitions, doesn’t it. “Atheist” doesn’t mean “non-theist” to a lot of people. It’s used as a way of saying, “I don’t believe that religion stuff, but I might believe in God.” That’s the way I used it back in 1981. Actually, when I ever do meet an atheist (in the strict definition of the term), I’m pretty interested to hear her view of things, because I know she’s had to come to a completely non-theistic worldview, not just a non-religious, or non-western-religious one. And that’s always a pretty sophisticated philosophical process.

I just posted most of my journal entries (and one of the presentations) from WR 593 The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Writing (from winter term). Half-a-year delay, but I finally get it done! ;-)

They’re found under the WR 593 Rhetorical Tradition category and/or January and February 2008

I just read the article “The First Lady’s Lady Friend” by Kenneth Lynn (from The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America, 1983), about Eleanor Roosevelt’s love affair with Lorena Hickok — well, mostly about the way in which Hickok and F.D. Roosevelt biographers minimize it (or, in Doris Faber’s case, over-focus on the question of its exact physical/sexual nature).

I’ve read the published collection of their correspondence (Empty Without You, 1998 ) and a couple of ER biographies. But even I hadn’t put two and two together to notice that it might not have been coincidence that ER’s transformation (from an often diffident and depressed wife of a New York governor turned U.S. President into a great political force) coincided with the consistent and passionate love she received from Lorena Hickok. I think Lynn could be right on.

Only fleetingly does [Faber] give evidence of realizing that the great interest of the Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence consists in its revelation of how Eleanor Roosevelt broke free of a lifetime of self-doubt. [...] The more pages Mrs. Roosevelt fills with protestations of how much her secret private life has come to mean to her, the more pages she devotes to telling Miss Hickok about her rapidly expanding public life. The Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence not only chronicles a love affair, it traces the emergence of the most active First Lady in American history.

Both Roosevelt and Hickok became especially concerned with the poor. Lynn continues:

That both Mrs Roosevelt and Miss Hickok were extraordinarily concerned with the suffering of poor Americans in the 1930s can be partially explained by the fact that Miss Hickok was forced to give up her newspaper career in order to continue her romance with Mrs Roosevelt, that she thereupon went to work for Harry Hopkins’s Federal Emergencey Relief Administration — which gave her detailed knowledge of the poor — and that she passed on everything she learned to Mrs. Roosevelt. Their exchanges on this subject, however, did not take place in a vacuum. They took place in the context of a love affair which the participants had to keep secret lest they be disgraced and which had been built upon mutual confessions of victimization and despair [mainly, during their childhoods]

Photo: ER and LH in Puerto Rico in 1934.

I knew I liked Martha Kolln. She was quoted in a Washington Post article about those who are worried that a deterioration of the sentence (due to text messaging, etc) will lead soon to a general lessening of critical thinking ability (and presumably the fall of western civilization!). Anyway, she says something like, “I’m more optimistic” and “I’d need more evidence.” I cheered her, because that’s exactly what i was thinking.

Oh, and then the article ends this way:

Wilson Follett, writing in Atlantic magazine, offered proof [of the deterioration of the sentence]. In an essay titled “Death of the Sentence,” fiction writer and literary critic Follett wrote, “To deal with the organization of thought in words is of necessity to deal with the sentence.”

In all languages, he added, “it has been the great continuum.”

The sentence, he declared, “is a structure inherently faithful to the pattern of consciousness.” It is “an instrument inevitable and perfect for the expression of thought.”

But, wrote Follett, the sentence is under attack. “To what stage of vagueness, confusion, or sheer lunacy must the English sentence be pushed to evoke any noticeable volume of outcry?”

Follett’s essay appeared in Atlantic’s October issue. Of 1937.

At the time, he was not concerned about millions of text-messagers and e-mailers killing the sentence. He was worried about highbrow writers — such as John Dos Passos and Harvard University’s Bernard DeVoto — using long, looping sentences that did not adhere to the strict grammatical and punctuation rules of the day.

Back then there was concern that sentences were too complex; today, that sentences are not complex enough. And that’s the way it.

I love it.

Ooh, way fun. Thanks, Marjorie. And Michael, you’re right: word clouds just got way cooler. This first one is my final Rhetorical Traditions paper, from winter term. (Click on image to see a bigger version.)

This one is an evening prayer service I led at our church back in December.

And this is a short response paper I wrote after reading excerpts of Cixous’s “Coming to Writing” (for Literacy Studies, Spring term).

Rhetoric… God… body… Hmm, is rhetoric God’s body?? :-)

I’ve been caught up in space lately. The combination of the Mars Phoenix lander (arrived a couple weeks ago) and the shuttle (orbiting with the space station the last week or so) plus the NASA channel, and I’m a bit distracted. I watch the space walks, try to imagine the world-view and the weightlessness. I stare at photos of the northern Martian plains.

I’ve always been fascinated with this stuff — well, as much as someone with humanities degrees can understand it (though I did do well in Astronomy and Cosmology as an undergrad).

When the first shuttle went up in 1981, when I was 19, I remember thinking that surely in my lifetime they would get to the point where they would sell passenger rides into space. I even thought the price would be do-able — I don’t know, something like $5000 or $10000 (!). (Now it cost about $4200 to take a ride on a “vomit comet” to experience zero-gravity for 30 seconds at a time.) Even then I knew that NASA, or any other space agency, would not send up anyone but scientists, pilots, and engineers at their own expense. They did decide to send up a K-12 educator in 1986, of course. But even then it was because K-12 educators teach and influence future scientists and engineers.

So 27 years later, it’s clear that it will also be way past my lifetime before NASA sends up, say, a great photographer or great writer or poet, let alone before there’ll be any commercial orbital passenger flights. Don’t get me wrong — the astronauts take some excellent photos and some even write later pretty eloquently about their experiences. And it’s just the usual order of things when exploring a new frontier. No artists or writers went along with Lewis and Clark. The explorers had to draw the pictures and record the thoughts. So it’s just going to be a long, long time before space contains the arts as well as the sciences.

Oh well…

On the other hand, sometimes the more I reflect on the conditions beyond earth (utterly inhospitable to human beings, without sophisticated technology), the more this planet seems like “heaven,” like “paradise,” and the more I’m content to stay right here.

But, still… it’d be nice to read the writings of a deeply reflective and articulate soul who had rode some orbits along with the scientists and engineers.

Erratum, June 23, 2008: Was watching “When We Left Earth” last night and found out that Christa McAuliffe was a social studies teacher. Mea culpa. Makes the challenger explosion that much more heart-breaking (if that’s possible). It’s cool, though, that Barbara Morgan, Christa’s back-up in 1986, became a full-fledged astronaut and flew last year to the space station.

I’ve seen this bumper sticker a couple times in my apartment building’s parking lot: “Sometimes ignorance comes disguised as tradition.”

Very true. Or, better — injustice comes disguised as tradition.

But, then again, both ignorance and injustice also come disguised as progress, too.

Ignorance and injustice just like to hide behind other movements, other categories of thought. People just like to use whatever ideology they like however they like — too often for their basest emotions.

But, oooh, I’m not aaaalways this cynical!

I was just skimming this post of mine from last year about the pedagogical and cognitive limitations of PowerPoint presentations. The research suggested that

the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digest in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

I concluded with this note:

Professor Sweller also says that it’s better to teach by presenting an already-solved problem rather than asking students to work out the problems themselves. That seems counter-intuitive. But he says that “Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it.

Now that makes me wonder if that’s the same reason we in the west prefer essays which state their theses right at the beginning and paragraphs which start off with topic sentences. We like easier reading. If we valued complexity and/or put more emphasis on the needs of the writer as opposed to the needs of the reader, we would probably have evolved a rhetoric, like some non-western rhetorics, which makes the reader’s brain work harder, which circles around the thesis, only getting to it much later (or not explicitly at all).

Does Professor Sweller’s observation also mean that deductive explanations will work better in classrooms than inductive ones?

I just came across the word “cultivated” in an article I’m reading, and it just now occurred to me that there’s a definition of “cultivated” — as “educated” or “refined” — that I definitely didn’t mean when I entitled my blog “Cultivated Pages.”

I don’t know why this other definition didn’t occur to me until today (!) — probably because to me the word has always first conveyed a rich organic and human metaphor such as that of a gardener cultivating a garden. I always liked the way Thoreau used it: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right” (from “Civil Disobedience,” I’m pretty sure), and “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage” (from Walden?).

So I didn’t mean “Cultivated Pages” as in educated or refined pages. Yikes, makes me want to re-name my blog and move to a new URL. “Educated” and “refined” sound simply too uppity. I didn’t mean that at all.

What do any readers think? When you read the title Cultivated Pages, do you first think of “refined and educated pages”??

Okay, here’s something that could easily distract me from my work. Cool.

NASA’s updates are here.

Note to self: Don’t forget to counter the view among a couple (?) of Pardoner critics that he was punished, or did feel the consequences of his hypocrisy (or a deeper sin?). I think it is the critics bringing in Augustine who say this. But I would answer that there is no sign of the Pardoner being unhappy (this would go against McAlpine, too). One could say he gets some comeuppance when the Host teases him at the end. But that’s not much more than teasting. The host is clearly joining in the game. The Pardoner is angered, but that anger hardly amounts to comeuppance or punishment. Yeah, the Augustine critics — at least one of them — says that the pardoner is experiencing the ever-deepening despair of his sin. Should be pretty easy to argue against that, and to support my claim that there’s this purposeful tension between the consequences of sin his audiences (both parishioners and pilgrims) assumed (and the pardoner preaches in his sermon exempla and in the tale of the three rioters) and the consequences of sin he himself was experiencing (none! he thrives and enjoys life). Sure, as some critics point out, because he doesn’t want to be seen a fool by the pilgrims, he goes ahead and tells them flatly about his hypocrisy before he begins his tale. (He has already traveled with them. They know his hypocrisy, anyway. So he’s not foolish enough to go about performing his sermon and tale, as if he was holy man, as if he was non hypocritical. He figures he’ll go ahead and just tell them openly, “This is how I fool them and make so much money with my relics and preaching.” But there’s actually nothing like a “consequence of sin” in that.)

The counter-argument (religion should not be allowed in the writing classroom) is unstated, implicit, and it grows out of the argument against the personal (probably). There’s a certain political correctness (i.e., no religion allowed) implicit.

An outline: Here’s the question, here’s why it’s important to the field and to me. Here’s how it has and has not been addressed.

___ Check with Vander Lei and Kyburz (eds of Negotiating Religious Faith…) to see if they encountered any explicit arguments against religion in the writing classroom.

___ Check the print edition of The Chronicle for an article arguing very explicitly against the personal in writing classrooms. Then a series of online responses. Check under religion, personal, teaching of writing.

Marshall Alcorn’s Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire. Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Marshall critiqued James Berlin’s work. Berlin reviewed it (anonymously) and said in essence “Berlin isn’t attentive to students…” Very cool. So had Berlin lived longer…

We talked briefly about Berlin’s four categories and how they became rather too defined, too binary.

___ Check for Alcorn in Lisa’s Situating Composition.

___ Email Lisa to find article by Pat Bizzell which says we should be explicit in our beliefs / assumptions.

Social Constructivism and Expressivism are really false binaries. Alcorn in the former, but criticizes it as well.

___ Check with Michael for people who are holding to the postmodern critique but trying to break out of false binaries.

Lisa’s Situating Composition — swoosh for mid section on history of process pedagogy.

It’s as if composition has been having this debate (over religion) “in absentia.” It’s lurking there, but we “don’t even want to go there.”

It’s very tough to talk about it, but we need to do it. Here’s how we’ve avoided it, here’s the reason why we need to talk about it, here’s the aknowledgement/discussion of the ways religion in the writing classroom could go wrong. (Lisa’s mantra: there’s no pedagogy that can’t be perverted.) Of course, we each can have preferences. But each method we used can be destroyed or perverted.

___ Check Elbow on voice in Everyone Can Write. Good on embracing paradoxes, perhaps a model for way to think about these things? Check his intellectual moves to see if I can use them.

See Lindemann’s and Tate’s debate re the place of literature in the composition classroom, as an example of how NOT to talk because they do binaries and left the field with no advance. Tate’s “A Place for LIterature in Freshman Composition” is in A Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook 175ff. Lindemann’s “Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature” is in College English 55 (March 1993): 311-16.

Dennis pointed out that current traditional pedagogy may have some connection here, too, because it views the text as so absolute (as, presumably, religious students would, too).

Critical review of issue, like Lisa’s Audience article — may be exactly what’s needed, especially if the response of many in the field is “Well, of course, religion ought not to be excluded — as an identity alongside race, gender, age, culture, class, location, political views, etc, and as a massively crucial issue in the public sphere — so your thesis would be stating the obvious.” But it’s also pretty obvious that religion is often excluded from writing classrooms. It’s pretty obvious we ought to embrace blogs in the classroom. But they are on the horizon (well, very close on the horizon), and so need a model of how to understand / incorporate them, how to understand the need to incorporate them. Michael’s thesis gave us that. Religion is in the past, the thing we left behind. But it’s not left behind in the public sphere. And so perhaps we need a model for how to understand / re-incorporate it, how to reach back into the past and bring it back up to pace with public debates (I know that sentence doesn’t makes too much sense yet) and many writing students’ lives. Vail McGuire (diss 2007) gets into that issue and proposes (though I haven’t read this section yet) that we need to — I’d say like good literacy studies folks, like good ethnographers — look at what theology is telling us about rhetoric and even about composition as well as to look at what rhetoric and composition are telling theology.

I think there are two main reasons this issue is important: 1) the individual, the particular (students’ lives, students’ identities) and 2) the societal, the general (the massive influence of religion in the public sphere). No one can imagine composition leaving out — either consciously or unconsciously — students’ race or gender or economics from our classroom work, from our theory. But we very often leave out their religion.  I know, I know — religion is — can be seen! — as anti-critical. But that’s a very one-sided, even old-fashioned view of religion. But even if that were always true, isn’t that all the more reason to engage it theoretically and practically?  And isn’t everything uncritical at first!? Students aren’t critical of the issue of race or gender or politics or culture or economics until they learn to become critical.  So why treat religion any differently? Why leave it off as the one thing that is irredeemable? un-make-critical-able?

Ooops, gotta go to class.

Notes from my conversation with Chris this afternoon about my thesis.

James L. Kinneavy’s Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (New York: Oxford UP, 1987).
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1873788.pdf
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1988/v45-3-bookreview8.htm

Steven L. Carter’s Culture of Disbelief

David Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity (re Augustine and composition studies both emphasizing meaning as thick, relative)

Compare Christian social justice with Composition’s service learning?

Lisa’s Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location.
- issue of composition pulling away from praxis (into theory) http://www.compositionstudies.tcu.edu/bookreviews/online/34-1/myers.pdf

Kurt Spellmeyer’s Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003) [Lisa -- good source of argument for the personal]
http://www.compositionstudies.tcu.edu/bookreviews/online/33-1/brunk_chavez.pdf
Critique of higher education. Composition is in ideal place to deal with problem.

Kurt Spellmeyer’s Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (1992) (covers B&E debate)

Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History
Critiques professorship as transfer of some sacred status to secular academics (could lead to cult of personality)

Lisa and Andrea’s “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” CCC 35.2 (May, 1984): 155-171
- as model for a review of an issue/topic

Or consider using something like James Berlin’s method of looking through the lens of four major theoretical categories.

And lots more angles and thoughts………… Whew!!! :-)

Whew, I feel as if I didn’t get much done this weekend, even though I finally came up with a workable and original thesis and an outline for my Pardoner paper. And that’s A LOT. It often takes me a long time to get that, and once I do, it feels like down-hill from there. So now I know the paper will make it into existence and not fall back into the abyss of mere potentialities. Really. Sometimes — most times — writing a paper feels like that for a while — as if it’s just not going to happen, that nothing is going to materialize or cohere into the thing called “a paper.” So, I did accomplish a lot this weekend. Just made something out of nothing. Scriptura creatio ex nihilo!

And speaking of creation, my friend and pastor in Yakima sent me this prayer tonight:

At the beginning,
God of Imagination,
you finger-painted
sunrises and sunsets
on the blank canvas of chaos.
You sang creation’s cantata,
while suns, moons, and stars
kept watch over your delights.
You laughed, while
lions, tigers, and bears
danced joyfully in the meadows,
with everything that
wiggles, creeps, crawls
clapped their hands in time.

Almost sounds easy!

Okay, I had this dream a couple weeks ago. But get this: I dreamt that I was teaching WR121 (first-year writing) and I required the students to write their whole papers with only one sentence pattern. That’s right: every sentence was to have the same sentence pattern. I even felt happy about it, as if it was working really well, making their papers stronger, at least at the sentence level. What pattern was it? It was just independent clause, participial phrase leading into dependent clause — e.g., “The students loved their writing class, praising their instructor every day for her wonderful sentence rules.” But, like I said, during the dream, I felt as if I had made this pedagogical breakthrough, as if this idea was going to revolutionize the teaching of sentence skills.

I don’t know why! I think I had been thinking about students sticking to simple subject-predicate sentences to avoid writing a “wrong” sentence or a wrongly-punctuated sentence. And somehow I thought that if I made them write every sentence with a participle, it would magically teach them to vary their sentences. Amazing — mandate one pattern in order to teach variety. Leave it to my subconscious to think that up!

At our last writing assistant staff meeting (last Thursday), I had the idea to have them read a section of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in middle English. I had noticed, when I was reading the middle English myself this quarter, that (of course) my comprehension would fade in and out, like a radio losing a distant broadcast. Of course, it’s all been very much like trying to read any language you are not fluent in. So I thought it might be a great way to help WAs understand for the first time or to be reminded of what doing academic work in English is like for the many English Language Learners they work with.

We had them read part of the Miller’s Tale. That was Dennis’ idea. Fifteen or twenty years after he’d studied Chaucer, that’s the tale that popped into his mind first. He remembered the scene in which Absolon “with his mouth he kiste hir [Alison's] naked ers / Ful savourly, er he were war of this” (3734-35) and, later, in which Nicholas “anon leet fle a fart” (3806).  We like to have fun in our writing center meetings.

I gave them only three reading helps, basically the ones Tara Williams gave our Chaucer class: 1) ignore spelling, 2) sound words out, and 3) words that begin with “y” are often past tense.

We got into groups of two or three and each group tried to figure out what was going on enough to provide us with a summary. When the WAs reflected on their experience, I was pleased with their responses. I mean, I had worried a bit that they might not find the exercise very significant, even a bit frivolous. But they obviously experienced much of exactly what we wanted them to experience (the fading in and out of comprehension, the frustration) and their comments showed it.

So I like this exercise. It works for both sentence and solaas (teaching and entertainment).

Deb just emailed me to let me know what campus security closed down YVCC today due to a threat of violence. The same thing happened last year. I checked a post I wrote about it last year, and it was almost exactly a year ago. What’s this? Someone gets spring fever and the urge to threaten violence? It was happening at other schools that same day last year, too (which I mentioned in my post). It’s sad and stupid, but it is curious that it’s happening at almost the same time of year.

Here’s the KNDO news story:

Serious Threat Shuts Down Yakima Valley Community College

Posted: Apr 30, 2008 09:33 AM Updated: Apr 30, 2008 11:25 AM

YAKIMA, Wash. - Yakima Valley Community College campus has been evacuated and closed down. Yakima Police is redirecting traffic around the campus.

Campus Security is currently saying that the campus has been closed down after YVCC received a credible and serious threat to public safety. Further details have not been released.

Nob Hill Boulevard is blocked off near the college as police work on getting vehicles off the campus.

Day and evening classes and activities has been canceled for Wednesday. Scheduled classes and activities will resume Thursday unless otherwise notified.

KNDO has a reporter on scene and we will be bringing you more information as it is updated. Watch tonight at 5pm and 6pm for all the details behind this developing story.

Gabriele Cocco. “I Trowe He were a Gelding or a Mare. A Veiled Description of a Bent Pardoner.” Neophilologus (2008) 92:359–366. Downloaded PDF.

Rowland, Beryl. Animal Imagery and the Pardoner’s Abnormality. Neophilologus Volume 48 Issue 1, 56-60. Dec 1964. Req’d via Summit 05-11-08 (U of O).

Green, Richard Firth. “Further Evidence for Chaucer’s Representation of the Pardoner as a Womanizer.” Medium Aevum, Vol. 71, 2002. Req’d via Summitt 05-11-08 (U of O) Excerpt: Twenty years ago I argued that the hints of effeminacy to be found in Chaucer’s portrait of the Pardoner should not be taken to indicate either homosexuality or a physical condition (whether that of a eunuch or a hermaphrodite), but rather an inordinate preoccupation with women. (1) To be effeminate in the Middle Ages, I suggested, was…

Sturges, Robert. S. Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (The New Middle Ages). Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. From Library Journal: Many journal articles have been published about the sexuality of the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but this is the first book-length study of the character. Along with its extensive examination of the Pardoner’s sexuality, the book delves into medieval society’s perception of and attitudes toward ambiguous gender. In fact, this effort, part of “The New Middle Ages” series, which emphasizes transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, focuses more on medieval views of gender than on analyzing Chaucer’s work. Most readers would find a selection of journal articles about Chaucer’s Pardoner more useful and accessible. Sturges (English, Univ. of New Orleans) has published numerous articles and one book about medieval French literature. Because his vocabulary is very specialized and his literary quotations are not translated, readers must be familiar with Middle English and with gender-studies terminology. Recommended for academic libraries only.

Manning, Stephen. “Chaucer’s Pardoner: Sex and Non-Sex” South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jan., 1974), pp. 17-26. Req’d via Summitt 05-11-08 (U of O)

Zeikowitz, Richard. “Silenced But Not Stifled: The Disruptive Queer Power of Chaucer’s Pardoner.” The Dalhousie Review:Medieval Culture Issue. Halifax: Dalhousie University, 2002. 55-73. Req’d via Summit 05-11-08 (U of O)

JUNGMAN, ROBERT E. “The Pardoner’s Quarrel with the Host.” Philological Quarterly 55 (1976):279-81. PB1 .P5 v.55 (1976) AVAILABLE The Pardoner/Host quarrel at the end of Pardoner’s Tale grows out of the same Pauline text (1 Timothy 6) as the Pardoner’s duplicitous homiletic theme and illustrates how false teaching leads to quarreling.

Condren, Edward I. “The Pardoner’s bid for existence” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1973. CB3 .V53 AVAILABLE. The Pardoner is one of the more complex and enigmatic figures in The Canterbury Tales. This detailed and extensive analysis of the Pardoner looks at what he says to the other pilgrims, their reactions to him and his description within the General Prologue. Condren argues that the Pardoner is not a simple fraud but a more complex person, one who no longer believes in the formal theology and piety that he preaches, or who is truly involved in lechery and avarice as he would have the other pilgrims believe. The Pardoner’s only joy lies in his ability to manipulate his audience and the power of his own performance. His obsession with death and the emptiness of his life are revealed in the Tale he tells of the Old Man and the Three Rioters. The epilogue, where the Host angrily denounces The Pardoner and his act, is also discussed.

Storm, Melvin. “The Pardoner’s Invitation: Quaestor’s Bag or Becket’s Shrine?” PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 5 (Oct., 1982), pp. 810-818 Abstract: Chaucer’s Pardoner functions pivotally in The Canterbury Tales, for he personifies illusory goals that can divert or halt the pilgrimage. A walking shrine, carrying spurious relics and questionable indulgences, he offers the pilgrims a meretricious equivalent of what they seek in Canterbury. His diversionary malfeasance gives thematic significance to his unsavory relationship with the Summoner and establishes a close parallel between Chaucer’s pilgrimage framework and the rioters’ quest in the tale itself. It is fitting that the Pardoner addresses his crucial invitation, at the end of the tale, to the Host, because the Host is responsible for guiding the pilgrims to Canterbury. The violence with which the Host responds is thus particularly appropriate, for he is confronting the man who threatens the impetus of the pilgrimage as a whole.

Grennen, Joseph E. “The Pardoner, the Host, And the Depth of the Chaucerian Insult.” English Language Notes 25:2 (1987): 18-24. PR1 .E4 v.25 (1987 SEP-1988 JUN) AVAILABLE

Kamowski, William. “Coillons’, Relics, Skepticism And Faith on Chaucer’s Road to Canterbury: An Observation on the Pardoner’s and the Host’s Confrontation.” English Language Notes 28:4 (1991): 1-8. PR1 .E4 v.28 (1990 SEP-1991 JUN) [incomplete] AVAILABLE

Osborn, Marijane. “Transgressive Word and Image in Chaucer’s Enshrined Coillons Passage.” The Chaucer Review 37:4 (2003): 365-384. PR1901 .C45 v.37 no.3-v.39 (2003/2005) [incomplete] AVAILABLE

Montelaro, Janet J. “The Pardoner’s Self-Reflexive Peyne: Textual Abuse of “The First Epistle to Timothy”" South Central Review, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 6-16 Ordered via ILL 05-11-08

Kruger, Steven F. “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 115-39. Kruger notes that, with one exception, this is ‘the only one of the Canterbury Tales that focuses solely on male characters’ and that the deadly struggle among the three revellers is described as ‘a violent pardoy of [homo]sexual intercourse’ (pp. 130-131). (from AC Spearing in Cambridge Comp to Chaucer 212). VALLEY PN661 .E94 but Valley’s collection begins in 2006. Requested 1994 vol via Summit 05-05-08

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. U of Wisconsin P, 1989. Available Valley PR1933.S35 D56

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities Pre- and Post-Modern. Duke UP, 1999. Chapter “Good Vibrations” includes discussion of Pardoner. Available Valley HQ14 .D56 1999

Kellogg, A.L. “An Augustinian Interpretation of Chaucer’s Pardoner” Speculum XXVI (1951): 465-481.Available Valley: PN661.S6 vol 26.

Burger, Glenn. “Kissing the Pardoner.” PMLA 107.5 (Oct 1992): 1143-1156. Available Valley PB6.M64 v.107 no.1-3

Gardiner, Anne Barbeau, and Glenn Burger. “The Medieval Kiss” PMLA 108.2 (Mar 1993): 333-335. Critique of Burger’s “Kissing the Pardoner.”

Gross, Gregory W. “Trade Secrets: Chaucer, the Pardoner, the Critics” Modern Language Studies 25.4 (Autumn 1995): 1-36. PB1.M67 Valley:AVAILABLE

MERRIX, ROBERT P. “Sermon Structure in the Pardoner’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 17 (1983):235-49. PR1901 .C45
Surveys the structural development of sermons in the Middle Ages and compares Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale to the university sermon of the late-medieval period, arguing that the tale does duplicate the structure of such sermons and their relationship between theme and form.

Sabine Volke-Birke. Chaucer and Medieval Preaching: Rhetoric for Listerners in Sermons and Poetry. Chapter XII: Preaching Perverted: The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale NOT AVAILABLE ANYWHERE I CAN FIND

Alan J. Fletcher, “The Preaching of the Pardoner” SAC 11 (1989): 15-35. Focused on the Pardoner’s sermonizing and its potentially polemical force. PR1901 .S7941

Waters, Claire M. “Holy Duplicity: The Preacher’s Two Faces.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002) 24: 75-113. (about the Pardoner and Parson) PR1901 .S7941

Nancy H. Owen, “The Pardoner’s Introduction, Prologue, and Tale: The Sermon and Fabliau” JEGP 66 (1967): 541-49). AVAILABLE VALLEY PD1 .J6

Jungman, Robert E. “The Pardoner’s ’Confession’ and St. Augustine’s ’De Doctrina Christiana’.” Chaucer Newsletter 1.1 (1979): 16-17. Summary: Cites “De Doctrina,” IV, xxvii, 59 as a source or gloss at least on the Pardoner’s “confession”: Augustine notes that the wicked may preach what is right and good. NOT AVAILABLE AT VALLEY AT ALL, NOT CHECK-OUT-ABLE VIA SUMMITT. ORDERED VIA ILL 05-01-08

Copeland, Rita. “The Pardoner’s Body and the Disciplining of Rhetoric,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds. Manchester UP, 1994: 138-59. GT495 .F73 1994 AVAILABLE VALLEY

Faulkner, Dewey R. Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Pardoner’s Tale; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. PR1868.P3 F3 AVAILABLE VALLEY

Halverson, John. “Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Progress of Criticism” Chaucer Review 4 (1970): 184-202. PR1901 .C45 AVAILABLE VALLEY

Patterson, Lee. “Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature and the Pardoner.” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 158-173. THIS VOLUME CHECKED OUT AT VALLEY. REQUESTED VIA SUMMIT 04-29-08

Spearing, A. C. “The Canterbury Tales IV: Exemplum and Fable.” In Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986: 159-77. (About “The Friar’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” and “The Manicple’s Tale”) NOT AVAILABLE AT VALLEY. REQUESTED VIA SUMMIT 04-29-08