Books & Magazines

Book & Magazines resources in the
Madison Area

• The Digital Cardinal - The Daily Cardinal Online.
• The Daily Page - The Isthmus Online, Madison's Weekly Newspaper.
• The ONION - No explanation would do this justice......

Other Selected Web Sites

• The Alternative Bookshop - The Alternative Book Shop specializes in unique and hard to find books from Independent, Small and Self-Publishers. Each book is vividly presented for your review. It's almost like browsing in a bookstore.

In this article I examine the evolution of the Tyneside song, ‘The Blaydon Races’, into a local anthem, with a focus on the contribution of the plurals lads and lasses to this status. I consider the obstacles to the dialect song becoming an anthem, in particular its origins in non-respectable 19th-century music hall. Existing scholarship on 19th-century dialect song or poetry often sees such material as enhancing solidarity at the levels of class or region (Beal, 2000; Wales, 2002, 2006). Influenced by the work of Coupland (2006) and Eckert (2005), however, I posit a more fluid conception of identity within popular entertainment spaces, which may operate alongside, contribute to, or undermine categories such as class or region.

I use an electronic corpus of 19th-century Tyneside song to investigate the collocation of lads in particular with Tyneside, and its role in fostering local patriotism. I also consider the pragmatic function of lads as a term of address or apostrophe to sporting heroes in song.

I then examine the terms of address lads and lasses within the already intimate context of shared music hall song choruses, recalling, nevertheless, the controversies surrounding the institution. This function of lads in the chorus of ‘The Blaydon Races’, and the cultural ‘resonance’ of references to ‘lads an’ lasses’ are seen potentially to enhance solidarity from the outset. However, increasingly with locally patriotic functions, they can enhance group bonding within evolving contexts of shared singing – within the later music hall, among troops in both World Wars, and among Newcastle United football supporters.

This article explores the use of nonstandard English forms and intertextuality in two recent works by Nigerian writers in English living abroad. To date, Chris Abani’s Graceland and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation have attracted little critical commentary, far less any academic survey of their language, yet each book is in its own way representative of conflicting treatments of nonstandard varieties of Nigerian English by writers in the diaspora. Beasts of No Nation owes a considerable debt to the linguistic and stylistic experiments Ken Saro-Wiwa made in his novel Sozaboy and Iweala has drawn heavily on this work in his use of a first person narrator and his assignment of a limited, if forcefully expressive, language to his hero. According to Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy is written in a mixture of Nigerian Pidgin (NP), Standard English (SE) and other forms. Graceland, however, makes selective use of nonstandard forms for reasons closer to those of earlier writers and makes this clear through its author’s insertion of intertextual elements. After providing an overview of the background to and characteristic features of NP and Nigerian English this article surveys their use in Nigerian literature and concludes by examining the language of Graceland and Beasts of No Nation through a linguistic comparison of shared episodes and a consideration of thematic similarities in order to place these two novels in a continuum of Nigerian writing in English through their use of language.

Reading groups are an increasingly popular phenomenon in contemporary life, offering a space for readers to share literary and personal experiences. Although there is a growing body of research into reading groups, few studies have considered in detail the language used by readers as they debate the meaning of texts. This article offers a close analysis of interaction in reading groups, focusing on a meeting held by a book club in 2009. Employing a mixed-methodology approach, combining conversation analysis and communities of practice, this study analyses the reading group’s interaction in fine detail while also accounting for elements of group dynamics that influence the talk in this specific community of readers. I consider how members go about articulating their interpretations of the stories in the context of the reading group, focusing on the way that members present these interpretations as reasonable and valid. Three features of interaction are found to be important to this: category entitlement, the ‘oh’-preface and X then Y structures. I conclude that the interpretations offered in the reading group are necessarily socially situated and are inextricable from the interactive context in which they are produced.

This article proposes a form of research that integrates reader study with textual analysis. Its purpose is to investigate the social production of literary value, potentially providing cultural sociology with a systematic means by which to study the formal features of texts in relation to their social significance: a means arguably required by (but not necessarily supplied in) the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of reading group (or ‘book club’) discussions reveals an association between descriptive writing, cultural legitimacy, and a focus on the form, rather than the content, of fictional texts. In order to understand this association, the analysis then turns to two paragraphs from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (2000 [1946]), which had been read by most of the groups involved and which many group members had referred to as involving ‘description’. It is argued that a long-standing tradition of association between descriptive writing and visual art has served as a resource both for consumers and for producers in distinguishing literature from popular fiction.

This article explores the workings of second-person pronoun forms in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road. More particularly, the analysis focuses on examples of ‘doubly deictic you’ (Herman, 2002), and demonstrates how the novel exploits the uncertain deictic, referential and address functions of this particular pronoun form to develop what I term a ‘post-apocalyptic poetics’, through which it attempts to explore – and enact – the spatial and temporal dislocations that ensue from the fictional apocalypse. The article also demonstrates how the novel’s indeterminate use of narrative you creates profound hermeneutical (and often ontological) uncertainty for readers, who must often suspend any attempt to fix the positions from and to which the story is addressed. McCarthy’s opaque use of the terms you and your throughout the novel creates profound polyphony and multivalence by preventing readers from clearly distinguishing the discourse and perspectives of protagonists from those of the narration, and by thus impelling readers to develop several interpretations of key passages, all of which must be sustained simultaneously. Finally, the analysis explores how the (potential) apostrophic effects associated with doubly deictic you serve to immerse readers in the horrors of the post-apocalyptic world, thus increasing the novel’s ecocritical import.

The starting point for this article is that although new communication technologies have become an integral part of much educational provision, the nature of virtual learning environments (VLEs) remains underresearched, particularly in terms of the language skills required of participants. Existing research paradigms from linguistics, especially those from formalist traditions, offer inadequate and simplistic accounts of new communication contexts. Drawing on the field of Mediated Discourse Theory and of Scollon’s central concept of discourse as a ‘nexus of practice’ (Scollon, 1998, 2011), the article brings together interactionist approaches with insights from stylistics in order to analyse a specific aspect of synchronous written language use within a VLE, that of ‘response cries’ (Goffman, 1981). The analysis acts as an exemplar, illustrating the complexity of new communication systems and the associated skills required by interlocutors to negotiate meaning in unfamiliar spaces. Response cries, as examples of utterances that are neither speech nor writing in any formal sense, show how ‘new representational technologies are simultaneously producing new forms of representation and mediational means’ (Scollon, 2001: 170). A number of pedagogic implications arise from this study, including the need to build a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of VLEs in order to assess participant performance accurately. For example, the study shows that in order to represent aspects of expressive language, which have traditionally been associated with speech, participants need a high level of literacy skill and metalinguistic awareness. In addition, participants who are part of international online study communities need to be able to negotiate new norms of usage as English is elaborated as a virtual lingua franca.

This article reports on an analysis of stance-taking in the university classroom, examining how students position themselves in relation to academic knowledge through the epistemic phrases I don’t know and I think. Analysis of specific interactional moments reveals that the meaning of discourse forms is largely indeterminate without an understanding of (1) the immediate discourse context; (2) the place of linguistic forms in an individual’s stylistic repertoire; and (3) the ideologies and social categories that frame that stylistic repertoire. Differential knowledge distribution amongst the students places constraints on what certain individuals can do with particular linguistic forms and this analysis reveals how they utilize the same linguistic resources in different ways in order to do different identity work. Through detailed interactional analysis, I demonstrate that our ability to evaluate classroom discussion as a social practice relies upon our ability to situate that practice within an understanding of individual speakers’ personal styles and the social ideologies that frame them.

This article takes up issues raised in Mirador’s article ‘A move analysis of written feedback in higher education’ (Mirador, 2000). It examines tutor-written feedback in terms of genre analysis (Swales, 1990), and modifies Mirador’s account of the repertoire of ‘moves’ that constitute feedback as a genre. It discusses the question of how far students identify with or share in the discourse community which produces feedback. The argument is that they do not, and that the genre of feedback is negatively reinforced by audit culture in assessment. The conclusion suggests ways forward to make feedback more effective.

Community engagement is an important area of development both generally in Higher Education English departments and also in the disciplines of stylistics and cognitive poetics. Though claiming to be concerned with ‘real readers reading literature in the real world’ (Stockwell, 2002: 8), cognitive poetic and stylistic analyses could be biased towards the reading practices of academics (Miall, 2006). As a result, it is becoming increasingly popular for stylisticians to use empirical methods to investigate readers other than the analyst in their discussion of literary effect (e.g. Burke, 2010; Stockwell, 2009; Whiteley, 2011). This article examines extracts from group discussion data collected as part of the ‘Creative Writing in the Community’ project at the University of Sheffield. Five groups of readers were recorded discussing poems by contemporary British poet Simon Armitage. The groups consisted of cognitive poetic researchers, first-year undergraduate English students, and local reading groups respectively. I examine the style and content of their discussions in the light of existing research into the distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ readers, and consider what the similarities and differences between their discourse could signal for university departments’ engagement with readers both within and outside of the classroom.

Does traffic congestion negatively impact the economic growth of metropolitan areas? This article reviews the findings of three research directions addressing this question. First, research on first-order impacts indicates that the economic value of congestion-induced travel delay is tenuous since travelers adapt. Second, research on second-order impacts suggests that congestion slows metropolitan growth, inhibits agglomeration economies, and shapes economic geographies. Third, research on public-sector congestion mitigation policies identifies significant fiscal burdens despite limited success at reducing congestion. In sum, research on individual, business, and public-sector responses to congestion demonstrate a shift from congestion mitigation toward adaptation.

Ecoregional planning—broadly defined here as planning for regions delineated by natural boundaries—seemed poised to prosper in the early 1970s. Faced with immense political and economic challenges, however, it subsequently transformed itself, taking a more collaborative, less regulatory tack. Ecoregional planning capacity has expanded, though highly unevenly, at multiple spatial scales. Today’s multiple initiatives receive financial, technical, and logistical support from federal and state funding programs, land trusts, watershed organizations, and ballot questions—and they may be further bolstered by climate change mitigation and adaptation policies. As they continue to develop, ecoregional programs must contend with issues of equity, efficiency, affordability, and intense opposition.

For this review, we included a wide range of literature related to emergency preparedness planning and information on the evacuation of carless residents, including minority, low income, elderly, disabled, and residents with limited mobility and health problems. The review includes sources that highlight best practices, and identify areas of weakness within the field of emergency preparedness with respect to the target population of this study. This review discusses different needs for different types of natural and human-induced disasters. It also discusses the role for an integrated, multimodal approach for evacuation planning to assist with evacuating people in the most efficient manner possible. This literature review serves to characterize the current state of thinking and practice on the subject of carless and special needs evacuation planning. The focus of the literature review is on the role of government and public agencies. Overall, the literature related to carless evacuation planning is multidisciplinary and wide ranging. The events surrounding Hurricane Katrina motivated this review of existing research and provided an opportunity to synthesize other earlier related research. The process is important for finding gaps in the contemporary understanding of these issues, especially given more recent evacuations.

Airports have been relatively neglected in scholarly planning literature despite their historic role in shaping metropolitan form. Their transformation into major mixed-use urban nodes anchoring subregional realms of aviation-oriented development has underscored their significance as agents of and products of globalization. Reviewing the trends and planning issues arising, several normative models of airport spaces are identified and discussed in relation to sustainable development objectives. The contestation of airport expansion that has made for epic political battles in diverse settings and its implications for models of airport-led urban development is noted. The review is guided by the notion of the sustainable airport region, which ultimately requires a rapprochement between airport master plans and broader urban planning strategies.

This article summarizes and synthesizes empirical research on relationships between youth physical activity and urban form across several disciplines, for a planning audience. It highlights how physical activity is characterized, introduces ecological theories of physical activity behavior, provides a conceptual model of interactions between urban form and other influences on youth physical activity behavior, and discusses implications of new evidence for future research and policy. Further research is needed to address several gaps and inconsistencies across studies and to build on recent methodological developments. Despite the limitations of existing research, it is evident that urban form can either serve to constrain or promote physical activity. Urban form interventions have the potential to result in lasting influences on the behavior of large populations of youth.