English 251 Kitchens: American Literature I

For thousands of years pirates, privateers, and seafaring raiders have terrorized the ocean voyager and coastal inhabitant, plundering ship and shore with impunity. From the victim's point of view, these attackers were not the rebellious, romantic rulers of Neptune's realm, but savage beasts to be eradicated, and those who went to sea to stop them were heroes.

Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history. In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

In Reconstructing the Native South, Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South--literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great moral philosopher. One of his principle contributions is the theory of self-reliance, a view of democratic individuality. During much of his life, Emerson was considered a radical thinker, and his opposition to established religious opinion was scandalous. Emerson's deep commitment to individualism was at the root of his critique, and his articulation of individualism was constant, whether aimed against the group mind or against institutional constrictions. 'Nietzsche was Emerson's best reader, ' and George Kateb provides an accessible reading of Emerson that is friendly to the interests of Nietzsche and to later Nietzscheans such as Weber, Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault.

This collection of new essays covers the myriad portrayals of the figure of the pirate in historical records, literary narratives, films, television series, opera, anime and games. Contributors explore the nuances of both real and fictional pirates, giving attention to renowned works such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, and the anime One Piece, as well as less well known works such as pirate romances, William Clarke Russell's The Frozen Pirate, Lionel Lindsay's artworks, Steven Speilberg's The Adventures of Tintin, and Pastafarian texts.