EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work Published by the English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities Volume 6, Fall 2009 ISSN 1548-1964 © 2009 English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities 1 EDITOR, Kim Martin Long Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania EDITORIAL BOARD Catherine Dent, Susquehanna University Ken Gilliam, Missouri State University Michael Mejia, Berry College, Georgia C.D. Mitchell, University of Memphis Felicia Ruff, Wagner College Karla Kelsey, Susquehanna University Haihong Yang, University of Iowa OFFICERS OF THE ASSOCIATION Cynthia Leenerts, President, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania Margo Wilson, Vice-President, California University of Pennsylvania Richard Van Dyke, Secretary, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania Mike Downing, Webmaster, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Carl Seiple, Treasurer, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Cheryl Wilson, Past-President, Indiana University of Pennsylvania 2 EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work Table of Contents Volume 6 Fall 2009 Introduction Kim Martin Long, Editor Essays, Poems, and Pedagogy Writing Origins, Writing History: Personal Voice and Nation in David Cusick’s Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827) Jeffrey Hotz ....................................................................................................................................... 6 “The Pictorial Land”: Ekphrasis, Art, and Perception in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun Kelly Wezner .............................................................................................................................................. 34 Zapatista Movement in Chiapas: The Local or the Global? Identity and Global Cultural Literacy Arun Pokrel ............................................................................................................................................ 57 “A Smile of Recognition”: Facing the Other in the Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Inna Volkova .............................................................................................................................................. 88 Terministic Screens and the Sacrifice of Children: Christianity and Empiricism in the Chimney Sweepers of Songs of Innocence and Experience Laura E. Rutland ...................................................................................................................................... 101 3 Poems by Noel Sloboda .......................................................................................................................... 120 Appointed, Anointed, Assigned and Ordained: Grant Wiggins’ Pilgrimage to the Center of Himself in Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying Anne Gray Brown ..................................................................................................................................... 123 Are We Shor We’re Empowering Our Students?: Questioning the Effects of De-centering Authority with Underprivileged Students Penelope Quade ...................................................................................................................................... 144 Notes on the Contributors ..................................................................................................................... 163 Submission Requirements ...................................................................................................................... 164 4 Introduction This issue marks the sixth annual issue of EAPSU Online, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes work that is critical, creative, or that concerns pedagogy—all subjects that professors and students of Pennsylvania‘s fourteen state-owned institutions value. PASSHE (the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) provides a quality education to more than 100,000 students across the Commonwealth and beyond. EAPSU (the English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities) is the organization that brings English people together across the state in an annual conference and in publishing this journal. From the beginning of this journal, we have received quality material from people all over the world, and we have published in many specialties within English studies. We have published quality graduate student papers that made it through the peer-review process, faculty members from all ranks, and independent scholars. We have prided ourselves on inclusiveness, fitting the mission of PASSHE. I have served as the editor of this journal during its infant years, but I now hand over the reins to Jeffrey Hotz of East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. I will consider myself the ―founding editor,‖ but I must pass the work on to those in the English departments across the System. Now working as an academic administrator, I do not have the time it takes to give this enterprise the attention it deserves. I feel a bit like Anne Bradstreet or Emily Dickinson, sending her work out into the world. Still, I am happy to have had this wonderful opportunity to meet so many people who have submitted manuscripts over the years. I want to thank Shippensburg University for its moral support and the department of English for reading many, many essays, stories, and poems. I want to thank my editorial board for making some tough calls and for being on the other side of an email when I needed you. Jeff has great plans for the journal‘s future, including registering with EBSCO Host to give the journal more visibility. Thanks, Jeff and the ESU folks for stepping up. All, enjoy this issue. I trust that bigger and better things await EAPSU Online. Better name, anyone? 5 Writing Origins, Writing History: Personal Voice and Nation in David Cusick‘s Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827) Jeffrey Hotz, East Stroudsburg University back to table of contents In his preface to David Cusick‘s Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827), Tuscaroran author David Cusick acknowledges the difficulty of recording ancient Iroquois history and admits his own limitations as an author engaged in translation. Cusick, a member of the Tuscacora nation, is fully aware of the daunting nature of his enterprise: the linguistic and cultural translation of Iroquois oral tradition into written American English. Cusick, in fact, confesses upfront his desire that someone else had assumed this task: ―I have long been waiting in hopes that some of my people, who have received an English education, would have undertaken the work as to give a sketch of the Ancient History of the Six Nations‖ (1). Noting that at one point he had even ―abandoned the idea‖ of the project, he comments, ―I, however, took up a resolution to continue the work, which I have taken much pains procuring the materials, and translating it into English language‖ (1). Cusick‘s manuscript is the end result of a complicated personal and cultural production, a process that critic Arnold Krupat describes as a ―bicultural composite composition,‖ where cultures collide in the individual‘s own act of authoring the work (15). In its very creation, Cusick‘s forty-five page historical sketch possesses the complicated layers of an encounter narrative, where Tuscacoran / Iroquois and Euro-American cultures meet. In Cusick‘s text one finds the intersection of personal voice and competing national histories. In her excellent 2002 article ―Finding a Place for David Cusick in Native American Literary History,‖ Susan Kalter notes that Cusick was ―one of the first Iroquois to record the oral literature of his nation in the alphabetic writing of Western civilization‖ (9). Cusick‘s work, no doubt, underscores the many challenges of being the first. He is the first member of the Iroquois Confederacy—and likely the first Native American (Royster 47)—to transcribe in written English 6 within the form of the mass produced book his people‘s oral stories of national origin and history. As a consequence, his account by virtue of its exclusivity has the potential become the public portrayal to which all future accounts will be compared. To manage the material, Cusick divides Iroquois history into three parts: Part One, ―A Tale of the Foundation of the Great Island, now North America‖; Part Two, ―A Real Account of the Settlement of North America and their Dissensions‖; and Part Three, ―Origin of the Kingdom of the Five Nations, which was Called a Long House.‖ Within these divisions, Cusick attempts to unify Iroquois culture or, as he puts it, ―throw some light on the history of the original population of the country, which I believe never have been recorded‖ (1). Cusick‘s overall narrative goal affirms what in American society today, according to the 2000 Census classification, might be described as ―original peoples status‖ (―State and County Quick Facts‖). By sketching his people‘s origins, Cusick establishes original claims and rights— an aim that propels Cusick to undertake the history in the first place. Engaging anxiously in the creation of a written history of the Iroquois people in the English language, Cusick re-asserts the claims of an ancient culture and recounts as a means of instruction, both for Six Nations members and Americans, time-honored traditions of interacting with other peoples. Susan Kalter rightly advises twenty-first century readers, however, to view David Cusick primarily as a single author, one Tuscacora, telling the history of the Six Nations and the Tuscacora, as he understands it, and not as a work that defines an entire culture. Cusick‘s reluctance to