Flash Readings by the Brittain Fellows at Georgia Tech

Matthew Dischinger, a scholar of literatures of the American and global South, analyzes a scene from the South Carolina chapter of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel set in the antebellum United States. His article, “States of Possibility,” about the novel's use of “speculative satire” is in the current special issue of The Global South, titled Engaging with the Poetics of Peripheralization. Read more at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program's online journal TechSTYLE: b.gatech.edu/1oRln6H

Ruthie Yow, a historian and ethnographer of student activism and public school integration in the South, takes Chief Justice John Roberts to task for his majority opinion in the landmark Supreme Court case of 2007, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Her study of the legacy of the high court's Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, specifically in Marietta, Georgia, is the subject of her book, Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City (Harvard UP, 2017). Read more at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program's online journal TechSTYLE: http://b.gatech.edu/2mVRUe6

Halcyon Lawrence, who specializes in speech intelligibility and accent bias in the design of voice-interaction technology, observes that her Samsung phone Galaxy “has no specific answers” for her when she asks how to get to the legendary Atlanta diner The Varsity. According to Lawrence, speech interactions with voice-user technologies are a “boundary . . . for which the rules of engagement are not clear.” Read more at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program's online journal TechSTYLE: http://b.gatech.edu/2jbcU15

Victorianist Ellen Stockstill interviews Sarah Higinbotham, who specializes in early modern literature, law, and violence. Higinbotham argues that Dr. Seuss’s absurd story and illustrations in The Sneetches (1961) offer kids “a safe imaginative space” to think about big issues like human rights, human dignity, and their responsibility for others. Such spaces are the subject of Higinbotham's book Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford UP, 2015). Read more at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program's online journal TechSTYLE: http://b.gatech.edu/2mYB8Le

Caitlin Kelly, who specializes in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, examines the role of private devotion in Samuel Richardson’s landmark epistolary novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Of particular interest is the public performance of Pamela’s adaptation of Psalm 137, best known by its first verse: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” (KJV). Read more at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program's online journal: http://b.gatech.edu/2mXxPUz

Brittain Fellow Eric Rettberg, who specializes in conceptual poetry and the digital humanities, interprets the variants—as editors and textual scholars call them—of William Carlos Williams’s laughter in two public readings of the iconic lyric “This Is Just to Say." Read more at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program's journal TechSTYLE: http://b.gatech.edu/2mXREv3