literature

Book Review: Sugar Birds

When Agate “Aggie” Hayes, a spirited and outdoorsy 10-year-old who sketches birds and climbs trees too high, unintentionally causes a devastating fire, she flees in an inflatable boat and hides out in the backwoods, riddled with guilt, dodging bird dogs, and evading rescue. She survives on cattails, salmonberries, and her own instincts and resourcefulness⁠—until someone […]

Data analysis, text mining drives literary research

English major Matthew Jockers wasn’t always a computer whiz. The new dean of the WSU College of Arts and Sciences recalls a class in high school in which he struggled to program a mainframe to print out his name. “It was that tricky,” he says. A love of reading, writing, and literature led him to […]

Homer on a flash drive

Plato is sitting at the feet of his mentor Socrates, writing down what the old philosopher says. What Socrates is saying, ironically, is that writing is bad for you: It rots your memory. Preserved in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates’s opinion of the then-emerging technology sounds strange to us now—until you recall that that’s pretty much exactly […]

Exploring citizenship in Asian American women’s lit

Pamela Thoma, associate professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, published a new book exploring the conditions of cultural and political belonging for Asian American women depicted in popular fiction. Asian American Women’s Popular Literature; Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging examines the ways Asian American female writers address various family and […]

Saving early digital works

Electronic literature lives on through the WSUV ‘Pathfinders’ project—saving early digital works of the late 20th century. An ambitious effort is under way in Vancouver to preserve electronic literature from the past. The project, “Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature,” debuted at WSU Vancouver this week. The project is led by Dene Grigar, […]