Inglés

With the rapid increase in the number of international students from different academic backgrounds around the world, college and university teachers in the West find it harder to understand the many and complex reasons when these students plagiarize or use sources ineffectively. Reviewing relevant literature, I first make a pedagogical analysis of student plagiarism then show why teachers should shift focus from traditional views about cultural difference toward a multidimensional understanding of plagiarism. I conclude by recommending pedagogical strategies to help students to adjust to the new academic system rather than “policing” their activities and undermining their confidence.

This is a conference paper I presented at The Animal/Human Bond in Oxford Summer 2014, excerpted from a larger work. Now available in "Who's Talking Now? Multispecies Relations from Humans and Animals Point of View" at http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/product/whos-talking-now-multispecies-relations-from-human-and-animals-point-of-view/
My research is on the development of the horse as a status symbol in western Europe during the Middle Ages. Horses throughout history have often been restricted to the upper classes in non-nomadic societies simply due to the expense and time required of ownership of a 1,000lb prey animal. However, between 1000 and 1300 the perceived social value of the horse far surpasses the expense involved. After this point, ownership of quality animals begins to be regulated by law, such that a well off merchant or a lower level noble would not be legally allowed to own the most prestigious mounts, despite being able to easily afford one. Depictions of horses in literature become increasingly more elaborate and more reflective of their owners’ status and heroic value during this time. Changes over time in the frequency of horses being used, named, and given as gifts in literature from the same traditions, such as from the Waltharius to the Niebelungenlied, and the evolving Arthurian cycles, show a steady increase in the horse’s use as social currency. Later epics, such as La Chanson de Roland and La Cantar del Mio Cid, illustrate how firmly entrenched the horse became is the trappings of aristocracy.

As a queer, white, cisgender, male Whitman scholar, this quotation from Toni Morrision’s Playing in the Dark (1992) speaks to how I am still in the act of confronting and critiquing Whitman’s contradictory stance as the “Poet of Democracy.” I recognize that, for far too long, Whitman’s inheritance of America’s white supremacist history has been overlooked or swept under the rug by many white Whitman scholars.

The following entry provides a queer critical genealogy of responses to Walt Whitman’s work, with “queer” acting as an umbrella term encompassing a variety of approaches. This survey covers a selection of early reactions to Whitman’s homoerotic themes, twentieth-century readings emerging from gay/lesbian academic scholarship, and studies published amid the flourishing of queer theory in the early twenty-first century.

The deployment of the myth of Narcissus in mid- to late nineteenth century American literature allows for a homoerotic imaginary to be built around romantic and sexual relations between men at a time when homosexuality had not yet been medicalized or theorized in the US. In this dissertation, I trace the influence of the Narcissus myth primarily in the writings of Walt Whitman to explore how male homoerotic desire becomes a structuring principle of Whitman’s poetics and his vision of American democracy.

Whitman creates the foundation for how homoeroticism will poetically appear, in both American and British literature, in his 1855 and 1860 editions of Leaves of Grass. His early poem “Pictures” (before 1855) provides the blueprint for Whitman’s experimentation with his vision of comradeship which becomes inextricably linked to his ideas on democracy and male same-sex desire. In “Pictures,” Whitman lays the poetic foundation for looking towards classical Athens as a means to represent homoeroticism in mid-19th-century America. Whitman turns to the novel A Few Days in Athens, by early-19th-century Scottish philosopher Frances Wright, for homoerotic ancient Greek creative inspiration. The queer influence of this novel, largely overlooked by Whitman scholars, shapes Whitman's homoerotic poetics, especially how he links democracy to comradeship.

I open my study with the meeting, in Camden, New Jersey, between Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde because Whitman and Wilde’s contrasting views on the emerging category of homosexuality illustrate its uneven development in a transatlantic context. The study concludes by examining how queer male nineteenth-century readers of Whitman’s poetry recognized that his homoerotic poetics speak to their own desire. The differences between American and British responses to Whitman’s poetry will illuminate how American and British theorizations on male same-sex desire appear before the invention of homosexuality as a sexual orientation. Exploring why Whitman turns to ancient Greek mythology for his homoerotic poetics contributes significantly to Whitman scholarship and queer reception theory.