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Department of English
207 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 625-3363

English at Minnesota
Newsletter

Donald Ross, Jr. Professor Department of English 210L Lind Hall 207 Church St SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 (612) 625-5585, rossj001@umn.edu

Special Interests

• Literature: the American "Renaissance" and movements which preceded and followed it; theory of the novel; travel writing
• Composition: the role of computers and word processors in writing instruction; writing in academic disciplines

Honors & Awards

• CEE Teaching Award

 

Background

• Education
  • University of Michigan, Ph.D.
  • Lehigh University, B.A., M.A.
    
    
• Job history
  • Lehigh University, Graduate Assistant, 1963-4
  • University of Michigan, Teaching Fellow, 1964-7
  • University of Pennsylvania, Instructor, 1967-8; Assistant Professor, 1968-71
  • University of Minnesota, Assistant Professor, 1971-6; Associate Professor, 1976-83; Professor, 1983-

Publications

• Publications on literature
  • With Stephen Adams, Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works (University Press of Virginia, 1988), 271 pp.
  • With Capper Nichols and Stephanie Athey, Transportation through the Lens of Literature: The Depiction of Transportation Systems in American Literature from 1800 to the Present in the Form of an Annotated Bibliography, Web distribution.
  • With Jim Schramer, co-editor,American Travel Writers, 1776-1850. Dictionary of Literary Biography Series, Number 183. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale 1997.
  • With Jim Schramer, co-editor,American Travel Writers, 1850-1900, Dictionary of Literary Biography Series, Number 189, Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale 1998.
  • American History and Culture from the Explorers to Cable TV New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
  • "Dreams and Sexual Repression in The Blithedale Romance," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 86 (1971), 1014-17.
  • "Verbal Wit and Walden," American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 11 (Summer, 1971), 38-44; rpt. in Artist and Citizen Thoreau (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971).
  • "Emerson and Thoreau: A Comparison of Prose Styles," Language and Style, 6 (1973), 185-95.
  • "Emerson's Stylistic Influence on Whitman," American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 25 (1975), 41-51.
  • "Stylistic Contrasts in Yeats's Byzantium Poems," Language and Style, 8 (1975), 293-305.
  • "Who's Talking? How Characters Become Narrators in Fiction," Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976), 1222-42.
  • "Structural Elements in Keats's Sonnets and Odes," Cahiers de Lexicologie, 31:2 (1977), 95-117.
  • "Stylistics and the Testing of Literary Hypotheses," Poetics, 7 (1978), 389-416.
  • With Stephen Adams, "The Endings of Waldenand Stages of its Composition," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 84 (1981), 451-69.
  • "Poems 'Bound Each to Each' in the 1815 Edition of Wordsworth," The Wordsworth Circle, 12 (1981), 133-40.
  • With Stephen Adams, "Thoreau's 'Ktaadn': 'The main astonishment at last,'" English Language Notes, (1983), 39-47.
  • How to Write and Publish Articles on Literatures in English for graduate students and others; published on the Web.
• Publications on computer-aided study of literature and style
  • "Composition as a Stylistic Feature," Style, 4 (1970), 1-10.
  • With Robert H. Rasche, "EYEBALL: A Computer Program for Description of Style," Computers and the Humanities, 6 (1972), 213-21.
  • "Beyond the Concordance: Algorithms for the Description of English Clauses and Phrases" in The Computer and Literary Style, eds. A.J. Aitken, R.W. Bailey, and N. Hamilton-Smith (Edinburgh: Univ. of Edinburgh Press, 1974), pp. 85-99.
  • "An EYEBALL View of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience" in Computers in the Humanities, ed. J. L. Mitchell (Edinburgh: Univ. of Edinburgh Press, 1974), pp. 94-108.
  • With S. Keith Lee, "Statistical Models of the Distribution of Monosyllabic and Polysyllabic English Words," Statistical Methods in Linguistics, (1975), 51-63.
  • With M.B. Pringle, "Dialogue and Narration in Joyce's Ulysses" in Computing in the Humanities, eds. Serge Lusignan and J. S. North (Waterloo, Ont.: Univ. of Waterloo Press, 1977), pp. 73-84.
  • "Differences, Genres, and Influences" Style, 11 (1977), 262-73. Reprinted in Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric, ed. R. Potter (Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 45-59.
  • "The Use of Word-Class Distribution Data for Stylistics: Keats's Sonnets and Chicken Soup," Poetics, 6 (1977), 169-96.
  • "Computer-Aided Study of Literary Language," Computer, 11:8 (Aug. 1978), 32-39.
  • "EYEBALL and the Analysis of Literary Style" in Computing in the Humanities, eds. P.C. Patton and R.A. Holoien (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1981), pp. 85-103.
  • "Skimming the Surface: Improvements in the Quality of Syntactic Descriptions for Stylistics," ITL: Review of Applied Linguistics, 52 (1981), 55-73.
  • With Paul Bratley, "Syllabic Spectra," Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Journal, 2:2 (1981), 41-50.
  • "Aids for Editing Walden," Computers and the Humanities, 15 (1981), 155-62.
  • "What Surface-Structure Parsing Can Tell Us About Style" in Systemic Perspectives on Discourse: Vol. 2: Selected Applied Papers for the 9th International Systemic Workshop, eds. W.S. Greaves and J.D. Benson (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), pp. 225-240.
  • With David Hunter, m -EYEBALL: An Interactive System for Producing Stylistic Descriptions and Comparisons," Computers and the Humanities, 28 (1994): 1-11.
  • With Dan Brink, co-editor, ACH/ALLC '91: "Making Connections" (Arizona State University Humanities Computing Facility, 1991), 446 pp.
• Computer programs
  • "EYEBALL" For analyzing Style, especially of literary works; circulated to over fifty scholars or research centers between 1972 and 1980, with Robert H. Rasche
  • "ACCESS" For computer-aided-instruction in writing and literary studies; circulated between 1986 and 1990, with Sheldon Fossum.
  • "m-EYEBALL" for the IBM-PC, including Style description and statistical and graphing programs, circulated from 1991- , with David Hunter. Documented in "Description" (18 pp.), "User's Manual and Tutorial" (35 pp.), and "Analysis Programs Manual" (37 pp.)
  • HyperCard version of Composition 3031, Technical Writing for Engineers, Department of Independent Study, University of Minnesota, 1992
• Publications on composition
  • "A Brief Note on How Writing Errors Are Judged," Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 11 (1981), 163-73.
  • "A Theory of the Function of Technical Writing," The Technical Writing Teacher, 9 (1981), 3-9.
  • With Paula Reed Nancarrow and Lillian S. Bridwell, The Word Processor and the Writing Process: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 125 pages.
  • With Lillian Bridwell and Paula Reed Nancarrow, "The Writing Process and the Writing Machine: Current Research on Word Processors Relevant to the Teaching of Composition" in New Directions in Composition Research, eds. R. Beach and with L.S. Bridwell (New York: Guilford, 1984), pp. 381-98.
  • With Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, "Integrating Computers into a Writing Curriculum; or Buying, Begging, and Building," in A Writer's Tool: The Computer in Composition Instruction, ed. William Wresch (Urbana IL: NCTE, 1984), pp. 107-19. To be reprinted in A Concise Guide to Computer Aided Writing Instruction, ed. David H. Roberts (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1991).
  • "Realities of Computer Analysis of Compositions" in Writing On-Line: Using Computers in the Teaching of Writing, eds. J.L. Collins and E. Sommers (Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1985), 105-113.
  • With Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, "Computer-Aided Composing: Gaps in the Software," in CAI and the Humanities, ed. Solveig Olson (New York: Modern Language Association, 1985), pp. 103-115.
  • With Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, co-editor, Proceedings: Second Annual Conference on Computers and Writing (Conference on College Composition and Communication, Special Interest Group on Computers and Writing, 1985), 250 pp.
  • "Computer-Based Writing Assignments," Computer-Assisted Composition Journal, 3:1 (1988), 31-42.
  • "Prospects for Writer's Workstations in the Coming Decade," in Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s, eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991), pp. 84-110.
  • "English Language Instruction" (Section 8) in The Humanities Computing Yearbook: 1989-90: A Comprehensive Guide to Software and other Resources, ed. Ian Lancashire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 75-94.

Teaching

• American Literature
  • Major-author survey to 1860 and from 1860
  • Survey of American Literatures and Cultures I
  • Introduction to American Lirerature
  • Thoreau and Melville through James; Crane to the present
  • Poetry since Whitman
  • American Novel to 1900
  • Novel since Howells
  • Short Story
  • Emerson and Thoreau
  • Hawthorne and Melville
  • Henry James
  • Hawthorne and the Brontés
  • Honors Seminar, Writing and Social Change
  • Graduate seminars and courses
    • Proseminar in 19th-century American literature
    • Writing in America, 1850-1860
    • Emerson
    • Emerson, Thoreau and Romanticism
    • Thoreau
    • American Transcendentalism
    • Anglo-American Romanticisms
    • How 19th-Century American Authors Learned their Trade
• Methods of literary study and stylistics
  • Textual Interpretation, Analysis, and Investigation (for majors)
  • Techniques of Literary Study
  • Theory of the Novel
  • Grammar and rhetoric
  • Language of literature
  • Introduction to modern prose fiction
  • Graduate seminars
    • Style of romantic works
    • Description of prose style
    • Technologies and Writing
    • Narrative practice
• Romantic movement
  • Major British and American Writers II
  • Undergraduate seminars on
  • The Romance before 1800
  • Classicism and Romanticism
  • Themes in 19th-century literature
  • Romantic to Victorian novels
  • Anglo-American romanticism

Selected Professional Activities