The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is widely recognized as the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of slang in the world.

The NPD uses three criteria for the inclusion of a term; it has to be (1) slang or conventional English (2) used anywhere in the English speaking world, (3) after 1945. Included are words that fit that criteria including pidgin, creolised English, and borrowed foreign terms used by English speakers in English-language conversation. No term is excluded on the grounds that it might be considered offensive as a racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or other slur. Each entry is organized into 6 parts: Headword, placement of phrases, definition, gloss and citation, country of origin, and dating.  A sample entry for the slang term “bridge” is “a group of four in a restaurant or soda fountain.”This definition dates back to 1967 and there are citations for the information provided as well as a glossary that states the word “bridge”, in this context, is an allusion to a bridge party.  The NPD digs its hands into the very depth of our culture to understand generational creations and their true meaning in everyday communication.

Today, the major effort of those working on the NPD has been to improve the dictionary as a comprehensive online resource. Currently the NPD is dealing with the unprecedented migration of slang from the spoken word to the written word, due to the popularity of electronic communication along with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The dictionary receives international contributions not only from the United Kingdom and America, but also from Australia, India, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. Tom Dalzell serves as senior editor and Terry Victor as editor.

For TTU Students, the NPD is accessible in print through the TTU Library ready References located on the 2^nd floor. Our culture appears to be defined through our words, and the NPD documents the everyday language that we use to create the unique culture of our generation. Through its credibility, international influence, and proven popularity, the NPD is a valuable resource to students and educators.

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857 when members of the Philological Society of London decided that the existing English dictionaries failed to encompass the totality of the English language. Now, over 150 years later, the OED is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over 600, 000 words from the English speaking world. The Oxford English Dictionary differs from the average dictionary because it incorporates a rich history into its composition. In the OED you will find not only the present day meanings and pronunciations of words, but also their linguistic history which traces the English language through 3 millions quotations from classic literature and travel texts, to film scripts and cook books.  The entry for the common English word “learn” for example, includes 15 definitions, each of which are supplemented with multiple relevant quotes from various authors in history. For example, the 3^rd definition in the entry for “learn” with the meaning “to acquire knowledge of (a fact)” lists a quote dating back to 1600 from the Shakespearean play Much Ado about Nothing, “I will presently go learne their day of marriage.” Examples, such as this one, gives dictionary impressive literary depth and it helps aid the researcher with a  greater historical profundity than the average dictionary.

The OED prides itself on being available as an online publication, the entire work of which is constantly being updated and revised.  Tech students can access the OED online database through Tennessee Tech’s Eagle search, which also automatically consults the database when researching any academic research topic. Multivolume print editions are also available in the TTU Library References located on the Second Floor.

The current chief editor is John Simpson, who has been working on innovating the OED for over 35 years by transforming it into a resource fit for the 21^st century. In addition to Simpson, the OED has staff members from some of the most respected Universities in the world including Oxford, University of York, University of Reading, Harvard, University of Sussex and Kellogg College.

The OED has never been profitable commercially for the Oxford University Press, and it remains committed to the sole motivation of researching and studying the origins and development of the English Language. The current revision program has been funded by $55 million, and the results of the program and addition of new words will be published online every 3 months. The Guinness Book of World records cites the OED as the world’s most comprehensive single-language print dictionary and its rigorous attempts to constantly update its enormous amount of information make it a highly attractive resource for all students.

The Role of Imagination and Reality in Wallace Stevens Poetry: A Selected Annotated Bibliography

No thought has intercepted and stimulated human cognition perhaps as much as the thought of reality. Why are we here, and more, what is “here?” What is the reality that we find ourselves in, and is this reality unique to each of us, or somehow independent of our perceptions of it? Wallace Stevens grappled with these questions his whole life through the interplay between imagination and reality and spent a lifetime of poetry on the exploration into the nature of the truth we create and what that creation says about the world.

Stevens’ poetry challenges us to examine the world with a fresh new eyes that reveal that perhaps the beauty we seek is already here for us to create, if we only have an outlet that allows its creation. For Stevens it was poetry, and he used it as a channel for his unique ideas and concepts of the world. There is a relevant aspect to the now in Stevens’ idea that the world is a supreme fiction that we invent and consider good or bad as it places an emphasis on life and how we should imagine our own reality.

The following selective annotated bibliography includes a wide variety of sources on the topic of imagination and reality used in Stevens’ poetry. Works in this collection examine the nature of reality; the importance and function of imagination; the poetic trinity of Stevens, the historical background of Stevens’ life; the impact of war and politics on Steven’s poetry, and the relationship between God, reality, and imagination.

Students, scholars, and teachers may use this bibliography in several ways. It may be used as a document for future scholarship or a guide to valuable criticism. In conclusion, 15 sources have been provided below to spark leads and research on Stevens’ greatest contribution to literature, the use and practice of imagination and reality in the human mind.

The Role of Imagination and Reality in Wallace Stevens Poetry: A Selected Annotated Bibliography

McConnell, Frank. “Understanding Wallace Stevens.” The Wilson Quarterly. Vol.8, No.3 (1984):160-169. JSTOR. Web. 30 Sept. 2013.

McConnell explores the life and works of Wallace Stevens. Several Poems are briefly analyzed such as, “The Snow Man,” “Poetry Is a Destructive Force,” “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” and “Esthétique du mal.” McConnell addresses, through comparisons of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Voltaire, and Freud, Stevens’ stance on God and the relationship God has with reality. This source also discusses Steven’s use of the supreme fiction, the importance of the imagination in creating it, and the relationship the creation shares with reality.

Vendler, Helen. “Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions.” Representations.

Vol.81, No.1 (2003): 99-117. JSTOR. Web. 30  Sept. 2013.

Vendler details the role of the contradictory nature of the hypothesis proposed in Stevens’ writing. Vendler examines poems such as “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “The Region November.” He explains Wallace Steven’s writing form and how it reflects a Nietzschean multiplicity or cubist variety of perspectives, and then also attempts to define a singular truth. This source also discusses Stevens’ stance that every creation of the mind can be abolished in death because when we die so do dies our capacity to imagine and create reality.

Pearce, Roy. “Wallace Stevens: The Life of Imagination.” PMLA. Vol.66, No. 5 (1951): 561-582. JSTOR. Web. 30 Sept. 2013

Pearce delves into Stevens’ form and function of the concept of imagination and its relationship with reality. He analyzes collections as a whole, which include Harmonium, and Transport to summer, to name a couple.  Page 561 list important footnotes on the details of outside sources used for this article. Pearce analyses a substantial portion of Steven’s work and compares and contrasts specific poems and collections. These comparisons and contrasts principally deal with Stevens’ thoughts on man’s role in imagining and the true reality man can expect to discover when doing so.

Altieri, Charles. “Aspect-Seeing and Stevens’ Ideal of Ordinary Experience.” Wallace Stevens Journal. Vol. 36, No.1 (Spring 2012): 78-90. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Sept. 2013

In this article, Altieri addresses the idea that poetry of the everyday, or that appeals to ordinary reality, is represented in Steven’s writings. Alrieri also refers several times to the criticisms of Stevens by the literary critic Siobhan Phillips. The article analyzes the poems, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The Rock,” and “The World as Meditation.” This source goes into detail about how Stevens’ says the human mind constructs the everyday, or in other words, the reality that is experienced. Altieri makes an important claim in this article stating, “That the imagination is an everyday power is perhaps Stevens’ greatest contribution to poetry.”

Olsen, Elder. “The Poetry of Wallace Stevens.” College English. Vol. 16, No. 7 (Apr.,1955): 395-402. JSTOR. Web. 30 Sept. 2013.

Elder examines the use of the imagination in Steven’s poetry as a consequential combination of images and emotion. Elder explores the idea that the images that we create when we read Stevens’ poetry are more complex and full than the poetry is itself. The source looks at the poems, ”Life is motion,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” and “Study of Two Pears.” Elder points out that Stevens’ poems give us a capacity to imagine primarily through our intellect and emotion. He contends that the imagination is steered to a certain course by Stevens, but one that can take a variety of shapes through our various imaginations.

Riddel, Joesph. “Wallace Stevens’ ‘Notes toward a supreme fiction.’” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature.Vol. 2, No.2 (1961): 20-42. JSTOR. Web. 30 Sept. 2013.

Riddel analyzes Stevens’ collection Harmonium referencing numerous poems such as “The Grand Poem,” “The Comedian as the Letter C,” and “Sunday Morning.” The source mainly focuses on what Riddel says is Stevens’ “central piece in his canon,” which is the poem “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” Stevens is analyzed as a poet who is considered self-consciously reflective and in constant concentration on the reality of thoughts, ideas, and theories. The article compares Stevens to writers such as T.S Eliot, William Carlos Willaims, and Robert Frost. Generally, Riddel addresses how for Stevens, poetry was the single source of truth; the reality; a supreme fiction that was on a constant journey of trying to find resolution in the world.

Beckett, Lucy. Wallace Stevens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Print

In this 216 page book Beckett uses an array of quotations from Stevens’ Opus Posthumous, The Necessary Angel, and Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. She also combines Stevens’ concept and ideas with comparative analysis of other prominent writers and philosophers including Ezra Pound, John Keats, and T.S Eliot. 23 pages are dedicated to “Imagination as Value,” and 11 to “The Pressure of Reality.”Finally Stevens’ value as a modern poet is looked at and is said not to be exposed through his conclusions, but instead through the affirmation of the value of the individual soul.

Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

A result of an effort of extensive research made possible by a fellowship provided by the National Endowment for the humanities, this book uses the historical events that surrounded Stevens to provide a background with which to study his work. A great amount of time is given to the idea that ideological debates were an influential part of Stevens’ career as a poet.  These debates included American liberalism, the rise of communism, the rights of women, and the pressures of nationalism.  Also in this book, the relationship of Stevens’ poetry to war, politics, and social change in the 20^th century is examined.

Fuchs, Daniel. The Comic spirit of Wallace Stevens. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1963. Print.

This is an interpretive study and evaluation of the comic tendencies of Wallace Stevens. The method used by Fuchs is exegesis with an exception of the 1^st chapter which is mainly cultural history. Stevens is studied not as a craftsman, but as a mind and a cultural performer. The scholarship follows thematically rather than chronologically. Chapter titles include “The comedian as the letter C,” “Stevens’ Comic Milieu,” and “The Ultimate Plato.”Fuchs believes Stevens’ comic spirit is central and without a sense of it there is no understanding Stevens.

Morris, Adalaide. Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Print.

Adalaide points her critical microscope at the centrality of what Stevens’ thoughts on imagination imply about his religious beliefs. There are only 4 chapters in the book with titles “Lineage and Language: Stevens’ Religious Heritage,” “The Deaf mute Church and the Chapel of Breath,” “A Mystical Theology: Stevens’ Poetic trinity,” and “How to live, what to do.” These chapters subsequently define Stevens’ ideas that imagination and God are interchangeable and therefore perfection, harmony, or paradise exists somewhere in the equilibrium of reality and imagination seeking complete shelter in neither.

Doggett, Frank. Stevens’ Poetry of thought. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1966.Print.

Stevens is looked at as a poet of thought whose work as a poet is comparable to that of a philosopher in its requisite of spontaneous imaginative insight. Hit poetic thoughts then, are considered “triumphs of imagination.” Concepts of poetry, through the criticism of various works of Stevens including Harmonium, are said to reflect concepts of philosophy in their exploration of the nature of reality. Chapter titles include, “The Invented World,””You and the Shapes you take,” and “The Poetry of thought.”

Kessler, Edward. Images of Wallace Stevens. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972. Print.

This 250 page book is dedicated to exploring the images Stevens employs in his poetry. The ideas of imagination and reality with which Stevens navigates is said to be ultimately determined by the images he provides. Kessler studies Stevens’ imagery with hopes that his analysis will aid in the establishment of the Stevens Canon. Kessler mentions the “imagination-reality opposition” Stevens provides is the underlying idea of all of Stevens’ work.

Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Print.

Sukenick splits this book into 3 distinct parts: 1) Wallace Stevens: Theory and Practice, 2) Readings, and 3) A Guide to Stevens’ Collected Poetry. The 1^st part looks into the concepts and ideas of Stevens with subtitles that include, “The Reality of Imagination,” “The Function of Imagination,” and “The Fiction.” Part II individually analyzes 47 of Stevens’ poem, taking up 167 of the 233 page book. Part III is a guide that covers the collected poems, plus all the poems that are of importance to Sukenick, as he refers to them or paraphrases them in the body of this book.

Morse, Samuel French. Wallace Stevens Poetry as Life. New York: Western Publishing

Company, Inc., 1970. Print.

Morse attempts to detail the relationship between Wallace Stevens’ life and his poetry. Stevens is autobiographically examined with numerous examples arranged chronologically starting with Stevens’ early years, moving to his days as a Harvard undergrad and graduate student, then to his time as an insurance executive. Morse takes you on a historical journey all the while simultaneously reviewing Stevens’ poetry as written during these periods of time. This book also contains vast amounts of Stevens’ personal information as well as plenty of information on imagination and reality.

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.,1988. Print.

Reviews and Essays are provided in this highly collaborative source that provides extensive information on theory and criticism pertaining to Wallace Stevens’ Poetry. This volume is part of a series that seeks to anthologize the most important criticism on a wide variety of topics and writers in American Literature. This volume also contains a balanced historical record of critical reception to Stevens. Both early reviews and recent scholarship are provided from over 25 scholarly critics.

The Faulkner Journal

The Faulkner Journal is a biannual scholarly journal published by the University of Central Florida. This journal is affiliated with the William Faulkner Society—an academic society that sponsors regular panels at MLA and ALA conferences, and is dedicated to fostering the study of Faulkner from all perspectives, and to promoting research, scholarship, and criticism dealing with his writings and their place in literature. Accessible to TTU students through the Humanities Full Text database, this journal is aimed at those seeking a peer-reviewed forum for the scholarly study of William Faulkner’s life and works. Journal articles published in 2003 or later are available in both PDF and HTML formats as compared with older articles only available in HTML texts. No titles are held in TNTECH print, but print text may be bought online at The Faulkner Journal website (UCF). Articles are also available audibly online through the TTU database with options of an American, Australian, or British accent. The journal publishes general issues twice a year, but may also publish special double issues on topics such as Faulkner and Death, Faulkner the Reiver, and Faulkner and Latin America.

Individual issues of The Faulkner Journal generally include an introduction and then 5-6 articles that apply literary analysis to Faulkner’s literary works. The criticism incorporates all of Faulkner’s work, but in terms of frequency, is aimed at Faulkner’s novels, with the most frequent titles mentioning Absalom Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury. Standard issues generally range from 90-120 pages, but special topic issues are combined as yearly compliments (Fall/Spring) that extend to around 190-220 pages. Over time, the length of the individual articles remains varied, with the most recent issue having article lengths of (2-22). Most articles are fairly short in this respect, with only a few, such as Vol. 17 issue 2 published in Spring 2002, reaching over 50 pages long. The majority of articles are written in a way that achieves professional distance, and authors will briefly explicate other theorists’ concepts for clarity.

Some issues may include, when necessary, an obituary tribute towards a Faulkner scholar that has recently passed away, such as scholars Jim Hinkle, Noel Polk, and James Watson. These articles typically are a biography of the scholar, and they explain the relationship the scholar had with Faulkner’s work. Issues end with information about contributors and a descriptive list of abbreviations for texts to be cited and to which essays published in The Faulkner Journal will refer. For example, AILD is the text abbreviation for As I Lay Dying and R the text abbreviation for The Reivers. Extensive Works Cited information is provided in every article. In terms of aesthetic quality, the cover illustration has changed from sketched portraits to a more contemporary and professional literary design, as does the interior design of the journal’s layout.

The current editor of The Faulkner Journal is Martin Kreiswirth of McGill University, with Joseph R. Urgo of St. Mary’s College of Maryland as Co-Editor and Dawn Trouard of University of Central Florida as executive editor. The Faulkner Journal also has an international advisory board composed of scholars from Emory University, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Université de Bourgogne, and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines, among several others. This international board diversifies the quality of the Journal thus making it a globally analyzed and respected resource.

In short, The Faulkner Journal is a diverse resource for consulting scholarly criticism on the many literary themes and concepts found in the writings of William Faulkner. it is directed towards the most knowledgeable Faulkner experts for publication, as the current editor Martin Kreiswirth has claimed, “it is the goal of The Falkner Journal to publish the very best academic scholarship on Faulkner and his context”(3).

Works Cited

Kreiswirth, Martin.“Note from the Editor.” The Faulkner Journal 26.2 (2012): 3. Web.

6 Oct 2013.

The Faulkner Journal. 12-26. (1997-2012). Humanities Full Text. Web. 5 Oct. 2013.

UCF English. Faulkner Journal. University of Central Florida, n.d. Web. 9 Oct. 2013