‘It's The Catcher in the Rye… He said it was the kind of book you made your own': Finding Holden in Contemporary YA Literature

Published in 1951,The Catcher in the Rye encapsulated teenage angst. Some time ago David Belbin mused about the influence of Catcher on the proliferation and popularity of YA literature. Salinger's recent death has sparked a renewed interest in his work and more attention on Holden and his inheritors. This article discusses how five recent adolescent novels, with male protagonists, mirror Holden's adolescent paralysis. They exist in a liminal state between childhood and adulthood, attempting to understand the phonies around them. These protagonists help define the nature of the ‘lost’ adolescent in the current golden age of YA literature.     

Films and Film-Makings: The Current Scene

I.C. Jarie's Movies and Society (Basic Books, $10.00)

Gone Youngblood's Expanded Cinema (Dutton, $9.95)

Robert Gessner's The Moving Image (Dutton $8.95)

Robert Richardson's Literature and Film (University of Indiana Press, $4.95)

Wolf Rilla's A-Z of Movie-Making (Viking/Studio Press Book, $6.95)     

Lessons in Service Learning: Developing the Service Learning Opportunities in Technical Communication (SLOT-C) Database

We justify and describe our development of the Service Learning Opportunities in Technical Communication (SLOT-C) Database. The database broadens the range of organizations that instructors and students have for client-based communication projects. We argue in support of incorporating service learning into classes and facilitating partnerships among university instructors, their students, and nonprofits. We report strategies we learned for working with student interns and IT experts and strategies we developed as we worked with usability-test participants.     

Rhizovocality

In this conceptual paper, the author offers a rethinking of the concept of voice in qualitative research informed by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural theories. Using Deleuze & Guattari's (1987) figuration of the rhizome, the irruptions of voice in feminist and postfoundational qualitative research are mapped to invent a concept of voice, rhizovocality, that signifies voice as excessive and transgressive yet interconnected. This mapping begins with early feminist emancipatory research that assumed an authentic, silent woman's voice in need of liberation. Then, the author moves into dilemmas of power that emerged from critiques of problematic representations of voice within feminist research. The third section of the paper is a postcolonial feminist response to imperial uses of voice in feminist research, and the final part is a feminist deconstructive critique of voice in qualitative research. The article concludes with an argument for rhizovocality as a conceptual, deconstructive tool for working the limits of voice in qualitative research.     

A usability analysis of municipal government website home pages in Alabama

This study uses e-government and corporate usability benchmarks to compare municipal government websites in Alabama and examine correlations between usability scores and population, as well as usability scores and per capita income. E-government in Alabama is on the rise. At the state level, in 2008, Alabama ranked in the top 10 states in e-government after three years of being in the bottom three. Improvements in state-level e-government have not, however, necessarily trickled down to the municipal level, and this study found no correlation between usability and a municipality's population or per capita income. Indeed, the study reveals substantial problems with municipal website usability, including accessibility; such problems could erode the web credibility of municipalities trying to engage citizens, to create or strengthen sustainable practices, and to attract companies that can bring new jobs and improve the local economy.