Sivils, Matthew

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Email Address
sivils@iastate.edu
Birth Date
Title
Professor
Academic or Administrative Unit
Organizational Unit
Department of English

The Department of English seeks to provide all university students with the skills of effective communication and critical thinking, as well as imparting knowledge of literature, creative writing, linguistics, speech and technical communication to students within and outside of the department.

History
The Department of English and Speech was formed in 1939 from the merger of the Department of English and the Department of Public Speaking. In 1971 its name changed to the Department of English.

Dates of Existence
1939-present

Historical Names

  • Department of English and Speech (1939-1971)

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About
Profile Link
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/handle/20.500.12876/99726
ORCID iD
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6947-7112

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Publications

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Review

Review: Abby L. Goode, Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability

2023 , Sivils, Matthew , Department of English

In her compelling and astute reconsideration of the development of early American agricultural thought, Abby L. Goode pays special attention to the ways that racist, nativist, eugenic, and expansionist rhetoric influenced the evolution of the concept of sustainability across America's long nineteenth century and beyond. The book begins with a helpful roadmap to demonstrate how the texts explored in Agrotopias challenge accepted views of how Thomas Jefferson's agricultural ideas informed early concepts of sustainability. Chapter 1, “No Rural Bowl of Milk: Unsustainability and the Demographic Agrarian Ideal,” examines Herman Melville's 1852 novel, Pierre, along with some of his lesser-known agricultural essays. Goode argues that in Pierre, Melville highlights the anxieties of certain mid-nineteenth-century labor and agricultural reformers who advocated for the formation of small, demographically diverse farming communities that would embody what they saw as a sustainable agricultural ideal. Pierre, however, disrupts this ideal to present, as Goode writes, “the reproductive subtext of this rhetoric: the idea that sexual disorder and racial intermingling enfeeble population fertility and agricultural productivity”.

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Book chapter

Environmental Apocalypse and The Crater

2022 , Sivils, Matthew , Department of English

Humanity has a talent for disaster. From the great flood in the ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, to the threat of nuclear holocaust, to the quiet cataclysm of anthropogenic climate change, our species has crafted a panoply of literary and actual ends to our world. And many of these ends come in the form of large-scale environmental destruction. "Apocalypse," writes Lawrence Buell, "is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal...for the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis" (285). Few early American authors are as adept at rousing this imagined sense of crisis as James Fenimore Cooper, and hs 1847 adenture novel "The Crater; or, Vulcan's Peak: A Tale of the Pacific is an especially pronounced example. In this maritime tale, Cooper's ship wrecked heroes-through a misture of agricultural savvy, hard work, and dumb luck-ingeniously terraform a barren island into an earthly paradise. the prosperity and beauty they create draws others, and soon a burgeoning community forms, but with it comes devasation as the new settlers, lured by the prospect of individual gain, exact a heavy toll on the environment. The novel ends with the island and its community swallowed by teh sea in what cooper hints is akin to divine retribution for the sins of the settlers against each other and the land.

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Other

Book Review: Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020

2021-12-27 , Department of English , English

Sarah Gilbreath Ford’s Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic offers a richly nuanced and timely examination of how southern Gothic literature functions as a mechanism by which authors have interrogated the deep relationship between the American Dream of fulfillment through property and the horrors of slavery. Across its five chapters, the book focusses on a selection of influential, or otherwise instructive, southern texts that span from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentyfirst centuries. Much of the book’s strength resides in how well it teases out instructive commonalities between texts while inviting interpretive leaps that span the landscape of southern literature.

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