Jacobsen, Martin M.
Martin M. Jacobsen, Associate Professor of English at West Texas A&M University, has taught linguistics, literature, and composition since 1992. He earned his Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Discourse Studies at Texas A&M University in 1999. His first book, Transformations of Literacy in Computer-mediated Communication: Orality, Literacy, Cyberdiscursivity, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press in 2002, the same year he received West Texas A&M’s University Teaching Excellence Award. In 2013, he added heavy metal to his list with a course called Heavy Metal as a Literary Genre, which was reported worldwide in the metal media, newspapers, and even an interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s As It Happens. Since then, Dr. Jacobsen has written liner notes for The Great Lefty (a tribute album to Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi) and appeared as a Defender of the Faith in the April 2015 edition of Metal Hammer Magazine.
2026 1-4955-1346-7Iron Maiden’s particular innovation comes not only in the form of musical adaptation but also in an open exhibition of intellectual interests. While heavy metal to this point certainly based its lyrics and its ethos on the sources that influenced the artists’ thinking, Iron Maiden, as often as not, explicitly cites these sources, paying homage to the larger, predominantly Western, intellectual tradition, borrowing freely from literature, history, cinema, and philosophy in the same way they have extracted musical elements from the bands that preceded them. Like curious college students on tangents inspired by the core curriculum, much of Iron Maiden’s lyrical output interrogates the ideas that precede it. Rather than taking an idea and fashioning a song from it, they share the idea itself, a public service to an audience they obviously believe both deserves the truth and will understand it. Iron Maiden takes its fans as seriously as its enterprise, inviting all “that hath understanding” to reckon the source of the song they have offered.
Price: $159.95
2002 0-7734-7060-3
This work offers a rhetorical analysis of hypertext resulting in a taxonomy for the elements of hypertext as they relate to literacy. It postulates a theory of cyberdiscursivity, which holds that the more instantaneous, widespread, and individual discursive practices are inherent in computer-mediated communication.
Price: $139.95