bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth's Pastoral
Authors: Jones Mark
Published: February 2007

Literary historians have celebrated Wordsworth's pastoral poems for their realism; more recently, new-historicist critics have criticized them for idealization. Reading the poems as ironic, even as parodie in Bakhtin's sense, explains what makes such opposite assessments both plausible and insufficient. My chief example is “Michael.” Formal symmetries in “Michael” suggest a mythic dimension, but they are subtly breached so that the poem cannot be read definitively as idealization. Conversely, while the poem's emphasis on labor suggests reality, its subtle exaggerations also discredit the use of labor as a mere device of realism. Wordsworth invites readers to consider pastoral's primary symbols, sheep, in two symbologies simultaneously: spiritual and material. Such cross-valuation, which recovers an ambivalence crucial to both biblical and classical pastoral, neither mimics nor distorts reality but rather foregrounds the way reality is constructed from symbols. Considering Wordsworth's pastoral as a version of Bakhtinian parody further illuminates the anti-interpretive functions of both modes.
More Seductive Than Phryne: Baudelaire, Gérôme, Rilke, and the Problem of Autonomous Art
Authors: Ryan Judith
Published: February 2007

Rilke's poem “Die Flamingos” turns on a curious image in which exotic birds are compared to the Greek courtesan Phryne. By tracing the development of the Phryne motif in Baudelaire's poems “Lesbos” and “La beauté” and in Gérôme's painting Phryné devant l'Aréopage, this essay argues that Rilke's poem takes issue with the notion of autonomous art and with the aestheticist cult of beauty, for which the motif had come to stand. “Die Flamingos” not only breaks with the idea that art and aura are necessarily linked but also questions the ability of Baudelairean allegory to restore poetic wholeness. In so doing, the poem represents not a continuation of the nineteenth-century “art for art's sake” movement but a final phase in the complex history of aestheticist self-questioning.
Augusta Gregory, Bernard Shaw, and the Shewing-Up of Dublin Casde
Authors: McDiarmid Lucy
Published: February 2007

In 1909 the lord lieutenant of Ireland attempted to prevent the Abbey Theatre from producing Bernard Shaw's Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet because the English lord chamberlain had denied the play a license. Shaw and the Abbey directors Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats seized the opportunity to contest the extension of English censorship to Ireland. With their genius for hype, they produced the spectacle of their resistance, winning nationalist support for the Abbey. The triumphant first performance was a multivalent occasion, the season's most stylish and seditious event. Gregory filled the theater with Dublin Castle society, members of the very state apparatus that had tried to stop the production; but in meetings with Castle officials and in Abbey press releases, she adopted the idiom of the Irish rebel tradition. Like those other Irish happenings the speech from the dock and the graveside oration, this event was staged not only for its immediate audience but for the Irish people of the future.
Censorship, Reading, and Interpretation: A Case Study from the Soviet Union
Authors: Scotto Peter
Published: February 2007

Based on a close examination of a 1941 article by the Soviet scholar Leonid Grossman, this essay studies the moral questions faced by the reader of a work written under censorship.
Code of Silence: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refusal to Speak
Authors: Temes Peter S.
Published: February 2007

By renouncing poetry in 1942, Laura (Riding) Jackson won a kind of authority over her critics and interpreters. Though silence as a poet was a high price to pay, (Riding) Jackson managed to insulate her poetry from critical representation by denying her assent to every interpreter's necessary assumption that her poems succeed at meaning something. Her renunciation mirrors the motion toward silence that animates a number of her poems, notably “Memories of Mortalities” and “Lucrece and Nara.” These poems, like (Riding) Jackson herself, use a final state of silence to insist on the authority of a woman's speaking voice, despite the critical appetites of others.
Reflections on a Manual
Authors: Barthes Roland , Petrey Sandy
Published: February 2007

“Reflections on a Manual” was Roland Barthes's contribution to the colloquium “The Teaching of Literature” held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1969. Organized by Tzvetan Todorov and Serge Doubrovsky, the Cerisy gathering featured other prominent theorists, like Gérard Genette and A. J. Greimas, whose concerns Barthes addresses and adapts to his own purposes in this paper. Reading manuals of the history of French literature as texts whose grammar is organized by a set of oppositions, he conducts a structuralist enterprise that becomes an inquiry into the myths enabling societies to create and preserve their identities. Barthes's reflections on the teaching of literature recall some of the major works that punctuate the phases of his career, from Mythologies (1957) to “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966) to The Pleasure of the Text (1973).
Teaching English in American Universities—1895
Authors: Buell Lawrence
Published: February 2007

Although modem literary studies in the United States began well before the turn of the century, it was only through gradual evolution that the field acquired a self-conscious pedagogy differentiated from the methods of classical and philological education. A provocative barometer of this emergence is English in American Universities (Boston: Heath, 1895), a late-Victorian collection of twenty-five position statements by professors from leading universities and colleges from coast to coast, assembled by William Morton Payne in large part from papers previously published in the Dial. The following excerpts from this book concern pedagogical ethos (Martin W. Sampson, Univ. of Indiana), pedagogical drill (F. A. March, Lafayette Coll.), the undergraduate English curriculum (Melville B. Anderson, Stanford Univ.), and the premises of comparative literature (Charles Mills Gayley, Univ. of California, Berkeley).
The Text within the Text
Authors: Lotman Yury M.
Published: February 2007

Translators' note. The first few pages of this essay are not printed here. In this omitted portion Yury Lotman distinguishes between two major functions of texts. The first function is the adequate transmission of information, and the second is the generation of new meanings. The most desirable condition for the first function is the complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages. Since this situation is virtually impossible, an intermediary is developed, which Lotman terms the “text-code.” The text-code, of which the Bible is the most obvious example, serves an interpretive and prescriptive role in the transmission of texts. The traditional linguistic, structural approach to analyzing texts, exemplified by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, often results in the construction of a text-code. The linguistic, structural approach presupposes a closed set or system whose elements can produce an infinite series of texts. In contrast, the second function of texts suggests an immanent, literary approach that attempts to situate texts within the confluence of their contexts, antecedents, and descendants. A text analyzed in its second function will be noted for the heterogeneity of its constituent elements, some of which form “texts within texts.” In the remainder of this essay, presented here in its entirety except for one elision, Lotman develops this approach, which he associates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.
Irony, Allegory, and Metaphysical Decay
Authors: Teskey Gordon
Published: February 2007

In classical rhetoric, irony is included in allegory (“other speaking”) as one of its species: contradiction, or antiphrasis. Because contradiction is incompatible with the classical definition of allegory as “continued metaphor” and with the synecdochal and associative mode of thinking (polysemy) typical of complex allegorical works, irony was excluded from allegory in postclassical literary theory. Nevertheless, the conditions for allegorical expression are grounded in the systematic confrontation of antiphrasis and polysemy, as in a grid. For allegory to emerge from this scene of confrontation, polysemy must predominate, transforming the grid into a perspectival regress to an origin that remains out of sight. This transformation is accomplished by means of interpretation, to which irony, being confined to the realm of the subject, is inimical. Antiphrasis remains present throughout. But it is interpreted as the resonance of the origin that remains out of sight. (GT)
Ethnography, Thievery, and Cultural Identity: A Rereading of Michel Leiris'sL'Afrique fantôme
Authors: Larson Ruth
Published: February 2007

During 1931–33 Michel Leiris took part in an ethnographic expedition across Africa, the highly publicized Dakar-Djibouti mission. This essay examines three documents related to the mission. The first, remarks that Leiris wrote before the trip, reveals his understanding, either conscious or unconscious, that theft would be an essential part of the mission's ethnographic strategy. In the second, a journal kept during the expedition, Leiris recorded specific incidents of theft. I argue that the ethnographers' thieving, portrayed as spontaneous acts, is in fact a political one that allows them to collect objects of great cultural significance while ensuring a European identity distinct from the identity of the colonized. The third document is the published version of the journal, which Leiris titledL'Afrique fantôme.Variants in this version and a photographic illustration prefigure Leiris's rethinking of ethnography's role in decolonization.
Myths of Anthropology: Eliot, Joyce, Lévy-Bruhl
Authors: Spurr David
Published: February 2007

The emerging science of anthropology created myths of the primitive that became important to literary modernism's mythic interpretation of contemporary history. T. S. Eliot and James Joyce in particular were attracted to the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose theory of the mentalité primitive appeared to offer alternatives to prevailing modes of Western logic. Eliot took this myth of anthropology and other ones at face value insofar as they contributed to his theories of poetic origins and to his attacks on modern civilization. He opposed a primitivist ideal of tradition to the notion of a corrupt civilization embodied in the figure of the Jew. In contrast, Joyce treated anthropology ironically as a discursive construct rooted in colonizing enterprises of European institutions and thought. He satirized anthropology's pretensions while exploiting its material for his artistic ends.
Textual Forensics
Authors: Greetham D. C.
Published: February 2007

Because textual scholarship, having no definable Fach, or subject matter, is an exemplary postmodernist antidiscipline, it can serve as a site for testing the epistemological assumptions and protocols of the current debate over the status of evidence and the nature of proof. Since text is “authority” and “original” and yet also “network” and “tissue” and since forensics encompasses both hard physical “facts” and the rhetorical formulation that gives such data interpretive meaning, a textual forensics will codify and test the interaction of the phenomenological world and the hermeneutic analysis of its evidence. With procedural and conceptual links both to scientific empiricism and to rhetorical strategies for persuasion, textual scholarship becomes a vehicle for anatomizing the postmodernist breakdown of the master narratives, including that of evidence and proof.
Parting from Phantoms: The Business of Germany
Authors: Wolf Christa
Published: February 2007

Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cocking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.
The Demanding Woman Poet: On Resisting Marina Tsvetaeva
Authors: Ciepiela Catherine
Published: February 2007

Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, like Sylvia Plath's, dramatizes issues of primary psychological and sexual experience, issues that many critics have taken to be purely biographical. The openly apostrophic character of Tsvetaeva's writing has generated critical judgments about her character. Tsvetaeva's address, in both her lyrics and her letters, is embarrassing—not, as Jonathan Culler maintains, because apostrophe never fulfills its claims but, as Barbara Johnson argues, because it is a naked expression of need. Johnson's Lacanian conception of apostrophe as the child's demand illuminates Tsvetaeva's writing and helps to explain why Tsvetaeva has been charged with being a bad mother. However, Tsvetaeva's practice suggests that far from being contradictory impulses, demanding and giving can hardly be distinguished—a confusion that is reflected in the ambivalent responses her work has inspired.
The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness
Authors: Frantzen Allen J.
Published: February 2007

Cleanness, an alliterative Middle English poem attributed to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, contains a graphic account of the destruction of Sodom. Elaborating the theme of cleanness, the poet advocates not only sexual purity but also right conduct and respect for God's will. Exhortations to clean behavior are conventional; less expected are the poem's bold censure of “unclean” sexual acts, especially sodomy, and insistence that the clergy maintain vigilant surveillance of sexual wrongdoing. A poem with a salacious cast, Cleanness takes unusual risks in describing sodomy while denouncing it. Using Foucault's “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses,” I analyze Cleanness in relation to contemporary manuals of confession, which avoid mentioning sodomy for fear that the word might encourage the act. The poem's description of Sodom concludes with a construction of the feminine that serves as a corrective to the sins of male lust.
Historical Fictions and Postcolonial Representation: Reading Girish Karnad's Tughlaq
Authors: Dharwadker Aparna
Published: February 2007

Recent antiorientalist and subaltern critiques of colonial and neocolonial historiography elide the interdependence of “true” and “fictive” modes in historical writing. I use Girish Karnad's Tughlaq (1964), a contemporary Kannada play about a fourteenth-century Islamic ruler in India, to chart that interdependence and to demarcate the textual, political, and cultural contexts of postcolonial historical fictions. I show that Karnad's fiction is informed by a complex historical narrative mediated by medieval Muslim historians, who disapproved of Tughlaq's religious unorthodoxy, and by nineteenth-century orientalists, who treated the turmoil of Islamic rule in India as a justification for British colonial rule. The play's ironic representation of history also participates in a dialectic of heroic and satiric discourses that has shaped European and Indian constructions of India since the early colonial period. Using religious difference as its central problematic, Tughlaq develops a resonant parallel between premodern and contemporary Indian political and cultural experiences and reenacts the country's postindependence crisis of secular nationhood.
Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism
Authors: Boone Joseph A.
Published: February 2007

This essay theorizes an aspect of colonial discourse omitted from most critiques of orientalism by focusing on an array of Western male writers whose representations of an eroticized Arabic Orient cannot be disentangled from their imagined and real encounters abroad with male homosexuality. Suggesting that the historical possibility of sexual contact with and between Near Eastern men has often covertly underwritten the appeal of orientalism as a Western mode of perception and control. I examine three homoeroticizing strands of colonialist discourse: depictions of Egypt as a symbol of polymorphous desire, accounts of masquerading as the foreign other, and narratives of the colonial trade in boys. The contingency of Western conceptions of “homosexuality”—as identity category, sexual practice, and site of theoretical speculation—becomes apparent when they are brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures and crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.
Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne
Authors: Sedley David L.
Published: February 2007

This essay argues that two early modern phenomena, the rise of the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem, are interrelated. This argument, introduced through a study of Montaigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome in hisTravel Journal, takes on complementary forms. The first is that sublimity motivated skepticism: the sense that a force existed outside the aesthetic categories conventional in the Renaissance (such as wonder) drove authors into a skeptical frame of mind. The second is that skepticism created sublimity: the skeptical mindset offered alternative resources of aesthetic power as authors quarried the fragmentation and distraction embedded in skepticism to fashion a sublime style. These claims revise standard views of skepticism and the sublime, suggesting a mandate for an enriched aesthetics behind late-Renaissance loss of belief and exposing the Renaissance impulse behind the modern career of sublimity.
A Lady Asks: The Gender of Vulgarization in Late Medieval Italy
Authors: Cornish Alison
Published: February 2007

Classical texts were extensively translated into the vernacular in Italy during the period when Italian poetry began, and the “mentality” of translation is traceable in this early verse. Vernacularization is gendered female, especially in the conventions of lyric poetry. As exemplified in some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poems and their prose commentaries, “vulgarization” is often presented as a discourse to women, who are conceived as a superior rather than an inferior audience. Instead of demeaning the Latin original, this kind of vulgarization paradoxically ennobles both the learned or scientific content and the young language in which it is written. This peculiar moment of Italian literary history contrasts with concurrent translation in France, with the subsequent abandonment of vulgarization under the influence of Petrarch, and with modern notions of the politics of translation.
1939-40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism
Authors: Pridmore-Brown Michele
Published: February 2007

Virginia Woolf in her last novel, Between the Acts, explores fascism from the vantage of the new physics and of information technology. Her knowledge of the new physics is attested to by myriad diary entries; her knowledge of information technology was largely intuitive. In Between the Acts, she uses a gramophone to brew patriotic emotion and thus to transform a group of British pageant goers into a herd. Ultimately, however, she short-circuits the herd impulse by privileging the audience members' interpretative acts. In the novel, patriotic messages of authority are deliberately adulterated by the gramophone's static or noise. The audience members must therefore make meaning out of noise; these interpretative acts break their visceral connection to the sound waves, the rhythm and rhyme, of patriotism. Woolf's intuitive grasp of the concept of noise inherent in information technology allows her to articulate an antiauthoritarian pluralist politics.
Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction
Authors: Flint Christopher
Published: February 2007

An enormously popular narrative device, speaking objects were used frequently in eighteenth-century British fiction to express authorial concerns about the circulation of books in the public sphere. Relating the speaking object to the author's status in a print culture, works featuring such narrators characteristically align authorship, commodification, and national acculturation. The objects celebrate their capacity to exploit both private and public systems of circulation, such as libraries, banks, booksellers' shops, highways, and taverns. Linking storytelling to commodities and capital, they convey an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination, economic exchange, and public use appear homologous. But as object narratives dramatize, such circulation estranges modern authors from their work. Far from mediating between private and public experience or synthesizing national and cosmopolitan values, these narratives record the indiscriminate consumption that characterizes the public sphere in a print culture.
“O Canada!”: The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop
Authors: Jarraway David R.
Published: February 2007

A general reluctance to engage the issue of lesbian identity in Elizabeth Bishop's work has understandably been conditioned by her own longstanding reticence. An approach that theorizes about the nonreferential, hence inarticulable, contours of Bishop's project, however, discloses a more eroticized aesthetic practice—one conceivably enabling the vital exploration of transgressive sexuality that perhaps goes without saying. What arguably forges the link between theory and practice is Bishop's experience of loss. The unspeakableness of mother loss due to insanity, mediated poignantly by the curtailment of Bishop's Canadian childhood, formerly provided the invitation to enclose Bishop's writing explicitly within a lifelong travail of itinerant displacement. Recent psychoanalytic theory, by contrast, foregrounds a more challenging loss that divides her writing between reality and the real and thus implicitly opens it up to a spectral lesbian poetics beyond what her canonical “American” identity readily permits readers to see and to say.
Postcolonial Memory, Postmodern Intertextuality: Anton Shammas'sArabesquesRevisited
Authors: Feldman Yael S.
Published: February 2007

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novelArabesques.A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed inArabesqueand suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.
Testimony, Ethics, and the Aesthetic in Diamela Eltit
Authors: Tierney-Tello Mary Beth
Published: February 2007

Two works by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit,El Padre Mío(1989) andEl infarto del alma(1994; produced in collaboration with Paz Errázuriz), contain an undeniable testimonial impulse that aligns them withtestimonio, a genre of subaltern personal narrative that has emerged with new force in Latin America in recent decades. Yet these texts, which present subjects who are mentally ill, incoherent, or lacking identities, call into question some of the key assumptions about testimonial practice and its reception, disrupting the usual responses of identification with and empathy for the narrator. By reading and writing testimonial discourse through a postmodern aesthetic, Eltit advocates the recognition of testimonial subjects as producers and agents of culture rather than as victims in need of compassion. Her project, with its particular merging of the aesthetic and the ethical, constitutes a local yet politically urgent attempt at rethinking the predominant conceptualizations of marginal culture, refusing the notion that the aesthetic is the exclusive privilege of elite culture.
Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism
Authors: Said Edward W.
Published: February 2007

I recall two things about my exchange with the friendly soul who rang me several years ago with the offer to stand for the second vice presidency of the MLA. First is the vivid recollection of my serious and mostly incapacitating illness at the time: as it turned out this was to disable me almost completely for the first year's Executive Council meetings. The second is my somewhat ungracious response to the (mostly undeserved) compliment contained in the suggestion that I should accept the nomination: “Do I have to do anything if I get elected?” I asked with almost ridiculous impertinence. I think the answer was no, and I think I should say in my own defense that I formulated my question very specifically to mean only “do I have to do anything very much as second vice president?,” a position I had frivolously assumed was not usually thought of as bearing a great responsibility. In any case, I was elected, and I did nothing the first year except, as I said, miss most of the meetings because of illness, unending treatment, and pain. Never having had much to do with administration during the many, too many, decades of my teaching life, I have to report to you that in my year as first vice president I had the opportunity at the outset to see how a major professional organization is run by really competent people and, second, to witness its humane and rational responses to the various demands of our time and those of our by now somewhat anxious guild, especially its younger members, for whom the job crisis has been so disabling and discouraging a symptom of this fin de siècle. Because of this genuine learning experience throughout my presidency, I am really grateful to, and happy to mention in particular, the extraordinary talents of our superb executive director, Phyllis Franklin, whose sensitive intelligence and marvelous skills not only guided us as a very large professional organization through a series of new challenges but, to speak personally, rescued your faltering president on numerous occasions when his temper and peculiar sense of humor got the better of him. May I also mention Phyllis Franklin's senior colleagues in the association, to whom I and all the other elected officers and members owe so much: Martha Evans, director of MLA book publications; Terence Ford, director of Bibliographic Information Services and editor of the MLA International Bibliography; Judy Goulding, managing editor of MLA publications; Amilde Hadden, director of financial operations; Maribeth Kraus, director of convention programs; David Laurence, director of English programs and ADE; Regina Vorbeck, associate executive director and head of the Division of MLA Operations; Elizabeth Welles, director of foreign language programs and ADFL; and Carol Zuses, coordinator of governance and assistant to the executive director?
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Books of the Members of the MLA from Being a Burden to Their Authors, Publishers, or Audiences
Authors: Waters Lindsay
Published: February 2007

“It is a melancholly object to those, who walk through this great [country] or travel in the [world], when they see the Streets, the Roads and Cabbin-doors crowded with [would-be authors] importuning every Passenger for Alms.” Thus Jonathan Swift, but now I want to make my modest proposal to you. I propose that modesty be our guide. Once I sought to make my way in the world by publishing articles and books and teaching and thereby winning tenure, and my heart goes out to all those who crowd the aisles of the book exhibits at the MLA annual meeting and the corridors of the hotels where interviews are taking place. Those corridors, where you cannot make eye contact with anyone, I will never forget. But does the current system for granting tenure make sense, based as it is in large part on the imperative that those who would win tenure publish one and often two books? I think not, and I think the members of the MLA should rise up and insist that these expectations be demolished and that other, more modest expectations be erected in their place.
Premodern Sexualities
Authors: Smith Bruce R.
Published: February 2007

Punch insexualityas a search word in the MLA online bibliography, and you'll come up with well over three thousand items published since 1981. By my estimate, at least ten percent of the journal and book articles and dissertations in this list are concerned with sexuality in texts written before 1800. Add to that the scores of books on sexuality in medieval and early modern literature that have been published during the past fifteen years, and you have quite a pile of reading to do if you want to keep up-to-date. Not bad for a subject that didn't even exist when the literary texts in question were written—and still may not exist, at least in words.
William Sanders Scarborough: The First African American Member of the Modern Language Association
Authors: Ronnick Michele Valerie
Published: February 2007

Our interest in learning about original or inaugural achievements in every field of endeavor is perennial. When a member of a traditionally disenfranchised group is an innovator, acknowledgment of the person's accomplishment is important to the well-being of the group, especially if it has been omitted from the record. Thus, it is right that we give some attention to the life of William Sanders Scarborough (1852-1926), the first professional scholar of classical studies of African American heritage and the first African American member of the MLA. In his era he rose to fame in the vanguard of the proponents of liberal arts education, but his career has been neglected since then (Ronnick, “Scarborough” [1997]).
1949: Words That Intimidate
Authors: Sherburn George
Published: February 2007

In the belief […] that certain words or concepts do […] limit our effectiveness as students of literature I wish to offer a few casually selected terms for present consideration.
1955: Then and Now
Authors: Pound Louise
Published: February 2007

I look back with nostalgia on my early days in the MLA. It was then tripartite with the divisions English, Romance, German. One could attend all three and hear all the papers offered in them if one wished. That was “then.” Now we migrate from room to room, sometimes from building to building, hoping to hear, if we can, the papers in the special research or discussion groups that interest us. This only to find that all those we wish to hear come simultaneously. These changes in the structure of the society did not come, of course, from changes in policy but resulted from increasing enrolment, and beyond question they have advanced professional training and scholarship among us. The MLA has risen in membership, scope, and dignity to a degree that the founding fathers could not have foreseen.
A Beginning in the Humanities
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: February 2007

I begin with some local history. the first modern foreign language proposed for inclusion in Yale College was French. In 1778, the chevalier de la Luzerne, French minister plenipotentiary to the American colonies during the Revolutionary Wars, offered “to found a professorship at New-Haven College, the object of which was to be to teach the French language, and the history of France.” This was a moment of relative enlightenment at Yale—during the presidency of Ezra Stiles, a remarkable polymath, a great Hebraist who was also an astronomer and experimental scientist, and indeed taught all the subjects in the curriculum, and who welcomed the proposed addition of French. But enlightenment did not stretch so far. “The trustees of this college refused the generous offer, alleging that such an establishment would tend to introduce popery into the state” (Nancrède 10). Despite student demand, the trustees did not relent until 1825: French and then German became required subjects of study (though no professorship in French existed until the 1860s).
Fragments of the Past, Tasks for the Future: Spanish in the United States
Authors: Fernández James D.
Published: February 2007

In december1826,a young bostonian on a grandtour of Europe received a letter from his father, offering the following advice: “Such are the relations now existing between this country and Spanish America that a knowledge of the Spanish is quite as important as French. If you neglect either of these languages, you may be sure of not obtaining the station which you have in view.” The son received the letter in Paris, heeded his father's advice, and headed straight for Madrid. Some four months later he would write back from the capital of Spain, “I have not seen a city in Europe which has pleased my fancy so much, as a place of residence” (Helman 340).
Working with the Schools: Project Tempest
Authors: Graff Gerald
Published: February 2007

One of the most striking recent trends in american education is the increasing collaboration between universities and high schools. Spurred by deepening national concern over the schools, universities are making a far greater commitment than ever before to the preparation of secondary teachers (Amer. Council on Educ.; Franklin, Laurence, and Welles; Franklin). This long-overdue development marks a dramatic change in outlook since the days when I began university teaching in 1963.
The Period of Literature
Authors: Guillory John
Published: February 2007

On the occasion of the millennium it seems appropriate to reflect yet once more on the subject of the canon, if only to set the canon debate of the 1980s in relation to the longue durée of Western writing. There is a lesson in the fact that the turn of the millennium evoked a pervasive sense of anticlimax. History follows another and more elusive rhythm than the cycles of the calendar or the expectations of short-lived human beings. In retrospect, the debates of the 1980s greatly overestimated the stakes and possible consequences of “opening the canon,” not because there were no stakes or consequences, but because the concept of the canon belonged to the order of a mythical time, the order of millennial expectations. If it was never true that the canon was irrevocably closed to the revision and reordering of its supposed monuments, this is not to say that the tendency of verbal artifacts to solidify into monuments does not need to be resisted and that the struggle to prevent the schools from becoming the agents of this monumentalization must sometimes take the form of mythical antagonism.
Forgetting Our Name, Remembering Our Mother
Authors: Holquist Michael
Published: February 2007

It is notoriously the case that there is no satisfactory English equivalent for the German Literaturwissenschaft or the Russian literaturovedenie. On the cusp of a new millennium, we are a profession that cannot say its name. This onomastic homelessness is reflected in the spate of recent books that mention borders in their titles, such as the MLA's own Redrawing the Boundaries, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, or Giovanna Franci's Remapping the Boundaries. The suggestion in each is that the comfortable boundaries of our old disciplinary territory have eroded: we have somehow lost our place. If our profession were a person, it would be an orphan in exile. This condition is also legible in the current broad interest in the history of our profession's formation. There is increasing—and increasingly urgent—concern to know who we are and how we got here.
Whose Field? Whose MLA?
Authors: Shattuck Roger
Published: February 2007

The questionnaire ruffled me a bit. “did your field exist in 1900?” My field? There's the rub. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Voltaire writes in the last sentence of Candide. Not my garden: our garden. Our field, the study of literature as a heightened form of language, came into existence by 500 BC in a few languages. In the modern languages, our field arrived a little later, let's say by the fourteenth century. And today our field, with all its knolls and swales, remains one, embracing many, rewarding all.
Potential work‐related bloodborne pathogen exposures by industry and occupation in the United States Part I: An emergency department‐based surveillance study
Authors: Chen Guang X. , Jenkins E. Lynn
Published: February 2007

Background

Since the early 1990s, researchers have attempted to assess the magnitude of potential work‐related bloodborne pathogen (BBP) exposures in the U.S. The only data‐derived estimate of 385,000 needlestick and other sharps injuries per year was reported in 2004. The estimate was derived from a convenience sample and did not include exposures outside of hospitals. This study seeks to understand the magnitude and distribution of the exposures across all industries and occupations.

Methods

Data were from the 1998 to 2000 National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), a stratified probability‐based sample of U.S. hospital emergency departments (EDs). NEISS covers all industries and occupations. National estimates of exposures and exposure rates (the number of exposures/1,000 full‐time equivalents (FTE)) were computed.

Results

An estimated 78,100 potential work‐related exposures to BBP were treated in hospital EDs annually in the U.S. While hospitals accounted for 75% of all these exposures, 11 other industries had a substantial number of exposures. While registered nurses accounted for 36% of all exposures, 13 other occupations had a substantial number of exposures. Hospitals had the highest exposure rate of 11.3/1,000 FTE, followed by nursing homes (2.8), and residential care facilities without nursing (1.9). Registered nurses had the highest exposure rate of 15.3/1,000 FTE, followed by clinical laboratory technologists and technicians (13.9), and physicians (7.1).

Conclusions

While this study begins to more completely describe the problem of potential BBP exposure in the workplace, it is but a first step in further understanding the complex issues surrounding workplace BBP exposures. Am. J. Ind. Med. 50: 183–190, 2007. Published 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Major fetal structural malformations: The role of new imaging modalities
Authors: Lee Young Mi , Simpson Lynn L.
Published: February 2007

Prenatal diagnosis has embraced a recent wave of innovative imaging modalities including three‐dimensional (3D) ultrasound and fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Traditional two‐dimensional (2D) ultrasonography remains the standard method by which major structural abnormalities are diagnosed antenatally, but advances in technology are opening new doors. Growth in our knowledge about fetal development, improved patient counseling, and more favorable perinatal outcomes are all potential benefits of incorporating new imaging modalities into clinical practice. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Interpenetrating Polar and Nonpolar Sublattices in Intermetallics: The NaCd2Structure
Authors: Fredrickson Daniel C. , Lee Stephen , Hoffmann Roald
Published: February 2007

In the 1960s, Samson solved the structures of some of the most complicated intermetallic phases known, including those of NaCd2, Mg2Al3, and Cu3Cd4(each with over 1000 atoms per unit cell). Following remarkable earlier constructions by Samson and by Andersson, we use quantum‐mechanical calculations as a guide to describing and understanding these structures. Our electronic Aufbau begins with the relatively simple Mg17Al12structure and works up to Samson's NaCd2structure. In both structures, a division of the sites into electron‐rich and electron‐poor (with respect to an average electron count) reveals MgCu2‐type fragments. Between the interiors and exteriors of these fragments, a change in bonding character takes place—the interiors are more polar, the interfaces relatively nonpolar. This electronic situation is traced to the geometry of the interface sites; they lie simultaneously on electron‐rich and electron‐poor networks. The resulting polar and nonpolar sites in NaCd2are separated by a minimal surface, the D surface. The driving force for assuming this structure is electronic: NaCd2features an interpenetration of polar and nonpolar bonding regions. This sort of thinking can be applied to other structures.
Chiral Ruthenium–Allenylidene Complexes That Bear a Fullerene Cyclopentadienyl Ligand: Synthesis, Characterization, and Remote Chirality Transfer
Authors: Zhong Yu‐Wu , Matsuo Yutaka , Nakamura Eiichi
Published: February 2007

Ruthenium complexes that bear both a fullerene and an allenylidene ligand, [Ru(C60Me5)((R)‐prophos)=CCCR1R2]PF6 (prophos=1,2‐bis(diphenylphosphanyl)propane), were prepared by the reaction of [Ru(C60Me5)Cl((R)‐prophos)] and a propargyl alcohol in better than 90 % yields, and characterized by 1H, 13C, and 31P NMR, IR, and UV/Vis/NIR spectroscopy and MS. Cyclic voltammograms of these complexes showed one reversible or irreversible reduction wave due to the allenylidene part, and two reversible reduction waves due to the fullerene core. Nucleophilic addition of RMgBr or RLi proceeded regioselectively at the distal carbon atom of the allenylidene array. The reaction took place with a 60:40–95:5 level of diastereoselectivity with respect to the original chirality in the (R)‐prophos ligand, which is located six atoms away from the electrophilic carbon center.
Cardiovascular abnormalities in Folr1 knockout mice and folate rescue
Authors: Zhu Huiping , Wlodarczyk Bogdan J. , Scott Melissa , Yu Wei , Merriweather Michelle , Gelineau‐van Waes Janee , Schwartz Robert J. , Finnell Richard H.
Published: February 2007

BACKGROUND:

Periconceptional folic acid supplementation is widely believed to aid in the prevention of neural tube defects (NTDs), orofacial clefts, and congenital heart defects. Folate‐binding proteins or receptors serve to bind folic acid and 5‐methyltetrahydrofolate, representing one of the two major mechanisms of cellular folate uptake.

METHODS:

We herein describe abnormal cardiovascular development in mouse fetuses lacking a functional folate‐binding protein gene (Folr1). We also performed a dose‐response study with folinic acid and determined the impact of maternal folate supplementation on Folr1 nullizygous cardiac development.

RESULTS:

Partially rescued preterm Folr1−/− (formerly referred to as Folbp1) fetuses were found to have outflow tract defects, aortic arch artery abnormalities, and isolated dextracardia. Maternal supplementation with folinic acid rescued the embryonic lethality and the observed cardiovascular phenotypes in a dose‐dependant manner. Maternal genotype exhibited significant impact on the rescue efficiency, suggesting an important role of in utero folate status in embryonic development. Abnormal heart looping was observed during early development of Folr1−/− embryos partially rescued by maternal folinic acid supplementation. Migration pattern of cardiac neural crest cells, genetic signals in pharyngeal arches, and the secondary heart field were also found to be affected in the mutant embryos.

CONCLUSIONS:

Our observations suggest that the beneficial effect of folic acid for congenital heart defects might be mediated via its impact on neural crest cells and by gene regulation of signaling pathways involved in the development of the pharyngeal arches and the secondary heart field. Birth Defects Research (Part A) 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Randomized comparative trial of a thin‐strut bare metal cobalt‐chromium stent versus a sirolimus‐eluting stent for coronary revascularization
Authors: Ortolani Paolo , Marzocchi Antonio , Marrozzini Cinzia , Palmerini Tullio , Saia Francesco , Taglieri Nevio , Aquilina Matteo , Baldazzi Federica , Silenzi Simona , Cooke Robin M.T. , Reggiani Maria‐Letizia Bacchi , Branzi Angelo
Published: February 2007

OBJECTIVES: To see whether use of a sirolimus‐eluting stent (SES) is superior to a third‐generation thin‐strut, cobalt‐chromium stent (CCS) in terms of in‐segment late loss at 9 months in patients with symptomatic coronary artery disease. BACKGROUND: Stent‐strut thickness has been shown to be strictly related with risk of in‐stent restenosis, but available demonstrations of the angiographic efficacy of SES have been based on comparisons with thick‐strut bare metal control stents. METHODS: The primary outcome measure of this single‐center, single‐blind randomized comparative trial was 9‐month in‐segment late loss. Eligibility criteria were symptomatic coronary artery disease and target vessel diameter appropriate for implantation a 3‐mm stent. Based on a power calculation, 104 patients were randomly assigned to receive a SES (Cypher™) or a CCS (Vision™). RESULTS: In‐segment late loss was significantly lower in the SES group (0.18 ± 0.40 mm vs 0.58 ± 0.51 mm, P < 0.001). Regarding subsidiary outcome measures, in‐segment restenosis (at 9 months) was recorded in 10% (5/50) patients treated with SES and 23% (11/48) receiving CCS (P = 0.14). No clinical difference between the two groups was apparent at 12 months. Freedom from target vessel failure at 12 months was 72% for SES patients and 68% for CCS patients (P = 0.65). CONCLUSIONS: In patients with de‐novo coronary lesions at medium risk of restenosis the anti‐proliferative effect of SES is greater than that of a thin‐strut CCS. Nevertheless, the angiographic results of the CCS were rather good. It remains to be seen whether the angiographic superiority of SES can translate into clinical superiority. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Impact of diabetes mellitus on outcome of patients undergoing carotid artery stenting: Insights from a single center registry
Authors: Gurm Hitinder S. , Rajagopal Vivek , Sachar Ravish , Abou‐Chebl Alex , Kapadia Samir R. , Bajzer Chris , Yadav Jay S.
Published: February 2007

Objective: To evaluate the impact of diabetic status on outcome of patients undergoing carotid artery stenting (CAS). Background: Diabetes has been demonstrated to be a strong predictor of adverse outcome in patients undergoing coronary revascularization. Its significance in predicting outcome of patients undergoing carotid interventions has not been ascertained. Methods: We evaluated the short‐term outcomes of 833 patients who underwent CAS at our institution. The primary outcome of this analysis was 30 day incidence of stroke, myocardial infarction, and death. Results: Diabetes was present in 311 patients. Baseline characteristics were comparable between diabetics and nondiabetics except for the diabetics having a lower left ventricular ejection fraction, lower hemoglobin, and a higher body mass index at baseline. Further, they were more likely to have congestive heart failure and coronary artery disease. There was no difference in the incidence of stroke (1.9% versus 2.7%,), myocardial infarction (MI) (2.6% versus 1.9%), death (3.9% versus 2.5%), or the composite of death stroke or MI (6.8% versus 5.9%) at 30 days between diabetics and nondiabetics. Similar results were seen when the analysis was restricted to patients treated with an emboli protection device. Diabetes was not a risk factor for adverse outcome after CAS after multivariate adjustment. Conclusion: Diabetics undergoing CAS are more likely to have associated co‐morbidities. However despite this handicap, their short term outcome after CAS is similar to that of nondiabetics. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.