bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Why Major in Literature—–What Do We Tell Our Students?
Authors: Berman Russell A.
Published: November 2005

What do we tell our students? the question implies a range of assumptions, most obviously the simple hope that such a conversation might even take place. Imagine a student dropping by during office hours or approaching us after class to ask for our thoughts on the choice of a major. Or consider a different scenario: the faculty member struggling to find the right tone in order to strike up a conversation with a student about his or her academic plans. Certainly such discussions take place, certainly teachers and students talk about educational goals, and certainly a teacher's advice can at times be important for a student. Yet all this reassurance cannot disguise the fragility of the situation. For it is equally certain that the question overstates the frequency, significance, and ramifications of these sorts of exchanges. Parental pressure plays a larger role in the real decision making than does a teacher's advice. (Perhaps there is a journal somewhere for parents of college students with a discussion on “Choosing the Right Major: What DoWe Tell Our Children?”) Many of us have spoken with students who plea their interest in selecting a literature major but find themselves compelled by their parents to choose something allegedly more practical. I for one have rarely met students passionate about a major in business but whose families heartlessly forced them to study literature.
Concentrating on and in Literature
Authors: Richmond-Garza Elizabeth M.
Published: November 2005

Language rustles. its particularity can be heard and even described. When Roland Barthes first suggested this metaphor for the ways in which language is detectable per se, he offered a structuralist rejection of the mimetic and hermeneutic models of literature. Nearly forty years later, his insistence on the detectability of language suggests a defense of literary study that is profoundly humanistic. Barthes's literature, with its special discursive density, answers the claim that literature programs, which perhaps were never seen as fully practical, have betrayed the public trust through aloof hermeticism since the advent of poststructuralism in the 1970s. The case for majoring in literature either has too fine a historical pedigree or goes too much against the grain of the current institutional and political emphasis on utility and accountability in education. Thus, the imperial Roman rhetorician Plutarch felt the need to write a defense of literary education in “How a Young Man Should Hear Lectures on Poetry.” Indeed, despite the successful closing of the commercial theaters in 1642 by the Puritan London City Council, new plays continued to be encouraged, written, and performed in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge without interruption. Even Glavrepertkom, instead of silencing Soviet literature, policed it and honed it into a distinctively effective system of ideological dissemination, albeit with the censorship of such luminaries as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My essay, with its claim that our students should continue to concentrate in literature, has thus already been written and enacted, even under strict surveillance of extremist governments. In the face of so many arguments for applied literary studies as one of “the basics,” for the integration of the literary into the pedagogical, there is in the academy a sense that a literary education is at best supplemental. It is a pleasing option to consider, budgets permitting, after writing and analytic reasoning have been addressed. A case for majoring in literature can and must be made, and it can avoid the cultural globalism of E. D. Hirsch's arguments for an exclusionary “cultural literacy.” It can also avoid taking refuge in Harold Bloom's justifications for a canon, which are centered on an Emersonian view of Shakespeare's necessity, lest “we cease to think” (41).
Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne's “Cannibals”
Authors: Hoffmann George
Published: November 2005

What might the Mass resemble among a people who never experienced the Fall? Montaigne's most famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” emerges as a radical response to this question when examined in the context of his time's religious polemic, a context from which the essay borrows much of its imagery. Unlike Protestant controversialists who disparaged Catholic eucharistic rites as barbarous, Montaigne suggests such religious prejudices prove little better than the cultural ones under which New World natives labored. He elects to pursue a line of religious inquiry opened up by Renaissance speculation that Amerindians might constitute a non-Adamite race in order to conduct a personal exploration of alternative practices of faith. This two-mindedness with regard to religion suggests that characterizations of Montaigne need to step beyond the categories of believer and unbeliever. Abandoning tendencies toward denominationalism and, more generally, toward affixing labels to heterodoxy allows for an investigation of the fully idiosyncratic experience of early modern belief.
Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife
Authors: Underwood Ted
Published: November 2005

Many Romantic poets were fascinated by the idea that a special historical sense could hear the cultural difference of remote epochs in the sound of the sea or of the wind. This essay traces that fascination back to late-eighteenth-century attempts to imagine a new kind of secular afterlife that fused nature and history, thereby combining the permanence of a natural process with the consoling collectivity of social existence. The most influential parts of James Macpherson's Ossianic poems were the ostensibly archaic ghosts who literalized Enlightenment fantasies about this form of historical immortality. In poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Felicia Hemans, historical sensations function as intimations of immortality and as signs of culture's primacy over other forms of class distinction. The essay closes by suggesting that late-twentieth-century film and literary criticism continue to promise their audiences a similar kind of earthly immortality.
The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien
Authors: Socolovsky Maya
Published: November 2005

Cuban American literature and Oscar Hijuelos's texts in particular have generally been approached through a consideration of their material, multicultural aspects. This essay analyzes Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, on which there is little critical work, by combining the novel's descriptions of photography and immigrant experiences with theories of photography. My reading considers the placing of ghosts and memory in the narrative and problematizes the undialectical presence of death in it. Referring to Hijuelos's text as an “imagetext” (photographs exist in it only through descriptions, never appearing visually), I read it through Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and his development of the wounding punctum of a photograph, which produces a melancholy lingering trace of the past in the present moment. In this reading, the immigration experience in Hijuelos's novel exceeds narrativization and is unrepresentable by it.
Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid'sMy Brother
Authors: Brophy Sarah
Published: November 2005

This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir,My Brother(1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic,My Brotheralso overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.
Mobile Citizens, Media States: A Panel at the 2000 MLA Convention
Authors: Apter Emily
Published: November 2005

The idea for this panel grewout of discussions among Anton Kaes, David Rodowick, and me during our stint as members of thePMLAEditorial Board in 1998–99. We were interested in developing a theme that would build on some of the issues raised in a priorPMLAspecial topic devoted to globalizing literary studies but that would concentrate more pointedly on the politics of transnational cultural production and the effect of global media on literature, art, and cinema. Working with the assumption that categories of citizenship and local forms of identity have become increasingly mobile, nomadic, and hybrid and drawing on theories of transnational citizenship in philosophy and social theory, we identified a number of interrelated subjects as our focus: the internationalization of aesthetics in a global culture industry; the influence of globally exported mass culture on nation-states worldwide; the consequences of the emergence of “cybernations”— virtual communities defined by electronic and Internet culture; the question of whether the dynamic push for economic and cultural internationalism will produce a return to political nativism and a renewed insistence on cultural difference; the politics of translation, not only across borders but in aesthetic exchanges between literature and cinematic and televisual forms; the shifting tensions between monolingualism and nonstandard language as new, displaced minority cultures emerge as consumers of transnational media and makers of alternative literatures and media; and the relevance of analogies between the borderless cartographies of the new Europe and medieval Christendom to discussions of global cultural production.
Digital Networks and Citizenship
Authors: Poster Mark
Published: November 2005

Paradoxical as it may appear, isn't it through the rights of man that transpires today—at a planetary level—the worst discriminations?

—Jean Baudrillard, Les mots de passe

Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.
Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)
Authors: Keenan Thomas
Published: November 2005

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

—Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media(30)

Here in Sarajevo, hundreds of TV crews parade before our very eyes; dozens of foreign journalists, reporters, and writers. Everything is known here, right down to minutest details, and yet, nothing …

—Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger (qtd. in Dizdarevic 39)

With these epigraphs I aim to abbreviate a frequently cited “lesson of bosnia”——That a country was destroyed and a genocide happened, in the heart of Europe, on television, and what is known as the world or the West simply looked on and did nothing. Bosnians, said one to the American journalist David Rieff, “felt as you would feel if you were mugged in full view of a policeman and he did nothing to rescue you” (140). Or, as Rieff says with slightly more precision,

200,000 Bosnian Muslims died, in full view of the world's television cameras, and more than two million other people were forcibly displaced. A state formally recognized by the European Community and the United States […] and the United Nations […] was allowed to be destroyed. While it was being destroyed, UN military forces and officials looked on, offering “humanitarian” assistance and protesting […] that there was no will in the international community to do anything more. (23)
Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography
Authors: Phillips Mark Salber
Published: November 2005

Nineteenth-century historians and critics attacked the works of their Enlightenment predecessors as dry, abstract, and overly rational, yet eighteenth-century authors also placed considerable stress on the need for emotional involvement in the reading of history. Using the idea of historical distance, this essay shows that two forms of distance operated in the historical works of this period. On cognitive grounds, Enlightenment historians were committed to a theory of explanation that demanded considerable abstraction. In affective terms, however, the moral psychology of Hume, Smith, and Kames emphasized that history's potential for moral instruction depends on the writer's ability to reduce emotional distance. Actuality rather than exemplarity became the watchword of historical narration as readers were invited to appreciate history in ways that were strongly influenced by the contemporary culture of sensibility.
Advantage, Affect, History,Henry V
Authors: Hedrick Donald
Published: November 2005

Shakespeare'sHenry Vexplores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action.Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.
The Sins of the Father: Colonialism and Family History in Diderot'sLe fils naturel
Authors: Weber Caroline
Published: November 2005

The self-abnegating, even self-flagellating, virtue promoted by the protagonist of Diderot'sLe fils naturelis a function not of the text's incest plot, as critics have traditionally asserted it to be, but of the drama's colonialist subtext. This essay highlights the involvement of the play's aging patriarch, Lysimond, in the slave-based commerce of the West Indies and suggests that the old man's son, Dorval, preaches a strict and selfless brand of morality in order to overwrite this shameful aspect of his family history. If, in the end, Dorval and his kinfolk prove unable to commemorate and celebrate their supposedly virtuous birthright, this result is due to the abiding, irrepressible specter of Lysimond's colonialist transgressions.
Jews on Ships; or, How Heine's Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History
Authors: Presner Todd Samuel
Published: November 2005

Although it is known that Heine attended Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelian-inflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heine's early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel's geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel's philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophy's progressive development relies.
Metaphoric History: Narrative and New Science in the Work of F. W. Maitland
Authors: Nolan Maura B.
Published: November 2005

This article reads the work of F. W. Maitland, a foundational figure in medieval legal scholarship, as an extended meditation on the theory and practice of writing history. Because Maitland's scholarship not only occupies a central place in two disciplines (law and history) but also negotiates the competing demands of an older, narrative form of historiography and the newer, scientific discourses of sociology and anthropology, his writing illustrates the persistence of certain epistemological and methodological questions. In particular, it reveals a deep interest in the modes through which history is figured. Recognizing that history is epistemologically constructed through and by tropes—metaphor, metonymy, analogy—each with its own conceptual and practical logic, Maitland turns to a notion of metaphoric history to productively sustain the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the part, that haunts nineteenth-century history writing.
Afterword: Speaking with the Dead
Authors: Woodbridge Linda
Published: November 2005

Various ghosts have haunted this special topic. Caroline Weber's essay conjures the ghosts of slaves in Denis Diderot'sLe fils naturel. Kari Lokke explores the way Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand deploy tales of contact with the spirits of the dead to probe a nation's political unconscious, enlisting the dead to galvanize the present into revolutionary action. For Todd Samuel Presner, Hegel's grand sweep of world history is haunted by the ghosts of Jews written out of that history. ThatPMLAin its special topics has not always wanted to listen to the Spirit of Literature Past is unsurprising, for the desire to listen to history's ghosts is by no means universal.
Allegories of Creativity and Territory
Authors: Bartra Roger
Published: November 2005

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.
Jorie Graham's _____ s
Authors: Otten Thomas J.
Published: November 2005

Jorie Graham's blanks offer the chance to see how lyric intersects with the historical vicissitudes of material culture. The word-length line segments in Graham's poems function as both a graphic representation of lyric and as a reflection of late-twentieth-century material culture, a way of writing the surfaces and textures of everyday life. While reducing to the simplest expression the alienating distance that gives the lyric I its definitive privacy, the blank also replicates the nebulous substances of late-century technology—latex, spray paint, Formica. Such substances become a material idiom of mediation, a repertoire of images that shape our understanding of interpersonal relationships, which in contemporary culture are both void of definition and thick with significance. While much lyric criticism defines the genre in terms of transhistorical rhetorical patterns, the example of Graham's blanks suggests that lyric must also be considered as an intimate material history.
Oral Composition in the Medieval Spanish Epic
Authors: Bailey Matthew
Published: November 2005

This essay addresses the question of whether the Spanish epic was composed orally or was a literary creation using the oral techniques of bards but composed in writing. Oral dictation played an important role in even the most literate works of the time. Theme was an important compositional aid employed by bards during performance, and its presence is evident in passages of theCantar de Mio Cidand theMocedades de Rodrigo. A new tool of analysis is introduced, the intonation unit, which leads to an understanding of Spanish epic narrative as orally composed and governed by the cognitive constraints of speech. Oral composition eventually included literate individuals whose contributions are linked to the social and political circumstances under which these poems were preserved on parchment.
Don DeLillo's “In the Ruins of the Future”: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11
Authors: Abel Marco
Published: November 2005

This essay explores the rhetorical strategies deployed by Don DeLillo in his essay on 9/11. What distinguishes the essay is less what it says about 9/11 than how, in responding to the event, it puts the question of response at stake. Resisting the demand to speak with moral clarity and declare what 9/11 means, he instead shows that response is always a question of response-ability, or the ethical “how.” To image 9/11, DeLillo rhetorically activates a neorealist mode of seeing that differs ethically from other accounts of perception, such as those of (neo)phenomenology. Whereas the latter locate the perceiving subject's perspective outside an event, DeLillo insists that point of view—the act of seeing—is immanent in the event. Responding to this immanence, DeLillo's rhetoric of seeing suspends and questions any representational judgment of 9/11.
Editor's Column: Collateral Damage
Authors: Hirsch Marianne
Published: November 2005

In an interview following his 7 may 2004 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense, admitted knowing about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison since they were first exposed in January. He also knew of the existence of photographs documenting the abuses, but he had not studied the images until shortly before they were shown to the public during the first week of May. In asserting that “[i]t is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place” and that “[w]ords don't do it,” Rumsfeld expressed, and even surpassed, one of the prime clichés of our time, that a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the power of visual images, the subject has an uncontrollable emotional response: “you cannot help but be outraged.”
An “Artful Juxtaposition on the Page”: Memory, Perception, and Cubist Technique in Ralph Ellison'sJuneteenth
Authors: Yukins Elizabeth
Published: November 2005

While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novelJuneteenth.Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.
Clearing the Stage: Gender, Class, and the Freedom of the Scenes in Eighteenth-Century Dublin
Authors: Harris Susan Cannon
Published: November 2005

This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan's attempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin's Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dressing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for control over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator's attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan's production of John Vanbrugh'sAesop.Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article illuminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities.
Figuration
Authors: Bal Mieke
Published: November 2005

Trained and working in literary studies, i began to analyze visual artifacts such as paintings sometime in the late 1980s. My interest in visual aspects has grown out of the realization that subjectivity is formed by a perpetual adjustment of images passing before the subject, who, as focalizer, makes them into a whole that is comprehensible because it is continuous. Having a certain continuity in one's thought depends, at a level more subliminal than conscious, on having a certain continuity in one's images.

But continuity is not the same thing as coherence. This distinction is another source of interest that informs work on visual narrativity. In such historically and sociologically varied texts and images as modern novels, the ancient and incomplete fragments that make up the Hebrew bible, and Rembrandt's paintings, I constantly came up against that which eludes the coherence of these artifacts. My attention was systematically arrested by the detail that seems out of place, the contradiction that tears open the work, the monstrous element that reveals flaws and disparities and, because it provokes astonishment, offers never-ending possibilities for the understanding of these works. Such experiences led me to consider those dimensions of literature that classical narratology has tended to think marginal and that pictorial narratology, unbounded by the presumption of linearity, would promote to the forefront or, at least, deploy as heuristic instruments with which to grasp structure outside linear plots.
Chamisso, Chamisso Authors, and Globalization
Authors: Weinrich Harald , Brown Marshall , Brown Jane K.
Published: November 2005

The man.Harald Weinrich, an honorary member of the modern language association since 1996, may be the quintessential interdisciplinary humanist. Having mastered French as a young internee in France at the end of World War II, he began his academic career as a Romance philologist in the tradition of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, with professorships successively at the universities of Kiel and Cologne. In a second career he became a professor of linguistics at the new University of Bielefeld (which he helped to found and where he served as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research); then he established in Munich the first program for the teaching of German as a foreign language. Following his compulsory retirement, he received the honor (extraordinary for a foreigner) of an appointment as professor of Romance studies at the prestigious Collège de France, from which he is now also retired. He has published writing of great scholarly and public resonance in all these areas. Among his voluminous output (translated into many languages) areTempus, a wide-ranging and meticulously nuanced study of tense use in the major literatures of Western Europe; a prizewinning short book of cultural linguistics entitledLinguistik der Lüge(Linguistics of Lying); “text grammars” of French and of German that aim to record not just morphology and syntax but also the usage problems that confront speakers and writers of all foreign languages;Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens(Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, his first book to appear in English) and much other work on cultural topics, including memory and politeness; and dozens of essays on the teaching and learning of languages and on problems of intercultural understanding.
Alien Sex Acts in Feminist Science Fiction: Heuristic Models for Thinking a Feminist Future of Desire
Authors: Rogan Alcena Madeline Davis
Published: November 2005

Even at their most bizarre, representations of alien sex are bound to reinscribe the terms of human desire. Thus there can be no representation of an alien sex act that is radically alien. However, for certain writers, this representational impasse provides an occasion for thinking through the limits of fictional and feminist representation. Through a reading of Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, I explore how alien sex is represented not only or even primarily in literal terms but also as an act that takes place in a fictional discursive milieu that critiques contemporary human sexual relations. I also describe how these writers' creative imaginings of alien sex function as a dialectical corollary to their theoretical investigations into the limits of representation.
Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism
Authors: Rabkin Eric S.
Published: November 2005

Science fiction, ranging from films to industrial design to world's fairs, is a cultural system no more confined to literature than love is to love letters. From its self-recognition in 1926, science fiction has involved commercial and social realities most obviously visible in fandom and the hundreds of annual science fiction conventions. This system includes many types of consumers and producers, even collaboratively self-correcting volunteer bibliographers. Collectively, science fiction fandom, the first organized fandom, has created vast informational resources that allow not only reference but also statistical inquiry. The Genre Evolution Project (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/) shows that these social structures and resources potentiate, in an age of widespread computer networking, the transformation of criticism from acts of isolated scholars working with narrowly defined subjects to collaborative projects drawing on human and informational resources across disciplinary boundaries. Science fiction points to a future in which criticism will be more systematic, collaborative, and quantitative.
Body Parts: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Short Stories by Women
Authors: Donawerth Jane
Published: November 2005

This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.
Oh No, Not More Sci-Fi!
Authors: Aldiss Brian W.
Published: November 2005

Like the automobile industry, the science fiction industry overproduces. Increasingly, the science fiction label is intended to fit every model. “Any color as long as it's colorful.”
The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction
Authors: Baccolini Raffaella
Published: November 2005

It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.
Researching and Teaching Science Fiction in Greece
Authors: Pastourmatzi Domna
Published: November 2005

In the dreams our stuff is made of, Thomas M. Disch talks about the influence and pervasiveness of science Fiction in American culture and asserts the genre's power in “such diverse realms as industrial design and marketing, military strategy, sexual mores, foreign policy, and practical epistemology” (11-12). A few years earlier, Sharona Ben-Tov described science fiction as “a peculiarly American dream”—that is, “a dream upon which, as a nation, we act” (2). Recently, Kim Stanley Robinson has claimed that “rapid technological development on all fronts combined to turn our entire social reality into one giant science fiction novel, which we are all writing together in the great collaboration called history” (1-2). While such diagnostic statements may ring true to American ears, they cannot be taken at face value in the context of Hellenic culture. Despite the unprecedented speed with which the Greeks absorb and consume both the latest technologies (like satellite TV, video, CD and DVD players, electronic games, mobile and cordless phones, PCs, and the Internet) and Hollywood's science fiction blockbuster films, neither technology per se nor science fiction has yet saturated the Greek mind-set to a degree that makes daily life a science-fictional reality. Greek politicians do not consult science fiction writers for military strategy and foreign policy decisions or depend on imaginary scenarios to shape their country's future. Contemporary Hellenic culture does not acquire its national pride from mechanical devices or space conquest. Contrary to the American popular belief that technology is the driving force of history, “a virtually autonomous agent of change” (Marx and Smith xi), the Greek view is that a complex interplay of political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific agencies alters the circumstances of daily life. No hostages to technological determinism, modern Greeks increasingly interface with high-tech inventions, but without locating earthly paradise in their geographic territory and without writing their history or shaping their social reality as “one giant science fiction novel.”
He and His Man
Authors: Coetzee J. M.
Published: November 2005

Boston, on the coast of lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.
Doubtful Arms and Phantom Limbs: Literary Portrayals of Embodied Grief
Authors: Krasner James
Published: November 2005

Theories of grief based on Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia“ typically portray mourning as a disembodied process. This essay investigates the literary portrayal of grief in the context of phantom limb pain, a literally embodied, neurological response to loss. By comparing Derrida's image-based discussion of mourning with theories of embodied habit by Merleau-Ponty and of disability by Lennard Davis, this essay investigates the physical apprehension of loss caused by our habitual engagements with the bodies of our loved ones. Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty, Alfred Tennyson, and Donald Hall portray the physical confusions and discomforts of grief that occur when the griever takes up a habitual position in relation to a lost body. Embodied grief emerges in tangible illusions that, like the phantom limb, memorialize the lost beloved through misperceptions of material presence.
Paranoid Interpretation, Desire's Nonobject, and Nella Larsen's Passing
Authors: Carr Brian
Published: November 2005

This article claims that much of the contemporary scholarship on Nella Larsen's Passing attempts to correct the delusional apprehensions of the novel's main character, Irene Redfield. I suggest that this corrective effort ultimately places critics in the paranoid orbit they aim to diagnose. Critics are unable to escape the logic of paranoia primarily because they read Irene's paranoia according to a conventional tropology of paranoia, homosexuality, and delusional jealousy. The paranoid gesture tries to prove that Passing is “really about” homosexuality and simply passing itself off as a novel about racial passing. I work through the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and paranoia to show how the novel incessantly thematizes the processes by which race and sexuality are substantialized in the scholarship. Ultimately, it is because Passing rigorously drains identitarian categories of substance that the novel is available to the paranoid substantializing of critics.
History and Memory: The Problem of the Archive
Authors: Blouin Francis X.
Published: November 2005

It is often said that a century ago the author and the reader occupied the same space. I am told that much of modern literature is the result of a separation in that sense of space. It could also easily be said that a century ago archives and history occupied the same conceptual and methodological space. This sense of partnership in the study of the past has undergone a variety of stresses and strains over recent decades, to the point that what constitutes the archive has become a question fundamental to how our knowledge of the past is acquired and shaped. History and archives now occupy very different spaces, a condition that has conceptual, technical, and practical causes. Among the many consequences of this intellectual divide is the need for a new understanding of the archive apart from its historical roots.
Letter on Romanticism
Authors: Manzoni Alessandro , Luzzi Joseph
Published: November 2005

It was a foreign critic, ironically, who grasped the insurmountable national challenge that alessandro Manzoni posed to himself and to Italy's future authors with his monumental novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed [1827, rev. ed. 1840]). Manzoni's basic theme, Georg Lukács writes, is “much less a given, concrete, historical crisis of national history” than it is “the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole” (70). This eternal plight—distilled into the story of the courtship and separation of two peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy during plague, riots, and Spanish occupation—encompassed Italy's perpetual struggle against foreign rule, its lack of a unifying language and polity, and its reticent modernity, especially its tensions between religious tradition and secular progress. According to Lukács, the universality of the text combined with the abiding, unchanging nature of the problems it fictionalized essentially exhausted the genre of the historical novel that it introduced to Italy. Posterity has vindicated this assessment. Manzoni abandoned the genre soon after I promessi sposi to dedicate himself to historical writing proper, and his novel remains ensconced in the Italian public imaginary, just behind Dante's Commedia, as the towering, mythic work that helped occasion Italy's belated unification in 1861.
American Literature in English Translation: Denise Levertov and Others
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: November 2005

The theory of exile as a form of intellectual empowerment strongly influenced writers of the Romantic and modernist periods, when major figures from Byron to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett sought to take advantage of a dissociation from native customs to embrace the authenticity of their art. More recently, however, displacement from indigenous cultures has become such a commonplace that it appears difficult to credit the process of migration with any special qualities of critical insight. Nevertheless, literary scholarship remains to some degree in the shadow of the idealization of “exiles and émigrés” that ran through the twentieth century. Edward Said, a Palestinian in the United States, consistently linked his “politics of knowledge” with a principled alienation from “corporations of possession, appropriation, and power,” while looking back to the exiled German scholar of comparative literature Erich Auerbach as a model for transcending “the restraints of imperial or national or provincial limits” (Culture 335). Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian in France, associated a similar perspective of estrangement with Christian narratives of exile and purification, along with their negative correlatives, psychological traumas of disinheritance and depression; but she also attributed to the foreign writer a levitating condition of “weightlessness”: “since he belongs to nothing the foreigner can feel as appertaining to everything, to the entire tradition” (32).
Supranational English, American Values, and East-Central Europe
Authors: Frank Tibor
Published: November 2005

The extent to which we in east-central europe ACquire proficiency in new languages and develop the capacity to communicate in the new international environment without translators or interpreters has significant consequences for our economic efficiency, living standards, and general welfare.
Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England
Authors: Robinson Mary , Craciun Adriana
Published: November 2005

Mary robinson's essay “present state of the manners, society, etc. etc. of the metropolis of England,” published in the reformistMonthly Magazineshortly before the author's death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatility of British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once again recognized as a major writer of the Romantic period, Robinson influenced and was influenced by contemporaries such as Southey, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, who called Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius” (Letter). “Metropolis” is an important document not only because of its engagement with the contemporary debate over the direction of print culture and the public sphere but also because of the alternative it offers to Wordsworth's Preface to theLyrical Ballads. Moreover, it provides an important link between earlier eighteenth-century concepts of urban culture and cosmopolitan refinement and later nineteenth-century ideas of urban identity such as Poe's Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire'sflâneur. Resolutely urban, democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson's essay amounts to a manifesto of metropolitan culture.
The New School of Literary History in Russia
Authors: Tomashevsky Boris , Fisch Gina , Gelikman Oleg
Published: November 2005

Anthologies of literary theory, the backbone of courses on literary criticism, rely on viktor Shklovsky's “Art as a Device” or Boris Eikhenbaum's “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method‘” to broach the subject of Russian formalism. The canonical status of these essays is well deserved. Written when the author was merely twenty-four, Shklovsky's 1917 essay bristles with a polemical fervor, wit, and knack for example that announce him as a critical prodigy. Marked by the mixture of embittered pride, rigor, and self-conscious malaise typical of later formalism, Eikhenbaum's dense history of the formal school is remarkable for its titanic effort to marry historical considerations to a systematic analysis of the evolution of key formalist doctrines.
ET-743: A Novel Agent with Activity in Soft Tissue Sarcomas
Authors: Fayette Jérôme , Coquard Isabelle Ray , Alberti Laurent , Ranchère Dominique , Boyle Helen , Blay Jean-Yves
Published: November 2005

Learning Objectives

After completing this course, the reader will be able to: Describe the original mechanism of action of ET-743.Explain the management of patients treated with ET-743, including what biological exams are needed because of toxicity and what is the optimal schedule of administration.Choose the best histological subtype of sarcoma for treatment with ET-743 and describe the clinical aim of treatment.Discuss putative combinations of ET-743 with other therapies.

Access and take the CME test online and receive 1 AMA PRA category 1 credit at CME.TheOncologist.com

Ecteinascidin-743 (ET-743) is a natural product derived from the marine tunicate Ectenascidia turbinate. ET-743 binds in the minor groove of DNA, blocks transcription factors activity, and traps protein from the nucleotide excision repair system, thus blocking cells in G2-M phase. ET-743 demonstrated cytotoxic activity at very low concentrations against sarcoma cell lines in pre-clinical studies. In several phase II clinical studies in patients with advanced sarcoma failing conventional doxorubicin- and ifosfamide-based chemotherapy, ET-743 delivered by continuous intravenous 24-hour infusion at a dose of 1,500 μg/m2 every 21 days yielded 8% overall response and 30%–40% stabilization rates for a clinical benefit rate close to 40%. Interestingly, long-term stabilizations over more than 3 years have been described. In vivo, ET-743 has a specific toxicity profile, the major toxicity of this product being hepatic, through biliary duct destruction, and hematologic. ET-743 has also been evaluated in first-line treatment for these patients. Finally, due to its original mode of action and the lack of cross-resistance with other chemotherapy agents, ET-743 was tested in a preclinical model in combination with other drugs. Synergy was reported in vitro with doxorubicin and cisplatin; phase I combination studies are in progress.