bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epilogue
Authors: Neville Gwen Kennedy
Published: November 2023

We anthropologists working in highly textualized cultures, such as those of Western Europe, often find ourselves overwhelmed by the wealth of our ethnographic materials and by the inadequacy of our method in dealing with centuries of written texts. We face the further intimidation of answering critics who read our work outside their own elegant expertise in some aspect of cultural or social analysis— folklore, ethnomusicology, literary history and criticism, sociocultural and economic history—not to mention the contemporary experts who find their voices in fields of "Scottish studies," "British studies," or "European studies."
Early Rabbinic Responses: Mishnah and Avot
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

In the year 70 CE, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and Jews were left once again without the classical means to atone for their sins, with out obvious evidence of God’s presence on Earth. Whatever the difficulties of the decades and even centuries leading up to this event, nothing could have been as shattering as this loss. Before, at least, the divinely commanded service, as spelled out in detail in the Torah, could be observed. Now, in a single catastrophic instant, the entire priestly code was rendered irrelevant and, with it, whatever stability and confidence it provided.
Early Rabbinic Responses: The Halakhic Midrashim
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

The so-called halakhic midrashim, the tannaitic midrashim on the books of Exodus through Deuteronomy, are the next stage in the development of the rabbinic literary corpus. Regrettably, there remains considerable dis,agreement among scholars in dating these works, with regard both to their substance and (somewhat less so) their final redaction. As in the case of the Tosefta, Albeck here again argues that these are (redactionally) post Talmudic documents.1 In what he calls “a good guess,” Neusner remarks that they were probably completed around 400 CE-though he does not offer substantive proof for this guess.2 In my opinion, it is more reasonable to suggest a date of the late third century, for the following reasons. First, these midrashim quote both the Mishnah and, less frequently, the Tosefta, meaning that the earliest possible date of their redaction is the mid-third century. On the other side, they are already quoted in the Yerushalmi, c. 400, making this the latest possible date of their redaction. The remaining question is whether they were completed before the Christianization of the empire and therefore closer to Avot and the Tosefta, or after the triumph of Christianity and thus closer to the Yerushalmi and the early aggadic midrashim. As will be evident to anyone who reads these works, they are, in terms of language, named authorities, and ideologies, far closer to the former than to the latter.
Later Palestinian Documents: The Yerushalmi
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

The Talmud of the Land oflsrael-the Yerushalmi-is, after the Mishnah, the major halakhic work of the rabbinic community in Palestine in the ancient period. It came to its final shape in the early fifth century, as part of a burst ofliterary creativity which produced, at approximately the same time, this Talmud, two major aggadic midrashim (Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah), and a variety of more minor midrashic compositions. Together, these works comprise the statement of the rabbinic community at a crucial crossroads in Jewish history.
Later Palestinian Documents: The Aggadic Midrashim
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

As indicated in Chapter 7, the Yerushalmi was not the only rabbinic text to take shape in Palestine in the century following the triumph of Christianity and the failed restoration of the (once and future) glorious Jerusalem temple. Joining the Yerushalmi were the earliest aggadic midrashim-Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, Lamentations Rabbah, and Pesiqta de’R. Kahana.1 Though they are certainly distinct in their documentary characteristics and programs, these midrashim, along with the Yerushalmi, represent a common approach to the issues at hand. Thus, though a consider able number of traditions discuss suffering in this literature, it is pointless to review them all. Our attention will therefore be applied selectively, seeking to examine representative examples of the full range of opinions (limited as it is) finding expression at this time. Furthermore, because Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah are the more ambitious of the four and be cause they, in any case, record virtually the full range ofrelevant views evidenced at this level of the developing rabbinic tradition, primary attention will be given in this chapter to these documents.
The Bavli Rebels
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

I have isolated three Bavli texts that make especially important statements about suffering. The first two represent significant manipulations of earlier traditions in order to express innovative positions. In each case they add their own distinct voices as well, but it is the appropriation of prior voices that makes these deliberations so striking. The third text is almost entirely original, articulating an opinion that, as far as I have been able to discern, is entirely without precedent in all rabbinic tradition. Individually and in combination these texts exemplify the rebellious side of the Bavli.
Introduction
Authors: Motz Lotte
Published: November 2023

In discussion and reconstructions of archaic religions the figure of a di vine mother has been given an important place. A number of books were devoted to this deity in the past-for example, Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother, E. O. James’s The Cult of the Mother Goddess, Robert Briffault’s The Mothers-and were still written in recent time-such as Marija Gimbutas’s The Language of the Goddess and Elinor Gadon’s The Once and Future Goddess. These scholars invariably draw the image of a universal, archetypal, time-transcending being in whose womb all life has generated. She received her exaltation through the awe and wonder inspired by the powers of her fertile womb. The writers invariably include in their explorations divinities who did not bear a child and do not bear the title mother. Motherhood is also attributed to the mute forms of prehistory. Widely divergent qualities and creatures, belonging to various cultures, are held to be expressive of the many shapes of one single divinity. One gains the impression that the scholars set out on their endeavor with an already fixed belief in the existence of a primordial, maternal, all-encompassing, and sovereign deity.
Reverence of Nature: Nortliem Eurasia
Authors: Motz Lotte
Published: November 2023

To gain insight into the spiritual universe in which the goddesses of this study found their earliest manifestations, we must tum to cultures that retained not only archaic ways of subsistence but also archaic modes of thought and religion. Such cultures exist, or existed until recently, in the arctic and subboreal belts where urbanization or even farming had not entered or prevailed. The European and Asiatic portions of this region, named North Eurasia, have been well explored and the mode of life of their inhabitants well documented; it was found that a homogeneous cultural unit had been formed. In this chapter the beliefs of the North Eurasian peoples will briefly be presented in exploring the environment of very early forms of divinity and in examining to what extent the figures of more complex societies can be traced to the archaic gods.
The Creativity of Suffering: The Eskimo
Authors: Motz Lotte
Published: November 2023

The territory of the Eskimo (Inuit) is sparsely settled. A population of about 100,000 dwells in an area that extends across the North American continent and reaches the Chukchee Peninsula of Siberia.1 The most northern of the groups, the Polar Eskimo, lives at the edge of the inhabitable world. Some experts believe that the tribes had been pressed toward the North from a more southerly station of the continent. Whatever their point of origin, they found their new homeland to be a place of harsh and cruel natural conditions that allowed them no more than a life of bare subsistence. In our time the region has been modernized, and Inuit culture has all but vanished.
The Human Condition: Mesopotamia
Authors: Motz Lotte
Published: November 2023

If we turn from the cultures of northern Europe, Asia, and America to those of the ancient Middle East, it is as if we left a somber half-lit place for a realm of dazzling riches and dizzying complexity. Even in their preliterate period the settlers of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates had achieved a state of civilization in which urban centers had emerged in the cultivated farmland, and where the towering places of devotion rose beside the palaces of kings. With the invention of writing (about 3000 B.C.E.), the continued construction of monuments, and the recording of literature and legal codes, Mesopotamia became, with Egypt, the leading intellectual force of the Mediterranean regions.
Beauty through Resemblance
Authors: Johnston Mark D
Published: November 2023

The limited techniques of verbal ornament reviewed in chapter 5 do not indicate that Ramon Llull possessed a very wide or profound knowledge of poetical and rhetorical doctrine regarding style. Despite its narrow theoretical foundation, his work does display a broad practical familiarity with certain very popular techniques of verbal ornament. He especially recommends a wide range of devices that we would call symbols, personifications, metaphors, comparisons, similes, proverbs, analogies, exempla, and fables. Taken together, these devices comprise a discourse of resemblance that virtually defines verbal ornament for Llull. His preference results from the preeminently herineneutic function of his own Great Art: the devices of likeness that Llull favors are all means to interpret signs. His reliance on these techniques of likening reinforces the conviction that language obeys the same metaphysics of participated resemblance found in all being and thought. Llull displays his broad appreciation of these techniques terminologically in his interchangeable use of labels such as exemplum, similitude, metaphor, comparison, or even proverb to name any sort of figural or illustrative discourse.
Framing The News
Authors: Cappella Joseph N , Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: November 2023

When Scholars speak of framing, those not steeped in the jargon may recall that builders speak of framing a house and photographers of framing their subjects. Each offers a way to explain our use of the word. Like the framing of a house, a news frame creates a structure on which other elements are built. There is much in a house that is not the frame, but without the frame there is no house. And the frame determines the shape of the house.

A photographer frames her subjects by setting boundaries, choosing contexts, selecting and manipulating light. The act of framing determines what is included and excluded, what is salient and what is unimportant. It focuses the viewer’s attention on its subjects in specific ways. The objects in the photograph are presented in a setting and illuminated to create visual effects. The photographer’s act of framing binds its subjects together in a distinctive way; another photographer framing the same subject would produce a recognizably different picture.
The Cognitive Bases For Framing Effects
Authors: Cappella Joseph N , Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: November 2023

How Audiences process news cognitively is central to understanding the effects of news content and news frames. In this chapter we offer an account of the psychology of the audience to set the groundwork for our studies of the effects of news frames on learning, cynicism, and understanding. Our discussion focuses specifically on the strategy frame and how it might interact with the audience’s knowledge and normal cognitive functions.

News frames make salient certain features of a news event and depress others. What is salient in a story primes mental associations in the receiver and, through a process of spreading activation in the knowledge system, stimulates other, related concepts as well. Strategic frames invite negative attributions about political actors because the stories suggest that politicians are motivated by self-interest. These attributions may be automatic in the sense of being effortless and, after repeated application, may become the accepted narrative account organizing thinking about a politician or politicians in general.
Breaking The Spiral of Cynicism
Authors: Cappella Joseph N , Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: November 2023

Political Events, like all social events, are the objects of interpretation by the press, the public, and the public through journalistic frameworks of presentation. Our studies are premised on the assumption that understanding the impact of social and political events requires understanding how the events are framed for the public in the stories the press tells. Framing is a kind of sense-making that creates one interpretation of political events while ignoring others.

That framing is done by the press, by the public, and by the public through the press is a widely shared assumption. Murray Edelman describes the framing process this way:

Interpretation pervades every phase of news creation and dissemination. Officials, interest groups, and critics anticipate the interpretations of particular audiences, shaping their acts and language so as to elicit a desired response. The audiences for news are ultimate interpreters, paying attention to some news stories, ignoring most, and fitting news accounts into a story plot that reflects their respective values. For any audience, then, an account is an interpretation of an interpretation.
Charles Baudelaire: Portrait of the Poet as Anti-Writer
Authors: Porter Dennis
Published: November 2023

Charles Baudelaire is a case apart in the context of this exploration of a legacy that, whether reaffirmed or contested, was of the greatest significance for French culture for over two hundred years. Baudelaire is the only poet on whom I focus. From the point of view of early- to mid-nineteenth century French literary history, Rousseau has a great many obvious heirs, including the authors of the first-person, confessional romans personnels, such as Etienne Pivert de Senancour or Frani;ois-Rene de Chateaubriand, or poets such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, and Victor Hugo himself. Yet with the partial exception of the latter, none of them is “a writer” in the full sense I am giving the word here-although Hugo was the first to make a programmatic identification of the revolutionary tradition in politics with romanticism in literature, and later in his life he never ceased fulminating against the imperial regime of Louis-Napoleon from his place of exile on the Channel Islands.
Why Should Jews Survive?
Authors: Goldberg Michael
Published: November 2023

In the fifty years since the Holocaust, the Jewish People have felt one overriding concern: survival. The ghosts of the murdered six million, along with the living generation of survivors, have called out the unifying chant, “never again.” In 1948, this concern found a second focus in the state of Israel, the ultimate refuge of Jews worldwide. But Rabbi Michael Goldberg finds that these twin pillars of Jewish identity are brittle, and have already begun to crumble; they will not be enough to support or sustain the next generation. The time has come to answer the question: Why should Jews survive? In this provocative book, Goldberg launches a bold attack on what he calls the “Holocaust cult,” challenging Jews to return to a deeper, richer sense of purpose. He argues that this cult--with shrines like the U.S. Holocaust Museum, high priests such as Elie Wiesel, and rites like UJA death camp pilgrimages--is deeply destructive of Jewish identity. As the current “master story” of Judaism, Goldberg writes, the Holocaust has been used to depict Jews as uniquely victimized in human history--transforming them from God’s chosen to those who manage to survive despite God’s silent complicity in their persecution. This Holocaust-centered, survival-for-survival’s-sake Judaism is already showing its emptiness, Goldberg contends; the generation that survived Hitler and founded Israel is dying, and the new generation seems adrift (for instance, one recent survey predicts that 70% of American Jewish marriages will be intermarriages by the turn of the century). Jews need positive reasons for remaining Jewish, he argues; they need to return to the Exodus as their master story--the story of God leading the Jews out of slavery and making with them an eternal covenant that gave the Jews a unique place in God’s plan. The Jews should survive, Goldberg concludes, because they are the linchpin in God’s redemption of the world. Rabbi Michael Goldberg has long wrestled with the crisis of identity facing today’s Jewish community. In Why Should Jews Survive?, he provides a provocative and powerfully argued challenge to the dominant theme of modern Jewish thought.
The Holocaust Cult
Authors: Goldberg Michael
Published: November 2023

As the Holocaust has become many contemporary Jews’ master story, so, too, its perpetual observance has become their paramount Jewish practice, its veneration their religion. And as with any organized church, this Holocaust cult has its own tenets of faith, rites, and shrines.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Authors: McDonagh Eileen L
Published: November 2023

More than a generation has passed since the Supreme Court first ruled in 1973 in Roe v. Wade that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion During this time, the abortion issue has become “one of the most hotly debated issues” in the country, and the exercise of abortion rights has become progressively limited. Though the Supreme Court has firmly upheld in principle a woman’s right to an abortion, it has just as firmly undermined a woman’s ability to exercise that right, by ruling that there is no constitutional obligation for the state to fund abortions for women who cannot afford them, to make facilities or personnel available for the performance of abortions, or even to provide information about abortions as an option in family planning.
Immaculate Pregnancy
Authors: McDonagh Eileen L
Published: November 2023

In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court in its majority opinion noted the American Bar Association’s definition of abortion as the “termination of human pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus:’ In the years since Roe, it has been common to focus on the last part of this definition, which concerns the fetus. Debate has centred on whether the foetus is a person and the extent to which its personhood affects the right of a woman to remove it “with an intention other than to produce a live birth:’ Insufficient attention has been paid to the first part of this definition, which refers to the condition of pregnancy that abortion terminates. Despite the many cases in which the Court has considered the abortion issue, it has yet to evaluate pregnancy in a formal, systematic, or complete way from either a medical or a legal perspective.
Introduction
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

We have three main sources for our knowledge of Aquinas’s life. The first is the text of his canonization process (Naples 1319). Then there are two early biographies. One is by William Tocco, who knew Aquinas personally. The other is by Bernard Gui, whose account depends partly on that of Tocco, but may also incorporate independent and reliable information. Putting these documents together allows us to form a generally credible outline of Aquinas’s career. But they also leave us with many unanswered, and probably unanswerable, questions. Hence we find that the three most recent biographies of Aquinas differ significantly on a number of issues. They do so, for example, even when it comes to the year of Aquinas’s birth, which can arguably be placed anywhere from 1224 to 1226.
De malo
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de malo. Et primo queritur an malum sit aliquid. Et videtur quod sic. Omne enim creatum aliquid est. Set malum est aliquid creatum, secundum illud Ys. XLV “Ego Dominus faciens pacem et creans malum.“ Ergo malum est aliquid.
De peccatis
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de peccatis. Et primo queritur utrum in quolibet peccato sit aliquis actus. Etuidetur quod sic. Dicit enim Augustinus quod “peccatum est dictum uel factum uel concupitum contra legem Dei.” Set in quolibet illorum trium importatur aliquis actus. Ergo in quolibet peccato est aliquis actus.
De peccato originali
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de peccato originali. Et primo queritur utrum aliquod peccatum ex origine contrahatur. Et uidetur quod non. Dicitur enim Eccli. XV “Ante hominem uita et mors, bonum et malum: quodcumque uoluerit dabitur ei,” ex quo potest accipi quod peccatum, quod est spiritualis mors anime, in uoluntate consistit. Set nichil quod homo contrahit ex origine sua consistit in eius uoluntate. Ergo nullum peccatum contrahit homo ex sua origine.
De inuidia
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de inani gloria. Et primo queritur utrum inanis gloria sit peccatum. Et uidetur quod non. Consistit enim inanis gloria  eo quod aliquis uelit bona sua aliis apparere. Set hoc non est peccatum, set laudabile. Dicitur enim Mat. V “Sic luceat lux uestra coram hominibus ut uideant opera uestra bona”. Ergo inanis gloria non est peccatum.
De accidia
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de accidia. Et primo queritur utrum accidia sit peccatum. Et uidetur quod non. Virtus enim et peccatum cum sint contraria sunt in eodem genere. Set uirtus est in genere amoris: dicit enim Augustinus in libro De moribus Ecclesie et XV De ciuitate Dei quod uirtus est ordo amoris. Cum ergo accidia non sit in genere amoris set magis sit tristitia quedam ut Damascenus dicit, uidetur quod accidia non sit peccatum.
De auaritia
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de auaritia. Et primo queritur utrum sit uitium speciale. Et uidetur quod non. Omne enim uitium speciale habet materiam specialem, quia semper in moralibus species determinantur secundum obiecta. Set auaritia non habet materiam specialem set generalem: dicit enim Augustinus in III De libero arbitrio “Auaritia que grece philargiria dicitur non in solo argento uel nummis set in omnibus rebus que immoderate cupiuntur intelligenda est ubicumque omnino plus uult quisquam quam satis est”. Ergo auaritia non est speciale peccatum.
De luxuria
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de luxuria. Et primo queritur utrum omnis actus luxurie sit peccatum. Et uidetur quod non. Fornicatio enim est actus luxurie Set ipsa connumeratur quibusdam que non sunt peccata secundum se  licita: dicitur enim Act. XV “Visum est Spiritui Sancto et nobis nichil ultra imponere honeris uobis quam hec necessaria, ut abstineatis uos ab immolatis simulacrorum et sanguine  suffocato et fornicatione”. Set nullus cibi esus secundum se est peccatum, secundum illud I Tim. IV “Nichil reiciendum quod  gratiarum actione percipitur”. Ergo neque fornicatio est peccatum, et ita non omnis actus luxurie est peccatum.
De demonibus
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de demonibus. Et primo queritur utrum demones habeant corpora naturaliter sibi unita. Et uidetur quod sic. Dicit enim Augustinus XI Super Genesim ad litteram “In spiritu rationalis creature bonum est hoc ipsum quod uiuit et uiuificat corpus, siue aereum sicut ipsius diaboli uel demonum spiritus, siue terrenum sicut hominis anima.” Set corpus quod uiuificatur est naturaliter unitum spiritui uiuificanti, quia uita est quiddam naturale. Ergo demones habent corpora aerea naturaliter sibi unita.
Human Nature (Jen-hsing) and the Ethics of Perfectibility
Authors: Ching Julia
Published: November 2023

What is the human being, and wherein lies his or her worth? This question has been asked—by humans—probably as long as humans have existed. Human beings have always been fascinated with themselves, with their limitations as well as their potentiality for greatness. They have been fascinated with this question also because it can never be fully answered. And yet, one must keep on asking and, in so doing, reveal one’s humanity—that which differentiates the human from the rest of nature.
The Primeval Age
Authors: Hiebert Theodore
Published: November 2023

The Yahwist’s epic begins with three of the most familiar stories in Western literature: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Cain’s murder of his brother Abel; and Noah’s ark, in which Noah’s family and all species of animals survived the great flood. These stories are actually the primary episodes in a more detailed account of the first era of world history, a primeval age cut off from subsequent history by a catastrophic flood. This primeval age is above all an age of origins, in which the basic features of the world of nature and of human society come into existence.
X Marks The Plots: A Critical Reading Of Malcolm’s Readers
Authors: Dyson Michael Eric
Published: November 2023

I think all of us should be critics of each other. When-ever you can’t stand criticism you can never grow. I don’t think that it serves any purpose for the leaders of our people to waste their time fighting each other needlessly. I think that we accomplish more when we sit down in private and iron out whatever differences that may exist and try and then do something constructive for the benefit of our people. But on the other hand, I don’t think that we should be above criticism. I don’t think that anyone should be above criticism. Malcolm X, in Malcolm X: The Last Speeches
Malcolm X And The Resurgence Of Black Nationalism
Authors: Dyson Michael Eric
Published: November 2023

And in my opinion the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.
Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum Entertainment
Authors: Brodhead Richard H
Published: November 2023

When she is not at Blithedale, the Priscilla of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance has a career. She makes public appearances as the Veiled Lady: clothed in a silvery white veil, which purportedly insulates her from terrestrial reality, she goes onstage as a human conduit to occult knowledge, giving sibylline answers to the questions her audience puts. Hawthorne, we know, felt final dissatisfaction with this figure of his creation. When Blitlzedale was finished but unnamed he considered “The Veiled Lady” as a possible title for the book but ruled that “I do not wish to give prominence to that feature of the Romance.”1 But would he or no, prominence is just what Blithedale gives the Veiled Lady. The book begins with Miles Coverdale “returning to my bachelor-apartments” from “the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady” (5). Its plot machinations-unusually intricate for a Hawthorne novel-all tum on moves to rescue Priscilla from or to re-imprison her in her onstage role. And if any figure in Blithedale might be said to be figurally belabored, it is the Veiled Lady, this book’s prime site of symbolic overdevelopment. The question I want to put in this essay is what, historically, is on Hawthorne’s mind when he writes Blithedale in 1851-52, and by extension, what cultural situation a novelist would have had to address at this moment of American literary history. If I begin with the Veiled Lady, it is on the assumption that she embodies answers to questions of this sort.
Pictographs as Autobiography: Plains Indian Sketchbooks of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Wong Hertha D
Published: November 2023

When scholars talk about Native American autobiography the assumption is that they mean the• ethnographer-collected life histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because autobiography has been considered a distinctly Western impulse emphasizing individuality and has been defined as the story of one’s life written by oneself, precontact personal narratives spoken, performed, and painted by more communally oriented indigenous peoples have generally been overlooked. Thoughtful critics like Arnold Krupat insist that “Indian autobiography has no prior model in the collective practice of tribal cultures” (31). But long before Anglo ethnographers came along, Native Americans were telling, performing, and painting their personal histories. One potential preliterate model of autobiography, at least among Plains Indian males, is the pictographic personal narrative. The symbolic language of pictographs allowed preliterate Plains Indians to “read” about each other from painted robes, tipis, and shields. According to Helen H. Blish, pictographic hides were a “widely practiced” form of artistic personal history. Such “personal records” were “quite common ... among the Plains Indians,” and, says Blish, “these are the most frequently found pictographic records” (21).’
Early Histories of American Literature: A Chapter in the Institution of New England
Authors: Baym Nina
Published: November 2023

When, in the second decade of the twentieth century, academics defined a field of study called “American literature,” they did so by appropriating and sophisticating a narrative already constructed in the plethora of American literary history textbooks that had been published between 1882 and 1912. Putnam; Houghton Mifflin; Ginn; American Book Company; Silver, Burdett; Macmillan; Henry Holt; A. C. McClurg; Scribner’s; Harper; D. C. Heath; D. Appleton-these and other publishers commissioned American literary histories for high school and college use, and had them frequently revised and updated.1 By situating select works and authors-above all authors-in a narrative, these textbooks attempted to configure American literature to serve the aims of American public education: forming character and ensuring patriotism.2 As one of them put it, American literature “is valuable to the young student and future citizen of the Republic just in proportion as it seems to mirror our American ideals and as it shall have a tendency to build up the reader into a worthy citizenship” (Burton v). The histories were written for the most part by professors of New England origin employed at elite colleges; they cribbed from each other routinely and meshed with an array of handbooks, anthologies, memoirs, and biographies (many put together by the same professors) to create the tendentious narrative that launched the academic field and continues to influence it. Constructing history in a shape to further the purpose of schooling, the textbook writers made literary works and authors display the virtues and achievements of an Anglo-Saxon United States founded by New England Puritans. The histories were expressly derived from national history as it had been iterated throughout the nineteenth century in a variety of forms, chiefly in connection with the Whig political project.3 The story that they told, simply put, is this: in the face of numerous obstacles, a bona fide literary culture had developed in America before
Beyond Transcendence or Beyond Ideology: The New Problematics of Cultural Criticism in America
Authors: Gunn Giles
Published: November 2023

If one were looking for a way to describe contemporary American literary and cultural studies, one could scarcely do better than associate it not, as in Daniel Bell’s phrase, with the “end of ideology,” but rather with its rebirth. By this I mean that almost everywhere in humanistic scholarship these days, one finds people exploring cultural mind-sets that are presumed to define the conceptual and emotional frames within which readers like writers, historical actors like historical interpreters, determine what constitutes meaning. Nor is this analysis of ideology the preoccupation of any particular school of interpretation or specialty alone. Concern with ideology is no more exclusively the preserve of neo-Marxists than of Derrideans, of Renaissance scholars or of gender critics. Instead it serves to focus the work of most contemporary thinkers who seek to relate the products of individual consciousness to more collective forms of mentality and to the systems of power that determine their significance. Contemporary interest in ideology has not, however, developed without certain problems of its own. One of them, though comparatively minor, is related to slippage in the term itself. In current American scholarship, for example, ideology refers to everything from ideas in the service of power to complex semiotic systems that, as Clifford Geertz has proposed, map the political world, simultaneously demarcating its boundaries and furnishing directions about how to move around within it.
The Borderlands of Culture: America Paredes’s George Washington Gomez and Chicano Literature at the End of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Saldivar Ramón
Published: November 2023

The Caribbean revolutionary, writer, and theoretician C. L. R. James once noted that “[o]ver a hundred years ago, Hegel said that the simplest reflection will show the necessity of holding fast ... the affirmation that is contained in every negation, the future that is in the present” (161).1 Doing “cultural studies” before the term, with all of its current proprietary implications, was in common use, James has much to say about questions of culture, writing, and politics, issues of vital concern today. James ‘s analyses are particularly instructive in the way they consider issues of cultural production in relation to personal consciousness and across national boundaries and historical eras. The last few years, however, have been marked less by speculation on the future than by what Fredric Jameson has called “an inverted millenarianism ... in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redeinptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.” (“Postmodernism” 53). Given the recent, astonishingly sudden, collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, an event that Robin Blackburn has called “sufficiently comprehensive to eliminate [Communism] as an alternative to capitalism and to compromise the very idea of socialism” (5), one might understandably be tempted to add to this list, in premature gesture of dismissal, the end of Marxism, or of revolution.
George Whitefield, Spectacular Conversion, and the Rise of Democratic Personality
Authors: Ruttenburg Nancy
Published: November 2023

“I think I am never more humble than when exalted,” wrote George Whitefield in his journal entry for Sunday, 21 January 1739 (Journals 194).1 Ostensibly meant to invoke the conventional Christian belief in empowerment through meekness and yet perceptibly at odds with it, this sentiment is reiterated throughout the spiritual autobiography of the iconoclastic Anglican minister who between 1739 and 1770 undertook an enormously influential series of preaching “tours” in colonial America. By no means the first evangelical minister to enthuse an American audience-Jonathan Edwards had recorded a cluster of “surprising conversions” in the Connecticut River valley in 1735-Whitefield is yet widely credited with launching an intercolonial religious revival of unprecedented scope and duration, which many have argued definitively altered the state of social and political life in the colonies. Known as the Great Awakening, this grass-roots religious movement democratized American religion by shifting the balance of power between minister and congregation.2 The deference traditionally accorded the Puritan clergy gave way to a spirit of popular criticism while the respectful silence customarily observed in Puritan churches was broken by the cries and groans of a congregation whose religious experience was, according to their conservative detractors, increasingly “enthusiastic.” Both developments were legitimated if not explicitly sanctioned by prominent members of the “New Light,” or evangelical, ministry. Many students of the Great Awakening and its aftermath have suggested its central role in the development of an American revolutionary ideology, a development enabled, I would argue, by Whitefield’s strategic reconciliation of power and humility.
Journey to the Village of Souls
Authors: Schiller Anne
Published: November 2023

Ritual specialists often draw parallels between the ritual processing of the dead and the nesting habits of rhinoceros hornbills, extraordinary birds that figure prominently in local mythology. As naturalists have observed repeatedly, when a female hornbill is ready to lay her eggs, she prepares a nest inside the trunk of a dead tree. Her mate follows. He entombs her inside, alone behind a thick wall of resins and mud. If abandoned or forgotten, the female would remain in the tiny chamber forever. Day after day, however, the male hornbill returns. He brings food, which he passes through an opening in the mud wall. Her ordeal continues even after the hatchlings appear. According to local lore, the female may not emerge until seven more days pass. On the thirty-third day of entombment, the male hornbill frees his mate, smashing open the entrance to the nest with his massive beak. Remarkably, if the male has died, other hornbills arrive to take his place. Like their metaphorical alter egos, the hornbills, men and women are also dependent on their spouses and others to break open their tombs. Only in this way can souls begin the journey to the Prosperous Village. Tiwah is the mechanism by means of which this relocation and transmutation occurs.
Order and Anti-Order in Natural and Supernatural Worlds
Authors: Schiller Anne
Published: November 2023

The preceding description of the eschatological beliefs and mortuary celebrations of Hindu Kaharingan villagers, in particular those living along the upper-middle reaches of the Kahayan River, is the product not only of observation but also of long discussions with many celebrants. As we reviewed the format of these celebrations, I was struck by their insistence that the rituals were “correct”: “Jetuh hadat itah uluh Kahayan nah” (This is the way of us Kahayan people). This notion of the proper way is not restricted to death ritual only. From birth to death and even beyond, every aspect of existence is said to be governed by rules and expectations constituting the right way to live. These guidelines are known generally as hadat, usually glossed into the Indonesian language as adat. At the same time, the term adat (customary law) fails to communicate fully the many dimensions and complexities of the Ngajulanguage term. Hadat is broadly applied, referring to custom, to kinship, to ideas about order, and to a sense of tradition. This breadth of usage is not unusual among cognates of the word in other Dayak languages. In a study of the East Kalimantan Kenyah, for example, Herbert Whittier proposed that it is often inappropriate to treat adat as an analytical category distinct from beliefs about the supernatural (1973, 135-37). Peter Metcalf, in his study of Berawan death rituals, raises a similar point about Berawan aded:
Hindu Kaharingan in the New Order
Authors: Schiller Anne
Published: November 2023

Tiwah is the ritual form that villagers and townspeople most often characterize as expressing the essence of their indigenous culture. People ardently declare, “Tiwah tell us who we are:’ In the preceding chapter, I made a case for the way such pronouncements speak to genealogical issues. People also claim that the celebration’s format has remained constant throughout generations. Yet tiwah and the eschatological beliefs and attitudes surrounding its performance are clearly changing. For many indigenous inhabitants of Central Kalimantan, their sense of who they are is also changing. A host of variables have conspicuously influenced the contours and contexts of tiwah.
Religions and Identities
Authors: Schiller Anne
Published: November 2023

Writing of the Sipirok Batak peoples of Sumatra, Susan Rodgers Siregar suggested that without losing their local culture (adat), the Sipirok Batak had managed to absorb the influence of two pan-ethnic religions, Islam and Christianity. In assimilating these belief systems, the Sipirok hybridized their symbolic complexes until they “worked.” By way of illustration, she directed attention to the case of Batak students who, upon returning from universities where they had completed degrees in law or engineering, paid tribute to their ancestors in a traditional manner, then concluded their celebrations by offering up Islamic prayers (1981, 2).
Introduction
Authors: Young Donna E
Published: November 2023

In reflecting on the commercial media coverage of progressive social movements, one comes to appreciate the media’s immense power to alter popular opinion on matters of public policy. Clearly, the media has the potential to advance the objectives of progressive movements. Too often, however, the media exercises its interpretive authority, sometimes deliberately and sometimes carelessly, to obstruct progressive social change. Therefore, feminists and others interested in using the media to promote social change must try to expose weaknesses in journalistic theory and practice while at the same time exploiting the media’s transformative potential.

The chapters in part I, “Portrayals of Feminism in the Media,” offer insightful analyses of the ways in which the commercial media has advanced or hindered feminist and other social movements. The authors examine newspapers and newsrooms, books, radio and television talk shows, and popular news and women’s magazines to explore how the media presents feminism and feminist issues to the public. Different degrees of pessimism about the media’s ability to accurately address contemporary feminist concerns are reflected in the chapters. Each author concentrates on a different critique of the means by which the media constructs and shapes the theory and politics of feminism.
Glamour Law
Authors: Hanigsberg Julia E
Published: November 2023

Who reads women’s magazines? … Millions of American women do, of every class, background, religion, race, and age. Who reads Ms. and the Village Voice? A few hundred thousand people, mostly urban, white, middle class, and college educated. Just twenty years ago, who would have believed it? The United States Attorney General—top lawyer in the land—is named Janet. And sitting on the lofty bench of the U.S. Supreme Court are two women. Yes, we (women) still have a long (long) road ahead, but in arenas as public as the U.S. Senate and as private as the home front, we have indeed made stunning moves forward
The Movie of the Week
Authors: Rapping Elayne
Published: November 2023

When The Burning Bed aired on prime time in October 1984, it drew 75 million viewers, becoming one of the highest-rated movies (theatrical or made-for-TV) in TV history, a distinction it still holds. This made-for-TV movie dramatized the precedent-setting case of Francine Hughes, the battered wife who set her husband’s bed on fire after seventeen years of abuse and was acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity. In the decade since its original airing, The Burning Bed has taken its place among the ranks of TV texts which have come to be considered “major media events.” In their original airing and through subsequent media circulations in reruns, classroom and community screenings, video rentals, and the endless use of selected clips and references in contexts too numerous and diverse to count, these TV texts have entered the public sphere (now largely constituted within the televisual frame, which is our common symbolic “home”) and have permanently affected public consciousness and discourse around key public issues.
The Politics of Surrogacy Narratives
Authors: kaplan E Ann
Published: November 2023

In their narratives, surrogate mothers (SMs) often announce their motive for becoming such mothers as sisterly desire to help infertile women. Yet in practice, surrogacy becomes the terrain for incredible, even unprecedented, hostility and violence between women. It is this discrepancy between sisterly motives and unsisterly practice that I begin to explore here. Since narratives are always discursively formed, my ultimate aim is to understand what discourses produce the women’s stories narrated in popular journals: What audiences do they address? What effect does the context of their publication have on the form of the stories? What economic, political, and other social factors enter in? Important for my purposes is how the melodrama form oversimplifies the actual psychological, political, social, and economic contexts of surrogacy. Women need to find more subtle narrative forms—ones that enable multiple perspectives, ambiguities, contradictions—the yes/but and the no/and/yes possibilities that are crucial as feminisms in the 1990s grapple with difference on new levels.
Lesbians Prostitutes and Murder
Authors: Russo Ann
Published: November 2023

What is the value of a woman’s life? This question haunts me daily. In the United States social, historical, and cultural context, the question has no simple answer. It depends on race, class, sexual identity, and marital status, as well as on the politics of the situation, the interests being served by the valuation, the life being protected or incriminated. In this chapter, I explore the social construction of violence, murder, and power in the news media when victims or perpetrators are identified as either lesbians or women working in prostitution. I am interested in how media constructions inform and shape social value hierarchies that reinforce gender, race, sexual, and class inequalities in this society.
Race Under Construction
Authors: Ikemoto Lisa C
Published: November 2023

In the mass of words and pictures ansmg from the civil unrest that took place in Los Angeles in 1992, the notion of Korean American/African American conflict emerged as an explanation for the violence that occurred. And “Los Angeles” became both metaphor and prophecy for race relations in late-twentieth-century United States society. Without denying that a conflict occurred or exists, my aim is to examine the way we interpreted and gave meaning to race and racial identity during five specific days when what happened on the streets and what happened in the media became apparently inseparable.
Desire and Death Seducing the Lost Father in Quicksand, by Nella Larsen
Authors: Tate Claudia
Published: November 2023

It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities, about clothes and books, about the sweet mingled smell of Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music. It was so hard to think out a feasible way of retrieving all these agreeable, desired things. Just then. Later. When she got up. By and by. She must rest. Get strong. Sleep. Then, afterwards, she could work out some arrangement. So she dozed and dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking, letting time run on.Away.