bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Hearing-Impaired and Normally Hearing Students on Locus of Control, People Orientation, and Study Habits and Attitudes
Authors: Dowaliby Fred J. , Burke Nancy E. , McKee Barbara G.
Published: April 2013

Previous research has demonstrated the relevance of various student aptitudes to instructional outcomes for hearing students. The purposes of the present work were: (a) to refine measures of locus of control, people orientation, and study habits and attitudes developed and/or adapted especially for hearing-impaired students and (b) to compare hearing-impaired students with normally hearing students on these measures. Results demonstrate reliable assessments of these aptitudes and reveal pedagogically important differences between normally hearing and hearing-impaired postsecondary students. These differences were consistent with expectations and theory and are discussed in terms of practical implications.
From Sign to Speech: The Language Development of a Hearing-Impaired Child
Authors: Gardner Judith , Zorfass Judith
Published: April 2013

A case study of Denis, a prelingually hearing-impaired boy who has bilateral severe-to-profound sensory neural hearing loss, is presented. Separate analyses of his spoken and signed language were made, and the change in the relationship between the two modalities was examined. At age 15 months, when Denis began producing signs (MLU 1), he used sign almost exclusively; vocalization was rhythmic and intonational but not meaningful. Eight months later, his expressive language development had changed dramatically: He understood and used speech most of the time, using sign only with new and unfamiliar material. By age 3 years, his oral language compares with that of hearing children of the same age. The case study has practical implications for the education of prelingually hearing-impaired children: Signs have become vehicles for attaching meaning to sounds.
Short Stories with Deaf Fictional Characters
Authors: Guella Bernard
Published: April 2013

The literature on the deaf fictional characters portrayed in short stories is reviewed to see what images of deaf people are presented. The images are grouped into categories useful for discussion purposes; stories that do not easily fit into groups are discussed separately. The findings are supported by research from the fields of deafness, literature, folklore, sociology, and rehabilitation. Images of the deaf are found to be portrayed largely in stereotypes that have little basis in reality, although some stories do offer images based on an understanding of deaf culture. Both major and less-known writers' works are reviewed; stories discussed and references are presented at the end of the paper.
Issues in the Development of a Special Edition for Hearing-Impaired Students of the Seventh Edition of the Stanford Achievement Test
Authors: Allen Thomas E. , White Corinne S. , Karchmer Michael A.
Published: April 2013

The standardized achievement testing of hearing-impaired students is an endeavor that poses unique problems: the proper assignment of students to test level, the sequencing of tests in different subject areas, and the communication of test instructions and items. To address these problems adequately, standardized tests that have been designed and developed for use with hearing students must be adapted for use with hearing-impaired students. This paper describes ways in which the special requirements of testing hearing-impaired students have been accommodated using the new seventh edition of the Stanford Achievement Test.
The Effects of Signed Text on the Reading Comprehension of Hearing-Impaired Children
Authors: Robbins Nancy L.
Published: April 2013

For deaf students who use sign language, spatial-gestural information may be an integral dimension of the semantic network which serves to reconstruct meaning during reading. The purpose of this study was to investigate deaf students' comprehension of paragraphs with and without accompanying sign language pictures above English words. Subjects were 49 elementary and 32 secondary students enrolled in a full-time residential program for the deaf. An adapted version of the Silvaroli Classroom Reading Inventory was prepared for the experiment. The adaptation resulted in three forms per graded reading level—a total of 54 for grades one through six. One edition of each of the three forms appeared in standard English print. The second edition was signed with a pictorial representation of the American Sign Language equivalent above each word. The third edition appeared in Cloze format with every fifth sign deleted. Comparison of means for standard English and signed editions produced alpha levels of .0001 for the elementary and secondary students. Cloze sign format also produced gains over the standard English presentation, p = .0001 for the elementary and p = .0001 for the secondary students. For the 32 secondary students, there was a difference ( p <.05) between the signed and Cloze sign presentations indicating that, although signed and Cloze sign were both more effective than the standard English, statistical evidence did not indicate equal effectiveness for both editions. The results of the study support a language difference viewpoint. This notion should be considered in teaching reading to the deaf.
Parental and Staff Attitudes Toward Instruction in Human Sexuality for Sensorially Impaired Students at the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind
Authors: Love Erminel
Published: April 2013

The purpose of this study was to determine parental and staff attitudes toward the subject of human sexuality instruction for sensorially impaired students at the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. A questionnaire was developed and disseminated to 603 parents/guardians and to 265 staff. The percentage of returns was 32.34% for parents/guardians and 41.13% for staff. Respondents provided questionnaire data in areas including instruction, grouping of students by sex, and person(s) responsible for instruction. Respondents' attitudes toward these areas were examined also in terms of race, sex, and income. The responses showed strong agreement between parents and staff about the need for instruction in human sexuality. Contrary to the notion that parents of children with sensory impairments are resistant to the subject of human sexuality instruction for their children, this survey confirmed the idea that parents and staff are not only supportive but are eager for instruction to begin in this area.
A Re-examination of Sign Language Diglossia
Authors: Hawking James
Published: April 2013

The study of the sociolinguistic aspects of American Sign Language has been greatly influenced by Stokoe's (1969-1970) theory of sign language diglossia, which in turn was influenced by Ferguson's (1959) general theory of diglossia. Subsequent developments in the meaning of the term diglossia and further study of sociolinguistic patterns give us cause to re-examine Stokoe's characterization of signed English as H and American Sign Language as L in a diglossic relationship. Point-by-point analysis of Ferguson's article shows a great discrepancy between his Arabic, French, German, and Greek examples and the American Sign Language situation. Although the concept of diglossia remains of some use in understanding sign language communication, it must be expanded to a theory of bilingualism and diglossia. Consequences of recent developments and their potential for language change are speculated on.
Voice Quality and Speech Intelligibility Among Deaf Children
Authors: Monsen Randall B.
Published: April 2013

Measures of the voice quality and speech intelligibility of deaf children are compared and related to articulatory and acoustic variables. It is shown that voice quality and speech intelligibility are closely related and that abnormalities of both phonation and articulation have a mutual negative effect on intelligibility and voice quality. A primary source of what is heard as the "deaf voice" may be inadequate vowel articulation, caused in part by insufficient tongue movements and by excess tension when speaking, which tends to constrict the pharynx and thereby further reduce the movements in frequency of the vowel resonances.
Gwadloup sé tan nou! (Guadalupe es nuestra): EL impacto de la huelga general en el imaginario político de las Antillas Francesas
Authors: Bonilla Yarimar
Published: April 2013

Au début de l’année 2009, l’île caribéenne française de Guadeloupe a connu la plus grande manifestation sociale de son histoire. Une coalition de 48 syndicats, organisations politiques, économiques, culturelles et civiques ont organisé une grève générale qui a duré 44 jours contre les inégalités économiques et le manque d’initiative politique dans l’île. Cet essai traite de l’impact de ce mouvement dans l’imaginaire politique de la Guadeloupe et la signification de celle-ci pour l’avenir politique des Antilles françaises. Je soutiens que la grève a crée un moment d’exploration politique dans lequel de nouvelles configurations collectives ont été invoquées et testées.
Los pequeños insurrectos: Niños, familia y guerra en Cuba (1868–1878)
Authors: Cardet José Abreu
Published: April 2013

Dans l’article nous présentons une analyse sur la participation des enfants et des familles cubaines dans la première guerre d’indépendance de 1868 à 1878. Notre argument s’inspire des exemples de sa permanence parmi les insurgés durant toute la guerre comme une partie de la famille des révolutionnaires. Tout en évaluant la situation de ces derniers, nous expliquons comment les enfants et leurs familles forment une base très importante de la résistance des indépendantistes cubains.
Taso’s Life: Person and Community
Authors: Mintz Sidney W.
Published: April 2013

L’histoire orale et l’histoire de la vie, sont deux aspects de la recherche historique qui ont corroboré leur importance et engagent un plaidoyer pour une meilleure acceptation. De fait, l’article démontre que l’histoire de la vie de Taso Zayas a illustré une extension significative dans la recherche anthropologique. Avec l’ouvrage The People of Puerto Rico , l’histoire de Taso a marqué la disposition de l’anthropologie envers différentes formes de variété culturelle, au lieu d’analyser uniquement les gens appelés « primitif ».
Negro sobre blanco: La conspiración esclava de 1812 en Puerto Rico
Authors: Pinto Antonio J.
Published: April 2013

Cet article étudie la conspiration d’esclaves du jour des Rois à Porto Rico en 1812, à partir des rapports des autorités coloniales et des déclarations des personnes impliquées. Mes principaux objectifs : d’abord, souligner que dans la formation de ce complot les facteurs externes ont été décisifs, à savoir le couronnement du noir Henri Christophe dans le nord d’Haïti, et le débat abolitionniste des Cortes de Cádiz, qui ont été connus dans les Antilles hispaniques au moyen du boucheà-oreille ; ensuite, démontrer que le complot qui me concerne ainsi que celle de Aponte à Cuba et l’intrigue noire à Santo Domingo, qui ont eu lieu en 1812, n’ont pas été trois phénomènes isolés, mais trois échos différents de la même vague d’instabilité qui a secoué les Antilles espagnoles à cette époque. Pour cela, j’ai articulé mes remarques en cinq parties : dans la première, j’analyse le contexte immédiat de la conspiration ; puis, je décris les facteurs externes qui l’ont favorisé, en récupérant le témoignage des esclaves impliqués dans les troubles initiaux ; dans la troisième, j’étudie le développement du complot pour ensuite énumérer les peines de ceux qui sont impliqués ; et enfin, je présente mes conclusions.
Environmental Struggles in Paradise: Puerto Rican Cases, Caribbean Lessons
Authors: Baver Sherrie
Published: April 2013

Contrairement aux autres pays de l’Amérique du Sud où les conflits environnementaux relatifs aux ressources naturelles incluent l’exploitation minière, les forêts, le pétrole, ou le gaz naturel, les conflits environnementaux dans la Caraïbe comprennent de grands projets touristiques, le contrôle des côtes, et le contrôle des régions naturelles protégées. Cette étude se sert d’une lentille de l’écologie politique pour discuter les formes sociales d’accès et de contrôle des ressources ; l’étude permet de comprendre le tourisme de la région caribéenne comme une construction d’entreprise d’un paradis séculaire. Porto Rico sert comme une étude de cas de citoyens en lutte pour obtenir le contrôle de leurs ressources naturelles, spécifiquement les côtes. Deux cas de luttes continues sont examinées : 1. l’île de Vieques où la problématique principale constitue non seulement le contrôle du développement du tourisme, mais aussi l’avenir de la réserve naturelle nationale et les maladies des habitants de cette île causées par la contamination des matériels militaires abandonnés ; et 2. le Corridor Écologique du Nord-est entre Luquillo-Fajardo, où les discussions demeurent vives en ce qui a trait à l’équilibre entre la protection de la nature et le développement commercial, ainsi que ceux qui bénéficient du développement de cette zone.
“Batista is Dead”: Media, Violence and Politics in 1950s Cuba
Authors: Bronfman Alejandra
Published: April 2013

Cet article a pour point de repère la tentative d’assassinat sur Fulgencio Batista en Mars 1957. S’inspirant des archives de La Havane et de Pinard del Río incluant des récits journalistiques, des mémoires et des bandes sonores, il soutient que l’adoption, au début du vingtième siècle, des nouvelles technologies de télécommunication comme le télégraphe, le téléphone et la radio inspire de nouvelles pratiques politiques. Vu l’influence grandissante des médias, les acteurs historiques de différentes tendances idéologiques ont réalisé combien leur capacité de persuasion s’avère nécessaire. A juste titre, les historiens ont présenté la Cuba des années cinquante en termes d’une narrative de polarisation et de conflit. Contrairement, cet article suggère que l’emphase sur la technologie favorise une approche alternative, liée aux réseaux transnationaux soutenue par des pratiques politiques communes plutôt que des ruptures radicales.
Sexualidades migrantes: La emigración de hombres dominicanos gay
Authors: Toro-Alfonso José , Ortiz Mabel López , Lugo Karen Nieves
Published: April 2013

La vague migratoire de la République dominicaine à Porto Rico est de plus en plus marquée, étant la plus grande minorité ethnique du pays. Pour qu’une personne décide de partir de son pays cela peut avoir de multiples raisons et l’identité sexuelle peut être une des raisons pour lesquelles les homosexuels décident d’émigrer. L’exode motivé par l’orientation sexuelle se nomme migration sexuelle. Ce phénomène est le produit de la répression, l’oppression et la persécution que subit cette population. Pour l’émigrant, vivre dans un autre pays représente de grands défis parce qu’il doit affronter une nouvelle culture, une nouvelle langue et un nouveau contexte de discrimination. Nous examinons la perception d’un groupe d’hommes dominicains résidant à Porto Rico et en République Dominicaine concernant l’émigration et l’imaginaire du phénomène migratoire respectivement. L’étude présente une analyse qualitative sur la base d’entrevues réalisées avec la participation de 8 hommes résidant à Porto Rico et 15 autres en République Dominicaine. Les participants sont très motivés par la migration, car cela leurs donne l’opportunité d’avoir une meilleure condition de vie, d’exprimer leur identité sexuelle loin d’oppression et de discrimination. Les personnes immigrées à Porto Rico révèlent que le processus est délicat car elles sont obligées de s’éloigner de leurs familles, leurs amis et leurs partenaires. La migration causée par l’orientation sexuelle reste masquée par les discours économiques éclipsant la réalité de la discrimination par l’orientation sexuelle.
Island Nation: Mapping Florida, Revising America
Authors: Navakas Michele Currie
Published: April 2013

This essay tells the story of how Americans came to imagine Florida as islands and explains the cultural and political significance of Florida's geographic dispersal during the early national period, a time when efforts at national self-definition were largely rooted in a sense of America as solid ground where national and continental boundaries coincided. I argue that reflections on Florida in maps, settlers' guides, natural histories, and tales of Florida, such as "The Florida Pirate," reveal a largely overshadowed dimension of early national imaginations of self and national identity—namely, the prospect that mobility and dispersal could also sustain American character. The same people who pondered Federalist ideals of nationhood in documents such as the Northwest Ordinance and the Federalist Papers also contemplated popular images of Florida that challenged these ideals and proposed versions of America and Americans that might derive from impermanent, shifting ground.
"One Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had": Imagining the Archive in Early Bermuda
Authors: Kopelson Heather Miyano
Published: April 2013

The early generations of enslaved and bonded Africans and Indians in Bermuda were essential to the functioning of the colony. But beyond their contributions to the colonial enterprise, they continued to practice the skills that connected them to spiritual entities whose power enabled them not only to comprehend their environment but also to affect it directly. In their initial approach to Bermudian shores, in fishing, processing manioc, thatching and weaving with parts of the palmetto tree, as well as making cords with cotton and palmetto fibers, they altered the spiritual landscape in ways that are perhaps less tangible toWestern scholarly inquiry but no less significant to investigating these individuals' influence on the tiny archipelago in which they found themselves. Uncovering these multiple layers of meaning requires imagining the archive in an expansive, speculative way that moves beyond certain narratives of the documentary record to a fuller consideration of the process of making place in an early modern Atlantic colony.
No One Who Reads the History of Hayti Can Doubt the Capacity of Colored Men: Racial Formation and Atlantic Rehabilitation in New York City's Early Black Press, 1827-1841
Authors: Yingling Charlton W.
Published: April 2013

From 1827 to 1841 the black newspapers Freedom's Journal and the Colored American of New York City were venues for one of the first significant racial projects in the United States. To counter aspersions against their race, the editors of these publications renegotiated their community's identity within the matrix of the Black Atlantic away from waning discourses of a collective African past. First, Freedom's Journal used the Haitian Revolution to exemplify resistance, abolitionism, and autonomy. The Colored American later projected the Republic of Haiti as a model of governance, prosperity, and refinement to serve this community's own evolving ambitions of citizenship, inclusion, and rights.
The French Education of Martha Jefferson Randolph
Authors: Kerrison Catherine
Published: April 2013

The four years the young Martha Jefferson spent in a French convent school were profoundly formative of her outlook on female education, a subject that, by his own admission, Thomas Jefferson never spent much time contemplating. The years spent in the company of girls and women, devoted to the intellectual life, and supervised by an abbess who herself epitomized female intelligence, capacity, and energy, shaped her own ideas of the content and meaning of female education. Given such a model, as well as the rich pageantry that Roman Catholic liturgies presented to a Protestant Virginian, it is perhaps no wonder that Martha considered taking the veil and remaining forever. Of course, she did not; rather, she returned to Virginia, married, and learned household management. But she created a culture of learning at Monticello that in many ways looked like an Enlightenment model, emphasizing the cultivation of a rational, disciplined self. These various influences—French, Catholic, and aristocratic, on the one hand, and American, Protestant, and republican, on the other—converged in Randolph's thought to produce a unique view of female identity that fit neither the national paradigm of republican motherhood nor the regional pattern of southern slave mistress.
"Turned Their Minds to Religion": Oquaga and the First Iroquois Church, 1748-1776
Authors: Mandell Daniel R.
Published: April 2013

In the mid-eighteenth century a cluster of Oneida-Tuscarora villages along the upper Susquehanna River formed a Protestant congregation directed by local leaders, who took the names Isaac and Peter, which had close ties to New England missionaries. Like other Native groups in the region, Oquaga embraced Protestantism in response to wars and other terrible disruptions. But this Iroquois church was distinctive. It preceded Samuel Kirkland's more famous effort by two decades; was driven and directed largely from within by Oneida leaders and needs; reflected Iroquoian norms of decorous ritual; initially shared the powerful spirituality of contemporary Native "prophets"; but showed little interest in the radical "New Light" pietism embraced by Natives in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island. After the French and Indian War, the community faced land-hungry colonists, newly arrived Tuscaroras who scorned Christianity, and a large influx of Mohawks loyal to the Church of England—whose leader, Joseph Brant, married Isaac's daughter. In 1773 Kirkland visited and roiled the church with his insistence on Calvinist reforms. The subsequent division and dissolution of the Oquaga church highlights how local, regional, and international politics—particularly those of the American Revolution—shaped religious identity in America.
Circles upon Circles: Tautology, Form, and the Shape of Democracy in Tocqueville and Melville
Authors: Greiman Jennifer
Published: April 2013

Two of the nineteenth century’s most significant and prolific thinkers on the idea and practice of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville and Herman Melville both invoke the shape of a circle to foreground the representational challenges of a self-originating and self-defining political form. In this, they identify democracy with the tautologies of absolute sovereign power, but they also find in the circles of democracy a form and an art of common action through which democracy might be transformed. The circles that first appear in Democracy in America and Moby-Dick as figural responses to the tautology of self-grounding authority provide both a history and a corrective to recent political theory that tends to describe democracy as reducible to sovereignty. By casting the problem of representing democracy as a formal one, Tocqueville and Melville identify it with artifice and art as well, imagining alternative possibilities for democratic political action, while revealing how fully the formal structures of their own works are implicated in the art of democracy.
“No Reparation”: Accounting for the Enduring Harms of Slavery in Stephen Crane’s The Monster
Authors: Laski Gregory
Published: April 2013

This essay reconsiders the racial politics of Stephen Crane’s 1898 novella The Monster . Far from providing yet another case in support of the prevailing thesis that this white writer had little if anything insightful to say about issues of race, I argue, the narrative affords unique insight into the afterlife of slavery and the racialized contours of wrong, debt, and responsibility that haunted the postbellum United States. Such a possibility has remained in critics’ blind spot, however, because the text’s sense of history and temporality diverges significantly from the adherence to chronology and the associated notion of discrete epochs presupposed by the historicist approaches scholars generally deploy to unravel the work. In its conceptualization of the peculiar institution’s persistent injury as the devaluation of blackness that survives legal emancipation, The Monster gives narrative form to the process, if not necessarily the end, of accounting for slavery’s endurance through time and across the boundaries imposed by standard historical markers. In so doing, Crane’s novella exhibits a politically charged double vision that renders legible the persistence of the past in the present—the narrative task implicit in any project of redress—and suggests a way out of the problem of causality that confronts debates about making amends for slavery even today.
Emily Dickinson in Domingo
Authors: Fretwell Erica
Published: April 2013

This essay illuminates the function of Domingo in Emily Dickinson’s work by examining a far-reaching set of debates about food, race, and poetics in the nineteenth century. By pairing her writings with freewoman Malinda Russell’s recently recovered _A Domestic Cook Book_ (1866), this culinary approach shows how Dickinson’s “taste” of race shiftd after the Civil War: from a bittersweet aftertaste of the Haitian Revolution to an intensely sweet expeirment in aesthetic freedom. The essay ends by connecting the emergence of culinary science to Dickinson’s initial reception. Whereas her poetics racialize taste, early readers used taste to racialize Dickinson’s poetics. Reading Emily Dickinson in, with, and through Domingo reconstitutes sensory tatse and aesthetic taste as a synthesis of racial, gustatory, and literary encounters.
Signposts on the Road Less Taken: John Newton Hyde’s Anti-Racist Illustrations of African American Children
Authors: Bernstein Robin
Published: April 2013

In the second half of the nineteenth century, popular images of African American children became increasingly denigrating. However, John Newton Hyde, a white, prolific, mid-nineteenth century commercial artist of middling talent produced two quietly extraordinary, radically anti-racist images of African American children. Each of these illustrations cannily revised an image from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to envision racial egalitarianism. This article locates these images within the intensifying visual denigration of black children during the second half of the nineteenth century—a process of dehumanization that reached its nadir, by the end of the century, in the grotesque figure of the “pickaninny.” If Hyde—a white man of economic privilege, a political moderate, and an artist of no great genius—was able to visualize racial egalitarianism through black children, then the potential existed for such images to become widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. But that did not happen. Hyde’s two images linger as small, painful signposts upon a visual and political road that was less taken.
A Dis-Identity Card: Geoffrey Hartman on the Paul de Man Affair, Twenty-Five Years Later
Authors: Ben-Naftali Michal
Published: April 2013

This essay will concentrate on one aspect of Hartman’s famous essay “History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man,” focusing on his notion of intellectual responsibility and judgment. I would like to distinguish between Derrida’s melancholic intervention in this affair and Hartman’s mournful one, a distinction that brings about two different notions of responsibility. Hartman introduces a complex idea of judgment which resembles that of Hannah Arendt, though she is not referred to explicitly in that context. To end, a distinction will be made between Hartman’s literary-theoretical task and his moral task, thereby differentiating him from the post-war figure of the philosopher-as-a-reader-of-literature.
Theology and the Imagination
Authors: Hartman Geoffrey
Published: April 2013

Levinas has said that Judaism is a religion for adults. He said this not to disparage other religions but in the context of valuing the Talmudic/midrashic mode of commentary and law-finding. In Midrash, he claims, reason recognizes itself. My argument here is that imagination too should recognize itself, in all religions. For illustration this essay chooses a basic theological constant, the story of Creation. It is my hope that when theology’s imaginative truths are fully explored they will be freed from dogmatism and appreciated also in a liberal arts curriculum.
Pricing Persons: Consecration, Compensation, and Individuality in the Mishnah
Authors: Balberg Mira
Published: April 2013

In this article I explore the procedures of monetary evaluation of persons as constructed in three halakhic contexts in the Mishnah consecration of humans to the Temple, restitutions for bodily injuries, and compensations for rape and seduction. I argue that in all three contexts we can identify an underlying tension between two competing paradigms of personhood: a paradigm which stresses the unity and sameness of all persons qua persons, and a paradigm which stresses variations and diversity among different persons. The rabbis oscillate between biblical legal models, which assign fixed and non-fluctuating values to human life, wellbeing, dignity, etc., and a commitment to accommodating the particularities of persons as individuals with distinct sets of traits, a commitment which is manifested, in its rabbinic construction, in the individual monetary assessment of each person. While the rabbis take different paths in grappling with this tension in these three contexts, the analysis presented here makes clear that the rabbis considered a legal model that disregards the discrepancies between different individuals to be problematic and unsatisfactory. I suggest that the competing models of sameness as opposed to diversity that we find in the Mishnah reflect a fundamental tension between a biblical ethos on the one hand, and the impact of Graeco-Roman social and conceptual frameworks on the other hand.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
Authors: Idel Moshe
Published: April 2013

The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.
How the Golem Came to Prague
Authors: Dekel Edan , Gurley David Gantt
Published: April 2013

This article examines the emergence of the Golem legend associated with the Maharal of Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, with specific attention to the innovations found in two little-known versions by important Jewish literary figures of the era: the Bohemian-born Viennese poet and editor Ludwig Frankl and the Danish writer Meir Aaron Goldschmidt. These versions, it is argued, reveal several crucial mechanisms that help explain the shift from a Golem tale distributed among various individual places and rabbis, to one with little or no specificity at all, and finally to the Prague version that dominates the subsequent literary and artistic manifestations of the legend. The proliferation of non-Jewish renditions of the legend in the first quarter of the century, starting with the folklorist Jakob Grimm’s brief report in 1808, provides a context for several Jewish reconfigurations of the material around the centrality of Prague and its most famous rabbi, the Maharal. By 1847, the transition is complete with the near-canonical version published by Leopold Weisel in the popular and influential anthology of Bohemian Jewish tales, Sippurim. But in the decade leading up to Weisel’s publication, Frankl and Goldschmidt both produce intricate and sophisticated versions that offer a glimpse into the motifs and techniques engaged by the Jewish literary imagination of the period.
Winged Words and Wounded Voices: Geoffrey Hartman on Midrash and Testimony
Authors: Liska Vivian
Published: April 2013

Geoffrey Hartman’s distinctive contribution to Jewish Studies encompasses two separate spheres—a reflection on testimony, poetry, and culture after the Holocaust, as well as an exploration of the Jewish textual tradition, more particularly Midrashic commentary. While seemingly unrelated, Hartman’s writings in the two domains display striking similarities. Both bodies of texts are informed by a tension between two forces: on the one hand an attraction towards an unnamable absolute that eludes representation, disrupts the quotidian, and escapes human grasp, and on the other a humanizing impulse turned towards the unintelligible, the moderate, and the concrete that embraces the impure diversity of everyday life. A reconstruction of the oscillation between these two poles in Hartman’s “Jewish” writings will focus on the intersection between his idea of Judaism and the role of literature and commentary in invoking an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical intensity without succumbing to the totalizing dangers of the ecstatic and the sublime.
Virgilian Incarnation: Hartman and the Issue of Auerbach’s Jewishness
Authors: de Graef Ortwin , Vermeulen Pieter
Published: April 2013

In his memoir A Scholar’s Tale, Geoffrey Hartman recognizes the decisive influence of Erich Auerbach, one of his teachers at Yale, on his own early work. Auerbach came to Yale after having spent the Second World War in Istanbul, where he wrote his magisterial Mimesis. That book not only bears the stamp of the war that was then ravaging Europe, the continent whose literary heritage he aimed to preserve in Mimesis, but also of a second trauma: the demise, somewhere (according to Auerbach) in between Dante and Montaigne, of a divinely sanctioned reality, which condemned the West to the historical world. For Auerbach, what saved this historical reality was the unfulfilled figure of the Incarnation still haunting it against all odds... The influence of Auerbach’s sense of lateness, and of the autumnal literary ethos it sustains, can be traced in Hartman’s lifelong engagement with William Wordsworth, whose exemplary remediation of the loss of rural life, Hartman recognizes, today threatens to fade away in our increasingly networked memory-and mediascapes. It is significant that in the last three decades, Hartman has supplemented his Romanticism and his work on the memory of the Holocaust with an increasingly explicit elaboration of the Jewish imagination. Does this point to the perceived insufficiency of Auerbach’s autumnal stance? Or does the tension between the literary, the disaster, and the religious point to an ethos beyond Incarnation?
Fanon’s Travels in Postcolonial Theory and Post-Apartheid Politics
Authors: Johnson David
Published: April 2013

Using Edward Said’s reflections on travelling theory as a point of departure, this essay traces how Frantz Fanon’s radical anticolonial and postcolonial theory has travelled to South Africa in the last fifty years. Said’s mode of analyzing travelling theory is extended in two ways, namely by attending in detail to how specific historical moments and locations set limits and exert pressures on theory, and secondly, by examining how communities of activist-intellectuals rather than individual theorists reinterpret theory. Three groups of South African appropriations of Fanon’s theory are analyzed: the anti-apartheid activists of the 1970s; African National Congress government ministers post-1994; and the communities of resistance critical of the ANC’s post-apartheid governance. In the light of these reception histories, certain limitations of Said’s model of travelling theory are identified and conclusions are drawn regarding how Fanon’s theory serves conflicting political interests in these different (mis-)appropriations.
Unstable Kinship: Trojanness, Treason, and Community in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight
Authors: Schiff Randy P.
Published: April 2013

The essay ethno-symbolically analyzes Trojan identity as illuminating ethnic instability and blood-based elitism in the Britain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Classical and medieval sources reveal the fluid nature of the Trojan identity co-opted by various cultures. Presenting British community as a neo-Trojan ethnie , the Gawain -poet produces an ethno-historical frame that grounds Arthurian culture in violence and division. Gawain’s expertise in the essentially deceptive discourse of courtly love links him with the originary treason of the Trojan frame, while his inadvertent founding of a sartorial sign discloses the degeneration of epic Trojan warriors into the sophisticated courtiers of romance. The Gawain -poet presents British community as cursed both by the fractiousness and the elitism of its Trojan roots, as the story of purely ethical bonds being forged between Gawain and Bertilak is shown to be a ruse masking the primacy of a blood-based hierarchy dominated by sovereign siblings.
Doing Shakespeare in a Kazakhstani College: Teacher Plays Ethnographer
Authors: Kietzman Mary Jo
Published: April 2013

This essay documents the author’s work with Kazakhstani English-language students to devise and stage a play based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet . The cross-cultural nature of the project involved them all in a process of renegotiating their identities as they constructed something like a micro-culture in their dramatic classroom world. The essay examines the ways the author’s approach challenged the Soviet educational legacy of teaching about authors as icons by giving students texts and encouraging them to use the texts to understand themselves and to reflect on their culture. But the author’s role as teacher also underwent change. Accustomed to student-centered American classrooms, she could never assume the autocratic authority of Kazakhstani teachers. Teaching students to write, to act, and to direct, she had to relinquish authority to become a working member of the group. As students learned to play new roles as writers, stage managers, directors, designers, and actors, the author found herself writing about their revelations, struggles, desires, and dreams. In short, she became an ethnographer. Ethnography not only helped her cope with difficult moments of dissonance and confusion, but heightened her awareness of the inherent drama of both classroom teaching and the cross-cultural encounter.
“I Feel Close to Myself”: Solipsism and US Imperialism in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Authors: Clarke Michael Tavel
Published: April 2013

This essay addresses the relationship between solipsism (as a theme and formal device) and American imperialism in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried . The essay counters an emerging consensus among critics that the solipsistic form of the book reinforces the American imperialism that led to the Vietnam War. Instead, the article contends that the solipsism in O’Brien’s fiction is in fact central to his critique of US imperialism.
Marìa Luisa Bombal and Sherwood Anderson: Early Twentieth-Century Pan-American Feminism(S)
Authors: Esplugas Celia C.
Published: April 2013

This essay analyzes the feminist perspectives evident in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and María Luisa Bombal’s La ultima niebla and La amortajada . In their respective cultures female characters, victimized by fathers and husbands, constricting social environments, and authoritarian religions, succumb to personal frustration that leads to emotional imbalance and, in some cases, even to the verge of insanity. Scathing critics of their monolithic cultures, both Anderson and Bombal condemn institutional structures that repress women’s rights and individual development. Strong advocates of women’s full-fledged subjectivity, these authors deconstruct patriarchal cultures and pioneer the advent of women’s liberation in their respective societies. The comparative study of these two authors reveals an emergent Pan-American dialectic that continues to demand the deconstruction of patriarchal cultures in today’s global societies.
“Selective in Your Mercies”: Privilege, Vulnerability, and the Limits of Empathy in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Authors: Gauthier Tim
Published: April 2013

Since September 11, 2001, a number of critics, including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, have outlined a greater need for empathy, most specifically from those who were targeted on that day. The logic of this argument is that those who were victimized should use their newfound vulnerability as a means of ‘resonating’ with the other. Ian McEwan’s Saturday problematizes precisely the scenario to which these theorists allude. The novel illuminates a desire to empathize, to recognize empathy’s importance, while unintentionally demonstrating just how difficult it is to enact. The protagonist, already existing in a state of heightened alert, is confronted by an other in whom he recognizes anger and hatred, but also suffering. Arguably, these should prove optimal conditions for the exercise of empathy. The novel, however, demonstrates the problematics of just such an exercise. For while Saturday may declare the need for empathy and extol it as a cornerstone of Western secularized society, the text simultaneously reveals how easily its application can be perverted. The seemingly benign and benevolent actions of the novel’s neurosurgeon emphasize the blind spots of privilege and the co-opting of empathy to assert a superior moral stance over that of the other. The dialectics of the novel thus suggest that a retrenchment of differences is a more probable response to violence than a recognition of shared vulnerability.
Graphic Ethics: Theorizing the Face in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
Authors: Darda Joseph
Published: April 2013

Critics indicate that the graphic memoir is uniquely capable of making an ethical appeal to the reader. But it remains unclear what this mechanism is or how it functions in the text. It is crucial that we recognize what representational practices do and do not communicate what Avery Gordon calls complex personhood. “Complex personhood,” she notes, “means that all people . . . remember and forget, are beset by contradictions, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others” (1997, 4). The graphic memoir, I aim to make clear, lends itself to the transmission of this complexity. In considering the ethics of the graphic memoir, I first trace the origin of the debate within comics criticism. Second, calling on Judith Butler’s theorization of the Levinasian notion of ‘the face,’ I establish an ethical framework to substantiate the thus-far-unclear claims connecting formal destabilization to reader obligation. Third, I demonstrate this ethical import as it operates within Marjane Satrapi’s émigré graphic memoir Persepolis .
Humanism and Holiness: Leon Battista Alberti between Florence and Rome
Authors: Kircher Timothy
Published: April 2013

This article investigates Alberti’s relation to Italian humanist ideas around 1450, as they pertain to the dialogue between classical erudition and religious insight. The key source in this investigation is Alberti’s Latin novel Momus . While scholars have often interpreted this work as a commentary on the papal court of Nicholas V, to which Alberti belonged, the essay argues that it shows Alberti’s critique of humanist thinking on holiness. This critique emerges through the work’s variant of the Prometheus myth. Comparing the rendering of this myth in the Momus with allegorical readings of the Prometheus story by Giovanni Boccaccio and Marsilio Ficino, we may observe how Alberti took issue with other humanists’ assertion of enlightened reason, symbolized by Promethean fire. Alberti looked skeptically at the epistemological and ontological claims that supported Renaissance humanist allegorism, seeing in these imaginings more the absence or withdrawal of the divine rather than its manifestation.
Visual Intertextualities in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien
Authors: Mirabile Andrea
Published: April 2013

The reciprocal nourishment between the verbal and the visual arts punctuates Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry, narrative, and theater. Influenced by Richard Wagner, Walter Pater, and Bernard Berenson, D’Annunzio is interested in both mixing the optic and the haptic and transgressing the guardrails between the arts. In Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911)—a sacred drama written in French with Ida Rubinstein in the title role, incidental music by Claude Debussy, and costumes by Russian Ballet master Léon Bakst—the visual and the verbal intermingle to create a ‘total artwork,’ which both indulges in decadent stylization and foreshadows modernist multimedia experiments.
Ariosto’s Dialogue with Authority in the Erbolato
Authors: Looney Dennis
Published: April 2013

This essay examines how Ariosto used the Erbolato , a work in Italian he probably wrote between 1530 and 1533, to defend his youthful decision to turn away from the philological world of his humanist contemporaries with its focus on scholarship and the composition of verse in Latin in order to pursue a different kind of learning better expressed in the vernacular. In the process of making this defense, he parodies humanism in general, Neoplatonic philosophy in particular, with a nod to the growing interest in some circles of Ferrarese culture to challenge the Church’s authority, doctrinal and political.
L’idea dell’etica dell’artista di Pirandello nella rappresentazione tragica dell’ Enrico IV
Authors: Piredda Patrizia
Published: April 2013

Il seguente articolo è uno studio indaga la concezione dell’etica artistica di Pirandello. Nella prima parte individuo le linee generali del pensiero pirandelliano sul ruolo dell’artista e dell’arte in relazione alla logica con la quale Pirandello polemizza. Nella seconda parte, attraverso l’analisi dei personaggi dell’ Enrico IV , dimostro che Pirandello considera etico solo l’agire dell’artista che crea le sue rappresentazioni ascoltando il proprio sentimento e accompagnando la creazione da una costante riflessione, come Enrico IV che crea la sua maschera partendo dal suo proprio sentire, contrariamente agli altri personaggi che, riproducendo le norme di un canone, agiscono similmente agli stoici che accettano passivamente i ruoli che il destino assegnava loro.
Crusade and Conversion: Islam as Schism in Pius II and Nicholas of Cusa
Authors: Moudarres Andrea
Published: April 2013

In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Western European authors primarily described the Turkish enemy as a barbaric force. Within this established, albeit by no means unanimous, storyline it is possible to make out a wide array of nuances that distinguish the positions adopted by prominent humanists such as Pius II and Nicholas of Cusa. As this essay will examine the theological elements of their critiques of Islam in the Epistle to Mahomet II and the Cribatio Alkorani , I will argue that the arguments put forth in these critiques were primarily anchored to the same principles and myths formulated during the Middle Ages. Pius II and Cusa weave together different threads of doctrinal disagreement to engage in a polemical dialogue between Christianity and Islam that casts Mohammed as a schismatic and his Turkish followers as the arch enemies of the Christian faith.
The Other as the Judge: Testimony and Rhetoric in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo
Authors: Baldasso Franco
Published: April 2013

This contribution examines Primo Levi’s testimony, Se questo è un uomo , focusing on the rhetorical strategies of the text. Following classic theory of judicial speeches and through a close comparison between the first two editions of the book, the article shows that the sense of “interior liberation” Levi spoke of as the ground of his testimony was not only an overwhelming drive to let “the others” know of the Holocaust: it is an appeal for a suspension of the judgment about his personal survival. In this regard, Se questo è un uomo is not only a testimony, but a confession.
The Female Voice in Italian Renaissance Dialogue
Authors: Cox Virginia
Published: April 2013

A remarkable novelty within the early modern Italian tradition of literary dialogue was its inclusion in significant numbers of women among the interlocutors portrayed. Read with due sensitivity to genre conventions, these dialogues can offer insights into gendered speech decorum that interestingly nuance the evidence offered by prescriptive texts such as conduct manuals. The essay offers an overview of early modern Italian dialogues featuring female speakers, encompassing a chronological account of their development, and discussions of their production contexts and thematics, as well as an analysis of their gender dynamics.