bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Milton's God and the Matter of Chaos
Authors: Rumrich John
Published: February 2007

Milton scholarship has long regarded chaos in Paradise
Lost as hostile to God and creation. This judgment
identifies Milton with traditional Western attitudes toward matter and
material disorder—evident as early as the Babylonian creation epic, the
Enuma elish. In contrast to such attitudes,
modern science conceives of chaos as dynamically productive of order, and
postmodern cultural studies sees chaos as a relevant principle of ironic
indeterminacy. Milton anticipates the postmodern endorsement of chaos in his
theology of matter and in the symbolic reflections and allegorical
representations of chaos in Paradise Lost.
Appreciation of chaotic disorder and of indeterminacy and disapproval of the
tyrannical suppression of these qualities distinguish Milton's idiosyncratic
theology, political theory, and aesthetics. Even Milton's God contains the
potency of chaotic matter, a womblike virtue essential to God's creative
power.
“Abroad and at Home”: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth'sBelinda
Authors: Greenfield Susan C.
Published: February 2007

A number of critics suggest that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature femininity is portrayed as both similar to and different from colonial otherness in ways that destabilize the English woman's relation to empire. Maria Edgeworth'sBelinda(1801) presents an opportunity to enrich this discussion because of the novel's synchronization of domestic and colonial authority, sustained attention to the sexual, national, and racial ambiguities posed by transvestites and Creoles, and chaotic variety of events that prohibits political fixity. Following the multiple allusions to “home” and “abroad” inBelinda,I argue that female homoeroticism and miscegenation become analogous dangers and reflect eighteenth-century concerns about the mutability of bodily and colonial boundaries.
On Dialogic Speech
Authors: Yakubinsky Lev Petrovich , Eskin Michael
Published: February 2007

Although the pivotal role of the Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky (1892-1945) in the development of modern linguistics and literary theory has been repeatedly stated by prominent scholars, he has remained virtually unknown outside Russia. Yakubinsky was educated at Petersburg University in 1909–15 during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, a field that hitherto had been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarians' positivist and historicist concerns were contested by a range of scholars interested in the functional diversity of language and concomitantly in the processuality of language as an individual and a collective activity. In this heated atmosphere of reevaluation and change Yakubinsky, with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Viktor B. Shklovsky, initiated the movement that later came to be called Russian formalism. In fact, the functional distinction between “poetic” and “practical” language that Yakubinsky introduced in his groundbreaking study “On the Sounds in Poetic Language” (“O”; Jakubinskij 163-76) became the cornerstone of formalist criticism and “served as the activating principle for the Formalists' treatment of the fundamental problems of poetics” (Èjchenbaum 8). Yakubinsky thus laid the foundation for structuralism. However, he soon moved away from the formalists' preoccupation with poetic and literary texts and devoted himself to the social dimension of the functions and forms of language.
The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism
Authors: Lipking Lawrence
Published: February 2007

A collaboration between poetry and nationalism, exemplified by the tutelary border guard or “genius of the shore,” accounts for the interest of many Renaissance poems; redrawing the map, poets express the myths and grievances that hold their nations together. In “Lycidas,” Milton tries to redeem the fatal voyage of Edward King, his Anglo-Irish friend, by renewing the ideal of a missionary spirit, joining poet, saint, and soldier in a protectorate to bridge Ireland and England. InThe Lusiads, Camões personifies the Cape of Storms as the titan Adamastor (“Unconquerable”), who curses the audacity of da Gama's voyagers and predicts their future calamities; hence the figure represents both the glory and the self-pity of Portugal and of its national poet. Though Milton and Camões hope for a bright colonial future, they turn their faces, like Benjamin's Angel of History, toward memories of shipwreck in the past.
Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity
Authors: Rigolot François
Published: February 2007

Renaissance symbolic representations of gender identity and sexual difference appear firmly grounded in the medieval and Neoplatonic misogynist tradition, no matter how unacceptable the terms of that tradition may be to modern sensibility. In Rabelais's works the exemplarity of Christian humanist discourse often coincides with what today is considered profoundly disturbing behavior. The recurrence of trickery, obscenity, and violence against women does not seem to bother the Rabelaisian narrator, who gleefully presents his writings as “beaux textes d'évangilles en françoys” ‘fine gospel texts in French.’ I concentrate on a single episode ofPantagruel, the one devoted to Panurge's and Pantagruel's twin amatory adventures with a lady of Paris. Although the episode has been the object of some probing critical scrutiny, little attention has been paid to the biblical intertext, which Rabelais's humanist entourage must easily have recognized and which can be read in the context of what modern critics have come to recognize as the Renaissance crisis of exemplarity.
Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens'sA Christmas Carol
Authors: Jaffe Audrey
Published: February 2007

Dickens'sA Christmas Carolexemplifies the literary and cinematic use of visual representation to reinforce ideological values in Western culture. The story positions Scrooge and its readers as spectators of a series of culturally valorized scenes; access to the spectator's idealized self depends on the ability to perceive and desire (to identify and identify with) the values embedded in those scenes. Scrooge saves his life by recovering what the story posits as his natural ability to identify with representations, an ability that characterizes both his ideal, sympathetic self and the ideal subject of commodity culture.
Imaging the Human Body: Quasi Objects, Quasi Texts, and the Theater of Proof
Authors: Crawford T. Hugh
Published: February 2007

In the field of medical imaging, theory, technique, and rhetoric converge to produce knowledge. Historical taboo and cultural belief in the fragility of life have protected the interior of the human body from the scientist's prying eyes; nevertheless, in the modern period (since about 1540), the production of medical knowledge has depended on the unveiling of physical detail. Recent work in the sociology of science—notably Bruno Latour's concept of the theater of proof—has questioned this epistemology. Latour argues that scientific knowledge can be produced by superimposing data that create an effect of reality. To illuminate traditional strategies for constructing convincing accounts of hidden biological processes, I examine texts by Andreas Vesalius, William Beaumont, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. I then discuss an advertisement for a contemporary medical-imaging device that, by foregrounding the superimposition of diagnostic data, provides a useful counterexample to the constructed objectivity of the earlier texts.
Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale
Authors: Griffin Susan M.
Published: February 2007

Popular American tales of women's escapes from Roman Catholic convents were important manifestations of the virulent anti-Catholicism of the 1830s and 1850s. These stories also reveal how questions of evidence were imbricated with the woman question in nineteenth-century American culture. “Fictional” and “nonfictional” versions of these narratives attempt to prove their veracity, using a common standard of evidence and shared methods of authentication, documentation, and corroboration—including a reliance on their Protestant audience's reading history. Yet the multiple voices and forms and the visual, as well as verbal, rhetoric that the telling of the escaped nun's story entails work to destabilize feminine spiritual, religious, and moral authority. The escaped nun's intertextual story expresses and contains a cultural anxiety about young Protestant women and their influence in the remaking of American Protestant religious practices.
A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s “Best-Speaking Witnesses”
Authors: Foster Donald W.
Published: February 2007

A Funeral Elegywas written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare'sSonnetsin 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies,A Funeral Elegyreceived scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”
Shaking Down the Pillars: Lamentation, Purity, and Mallarmé's “Hommage” to Wagner
Authors: Saunders Rebecca
Published: February 2007

Mallarmé constructs a “crisis of verse” that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation to produce his celebrated poetic purity. Indeed, he constructs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on ambiguity. The significance of this defilement spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé‘s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Third Republic, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Moreover, because defilement is at once material and symbolic and because that “symbolism” is an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality, Mallarmé‘s cultivation of defilement is a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure” philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential.
Presidential Address 1995: Habent Sua Fata Libelli; or, Books, Jobs, and the MLA
Authors: Gilman Sander L.
Published: February 2007

Terence remarked that books have their fates. Many are one day in fashion, the next day discarded. A quick look at the remainder tables at Barnes and Noble or at Chicago's Powell's reflects last week's or last month's reading. The fate of these books—our books—is clear. Books have their fates, but so do their authors and their readers, and it is the fates of those authors and readers that I want to speak of. Ours seems to be a time of transition, and this transition has created much fear and anxiety within our ranks. We see the possibility that younger colleagues will be displaced, tossed away much like the books on the remainder table. Or if they do find work, they will be employed marginally—employed part-time, underpaid, and exploited. This fear has had both personal and political repercussions over the past year for many of us. Yet we are a profession that reads, and the act of reading is an optimistic one, especially in the cold, dark night of the soul.
Ghosts of Liberalism: Morrison'sBelovedand the Moynihan Report
Authors: Berger James
Published: February 2007

In focusing the novelBelovedon Sethe's forced infanticide, Toni Morrison places social and familial trauma at the center of American discourses on race. This emphasis opposes two forms of the denial of trauma that have characterized American politics since the late 1960s—neoconservative denial of the continuing effects of institutional racism and the New Left and black-nationalist denial of violence within African American communities.Belovedinvokes an essentially liberal position of the sort that culminated and largely ended in the Moynihan report of 1965. But Morrison corrects the errors of this form of liberalism by insisting on the agency and autonomy of African American culture and on the positive roles of women.
Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass'sMy Bondage and My Freedom
Authors: Dorsey Peter A.
Published: February 2007

In hisNarrative(1845), Frederick Douglass constructs a self based on conversion rhetoric and binary logic. In the greatly expandedMy Bondage and My Freedom(1855), he complicates this textual self by both imitating and criticizing tropes conventionally used in the slavery debate, such as metaphors related to animals, Christianity, and manhood. Emphasizing the constructed nature of mimesis and metaphor, Douglass demonstrates his ability to escape the bondage of reductionist language even as he claims the power associated with linguistic mastery. This revision of self emerges from his experience of northern racism, manifested in his limited role in William Lloyd Garrison's organization. Douglass's renunciation of Garrisonian dogma and his entry into political action—including his striking textual reinterpretation of the United States Constitution—coincide with the stylistically “modernist” self of the second autobiography.
Beyond Authenticity and Creolization: Reading Achebe Writing Culture
Authors: ten Kortenaar Neil
Published: February 2007

Postcolonial discussion of culture revolves around the twin poles of authenticity and creolization, which are not descriptions of culture but rhetorical constructs used to win the adherence of the members of a community. These metaphors are valid insofar as they convince community members to adopt a certain identity. Chinua Achebe'sArrow of God, a postcolonial novel set in the early colonial era, supports my contention that cultural identity has always been constructed by such appeals. The priest Ezeulu invents the tradition that he upholds, and in so doing he (unintentionally) permits the consensual writing of a tragedy in which an authentic identity is lost. The experience of colonization is configured by the community of Umuaro as a tragedy but by the novel as the writing of a tragedy. I emphasize the community's capacity to write a cathartic narrative.
Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon'sBlack Skin, White Masks
Authors: Bergner Gwen
Published: February 2007

InBlack Skin. White Masks, Frantz Fanon transposes psychoanalysis from its gender-based framework of subject formation in order to interrogate racial subjectivity in the colonial context. Though the work inaugurates a psychoanalytic discourse of racial identity, Fanon—like Freud—takes the male as the norm. Women are implicitly present, nonetheless, in Fanon's conception of colonial identity—a mirroring relationship between white men and black men that is mediated through the bodies of women. This colonial dynamic suggests a sex-gender economy circulating women among men to construct and maintain racial categories. Though Fanon's analysis of black women's sexual desire has been dismissed as obviously sexist, the terms of his critique reveal norms of gender, class, and sexuality by which black women are bound and against which he formulates black masculinity. Analyzing gender in Fanon's text works to broaden the outline of black women's subjectivity and to delineate the interdependence of race and gender.
Epilogue: Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness
Authors: Mohanty Satya P.
Published: February 2007

Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that I think your Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon, and all its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops who were in Sao Thome, Cape Verde, and here in Loando—all learned and virtuous men—find fault with it. We have been here ourselves for forty years and there have been among us very learned Fathers…. [N]ever did they consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers of Brazil buy these slaves for our service without any scruple….

Brother Luis Brandaon to Father Sandoval, letter dated 12 March 1610 (Zinn 29)

So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? … Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you? … We first met at the MLA panel, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action.” This letter attempts to break a silence which I had imposed upon myself shortly before that date.

Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” dated 6 May 1979 (68–70)
“Discovering Some New Race”: Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills” and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness
Authors: Schocket Eric
Published: February 2007

Recent readings of Rebecca Harding Davis's landmark exploration of the emerging industrial working class have been concerned primarily with the connections between class formation and gender relations. By focusing attention instead on the text's indebtedness to various contemporaneous discourses of racial subjection (which crucially shape and delimit analyses of class and representations of labor during the late antebellum era), I argue that the transcendence, mobility, and salvation that the text allows its working-class characters are subtly but consistently aligned with an emerging racial conception of whiteness. Not only does this alignment link freedom with whiteness and exploitation with blackness, but through these disabling linkages it also establishes a literary precedent for representing (and Actively resolving) class struggles with racial language.
From the Suwanee to Egypt, There's No Place like Home
Authors: Ward Cynthia
Published: February 2007

Zora Neale Hurston'sSeraph on the Suwanee(1948) and Carolyn Chute'sThe Beans of Egypt, Maine(1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite present-day critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated interest in Hurston's other works, particularlyTheir Eyes Were Watching God(1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers lind it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical receptions ofSeraph, The Beans,andTheir Eyesreveals that the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged forTheir Eyes,one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning, and reality. In addition,SeraphandThe Beanspoint, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification.
Drama, Performativity, and Performance
Authors: Worthen W. B.
Published: February 2007

There is a crisis in drama studies that is reflected in the ways different disciplines understand dramatic texts and performance. Literary studies, absorbed with the functioning of language, often betrays a desire to locate the meanings of the stage in the dramatic text. Performance studies has developed a vivid account of nondramatic performance, which appears to depart from textual authority. Both disciplines, however, view drama as a species of performance driven by its text; as a result, drama appears as an unduly authorized mode of performance. Here, I read a range of critics (Andrew Parker. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler on J. L. Austin; Dwight Conquergood on ethnography; Joseph Roach on surrogation) to suggest ways of rethinking the relations of authority that inform texts and performances. I conclude with a glance at the representation of the text in Baz Luhrmann's recent filmWilliam Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet.
The Allure of the Improbable:Fingal,Evidence, and the Testimony of the “Echoing Heath”
Authors: Wickman Matthew
Published: February 2007

While James Macpherson's epic translationFingalhas usually been marshaled as evidence or impugned for its lack thereof, it actually bears a reflexive and critical relation to the issue of evidence in eighteenth-century British culture. On the one hand, the text elicits the ubiquitous logic of probability that was coming to shape the epistemology of legal evidence as well as parallel formations in commercial society and even in theories of the novel; on the other hand, however, the text counteracts this logic by highlighting its own affiliation with the improbability of witness testimony. Such testimony—improbable because widely differentiated from the deliberations of jurors, for example—increasingly came to reflect the relation of literature to the legal, scientific, and philosophical discourses of knowledge.Fingalshows how the improbability of the Scottish Highlands began symbolically to enable configurations of literary form as a vehicle of social critique.
Poetic Practice and Historical Paradigm: Charles Baudelaire's Anti-Semitism
Authors: Bowles Brett
Published: February 2007

Historians identify two principal strains of anti-Semitism in France: a traditional, religious variety rooted in medieval Catholic theology and a modern, racial variety that holds Jews responsible for the myriad of socioeconomic problems associated with the rise of mass-market capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. This essay argues that Baudelaire exemplifies the historical transition between the two strains. The first, expressed in the poet's work in the late 1850s through the motifs of prostitution and hyper-Catholic self-martyrdom, resulted from his lifelong financial misery, his relationship with a Jewish prostitute, and his identification with Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph de Maistre. Over the course of the 1860s, largely in response to his dealings with the Jewish publisher Michel Lévy and to increasingly heavy financial and psychological pressure, Baudelaire's theological anti-Semitism turned into an aggressive, pernicious racism that culminated in his calling for “the extermination of the Jewish race.”
IsMiddlemarchAhistorical?
Authors: Staten Henry
Published: February 2007

Middlemarchhas been criticized as a work that subordinates politics and history to an ethics of universal sympathy. Such criticisms grant too much authority to narratorial commentary over what is represented in the novel: the grip on the bourgeoisie of an ideology derived from the aristocracy as model class of Victorian society, resulting in a baffling of the movement of democracy. The disastrous consequences of the mystification of the sources of wealth by the allure of “aristocratization” are depicted in the figure of Lydgate; the possibilities of liberation from class ideology in the interests of democracy are evident in that of Ladislaw, who emerges as, in Raymond Williams's words, the novel's “thread to the future.” The contrast between these two figures shows the novel as a whole to be a critical analysis, not a symptom, of the historical impasse of Victorian society.
Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart'sDamage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics ofJouissance
Authors: Mellard James M.
Published: February 2007

Read through Lacan and such new Lacanians as Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, Josephine Hart'sDamage(1991) illustrates how an ethics ofjouissancefounds a tragic action emblematic of postmodern narcissism. New Lacanians stress drive,jouissance, the real, the primordial father, and the femme fatale. Typically, they find these elements in film noir. Transforming noir into love story,Damageforegrounds an unnamed narrator whose sadomasochistic affair with his son's fiancée precipitates the son's death. Beginning with the narrator in the guise of the traditional oedipal father, the affair unveils the fiancée as a femme fatale who constitutes the narrator as what MacCannell would call the destructive, narcissistic brother become primordial father. Enacting an ethics ofjouissancebecause the narrator will not abandon his drive to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle, primordial father and femme fatale participate in a narrative that must be called Lacanian tragedy.
Reading through the Veil of Juan Francisco Manzano: From Homoerotic Violence to the Dream of a Homoracial Bond
Authors: Ellis Robert Richmond
Published: February 2007

TheAutobiografíaof the Cuban slave poet Juan Francisco Manzano is the only Spanish American slave narrative written by a person living in slavery. In this text Manzano recounts his corporal punishments in graphic detail but explicitly veils certain key episodes of abuse. I contend that this veil is a marker of sexual assault and that theAutobiografíabears silent testimony to the rape of male slaves. Manzano, however, was not only a victim of homoerotic violence; in one of his poems, “Un sueño” (“A Dream”), he reconfigures homoerotic desire in a way that tentatively reconstitutes his self-integrity and establishes a bond of reciprocity with his enslaved brother. In Manzano's writing, then, homoeroticism is transformed from an instrument of oppression into an act of resistance that challenges the racist and masculinist violence of the colonial slave system.
Gazing on Life's Page: Perspectival Vision in Tolstoy
Authors: Seifrid Thomas
Published: February 2007

Abounding in visual metaphors and situations, Tolstoy's works are permeated with the conviction that it is the nature of truth to be seen. This attitude exemplifies the ocularcentrism that has characterized European thought since the Greeks, though the Tolstoyan corpus also displays some of the tension between ocularcentrism's eastern and western European recensions that obtains in the Russian context. The quintessential visual situation in Tolstoy is emphatically perspectival—despite the attractions of more “Russian” ways of seeing. The scenes constituting that situation work, in a way reminiscent of the camera obscura, to present life in an intellectually and morally apprehensible form by turning it into a planar visual surface. Ultimately Tolstoy's impulse can be linked with the material nature of books, which foster this very kind of experience when the eye is trained on the page, and this linkage has implications for Russian culture as well as for the relation between the verbal and the visual in general.
Cloud Cover: (Re)Dressing Desire and Comfortable Subversions in Caryl Churchill'sCloud Nine
Authors: Harding James M.
Published: February 2007

Scholars have maintained that Caryl Churchill'sCloud Nineunites Brechtian and deconstructive strategies in a dramatic form that subverts traditional representations of gender and sexuality. Yet this reception has consistently overlooked the repressive undercurrents that surface in the movement from the text of Churchill's play to a performance of it. Indeed, a fundamental disparity exists between the play's seemingly progressive textual pronouncements and the effects of its oft-celebrated dramaturgical strategies. The use of theatrical techniques like cross-casting harbors surprisingly reactionary attitudes that reinforce heterosexual imperatives by presenting homoerotic desires in conventional, stereotypical forms. Underlying these reactionary attitudes, I argue, is a liberal ideology that restricts the expression of gay male and lesbian desire to terms that reaffirm heterosexual norms. The play thus perpetuates a disturbingly naive and demonstrably repressive notion of acceptance of sexual diversity, a notion in which difference is easy to accept because it is not enacted.
The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics
Authors: Shreiber Maeera Y.
Published: February 2007

What is the location of Jewish identity? Cultural studies has provoked reexaminations of many long-standing tropes of ethnic and religious identity, including that of exile. Such inquiries have potentially explosive consequences for the already vexed notion of Jewish identity, especially in the context of an American experience. This essay means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile, within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, including Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Boyarín, and Edward Said. This analysis allows for a sustained consideration of a diasporic poetics—an alternative aesthetic model for imagining community and the attendant terms of belonging. The experimental Yiddish-English bilingual verse of the contemporary poet Irena Klepfisz serves as a paradigmatic example of such a vision that challenges the familiar opposition between home and exile. Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a by-product of the Diaspora, is central to her inquiries into the relation between individual and collective identities and into the role gender plays in the construction of such entities.
Igitur and the Photographer
Authors: Bonnefoy Yves , Caws Mary Ann
Published: February 2007

With “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,” of 1897 (“Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”)—a meditation on how to set up a mental dice game that would visually inscribe the fatal play of human thought shipwrecked against unbeatable chance—Stéphane Mallarmé announced modernism. As his celebrated white sonnet about a swan stuck in the glacier of the blank page (“The new, lively, and lovely today”) had established the image of writing as a near-to-death experience, his equally celebrated understatement about how the ultimate presence of the rose depends on its absence “from any bouquet” had set up symbolism as the art of suggestion. Had any French poet ever had such influence on writers to come? such resonance for readers and artists? With Mallarmé modern poetry begins.
“Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew”: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity
Authors: Metzger Mary Janell
Published: February 2007

Recent readings of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which have been concerned primarily with the play's representation of difference, especially that of gender, religion, or race, often leave Jessica out of their analyses. Yet Jessica, as both a Jew and a willing Christian convert, enables the play to resolve the problem posed by the equations of white Christianity and national identity in the emerging discourse of English imperialism: how to render the Jew's difference as a difference of nature and as a difference of faith involving the act of will implicit in Christian baptism? Only by taking Shylock's measure in the light of the gender, racial, and religious ideologies that integrate his daughter into Venetian society can we account for the play's early modern representations of racialized Jews and of the Christians who imagined them.
Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case ofHunger of Memory
Authors: Staten Henry
Published: February 2007

Richard Rodriguez's autobiographicalHunger of Memory(1982) is assigned to Chicano-Chicana literature because the book tells a story of growing up the child of Mexican immigrants, but Rodriguez rejects the termChicanofor himself and denies that it is possible or desirable for Americans of Mexican descent to retain an identification with their culture of origin. Rodriguez has been widely criticized as a sellout to white bourgeois culture, but his life narrative shows that his rejection of Chicano identity is rooted in the class-and-race ideology of his Mexican parents and thus in the contradictions of Mexican history. Chicano-Chicana nationalism assumes a simple dichotomy between the proletarian mestizo or mestiza and the bourgeois white oppressor. Rodriguez's family history, however, points toward race and class divisions within the population of Mexican descent that call into question the monolithic conceptions of Chicano-Chicana identity on the basis of which Rodriguez has been attacked.
Public Credit; or, The Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace
Authors: Mulcaire Terry
Published: February 2007

The feminine figure of “Public Credit,” which appears prominently and frequently in early-eighteenth-century Whig texts, is a rich and complex symbolization of early liberal political and economic ideology. In readings of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, and the Whig libertarians John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the collective authors of Cato's Letters, a polemic that had a major influence on American revolutionary ideology), I show that their representations of Credit speak not to the empirical truth of economic value but openly to its imaginary desirability. Credit thus represents a manifest political and cultural strategy of these Whig writers for articulating and defending the values of a liberal market society by representing them as desirable—or, in other words, as aesthetic values.
The Birth of an Empire
Authors: Kaplan Amy
Published: February 2007

The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 was one of the first wars in history to be filmed. Yet despite its participation in the birth of American cinema, the war disappeared as a subject from the later archives of filmmaking. No major films chronicle the three-month war in Cuba or the subsequent three-year war in the Philippines, although films have been made about virtually every other war in American history. My paper is about that duality, about the formative presence and telling absence of this pivotal war in the history of American film.
Micheaux's Chesnutt
Authors: Gillman Susan
Published: February 2007

Who is, or are, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction novels may Oscar Micheaux be said to have adapted in his films? To such seemingly obvious questions, there are some obvious answers. It is well known that Micheaux directed two film versions of Chesnutt's tragic novel of racial passing, The House behind the Cedars (1900): the first, in 1924, is entitled House behind the Cedars and is a faithful adaption that encountered difficulties with the censors; the second is the recently rediscovered Veiled Aristocrats (1932), a remake with a happy ending. It is less well known that around the same time, Micheaux may also have arranged to purchase the rights to Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race “riot,” with a parallel plot on the struggles in an interracial family over the legitimacy of the mulatto side. It is not clear whether the transaction was ever completed or whether the Marrow film was ever made. But together the two novels may be said to map the conflicting contours of and historical changes in representations of racial passing—not only Chesnutt's but also Micheaux's. Both novelist and filmmaker chart the crossing of the classic passing plot of discovery and subsequent acknowledgment or denial of “black blood,” which shapes both Chesnutt's and Micheaux's House behind the Cedars, with narratives of legitimacy—legal, social, and professional—central to Marrow of Tradition. In the process, the novel and the film suggest how the traditional tropes of racial uplift that undergird the search for middle-class respectability, in a kind of updated passing plot, should be thought of as an available narrative form rather than a coherent ideology.
A Theory of Resonance
Authors: Dimock Wai Chee
Published: February 2007

Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary studies, makes some meanings unrecoverable and others newly possible. A text endures as a nonintegral survivor, an echo of what it was and of what it might become, its resonance changing with shifts in interpretive contexts. Since this resonance cannot be addressed by synchronic historicism, I propose an alternative, diachronic historicism, inspired especially by scientific theories on background noise, by Einstein's account of the relativity of simultaneity, and by critiques of the visual bias in Western epistemology. I try to theorize the text as a temporal continuum, thick with receding and incipient nuances, exercising the ears of readers in divergent ways and yielding its words to contrary claims. Literature thus encourages a semantic democracy that honors disagreement as a crucial fact of civil society.
1952: Justification by Works
Authors: Baugh Albert C.
Published: February 2007

Some of the writers whose remarks I have quoted may belong to the school often referred to as the New Critics. At any rate, if we can trust their frequently expressed disapproval of current scholarship, the New Critics would not disagree with those remarks. I do not wish to be intolerant of those whose intolerance I deprecate. There is more than one fruitful approach to a work of literature, and while some of the New Criticism seems to me to be quite sterile I am ready to welcome any method of interpretation which leads to the fuller understanding and enjoyment of a work of literature. What I am not willing to admit is that the New Criticism is the only true source of illumination. Behind the poem is the poet, and whatever in his own life or in the life of his time helps us to understand the man helps us to understand his work. Literary history is a frame which enhances the work of art, or, if I may change the figure, a means of displaying it, a setting which permits us to view it in proper perspective. Without it we should be like the historian who would interpret Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence without reference to the conditions which called these documents into being. Besides this, literary history as a part of the history of man is as legitimate an object of interest and as worthy of study as political or economic history, or the history of science or art. And the history of literature has been made possible only by the patient labors of scholars who have quarried and shaped the stone out of which the edifice has been built. We need criticism and we need the historical perspective which investigation makes possible. Let us seek for a fruitful union of the two without disparaging the share which each contributes to the common end.
1959: The Profession and George
Authors: Parker William Riley
Published: February 2007

How does a profession, ours or any other, express itself? How does it establish standards and achieve its common purposes? Well, the American way of doing these things is familiar enough. Whenever we discover an interest in common, we call a meeting and elect officers. Then we appoint committees. Presto, we have an organization. It's easy to poke fun at this process, but it's a democratic invention, and one especially valued by teachers, who in point of law (we sometimes forget) are nothing more than hired employees of corporate bodies over which they have no control whatsoever. When we form our own organization and its program fails to take into account the special concerns of a minority, these may start a new organization. American geography being what it is, we are also prompted to form, not only national, but regional, state, and local societies. Because we are now internationally minded, we even join international societies. We have councils and federations, too, plus institutes, “workshops,” conferences, academies, and a great deal of peripheral pother. There is an organization for almost everything, and lone wolves are asked to pay annual dues for their sheep's clothing.
1960: Facing the New Decade
Authors: Peyre Henri
Published: February 2007

If ours is a young man's world, it is also a woman's world. Some of us who are fortunate to have women among our graduate students and as young colleagues are extraordinarily impressed by the high level of their work. Indeed, we often wonder if criticism will not make substantial strides forward, blending the cognitive and the affective values, taste and a rational approach, the logic of the intellect and that of the heart, only when women take over a large share of it, as they are now out-numbering men as teachers of English and of languages in many schools. This country witnessed a bold feminist movement several decades ago. The second sex then conquered all the rights and courageously accepted corresponding duties. College presidents in women's colleges were in many cases women. In anthropology, archeology, psychology several American women have been outstanding. So have they been in journalism. Why not to the same extent today in philology, medieval studies, literary history, criticism? Are men to blame, wary of these potential rivals, preferring to utilize women's generosity and their capacity for devoted attachment by keeping them as secretaries and obedient confidents of their profound male cogitations? Have women put so much energy in once winning equality and security that they are now content to enjoy these rights, and to look upon maternity and procreation without tears and without anesthesia as their sole vocation? Men in any case have the duty to make room for them, to incite them to express themselves more boldly, to elect them to more positions of power in this Association and in others, to ask them for the healthy challenge which our duller brains need to receive from their keener perceptiveness in matters of art and literature.
African American Literary Study, Now and Then and Again
Authors: Foster Frances Smith
Published: February 2007

Recently a prominent scholar of british literature was being courted for an endowed chair at my university. At dinner he turned to me and asked, “And what do you do here?” I replied that my speciality was African American literature. He responded, “Oh, is there a constituency for that here?”
A New Field of Research: SLA-Applied Linguistics
Authors: Kramsch Claire
Published: February 2007

Second language acquisition research (sla) is the systematic exploration of the conditions that make the acquisition of a foreign language possible, both in natural and in instructional settings. Its objects of study are the biological, linguistic, psychological, and emotional makeup of language learners and the educational, social, and institutional context of learning and teaching. Whereas language as a linguistic system is studied through the metalanguage of linguistics (phonology, syntax, and semantics), language learning, as psycholinguistic process and sociolinguistic discourse, is researched through the metadiscourse of applied linguistics: psycho- and sociolinguistics, anthropological and educational linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and composition and literacy studies. These fields illuminate what it means to learn to speak, read, write, and interact in a foreign language, what it means to appropriate for oneself the national idiom of communities that share a history and a culture that are different from one's own. SLA provides the applied linguistic metadiscourse for the practice of language learning and teaching.
Lead neurotoxicity in children: Decomposing the variability in dose–effect relationships
Authors: Bellinger David C.
Published: February 2007

Background

Enormous progress has been made in recent decades in our understanding of lead neurotoxicology in children, but an important obstacle to additional progress is the striking variability that is evident in any plot of a lead biomarker versus a health endpoint.

Methods

In this article, three potential sources of variability are identified: (1) errors or imprecision in characterizing dose (and/or outcome); (2) incomplete characterization of endpoint variance attributable to factors other than lead; and (3) inter‐individual differences in susceptibility to lead neurotoxicity.

Results

Strategies are suggested for reducing the variability contributed by these sources, including the development of validated PBPK models and biomarkers of early biological effects; the development of more comprehensive models of outcome variance and, specifically, the application of multi‐level models that incorporate supra‐individual and supra‐family risk factors; and the use of study designs that permit assessments of the effect modifying influence of contextual factors on the form and severity of neurotoxicity.

Conclusion

Decomposing the variability in the distribution of observed scores around the best‐fit lines that describe the dose–effect relationships for lead neurotoxicity in children is a major research need. Am. J. Ind. Med. 50:720–728, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Access to health insurance: Experiences and attitudes of those with genetic versus non‐genetic medical conditions
Authors: Kass Nancy E. , Medley Amy M. , Natowicz Marvin R. , Hull Sara Chandros , Faden Ruth R. , Plantinga Laura , Gostin Lawrence O.
Published: February 2007

While studies reveal that individuals with both genetic and other chronic medical conditions have difficulty obtaining health insurance, no large‐scale studies have compared the health insurance experiences of these groups. The goal of this study was to document and compare the health insurance experiences, attitudes, and beliefs of persons with genetic conditions to those of persons with or at risk for other serious medical conditions. We interviewed approximately 100 adults or parents of children with one of each of the following medical conditions: sickle cell disease (SCD), cystic fibrosis (CF), diabetes, and HIV, and 200 adults with or at risk for breast (BC) or colon cancer (CC). The interview included items related to respondents' experiences and attitudes regarding health insurance. Twenty‐seven percent of 597 total respondents self‐reported having been denied health insurance or offered insurance at a prohibitive rate. Respondents with single‐gene disorders (CF and SCD) were twice as likely to report this as those with non‐genetic conditions. Legislation that exists to limit genetic discrimination in insurance addresses genetic risks or traits only, however, rather than protecting those with actual disease. Thus, current legislation may not address the challenges faced by individuals like those in this study, who try to maintain access to health insurance when they or their children are symptomatic with a genetic or other serious health condition. More than one‐third of all respondents thought there was a high chance they would be denied health insurance in the future or their insurance would become unaffordable. That individuals with all six health conditions expressed concern regarding their ability to obtain future health insurance suggests policy proposals should be broad‐based, addressing the needs and concerns of individuals with diverse health conditions. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Molecular cytogenetic and rapid aneuploidy detection methods in prenatal diagnosis
Authors: Shaffer Lisa G. , Bui The‐Hung
Published: February 2007

Cytogenetic analysis is an important component of prenatal diagnosis. The ability to rapidly detect aneuploidy and identify small structural abnormalities of fetal chromosomes has been greatly enhanced by the use of molecular cytogenetic technologies. In this review, we will present some of the molecular cytogenetic techniques available to the clinical cytogenetics laboratory. These include fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), quantitative fluorescence PCR (QF‐PCR), multiplex ligation‐dependent probe amplification (MLPA) and microarray‐based comparative genomic hybridization (array CGH). The benefits and limitations of each technology will be discussed in the context of prenatal diagnosis. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.