bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Back to Utopia
Authors: Leonard Sarah
Published: December 2013

Haven for utopian ideas. An early essay by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser declared that socialism was “the name of our desire,” paraphrasing what Tolstoy had written about God. In 1954 it was utopian to reject every big ideology on offer—Stalinism, McCarthyism, the mild conservatism of Eisenhower and the milder liberalism of Stevenson—in favor of a radical democratic vision with no mass movement behind it. In the very last piece he published, Irving was still naming his desire. Utopianism, he wrote in 1993, “is a necessity of the moral imagination. It doesn’t necessarily entail a particular politics; it doesn’t ensure wisdom about current affairs. What it does provide is a guiding perspective … an understanding that nothing is more mistaken than the common notion that what exists today will continue to exist tomorrow.”
The Art of Gentrification
Authors: Schwartz Madeleine
Published: December 2013

When the artist Donald Judd lived at 101 Spring Street in Manhattan in the 1970s, oil leaked from all sides. The SoHo cast-iron had been originally used as a clothing factory, and over the years oil had seeped into the walls and floorboards and would ooze out at unexpected moments. Black spots afflicted the open spaces where the artist worked and lived, an unwanted reminder of the building’s past. Judd, who died in 1994, stipulated that the building be preserved in perpetuity, and in 2006 his foundation sold some artwork to fund a restoration that would preserve the artist’s home as a museum.
Emerging from the Ruins
Authors: Berman Marshall
Published: December 2013

I would like to begin with a little time travel: first, back to the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s—and particularly the South Bronx of the 1970s; then, back to the Bible, back to the sixth century BCE, back to the first destruction of Jerusalem, and the start of its renewal; then a final leap into a twenty-first-century Manhattan that is full of echoes of both. I’m not going to talk now about the horrors of 9/11, or of Boston, or about the vulnerability of New York Harbor. I pay homage to the people of those places. But I’m going to focus on a distinctive landscape of ruins, an amazing, dreadful landscape that came to define the South Bronx, and for many people to define New York, for the last decades of the twentieth century. Those ruins were one of New York’s great negatives. I want to try to do what Hegel says: look the negative in the face.
The Rise of Respectability Politics
Authors: Harris Fredrick C.
Published: December 2013

This past September, during the first week of school, seven-year old Tiana Parker wore dreadlocks tied in a bright pink bow to her school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Deborah Brown Community School, a charter school sponsored by the historically black college Langston University, sent Tiana home and told her parents that their child was in violation of a school policy prohibiting students from wearing “unusual hairstyles” that distract from the school’s “respectful” learning environment. Not only were “dreadlocks, Afros, Mohawks” and other so-called faddish styles banned from the school, the school’s handbook also instructed that girls’ “weaved hair should be no longer than shoulder length” and that boys’ hairstyles are “to be short and neatly trimmed.”
The Voice of a Generation Yawns
Authors: Horning Rob
Published: December 2013

In our media-saturated, surveillance-rich era, everyone expects to always have access to us. We carry an irrefutable audience in our palms and in our heads. The attention won’t go away; playing along has become an economic necessity. Under these conditions, exposing yourself can seem like the best way to disappear. The more pictures of yourself you post, the more contradiction you sow. You hope you can escape into the ambiguity. Bob Dylan confronted these paradoxes of the “attention economy” before the rest of us, most notably on his 1970 album Self Portrait, overhauled and reissued last August by Columbia Records as Another Self Portrait.
From the Age of Fear to the Age of Shame
Authors: Sierakowski Sławomir
Published: December 2013

If the twentieth century was the age of fear, the twenty-first is the age of shame. This is the most succinct way to describe how the dominant form of repression has changed. The twentieth century was full of terrible events and fearless heroes. The twenty-first century has not yet lasted long enough to exclude the possibility of similar tragedies and resultant challenges for the brave, but so far it seems to be a time of ordinary stories and ordinary people. As in the previous century, we live in a mass society, but the dominant emotion is no longer fear, but shame. Shame, unlike fear, is an emotion that can be hidden, and that is the entire point. It arises from a sense of inferiority. Fear does not necessarily violate dignity. In the twentieth century, fascist and communist totalitarian regimes perpetrated terrible crimes, but they ultimately failed because they could not effectively control people’s identities. Too many individuals were able to maintain their inner freedom and dignity. Fear did not humble them.
The Black Church: From Prophecy to Prosperity
Authors: Butler Anthea
Published: December 2013

The rhetoric last summer at commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington was quite different from that heard at the original march in 1963. Lament replaced the determination to gain “jobs and freedom.” Speakers deplored the Supreme Court’s rollbacks of affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. They condemned the notguilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. Instead of celebrating the great march, the anniversary events sounded a plea for a new civil rights movement. Largely missing from that call, however, was the strong prophetic voice of black religion that Martin Luther King, Jr. had famously articulated from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
A Buoyancy of Spirit
Authors: Walzer Michael
Published: December 2013

Marshall was a good friend over many years—almost half a century; he was a political comrade for all those years; and he was a lovely human being. My wife, Judy, and I knew him first as a very vulnerable young man, a graduate student, miserable in Harvard’s Government Department (as I had been not many years before). When he was especially unhappy, he would visit us and hang out in our house, with our kids. I think that we raised his spirits, and he certainly raised ours. I remember vividly how he dragged us to the first Earth Day celebration in Cambridge, on the banks of the Charles River. Judy and I were skeptical, probably wrongly, but Marshall and our two daughters had a wonderful time. Marshall was in important ways a child of the sixties. Though he hated the way that decade ended, in ultra-left posturing and experiments in violence, he never turned his back on all that had gone before
Over Our Dead Bodies
Authors: Ratner-Rosenhagen Jennifer
Published: December 2013

In recent years, as death has silenced the critical voices of too many people important to me, I’ve found it necessary to read obituaries. Though I never took walks with philosopher Barbara Johnson (d. 2009) and her canine companion Nietzsche, lunched with “death of God” theologian Gabriel Vahanian (d. 2012), attended a jazz concert with the writer and music critic Albert Murray (d. 2013), or invited the sociologist Robert Bellah (d. 2013) to my family’s very American interfaith “Chanukmas” holiday celebration, their ideas were, as one friend wrote of Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) in his obituary, “a central part of the landscape” of my life.
Beyond Superwomen: Justice for Black Women Too
Authors: Alexander-Floyd Nikol G.
Published: December 2013

On June 18, 2007, Tommy Poindexter coaxed a woman out of her apartment in West Palm Beach, Florida by telling her that her car had a flat. Then he and nine other young blackmen forced her back into her home in the Dunbar Village public housing community, where they not only robbed her but engaged in three hours of rape, beatings, and torture. The female victim, a Haitian immigrant, was raped vaginally, orally, and anally, sometimes with bottles or a firearm, while they beat her twelve-year-old son in another room. In an effort to cover up their crimes, they told both the woman and her son to clean off and then forced the mother and son to have sex with each other. Finally, the assailants poured alcohol into the woman’s anus, ammonia on both her and her son’s eyes, stuffed a bar of soap into the woman’s vagina, and tried to light the mother and child on fire as they lay naked in a bathtub.
Dissent and the Next Left
Authors: Kazin Michael
Published: December 2013

When you’re celebrating your sixtieth birthday, there is a natural impulse to gaze back fondly at what you did well. For a magazine that has always been described as “little,” Dissent has aspired to contain multitudes. In our pages (and, more recently, on our website), editors and contributors have argued with insight and authority about every major issue in American and world politics—from the Cold War and the rise of the black freedom movement to the invasion of Iraq and the battle over same-sex marriage. They have also analyzed the interweaving of culture and power in dozens of pieces about education in and out of school, the life of cities, novels, and films. We have published eloquent provocations about these and a myriad of other matters by some of the leading intellectuals of the era that began when the bloodiest war in history ended. Forgive you.
Syria in Fragments: The Politics of the Refugee Crisis
Authors: Dahi Omar S.
Published: December 2013

Throughout 2013 Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, seemed to be running out of ways to sound the alarm and describe the magnitude of the Syrian refugee crisis. “Syria as a civilization is unraveling,” he declared in early June. Later that month he stated that it was the worst catastrophe since the end of the Cold War. The numbers bear out his claims. By the end of 2013 there were over 2 million registered refugees, several million others internally displaced, and estimates of 10 million in desperate need of food and shelter, out of a total population of around 23 million. An estimated 100,000 have been killed by the fighting and many more wounded and disappeared. As many or more Syrians are dying of chronic diseases due to their inability to access medicine and treatment amid the devastation of the country’s economic and health infrastructure. This prompted the UN to declare Syria a Level 3 emergency, the highest level emergency in the UN system and a top priority for funding and personnel.
Starting Out in the Fifties
Authors: Isserman Maurice
Published: December 2013

Volume I, Number 1 of Dissent showed up in mailboxes of charter subscribers in early 1954, as inauspicious an occasion for the debut issue of a socialist magazine in the United States as can be imagined. Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon were waging a no-holds-barred political war to stigmatize Democratic opponents as soft on communism—or worse. Demoralized and divided, Democrats feebly defended themselves against charges that their party had presided over “twenty years of treason,” while some panicked liberal leaders abandoned any commitment to basic civil liberties to burnish their anti-communist credentials.
"Bring them what they lack": Spanish-Creek Exchange and Alliance Making in a Maritime Borderland, 1763-1783
Authors: Hill James L.
Published: December 2013

Between the late 1760s and the early 1780s, dozens of Creek Indians made the journey to Havana, ferried by Cuban fishing boats along the Gulf Coast of Florida. Creeks and Spanish Cubans traveled into the coastal and marine regions between Havana and the Florida Gulf Coast as it suited them; both took advantage of the space to negotiate and participate in exchanges with one another. For Creeks the region served as an economic and diplomatic safety valve. In the midst of conflict with Anglo Americans, Creeks hoped that Florida would provide them with new avenues into Atlantic diplomatic and exchange networks. For Cubans, and the Spanish Empire as a whole, an alliance with the Creeks represented a means of reestablishing Spanish influence in Florida and of pushing back against an expansionistic British Empire in the wake of the Seven Years' War. Though Spaniards and Creeks found the Florida Gulf Coast and its waters eminently useful, neither established full control over this maritime space. Though neither group would have framed it in these terms, Creek-Cuban contacts converted the Gulf of Mexico into a maritime borderland.
Enlightenment and Revolution: The Case of Louisiana, 1768
Authors: Biagetti Samuel
Published: December 2013

In 1768 the colonists of Louisiana rose up in a bloodless rebellion against the Spanish royal governor. Though almost totally ignored by historians of early America and the Atlantic world, the Louisiana uprising demonstrates the complex relationship between avant-garde philosophy and popular resistance in the eighteenth century. The rebel leaders produced a series of pamphlets justifying their actions, which deployed arguments drawn from the French legal tradition, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment radicalism. These arguments not only aimed to persuade audiences abroad, but helped cement a popular coalition within Louisiana society. This popular coalition broke down when, in the absence of imperial authority, colonists openly discussed the notion of founding an independent republic. A comparison between the Louisiana rebellion and the American Revolution illustrates the ways in which the latter event was not unique—and more specifically, how Enlightenment universalism could help paper over class divisions within colonial society, which civic republicanism then reopened.
With a Song in Their Hands: Incendiary Décimas from the Texas and Louisiana Borderlands during a Revolutionary Age
Authors: Gerona Carla
Published: December 2013

During the late eighteenth century the commanders on Spain's northern frontier town of Nacogdoches conducted two trials against citizens who sang songs that offended them and challenged their authority. One group sang in French and the other in Spanish, and taken together the two trials offer a unique opportunity to observe and reconstruct the vibrant and original musical culture that developed in this contact zone. By placing the songs in a local, regional, and Atlantic context, this essay shows that the creole ranchers, farmers, and traders of east Texas and west Louisiana invented new songs to retain control of their communities. This essay also suggests that the singers and musicians shared ideas with each other while participating in the creative developments that flourished during the Age of Revolution. Both French and Spanish creoles incorporated subversive subjects into their music, though in the end their ribald and incendiary songs did not lead either group to overthrow the Spanish government. Nonetheless, because the musical compositions posed a threat to Bourbon authorities and foreshadowed future uprisings, an analysis of these cases can help us reimagine revolutionary Texas from a fresh perspective that is at once more Tejano and more transregional.
Rods and Reels: Social Clubs and Political Culture in Early Pennsylvania
Authors: Haulman Kate
Published: December 2013

Through the story of Philadelphia's dancing and fishing clubs, this article explores the intersection of elite Anglo-American social institutions, gender relations, and political culture in the late colonial and early national periods. These exclusive, invitation-only organizations provide a case study and window onto the shifting relationship between elite sociability and politics across the period. From the clubs' origins in the 1730s and 1740s through their function on the eve of the Seven Years' War to their careers in the early republic, their position and composition suggest that they evolved from integral components of colonial political culture to something more insularly social—from the auxiliaries of governance and diplomacy to their counterpoint. This trajectory shows that one way in which local men of wealth and lineage may have adapted to the gendered, ethnic, and political challenges fired in the forge of imperial crisis, revolution, nation making, and democratization was by closing their social ranks.
Rus-Urban Imaginings: Literature of the American Park Movement and Representations of Social Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Authors: Evelev John
Published: December 2013

This article reconsiders various kinds of writings that were part of the cultural project to legitimize the building of urban parks in the mid-nineteenth century by casting their creation as an imaginative project that could reshape the way Americans understood urban spaces and their social roles within these spaces. Although the space of the park itself was imagined as the primary means of changing the social experience of American urban life, advocates of the park movement saw print as an equally important avenue for this public transformation, and this article draws parallels between the public park (itself a highly artificial and symbolic space) and the variety of literary forms in which the park was advocated before the development of Central Park. Examining nonfiction writing by Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted among others, as well as Sylvester Judd's 1850 novel Richard Edney and the Governor's Family , this essay explores the correlation among parks, landscape design, and manhood. Although the antebellum park movement ostensibly envisioned the park as a tool of egalitarian social reform, bringing together the genders and classes in an idealized intimate public sphere, the literature of the park movement's definition of the park spoke to bourgeois male anxieties about men's place in the gender- and class-determined spaces of the city.
"Exactly as they appear": Another Look at the Notes of a 1766 Treason Trial in Poughkeepsie, New York, with Some Musings on the Documentary Foundations of Early American History
Authors: Merrell James H.
Published: December 2013

Seventy-two years ago the historians Irving Mark and Oscar Handlin typed up and published the manuscript notes taken at the renowned 1766 trial of the Dutchess County land rioter William Prendergast. Ever since, scholars of the Hudson Valley, of New York, of colonial America, and of American history more generally have relied on Mark and Handlin's version of this rich source to give voice to the historically silent, confident that the printed words are, as the editors wrote, "exactly as they appear" in the original document. Comparison of the two texts, however, reveals a plethora of errors large and small that, taken together, render the published account deeply flawed. After tracing these corruptions of the manuscript, this essay goes on to wonder how many of the other published annals of colonial records produced over the past two centuries, on which historians rely so heavily, similarly distort or otherwise obscure our view of early America.
The Paradox of Sagadahoc: The Popham Colony, 1607-1608
Authors: Bilodeau Christopher J.
Published: December 2013

This article focuses on the failed colony at Sagadahoc, also called the Popham Colony, which existed on the coast of Maine between the autumn of 1607 and the autumn of 1608. Although plagued with a striking list of shortcomings nd defects, including poor planning and support from England, lack of immediately profitable resources in the region, incompetent leadership and factionalism, and a historically brutal winter, the colony's most important failure was ts settlers' troubled dealings with the local Etchemin Indians. Unfortunately, the colonists needed good relations ith the Indians in order to engage in the fur trade, which could have been the foundation of economic success for he colony. That tension produced the paradox of Sagadahoc.
Because I Do: Trollope, Tautology, and Desire
Authors: Wright Daniel
Published: December 2013

This essay argues that in Anthony Trollope’s fiction, tautology functions as a characterological language for erotic desire. While in Can You Forgive Her? (1865) male characters exploit the irrefutability of tautology as a form of erotic and ideological coercion of women, in The Way We Live Now (1875) female characters embrace the opacity of tautology as part of a self-reflexive critique of the marriage economy--a critique that emphasizes the erotic over the logical and the anti-social over the social.
The Kindest Cut: Circumcision and Queer Kinship in The Merchant of Venice
Authors: Greenstadt Amy
Published: December 2013

This essay argues that through evoking the idea of a male community bound through the act of circumcision, Antonio’s proposed forfeit of a “pound of flesh” suggests a form of kinship (or, in the play’s terms, kindness) based on contract rather than heredity. I characterize these ties as instances of “queer kinship” because they occupy an in-between space in which identities traverse sexual and national categories. By extending the meanings of circumcision well beyond this ritual’s original gendered and national context, Shakespeare’s play opens onto a subtle, corporeal terrain that promises alternative, half-imagined structures of intimacy and community.
Tortured Sympathies: Victorian Literature and the Ticking Time-Bomb Scenario
Authors: Ablow Rachel
Published: December 2013

This essay argues that much of the continuing appeal of the ticking time-bomb scenario has to do with the way it exploits deeply held beliefs regarding the relation between pain, sympathy, and the definition of the human that originated in the nineteenth century. These beliefs include the notion that sympathy precludes the infliction of pain; that sympathy is constitutive of humanity; and that in relation to certain kinds of subjects, pain does, in fact, elicit truth.
Embodied Resonances: Early Modern Science and Tropologies of Connection in Donne’s Anniversaries
Authors: Harvey Elizabeth D. , Harrison Timothy M.
Published: December 2013

We argue in this essay that the phenomenon of resonance structures the formal and metaphoric coherence of John Donne’s Anniversaries , underpinning the poems’ allusions to magnetism, the doctrine of signatures, atomism, and Paracelsian theory. Linking analogy and metonymy through resonance allows Donne to engage emergent scientific discovery, the epistemological upheaval of the early seventeenth century, and the extra-linguistic dimensions of language. We explore the workings of this concept as a musical, scientific, and passional principle of cosmic cohesion; through his verse Donne seeks to harness resonance as a vital force of magnetic and emotional connection.
Miscegenetic Melville: Race and Reconstruction in Clarel
Authors: Hutchins Zach
Published: December 2013

This essay investigates Herman Melville’s views on Reconstruction and racism in Clarel, the national epic published in the centennial year of 1876. In Clarel, Melville points toward miscegenation as the solution to problems of ethnic conflict festering since the Civil War, the key to rebuilding a nation torn apart by the economic exploitation and lingering racism of Reconstruction. Miscegenation is an ideal Melville pointed to somewhat naïvely in his earlier prose, but Clarel is Melville’s most sustained narrative commentary on race published after Benito Cereno and reflects a more sober assessment of racial realities and possibilities in the United States.
Brain-ache: Anne Bradstreet on Sensing
Authors: Arsić Branka
Published: December 2013

This essay examines the physiology of sensing across Anne Bradstreet’s poetry and considers the implications of her material emphasis on the brain to the mental processes of thinking and reading. For Bradstreet, I argue, the brain is thinking insofar as it is constituted by thoughts and sensations it generates within itself. In analyzing how thought, sensation, and organ converge, I compare Bradstreet’s theory of the brain to those of Phineas Fletcher, Helkiah Crooke, and John Cotton. Ultimately, I suggest, this concept of material thinking--which pervades the self instead of being produced by it--is key to Bradstreet’s enigmatic originality.
Hamlin Garland’s “Modernism”
Authors: Holbo Christine
Published: December 2013

In 1890, the regionalist writer Hamlin Garland used the word “modernism” to describe his own aesthetic project, apparently becoming the first American writer to claim this label. This paper explores the implications of Garland’s historically early usage for understanding the emergence of American modernism. It argues that a number of aspects of Garland’s writing—his exploration of symbolism, his interest in women’s experience and his celebration of female rebellion, his interest in fragmentary forms, and his focus on the modernity of provincial American life—define points of articulation between regionalism and modernism, American provincialism and an American avant-garde.
Equiano’s Trifles
Authors: Bugg John
Published: December 2013

This article asks what we might learn by attending to the form of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative . Henry Louis Gates, Jr. first took seriously the structure and tropes of Equiano’s work, but Vincent Carretta’s famous questions about Equiano's birthplace have eclipsed other lines of inquiry. Suggesting that there is much we have missed in the Interesting Narrative in this turn away from form, I argue that a counterplot runs through the text, one shaped through textual clusters I refer to (using Equiano’s keyword) as “trifles.” In this counterplot Equiano expresses thoughts and emotions not containable within contemporary abolitionist discourse.
Fish, Crystal, and Loop: Dreiser’s Histories in the “Trilogy of Desire”
Authors: Graham T. Austin
Published: December 2013

This article analyzes the historical methodology of Theodore Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire,” which includes his novels The Financier , The Titan , and The Stoic . Focusing on the novels’ depictions of the American economy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the article demonstrates how Dreiser’s treatments of the period did and did not resemble those of professional historians and contemporary business writers. Dreiser is shown to be studying the American past from a variety of perspectives, including scientific, evolutionary, spiritual, and mythical ones. The article ultimately concludes that Dreiser’s Trilogy argues for a diverse, multi-disciplinary approach to history writing, and that it suggests the genre of the novel is an especially effective instrument of retrospection.
Sense and Sensibility and Suffering; or, Wittgenstein’s Marianne?
Authors: Lindstrom Eric
Published: December 2013

This essay approaches Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility through concerns drawn from ordinary language philosophy, developing the other minds problem against a teaching backdrop in which Elinor and Marianne serve as “pictures” of the title. I chart an alternate, minimal sensibility as the capacity to respond to stimuli at all. In addition to the troubling eclipse of Marianne as an expressive subject upon her marriage, Elinor’s opacity as a know able character is an obdurate weight inside the book. Teleological readings focusing on Austen’s so-called early free indirect style fail to register the appropriately thin (not “deep”) resiliency of the novel’s dissatisfying conclusion.
Representative Government: The “Problem Play,” Quotidian Culture, and the Making of Social Liberalism
Authors: Meeuwis Michael
Published: December 2013

Late-Victorian social liberalism held that individuals should tune their thought and behavior to nationally standardized values; theater was central to the theorization, and to the practice, of this socialization of thinking. This theory was given its most precise articulation by Walter Bagehot’s concept of emulation . Theaters spearheaded both Bagehot’s theorization of social emulation and its real-world practice, giving rise to the so-called problem play of social critique and reform. In a new reading of the genre, through its unexpected origins in Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers (1852) to its mature form in T. W. Robertson’s M.P. (1870) and A.W. Pinero’s Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898), I demonstrate how problem plays created spectacles that invited audiences to emulate their examples, as well as how late-liberal political philosophy made use of this model of theatrical emulation.
Peddling Pablo: Escobar’s Cultural Renaissance
Authors: Pobutsky Aldona Bialowas
Published: December 2013

Nearly two decades after his death, Pablo Escobar has reemerged in a number of autobiographical publications that revisit the era of the Medellín cartel and its most infamous capo. Rather than providing strictly historical information, these texts adopt an anecdotal and intimate angle from the positions of Escobar’s hitman, his lover, his siblings, and his only son. The recent plethora of Escobar-themed bestsellers signals a collective need to confront the capo’s evil in order to bring closure to what can be considered his inner circle and the Colombian nation. It also underscores the tension between the state’s desire to curtail Escobar’s growing myth and the concomitant trends in popular culture and mass media that celebrate Escobar and the crass narcolifestyle. While the former strives to divorce the national image from narcoterrorism, the latter has found a new marketable commodity in Colombia and abroad.
Investigating the Secondary Effects of Processing Instruction in Spanish: From Instruction on Accusative Clitics to Transfer-of-Training Effects on Dative Clitics
Authors: Leeser Michael , DeMil Andrew
Published: December 2013

In this article, we examine whether the effectiveness of processing instruction (PI) is limited to forms targeted in the instructional treatment (primary effects) or whether it also extends to other forms (transfer-of-training effects). L2 Spanish learners (N = 123) received either PI or traditional instruction (TI) targeting third-person accusative clitic pronouns, and a third group received no instruction. We used a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest design to examine the impact of instruction type on learners’ interpretation and production of accusative clitic pronouns; we used the same design to analyze the impact of instruction type on their interpretation and production of a second form, dative clitics, for which learners did not receive instruction (secondary effects). Although both PI and TI improved on the learners’ interpretation of dative clitics in object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences, TI showed a decrease in accuracy with subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences. We propose that of the two approaches, only PI is effective in prompting learners to alter the way they process primary linguistic data in the input.
Virtuosas o corruptas: Las mujeres indígenas en las obras de Guamán Poma de Ayala y el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
Authors: Guengerich Sara Vicuña
Published: December 2013

El artículo examina los discursos prescriptivos y la retórica del sermón que emplean el Inca Garcilaso y Guamán Poma para hacer una analogía entre las mujeres andinas y las europeas en la historia de la cristiandad. Mediante la antítesis bíblica de Eva y la Virgen María (Eva/Ave), estos dos autores clasifican a las mujeres indígenas en dos categorías: buenas y malas. La primera categoría está compuesta por sus ancestros femeninos precolombinos, sus madres y las mujeres de la elite andina colonial. En la segunda categoría se encuentran las plebeyas y aquellas de naciones gentiles. Si bien la dicotomía Eva/Ave tiene poco que ver con la complejidad de las relaciones de género en el contexto andino, ambos autores la usaron para cuestionar las jerarquías coloniales de su época que dominaban el conocimiento y el poder.
Multilingual Manipulation and Humor in I Love Lucy
Authors: Kirschen Bryan
Published: December 2013

I Love Lucy is considered to have been one of the most humorous television programs in the United States as early as the 1950s. This paper explores the use of language by the protagonists, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, in order to understand the source of the program’s humor. Linguistic analysis of the Ricardos’ speech is applied, and ideological implications are explored, in an attempt to explain how the humor of the program is acceptable to both English and Spanish speakers. Lucy and Ricky execute multilingual manipulation with one another in such a way that linguistically charged statements throughout the series do not insult viewers, and such interaction may be considered humorous for English and Spanish speakers alike. The question of why it is justifiable to laugh at such multilingual humor is explored by analyzing the frameworks of linguistic manipulation utilized by each of the Ricardos.
“El enemigo es múltiple y adopta disfraces”: La performatividad y la identidad queer en El placer desbocado de Ernesto Schoo
Authors: Brant Herbert J.
Published: December 2013

En El placer desbocado (1988), Ernesto Schoo (1925–2013) explora las complejas relaciones sexuales, emocionales y políticas de un grupo de argentinos que viven en Italia entre 1956 y 1967. La novela narra la historia de Marcelo P. Cabrera y su viaje psicosexual desde una identidad homosexual (tradicional y secreta) hacia una identidad queer (anticonvencional y contemporánea). Empleando las teorías actuales sobre la construcción del género y de la sexualidad, sobre todo las de Judith Butler y de la performatividad queer, este ensayo analiza cómo los personajes de Schoo sirven como “estudios de caso” de la deconstrucción de los conceptos tradicionales sobre el género y la sexualidad. El final de la novela revela que lo queer existe en la sociedad—a veces de forma oculta, enmascarada—dentro de las instituciones supuestamente normativas como el matrimonio y la paternidad. En última instancia, la novela de Schoo revela un mundo queer que funciona subrepticiamente dentro de la hegemonía heterosexista en la cultura argentina.
Tense or Aspect?: A Review of Initial Past Tense Marking and Task Conditions for Beginning Classroom Learners of Spanish
Authors: Bonilla Carrie L.
Published: December 2013

This essay contributes to the research on the emergence of tense/aspect morphology by reviewing the results and task conditions of studies supporting either the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) or the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) for second language (L2) learners of Spanish. The AH has found that past marking emerges based on inherent aspectual categories (Andersen 1991; Andersen and Shirai 1994), and the DPTH proposes (Salaberry 1999, 2002, 2003, 2008; Salaberry and Ayoun 2005) that beginning learners of Spanish with first language (L1) English initially use perfective past marking as a default tense marker. The present study reviewed the results and task conditions of studies of beginning classroom learners of Spanish with L1 English that support either hypothesis. The review shows that many learners go through a stage of marking preterite regardless of lexical aspect particularly in tasks requiring an explicit focus on forms or in impersonal narratives. On the other hand, beginning learners show prototypical associations of preterite marking with telic predicates in open-ended tasks or personal narratives, and stronger associations of imperfect marking with state verbs especially in personal narratives.
A City on the Brink of Apocalypse: Mexico City’s Urban Ecology in Works by Vicente Leñero and Homero Aridjis
Authors: Larochelle Jeremy G.
Published: December 2013

At a conference on environmental change in Latin America, Homero Aridjis, writer, environmental activist, and founder of the Grupo de los Cien, quoted Yeats when answering my question about the connection between his prolific literary work and untiring activism: “In dreams begin responsibility.” He later explained that through writing poetry and narrative our ideas of how we envision a more hopeful future—our dreams—often begin through the subjective lens of artistic expression. Interestingly, however, Aridjis’s novel La leyenda de los soles depicts the future not as we hope it could be, but rather, as a reality in complete disrepair: a dystopic vision. Through an examination of Aridjis’s apocalyptic novel and selections from his poetic work, and of Vicente Leñero’s La gota de agua , I argue that both authors raise awareness in the reader about pressing urban ecology problems in Mexico’s capital city. In depicting environmental issues—a severe water shortage in La gota de agua and the Distrito Federal on the brink of apocalypse in La leyenda de los soles —both Aridjis and Leñero question conventional literary language relating to the city and to the non-human world.
Voseo to Tuteo Accommodation among Salvadorans in the United States
Authors: Sorenson Travis
Published: December 2013

Central America, including El Salvador, has been cited as the least studied of the Spanish-language dialect zones. The paucity of linguistic research extends to the language use of these populations in the United States, including that of Salvadorans who have relocated there. This paper analyzes Salvadorans’ utilization of voseo and tuteo , both pronominal and verbal, contrasting this linguistic phenomenon in the Salvadoran cities of San Salvador and San Miguel with that of Salvadoran diaspora communities in the US cities of Washington, DC and Houston. Accommodation Theory is employed to describe the decrease from high levels of voseo used by Salvadorans in El Salvador to significantly lower levels among their US counterparts who come into contact with tuteante speakers such as Mexicans. The difference in voseo usage between El Salvador and the United States is seen in the results of a survey completed by more than 350 respondents, as well as in the data obtained through protocols involving the actual speech of smaller groups comprised both of individuals and couples selected from among these same participants. The data are further analyzed according to social factors, such as the subjects’ age, gender, and education level. As participants are not queried regarding their income levels, which tend to be linked to educational opportunity, this last factor is seen as a variable indicative of social class.
Mulheres, mães e alienígenas: Subjetividade feminina na ficção científica de Dinah Silveira de Queiroz
Authors: Monteiro Luciana C.
Published: December 2013

Este artigo enfoca os aspectos originais dos contos de ficção científica de Dinah Silveira de Queiroz que revelam a importância destes textos para a crítica feminista e os estudos de gênero na literatura brasileira. Única mulher a integrar a primeira geração do gênero no Brasil durante os anos sessenta, a autora compartilha com seus contemporâneos os traços que diferenciam os textos locais do padrão anglo-americano, em especial a atitude de desconfiança frente à ciência e à tecnologia. Vistos como potenciais ameaças à humanidade, estes avanços remetem ainda a processos imperialistas ou neocolonialistas que põem em risco os valores nacionais e o caráter pessoal das relações sociais. Queiroz, por sua vez, lançandose num campo literário tradicionalmente masculino, coloca também em foco a subjetividade feminina, questões relativas à mulher como a maternidade e as dificuldades na relação entre os sexos. Em contos que utilizam solidão e isolamento como metáforas para a distância entre homens e mulheres, a escritora sinaliza um momento de crise e aponta para a necessidade de valorização do feminino, inclusive em sua correlação com a Terra e a natureza.
Writing “Che” Writing: Apocryphal Diaries and the Deconstruction of Guevara’s Myth
Authors: Weiser Frans
Published: December 2013

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s iconic photograph has taken on mythical proportions since his death. Though his image has ironically been exploited by the apparatus of capitalism against which he fought, his translation into a symbol has assured that his foothold within popular culture remains largely unassailable. While recent films and biographies perpetuate the revolutionary myth, novelists Abel Posse in Los cuadernos de Praga (1998) and Jay Cantor in The Death of Che Guevara (1983) strategically subvert the other staple of Guevara’s intellectual iconicity: his published diaries. Building upon Guevara’s existing self-criticism and overt awareness of writing for an audience in these supposedly personal documents, Posse and Cantor construct apocryphal diaries under the guise of official archival additions. These false documents, or what I define as “con-scripts,” allow the authors to deconstruct Guevara’s iconic status through the inconsistencies in his personal writing, a space unique to fiction and its ability to confuse the border between mimetic representation and invention and to interrogate the textual conventions that define assumptions about the objectivity of historiography or biography.
Weaving Webs of Intrigue: Classical Mythology and Analytic Crime Fiction in Rubem Fonseca’s A grande arte
Authors: Ginway M. Elizabeth
Published: December 2013

This study focuses on some of the classical features of Rubem Fonseca’s A grande arte (1983) in order to emphasize the puzzle-solving tradition of the detective novel that is embedded within Fonseca’s crime thriller, producing a work that does not entirely fit into traditional divisions of detective, hardboiled, or crime fiction. For this reason, it might be called analytic “crime” fiction instead of the purely intellectual analytic “detective” fiction because it weaves social commentary into the literary model detective fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges. While pure crime fiction generally goes beyond mere detective work to take us into the minds of the criminals themselves, Fonseca’s A grande arte not only blurs the distinctions among conventional genres of detective fiction but also exposes the interaction between the formal, legal economy, and the illegal activities of the economic underworld through its use of classical references and cultural allusions.
The Table and the Word: Translation, Priority, and the Periodic System of Chemical Elements
Authors: Gordin Michael D.
Published: December 2013

In the late 1860s, chemistry was rocked by a priority dispute over who discovered the periodic system of chemical elements: St. Petersburg chemist Dmitrii I. Mendeleev (1834–1907) or southern German chemist Lothar Meyer (1830–1895)? The dispute hinged upon whether publications in the Russian language “counted” within the credit system of European chemistry. This article excavates this dispute and places it in the context of the limited publishing opportunities in both Russian and German for chemists within the Russian Empire, and argues for the role of this particular argument in establishing the status of Russian as a viable international chemical language.

В конце 1860-х гг. химическое сообщество сотрясал спор о том, кому принадлежит приоритет открытия периодической системы хи-мических элементов: санкт-петербургскому химику Д. И. Менделееву (1834–1907) или южно-немецкому химику Юлиусу Лотару Мейеру (1830–1895). В основе спора лежали разногласия по поводу того, “за-считываются” ли публикации на русском языке в системе европейской химической науки. В статье реконструируется история этой полемики, рассматриваемой в контексте проблемы ограниченных возможностей научных публикаций для российских химиков как на русском, так и на немецком языках. Как доказывается в статье, именно спор между Менделеевым и Мейером привел к утверждению статуса русского как полноценного международного языка химической науки.
A Past of One’s Own: The Post-Soviet Historiography of Russian Philosophy
Authors: Mjør Kåre Johan
Published: December 2013

This article analyzes the historiography of Russian philosophy as it appears in post-Soviet Russian university textbooks. How is a Russian national tradition in philosophy – a discipline that otherwise operates with a universal truth-claim not bound by its cultural settings – created and defended in these texts? Particular emphasis is placed on their rejection of the alleged Eurocentrism of Western historiography, their dependence (nevertheless) on Western notions of philosophy, and their idea of Russian philosophy as “native philosophy” ( otechestvennaia filosofiia ) with an independent “integral history.” The article concludes that this material presents us with an example of cultural nationalism in academic writing.

Статья рассматривает историографию русской философии как она предстает в постсоветских университетских учебниках. Каким образом создается и отстаивается в этих текстах российская (и даже русская) национальная традиция в философии – дисциплине, по определе-нию оперирующей универсальной категорией истины, не связанной с конкретным культурным контекстом? Особое внимание уделяется демонстрирующемуся в этих учебниках отрицательному отношению к предполагаемому европоцентризму западной историографии, при одновременной зависимости их от западной концепции философии, а также идее философской традиции в России как “отечественной философии” с независимой “интегральной историей”. В статье дела-ется вывод о том, что рассмотренный материал являет собой пример культурного национализма в академической сфере.
Illegal Eurasia: Причины несостоятельности евразийской юриспруденции
Authors: Hазмутдинов Булат
Published: December 2013

The article discusses a little-studied aspect of the history of the Russian émigré Eurasianist movement of the 1920s and 1930s: namely, an attempt to develop holistic “Eurasianist” jurisprudence. The task proved to be much more complex than merely applying Eurasianist ideology to the field of law, as the latter was not a single phenomenon, and had different institutional and especially conceptual dimensions. Eurasianists themselves differed in their approaches to law. These distinctions were based on metalegal grounds, whether in phenomenological sources of the works of Nikolai Alekseev, who argued for legal individualism, or alleinheit theory in the writings of Leo Karsavin, or positivist theory informing the approach by Nikolai Dunaev. Based on Eurasianists’ published works and unpublished archival materials, this article argues for the fundamentally contradictory legal views by members of the Eurasianist movement. These contradictions suggest that it was impossible to create a particular “Eurasianist” legal theory on the basis of their writings.
“Urania Is Older than Sister Clio”: Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Russian Textbooks on Geopolitics
Authors: Suslov Mikhail
Published: December 2013

This article analyzes contemporary Russian textbooks on geopolitics, whose number soared spectacularly around and after 2000. Steeped in Eurasianism and pro-Kremlin conservatism, these textbooks marked an important – although much troubled – tendency to modernize the language of Russia’s self-representation along the lines of “Westernized” rationalism, nation-state political subjectivity, and the rhetoric of authenticity. At the same time, geopolitical discourses in textbooks fail to identify the real source of authenticity and agency in a democratic community. Nevertheless, in the epoch of “presentism” the state’s attempts to instrumentalize the geopolitical rhetoric of authenticity are severely limited by the fluidity of the Russian space and by the ideological character of geopolitical theorization itself.

В статье анализируются современные российские учебники по геополитике, количество которых растет быстрыми темпами начиная примерно с 2000 г. Пропитанные духом евразийства и прокремлевским консерватизмом, эти учебники отражают стремление модернизировать язык саморепрезентации России в соответствии с принципами “запад-нического” рационализма, субъектности национального государства и риторики аутентичности. В то же время, дискурсы геополитики в учеб-никах не в состоянии определить реальный источник аутентичности и субъектности в демократическом обществе. Попытки государства инструментализировать геополитическую риторику аутентичности в эпоху “презентизма” натыкаются на ограничения в виде пластичности социального пространства России и идеологического характера самого геополитического теоретизирования.