Fantastic Autonomy: A Rhetorical Style in Economic Storytelling

Understandings of “critical” in critical scholarship on terrorism range from a Frankfurt School–influenced definition to a broader definition that aims to interrogate commonsense understandings of terrorism and counterterrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism draws on multiple disciplines and methodological traditions to analyze terrorism and counterterrorism. Within these, there have been ongoing debates and discussions about whether the state should be included in research on terrorism and, if so, what the inclusion of the state would do for the understanding of terrorism. Critical scholarship has also outlined the need for further attention to research ethics, as well as urged researchers to acknowledge their standpoints when conducting and communicating research. Some, but not all, critical scholarship has a normative orientation with the goal of emancipation, though the meaning of emancipation remains debated. Methodologically, the majority of critical scholarship on terrorism utilizes an interpretive lens to analyze terrorism and related issues. A central goal of critical terrorism research is to rework power relations such that Global South subjectivities are centered on research. This means including research conducted by Global South scholars and also centering Global South peoples and concerns in analyses of terrorism and counterterrorism. The role of gender, analytically and in practice, in relation to terrorism is also a key part of critical scholarship. Critical scholars of terrorism have observed that race is absent from much of terrorism scholarship, and there needs to be ongoing work toward addressing this imbalance. Media and popular culture, and their depiction of terrorism and counterterrorism, form another key strand in critical scholarship on terrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism is about scrutinizing and dismantling power structures that sustain commonsense knowledge regarding terrorism.

This paper represents an exploration into “chick-lit” literature and its significance in the popular cultural context. As a genre of popular literature written for young urban women, the tremendous commercial success of the popular chick-lit fiction inevitably calls for a critical assessment of its status within popular culture and literature. This paper aims to explore the genre’s significance for the research about popular literature, its relationship to literary and scholarly criticism, as well as women’s reading and writing practices. By focusing on the production, consumption and reception of chick-lit as a global feminine genre, the paper presents the main characteristics of chick-lit fiction and its differences from other genres such as conventional romances. It also highlights the strengths and limitations of the genre in relation to literary values and cultural standards. Chick-lit’s incredible popularity as a cultural and literary phenomenon is further investigated by drawing upon several critical debates introduced by Lawrence W. Levine, Stuart Hall, John Fiske and Michel de Certeau. This paper also considers chick-lit as a deeply contradictory genre of literature that generates highly polarized responses, thus as a site of continuous struggle between “consent and resistance” (Hall 466). To view chick-lit either from an entirely negative or positive perspective would be to oversimplify both the genre and the issues related to literature. Therefore, by considering chick-lit’s both wide appeal to its readers and denunciation by literary critics as trivial fiction, and exploring the positions taken up in academic and popular discussions about the genre, the paper seeks to examine the polarized responses and the questions chick-lit raises regarding literature, popular culture and contemporary socio-cultural realities of women. Keywords : Chick-lit, popular culture, literary criticism, women’s fiction, cultural studies

The Renaissance Revisited

About My Friend, Jay Fliegelman Donald Weber (bio) I wonder how many of Jay's friends know that as a teenager in the early '60s he was an aspiring journalist writing on popular culture? He profiled Sean Connery at the height of the James Bond craze; he wrote about would-be disk jockeys training at the BBC's London School of Broadcasting at the height of British Invasion. In "The ABC of Being a DJ"—an essay which, I wager, not even the most attentive "Jayfest" celebrants (the name given by the cohort of Jay's former graduate students who gathered in May 2007 to honor their mentor) know about—Jay was already analyzing the relation between voice and gesture, performance and meaning, audience and rhetorical style. While on assignment, Jay shadowed some of the trainees, reporting on the "art" of the DJ. Listen to a couple of Jay's sly DJ "maxims": "The DJ must project as if he were perpetually in love with his products, his music, his listeners—in that order." "When reading an ad you, the DJ, must play the part. OOZE enthusiasm, radiate sincerity." Sound familiar? Listen, almost 30 years later, to the introduction to Declaring Independence, where Jay speaks of the "elocutionary revolution," a cultural turning point that "made the credibility of arguments contingent on the emotional credibility of the speaker." From the very beginning Jay's subject, his passion, was (in his own words) "the performative understanding of selfhood." Among Jay's great gifts was his emotional creditability, his personal and intellectual investment in his students, colleagues, friends. I should know. I had the gift of learning from Jay, above all listening to Jay for virtually my entire adult life. He was the most important teacher, the most important friend I ever had. He always aimed for the deepest meanings—in textual marginalia, in the emotional relation between books and their readers, in [End Page 141] his profound concern for his students' souls. He had the amazing capacity to explain the deepest meanings of your own life. I met Jay 33 years ago, in the summer of 1974, at a Summer Institute for Early New England Studies held at Barrington College, a few miles southeast of Providence, Rhode Island. It turned out that Barrington was a Baptist Bible school. Who knew? A year into my graduate studies at Columbia, I attended the seminar because the list of guest teachers—Alan Heimert (who 8 years later blurbed Prodigals and Pilgrims), the Mathers scholar Robert Middlekauff, and Darrett Rutman (a practitioner of the "new" social history of early America)—were famous for their work in colonial American studies. It was a remarkable, and remarkably intense three weeks. Jay and I bonded immediately, two New York Jews crazy for the Puritans. He was in a serious reading mode for his dissertation (I recall he would constantly write "th" in the margins of his books, designating a key point or passage relating to his "thesis.") Over the next year or so I would listen, almost weekly, to his exuberant speed raps, the antic flow of ideas and insights that became Prodigals and Pilgrims, the book that transformed eighteenth-century American intellectual, religious, and literary history. At Barrington, Jay was just launching the project. We would drive into Providence to read at the Brown University library; we would rummage used bookstores; we would do rubbings of locally famous gravestones; we schlepped to Nantucket, where we were staggered by the psychically ravaged expressions on the faces of the whaling captains. What I remember most was Jay's brilliant interrogative style, the way he could pose tough, provocative questions to the guest faculty that always—always—got to the heart of the matter. You might say that I witnessed the beginning of the legendary Fliegelman habit of asking the most probing question, leading to the startling insight. Jay's interrogative art invariably made you think—really rethink—the meaning of your project—in art, in life. One night during that summer of '74 we fled Barrington to hear Tom Wolfe (on display in his signature white suit, at the height of his oracular fame on the college lecture circuit) speak...

An elusive, trace-like entity, ‘poetic’ presents itself in the form of an intangible and yet indispensable relation, or relatedness, in the overall dynamics of information transformation. Paradoxical in nature and function, its ineffability forms the very condition of expressivity in poetry and poetics. ‘Poetic’, as such, also gains popularity and practicality in popular culture at large where and when it becomes articulated, tailored pragmatically to the specificities of any given activity. As an epochal phenomenon, this pragmatic rendition of ‘poetic’ takes the more pronounced form of rhetoric, which appropriates ‘poetic’, and which is resorted to by the contending smaller narratives in the postmodern world as their means for their respective identity formations and legitimations. In the context of the contemporary poetry scene, this rhetorical appropriation of ‘poetic’ manifests itself eloquently in the three areas of rhetorical situation, constitutive rhetoric, and rhetorical styles, which reveal the mechanisms of a soft interpellation that grants the contemporary poets their identity and legitimacy through their own performative confirmation.

Reviewed by: Contemporary Peruvian Narrative and Popular Culture: Jaime Bayly, Iván Thays and Jorge Eduardo Benavides Jean O'Bryan Knight Ruz, Robert . Contemporary Peruvian Narrative and Popular Culture: Jaime Bayly, Iván Thays and Jorge Eduardo Benavides. Woodbridge: Támesis, 2005. 130 pp. Given that Vargas Llosa is in his seventies, Bryce Echenique is not far behind, and Ribeyro is no longer with us, now is a good time to ask what's new in Peruvian [End Page 429] narrative. In Contemporary Peruvian Narrative and Popular Culture Robert Ruz offers us a well-structured response to this question based on the work of three successful novelists, all in their forties and all vibrant voices. Ruz situates his study of Peruvian narrative from 1994 to 2003 in a theoretical framework that includes perspectives from queer theory, postmodern thinking, and cultural studies. As the author explains, "a central preoccupation running through this book is to give a sense of the specificities of Peruvian cultural production and how theoretical readings might deal with them" (2). These two components of Ruz's project are apparent in the introduction, which incorporates phenomena from contemporary Peruvian culture (the baylyboom, vladivideos, and the "cholificación" of Lima), as well as theoretical concepts (Bourdieu's distinction between high and popular culture, García Canclini's understanding of the notion of teleparticipación, and various theorists' reflections on postmodernity). Readers in search of a more traditional literary studies approach may turn away at the introduction. Those who push on will discover that Ruz's book is as much about new approaches to narrative as it is about new narrative from Peru. The monograph consists of four chapters, the first two of which focus on the works of Jaime Bayly, the high profile talk-show host turned best-selling novelist, who is based in Lima and Miami. With seven novels, Bayly is by far the most productive of the group, so this extra attention is warranted. Chapter 1, which was published previously in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, examines Bayly's portrayal of gay and bisexual identities in his early novels and the extent to which these works support or challenge the positions of queer theorists Butler, Sedgewick, and Bersani (all working outside the Latin American/Peruvian context). Ruz credits Bayly for being the first to introduce gay subject matter into mainstream Peruvian culture, albeit with the help of his Spanish publishers. He also suggests that this accomplishment has come at a cost, since the use of negative homosexual stereotypes and ambiguous sexual identities in Bayly's work may be seen as a sell-out to the demands of the Peruvian market. Chapter 2 takes a closer look at the evolution of Bayly's "postmodern narrative style" and its relationship with mass-marketing. Ruz proposes that in Bayly's narrative style trumps structure, and by style he means primarily the author's use of the edgy language of Lima's youth culture. Drawing on Hutcheon's idea that political engagement can take the form of "complicitous critique" in postmodern writing, Ruz argues that Bayly's populist style does not necessarily preclude social criticism in his works. He finds that beginning in the early novels and culminating in his fourth, La noche es virgen (1997), Bayly is capable of delivering some social critique in a light, consumer-oriented style. More recently, however, Ruz finds that complicity with popular culture outweighs critique in Bayly's writing as the marketing of his works has gone global. [End Page 430] A vocal critic of Bayly's literatura light, university lecturer and literary critic Iván Thays positions himself as an exponent of narrativa culta. Ruz's third chapter examines how Thays defines himself in opposition to the international baylyboom by writing and publishing inside Peru about decidedly intellectual themes. His three novels are an exploration of the writing process, the image of the writer, and the social status of literature, and all engage with the literary canon both inside and outside Peru. The title of Thays's third novel, for example—La disciplina de la vanidad (2000)—alludes to his preoccupation with the literary vocation. One might expect that this emphasis...

Previous articleNext article FreeCall for PapersSigns Special Issue: Complexities of Care and CaringPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOver the past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debate while challenging binaries of equality and difference, public and private, the cold hand of the market and the warmth of home, the rational and irrational, and paid and unpaid labor. We write this call at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid the groundswell of support for #BlackLivesMatter, when indeed the need for renewing such challenges is dramatically clear. Our needs for care, the reality of our embodied vulnerabilities and interdependence, stand in stark relief against the cruel indifference of neoliberal nation-states and global superpowers, with great gulfs in whose needs for care, whose caring labor, and whose fragility we value. Yet at the same time, notions of care and relationality have traveled far from their critical or radical roots in differing strands of feminism, and it is timely to reassess. This special issue invites such reassessment across disciplines, broadly questioning and complicating feminist histories, debates, and politics of care and caring. We also welcome submissions exploring and complicating cultural work on representations of care and caring, whether from the arts, media and popular culture, or literature or literary studies.The editors invite essays that consider, but are by no means limited to, the following questions:• What work have concepts of care and caring done in feminist scholarship? And in praxis, for groups, solidarities, and activist orientations? What histories and debates should be revisited or rethought?• Can care and caring still function as critical or radical concepts? Is care still gendered? Or racialized in differing national contexts?• Can self-care still be radical? Black feminist Audre Lorde wrote, in her 1988 book A Burst of Light, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” But in a neoliberal age, is it hopelessly individualized, domesticated, and commodified? Subject to cultural appropriation?• Are frameworks of care and caring useful for environmental or interspecies politics?• How have feminists across disciplines and in conversation with critical race and disability scholars understood the relation (or the entanglement) of care and caring to affect, labor, power, harm, and violence? What are the outer limits of the concept?• What are the histories and futures of global care chains, of marginalized care workers and their struggles in the context of increased structural inequalities?• How have care and caring been represented, debated, theorized, or problematized in literature, theater, dance, art, film, and/or popular culture? Are there emergent feminist representations or performances of care?• What is the relation of feminist scholarship on care and caring to law, economics, and philosophy? To notions of autonomy and rights? To theories of the state?• Can we have caring technologies? Do technologies facilitate caring or further commodification, individualization, and surveillance?Signs particularly encourages transdisciplinary and transnational essays that address substantive feminist questions, debates, and controversies without employing disciplinary or academic jargon. We seek essays that are passionate, strongly argued, and willing to take risks.The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2021. The issue will be guest edited by Linda Blum, professor of sociology, Northeastern University; Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University; and Amber Jamilla Musser, professor of American studies, George Washington University.Please submit full manuscripts electronically through Signs’ Editorial Manager system at http://signs.edmgr.com. Manuscripts must conform to the guidelines for submission available at http://signsjournal.org/for-authors/author-guidelines/. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 46, Number 2Winter 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710819 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In one of his finest literary essays, i.e., “Tradition and Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot opined that past works of art forms an order of tradition and this tradition is the foundation of long-lasting literature. Folklore is also a work of art, and it seems that no one knows better how to use folkloric elements in their novels than African writers. Folklore is an embodiment of individual dignity and social justice, explored in a traditional way. Most writers from the African continent including Chinua Achebe, Ngugiwa Thiong’o, Ben Okri etc. have made extensive use of African folklore and folk culture in their novels. In contrast, modern fiction writers across the globe have adopted a new fondness for popular culture in their writings. Popular culture generally refers to the set of contemporary practices, entertainment media including music, films, fashion, politics, use of technology etc. Some social science experts emphasise the importance of considering folk culture and folk beliefs as part of popular culture. However, popular culture commonly refers to modern cultural practices that have influenced a larger group of people. Chigozie Obioma is a writer from Nigeria—an African country with vibrant and rich cultural heritage. In his famous novel The Fishermen, he sets out to mix-up these two seemingly different areas i.e., folk culture and popular culture. This article examines how the novelist has blended popular culture with traditional and folkloric conventions, which represent two different poles of time and space.This article also examines the author’s unique narrative style which enables him to combine folk culture and popular culture with extraordinary ease of writing. This study aims to understand the multilayered dynamics of popular culture and oral folkloric traditions, with special reference to their use in this novel. Besides, it will look into how a traditionally orthodox Nigerian society is gradually transforming into a society of modern developments which are being reflected in this novel. The primary purpose of the study is to examine the intermingling of popular culture and traditional folkloric culture in the Nigerian society with special reference to the novel The Fishermen.In doing so, the primary approach of the researcher was speculative and analytical in nature. The study uses the method of closed reading of the primary text for detailed analysis of the topic concerned. The method of analyzing different situations and characters in connection to the concerned topic has been thoroughly used for this study. Apart from the study of the primary text, method of reading connected socio-cultural concepts and theories have also been used for this research article. It is believed that this article will pave a new path for the study of the intermingling of popular culture with folkloric conventions not only in the texts of the African continent but also encourage researchers to do the same in Oriental fictions which are equally rich in the blending of popular culture with folkloric conventions. This research will help readers and researchers engage in a new area of study where modern developments in the field of literature and folklore can be explored. This study will contribute to the study of Nigerian novels in connection to their very own folkloric conventions. In addition, this study will help create a new ecosystem of knowledge where folklore and popular culture within literature can be easily studied.

Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, critical/cultural scholars approach food and food related activities as texts, asking questions about power, identity, political economy, and culture. The emergent field of critical food studies represents a growing interdisciplinary interest in taking food seriously. Approaching cultural practices as the site of resistance to and incorporation into hegemonic social structures, cultural studies orients us towards questions regarding the politics of food practices with an eye towards social justice. Framed by an awareness of the performativity of cultural practices, both food studies and critical cultural studies engage questions of subjectivity, symbolic meaning, institutional power, identity, and consumption. Broadly speaking, critical cultural studies scholars examine foodways—the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the production and consumption of food—as (a) symbolic repertoires for the production of social identity; (b) a site of cultural performance; and (c) a metaphor for race, class, gender, and sexuality within popular culture. These areas overlap, reinforce, and problematize each other, and are not intended to provide an exhaustive account of the approaches critical cultural scholars take when integrating food studies into their research. As symbolic repertoires, food, foodways, and cuisine are often understood as integral to articulating identity around nationhood, race and ethnicity, class, and gender. Food, foodways, and cuisine provide potent examples of how symbols construct knowledge and meaning. As a site of cultural performance, foodways are understood as part of a cultural system embedded within a matrix of rituals, values, and practices that comprise the rhythm of daily life. Paying attention to food as performance reveals the intricacies of our understandings of and negotiations between self and community; nostalgia and the present moment; home and away; family and individual. Finally, cultural studies deconstructs the metonymic functions of food as presented in media texts. Methodologically, this research provides a textual analysis of how particular foodstuffs function rhetorically within media texts. Theoretically, it provides an important addition to our understanding of the workings of hegemony within the context of food as a metaphor for race, ethnicity, and gender, particularly on cable networks, reality TV, and in film.

This article argues that representations in popular culture of the Holocaust of World War II are being used to reframe issues of racism in the United States. It critically examines three major discourse formations: contemporary Western thought on fascism, critical scholarship on the US collective memory of the Holocaust, and popular culture’s use of the Holocaust for racial instruction. The Americanization and de-Judification of the Holocaust shows how fascist racism is constructed through institutional discourses and practices and functions as an archetype for understanding race and racism in the United States. Exploring the emergence of Holocaust references in US public culture following Barack Obama’s election, this article proposes that the analogy gains its efficacy because the Americanization of the Holocaust articulates the relationship between institutional practices and race for racist whites.

Critical scholarship on pro-environmental and dark green religious themes in popular culture must engage more directly with that culture’s means of production. To make this argument, I first draw on Bron Taylor’s theory of ‘dark green religion’ as a foundation for articulating the sacredness underlying the call to deep ecological ethics. Reflecting on the means of mass mediating that message provides us with an opportunity to critically evaluate the challenges of ecological ethics in late capitalist society. Second, through analyzing two of the most popular sitcoms of the last twenty years—The Simpsons and South Park—I contend that the task of articulating dark green ethics through mass media is inherently challenged by the capitalist modes of production that make opposition to them possible. While other scholars have been hopeful about these programs’ ecological statements, I argue that the programs are inherently hampered by their reliance on consumer capitalism and its modes of production. In conclusion, I provide a warning for those who would perform ecological ethics in the contemporary media sphere and offer a way to build towards potential alternative paths.

Malthus’s privileging of population growth as the main cause of poverty, scarcity and war still resonates widely in both the public policy arena and popular culture. It shapes dominant discourses about the relationship between climate change, conflict and security in Africa. This article examines what I call the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa (MARA). MARA represents the convergence of current international strategies for reducing high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa through long-acting female contraception with climate conflict narratives that blame environmental degradation on population pressure and portray young African men as a security threat. Together these serve as a powerful gendered rationale for Western humanitarian and military interventions. MARA also plays a role in justifying the new land enclosures on the continent. How can critical scholarship more effectively challenge MARA and intervene in the politics of anticipating the future?

"Order Is the Best We Can Hope For":Sicario and the Sacrificial Violence of the Law Kojo Koram (bio) The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo. —James Baldwin The spectacular modes of violence witnessed within contemporary politics offer a persistent challenge to the end-of-history proclamations that were made at the end of the previous century.1 The imagined resolution of social antagonism that was presumed to follow the fall of the Berlin Wall promised a global order in which liberal, capitalist democracy would provide a cohering anchor for all nations and cultures to coexist within a single universal. Rivalry between sovereign nations had been accredited as the source of murderous global conflict in what had been the bloodiest century in human history up to the end of the Cold War; with the twenty-first century heralding the suppression of that rivalry, it was anticipated that the violence would dissipate under the glare of a shared adherence to rule of law. However, the preponderance of increasingly spectacular images of violence delivered by contemporary politics and reflected in our popular culture troubles this [End Page 230] presupposition. The sight of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on fire that has been seared into our collective memory is read as confirming the end of "the end of history."2 The so-called War on Terror launched in the aftermath of 9/11 has continued to remind us of the return of a violence that was never truly contained, particularly with the images of Lynndie England's Abu Ghraib and the capture of Saddam Hussein. Critical scholars have responded by taking up the task of unpacking the insights that the War on Terror can offer us with regard to the contemporary workings of violence within the modern global legal order.3 However, absent from this critical engagement has been another abstract war that has both preceded and paralleled the War on Terror: the so-called War on Drugs. The task I will undertake in this essay is to address this absence by drawing some insights into the structuring of contemporary violence and its operative function within our proclaimed peaceful global legal order. I will examine first the legal architecture that governs the War on Drugs and then the representation of this inexhaustible war within popular culture, particular through Denis Villeneuve's 2015 film Sicario. Sicario, a cinematic interrogation of the irresolvable conflict between drug enforcement agents and narcotraffickers along the U.S.-Mexican border, captures the ways in which the drug war offers a telling instance of law underwritten by violence. The drug war and its damning representation in films such as Sicario offer a significant challenge to the presuppositions of the universal triumph of the rule of law heralding the realization of universal peace, for the legal project of universal drug prohibition requires reconciling an expansion of law with an expansion of violence. I will illustrate how the drug war reveals a violence that is not only present within the legal order but also in fact constitutes its very ground, a violence that takes a (re)generative form due to the way in which the construction of its victims imbues it with legitimacy. I term this violence "sacrificial violence," following the work of philosophical anthropologist René Girard. My exploration into the sacrificial undercurrent of legal ordering begins with an evidential problem: that the empirical violence that has resulted from the law's determination to prohibit drugs cannot be explained without challenging the orthodoxy that international law is opposed to violence. The contradiction between international law's founding claim to save "succeeding generations from the scourge of war"—as stated in the opening line of the preamble to the United Nations (UN) Charter—and its concurrent declaration of a War on Drugs holds significance for both scholars and practitioners who continue to uncritically invest in the redemptive power of law. [End Page 231] The Drug War as Catastrophe To intimately associate the violence of the War on Drugs with the workings of the international legal order is to call into question a primary orthodoxy of the law: that...

Using examples from popular culture, this chapter shows that by the 1970s, Americans were far more interested in the past than in the present or future. While many popular and scholarly critics have dismissed this as simple nostalgia or escapism symptomatic of the turbulent decade, the book will argue that in fact what happened was a larger-scale shift in not only how Americans thought about the past, but also how they placed themselves within it, a shift that manifested itself across many iterations of popular and public history during the decade. Chapter ends with an overview of remainder of book and case studies within.

spectrum of mail order and online distributors. Clearly, many people are buying books, and according to Mary Cregan, a lecturer at Barnard College, really good news is evidence that Americans by thousands are joining groups and taking their seriously.2 Cregan points to Oprah Winfrey as only most striking example of two important trends influencing contemporary book culture in America. One, the proliferation of groups across country in past few years sheds light on other, namely, a widening rift between scholarly critics, who write in a highly specialized language, and common readers. 3 These trends, Cregan claims, are driving force behind expanding market for guides designed to bridge academic and popular culture by helping readers recognize and discuss nuances of style, narrative form, historical and literary context, and genre. Moreover, she adds, these guides are beginning to play an important role in shaping how readers outside academy approach literary classics.4 I must admit to feeling less sanguine than Cregan does about prospect of publishers' marketing and promotional departments assuming role of educators in this way. It worries me to imagine that mission of communicating skills of careful reading might be entrusted to those motivated primarily by commercial interests.5 Moreover, having held teaching positions at high school and university levels, I speak as one situated within academy who resists simplistic notion of two distinct cultures, one academic, other popular, that need somehow to be bridged. Nonetheless, I agree with Cregan that literature instruction in schools and