Monstrous Subjectivity in P. O. Enquist’s Nedstörtad ängel 1985

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Editors' Foreword Reimund Leicht and Resianne Fontaine After some twenty years of intensive and fruitful work, Gad Freudenthal has decided to step down as editor of Aleph. During this time, Aleph and "Gad Freudenthal" have been almost synonymous, creating and developing a lively international platform for the historical study of science and Judaism. It was late in the last century when Prof. Yemima Ben-Menahem, who was then the head of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, raised the idea of a scholarly journal devoted to the interface between Judaism and science. It was immediately clear that Gad Freudenthal was the only possible choice for its editor. In 1998, Ben-Menahem and Freudenthal, working with Esti Micenmacher, started laying the groundwork for the new journal. The first issue of Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism appeared in 2001. In the editor's foreword to that first issue, Freudenthal explained the journal's raison d'être: the increasing interest in the ongoing encounter and interaction between Judaism in its various cultural settings and the history of science would make Aleph "an intellectually and economically viable enterprise." It is in large part due to Gad's efforts that Aleph has become a success. With his indefatigable energy Gad established contacts in Europe, Israel, and the United States, soliciting articles from scholars in many fields and encouraging young scholars to submit the fruits of their research to Aleph. It is no exaggeration to say that he has created not only a journal, but also a scientific community. Aleph began as an annual; the volume of material submitted necessitated twice-yearly publication from 2009 on. Gad has set very high standards for acceptance and publication. Every submission was reviewed by two and usually more readers, and went through a process of thorough revision before being accepted. Gad himself spent countless hours reading the submissions and suggesting how authors could improve their argumentation and clarity. Many of us have benefited from his vast knowledge, erudition, and guidance. In addition to supervising the review process, he was involved in all aspects of the journal's contents and the management—maintaining contact with the executive and advisory board, and securing funds and handling financial matters. He was constantly thinking into new directions, including the challenges involved in the adaptation of a scholarly journal to the requirements of the digital age. [End Page 7] Our scholarly community owes a profound and lasting debt to Gad Freudenthal. We heartily thank him for all his efforts, will gladly continue to rely on his advice, and wish him many more years to pursue his own research interests, whose results we hope to see in future issues of Aleph. [End Page 8] Copyright © 2019 Aleph

Manifest Wendel A. White (bio) Manifest is an ongoing project, a portfolio of nearly one hundred photographs of African American material culture held in public and private collections throughout the United States. These repositories have accumulated diaries, receipts for the purchase of humans, hair, a drum, a door, photographs, figurines, and other artifacts—some with great historical significance, some the commonplace, quotidian material of black life. This project is concerned with the physical remnants of the American concept and representation of race. The histories of slavery, abolition, the U.S. Civil War, segregation, oppression, accomplishment, and agency are among the narratives that emerge in these photographs. I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration. While the artifacts are remarkable as visual evidence of lives and events, I also intend the viewer to consider this informal reliquary as a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory. Various projects have occupied my attention during the past two decades; in retrospect, each has been part of a singular effort to seek out the ghosts and resonant memories of the material world. I am drawn to the stories "dwelling within" a spoon, a cowbell, a book, a postcard, or a partially burned document. The photographs are made with a 4 × 5 view camera, using film or digital capture. The prints are pigment-based inkjet. [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution Lunch Box, Larkin Franklin Sr., Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 15] Click for larger view View full resolution Slave Bill of Sale, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, 2009. [End Page 16] Click for larger view View full resolution Door Knob, Maye St. Julien, Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 17] Click for larger view View full resolution Spoon, Harriet Tubman House, Auburn, New York, 2009. [End Page 18] Click for larger view View full resolution Iron, Great Plain Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 19] Click for larger view View full resolution Tintype, Fenton History Center, Jamestown, New York, 2009. [End Page 20] Click for larger view View full resolution Zora Neale Hurston Sketch Book, Smathers Library Special Collections, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 2012. [End Page 21] Click for larger view View full resolution James Baldwin Inkwell, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution FBI Files on Malcolm X, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution Poster of Angela Davis, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution Drum, Dan Desdunes Band, Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Cab Calloway Home Movies: Haiti, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Radio Raheem's boombox from the movie Do the Right Thing, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution New Orleans Door, Hurricane Katrina, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2016. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Quilt (W. Black), Great Plains Black History Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2011. [End Page 29] Wendel A. White Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has received various awards, including fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in...

Reviewed by: Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (bio) Beverly Lyon Clark . Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. The reception of children's literature in general, and the history of children's literature research in particular, are areas of research long in need of further exploration. Clark's engaging study is a detailed and thorough analysis which focuses on the marginalization of children's [End Page 112] literature in the United States, both by the mainstream critical establishment and within the academy. Based on the study of primary materials such as reviews and articles in both the popular press and scholarly journals, lists of recommended books, anthologies, and literary histories, Clark's monograph sheds light on the changing attitudes toward children's literature and childhood in America in the course of 150 years. Whereas children's literature was highly regarded by the nineteenth-century cultural elite, many critics and scholars have been dismissive of this topic since the beginning of the twentieth century, downplaying children's literature as "kiddie lit" and "childish." These devaluative terms reveal fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary value of books read by both children and adults, leading to an increasing bifurcation of high and low literature. Clark divides her book into eight chapters. In the first chapter she gives a summary of the central theoretical concepts she employs, ranging from reception theory to gender studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. Overall, however, Clark reflects on the causes for the disregard of children's literature by theoretical approaches such as New Criticism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and New Historicism. Whereas these theories reach out across the boundaries marked by gender, race, ethnicity, and class, they generally do not consider age as a relevant analytical category. Even scholars who specialize in feminist studies have rarely recognized the position of the child, although in nineteenth-century literary criticism children's books were often regarded as suitable reading for both women and children. This once-firm connection between feminism and childhood has nonetheless been weakened in favor of an adult-centered perspective influenced by the image of childhood as a stage of immaturity which needs to be surpassed. In the next chapter Clark turns to two key figures in the representation of childhood at the turn of the century. By opposing Frances Hodgson Burnett's bestselling children's book Little Lord Fauntleroy to Henry James' adult novel What Maisie Knew, a text written from the child's point of view, Clark stresses the complexity of the changing attitudes toward childhood. The close textual analysis of these books demonstrates the depth of Clark's understanding of both contemporary literary conventions and the discussion of gender issues. Whereas Burnett's contributions to children's literature were regarded as "great literature," thus stressing her critical acclaim in the nineteenth century, her works disappeared from lists of recommended reading after 1910. In order to gain reputation in the academy, James and his circle stressed the unsurmountable opposition of childhood and maturity, thus supporting [End Page 113] the bifurcation of children's and adult literature. In addition, James's main thesis, which is based on an "incongruity between attention to youth and attention to style" (36), leads frequently to an "invisibility" of children's books in the popular press and in academic and literary circles. Against this background, in the third chapter Clark offers a sketch of the changing institutional frameworks associated with literature, based on an extensive reading of American periodicals from the mid-1850s to the end of the twentieth century and on a concise study of three important literary histories: Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21), Literary History of the United States (1948), and Columbia History of the United States (1988). America's most well-known literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and adults. Clark focuses on the decisive role of Horace Scudder, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, all of whom advocated and published children's literature and contributed to its high esteem with reviews in journals such as Youth's Companion and...

Appropriating Science for a Weathered Area

Special Issue: Heredity and Evolution in an Ibero-American Context

LongingPersonal Effects from the Border Susan Harbage Page (bio) and Bernard L. Herman (bio) Susan Harbage Page's portfolio, Longing: Personal Effects from the Border, is an intervention—at once aesthetic, archaeological, and archival—into the spaces and objects associated with the great migration north across the Rio Grande and into the United States. Page's images are visual conversations about the material culture of the immigrant experience and compel us to consider how we see ourselves through seeing others. Images of a deflated inner tube dropped by the road, a wallet mired, its contents spilling into the mud, footsteps revealed in soft earth, and river-wet clothes wrung, wadded, and cast aside document ordinary things possessed with extraordinary associations of flight, hope, panic, determination, and fear. In collecting possessions discarded at the border and photographing them in her studio, Page transforms them, re-contextualizing found objects through a cool and loving curatorial eye. The artist becomes archivist. With the debris-field chaos of riverbank and border fence erased, inner tube, wallet, and shirt take on different associations drawn from the calm and analytical confines of the studio. These images evoke the strange and subdued violence of the museum, the morgue, the catalog. Side by side (imagine a diptych), the juxtaposition of images from field and studio reveal the spaces between the desperation of flight and the stillness of the archive—there, here, lost, found. Longing speaks about power through the operations of borders, places where identities are furtive, hidden, gleaned only via jettisoned artifacts, first discarded and depersonalized, then retrieved and remembered. The visual space Page creates between the inner tube encountered in brush and sunlight and subsequently pedestaled on a shadow-edged blue background, delicately and revealingly lit by studio lamps, forces us to question how we must position ourselves to pursue the always political work of seeing. Page locates that political work in what she describes as "contexts for viewing." It is not just what we see that matters, but how our privileged vantage points contextualize her images and their content. In that gesture Susan Harbage Page makes us aware of how the frailties and vanities of our own habits of seeing reinforce unspoken ideologies of power. [End Page 31] If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron. —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 40] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 41] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 42] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 43] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 44] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 45] Susan Harbage Page Susan Harbage Page teaches studio art and women's studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her art addresses such concerns as the performance of race and gender, identity politics, and immigration. Amongst Page's numerous awards are fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Camargo Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Bernard L. Herman Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (2005) and The Stolen House (1992). He has published essays, lectured, and offered courses on visual and material culture, architectural history...