Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness by Michael Black

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See Gamer’s forthcoming essay, “Timour Tartar’d: Theatrical Centers and Romantic Culture” See also Younquist’s very interesting recent Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJeffrey N. Cox Jeffrey N. Cox is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Correspondence to: Jeffrey N. Cox, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA; e-mail: jeffrey.cox@colorado.edu Angela Esterhammer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, at the University of Western Ontario. Jeffrey N. Cox is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Correspondence to: Jeffrey N. Cox, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA; e-mail: jeffrey.cox@colorado.edu

Literature and Happiness D. J. Moores Let your verse be the happy occurrence Somehow within the restless morning wind Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme . . . And all the rest is literature. —Paul Verlaine1 It's not lIterary unless it's depressing. Although this statement is unfounded, I often hear it from beginning students and nonacademics who believe that literature is always dark and dreary, and that literariness is tantamount to depictions of suffering, struggle, and tragedy. I typically respond to such comments in the usual English-professor way, pointing out that literature represents the full range of human experience, and that the subject matter is far less important than the way in which a writer describes it. What is more, I say to such people, sounding a bit like Polonius, there are numerous literary genres beyond the tragic, including comedy, romance, pastoral and bucolic poetry, absurdist drama, and utopian fiction, as well as countless aesthetic effects such as the grotesque, the sentimental, the sublime, the ecstatic, the satirical, the epiphanic, and many others that are by no means "dark and depressing." And yet, the question remains whether such a response is entirely accurate. Is there at least a measure of truth in the idea of a negativity bias in literary studies? [End Page 260] The source of such a misconception lies, in part, in the nature of narrative, which is itself conflict based and cannot be otherwise if it is to capture interest. According to long-standing ideas that persist around the globe in numerous cultures, narrative needs to be rooted in conflict and tension. To my knowledge, no artistically complex narrative exists that is not driven by a central conflict or set of interrelated tensions. A story about a wealthy, successful man who lives in pure, suburban felicity with his supermodel wife and two lovely children, each of whom is a high-achieving honor student, is just not interesting. As preferable as such happiness is for many heterosexual people, it is not compelling as a story. If I were to tell such a story to someone, framing it with, "let me tell you an interesting tale," my interlocutor would likely be disappointed after listening to me. But if I started my tale with a description of this family and then added a complicating element, such as the man's secret affair with his young, male assistant, who blackmails him and is then found dead with twenty kilos of cocaine in the trunk of an abandoned police cruiser, I suspect it would capture the interest of someone with an ear for a good tale. Insofar as narrative is concerned, then, stories must by their nature be thickened, or made interesting, by crises, hardships, losses, challenges, obstacles, etc. Aristotle's ancient idea about the necessity of complication, or forces locked in a productive tension that fuels the narrative forward, still holds. Perhaps I can be proven wrong on the point, but I am unaware of any narrative in any genre—even comedies or stories with happy endings—that does not also foreground obstructionist characters, tension, struggle with obstacles, hardship, or suffering. Such elements make the story a story, and without them there may be something interesting to tell, but what one tells in such a zero-conflict circumstance is definitely not narrative in the traditional, literary sense. If the principle (that narrative needs conflict to be deemed narrative) is true, however, does this mean that all narratives, in order to be deemed literary and thus worthy of serious, critical attention, need to end with the protagonist's suicide, tragic death, incarceration, or institutionalization for psychosis? This type of denouement may lend some measure of truth to the popular (mis)conception of literature as a dark and dreary form. After all, is there such a thing as happy literature? Do English departments ever offer courses in such a topic? Perhaps a few, like me, do teach the subject of happiness, but many professors of English, especially in graduate programs, would likely scoff at such a course as "Ecstatic Poetry" or the "Literature of Happiness." Have literary [End Page 261] scholars cultivated an unstated but ubiquitous preference for the...

From the Editor Suzanne Juhasz (bio) The Emily Dickinson Journal is pleased to present the proceedings of the EDIS Conference, "Emily Dickinson Abroad," held in Innsbruck, Austria on August 4-6, 1995. Beneath the "Immortal Alps," scholars from around the world gathered to enjoy a feast of presentations and discussion about Dickinson. Her work and life were explored in a multitude of ways that, taken together, represent the range and richness of Dickinson studies today. In plenary sessions and panels, sixty-two scholars from Great Britain, Europe, Australia, India, Japan, and Thailand presented papers from perspectives that included historical and cultural contexts, editing issues, gender identity, international reception, interdisciplinary approaches, and language and rhetoric. This issue gathers forty-three of those papers. The authors have graciously cut their essays so that it would be possible for us to publish so many of them and thus present a volume that truly represents the content and spirit of that memorable gathering. Special thanks to Gudrun Grabher and her Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, whose extensive work and generous hospitality extended to every dimension of this wonderful conference. We appreciate as well the contribution of Conference Director Margaret Dickie and her staff of graduate students for so capably organizing the program. For help with the publication of this Special Issue we thank Laura Hoopes, Dean of Pomona College. This event was a testimony to the vitality of Dickinson's presence abroad as well as at home. The community of Dickinson scholars is indeed international in every sense. [End Page x] Suzanne Juhasz Suzanne Juhasz is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work on Dickinson includes The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind; Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: A Celebration for Readers (with Cristanne Miller); and Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (with Cristanne Miller and Martha Nell Smith). Her other books include Reading From the Heart: Women, Literature, and the Search for True Love and, with Cristanne Miller and Camille Roman, The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook She is the Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. Copyright © 1996 Emily Dickinson International Society

Fist is a Flag Amitava Kumar (bio) What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value. But we shall make this demand most emphatically when we—the writers—take up photography. —Walter Benjamin There is a photograph of Jewish deportees in Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken probably by the SS Sergeant Ernst Hoffman in late May of 1944, where you see the freshly arrived Hungarian Jews and sense their uncertainty and their loss. As you observe the child clutching his father's lapel, and the eyes of the men and women around him, the look you encounter is one of implacable distance, mixed with fear and curiosity. In the faces of the people I have photographed in the land of my birth, India, I have tried to locate a record of memories and expression that were never the domain of the documentary interests of the state or the dominant media. The photographs you see here are a small part of that extended, ongoing project. [End Page 59] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 61] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 62] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 63] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 64] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 65] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 66] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 67] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 68] When I speak of art specifically, away from the scene of crisis, my take is a schoolteacher's take: art and literature and music for me are audiovisual teaching aids in the construction of cases. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak I use the photographs I've taken in various parts of the world to provoke my students to think not only about the invisible worlds within the world they live in, but also about the connections between those worlds. This globality is a local practice; it is linked to an alert awareness of the particular histories one inhabits. In that sense, the active meanings and uses of these images largely lie with you. [End Page 69] Amitava Kumar Amitava Kumar teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a member of Impact Visuals, a New York based progressive photo co-op. Amitava Kumar's photo journalism and poetry have appeared in both Indian and American publications, including the Indian Express, The Times of India, Samar, The Guardian, Z Magazine, Rethinking Marxism, and Artpaper. Copyright © 1993 Purdue Research Foundation

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Herb Wyile Tony Tremblay (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Herb Wyile, 1961-2016 "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away." Tom Waits Speaking in the past tense about a very close colleague is never easy – doubly so when that colleague was struck down in the prime of an incredibly productive and meaningful life. Herb Wyile was a professor of English at Acadia University who died in July 2016 after a very short illness. He was a husband and father, and a friend to many in the Atlantic Canadian scholarly community. Moreover, he was a man of abundant and healthy contradictions, an academic who was uneasy in the bureaucratized academy, a Maritime nationalist who was wary of place-based tribalism, and a champion of the literary who always felt confined by English departments. He was, in short, uncomfortable with anything that had hardened into dogma or certainty. [End Page 242] He was also avuncular, a role he not so much grew into in middle age but always displayed in his dealings with others. A long-time warrior in the sessional trenches, he was unfailingly generous to his peers, the very people with whom he would have to compete for the few jobs in his field that opened. As his colleague Dan Coleman remembered, Herb did what was right, regardless of the circumstance: Herb shared his CanLit Survey class notes with Dan, who had just finished his doctoral studies at the University of Alberta, so that Dan could teach that course, even though Herb, also a sessional, was more qualified and had more of a right to teach it. The Herb we came to know was, not surprisingly, an uncompromising moralist who built a career on challenging various truths about our region. In his first edited book, A Sense of Place: Re-evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1998), he took up the cause of literary regionalism amidst a formidable regime of textual scholars from the West whose dismissive theoretical authority sought to erase us. Likewise in Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press, 2002) and Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), he championed the efforts of Canadian writers who were reimagining history, thus doing his part to support authors who were resuscitating the literary from the sterile realms of stereotype and celebrity. In that regard, he was especially fond of Newfoundland writers, who insisted that identity formation was a negotiation between a creative community and that community's unease with its own past. Anne of Tim Hortons (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), however, is his definitive statement. In that book, subtitled Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature, Herb shows the disconnect between what people assume about our region (hence the "Anne" in the title) and what contemporary Atlantic Canada writers are actually saying. Globalization, he argues, licenses a free market liberalism that ignores the histories of structural disadvantage in an effort to move capital to tax free and low wage zones, actions that have changed the nature of federalism's social contract, worsened the broader attitude toward Maritimers, and robbed our region of many of its primary industries. Evident in the literature he discusses are the consequences: stories of broken lives, economic hardship, and social ruin. But evident, too, as he is careful to point out, are the triumphs and positive dispositions, one of the most powerful a long-standing resistance to the deracinating forces that negate regional identification and affinity. And it is from that instinct to oppose – whether with wit and humour, taking back our own histories, or fortifying our communities against normative instances of neoliberal common sense – that Maritime durability and the affections for place are built. [End Page 243] Herb Wyile was thus an unusually attentive scholar whose faith was ultimately in communities of writers, scholars, and citizens to reinvent the country by reimagining its histories of colonialism, racism, stereotyping, and division. To that end, he was unfailingly consistent, his early work on literary regionalism of a piece with...

The Influence of Anime on Contemporary Art Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Mitsume, © 2022 MITSUME [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolution Mr., A Day When Many Dreams Come True, 2016. © 2015 Mr. /Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. Courtesy of the artist, Kaikai Kiki Co., and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London In fall 2000, when I stepped into the classroom as a new professor of English and creative writing at a women’s college in the Midwest, the moment resembled Dorothy opening the door of her small farmhouse to reveal the magical land of Oz. I first noticed the hypersaturated colors of my students’ clothing and then the distinctive styles of their outfits. They wore thrift-store frocks layered over blue jeans and ballet slippers, schoolgirl uniforms with knee socks and loafers, and baby-doll dresses with Mary Jane pumps. I knew from reading Vogue that their clothing choices were inspired by Tokyo Street fashion, a look that was more [End Page 92] Click for larger view View full resolution Mr., In a Corner of This Town, 2018. © 2018 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. Courtesy of the artist, Kaikai Kiki Co., and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London overgrown preschooler than college girl. Images of cherry blossoms, Pokémon characters, and Hello Kitty covered their book bags, and while I lectured, they busily doodled in their notebooks. They filled the pages with illustrations of stylized characters, mostly female, who looked gently suggestive with dilated saucer eyes, gravity-defying hair, and slinky [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution Hiro Ando, Kohaku & Flag, 2009, courtesy of CrazyNoodles art collective dresses. After class they talked excitedly about the newest episode of Sailor Moon and shared mochi candies. No one had warned me that many of my students were swept up in the anime craze. My students’ interest in anime mystified me. They seemed to be re- creating a fantastical version of childhood, a time in my life that I couldn’t wait to leave behind. Truth be told, I have always disliked cartoons. I never wanted to see Disney movies, but my father insisted. [End Page 94] Click for larger view View full resolution Hiro Ando, Red Traffic, 2009, courtesy of CrazyNoodles art collective While he was moved to tears by the pleading eyes of Bambi, Dumbo, and Pinocchio, I was left cold. On Saturday morning, my brothers kept the channel tuned to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Woody Woodpecker Show, and The Roadrunner Show, programs I found loud and stressful. In junior high, I wanted to kiss Ricky Bradley, so I accepted an invitation to his house after school to watch Spider-Man. After an unspectacular kiss, I declined future cartoon-watching sessions. It just wasn’t worth it. Fortunately, in college during the 1980s, there was little mention of cartoons. Most English majors were anglophiles caught up in dreams of visiting Stratford-upon-Avon, Canterbury, and Bath. We accessorized our Laura Ashley knockoffs with worn copies of Austen and Brontë under our arms. So as a new professor at a women’s college, I had looked forward to sharing stories of productions at West End theaters and visits [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Hiro Ando, Ola, 2010, courtesy of CrazyNoodles art collective to the British Library. Instead, I was lost amid a lively anime culture; my students’ conversations were peppered with references I didn’t understand and stories of activities I knew nothing about. I began to question why anime was such a dominant force in Japanese culture and how it had achieved mainstream status among young people around the world. What I learned began with the simple fact that in Japan, anime isn’t a genre; it is a medium. Based on the adaptation of manga (comic books), light novels, and, later, video games, its popularity began to flourish after the country’s defeat in the Second World War. As an inexpensive, versatile form of entertainment that suited every age [End Page 96] Click for larger view View full resolution Jimmy Yoshimura, Blueyes, 2009, courtesy of CrazyNoodles...

It is widely thought, both inside and outside our profession, that sociologists do not express themselves very well. The critic Malcolm Cowley complained years ago that the wisdoms of sociology, such as they are, tend to be conveyed "in a language that has to be learned almost like Esperanto." And Edmund Wilson, who once toyed with the idea that the writing of every specialist in the university should be reviewed by professors of English, doubted that sociologists would ever be able to survive such a test. Exposing the defects of sociological writing is a literary sport of long standing.

Now All Mistakes Conspire, and: Between the Shore and the Open Water Carl Phillips (bio) NOW ALL MISTAKES CONSPIRE It’s almost starting to ring true again, about fear being the sturdiest bond possible betweenany two people: I’ve never beenso frightened; I’ve never feltmore close. You make shelter—I mean the kindthe mind sometimes misses especially—seem noharder to find than those stranded-looking nests I seeeverywhere, now the orchard’s leaveshave all but finished falling, what’s a nestanyway, but a weaving together of stray weeds,lost remnants found, whatever jetsam mightmean here—something, I hope, though the sea’sfar away—what’s shelter, anyway, if notonly for now, while we need it. You’ll have seen howthe present tends at once to eclipse and reinforce the past. What’s the more usefulquestion, though—how? or why? Sometimes, whenthe backdrop of winter sky behind the trees’bare branches goes red at sunset,I think equally of stained glass and of one thingmaking up for another—and I can’tdecide. Is the most difficult part of lovewhat can look like the simplest part—staying,when love as a fixed requirementdisappears, and no one asks where it went to? Oras with certain ones of the wilder animals,for whom superior power comessecond, finally, to discernment, being ableto pinpoint the enemy’s weakness and withneither warning nor thought exploit it—what if that’s it? [End Page 33] BETWEEN THE SHORE AND THE OPEN WATER What injures the hiveinjures the bee, says MarcusAurelius. I say not wantingto hurt another, this late,should maybe more thancount, still, as a formof love— skull of an ox, from which a smattering of stars keeps rising . . . Did you knowthere’s an actual plantcalled honesty—for its seedpods,how you can see straight through.Who I am. And how I treated you,and how you feel. Tell me everything. [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution Rigoberto Gonzalez, Sharon Olds, and Carl Phillips Photograph courtesy of Nicholas Nichols Click for larger view View full resolution Airea D. Matthews and Rigoberto Gonzalez Photograph courtesy of Nicholas Nichols [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution Yusef Komunyakaa, just before receiving a Callaloo Lifetime Achievement Award Photograph courtesy of Nicholas Nichols [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution Gregory Pardlo Photograph courtesy of Jerriod Avant Click for larger view View full resolution A rapt audience at NYU. Photograph courtesy of Stacy Parker Le Melle [End Page 37] Carl Phillips Carl Phillips, poet and essayist, is Professor of English at Washington University (St. Louis), where he formerly served as Director of the Creative Writing Program. He is currently the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Included among his twelve volumes of poems and two books of essays are Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986–2006 (2007), Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004), Speak Low (2009), Silverchest (2013), The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (essays, 2014), and Reconnaissance (2015), winner of the PEN Center USA 2016 Literary Award for Poetry. In 2004, Oxford University Press published his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Phillips, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the National Book Award, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as a Chancellor (2006–2012). His other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Rituals William Virgil Davis (bio) One on One A sudden rush from above and then a flurryof feathers as the two came together in mid-air,clashed, and fell to the dirt, whirlwinding it.Then he, the hunter, roosted on his helpless prey. I was not twenty feet away, up on a ladder to fillthe feeder. We all three froze. The hawk staredhard at me as he flexed his talons in the robin’s back.Beneath him the dying bird lifted its broken neck slightly with each last breath. The hawk held tight,squeezing tighter and harder until there was the finalcollapse of this small ceremony. His wide eyes hadheld mine through the whole ordeal. It was as if he wanted me not only to see, to witness, but to attest.And then it had finished. He made a final clasp,and took his trophy and, in one beautiful maneuver,lifted with the dead one and flew off into oblivion. Homage to Wallace Stevens’s Interior Paramour Was it in Oslo or Copenhagen that we firstfound favor for the earliest candle of the evening,first of all of those that were later to be lighted, in sequence, round and around the rooms where wesat thinking our thoughts and sharing them with othersin the faint light that faded to full dark in the corners [End Page 5] of those cold rooms, that winter away, far furthernorth than we had been before? The warmed wineand the dimmed light, as we accustomed ourselves to them, as we thought our thoughts or spoke themopenly, seemed to adjust to the temper of our minds,to add something almost palpable to the conversation. And when someone, reminding all of us of you,quietly said, “Yes, God and the imagination are one,”we took our time to think that through all over again. And then, at last, there was only the silence and the slowlyguttering candles. And then a second serving of winewas silently delivered, with cheese and assorted crackers. A Winter Afternoon It is as ordinary as a bowl of flowersset in the exact center of a tableused for other things, for food and conversation, or the simple sittingwith a book in one’s hand or a glassof wine, with evening coming on along the horizon, through the barrentrees, flashing in the glass, causingit to shimmer with such struck light that it continues to tingle in the air,in the mind, long after any revelationhas dissipated in the growing gloom of that late winter afternoon, whenyou sat alone with long thoughts. [End Page 6] A Winter Remembered This winter I remember the weatherthat took you in, an icy rain, a lidof fog on the tops of the trees. We drove the long miles out of the city,into the open country, passing patchesof snow on the hillsides shielded from the sun and littering the low placesnear the road where it wristed aroundtilted fence posts, the barren trees, moving further out through long lanesof silence, to the place at the top of the hill,where we stopped. Too many of us had been hunched in the hearse, somefacing backwards. We watched fromthe windows, draining with an icy rain, and hardly spoke. Then, when we finallyarrived, everything was already ready.Several men stood a short distance off, under a large oak, leaning hardon their shovels, anxious for us to leave,to let them finish what they’d begun. We watched and listened to what wassaid, and nodded to the others whonodded to us, and then moved slowly [End Page 7] away, reentered the cars and were gone.Although we put your body in the earththat day—many years ago now— even then we knew that your spirit,so quickly lost to us, was still outthere somewhere in the cold icy air. [End Page 8] William Virgil Davis William Virgil Davis’s most recent book is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New. He is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Baylor...

In MemoriamJ. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) Andrzej Warminski (bio) I knew Hillis for a long time—it would be going on forty-six years now—first as a graduate student of comparative literature in the 1970s at Yale; then as a colleague, also at Yale, in the early 1980s; and then finally as a colleague in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine since 1989. J. Hillis Miller's path traversed not one but at least four careers. The first of these was his nearly twenty years at Johns Hopkins (1953–1972), where he distinguished himself as a talented scholar of Victorian literature and as the American "ambassador" for the Geneva School of literary theory. Hillis was also a prominent member of the school. (If you pick up Sarah Lawall's old book on the Geneva School of literary critics, Critics of Consciousness [1968], you will find there chapters devoted to Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset, and … J. Hillis Miller. Or should one say "EeLEES MeelER"?) Hillis's second career spanned the memorable years at Yale (1972–1986), when (along with Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman) he gained fame (and notoriety) as a member of the "Yale School" of deconstructive literary criticism. The third career would be his years (1986–2001) as indefatigable Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, where he, along with Jacques Derrida (whom Hillis brought to UCI), was the main shaper of UCI's reputation as a center for the rigorous study of "theory." But his fourth career would have to be Hillis's years since retirement. Hillis's achievements in "retirement" constituted what would be a full and very distinguished career for lesser mortals. This is the case not only in regard to the volume of publications—I count at least fifteen books (with more in [End Page v] production) and numerous articles—and an international lecturing schedule that many a younger scholar would not be able to keep up with. (Particularly in China—imagine what kind of trip you have to take to get from Deer Isle, Maine, to Beijing!) It was also true of Hillis's work as teacher and mentor. Since "retirement" Hillis served as chair or member on the dissertation committees of many students in English and in comparative literature. I know that he also supervised dissertations at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Queensland. This is a remarkable record, and not just in terms of quantity. As anybody who has known Hillis within the academic context would affirm, Hillis was the most generous teacher that any of us will ever come across. His was above all an intellectual generosity: Hillis's willingness to see students' thoughts and projects through to the end without either preemptive acceptance or dismissal. But it was also a simply personal generosity with his time and effort that must have been a response to a genuinely ethical imperative—indeed, the equivalent of a religious "calling" or vocation—to treat others with the respect due to "the other." If Hillis was what one calls a "beloved" teacher, it is no doubt because students recognized this trait and appreciated being treated with respect—intellectual and personal. On the personal side: I have many memories of time with Hillis, a lot of them also involving Derrida, for instance, our annual ritual picking up Derrida at the airport—first at JFK, then at LAX—to take him to New Haven and Laguna Beach, respectively. From LAX we would drive to Irvine, Derrida would pick up his rental car, and then Derrida would drive the rental car, together with Hillis, to Laguna, with me following them, Derrida's very heavy suitcase (full of paper) in the trunk. After his long flight from Paris, Derrida would be weaving all over MacArthur Boulevard (and later Newport Coast Drive). I remember despairing, "Oh God, he's going to get himself killed, and he'll get Hillis killed too!"—while trying to make sure I didn't run into them, what with Derrida braking erratically on the hills. … Hillis and I sometimes...

Challenging Creativity: A Critical Pedagogy of Narrative Interpretation Alexander Hollenberg (bio) The humanities and the rhetoric of creativity The interdisciplinarity of creativity research in academia has lent itself to a proliferation of inchoate ideas, definitions, and arguments, and yet, curiously, within the public sphere “creativity” is often promoted as a socio-economic panacea, a word with power enough to heal us of the fractious vicissitudes of modern life. In the face of widespread precarious employment with which our graduating students must now contend—employment that is insecure, temporary, seasonal, contracted, lacking benefits—workers’ creativity is typically celebrated as a means of negotiating the new neoliberal norm.1 In Ontario, the recent mandate of the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities2 emphasizes its role in support of “a dynamic business climate that thrives on innovation, creativity and partnership” (2014 Mandate Letter). Likewise, the Ministry of Education’s report, Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education [End Page 45] in Ontario, repeatedly calls for “increase[d] training in innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship” for secondary students (3, 6, 7). Unsurprisingly, this vision echoes economist Thomas Friedman’s pedagogical imperative in a New York Times op-ed column almost word for word: the education system must teach “entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity,” so as to engender a class of creative “untouchables” who have the requisite imagination to do old jobs in smarter ways (“The New Untouchables”). For many in the humanities, these more-or-less explicit ties between creativity and capital are suspect. In literary studies, we often see our role as filling out a vanguard of social critique, and we view our subject matter—the creative texts themselves—as the vehicles of such critique. Suddenly, our own pedagogical obligations come into question. How can literary educators teach modes of creativity that prepare students for their contemporary context without also tacitly endorsing the precarious world they are inheriting? The subsumption of creativity into corporatist discourse is, certainly, nothing new. In 2003, for example, the City of Toronto published its Culture Plan for the Creative City, in which it promoted creative culture as essential to the economic health of the city (5). Citing a study prepared by economist Richard Florida and Meric Gertler (now President of the University of Toronto) for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity, and Innovation, the report is founded on the premise that “arts and culture, ethnic diversity and cultural openness act as magnets to draw high-technology industries and spur economic growth” (9–10). In other words, creativity services the progress of capital. One might be tempted by such an equation, for it explicitly suggests that the creative worker and her concomitant creative acts have value and are valued by society; still, what’s missing from this optimistic reading is that to transform the creative moment into a moment of economic value is also to reimagine creativity quite restrictively. Creativity becomes, in this sense, work, but more perniciously, in the discourse espoused by those such as Florida, creativity—in its Romantic connotations of flexibility, individuality, and self-direction—becomes the servant of neoliberal policy, “a fantasy of labour. … the possibility within capitalism of work without exploitation” (Szeman 29). That is to say, to promote an amorphous form of creativity as the model of labour and essence of economic value in the twenty-first century is to more subtly transform creativity into its opposite—a sign of complicity within a given system. In its contemporary ubiquity, creativity has become a paradoxical signifier of neoliberal conformity. “Creative work,” according to Sarah Brouillette, “tends to be figured contradictorily by creative-economy rhetoric, [End Page 46] as at once newly valuable to capitalism and romantically honorable and free” (4). Further, creative-economy discourse tends to divorce creativity from social responsibility through its treatment of self-realization as a process that can occur in the absence of any judgment about the impact of one’s work on society; … its stigmatization of collective politics and workers’ interdependence; its lionization of an elite cadre of creative innovators and sidelining or outright omission of industrial, service, and manual labor; and its insistence that the individual worker shoulder the burden of establishing a secure future. (82) Indeed, in...

What Are English Teachers Teaching?Vol. 2, No. 2, February 1940 Cleanth Brooks In a book which appeared several years ago, Max Eastman makes some very sharp criticisms of the English professors. And in the course of that criticism he presents a graphic description of the plight in which they find themselves: the professors of literature are now plainly on the defensive, and may be seen from time to time peeping under the lids of their writing desks, and poking around in all the corners of their departments and among their old papers, trying to find out, if they can, just 'what' subject it is they are teaching. Is it history, philology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, ethics? It cannot very well be any of these things because they are all more competently taught in other departments. And yet in a way it seems to be all of them together and a good deal more…. It behooves us … for their sakes as well as our offspring's, to look into this matter very soberly and find out if possible what, if anything, the professors of literature are teaching. After that we may be able to suggest what they ought to teach. Mr. Eastman is very cocksure; the tone of gloating is more than just perceptible in the passage quoted. I have to disagree with his criticism as a whole profoundly. But he is here plainly right in saying that the professors are on the defensive, and I believe, further, that he is right about their confusion of purpose. It is about the confusion that I want to speak; for, in my opinion, the creation of the CEA constitutes an immensely important step toward clearing up that confusion. The average English department performs not one function, but several, and functions which are really more diverse than those usually subsumed under departments so different as those of economics and history, or of sociology and government. The answer to the question, "what do the English professors teach?," is several things, and quite admirable things to teach, but things which are finally only peripheral to the teaching of literature. An even more discouraging answer is this: many English departments are not engaged in teaching literature at all. I do not intend this last statement as a flashy and specious paradox. I mean it literally, and I believe that it can be thoroughly substantiated. I propose that we may view the activities of English departments under three main headings. (I do not claim that this is the only possible division, but I think it is essentially sound, and it is sufficiently simple to make my point.) [End Page 127] First, we may distinguish the various sciences of language. They are sciences, and in a world in which the prestige of science is so high, little need be said in their defence. Certainly nothing that I shall say is to be construed as an attack upon them. All honor to them and to the able scholars who profess them. One point only is relevant to our matter: we should not let the example of those rare persons who are at once good linguists and good critics mislead us into assuming that a sound discipline in linguistics in itself confers critical discrimination. So much for the English professor as scientist. The second category is less easy to establish. I shall call it for want of a better term: the history of literature and history as reflected in literature. Again, probably no defence is necessary. The present-day department is so thoroughly committed to the study of literary history, it has labored so hard in this vineyard and with such fine success!—the prestige of the social sciences is so high, that there is little danger that the English professor as historian will be trampled out of existence. There is probably more danger that he will not recognize his function of historian for what it is. Incidentally, insofar as he does consciously recognize it, he probably strengthens his hand. He has the more incentive to equip himself properly in such fields as economics, philosophy, etc., and thus to set himself up as an able historian of culture. The real danger...

Initially, the ability of personal computers to perform signal processing or multivariate analysis was severely limited by small memory address space and lack of scientific language support. Recently, however, this situation has changed, with large memory sizes common and with the availability of mainframe languages such as FORTRAN-77 to support complex and double-precision expressions. Today, personal computers can be applied to data collection, multivariate analysis, pattern classification, simulation of signal processing hardware, and other engineering applications. We discuss the conversion of mainframe data analysis software for personal computers, and the use of high-resolution personal computer graphics for data displays. The process is illustrated with the conversion of part of the IEEE signal processing library and of the ARTHUR81 multivariate analysis routines to run on a personal computer. Timing and accuracy results are given for two personal computers--the TI Professional and the IBM PC AT. The use of a personal computer to validate data, obtain measurement statistics, perform classification and cluster analysis, and perform modern spectral analysis is illustrated with run information and typical output displays.

Ilana M. Blumberg is professor of English literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel and author, most recently, of the memoir Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (2018). She has won teaching awards from University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University and is currently a recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant entitled Postsecular George Eliot.Rosalind Buckton-Tucker studied at King's College, London, and the University of Leicester, UK, and holds a PhD in American literature. Her main research interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, travel literature, and the pedagogy of literature and creative writing, and she has published a variety of articles and book chapters in these fields as well as presenting numerous papers at international conferences. She has taught in universities in Kuwait, Oman, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and has also worked as a freelance journalist and editor in the UAE and Oman. She enjoys writing fiction, memoirs, and travel articles.Elizabeth Effinger is associate professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, and human-animal studies. She coedited (with Chris Bundock) William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018). She was principal investigator of Erasing Frankenstein, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded public humanities outreach activity that transformed Shelley's 1818 novel into a book-length erasure poem in collaboration with incarcerated and nonincarcerated citizens. For more on the project, visit erasingfrankenstein.org.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College. Her most recent work includes an edition of “The Merchant's Tale” in The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (2020).Michael Keenan Gutierrez is teaching associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Trench Angel (2015) and his work appears in the Guardian, the Delmarva Review, the Collagist, Scarab, the Pisgah Review, Untoward, the Boiler, Crossborder, and Public Books.Angela Laflen teaches digital rhetoric and professional writing at California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition and Assessing Writing, among other venues.Laci Mattison is assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University in the Department of Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century, Victorian, and contemporary literature. She is one of the general editors for Bloomsbury's Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series. For this series, she has coedited volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Alongside Derek Ryan, she has also coedited a special issue of Deleuze Studies titled Deleuze, Virginia Woolf, and Modernism (2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, H. D., Mulk Raj Anand, and Vladimir Nabokov.Kelly Neil is professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College, a small liberal arts institution located in the upstate of South Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern literature and gender. She has published in such journals as Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and This Rough Magic. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare to nonmajors.Sarah Ann Singer is assistant professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Her work appears in College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Peitho.Rachel Tait-Ripperdan is associate librarian at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her master's degree in library science from Florida State University and her master's degree in history from Florida Gulf Coast University. She serves as library liaison to the Departments of Language and Literature, History, Communication, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, collection development, and graphic novels and manga in the academic classroom.Theresa Tinkle (she/her/hers) is a medievalist by training, a teacher committed to supporting students’ development and ambitions, and a disability studies scholar. Her most recent book is Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (2010). She has published widely on medieval English and Latin literature, gender, religion, and manuscript culture. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is engaged in antiracist work, writing to learn, writing in the disciplines, and writing program assessment.