Academic Canon Research Articles

Whither the Novel?

In his novel The Information (1995), British novelist and essayist Martin Amis criticizes the contemporary literary world, through both form and content—its structure and its characters’ ideas. Although the novel presents several postmodernist traits, blurring the limits between its author and its narrator, it mostly deals with the loss of control of the author (and the narrator), and the ever higher efforts that must be made by readers, resulting in commercially successful but low-quality literature being eventually more read than the literary works usually accepted by the academic canon. This direction may open the discussion about the fate of literature as viewed by writers themselves.

“We Come Not Here to Talk”—Revisiting the Work of Anna Julia Cooper: An Analysis of Standpoint Theory and Her Placement in the Academic Canon

This paper examines the writings and influence of Anna Julia Cooper. The honest, historical narrative of scholarship is in question when theorists of color are repeatedly forgotten or removed from the academic record. Anna Julia Cooper is just one example of someone who has been overlooked. I detail how Cooper's analysis of group identity, located in shared experience, provided the groundwork for intersectional frameworks and feminist standpoint theory. I further contend that Cooper's lived‐experience narrative not only informed her own work but the work of others of her time, including the more esteemed W.E.B. Du Bois. She addressed how race‐gendered politics and the legacies of slavery and colonialism shape scholarship. Cooper's critique of academia determined that the relationship between colonialism and academia is intrinsically tied. My analysis examines how the work of theorists of color is often omitted, erased, or contextualized within the writings of white theorists due, in part, to a lack of generational intellectual wealth. A concept that recognizes the historical discrepancy in scholarship between white scholars and scholars of color and how that exclusion has shaped and defined established knowledge. This paper analyzes Cooper's placement within the lineage of the academic canon.

A Review of Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers (Futures of Data Analytics in Qualitative Research)

How do we begin to connect to those who are no longer living, those who have been historically silenced, and those whose memory becomes a faint existence in our modern, colonial imaginary? Within Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory, and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee, a qualitative educational researcher, examines the tension that often accompanies the implementation of decolonial feminist knowledges, methodologies, and epistemologies, especially when these theoretical perspectives challenge the academic canon rooted in modernity and social scientific empirical realities. This review addresses Rhee’s major theoretical conceptualizations such as Rememory, M/others and Haunting throughout the various processes that often connect individuals through death and grieving. Rhee demonstrates that the production of knowledge being constructed through the rememory of those who have since passed, not only provides existence to their stories, but makes their lives, histories, and memories “very much alive and present.” Rhee challenges notions of the living/dead, remembrance/forgotten, time, national borders, and the fragmented self in an effort to establish new decolonial imaginaries and methodologies for bringing the silenced voices of women of color to the forefront of our modern reality. This book is recommended for any qualitative researchers and decolonial feminist scholars who are interested in challenging colonial matrices of power that often silence voices/stories from being included in western canons of academia, and those who want to examine the very notions of academic scholarship, epistemology, ontology, and methodology in order to secure a place where the rememory of those silenced out of existence can thrive and whose haunting enacts a decolonial resistance to the continued systems of oppression dominating the colonized other.

Broadening academia: an epistemic shift towards relationality

ABSTRACT In this article, we present a critical reflection on the academy’s approach to knowledge production and dissemination in Australian universities and propose a paradigm shift towards an approach that actively promotes Indigenous knowledges within the academic canon and searches for complementarity and shared interests between Indigenous and Western epistemes. We begin this article with discussion of the role of the academy, and Western and Indigenous discourses around knowledge. From there we discuss contemporary issues of bushfire management and the Juukan Gorge destruction as illustrations to make a case for the role of the academy in engaging with knowledges that arise outside Western paradigms; and translating those knowledges to diverse audiences. Finally, we examine obstacles that must be addressed in a robust academic pursuit of epistemological synergy. Issues of knowledge ownership, epistemological and methodological challenges, and neo-colonialism are discussed as critical aspects of all collaboration towards knowledge integration.

PEDAGOGICAL DILEMMAS FOR SOCIAL WORK IN ACADEMIA

The authenticity of pedagogy becomes compromised when students’ psychosocial needs are considered paramount, especially in the current transformation-driven context, when overstepping boundaries flies in the face of academics’ terms of employment, their teaching responsibilities and the academic canon. The nexus between the practices of this helping profession and the academic development of social work professionals has ignited considerable debate and presented significant challenges. This article explores academics’ conditions of employment regarding their teaching and learning responsibilities alongside the profession’s ethical obligation to respond to students’ psychosocial needs, a duality that presents numerous pedagogical dilemmas. Keywords: blurred boundaries;, collegiality, dilemmas, ethics, pedagogy, social work in academia

Agaciro, vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda

Abstract Recent debates in post-genocide and post-war Rwanda have explored how official commemorations of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in many ways borrow and ‘mimic’ the Holocaust memory ‘paradigm’. The academic canon on post-1994 Rwanda focuses the mostly on politics around this official memory that has evolved into hegemonic memory and on how it has been mobilized to promote a selective memory of the past. However, there is little analysis of vernacular, bottom-up memory practices that have evolved alongside the official one. Using observation, semi-structured interviews, and secondary sources, this article examines vernacular memory practices of mourning the wartime missing in Rwanda. Through the concepts of ‘multidirectional’ and ‘traveling’ memory, this study examines how survivors of these interconnected violent histories that unfolded in two different countries claim multi-faceted Agaciro (dignity, self-respect, and self-worth) through two different memory approaches. The article argues that while actors in official memory approach claim Agaciro through borrowing from another global hegemonic memory, respondents in this study created vernacular avenues to remember their missing loved ones. The article finds that while hegemonic memory might appear to only compete with vernacular memory, there are also ‘knots’ that connect these two memory forms in Rwanda’s context and beyond. In its conclusion, the article proposes an Agaciro-centred approach to examine the relationships between official and unofficial memory practices that have been reenergized through protests both offline and online in Rwanda and beyond. The article contributes to scholarship on Rwanda’s post-genocide memory politics, transcultural memory, and decolonial perspectives on dignity.

What we talk about when we talk about information literacy

Information literacy skills are requisite to fulfilling one’s potential and are highly connected to a good quality of life. However, the ways in which information literacy is discussed within the academic canon are largely unexplored, particularly as these conversations take place through different cultural lenses. The ways in which such cultures are grouped often rely on traditional methods of geographic clustering that are increasingly complicated by the disparate internal nature of societies. Using text analysis of a large bibliometric data set, this research is an attempt to examine how scholars around the world discuss information literacy in their publications. The authors pulled 3658 records with the exact term “information literacy” from the Scopus database. This data was analyzed for the most frequently employed words and phrases, and grouped by country. The authors then further grouped the countries by their levels of literacy, Human Development Index ranking, the average number of citations per article, and a metric created by the authors that assessed each country’s progress in regard to the Sustainable Development Goals and population health. The results include a discussion of the differences in the ways that scholars from different cultures discuss information literacy, and a number of data visualizations to highlight differences in the data.

The Procedure and Practice of Witness Testimony in English Ecclesiastical Courts, c.1193–1300

In the twelfth century, the English church courts made considerable use of compurgation and of sworn members of the community to aid in the resolution of disputes, but by the end of the thirteenth century, academic canon law depended almost entirely on witness testimony. Romano-canonical proceduralists established rules for examining witnesses, rejecting testimonies and resolving conflicts. However, these academic ideals were not always possible or even desirable in practice. Although Roman procedure required witnesses to be eyewitnesses, English ecclesiastical practice allowed witnesses to testify to public knowledge. Furthermore, individuals who were not qualified to testify did so regardless, and their testimonies were not excluded even following exceptions. This is not to say that standard procedure was not followed; more often than not, it was. However, these differences between theory and practice indicate that practitioners (and perhaps judges) in the English ecclesiastical courts were experimenting with ways to use witness testimony beyond the confines of the academic law.

Universal History Upside Down

Universal history as traditionally understood emerged out of the semi-secularization of Biblical history that followed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s attempt to think the whole of religion, philosophy, and history as a cosmological system of modernity. That was the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, universal history became an attempt to include all so-called civilizations within an academic canon. By unearthing the central significance of the Haitian Revolution for Hegel’s idea of freedom, the author argues for an inversion of historical understanding: the alleged margins of history are central, the alleged divisions between histories are mythical, and the goal of a universal history of humanity is to be achieved by dismantling the topology in which the past has been framed and passed down to us. The goal is to disrupt the intellectual order by exposing the blind spots that hinder conceptual, hence political, imagination—a writing of universal history upside down. A universal history worthy of the name will go far beyond the notion of correcting the Eurocentricity of history writing; it will need to be based on a deprivatized, denationalized structure of collective memory, effecting nothing short of a different world order. If the present is imagined not as the culmination of the past but rather as its rescue, then a radical pedagogy practices this gesture in its mode of historical recuperation. Theoretical pragmatics as a method of universal history, the transitory visibility of truth, respects the past’s lack of closure and welcomes the past’s intrusion in the present. It views history as a gift, given to all of us, without restrictions.

Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities. Jeff Strabone. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xv+351.

Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities. Jeff Strabone. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xv+351.

Intervenção social pelas/através das artes: Predisposições, desafios e propostas

Starting from a bibliographic gap about people who intervene socially through and by the arts, without an academic canon, the sociology of culture and the sociology of the arts intersected in a work of sociological investigation. This crossing is the inspiration for the artists' singular biographies, to consider the social journey of the individuals as the explanatory/interpretative variable of their modes of social intervention by the arts. Throughout the construction of four life stories, we try to understand how ethos and practices simultaneously configure social interventions by the arts, namely through do-it-yourself (DIY) spaces, daily creativity, and identity resistance strategies. What are the common characteristics among these social intervention agents? What predispositions, challenges and proposals can we present? That is how we try to contribute to its conceptualization and recognition.

La lectura adolescente y el actual sistema educativo en España: fracasos, logros y propuestas

<p>Las investigaciones recientes ponen de relieve que el actual sistema educativo en España no consigue un número relevante de lectores habituales ni tampoco la fidelidad lectora al canon académico que se propone en las aulas. El nuevo enfoque educativo basado en la lectura, por el que apuesta el Decreto de desarrollo de la LOMCE, podría remediar en buena medida estos problemas. En este artículo se revisa la normativa en Enseñanza Secundaria y Bachillerato y se constata que el desarrollo curricular de la Ley educativa vigente destaca de manera indudable la lectura como objetivo final de la educación literaria. No obstante, al mismo tiempo se comprueba que los currículos de algunas comunidades autónomas tratan de conciliar este enfoque didáctico con otros más tradicionales; en particular, con la enseñanza literaria entendida como historia de la literatura. Se revisan aquí otros trabajos afines en cuanto al objetivo de estudio y, por último, en consonancia con la reciente normativa educativa del Estado, se defienden algunas orientaciones didácticas que podrían contribuir a la formación de lectores.</p>

The Rite of Spring at 100 ed. by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef

Reviewed by: The Rite of Spring at 100 ed. by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef Peter J. Schmelz The Rite of Spring at 100. Edited by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. [xxx, 520 p. ISBN 9780253024206 (hardback), $50; ISBN 9780253027351 (e-book), $49.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In his plenary essay to this collection celebrating the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's landmark composition and its danced manifestations, Richard Taruskin throws cold water on assessments of The Rite of Spring [Vesna ] as an avatar of modernist difficulty: It is not, after all, a complex score. Its textures are simple, though very artfully and colorfully elaborated. What there is in it of counterpoint (beyond the prelude preceding the action) is uncomplicated. Its ostinato-driven forms are downright rudimentary, as is only right, given the subject and setting. Its dissonances are indeed harsh and grating but never mystifying (except to analysts), and neither are the irregular percussive rhythms. (p. 431) Yet he continues a sentence later, "The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener's imagination, and the listener's body." Highlighting Stravinsky's "peerless handling of the immense orchestra," Taruskin says, these sounds "have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score's reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated." He concludes, "It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else" (p. 431). And as his many influential publications on Stravinsky indicate, Taruskin's goal is to resist that mythology. One might, in turn, resist his counterintuitive, revisionist evaluation of this fiery score, as I at first did, but the criticism has merit. It rings true. Rather than being dismissive, Taruskin's critique clears away the clutter and amplifies what makes the score special. Whether the overall collection follows Taruskin's injunction to challenge The Rite is less clear. This book is a complex endeavor, to say the least, with three esteemed editors—Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, helped by John Reed—and a huge number of essays (twenty-seven in all, including one each by Neff, Carr, and Horlacher). The contributors include leading lights of musicology, theory, dance, and history. To list everyone involved and their work would take up this entire review and then some. Because of its breadth, the book serves several overlapping constituencies. It will both please and provoke many. "The Rite of Spring" at 100 originated as a pair of symposia, one held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in October 2012, the other in Moscow, Russia, in May 2013. The Chapel Hill symposium, part of a yearlong festival held on the UNC campus and sponsored by Carolina Performing Arts, sounds like it was quite a party. It was much touted at the time, covered even by Alex Ross in the New Yorker ("Primal Scream," 19 November 2012, 92–93). Taruskin describes the festival as a "bacchanalia" and an "orgy of commemoration" that, he says, owes its existence [End Page 654] to the unique status of The Rite, belonging as it does to both the popular classical repertoire and the academic canon (p. 422). The resulting essay collection is a more sober affair. Carefully compiled and edited, with abundant illustrations and music examples, it includes an extremely useful bibliography, discography, and videography as well as an accompanying Web site of videos and sound clips for six of the twenty-five chapters. (I was surprised by this low number.) Millicent Hodson's essay explaining and defending her famous reconstruction of the original Rite choreography uses by far the most video and audio examples; the remainder is in the theory section. The section headings give some sense of the book's general contents and its implicit argument, as the topics move from dance to France to Russia and on to the "music itself" (perhaps revealing the priorities of the editors, music theorists all). Part 1 is "Dancing Le sacre across the Century"; part 2, "Le sacre and Stravinsky in France"; part 3, "Observations on Le sacre...

Joe Gumbula, the Inaugural Liya-ŋärra’mirri Visiting Fellow

AbstractThis is my account of collaborating with Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula and, in tribute to him and his teaching and scholarship, a discussion of the methodological considerations for teaching and research-based teaching of Yolŋu culture. By privileging the agency and ontology of exegetes such as Gumbula and working in partnership, Yolŋu knowledge has become a part of the modern academic canon as well as a literary legacy for Yolŋu people. The invariable context of the scholarly encounter with Indigenous knowledge is an intercultural one attended by significant historical problems from experiences of the colonial and postcolonial capture of most indigenous societies in modern nation states. Indigenous exegetes hold knowledge systems that exist in situ, in places held in long traditions of customary land tenure and jural principles that predate colonial and postcolonial systems, and inherited in each generation by a few honoured and remarkable people who take up the arduous responsibility of learning and transmitting knowledge practices and their spoken, sung and performed vehicles of expression.

Mary Quayle Innis: Faculty Wives' Contributions and the Making of Academic Celebrity

Mary Quayle Innis (1899–1972) was instrumental in forging the career and legacy of her husband, Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952). Her labours on his behalf included typing, editing, writing, researching, preparing indices, curating his papers, revising his publications, and bringing his manuscripts to press. Quayle also ran errands, shopped, did laundry, prepared food, and provided care for Innis and their four children. She further often networked and hosted academic gatherings. All of this work made it possible for Innis to publish prolifically, advance his career, and become central to the English-Canadian academic canon. This article argues that it is time to give Quayle the credit she is due. It is also time to re-evaluate the importance of caring labour within the academy.

Kanon szkolny i akademicki

School and academic canon In this paper author considers the question, how literary canon is created and used in education. The answer is based on four points which are: 1) history of the nation, 2) identity of the reader – canon’s receiver, 3) rules of literature’s theory and 4) authority of the educational institutions and the people involved.

“Social Movement Theory” as a Baseline Legitimizing Narrative: Corporate Exploitation, Anti-Hegemonic Opposition and the Contested Academy

Scholars and administrators created “Social Movement Theory” (SMT) and associated institutions in order to establish a field of “contested politics” buttressed by “scholarly synthesis.” In this article, I place SMT as an object of study itself within the contested space of the corporate academy. SMT is a baseline legitimizing narrative that the domesticated academy produces and that corporate entities then use as preemptive inoculation against anti-hegemonic opposition by geographically separating governmentalities of often brutal and arbitrary material exploitation from depoliticized, dehistoricized and scientistic spectacles of consumerist legitimization. I summarize key ways that administrators govern the corporate academy and remove historical and social specificity, followed by analysis of exemplary cases demonstrating how SMT is placed within “peer-reviewed” scholarship. In contrast to SMT's over-riding goal of “synthesis,” I argue that effective social movement scholarship is contingent, situated and explicitly engaged with power (willing to “reveal a stand”), including difficult questions about who exercises power, how, and especially under what guises of corporate authority. Done well, such intellectual-activism must be conducted independent of current corporate academic strictures, and indeed will likely involve direct anti-hegemonic challenges to the corporate academy. Intellectual-activists that choose to do so can face significant negative impacts ranging from “double-shift” marginalization through loss of academic privileges, total career destruction, banishment from the academic canon and even physical endangerment. Therefore, effective transformation of social movement scholarship requires transformation of the contested academy, both projects very difficult for embedded academics absent external pressure from intellectual-activists.

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Anna Cienciala: What I Remember

Abstract I met Professor Cienciala in 1991 or 1992 at the University of Kansas, where I gave a talk. We were probably aware of each other’s existence before my visit but had never before met in person. In those days I strictly observed the academic canon concerning appropriate attire while giving a lecture: blouse and blazer it was, and of course trousers rather than a skirt. To my amazement, she came to my talk dressed in a flowery cotton dress, of the kind one associates with the 1950s. Bear with me: the dress has a meaning of its own. We became infrequent correspondents. I was in literature; she was in history and was somewhat older than I. It appeared that we had little in common. She would, however, respond affirmatively to my requests that she review books for Sarmatian Review. She wrote quite a few reviews for us and could always be counted on to deliver them promptly. I was pleased that she mentioned Sarmatian Review in her excellent compendium of works on the history of Poland and Eastern Europe available online (http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/hist557/bibpt1rev.htm).

The necessity of influence: New Writing articles and establishing creative writing scholarship

ABSTRACTAs creative writing studies develops, it will draw upon previous scholarship in articles published in flagship journals like New Writing. This study examines the first nine years of New Writing articles and finds that use of citations increases over this period, and authors cite a core group of scholars frequently, building an academic canon. Additionally, some articles demonstrate an awareness of a scholarly community through sentence-subjects. Overall, it appears that creative writing studies articles in New Writing are invoking the influence of those scholars who came before.