American Readers Research Articles

“Betwixt and Between”: Juanita Harrison’s Black Internationalist Practice

“Betwixt and Between”: Juanita Harrison’s Black Internationalist Practice Owen Walsh (bio) How to identify a historical subject whose lived practice was resistant to almost every fixed identity? This is the conundrum one faces when attempting to introduce Juanita Harrison. Perhaps the most effective introduction is found on the cover of her 1936 book, My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, an epistolary narrative covering eight restless years (1927–1935), which saw her traverse much of the globe, and her only volume of published writing. The dust cover of the Macmillan Company edition (the book’s original and most widely read version) is dominated by a bold typography, behind which, arranged in a jumble, are numerous photographs of the elusive author posing in different forms of dress. The design informs the reader that the narrator of this travel narrative can provide access to the interior of whatever culture she enters. The eclecticism of her dress and the commanding tone of the title—taken from a poem by nineteenth-century English writer W.B. Rands—clearly communicates a confidence in her mobility and her understanding of the alien social worlds that she allows the American reader to glimpse. Harrison’s nationality and her racial identity are not easily deciphered from any of these pictures, and on reading the text one has the sense that she had little interest in satiating any popular or market-based demand for identitarian certainty. One of the intriguing features of the text is its repeated resistance to the imposed categorization of Harrison and to any spatial or experiential limitations. Interpellated in the American context as Black, Harrison’s years of travel saw her use the ethnic ambiguity of her appearance to deceive and delight her acquaintances. This practice of “racial disidentification” is the focus of this reading of Harrison’s life, accessed primarily through her book. The term is borrowed from Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, who has used it to [End Page 1] describe a technique of Black cosmopolitanism deployed in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.1 In a broader context, racial disidentification describes an attempt to distance oneself from Blackness and foster a non-Black identity. Racial disidentification’s difference from the more familiar “passing” lies in its de-emphasizing the attempt to be accepted as white. In Harrison’s case, the non-American contexts in which she operated should be seen as important reasons for that difference: Harrison could not have passed for white in America, but she had opportunities to pose in multiple racial and national guises elsewhere. Harrison’s “racial border crossing” therefore occurred in a context quite different from that addressed by Nwankwo, as she escaped America’s Jim Crow regime and moved restlessly across dozens of national borders.2 By its nature, racial disidentification is an individualistic practice, and it certainly does not always lend itself to a reading invested in recovering modes of African American political radicalism and global solidarity. But placing Harrison’s practice of racial disidentification in a proper ideological setting challenges any assumption that it is an apolitical or even conservative practice. Interpellation as theorized in the Althusserian tradition is a process in which ideology becomes manifest. In his classic exposition of the idea, Althusser takes the example of a police officer hailing an individual. By the individual’s recognition that they are the object of the gendarme’s attention and by their turning around in response, the individual becomes a subject implicated in an ideological order.3 One moment from Harrison’s book helps to draw this Althusserian link toward Black travel in the interwar years. When Harrison stayed brief ly in Stalin’s Moscow, she played out a scenario redolent of Althusser’s example. As she moved anarchically through the city (“cut[ting] across many places”) she was hailed by a policeman. Whereas Althusser’s imagined individual recognized themselves as the object of the gendarmes’ attention and turned, Harrison records that she ignored his whistle and “didnt even look back.”4 Throughout her text, Harrison engages in similar maneuvers that reject hegemonic ideological forces. Althusser’s interpellation can be linked to Nwankwo’s disidentification via a third discussant. Evelyn Rose Higginbotham has described—relying in...

Экономика Восточной Сибири в периодической печати Соединенных Штатов Америки во второй половине XIX в.

The purpose of this study is to trace how and by what principle the economy of Eastern Siberia was covered in the American press, as well as to understand what perception of the Siberian region was formed in the minds of American public under the influence of newspapers. The American periodicals of the second half of the nineteenth century published many articles on the geography, history, and economics of Eastern Siberia. The increase in the number of articles about Siberia in American newspapers indicates that there was a remarkable interest in the Siberian region, its natural resources, population, and economy. American newspaper publications about the Siberian economy can be roughly divided into three categories: trade, agriculture, and gold mining. Each category was studied in detail and the arguments and conclusions were corroborated by excerpts and quotes from the newspapers. Newspapers have played an important role in shaping the country's public opinion about Siberia and its natural and economic resources. American society in the second half of the nineteenth century envisioned Siberia as a vast territory, rich in natural reserves and awaiting the development by the brave Russian colonizers. American readers identified themselves with the Russian population of Siberia, which, like them, carried the beacon of “civilization” and economic progress to the distant territories. Newspapers extolled the virtues of hard work of Russian peasants and industrialists, who bravely conquered the harsh Siberian landscape. The American public was most interested in newspaper articles about the gold mining in Eastern Siberia. American prospectors wrote letters to the editorial offices of newspapers asking how and when they could get to Siberia for gold mining. Newspapers instilled hope in the American society, that the Russian tsar would soon open Siberia to the American entrepreneurs and investors; and the new industrial and commercial joint ventures would bring great economic benefits to both nations.

Silent Eloquence: Literary Extracts, the Aesthetics of Disability, and Melville’s “Fragments”

Herman Melville’s first published story, “Fragments from a Writing Desk” (1839; released in two parts in the Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser), reimagines nineteenth-century American narratives of disabled female figures. In the first installment, Melville’s amorous narrator, L.A.V., quotes extensively from British romantic books of beauty, anthologies that gathered the best works from famous authors. In the second, Melville critiques L.A.V.’s exuberant citations, cultivating an alternative aesthetic we term “silent eloquence.” This essay argues that Melville’s early diptych reimagines deformed texts and disabled bodies by means of a deaf woman called “Inamorata.” Inspired by emergent deaf American communities, institutions, and forms of expression, and literary works by an array of deaf and hearing writers from James Nack and John R. Burnet to Washington Irving and Sarah Josepha Hale, Melville’s first fiction presents an early account of the communicative power of difference. Inamorata’s various, artful modes of expression— handwriting, signing, gestures, and expressions—put literary beauties and disabled bodies in conversation. Presenting nineteenth-century American readers with a new aesthetic vocabulary, “Fragments” simultaneously anticipates aspects of Melville’s major works and develops a concept of beauty capable of encompassing multiple senses, modes of address, experiences, and ways of knowing.

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

Editors' Note

Other| November 01 2020 Editors' Note Thornton Wilder Journal (2020) 1 (2): vi–vii. https://doi.org/10.5325/thorntonwilderj.1.2.vi Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Editors' Note. Thornton Wilder Journal 1 November 2020; 1 (2): vi–vii. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/thorntonwilderj.1.2.vi Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThornton Wilder Journal Search Advanced Search Much has happened since our inaugural issue was published last February. Our second issue is coming out in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic and widespread protests against racism and police violence. As proven before in times of crisis, Wilder's words and humanistic/philosophical vision continue to inspire and give hope. In the midst of the Great Depression, Wilder's novel Heaven's My Destination (1935) used comedy to entertain its American readers as it prompted them to deeper self-reflection; his two full-length plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), offered their audiences respectively profound appreciation of the smallest moments and an unwavering faith in our ability to survive World War II. During another crisis, at the memorial service for victims of the 9/11 attacks, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted Wilder's visionary lines ending his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927): “There... You do not currently have access to this content.

Editors' Note

Much has happened since our inaugural issue was published last February. Our second issue is coming out in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic and widespread protests against racism and police violence. As proven before in times of crisis, Wilder's words and humanistic/philosophical vision continue to inspire and give hope. In the midst of the Great Depression, Wilder's novel Heaven's My Destination (1935) used comedy to entertain its American readers as it prompted them to deeper self-reflection; his two full-length plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), offered their audiences respectively profound appreciation of the smallest moments and an unwavering faith in our ability to survive World War II. During another crisis, at the memorial service for victims of the 9/11 attacks, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted Wilder's visionary lines ending his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927): “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”As we remain sheltered-in-place due to the pandemic, access to Wilder's works has become easier. In May the Wilder Family and HarperCollins's legendary audio imprint Caedmon released five out of eight of Wilder's novels as digital audiobooks. Now you can listen to The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Cabala, Heaven's My Destination, The Ides of March, and The Woman of Andros, the latter four being available in audio for the first time. Later this year Caedmon will publish the remaining two novels, The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, as audiobooks. To keep Wilder's theater audiences engaged when unable to attend actual productions, Thornton Wilder Society board member Shoshana Greenberg has organized two Zoom play readings of The Skin of Our Teeth (May) and The Matchmaker (July). And in this issue of Thornton Wilder Journal, we are bringing you a selection of new Wilder criticism. The articles range from Nancy Bunge's analysis of how Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy explains the lasting popularity of Wilder's classic Our Town, to Ann Caldwell's theorizing about the prominence of the American Southwest as Wilder's “creative and spiritual home,” to Jamall A. Calloway's interdisciplinary probing of the relevance Social Gospel ethics may have to Our Town, to Ashley Raven's discussion of how to teach Our Town through a dramaturgical lens, and Wesley Longacre's summary of Wilder scholarship since 2016. For those who long for the reopening of theaters, we include five reviews of notable 2019 productions of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and a rare staging of The Seven Deadly Sins, a collection of Wilder's late one-acts, that took place at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.Besides the mixture of critical essays and significant production reviews, in this issue we introduce three kinds of material we hope to feature going forward: essays on teaching (Raven), biographical essays (Caldwell), and an annual review of Wilder scholarship and criticism (Longacre). We also draw your attention in Caldwell's essay to references to hard-to-locate articles and an interview with Wilder that was previously unknown. In future issues we plan to include previously unpublished Wilder letters and other primary documents as well as obscure secondary materials.Although many will remember 2020 for the global pandemic and social unrest, in the annals of Wilder Studies, in truly Wilderian style, this year will mark significant accomplishments and contributions to the continuing vitality of Wilder's artistic legacy in the twenty-first century. We congratulate Tappan Wilder on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his becoming Wilder's literary executor. It has also been twenty years since the founding of the Thornton Wilder Society, and this issue completes the first year of the Thornton Wilder Journal. We hope you will help us celebrate these important milestones by reading and contributing to our journal and joining the Society. We look forward to hearing your voices, reading your submissions, and continuing the conversation on all things Wilder.

Leonard Cohen’s Memorable Poetry: His Posthumous The Flame: Poems and Selections from Notebooks

ABSTRACT It is important to consider Leonard Cohen by looking back though his posthumous collection, The Flame Poems and Selections from Notebooks. From 1967 onward, Cohen came to be known increasingly as a songwriter and singer. In Montreal, and in Canada generally, Cohen was acknowledged as a literary figure, singer, and songwriter. Internationally, particularly in the United States, about the time of his death and after, Cohen’s fame was anchored in music. This article examines two scholarly treatments of Cohen’s work. It is written for Canadian and, especially, American readers, to remind them of Cohen as a poet and novelist because he was best known for his music and songs. Focusing on Cohen’s literary dimension, his accomplishment as a poet, and his creativity as an artist, the article argues that poetry has lyrical origins and that there is a false dichotomy that separates music lyrics from poetry. Cohen’s poetry is well crafted and beautiful and so memorable.

Resistance and Protest in Percival Everett's <i>Erasure</i>

As argued by the literary critic Margaret Russett, Percival Everett “unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from a lingering stereotype of ‘black’ style [and] challenges the assumption that a single or consensual African-American experience exists to be represented.” The author presents such a radical individualism in his most admired literary work published in 2001. In Erasure, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, the main character and narrator of the book, pens a stereotypically oriented African American novel that becomes an expression of “him being sick of it;” “an awful little book, demeaning and soul-destroying drivel” that caters for the tastes and expectations of the American readership but, at the same time, oscillates around pre-conceived beliefs, prejudices, and racial clichés supposedly emphasizing the ‘authentic’ black experience in the United States. Not only is Erasure about race, misconceptions of blackness and racial identification but also about academia, external constraints, and one’s fight against them. The present article, therefore, endeavors to analyze different forms of resistance and protest in Percival Everett’s well-acclaimed novel, demonstrating the intricate connections between the publishing industry, the impact of media, the literary canon formation and the treatment of black culture.

Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Translation: Translation in and of Please Look After Mom

In 2011, Please Look After Mom, a translation of a mega-bestseller novel in Korea, entered the American literary market with a significant commercial success. A close analysis of the translation, along with the celebration and controversy it caused on both sides of the pacific, reveal interesting and often paradoxical ideas about translation and its role in introducing cultural differences. The Korean original, Ommarul Put’akhae, employs translation to signify radical unsettling differences, and as a metaphor that epitomizes a meeting between the self and the other, translation raises questions concerning the complex relationship one has with the other. The translation of Please Look After Mom reduces critical layers of the original novel, and the reason why it was noted and read by many American readers had more to do with the U.S. than with Korea―more specifically, the cultural dilemma that the U.S. found itself in after 9/11. At the same time, however, Please Look After Mom retains and even possibly strengthens the peculiar way in which translation is thematized in the Korean source text. In other words, as a metaphor that epitomizes a contact between the self and the other, translation in and of Please Look After Mom raises important questions concerning national identities, cultural differences, international politics and interpersonal responsibilities. This article reads Please Look After Mom not only as a translated text, but also as a cultural phenomenon to examine cultural and political forces at work at the site of translation today.

American Reprinting, American Nationalism and British Women Writers: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , 1850-1899

This essay investigates the construction of British female authorship within Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in the latter half of the nineteenth- century in relation to American reprinting and American nationalism. By transplanting British authors and their realist works into American literary context, Harper’s tried to “Americanize” British literature, especially through its editorial control and rearrangement of British texts. In its effort to become a major “family literary magazine” targeting middle-class readership, Harper’s mobilized the presences of major British women writers in a distinctive way. Thus, the magazine constantly touted the literary reputation of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a way to support its nationalistic project. Their names assumed high visibility within the magazine, and their realist authorship participated in the elevation of an American literary taste by providing American readers with sound forms of writing. In other words, these British women writers played an important role in constructing healthy readership for the magazine. This essay aims to make visible the magazine’s close links with these British women writers, first, by exploring its signing policy for their works and, second, by analyzing its editorial reviews on these women writers. The magazine allowed several works by popular British women writers to be signed with their real names both at the volume index and in the main text, unlike other articles. It also made positive editorial commentaries on their works and personal characters.

DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATION AND RECONFIGURATION: A MATERIALIST READING OF WALT WHITMAN’S 1855 LEAVES OF GRASS

<p>The following article discusses the material conditions of production surrounding Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass. As a self-published poetry collection, I argue that Whitman uses paratextual features to mirror the text’s thematic rubric. By employing a materialist framework, this article claims that Whitman’s interpretation of America’s retroactive relationship to its democratic founding drives his collection. In depicting the nation as a work in progress, Whitman forces the American reader to revisit, reform and evolve the limited state of democratic power evidenced in his present-day nation. As self-reflexive focalization of the national condition, Leaves of Grass, through its unpretentious material composition, reconstructs the image of the poet as the necessary mediator of America’s unique political conception. Drawing upon Derrida’s synchronic assessment of the Declaration of Independence’s constative and performative structure, as well as Raymond Williams’ championing of the significance of a text’s cultural material context, this article claims that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a political project that provides intervention for the democratic failures of America’s founding principles.</p>

Rumi, Sufi spirituality and the teacher–disciple relationship in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

In William Patrick Patterson’s Struggle of the Magicians, a detailed study of the relationship between the prominent figures of Western esotericism, G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky, he writes ‘Only in a time as confused as ours could one think that the teacher–student relationship – an archetypal and sacred form – exists as an option, rather than a necessary requirement, a station on the way’ (1997: 92). My paper examines the numerous ways in which the famous teacher–disciple relationship that existed between Muhammad Jalal ad-Din, known to the anglophone world as Rumi, and his spiritual guide and mentor, Shams of Tabriz, is represented in Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love (2010) and how her depiction of this relationship is predicated upon her knowledge of, and belief in, the general principles of what can be termed ‘Western Sufism’. Although she had previously thematised elements of Sufi dialectics in her earlier fiction and clear, if minor, references to Sufi philosophy permeated novels such as The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), Shafak’s fascination with the teachings of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz reaches its culmination and most significant artistic expression in The Forty Rules of Love. Published in 2010, the novel situates a fictionalised representation of the relationship between Rumi and Shams at the centre of the narrative and provides an overt depiction of the emanationalist, perennialist and universalist ethics contained within Sufi dialectics. In addition, given that Shafak’s text represents one of the more prominent and commercially successful contributions to what Amira El-Zein (2010: 71–85) has called ‘the Rumi phenomenon’ my paper examines how, in privileging the aesthetics and the interests of American readers over conveying a more complete and more nuanced image of Sufism, Shafak succumbs to the oversimplification and decontextualisation of Rumi’s teachings perpetrated by the Western popularisers of his work.

Ambulatory Anesthesia, An Issue of Anesthesiology Clinics, Volume 37, Number 2

Ambulatory Anesthesia, An Issue of Anesthesiology Clinics, Volume 37, Number 2

Dewey, Foucault, and the Value of Horror: Transformative Learning through Reading Horror Fiction

Abstract This article advances an account of the nonhedonic values of horror fiction (including film). It is motivated by cases in which consuming horror fosters what theorists of education call “transformative learning” in adult students, brought to my attention through teaching a course titled “Horror Film and Fiction.” Transformative learning refers to the process by which students’ critical consciousness is activated in a way that they examine, question, and revise certain existing perceptions shaped by their experiences. The process is more a shocking and disturbing experience than pleasurable. In this article, I focus on two cases in which two students underwent such a transformation on studying Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion (1968) and Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), respectively. In the first case, the student’s experience of madness is modified, while, in the second, the student’s experience of abnormality is disrupted. To give the transformation in question a philosophical underpinning, I draw on Dewey’s concept of “aesthetic experience” in Art as Experience, Foucault’s concept of “experience book,” and O’Leary’s approach to the value of fiction developed in his Foucault and Fiction and contend that the works of horror effectuated what O’Leary calls “transformative experience” in the students. In the second half of the paper, I extend my account beyond the classroom context by offering a close reading of Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), with the aim of demonstrating that it has the potential to transform the everyday experience of madness of the American readers in Bloch’s times, and probably the experience of normality of the worldwide readers thereafter.

Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature

Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature

The Great Digital Migration: Exploring What Constitutes the Black Press Online

Scholars have previously conceptualized the Black press as print publications that are owned and managed by African Americans, targeting a Black audience and advocating for the Black community. This study investigates how online producers of Black news are troubling previous definitions of the Black press. Websites that target African American readers but are owned by White media companies and Black-targeted websites that primarily produce entertainment news create ambiguity. I conclude that African American ownership and advocacy are no longer requirements for the Black press and that entertainment content is often a relevant and important component of the digital Black press.

Over-detection of colonic abnormalities on CTAP and a decrease with experience: A simulation of machine learning.

68 Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially improve patient care by assisting physicians as demonstrated with the recent approvals for technologies that detect intracranial hemorrhage on CT exams of the head. AI also has potential for assisting early detection of colorectal cancer (CRC) on routine CT abdomen and pelvis (CTAP). We assessed the difference in detection of abnormal colonic findings between an expert reader (JC) and amateur readers (ARs). Methods: ARs consisting of two third year medical students (RB - AR1, ZG - AR2) studied 20 CTAP for tracing the colon and identifying pathology. Their search pattern and assessment of the colon was then evaluated by an expert radiologist (JC). They then spent two hours reviewing abnormalities in 10 scans with JC, who highlighted suspicious neoplastic findings such as colonic wall thickening, fat stranding, edema, masses, and abnormal lymph nodes. The ARs then individually read 203 CTAP scans to assess for these suspicious findings. The studies were from a single institution and were reported in a prior study in 2019 GI-ASCO. The findings of the ARs were then compared to those of the expert reader and the initial reader for each study. Data was analyzed using t-test with 2 tails. Results: The incidence of suspicious neoplastic findings was 87% and 81% for AR1 and AR2, respectively, compared to 18% in the initial reads and 33% for expert reader (p=0.01). Greatest discordance were 94% and 87% between AR1 and AR2 to the initial reads. Additionally, the incidence of suspicious findings between the first and last 20 cases (p=0.03 and 0.17) examined by ARs declined from 79 to 40% for AR1 and 69 to 55% for AR2. Conclusions: ARs are capable of detecting CRC features on CTAP from ED, but with higher false-positive (FP) rate than trained experts. The FP rate decreases with increasing experience. ARs learning course simulates AI which will likely yield high FP rate with initial training, but with improving FP with deep training, especially with larger volume of normal variants.

Readability of Cancer Clinical Trials Websites.

Clinical trials are critically important for the development of new cancer treatments. According to recent estimates, however, clinical trial enrollment is only about 8%. Lack of patient understanding or awareness of clinical trials is one reason for the low rate of participation. The purpose of this observational study was to evaluate the readability of cancer clinical trial websites designed to educate the general public and patients about clinical trials. Nearly 90% of Americans use Google to search for health-related information. We conducted a Google Chrome Incognito search in 2018 using the keywords “cancer clinical trial” and “cancer clinical trials.” Content of the 100 cancer clinical trial websites was analyzed using an online readability panel consisting of Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Flesch Reading Ease, Gunning-Fog Index, Coleman-Liau Index, and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook scales. Reading level difficulty was assessed and compared between commercial versus non-commercial URL extensions. Content readability was found to be “difficult” (10.7 grade level). No significant difference in readability, overall, and between commercial and non-commercial URL extensions was found using 4/5 measures of readability; 90.9% of commercial versus 49.4% of non-commercial websites were written at a >10th grade (P = .013) using Gunning-Fog Index. Written cancer clinical trials content on the Internet is written at a reading level beyond the literacy capabilities of the average American reader. Improving readability to accommodate readers with basic literacy skills will provide an opportunity for greater comprehension that could potentially result in higher rates of clinical trial enrollment.

Use and translation of abbreviations and acronyms in scientific texts

Most new concepts both in the Russian and English languages are expressed using phrases or compound words, because such complex words make it possible to represent a particular concept with completeness and accuracy. But multicomponent terms—complex words and phrases—are cumbersome; therefore, there is a need to abbreviate them in one way or another. In some cases this leads to the use of short versions of the term in the form of only one main component, while in others, various types of abbreviations are used, which can save time. However, their imprecise or incorrect translation can change or confuse the intended meaning. The paper discusses the differences in using abbreviations and acronyms in British and American scientific texts, as well as difficulties of their translation and optimal strategies of interlanguage adaptation. The investigation is performed using various research techniques, including a comparative method, a continuous sampling method, semantic structure analysis, and contextual analysis. It is shown that the existing modern classifications of abbreviations greatly differ in linguistic scientific literature and lexical units are abbreviated using various methods. It is found that there exist various traditions of their usage in scientific and technical texts. It is demonstrated that various standards for introducing, spelling, and punctuating abbreviations and acronyms in British and American scientific journals pose additional difficulties in the work of a translator in the field of science and technology, provokes translation errors and requires the use of normalization and explication as the main strategies for their translation. The paper may be of interest for those who translate scientific texts for British and American readership.

Review Essay: Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography

Review Essay:Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography Frye Gaillard Atticus Finch: The Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon. By Joseph Crespino. New York: Basic Books, 2018. Xx, 248 pp. $27.00. ISBN 978-1-5416-4494-6. In Atticus Finch: The Biography Joseph Crespino has given us a brilliant, readable historian's rumination on the making of a literary icon. How did Harper Lee conceive of Atticus? What were the subtleties in her own understanding of this most iconic of fictional characters, and how did Atticus capture our hearts and imagination as he did? These are the questions Crespino addresses, and I was surprised at the depth of personal reflection this book prompted. I was thirteen when my father gave me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. This was 1960 and the book had just appeared, and in my own Alabama family---with roots in the county where Harper Lee was born---Mockingbird carried its share of controversy. One of my aunts refused to read it, so offended was she by its revelations of racial injustice. My father was a different story. Like Atticus, he was a lawyer who believed that the courts, alone among human institutions, were "the great leveler," and when he was elected as a circuit judge in the year of Mockingbird's publication, he had promised Black voters that his courtroom would be colorblind. But in our family all of this was a delicate dance, for my father was also a segregationist, deeply [End Page 355] invested in the status quo. As Crespino reminds us, this was also true of Atticus. We know this because Harper Lee told us so, not so much in Mockingbird, though there were intimations of paternalism, but in her second book, Go Set a Watchman, which she had actually written first. Atticus is older in Watchman, and to the horror of many American readers, he is not as likeable the second time around. As Crespino writes, "Atticus, though physically weakened, is still wry, lively, and loving. The novel turns when Jean Louise discovers a racist, right-wing book among his reading materials. She heads immediately to the county courthouse where Atticus … had gone to a meeting. Looking on from the balcony, she discovers that it is a gathering of the White Citizens' Council. The rest of the novel tracks her outrage and disbelief that her wise and loving father would take up with such bigoted malcontents" (74). Crespino makes a strong case that personal experiences for Harper Lee shaped the dual character of Atticus. If, as most biographers assume, her father A. C. Lee was one of the prototypes for Atticus, A. C.'s career as a small-town newspaper editor foreshadowed the depiction of Finch in both of Lee's novels. Crespino pores through the untapped trove of editorials in the Monroe Journal, which A. C. owned and edited for two decades. What he finds is a patrician idealist who believed in the law and good order and, among other things, hated the southern practice of lynching. These ritualized killings were still widespread in the 1930s when Lee began his editorship of the Journal, and as he knew from his time as a lawyer, they sometimes enjoyed the cover of the courts. Lee once represented two Black men accused of murdering a White man, and one of the victim's sons was a member of the jury. Despite Lee's objections, the verdict was swift and his clients were hung. A few years later a Black man accused of raping and murdering a White woman was kidnapped from a small-town jail about forty miles south of Monroeville. Crespino describes what happened next: "[T]hey took him to an alternate location and murdered him, but not before subjecting him to two hours of sadistic torture, including castration, forced [End Page 356] autocannibalism, stabbing, burning with hot irons, and dismemberment of toes and fingers. They tied Neal's body to the back of a car" (13-14). A. C. Lee hated such moments of barbarism and carried stories on the front page of the Journal about the grand jury investigation that followed...