Critical Essays Research Articles

The Reverend Dr. Ian Ker: August 30, 1942–November 5, 2022

The Reverend Dr. Ian KerAugust 30, 1942–November 5, 2022 Paul Shrimpton (bio) Key Words Reverend Dr. Ian Ker, St. John Henry Newman Logos editorial board member, Fr. Ian Turnbull Ker, the leading scholar on the life and work of St. John Henry Newman, died on November 5, 2022. He was a brilliant writer and biographer, as well as a much-loved parish priest, and he published more than twenty books on Newman and his theology. His John Henry Newman: a Biography has long been regarded as the definitive account of the most recent saint of the Anglosphere; his scholarly biography of G. K. Chesterton is also widely admired. Like both men, Ker was a convert from Anglicanism. Ian Ker was born in Naini Tal, India, on August 30, 1942; he was the son of Charles Murray Ker of the Indian Civil Service and his wife Joan May Knox, a relative of Ronald Knox. In 1947 he and his parents and his two sisters left India after independence was declared. Moving to England, they settled in Wimbledon, London. Ker remembered, as a boy, entering the enormous Sacred Heart Church in Edge Hill, Wimbledon, and being impressed by the Mass being celebrated there: the then-normative Tridentine Rite was very unlike the middle-ofthe-road Church of England services his family attended. On the advice of an uncle, a Classics don at Trinity College, Cambridge, Ker attended Shrewsbury School. From there he went to [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph courtesy of Gracewing publishing [End Page 28] Balliol College, Oxford, to read Classics under three of the leading scholars of the time: Gordon Williams in literature, Russell Meiggs in ancient history, and R. M. Hare in moral philosophy. After Balliol he won a scholarship to study English at Corpus Christi College, a few streets away, where he was taught by F. W. Bateson, the founder of Essays in Criticism and a disciple of F. R. Leavis. Defying his father’s dogmatic dismissal of Christianity, Ker had read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in his teens, and while at Oxford decided to become a Catholic. The reaction of his parents was mixed: his father was indifferent, but his mother was upset—although she eventually became a Catholic herself. Four decades later, Ker wrote a work of apologetics of his own, Mere Catholicism, which argued that mere Christianity could not be other than mere Catholicism. From Oxford, Ker moved to Trinity College, Cambridge to study for a doctorate on George Eliot; the university did not give him a PhD, although it later awarded him an honorary doctorate for his published work. He took up a post at the University of York, where he taught Latin as well as English literature, but after a few years abandoned his academic career to train for the priesthood. He stayed briefly at the Birmingham Oratory, where he got know the distinguished Newman scholar Fr. Charles Dessain, and then completed his training at the Venerable English College in Rome. Once ordained, Ker took up an endowed chair in theology and philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He loved his time in the American Midwest, which he regarded as some of the happiest years of his life, but he missed the pastoral elements of priestly life. After a brief spell as Catholic chaplain at Oxford, he moved to a similar role at Southampton University, before becoming parish priest of Burford, a small Cotswolds town twenty miles from Oxford. During his twenty-five years in Burford he was part of the theology faculty of Oxford University, and latterly a research fellow at Blackfriars Hall. Over several decades Ker managed to combine his priestly ministry with a remarkable scholarly output. Besides critical editions of [End Page 29] three of Newman’s most influential works—the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the Grammar of Assent and the Idea of a University—he co-edited four volumes of Newman’s Letters and Diaries and worked in all the fields covered by Newman’s own “imperial intellect.” Like his subject, however, he was able to see souls behind his writing. This ensured...

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Steve Paul and Kelli A. Larson [The current bibliography aspires to include all serious contributions to Hemingway scholarship. Given the substantial quantity of significant critical work appearing on Hemingway’s life and writings annually, inconsequential items from the popular press have been omitted to facilitate the distinction of important developments and trends in the field. Annotations for articles appearing in The Hemingway Review have been omitted due to the immediate availability of abstracts introducing each issue. Kelli Larson welcomes your assistance in keeping this feature current. Please send reprints, clippings, and photocopies of articles, as well as notices of new books, directly to Larson at the University of St. Thomas, 333 JRC, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105-1096. E-Mail: Kalarson1@stthomas.edu.] The Hemingway Bibliography Online Database: The Hemingway Bibliography is a searchable database consisting of the most comprehensive record of annotated Hemingway-related scholarship published worldwide in English from 1990 to the present. Researchers can search by title, author, subject, keyword, publisher, or periodical. The database is updated annually. Visit The Hemingway Bibliography at https://ir.stthomas.edu/hemingway/ BOOKS Buchholtz, Miroslawa and Dorota Guttfeld. Ernest Hemingway in Interview and Translation. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022. [Brings together interview and translation studies to explore how interviewers and translators serve as mediators between EH and his audience, creating versions of the author and his writing through their hands-on approach. Section One draws on interview theory to examine some of EH’s last conversations with George Plimpton and others within their Cold War context. Focuses not only on EH’s response but also on the interviewer’s agenda and dynamics of their exchange. Concludes that these “’last’ conversations repeatedly expose Hemingway’s resistance to interviewing and publishing of interviews,” with the interview-savvy author adopting different personas depending on the interviewer. Section Two details the life and career of Bronislaw Zieliński, the Polish translator of EH’s works beginning with his 1956 translation of OMS. Chronicles their brief 1958 meeting in Ketchum, Idaho, which grew into an epistolary friendship against the backdrop of Cold-War paranoia. Pieces together their relationship through correspondence and Zieliński’s notes and private diary. Closes with commentary on Zieliński’s 1959 article on why EH is a “Polish writer.” Section Three discusses an experiment using Polish MA-level student translations of EH’s “Cat in the Rain” to illustrate the dangers faced by translators when confronted with ambiguity or simplicity. Research results show the students’ unconscious tendency to embellish meaning according to stereotypical notions of literariness, thus narrowing the story’s range of possible interpretations. Finds this same disturbing tendency present in the story’s canonical version by professional translator Bronislaw Zieliński.] Cirino, Mark and Michael Von Cannon, eds. One True Sentence: Writers & Readers on Hemingway’s Art. Boston: Godine, 2022. [Inspired by and drawn from the editors’ ongoing “One True Podcast,” this collection of conversations with a wide range of scholars, authors, and celebrities offers even general readers valuable glimpses into the pleasures of reading EH. Each participant begins with a “true sentence” from somewhere in EH’s oeuvre—from fiction, non-fiction, even letters—and the subsequent interview delves into sometimes familiar and often fresh aspects of meaning, interpretation, context, and style.] Evans, Robert C., ed. Critical Insights: The Old Man and the Sea. Ipswich, MA: Salem P, 2022. [Collection of sixteen new critical essays on EH’s classic no-vella ranging in topic from religion to film adaptation. Appendix features over twenty black-and-white photographs, chronology of EH’s life, and selected bibliography. Includes index. See individual contributions arranged alphabetically by author under ESSAYS.] Hemingway, Brendan and Stephen Adams, eds. Dear Papa: The Letters of Patrick and Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 2022. [Collection of selected letters between EH and middle son, Patrick, spanning 1932 to 1961. Topics include family, school, travel, writing, hunting, and fishing. Patrick writes in his prologue: “The man I knew tried very hard to be a good family man. I think our correspondence shows he was intimately connected with his wives and his children all his life.” Includes index.] Kurlansky, Mark. The Importance of Not Being Ernest...

“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”: Stevens and Santayana

“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”: Stevens and Santayana Jerry Griswold SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I noticed striking resemblances between George Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Wallace Stevens’s The Rock, the poet’s last “book” of poems which appears in his Collected Poems (1954). The resemblances were so extensive, in fact, that I was willing to experiment with a hypothesis: that Santayana’s philosophical classic provided inspiration for Stevens’s book of twenty-five poems on a pretty much chapter-for-poem basis. For fifteen months during the Covid-19 quarantine and after, I tested this thesis in the company of some two dozen experts in literature and philosophy via twice-monthly Zoom discussions hosted by the Santayana Society.1 In light of others’ suggestions and critiques, I have been preparing a book-length study of how Stevens responded in The Rock to Santayana’s book. The following discussion of “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” is a sample excerpt from that work-in-progress.2 To begin with, I should say that the connection between Santayana and Stevens has been widely recognized and frequently discussed: already by 1990, John Serio had identified more than three dozen books and critical essays that made links between the distinguished philosopher and the celebrated poet, and that work has continued.3 According to Samuel French Morse, Stevens’s literary executor, the poet owned all of Santayana’s books.4 And in the view of Holly Stevens, the poet’s daughter, “It is obvious that Santayana had a lifelong influence on my father” (69). Stevens encountered Santayana, the poet and popular young professor, as an undergraduate at Harvard (1897–1900); the two met now and then and exchanged sonnets on one occasion. For the next forty or so years, Stevens’s letters and essays make little mention of Santayana but this changed around the time Edmund Wilson published in The New Yorker a portrait of the old philosopher in his declining years in Rome (1946). During this period of renewed interest, Santayana begins to appear more frequently in Stevens’s letters and essays. Eventually, Stevens would publish a direct and moving homage to Santayana in his poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (1952). [End Page 91] During these same years, Stevens gave a lecture at the University of Chicago (in November of 1951) that would later be published as “A Collect of Philosophy.” In those remarks, he repeats his contention that poets could find many inspiring ideas in the work of philosophers. Among the wide range of philosophical concepts he mentions is the notion that perception always involves a delay between the event and the conception, and he points to Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that a system of location means that every point is related to every other point. In an indirect way, “A Collect of Philosophy” confirms Holly Stevens’s portrait of her father’s compositional techniques in Souvenirs and Prophecies: that he would return home from work in the afternoon, retreat to his library, and hunt in his readings and commonplace books for subjects upon which to compose his poems. In this regard, it’s safe to say that Stevens would have found in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith a goldmine of the kind of epistemological ideas he found inspiring. Yet let me be clear: I can point to no mention of Santayana’s book by Stevens, nor can I offer any other proof that he read or consulted it. But that is to be expected. While James Joyce made no secret of the fact that Homer’s work provided the structure and some of the inspiration for his Ulysses, Stevens bristled at any suggestion that he was influenced by others, because the idea struck him as a challenge to his originality; Harold Bloom has called this “the anxiety of influence.” Stevens grew testy, for example, when a graduate student asked about the philosophers who had influenced him, and he hotly insisted that he had no interest in “systematic philosophy” and would be “bored to death” by it (L 636). My sense is that he “doth protest too much...

The legal protection of the right to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment in the Republic of Ecuador

The right to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment is treated in this study in its close connection with the rights of nature, since until the human species is made aware that life is only possible in harmony and respect for natural resources, the present and the future of future generations are at risk. A reflective and critical essay has been carried out that focused on the legal protection of the right to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment, with special emphasis on Ecuador, contrasting the theoretical-normative order with reality in the face of the challenges posed. the current social, economic and political context. Among the results, it is recognized that, although the Ecuadorian Constitution provides for a holistic ecological protection superior to the anthropocentric protection of the environment, this has not prevented the national practice from being characterized by an extraction activity with unfortunate environmental results. Despite the fact that the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment has been recognized as a human right and that Environmental Law regulates it in its configuration, its defense is urgently necessary based on the empowerment of the subjects and social actors around it. to nature as a subject of law.

Self-Portrait of the Expatriate in the Time of Anxiety

Self-Portrait of the Expatriate in the Time of Anxiety Maxwell Tang (bio) They'll defend their hollows and rational absencesIn this spare manner,A few June instances piquant with twilight,Here and there, cooling the self-regarded secretsAt the Piazza Del Duomo.But still too lofty a culture for empathy,And too redoubtable, as those voices disembodiedFrom their Latin are the dead in the stucco churchyard,Pealing the vain away. A few invitations forelengtheningThe three o'clock penumbra in Firenze.A few one-liners extending the inspired disharmony:As flourish for expatriates bent backward in their eternalLegionnaires. Memory is engrafted firm to landscapes,Like floral prints hardened broadside on mortared terracesIn the Riviera. In San Stefano, café societies are many.In Amalfi, revolutionists stomached too muchAperitifs and ennui to remember their credos.The expatriates muffle their anxieties quoting Virgil,So it is no longer intended for theDemocratic conscience to mollify its absence abroad.Nothing can separate the American pathos hereFrom self-dialogue with its pragmatic, ancestralForeshadow, or especially pretend to while in Rome. One by one they are doubled amongst the piazza square–Aristocrats of counterfeit tragedy and unequal noonday,If one is to live outside and unnoticed,An indifference must become fashionable, that isCourageous as it is apologetic,Unto countries too transparent to hearten the dreams ofForeign embrace. [End Page 150] And I would like this celebration of indulgenceTo play out to a self-denial, when faced with theSeafront harrowed by clouded doubts.So physical liberty has reached its open-eyed revolt,And does it befall next year in the Matisse exhibit?The Bostonians rousing up fracas in the Louvre?In full absence, I would not know how to resumeThe enjoyment of absinthe, frescoed lures of dusk,Skylines anaesthetized by gladness,Wherein there is this double memory of Baltic Spring:Nature's accomplice for I in my ignorance,This brings closer for me the haggard face, theLibertine totaled from nationless winners and losers. The sheen in the center of sunspotted crowds, Saxons, Gentiles,Even the sorry Bostonians' facesGreet the Venetian canal pontes. Characters seem to possessThe banal frugality of desire and weather on their own.If their belief holds, the world is unaware,Tenderminded to consummate, or to annul,Their livelihood for them through the acutest passage of night.Until daylight seals their mouths from echoingThe barcarolles again in their rounds. [End Page 151] Maxwell Tang maxwell tang notes that in his lyrical and critical essays, Albert Camus once remarked that his entire thesis for literature could be reduced to a simple axiom: 'Language should only bring us closer to its opposites: Silence and God.' Every word I have written so far has been an attempt to be in alignment with this. Copyright © 2023 University of North Dakota

A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston

Reviewed by: A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston Donald A. Daiker A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Edited by Michael Thurston. New York: Norton, 2022. 348 pp. Paper. $14.38. The Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises, edited by Michael Thurston, is welcome because of its illuminating textual annotations but disappointing because of its one-sided approach to the novel’s meanings and value. [End Page 116] In addition to the full, magnificently annotated text of Ernest Hemingway’s first and arguably finest novel, the Norton Critical Edition (hereafter NCE) includes biographical and autobiographical material, background pieces on postwar Paris, bullfighting, and literary influences, and a brief selection of letters. For criticism, the NCE provides contemporaneous reviews by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, and others followed by ten essays of “Modern Criticism.” The volume concludes with a useful Hemingway chronology and an uneven selected bibliography. If you are reading The Sun Also Rises for the first or fourteenth time, your best bet is the annotated NCE text. That’s because this 1926 Hemingway novel includes references and even whole conversations that are difficult and even impossible for twenty-first-century readers to comprehend. The competing editions, like the Hemingway Library Edition and trade paperbacks, offer no annotations at all. The Library of America edition edited by Robert W. Trogdon provides helpful annotations not as footnotes but hundreds of pages away in a section labeled “Notes.” Besides, the NCE notes are far more extensive and helpful. Whereas Trogdon says nothing about Robert Cohn’s “feeling of inferiority and shyness . . . on being treated as a Jew at Princeton” (5),1 Thurston tells us that “Princeton had the lowest number of Jewish students among the Ivy League universities” (5). Trogdon does not gloss the passage when young men arrive at the dancing club, but Thurston’s note would have been appreciated by my students: “Hemingway’s description suggests that the young men are homosexual. Jake’s subsequent reaction confirms this” (17). Trogdon ignores Jake’s reference to the “n***** drummer” at Zelli’s restaurant in Montmartre, but Thurston responds with an informative and nuanced mini essay (47). Following the exemplary model of the Hemingway Letters Project, the annotated NCE enlarges our experience and deepens our understanding of The Sun Also Rises. The NCE aptly includes what is perhaps the most famous letter from one American writer to another: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway praising the novel he had read in manuscript but urging that its original opening be deleted because of its “sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings” (195). Thurston also includes several relevant Hemingway letters but not some of the most significant: Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald cautioning that Sun is “not . . . at all for a child to read” (Letters vol. 3, 75); his letter to Canadian writer Morley Callaghan asserting that Sun “is not about sex” (Letters vol. 3, 112); and his letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins explaining why he cannot further reduce the book’s “profanity” (Letters vol. 3, 107), why it “is a great mistake to put real [End Page 117] people in a book” (Letters vol. 3, 110), why Sun is not “a jazz superficial story” (Letters vol. 3, 148), and why Gertrude Stein’s epigraph, “splendid bombast,” should not be taken seriously (Letters vol. 3, 158). Thurston’s well-written, informative, and lucid “Introduction” helps explain his choices of critical essays. For Thurston, Sun lacks anything like a moral code or set of values. Instead, he writes, readers “are invited to find meaning in the arduous achievement of technique” (xxi). Thus, it is Hemingway’s “stylistic achievement”—his “mastery of the sentence”—and not “moral behavior” (xx] that is central to the novel and best accounts for our enjoyment of it. If you had read only the ten chosen “Modern Criticism” essays, you would scarcely have known that the novel’s central relationship is between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. You would be largely unaware of the novel’s most important dramatic scenes—the bedroom scene in Paris, the seduction scene in Pamplona, and the scenes in a bedroom, bar...

Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, eds. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century.

This edited collection presents twenty-eight critical essays on plays by contemporary women playwrights from around the world, providing a vital resource for students and theatre professionals. The book as whole highlights plays that are engaged and intervening in the contemporary political moment, from #BlackLivesMatter to the climate crisis.

Keepaway: for Stephen Bluestone

Keepawayfor Stephen Bluestone Sydney Lea (bio) The day was autumn-gray, with a flock of migrant starlings squalling above the schoolyard din. Meddlesome blasts of wind kept tipping my oversized baseball cap. I heard the older boys’ humbling laughter at my efforts to hold the hat on with one hand while stretching for the ball with the other. I still picture the ball’s every scuff and dent as it passed above, seeming to hang there, as if tethered to something unseen in that ashen sky. The faded blue of its rubber, a barely perceptible reddish ring around its girth—these remain clear to me even now. I simply couldn’t grab that ball, but at least it represented a tangible goal, unlike the nameless ones I would later crave. This all brings a not-entirely-rueful smile to my face: what if the ball had not escaped me, if by luck or cunning, I’d actually managed to grip it? Such longing, such paltry reward! But yes, I would have held it, known it. The ungraspable, ever-nameless adult goals were likely paltry too. Whatever they may have been, I recognized one day that my hunger for them had evaporated. Or had it been satisfied long before, and I’d suddenly and unconsciously awakened to that given? I look outdoors at the greening springtime field. There has always been so much available if I choose to see it, so much that I feel actual guilt at the sumptuousness all around me. [End Page 49] I consider that pair of mallards sculling on the pond, for one little instance. The drake’s green head rebounds the sun, and the hen’s blue primaries are a kindred if subtler marvel. I catch an oddly pleasant redolence of skunk cabbage, and through the trees, their leaves still small, I can make out splashes of gold from a sprawl of marsh marigolds. A phoebe is making her nest by the garden. She loudly announces her name from the crown of a flowering crab. [End Page 50] Sydney Lea A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He is the author of twenty-three books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and fourteen poetry collections, most recently Here (Four Way Books, NYC, 2019). A fifteenth book of poems, What Shines?, is due in September. In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Copyright © 2023 River Teeth

How to Use Methods of Visual Sociology to Study Global Threats

This paper argues for the significance of employing visual sociology methods to study global threats. The central theme revolves around the human tendency to struggle with recognizing shared humanity, often resorting to negative stereotyping that contributes to dehumanization and social injustices. The author draws on decades of experience in using visual semiotics to confront the stigmatization of diverse communities, emphasizing the role of the visual in reshaping perceptions. Addressing the dehumanization inherent in conflicts, the author emphasizes the importance of recognizing the "Other" as part of the human family, advocating for a right to be seen and represented in diverse ways. The essay critiques historical and contemporary visual practices that exclude and denigrate minorities, citing examples from film history and modern media. It underscores the persistence of negative stereotypes and advocates for counter-narratives that portray the diversity and humanity of marginalized groups. The conclusion reaffirms the author's commitment to using visual technologies and emphasizes the integration of visual technology with traditional approaches as a means to foster a deeper understanding of our multicultural world.

Editorial: Crafting review and essay articles for Human Relations

Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual reviews, narrative reviews, historical reviews – and critical essays that are original, innovative, of high-quality and contribute to theory building in the social sciences. The main purpose of this essay is to sketch out our current broad expectations for reviews and essays as a guide for authors and reviewers. As Editors of the journal, we do not wish to be overly prescriptive. After all, reviews may be integrative and focus on synthesis and integration to generate new concepts, frameworks and perspectives, or they may be more problematizing and contribute by identifying problematics, tensions and contradictions in a literature. Furthermore, consonant with its heritage, Human Relations invites scholarship from all research traditions across the social sciences that focus on social relations at work. It is a pluralistic, heterodox journal that will continue to publish a range of reviews and critical essays so long as authors have clear objectives and contribute meaningfully to the field. This will generally involve writing reviews and essays that seek to maximize what we see and are sufficiently complex to deal adequately with the richness and variety of the literatures and ideas considered.

Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith ed. by Tanya Long Bennett

Reviewed by: Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith ed. by Tanya Long Bennett Jennifer Ritterhouse Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith. Edited by Tanya Long Bennett. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. vi, 179. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3685-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3684-7.) “Am I really going down in history as just the ‘brave little woman who spent her life helping Negro[e]s,’” Lillian Smith asked plaintively in a letter written the year before her death from cancer in 1966. She hoped instead “to be acknowledged as the writer I think I am” (p. 8). Although scholarship on Smith has grown steadily over the decades, historians are especially prone to discuss her politics and draw on her insights about the segregated South without exploring her literary artistry. Yet Smith’s “optimism about improving society was inextricably tied to her artistic impulse,” argues Tanya Long Bennett, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia, an institution with which four of the seven contributors to this volume are also affiliated (p. 5). Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith is the first edited collection examining Smith’s entire body of work—from her best-selling debut novel Strange Fruit (New York, 1944) and her widely cited autobiography Killers of the Dream (New York, 1949) to her lesser known books from the 1950s and 1960s. These seven essays are organized chronologically “to guide readers through the powerful aesthetic and thematic workings of her texts” (p. 16). Along the way, they connect Smith’s writings not only to segregation and the civil rights movement but also to modernism, psychoanalysis, the Cold War, trauma theory, and the struggles of female artists in a misogynistic culture. The basis for Smith’s optimistic belief that individuals were able to overcome societal barriers and form mutually beneficial relationships also becomes clear. Bennett provides both a valuable introduction, which includes a review of existing scholarship on Smith, and the collection’s first essay. Her careful examination of the geography of Maxwell, Georgia, the setting of Strange Fruit, culminates in an appreciation for Smith’s use of multiple perspectives to put the reader in the shoes of various characters, female and male, Black and white. “Smith’s use of narrative point of view to effect individual awakenings aligns with research indicating that fiction can diminish perceived race boundaries,” Bennett writes (p. 38). Conversely, examining how anxious white patriarchs enforced boundaries and indoctrinated the young is the primary goal of [End Page 183] Killers of the Dream, as interpreted by Justin Mellette, who puts Smith’s autobiography in dialogue with William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (New York, 1941) and other texts. Emily Pierce Cummins focuses on Killers of the Dream as well, using trauma theory to highlight Smith’s optimistic “belief that human connection and understanding can stop the cycle of trauma and restore the future” (p. 83). Moving into Smith’s Cold War–era writings, Wendy Kurant Rollins offers a close reading of Susie, a character in The Journey (Cleveland, Ohio, 1954). “Smith weaves into Susie’s characterization two sides or impulses that Smith frequently identified in herself and called her Martha and Mary sides,” Rollins writes. As a result, Susie comes to embody “the maddening and isolating effects of totalitarian political culture on women” (p. 89). Keenly aware that Smith was no twenty-first-century feminist, Cameron Williams Crawford interrogates Smith’s problematic use of an eight-year-old girl’s false rape accusation as a plot device to explore the mob mentality of the Joseph McCarthy years in One Hour (New York, 1959). Narrated by a white male minister, One Hour can also be read to show “how rape culture is perpetuated when men’s voices are given more power than women’s,” Crawford argues (p. 124). In the collection’s final two essays, April Conley Kilinski finds much more than nostalgia in Memory of a Large Christmas (New York, 1962), and David Brauer draws especially close connections between Smith’s political sensibilities and her use of rhetorical strategies and multivocal narration in Our Faces, Our Words...

Four reasons why we should screen for dissociation in competitive sports

Four reasons why we should screen for dissociation in competitive sports

AI-Powered Personalized Learning Journeys: Revolutionizing Information Management for College Students in Online Platforms

Since college students rely more on online education, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing virtual learning paths. The study shows how schools are personalising instruction and improving student engagement, comprehension, and retention with AI algorithms and data analytics. The essay covers key features of AI-powered personalised learning , from content recommendations to customisable evaluations and real-time feedback. The essay critiques these innovations' ethical and transparency difficulties, despite their potential benefits. It emphasises ethical AI-driven teaching by highlighting prejudice and data privacy issues. AI can improve education, but it has limitations, recommending a balance between innovation and ethical scrutiny. The paper proposes federated learning to address these difficulties. Federated learning decentralises data and encourages diverse data sets in localised environments to reduce biases and privacy breaches. Federated learning protects privacy, making it a viable AI-driven education solution, as the study shows. AI-facilitated customised learning may improve academic performance and digital skills, according to the study. It stresses ethics and openness in AI-driven education. Federated learning may help ethically integrate AI into education by balancing privacy and personalisation.

The dialogic performativity of secrecy and transparency

How does the pursuit of transparency and insight have a tendency to produce secrecy? And vice versa? In popular and political discourse, secrecy and transparency are usually depicted as mutually exclusive practices. At the same time, we know from extant research that the two are closely related, that they each have performative effects, and tend to encroach on each other. The inseparability and performative dynamics between the two, however, remains to be unfolded. This critical essay revisits the secrecy–transparency relationship through the lens of Edgar Morin’s dialogical principle. From this perspective, we argue that secrecy–transparency dialogics perform as a complex whole, involving both complementary and antagonistic forces. As an illustration of dialogic performativity, we draw on the phenomenon and practice of “open meetings” in public sector organizations. Specifically, we argue that the ambiguous fascination with knowing and not knowing create conditions for simulated insight and self-imposed conformity in ways that recalibrate the relationship between transparency and secrecy. On this background, we call for renewed critical and reflexive engagement with the transparency ideal and its presumed antipode, secrecy.

Moving beyond experts’ answers: unmasking silences of the social in management accounting courses

ABSTRACT Two U.S. accounting educators reflect on their experiences deploying resources in a manner that highlights human elements that have traditionally been downplayed in cost/management accounting pedagogy. Structured as a critical essay and a field report, the authors ground their discussion in perspectives from Freirean (1972) pedagogy and Hirschauer’s (2006) work on the “silences of the social.” Conventional assurance of learning protocols, content specification guidelines for certification programs, and statements from accounting professional bodies influence accounting educators to deliver “appropriate”, objectively measurable, and seemingly neutral information based on current rules and best practices. A limitation of this approach is that the most important issues in a society may be those where either (1) a consensus on best practice has not yet been determined or (2) positions favored by authorities are less than optimal for some members of society. The primary contribution of the paper is to render visible “silences of the social” that mask subjective human aspects embedded in management accounting pedagogy. The authors’ tentative recommendation is that critical thinking elements should be introduced early in the curriculum and not reserved for the masters’ level.

Grey or Nothing: Blackness and the Perils of Ontology Without Ethics

ABSTRACT This article examines the enduring relevance of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in Religious and Cultural Criticism. Anderson rightly senses a close connection between the practice of African American cultural criticism and the ethical sensitivity required to do it well. He also recognizes the historical limits of ontological inquiry. I argue that these metaphilosophical assumptions afford more generative encounters with Black political and cultural life, especially its discursive ambiguities and practical incongruities. By engaging the writings of two contemporary critics, Tamura Lomax and Calvin Warren, I show the benefits of thinking alongside Anderson’s important text and the dangers of not doing so. Scholars of religion, African American studies, and cultural studies ignore Anderson’s work and the discourses it enjoins at their own peril.

Response: Remaining Committed to Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT Framed in the mode of an interview, this essay responds to questions surrounding the publication of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) in light of contemporary moves in Black studies, including Black religion and culture studies. The contemporary relevancy of the form of religious and cultural criticism presented in the book is the topic of the dialogue among contributors. My postmodern iconoclastic critique of Black essentialism—cultural, racial, or heroic—in favor of a grotesque aesthetic, which accents the comedic interplay of unresolved ambiguity and a Nietzschean robust pessimism filled with laughter, is rearticulated in light of the 21st century challenges and provocations of the religious situation discussed by the guest co-editors and contributors. Readers will discover a generous generational dialogue that models a commendable Black scholarly aesthetic.

Interpretation is opinion: realigning the fact/opinion distinction in English defamation law

ABSTRACT Statements that interpret the words of others are – by their nature – interpretative. Their meaning is contingent and (inter)subjective; it is something that those who encounter those words or actions construct. As such, it makes little sense for the law to treat interpretative statements as purporting to set out provable facts. Yet English defamation law does precisely this. As a result, publicly criticising ambiguous words or actions that are put into the public domain by one person can cost a commentator dearly. This essay critiques the peculiarities of English defamation doctrine that have created this situation, arguing that all published statements that interpret or purport to interpret one or more earlier statements, whether expressly or impliedly, ought to be treated as statements of opinion. By adopting this approach, English defamation law can address an issue that has the potential to cause significant chilling effects on public discourse – particularly on social media.

Hamlet in T.S Eliot’s Interpretation

T.S. Eliot’s critical essays have great importance in the process of creating the writer’s literary works and, in general, in establishing the characteristics of modernist writing techniques. In addition, Eliot’s theoretical works written in different years show the change in his way of thinking and make it possible to perceive his approaches differently. On the one hand, we can consider that his criticism of specific writers and individual literary works is extremely unfair and subjective. However, we must notice that the negative evaluations and opinions he deserved pushed him to propose new approaches to the discussed issues with endless interpretations. As Eliot wrote in another new essay dedicated to Shakespeare in 1927, It is better to change your way of being wrong than be the same way wrong. The 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problem" is an example of such inappropriate criticism. In fact, the new term ‘objective corelative’ makes it more attractive than the approach itself. It should be noticed that by accusing Shakespeare of expressing subjective emotions and declaring Hamlet a failure, he doesn’t stop discussing the play and interpreting it in his literary works. In a way, the essays of the following years and his practical usage of Hamlet explain the reasons for his attitudes. We should seek these reasons in the form of expressing ‘horrible’ accepted by the Modernist writers. Along with the explanation of the play and Shakespeare’s attempt, the terms established in Eliot’s literary works should be considered. His theory doesn’t remain an impractical theory; Eliot uses it in the writing process. When we are looking for the reasons for the criticism directed at "Hamlet", the following terms must be named: ‘Objective Correlative’, ‘Poetic Meditation’, and ‘Self-dramatization of a Hero’. After many attempts, in the essay "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," Eliot identifies Hamlet’s different level of consciousness, personality and the existence of different philosophical viewpoints. By connecting Shakespeare's characters with Senecan drama, identifying Machiavelli and Montaigne’s opinions, and considering Elizabethan drama itself, Eliot frees Hamlet from the accusation of expressing Shakespeare’s pains and comes to ‘the Theory of Impersonality’. The paper discusses "Selected Essays" written by T.S. Eliot. The essays from different years highlight various interpretations of criticism directed at the play "Hamlet". To outline the practicality of Eliot’s literary theory, the paper analyses the usage of Hamlet as a character and the purpose of allusions in the writer’s literary works. The main analysis is devoted to "A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Also, the episodes of "Burbank", and "The Waste Land" are discussed. Professor T. Kobakhidze has played a major role in Eliot’s literary works research process in Georgian reality. His monograph "T.S. Eliot and the Aesthetics of High Modernism" is used to identify the purpose of Eliot’s allusions taken from the play Hamlet according to modernist writing techniques. In addition, the paper summarizes the specific subjective reasons for Shakespeare’s criticism at an earlier stage of Eliot’s career.

The Impact of Youtube on Iraqi EFL Learners’ Academic Achievements at Sawa Private University: A Critical Essay

The present essay aims at investigating the effects of the educational videos on the college students’ academic achievements. The present paper came after checking the students’ responses to the lecture’s questions submitted by the instructor to the students to see how far the students go with their responses following their tracking YouTube videos. The present essay was based on the quantitative method and data had been collected through a sample survey. The study has revealed that that watching educational videos affected the academic activities and performance of the respondents positively. It also has confirmed that most of the students preferred short animated to summarize the lectures that they were requested to be presented in the upcoming lecture.