Related Genres Research Articles

Readability Formulas and User Perceptions of Electronic Health Records Difficulty: A Corpus Study.

BackgroundElectronic health records (EHRs) are a rich resource for developing applications to engage patients and foster patient activation, thus holding a strong potential to enhance patient-centered care. Studies have shown that providing patients with access to their own EHR notes may improve the understanding of their own clinical conditions and treatments, leading to improved health care outcomes. However, the highly technical language in EHR notes impedes patients’ comprehension. Numerous studies have evaluated the difficulty of health-related text using readability formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), and Gunning-Fog Index (GFI). They conclude that the materials are often written at a grade level higher than common recommendations.ObjectiveThe objective of our study was to explore the relationship between the aforementioned readability formulas and the laypeople’s perceived difficulty on 2 genres of text: general health information and EHR notes. We also validated the formulas’ appropriateness and generalizability on predicting difficulty levels of highly complex technical documents.MethodsWe collected 140 Wikipedia articles on diabetes and 242 EHR notes with diabetes International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision code. We recruited 15 Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users to rate difficulty levels of the documents. Correlations between laypeople’s perceived difficulty levels and readability formula scores were measured, and their difference was tested. We also compared word usage and the impact of medical concepts of the 2 genres of text.ResultsThe distributions of both readability formulas’ scores (P<.001) and laypeople’s perceptions (P=.002) on the 2 genres were different. Correlations of readability predictions and laypeople’s perceptions were weak. Furthermore, despite being graded at similar levels, documents of different genres were still perceived with different difficulty (P<.001). Word usage in the 2 related genres still differed significantly (P<.001).ConclusionsOur findings suggested that the readability formulas’ predictions did not align with perceived difficulty in either text genre. The widely used readability formulas were highly correlated with each other but did not show adequate correlation with readers’ perceived difficulty. Therefore, they were not appropriate to assess the readability of EHR notes.

Enduring Design Challenges in Western Roleplaying Video Games

A roleplaying game (RPG) is a fuzzy class of video games that includes at least three quite different subclasses. This paper focuses on one of these subclasses, Western RPGs, which stand out for their focus on discovery and expression. It proposes a definition of a Western RPG as a video game that: encourages players to assume the part(s) of one or more virtual characters, in large open environments, with plentiful freedom of expression throughout game narratives. This definition is evaluated against archetypal Western RPGs and related genres. The paper further identifies three enduring challenges in Western RPG design: (1) bipolar morality scales, (2) quest distribution, (3) oversimplified difficulty scaling. Concrete suggestions for overcoming these challenges are provided.

Editorial: The History and Philosophy Department

Amid social and political upheavals and economic uncertainties and the increasingly pivotal role of information and communications technologies in society, the information systems (IS) field is perfectly positioned to address the social and technical implications stemming from these developments. One can find such discussions in historical and philosophical papers that have always attracted IS researchers’ attention but that have not received a formal channel to grow and thrive. The history and philosophy department of the Communications of the Association for Information Systems provides such a channel. By providing an avenue to analyze historic events and past successes and failures and to encourage new philosophical thinking for the present and the future, the history and philosophy department seeks to achieve what Peter Keen (1991, p. 27) once prognosticated: for the IS field to be at the “forefront of intellectual debate and investigation about the application of IT across every aspect of…society”. With this lofty goal in mind and to encourage a shift towards writing more historical and philosophical research, I describe these two intricately related genres of research that are distinct from the hypothetico-deductive research that crowds the pages of our journals but that perhaps hold the most potential for moving the IS field towards becoming an intellectually and socially influential discipline.

Approaching History as Cultural Memory Through Humour, Satire, Comics and Graphic Novels

Recent empirical research into humour and memory attests to the fact that people remember better when they perceive a word, phrase or image to be humorous. When the proximity of multiple ethnic groups engenders jokes displaying diverse perspectives and what Henri Bergson described as ‘corrective’ satire, such jokes can help remedy racism and fear of the other. Taking a humorous or satirical stance allows artists and writers to explore alternatives to contemporary reality and to uncover truths overlooked or consciously elided by government and mass media discourse. Such is the case with the recent publications on humour discussed here. Although they vary widely by topic and time period, all focus on how power struggles, oppression and violence are represented by means of humour and satire, as well as by the not necessarily jocular but nevertheless related genres of comics and the graphic novel. Recent historical research demonstrates how these creative genres not only critique political events and figures but also preserve, in a sophisticated cultural format, their readers’ short-term everyday working memory and long-term cultural memory of prejudice, subjugation and mass murder. In these texts the authors spotlight how the primary source creators commented on historical events, incorporated historical artefacts in their works and generated countercultural memories that fill gaps in historical narratives from other sources.

Zacchaeus as the Rich Host of Classical Satire

This piece builds upon the work of Dennis Hamm and Mikeal Parsons to compare the character Zacchaeus of Luke 19:1–10 to the rich host of a banquet from classical satire and related genres. In this category the diminutive tax collector joins a rogues’ gallery, including Nasidienus from Horace’s Satire 2.8 and Trimalchio from Petronius’ Satyricon. Those who grumble (γογγύζειν) about Jesus’ table fellowship should be understood as his fellow dining companions. The moralizing voice of the satirist is represented by these grumbling guests, whose harping is similar to that of the Pharisees. According to recent literary theory, the voice of the satirist, in this case a Pharisaic one, is undermined by its own harshness. By weakening the criticism of the satiric voice, Luke encourages identification with the sinner Zacchaeus and thus fosters the Gospel’s general objective of salvation of the lost.

Lyrik? En refleksion over den lyriske genres aktuelle status

Louise Mønster: “Poetry? A Reflection on the Status of the Poetic Genre”The article raises the question of genre in relation to contemporary poetry. The point of departure is the mismatch between the ordinary understanding of poetry as a short literary form that expresses the experiences, thoughts and feelings of a subject, and the actual ways in which much contemporary poetry unfolds. The article discusses why it is still relevant to sustain the concept of poetry, and it points out four factors that are believed to play an important role in explaining why the established concept of poetry has come under pressure in recent years. These factors have to do with mediatization, literary culture, forms of publication and increased politicization.

English

Awareness of abstract writing skill plays an important role for research article (RA) abstract writers to meet the discourse community expectations. In academic writing, writers should persuade readers to read the whole article by writing an effective abstract in terms of both content and rhetorical structure. This paper utilised Swales’ (1990) theory as considers abstract as an independent discourse because of its distinctive function and indicates the content and structure of the whole text. Swales also highlights the format of the abstract as having I-M-R-D pattern. The underlying assumption is that the associated RAs follow the IMRD structures and their abstracts are also likely to exhibit the same move pattern. This study investigated 130 English research article abstracts in linguistics journals in order to identify the move patterns found in RA abstracts in terms of moves and steps. In addition, it established move cycling in the structuring of an abstract. The findings indicated that 63.84% of the abstracts followed the IMRD structure that was premised to reflect the structure of the main text. Findings from this research provide new insights into abstract writing in linguistics articles, in particular, with regard to the actual practice in the use of the IMRD move patterns and how the related genres in RA are similar or different. These findings have pedagogical implications as writers could be given training in the various aspects of writing to satisfy the rhetorical structure for information flow. Keywords: abstract; IMRD structure; move cycling; rhetorical move; step DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2201-04

The Biblical Tour of Hell By MatthewRyan Hauge. The Library of New Testament Studies, 485. London: Bloomsbury T&amp;T Clark, 2013. Pp. xiv + 204. Paper, $29.99.

This book places Luke 16:19–31, the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in the context of the ancient Mediterranean tour of the underworld. It is Hauge's stated purpose “to explore the literary relationship between the Homeric descent [of Odysseus into Hades] in Odyssey 11.1–640 and the ensuing tours of hell tradition and the parable.” He concludes that the Lucan story is a direct imitation of the Homeric one, stating “distinctive features” of the parable “can best be explained in the light of the author's mimetic relationship to the Homeric model.” The book has three major sections. Chapter 1 summarizes the treatment of parables in New Testament scholarship, particularly addressing the problem of genre in relation to the Rich Man and Lazarus. Chapter 2 covers Greco-Roman paideia, highlighting the importance and ubiquity of the Homeric epics in the period's educational models. Chapter 3 addresses the parable itself, showing its connections to other Greco-Roman tours of the underworld. The strength of this book is its thorough treatment of the Greek and Latin descensus tradition in relation to the parable, appealing to both philosophical and mythological texts. It shows clearly that the parable is heir to this tradition, helping to identify and refine the cultural context of the Gospel.

The Earliest Source of Notre-Dame Polyphony? A New Conductus Fragment from the Early Thirteenth Century

While it is known that Parisian organum and related genres were being cultivated in the last quarter of the twelfth century, no manuscript collection dating before the 1230s has yet been discovered. The surviving Notre-Dame sources do not predate the decade 1230–40 at the earliest. The manuscript Troyes, Mediatheque du Grand Troyes 1471 alters this picture. The binding flyleaves of this source transmit the texts of eight conducti and two Benedicamus Domino, which were set to receive two-part music that was never entered. Despite the absence of written notation, these fragments offer the opportunity to address the implications of polyphonic book production in the generation preceding the great Notre-Dame manuscripts. Codicological and historical evidence suggests a Parisian origin and a possible date of 1210–20 for a source probably comparable to such manuscripts as F and W1 . Such an early date makes these flyleaves the earliest surviving witness to the production of books of Parisian polyphonic music, and challenges the general assumption that no thirteenth-century manuscripts of Notre-Dame polyphony were produced before the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It also raises questions relating to the notation, chronology, and transmission of the repertory in the early thirteenth century.

Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading by Marek C. Oziewicz

Reviewed by: Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading by Marek C. Oziewicz Michael Levy (bio) Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading. By Marek C. Oziewicz. New York: Routledge, 2015. Marek C. Oziewicz is the Marguerite Henry Professor of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Minnesota and author of the award-winning scholarly volume One Earth, One People (2008). His newest book is a difficult and highly theoretical but ultimately rewarding examination of the various justice-related cognitive scripts that readers of fiction in general, and more specifically readers of young adult science fiction and related genres, unconsciously absorb from the stories they read and use to structure and make meaning from what they have read. In a blurb at the beginning of the book, Brian Attebery refers to Oziewicz’s method and the theory behind it as nothing less than “a new way to read—and to value—fantastic literatures,” and he may well be right. The book has certainly [End Page 224] changed the way in which I will read young adult literature in the future. Oziewicz begins: “I have continued to be struck, time and again, by how profoundly plot structures, theme—and, as I now believe, the very appeal—of young people’s literature are predicated on the dream of justice” (1). This, he says, is particularly true of young adult speculative fiction because, not needing to conform to mere fact, it has a unique capacity to examine ethical situations. Oziewicz then makes the bold claim that “YA speculative fiction ought to be recognized as one of the most important forges of justice consciousness for the globalized world of the 21st century, an argument with clear implications for both literary criticism and literary practice” (4). He believes that what he calls “the big bang” of justice began shortly after World War II, making it possible for humanity to recognize and put into effect new forms of justice that had not previously been widely available. Throughout recorded history society worldwide has embraced retributive justice: essentially, a belief that might makes right and either that injustice cannot be redressed, or that the primary sort of redress possible is the old “eye for an eye,” revenge sanctioned by law. An alternative form, restorative justice, which resolves conflicts by means of “repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation” (5), has always existed as well, but only came into common use in the past century. Since the early 1990s, however, we have seen the rapid growth of interest in three other forms of justice—environmental, social, and global—each of which represents a more specialized move beyond the older forms. As the next link in his argument, Oziewicz claims that “justice” is a “cognitive category.” Following the work of a number of other theorists, he states that “human cognition occurs through conceptual structures variously called scripts, schemata, mental or cognitive models, mental spaces, and conceptual frames or worlds.” Our minds are thus “hardwired” for “script-based narrative understanding,” or stories (5). Oziewicz builds the case for this claim in great detail over an introduction and two dense chapters discussing theories of justice, arguing for the existence of the above forms of justice not just as scripts, but as a variety of subscripts as well. He further sets up three overarching, chronologically based categories: “Old Justice,” “New Justice,” and “Open Justice” (15). He also presents in detail the reasons why speculative fiction is more capable of dealing with justice issues through scripts than is mimetic fiction, though he does at one point admit that such scripts undoubtedly apply elsewhere, but that he is simply more interested in how they are used in speculative fiction. In six further chapters, each supported by an excellent bibliography, Oziewicz discusses his scripts in more detail, applying each one to a number of different fairy tales, young adult novels, and films. Chapter 3, for example, provocatively entitled “The World Is Not Fair,” deals with poetic justice and its two subdivisions, or “tracks”: the “feudal” and the “transcendental.” It covers a range [End Page 225] of pre-Enlightenment texts and attitudes, and particularly such folk- and fairy tales as “Hansel and...

Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre by Dorothy Chansky

Reviewed by: Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre by Dorothy Chansky Kim Solga Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; pp. 304. The October 2008 issue of Theatre Journal was bookended by articles from Jill Dolan and Dorothy Chansky that separately reevaluated two stalwarts of the second-wave feminist movement: Wendy Wasserstein (Dolan) and Betty Friedan (Chansky). Together, they marked one unofficial beginning of what has since become a vibrant contemporary movement (including my work with Roberta Barker in Canada, as well as work by Elaine Aston in the United Kingdom, and Varun Begley and Cary Mazer in the United States) to rethink, reframe, and reclaim stage realism in all of its fraught complexity. While it is impossible to recuperate stage realism naively, thanks to the robust critique leveled against it by feminist and critical race scholars over the past four decades, it is—as the above writers contend—nevertheless necessary to parse that critique with care, to distinguish among the multiple practices and strategies (dramaturgical, technical, and performative) that constitute the thing(s) we mean when we talk about “realism,” and to take the measure of the different kinds of cultural work that multiple “realisms” can do—sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem, and sometimes at tantalizing cross-purposes with one another. Now, nearly a decade after her essay on Friedan was published, Chansky offers us a thickly historicized, informative, lively, and intelligent addition to the burgeoning critical literature we might call “Realism 2.0.” Kitchen Sink Realisms is a provocative, unabashedly “feminist history” (3; emphasis in original) of American theatre that spotlights the role that domestic labor has played, as both dramaturgical device and sustained performance action, in a wide range of popular (and a few avant-garde) works written and performed between 1918 and 2005. At the center of Chansky’s history is a careful revaluing of the often-derided genre in her title, and while the book does not offer a thoroughgoing engagement with genre per se, it structures all of its readings around the questions that ghost the label “realist”: How does the American theatre stage our [End Page 489] assumptions about what experiences, what human beings, and what kinds of human labor count as “real”? How can we, as scholars of theatre and performance, account for those assumptions effectively and interrogate the ways in which our performance cultures both uphold and challenge them? Chansky’s rich introduction will appeal to historians, as well as to readers interested more broadly in the recent critical turn back to realism. After introducing the term kitchen sink realism within its historical context, the author spends time thinking through the different ways in which we might value realism today, and the different generic structures within which we might uncover its operations. Although she begins by noting that her book will investigate the routine ways in which some of the most “real” labor in American life—domestic work for pay, or more often for none—is simultaneously implied and forgotten by major realist texts in the American canon (3), Chansky quickly moves on to complicate what might otherwise seem a familiar critical move: damning the realist stage for failing to account for multiple forms of human experience. Brecht, she helpfully reminds us, was a self-identified realist, one who believed realism to be the preeminent genre for “unmasking” a culture’s most malignant operations (5). Following his lead and quoting Pam Morris, Chansky defines realisms—plural—as a cluster of related genres invested in “a complex, ambivalent responsiveness towards, rather than repulsion from, the tangible stuff of reality” (Morris, qtd. on 5). The social and political potentials of these genres, Chansky goes on to argue, are always implicit, but not always available to artists or producers; especially when we examine works for a wide popular audience, the marketplace often gets in the way (6). Thus the task of the realist historian becomes to think theatre carefully through its cultural histories, exploring what knowledge audiences might have brought with them to the theatre at any given...

“Not a Play”: Redefining Theater and Reforming Marriage in Candida

ABSTRACT In his early plays, Shaw repurposed conventional theatrical tropes and privileged discussion over dramatic closure, redefining drama in ways that some of his contemporaries considered antidramatic. These strategies are especially important in Candida (1895), written explicitly in response to Ibsen's Doll's House, which Shaw considered the prototypical New Drama. I argue that in questioning popular assumptions about marriage and gender relations, Candida also reworks theatrical genres and devices commonly associated with these assumptions, in particular the dramatic stock characters of the preacher and the poet, and the related performance genres of religious homiletics and poetry reading. The play suggests that marriage itself is a theatrical performance modeled on these and other theatrical forms; thus, traditional theater is to some degree held responsible for faulty popular assumptions regarding love and marriage, and newer kinds of theater are called on to correct those assumptions.

Kongo: Power and Majesty

Kongo: Power and Majesty

Cross-Disciplinary Variations: Japanese Novice Writers’ Socialization into the Undergraduate Thesis

This study investigated, by means of an ethnographic approach, what exactly occurs when Japanese novice writers are socialized into the undergraduate thesis genre and how the processes differ among disciplines. Data were collected from 10 undergraduate students enrolled in various humanities disciplines at two Japanese universities. The study identified the genre chains in psychology and non-psychology consisting of the thesis genre and the related genres to capture the whole picture of their socialization processes, and then examined cognitive and sociocultural aspects of their learning. All of the four psychology students were systematically inducted into research and experimental reports, a genre similar to undergraduate theses, in their first 2 years with emphasis on acquisition of knowledge and skills of the research process and report writing, which appear to follow the tradition of the natural sciences. In the last 2 years, the students were then weekly guided by their supervisors specifically in writing their undergraduate thesis in groups. The non-psychology students were socialized into the undergraduate thesis only in the last 2 years, with a particular focus on subject-matter knowledge, which was solely dependent on their supervisors, in the group and/or individual sessions. On the other hand, the psychology students experienced less difficulty in writing their theses than the non-psychology students. The study concludes that the highly prescriptive and regulated training for writing in the disciplinary context at the early stage via the written genres similar to the thesis were likely to account for the psychology students’ success.

Women's Reading and Writing Practices: Chick-Lit as A Site of Struggle in Popular Culture and Literature

This paper represents an exploration into “chick-lit” literature and its significance in the popular cultural context. As a genre of popular literature written for young urban women, the tremendous commercial success of the popular chick-lit fiction inevitably calls for a critical assessment of its status within popular culture and literature. This paper aims to explore the genre’s significance for the research about popular literature, its relationship to literary and scholarly criticism, as well as women’s reading and writing practices. By focusing on the production, consumption and reception of chick-lit as a global feminine genre, the paper presents the main characteristics of chick-lit fiction and its differences from other genres such as conventional romances. It also highlights the strengths and limitations of the genre in relation to literary values and cultural standards. Chick-lit’s incredible popularity as a cultural and literary phenomenon is further investigated by drawing upon several critical debates introduced by Lawrence W. Levine, Stuart Hall, John Fiske and Michel de Certeau. This paper also considers chick-lit as a deeply contradictory genre of literature that generates highly polarized responses, thus as a site of continuous struggle between “consent and resistance” (Hall 466). To view chick-lit either from an entirely negative or positive perspective would be to oversimplify both the genre and the issues related to literature. Therefore, by considering chick-lit’s both wide appeal to its readers and denunciation by literary critics as trivial fiction, and exploring the positions taken up in academic and popular discussions about the genre, the paper seeks to examine the polarized responses and the questions chick-lit raises regarding literature, popular culture and contemporary socio-cultural realities of women. Keywords : Chick-lit, popular culture, literary criticism, women’s fiction, cultural studies

Remembrance of things past and recent: Modiri Molema's letters home to Mafeking

ABSTRACTModiri Molema was a medical student at Glasgow during the First World War. The war kept him in Scotland far longer than his five-year medical curriculum required and inspired the many letters that he wrote to bridge the gulf between the two spaces in which he lived, Glasgow and Mafeking. Though written during wartime, his letters did not share the phlegmatic self-censorship that made the epistolary style of soldiers “a literature of their own”, in Stuart Cloete's view (Fussell 1975 and 2009: 181–182, 228–229). This article explores the characteristic style and strategies used by Molema in his letters home, as well as their intersections with the related genres of life writing, autoethnography, and epistolary narrative. The overall focus is on the self-representation of Modiri Molema through the genre of letter-writing.

Review of Cueva and Byrne, A Companion to the Ancient Novel

The purpose of this new collection of recent work on the ancient novel, is, in the words of its editors, to assemble 'different perspectives and interpretations on a wide variety of topics in a manageable way to serve as a suitable introduction for readers new to the genre' (p. 1). More experienced readers of the ancient novels are not neglected either, however, since the book also aims to articulate 'the perplexities [of ancient narrative fiction] that have challenged scholars since ... the nineteenth century' (ibid.). The collection proceeds to achieve these two aims incrementally, beginning with some new surveys of the main authors of the Greek and Roman novel, the fragments, Menippean satire, and early Christian narratives in Part 1 (pp. 11-198), moving on to touch on the issues of genre (Part 2, pp. 199-272) and intertextuality (Part 3, pp. 273-424), and concluding with some special themes and topics (Part 4, pp. 425-597). This is not to say that Parts 1-2 avoid new topics entirely, however, since Graham Anderson's discussion of 'The management of dialogue in ancient fiction', pp. 217-30, for example, discusses a new aspect of ancient narrative fiction. Parts 3-4 entirely avoid the old and familiar - indeed, given the rate of publication in this field, it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise. The reader is warned that there is much recycling of what is already well known in this volume, especially the inevitable plot summaries, but it would be difficult for such a weighty tome as this not to have any new things to say about the ancient novel and related genres, and in this respect it does not disappoint. Perhaps the greatest virtue of the collection is that it brings together the standard introductory information on the ancient novel, for which Gareth Schmeling's The Novel in the Ancient World (Leiden 1996, reissued in 2003) has come to be relied on, and the more sophisticated theoretical approach of Tim Whitmarsh's The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge 2008). In keeping with this blending of old and new, Cueva and Byrne have assembled a good mix of established scholars and fresh voices in the field, with the former rather outweighing the latter, although some established names are absent.

"Myriad Subtleties": Subverting Racism through Irony in the Music of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie

In his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie recognizes the impact racism had on his youthful behavior and acknowledges his misreading of Louis Armstrong's minstrelsy-influenced performance style: Hell, I had my own way of Tomming. Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of of accommodating itself to basically unjust situation. ... Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops's [Armstrong's] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile (2009, 296). Since jazz, from its origins in the early 1900s in New Orleans, was increasingly performed by black musicians for white audiences, African-American jazz musicians have often been focal point for racial conflict in the United States, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. As Gillespie suggests, black musicians frequently dealt with racial prejudice by relying on strategies derived from African-American culture, in particular signifying, which includes variety of rhetorical strategies including indirection, irony, and verbal disjunction. Tomming, reference to the eponymous character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ([1852] 1982), is generally used pejoratively to criticize blacks who apparently ingratiate themselves with white society by unctuous and exaggerated servility; however, this persona might equally be regarded as form of signifyin(g), or more specifically, indirection or masking that facilitates ironic subversion. Although the guise it took in jazz performance changed from apparent submission to feigned aggression, signifying often characterized black dealings with the dominant white culture both in slavery and during the 1940s when the social changes that occurred in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century gradually began to mitigate the racist oppression African Americans had suffered for several centuries. Critical Approach The primary focus of this discussion is on the gradual decline in irony used in jazz during the first half of the twentieth century as political (Gates 1988, 45) and satiric tool to attack the ideology of white supremacy. During this period, the parodic revisioning of the various elements that constitute jazz performance (e.g., musical narrativity, costume, gesture, and language), which has been seminal characteristic of jazz since its inception, gradually achieved greater expression and became significant factor in the emergence of bebop. A discussion of this nature is problematized by the complexity of irony and the related genres of satire and parody, the still relatively opaque nature of musical meaning, and the difficulty of tracking microlevel social change. Irony, as Linda Hutcheon argues, is a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual) (1994, 10). It also involves, according to Margaret Rose, a statement of an ambiguous character, which includes containing at least two messages, one of which is the concealed message of the ironist to an 'initiated' audience, and the other the more readily perceived but 'ironically meant' message of the code (1993, 87). Thus, there are several key elements that must be in place for ironic communication to take place: (1) the social context in which the irony occurs; (2) the decoders or interpreters whose comprehension of the ironic message is often based on community of understanding they share with the encoder that excludes those who don't grasp the ironic meaning; (3) the encoders or ironists who perceive ironic incongruity and fashion message reflecting that insight; and (4) the message itself, which can be transmitted in performance by various means. Irony, moreover, is foundational to both satire, which aims at correcting social or extramural ills, and parody, which focuses on the form of discourse or the intramural. …

Popular Fiction and Development Studies

The essay uses two recent works of fiction as a takeoff for a critique of Development Studies, suggesting that what is presented in the form of fiction is often closer to reality than what the discipline offers as fact. The review of two novels by former US Peace Corps volunteers offers clear examples of how fiction in the field of “development” can offer truths that are not presented in academic work. This essay suggests how fiction can help invigorate the discipline of Development Studies, offers a list of examples, and also suggests how fiction should not be used. This essay challenges scholars in the field to draw upon insights from fiction and to review fiction works while encouraging publishers to widen their perspectives and present works in new genres in the field of “development.” The essay also notes how related genres like development “diaries” can also be used as a reality check on the discipline and as a way to infuse new ideas into this field.

Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture by Jennifer Esmail (review)

Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, by Jennifer Esmail (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013, 296 pp., cloth, $59.95, ISBN: 978-0-8214-2034-8)Reading Victorian Deafness opens with immortalization in a painting of Queen Victoria's willingness and ability to fingerspell with a deaf woman, Elizabeth Tuffield, by a deaf painter, William Agnew. Victoria's actions were contradictory to spirit of her age in terms of comfort with sign languages and deafness and focus on Hmiting definition of language via unrelenting rise of oralism. While this book does trace and revisit historical and Hnguistic trajectory of events leading to imposition of oralism on deaf people during this time, value of Esmail's book is her focus on deaf subjectivity: In addition to closely examining Victorian understandings of signed languages, this book focuses on two related topics: Victorian cultural constructions of deafness and Hved and self-representations of deaf (4). Her expHcation of deaf people and their work and writings within context of Victorian process of mis-understanding language as speech shows that deaf people actively tried to question and undermine this cultural process.Esmail's first chapter on deaf and politics of language disentangles and then re-entangles issues that arise in intersections between deafness, sound, and poetry (31). Esmail analyzes how deaf poets defended their in as imagined, silent, and textual-not auditory-constructions of print. Esmail analyzes specifically how deaf poets such as Amos Draper and John Kitto at this time show, in addition to celebration of visual properties and bodily signs within poems themselves, how patterns of rhythm and rhyme were therefore moored in textual practices rather than sound experiences (30) or speech. Esmail analyzes how the perceived gap between deafness and poetic ability was exploited by deaf people, and their allies, in their fight to defend sign language use (23).The issue faced by nineteenth-century deaf poets was then a particular physical disability but rather cultural prejudices about relationship between disability and poetry (26).In her second chapter, Esmail underscores rarity of signing deaf characters in world of Victorian fiction even as there are numerous examples of deafened, not signing, people in this genre.This chapter posits that absence of deafness in Victorian fiction reveals its investment in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality: one that understands fiction as a record of what was said and (70) via problematic silent heroines. Esmail points out how deafness is not as much of a problem for Victorians as lack of speech and assumption that writing is a form of printed orality (73). For silent Victorian woman to be acceptable, she had to have access to oral voice; one thing I would have liked to see Esmail do is indicate that this tradition goes at least as far back as early modern period in this era's dependence on speech along with anxieties about being heard and not hearing wrong thing. These anxieties did not just pop up suddenly in Victorian era as she seems to indicate.1 Writers like Dickens and Collins show difficulties of representing deaf characters in fiction via connecting corporeality to textuality and, more specifically, granting hands, arms, and face linguistic complexity of vocal organs, tongue, and lips within strictures of a written English text (71). Esmail also does neglect somewhat a more complete analysis of Victorian fiction genre in relation to silence, but possibly does so in order to focus on deaf viewpoint and subjectivity within works. She argues that Dickens and Collins portray Sophy and Madonna, deaf women in their works, as having more agency than has often been acknowledged; she also illustrates how Dickens and Collins attempt to incorporate inaudible voices (100) and in so doing subtly point out some of failures of assumed oral nature of print. …