Best-selling Research Articles

“Every Novel is a New Country”: A Conversation with Junot Díaz

ABSTRACTJunot Díaz (born on December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at Boston Review. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and obtained his MFA from Cornell University. Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2012, and was also the recipient of PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O Henry Award. He was appointed chair of the Pulitzer Board in April 2018. This conversation took place at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 6, 2019.

Black Books and Dead Black Bodies: Twitter, Hashtags, and Antiracist Reading Lists

CLA JOURNAL 179 Black Books and Dead Black Bodies: Twitter, Hashtags, and Antiracist Reading Lists Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II In 2000, Janifer P. Wilson started Sisters Uptown Bookstore in Harlem, New York. For two decades, she struggled to turn a profit selling books, and so Wilson worked a different full-time job to keep her bookstore afloat. But her fortunes greatly improved during the summer of 2020, as conversations and sympathy concerning violence against black people prompted unprecedented sales of black books at black-owned booksellers. Wilson welcomed the uptick in profit yet was conflicted about the circumstances:“to have our business surge in a matter of weeks as the result of an unfortunate incident with a man losing his life and the whole world getting to see it has just impacted my spirit and soul” (de Leónet. al). Like many people, Linda Duggins, Senior Director of Punlicity at Grand Central Publishing, thought that it was“awesome”that conversations related to Black Lives Matter led to unprecedented support for books by African Americans and blackowned bookstores. However, she too had reservations. “It does sadden me,” she noted, “to know that the push for the sales is connected to that stacking of dead Black bodies” (de Leónet. al). As life-long participants in and students of black culture, we are aware of the longstanding interest in successful black books expressed by African American literary scholars and general readers. The remarkable feats in sales and media attentionAfricanAmerican booksellers and books about racism and white privilege achieved in June 2020 indicate that significant news coverage about brutalities committed against black people can substantially drive the interests of readerconsumers . This situation is made evident in the available data and reporting on book publishing. The relative lack of attention for African American novels and volumes of poetry suggests that these genres matter less for consumers in dire moments, at least in comparison to what is categorized as “antiracist” nonfiction. Our observations reveal that those of us who study and teach African American literature should do more to discuss the relationship between successful black books and dead black bodies. Not long after George Floyd was killed on May 25,protestors took to the streets. Activist groups removed or altered Confederate statues. Employees prompted their employers to release public statements supporting Black Lives Matter. And, notably, people published and circulated antiracist reading lists. The lists were especially designed for apparent white audiences or other groups that presumably 180 CLA JOURNAL Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II overlookedthehistoriesof blackstruggleandwhitesupremacy.Journalists,scholars, librarians, and others offered roundups of titles that addressed systemic racism, and sympathetic readers responded by ordering those book recommendations— in some cases tens of thousands of select works. Our long-standing interest in the implications of data concerning black cultural products led us to consider the convergence of protests and books sales. We focused on bestselling books supplied by NPD BookScan and presented in Publisher’s Weekly. During the month of May, virtually no book on the top ten bestseller list dealt directly with antiracist topics or subjects, though Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming remained on the list. In the first week of June, however, a discernible shift took place. So You Want to Talk about Race (2018) by Ijeoma Oluo entered the bestseller list at number 2 with 35,859 sales for the week, and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018) by Robin DiAngelo was ranked number 3 with 30,221 sales. The next week, Oluo’s and DiAngelo’s books remained on the top ten bestsellers list and were joined by Ibram X. Kendi with Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016) at the #5 spot and How to Be an Antiracist (2019) at the #7 spot with sales at 37,862 and 26,755, respectively. Between May 25, when Floyd was killed, and July 3, the last date for which we collected book data, DiAngelo’s White Fragility sold 408,401 copies; Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist sold 308,309; and Oluo’s sold 185,850. Put another way, those three books...

Writing Cultural Celebrities: The Year in China

Writing Cultural CelebritiesThe Year in China Chen Shen (bio) Biographies of cultural celebrities are well received by readers in contemporary China. Books about outstanding people in cultural areas such as art, calligraphy, drama, literature, and philosophy appear frequently on bestseller lists, and in 2019, what drew the most attention were biographies of the painter Zhang Daqian, the dramatist Xia Yan, the publisher Wang Yunwu, and the actor Yu Shizhi. Over the past seventy years in contemporary China, biographies of cultural figures have been produced in various forms and include many classic works. Major publishing houses often launch biographies of cultural figures in succession. Shanghai Joint Publishing House has published several significant biographies in the past few years, including Bao Tianxiao's Chuan Ying Lou Hui Yi Lu in 2014, and Zhang Xinying's two biographies of Shen Congwen in 2018.1 Since 2012, Guangxi Normal University Press's "Imaginist" series has published collections about cultural figures in Republican China. Television documentaries representing cultural figures also appear every year. CCTV has been producing serial documentaries about masters of modern China in the fields of painting, architecture, literature, and ceramic craftsmanship since 2012. Why are biographies and other forms of life writing production so fond of cultural celebrities? Biographies of cultural figures popular among readers are not "great" biographies, whose writers are specialists in the field, conduct comprehensive research to present the subject from all sides, and cover the entire life—from birth to death. Such great biographies have great reference value for other researchers in their fields, but they generally are not easy to read for common readers. Especially those written under the direction of the government, some biographies turn their subjects into exemplars, focusing their narratives on the personalities' success, and on their possession of mainstream values. What makes celebrity biographies attractive is not the subject's great career, but what they reveal about what is behind the flashy or famous appearance. A collection titled Imperfect Understanding, a 1934 compilation of forty-six essays [End Page 30] published by columnist Wen Yuan-ning in his column in China Critic, was very popular for a long time because of the author's skill in presenting vivid images of the celebrities. The essays were brief portraits of contemporary cultural figures such as Hu Shi, Gu Hongming, Wu Mi, and Zhou Zuoren. Wen Yuan-ning was writing in English, and as Qian Zhongshu has shown, his essays show the influence of William Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age in their use of brief but piercing words to present the subjects' personalities, and to offer the author's own evaluation. Typically these essays display the author's incisive satiric but honest criticism of the celebrities. Although some of these figures were offended, by representing these celebrities as complex personalities, Wen Yuan-ning made them more "familiar" to readers. Cultural celebrities always play leading roles in their times. Though their reputations are firstly generated by great achievements in a specific field, their legendary life experience and glamorous spiritual world attract the attention of readers from a wide range of backgrounds. Rather than simply praise their achievements, or support their reputations, the biographer's responsibility is therefore to find a way to represent their subjects as a zeitgeist of their time, and to reveal their complicated and splendid inner world. Leon Edel once said that "the biographical process is a refining, a civilizing—a humanizing—process" (1). What is important is to clarify the subjects' personalities, and especially in their famous relations with the society. The biographer does not therefore necessarily have to make a profound study of the subject's works. The life is the most important concern. Looking at biographies of cultural celebrities published in 2019, we can see the writers struggle with this concern. First appearing in 1999, then in a revised edition with some supplements in 2019, Zhang Da Qian Yi Shu Quan takes a unique approach to presenting the painter's personality. In the preface, biographer Bao Limin writes that because he is not a painter or an art critic, he would not make any scholarly comments about Zhang Daqian's paintings (viii). Instead, his writing resembles idle talk...

Reading Regionalism in the Midwest: Evidence from "What Middletown Read" Data

Reading Regionalism in the MidwestEvidence from "What Middletown Read" Data James J. Connolly (bio) Regionalist fiction flourished in the United States between 1870 and 1910. Described as "local-color stories" by midwestern writer Hamlin Garland, a prominent practitioner of the genre, these stories featured vernacular dialect, rural settings, and folk customs. For Garland, the local-color novel had "such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native."1 These tales occupied a critical and commercial middle ground between the highbrow realism that emerged during the late nineteenth century and the popular romances and sentimental stories that dominated the era's fiction. In Mark Storey's words, regionalism was a "'compromise' between a dominant form of realism and the persistence of nonrealist genres."2 The standard formula blended closely observed details about a region or place with happy-ending love stories. If novels by regionalist writers such as Garland, Mary Freeman Wilkins, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Constance Fenimore Woolson rarely topped turn-of-the-century best-seller lists, they nonetheless drew strong interest from readers and produced brisk sales.3 Assuming American regionalism's readers to be members of an educated urban middle class based in eastern cities, literary scholars have attributed particular cultural and ideological functions to the genre. As Tom Lutz has put it, local-color stories "maintained an ongoing conversation about the part to whole, center to periphery, about the interdependence—conceptually, politically, materially—of the local to the global."4 Others contend that the genre helped knit together a nation recently fractured by the Civil War. It represented part of a larger attempt to integrate a diverse country, recognizing regional differences while establishing a cultural hierarchy in which sophisticated urban life sat at the apex while the small-town and [End Page 69] rural experiences of the Midwest and other regions occupied lower rungs. Nostalgic portraits of pre-industrial rural life produced by local-color writers helped mark such settings as subordinate, undeveloped places in an emerging industrial-capitalist order while cementing the authority of the metropolitan center.5 These accounts of the character and significance of regionalism assume that readers, generally imagined as educated residents of eastern cities, interpreted these texts in the manner described in modern scholarship. The data assembled in the What Middletown Read (WMR) database, which reproduces circulation records from the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library (MPL) from 1891 to 1902, permits us to consider the experiences of a different, non-metropolitan set of readers, library users in a small midwestern city.6 It provides us with some sense of who read regionalist fiction and offers us clues, if not definitive evidence, about how they interpreted what they read. Muncie's library data suggests that readers of regionalism were drawn to the romantic elements of the books they selected and were just as attracted to portraits of other places, whether across the U.S. or across the world, as they were to accounts of life in the Midwest. For the most part, MPL borrowers read local-color fiction as a part of a large encounter with print-borne popular culture, and such reading helped them imagine themselves as part of a metropolitan-oriented audience rather than as situated on the cultural periphery. To what extent Muncie's residents represented the Midwest as a whole is debatable. Customarily depicted as a quintessentially provincial middle-American community, courtesy of the city's role as the subject of Robert and Helen Lynd's seminal Middletown studies, turn- of- the- century Muncie might better be understood as a swift ly developing urban place that was increasingly integrated into national and international economic and cultural networks. The city's population approached 21,000 in 1900, following rapid growth triggered by the discovery of natural gas in the region in 1886. It gained the trappings of city life over the course of the 1890s, including a bustling downtown commercial area, industrial sections with laborers' homes grouped around factories, upscale neighborhoods, streetcars, and even a vice district. By 1900 the city had 347 manufacturing firms, and factory work was the dominant form...

The Tangled Journey of the Western Flyer: The Boat and Its Fisheries

The Tangled Journey of the Western Flyer: The Boat and Its Fisheries Kevin M. Bailey (bio) and Christopher Chase (bio) Introduction In 1940 the Western Flyer carried John Steinbeck and his comrade Ed Ricketts on a remarkable 6-week voyage to the Sea of Cortez. After they wrote a book (Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, 1941) about their adventure, the Western Flyer became an icon in American literature. Some say that it is, perhaps, the best-known fishing vessel in history. Ever since the Western Flyer arrived in Port Townsend for renovation work in 2012, a constant stream of visitors has paid homage to the boat. One of them pinned a picture of John Steinbeck to its hull as if the vessel was the casket at his wake. For many readers of John Steinbeck and followers of Ed Ricketts, the Western Flyer represents a deeply personal symbol—adventure, freedom, camaraderie, or perhaps even refuge. Steinbeck’s prose planted a vision of the Western Flyer in his readers’ minds and the seed took root, establishing a place there—like something Steinbeck called a “sea-memory” (Steinbeck 1951). And now the wind grew stronger and the windows of houses along the shore flashed in the declining sun. The forward guy-wire of our mast began to sing under the wind, a deep and yet penetrating tone like the lowest string of an incredible bull-fiddle. We rose on each swell and skidded on it until it passed and dropped us in the trough. And from the galley ventilator came the odor of boiling coffee, a smell that never left the boat again while we were on it. (Steinbeck and Ricketts 1941) [End Page 385] Click for larger view View full resolution Captain Tony Berry (left) and John Steinbeck (right) on the flying bridge of the Western Flyer, 1940. With permission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San José State University. However, the fame of the Western Flyer didn’t come to pass overnight. At first, Sea of Cortez wasn’t a best-selling book. Word of the book spread from person to person among those who’d been touched by the story and resonated with it. It’s not a book that people forget easily. As time has passed, the collective memory of the book has grown, along with the legend of the boat. We know a lot about the Steinbeck-Ricketts voyage to the Sea of Cortez on the Western Flyer from their writings and those of many others. But what do we know of the boat’s beginnings and of its 83-year history outside of the famous voyage with the author and scientist? Our intent in this narrative is to describe some of the boat’s history before and after the Western Flyer’s keystone journey.1 BUilding the Boat The Western Flyer was built in 1937 in Tacoma, Washington, as a [End Page 386] state-of-the-art purse seiner to fish for sardines out of Monterey. The builder was Martin Petrich Sr., owner of the Western Boat Building Company. Petrich would co-own the boat with fisherman Frank Berry (aka Bertapeli) and his son Tony, who was to become the boat’s skipper. The Petrichs and the Berrys were Croatians from the island of Hvar with a strong fishing tradition. In 1937, the world was reeling in the depths of the Great Depression. Many refugees had moved to California in search of employment and better times, but some migrated to Oregon and Washington. Near Petrich’s boatyard in Tacoma there was a camp called “Hollywood on the Flats,” on the east side of the Puyallup River, that held about 2,000 hobos. The residents lived in shacks made of wood scraps. For a while, even work in Petrich’s boatyard came to a standstill. But it was to pick up again because the sardine fishery in California was thriving and the fishermen needed more boats. Historian Arthur McEvoy called Monterey, the center of the fishery, “a local island of prosperity in a sea of depression” (McEvoy 1995). Martin Petrich was a tall man with broad shoulders...

Page 2: Happiness for Sale

Page 2Happiness for Sale Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Alain “It is not difficult to be unhappy or discontented,” wrote the philosopher Émile Chartier. “All you have to do is sit down, like a prince waiting to be amused,” he continues. “This attitude of lying in wait and weighing happiness as if it were a commodity casts the gray shadow of boredom over everything.” Chartier was a French philosopher who died in 1951 at the age of eighty-three. He spent his entire professional career teaching philosophy in secondary schools. Though his star has dimmed over the years, while he was alive, he was considered by the French as the most important philosopher since René Descartes. His pupils included Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Canguilhem, André Maurois, Maurice Schuman, and Simone Weil. He has also been called the greatest teacher of their generation. “The key to [Chartier’s] teaching,” writes John Hellman in Simone Weil (1982), “was his determination to instill critical habits of mind in his students.” “He believed,” continues Hellman, “that students did not truly ‘acquire’ ideas until they had digested them and re-expressed them in their own words.” Rather than in-class exams, he thus preferred to assign “‘topos,’ or take-home essay examinations, to his students which forced them to formulate their own (not ‘correct’) answers to knotty questions.” To be sure, Chartier’s pedagogical prowess was as legendary as some of his pupils. Still, the work of his closest contemporary, Henri Bergson, is much more highly regarded today than that of Chartier. Part of the reason is the ephemeral nature of the majority of his writing. That is, while he published numerous books on philosophical topics, he was best known in France through the thousands of articles he published in various daily newspapers. Beginning in 1903, he started to publish these philosophical articles under the pseudonym “Alain,” a name he took from the fifteenth-century Norman poet, Alain Chartier. At first Alain’s articles were longer weekly columns and then in 1906 they became daily short articles. The shorter articles were published as a daily column entitled Propos d’un Normand. From 1906 until the start of the Great War in 1914, Alain wrote a two page article every evening. Then, after the war—which he fought in as a soldier even though he was exempt from service and could have served as an officer—he resumed the practice of writing propos. All said and done, Alain produced nearly 5,000 of these little articles. Turning philosophy into literature or journalism can be difficult for philosophers. Writing for a philosophical audience is very different than writing for a literary or general one. Certain assumptions that are made when writing for a philosophical audience cannot be made for a general audience. As such, the list of philosophers of note who successfully wrote for a general audience is a short one. Alain was able to bridge this gap through the technique he used to write his little articles. Every evening he would sit down with two sheets of paper in front of him. He then started to write his propos knowing that its last line would be at the bottom of the second page. He also committed himself to making no corrections, erasures, or changes. This allowed him to meet his publication deadline (all pieces were published the next day) and write only that which was directly relevant to the topic of the propos. The result were thousands of 50 to 60 line aphoristic compositions. In 1928, ninety-three of Alain’s propos dealing with theme of happiness (bonheur) were published as Propos sur le bonheur, which became a best-selling book. The lines above are from the penultimate propos in this collection entitled “The Obligation to be Happy.” It is dated March 16, 1923, and was entitled as to leave no doubt as to his position on happiness. It was a position steeped in practical wisdom tempered with an endless bounty of cheerfulness and cheeky irony. Alain encouraged people to not complain or burden others with their problems. Rather, even when the chips are down, he encouraged his readers to present a happy...

Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001–16 by Kyle Meikle

Reviewed by: Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001–16 by Kyle Meikle Seda Öz (bio) Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001–16 by Kyle Meikle. Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. 2019. $70.00 hardcover. $20.96 paper. Also available in e-book. 181 pages. As the 1980s drew to a close, Dudley Andrew declared, "It is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn."1 His call opened the way for the incorporation of literary and cultural theories such as intertextuality into adaptation studies. A few decades later, Kyle Meikle has issued a new call to adaptation studies in the franchise era, an era in which adaptations have become "characteristically diffuse and unstable."2 Meikle draws a new, extended map for adaptation studies that includes the interactive and adaptive play of touch-screen technologies, self-broadcasting, streaming platforms, porn parodies, theme parks, cosplays, and board games, to examine their relationship to Google trends (and Google's tracking of top search queries), algorithms, and changing copyright laws. Meikle claims that as participation and interactivity have grown, the distinction between adaptations and franchises has become complex and blurry, which requires a new approach beyond readily available definitions of adaptation. By avoiding a linear model based on the formulation from novel to film, or X to Y, Meikle's monograph covers [End Page 200] a tremendous number of examples and their various connections to one another to trace franchised adaptations' "scope, legality, interactivity, and physicality" between 2001 and 2016.3 Meikle begins by discussing the ways franchises offer their audiences multiple points of entry into the "process" and "product" of adaptation, and the factors contributing to the expansion of adaptations and franchises. Investigating the web of intertextual links in the world of adaptation, Meikle claims that we are in the era of "Now a Major Motion Picture Franchise" rather than "Now a Major Motion Picture."4 He sees the franchise as a creative, liberating force that can fight against top-down industry productions while also acknowledging critiques that highlight their conservative, capitalist, and oppressive power. In his approach to franchises, Meikle places adaptations in a central position, one around which other products and processes develop. He writes: "If adaptations offered producers a foundational preawareness for kick-starting franchises, then adaptations also offered producers a foundational way to shape those franchises."5 In addition to centering adaptations, Meikle reminds us of forgotten or disregarded connections between adaptations and franchises. Referring to Thomas Leitch's observations on Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as franchised characters like Dracula, Tarzan, and Frankenstein's monster, which Leitch calls "fictional franchises," Meikle claims that even though the significant connection between adaptations and franchises became clearly visible in the 2000s, the links between the two have always been there, and these productions acted like franchises even if they weren't acknowledged by many scholars as such.6 Thus, he invites adaptation scholars to reevaluate their earlier analyses of the novel-film debate and its impact on other media products. Referring to the "politics of repetition and variation," in his second chapter, "Streaming Adaptations," Meikle highlights commonalities between the industry's "Now a Major Motion Picture" rhetoric and streaming platforms' "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" tags. Both attract knowing and unknowing audiences, and hence use and misuse their source texts. According to Meikle, the ability to predict audience tastes and expectations is a key feature of platforms like Amazon and Netflix; however, their logic is not so very different from that of earlier adaptation practices, in which the industry catered to the tastes of its audiences by adapting best-selling novels. He claims that algorithms of the streaming networks not only work in the same way as the industry's affiliative strategies—perhaps even more effectively!—but also share characteristics with a franchise mentality in which industry and audience activity oscillate reciprocally. In the first two chapters, Meikle invites scholars to think about franchises and their strategies as akin to the process of adaptation. In the third chapter, "Fannish Adaptations," Meikle analyzes the impact of changing levels of audience participation on issues of ownership. According to Meikle, the distinction between fan fiction and [End Page 201] adaptation was quite clear...

The use and impact of Goodreads rating and reviews, for readers of Arabic Books

The focus of this research is to assess how the use of Goodreads can influence Arabic readers' selection of books, to study Arabic reviewers' behaviour and to explore the impact of Goodreads' metrics on book sales. Research methodology of the presented work consisted of a wide review of relevant literature, the collection and analysis of data from a questionnaire and a case study on a list of best-selling Arabic books fetched from two book-review platforms; Goodreads.com and Jamalon.com. The findings of the presented study show that Goodreads metrics reveal highly relevant indicators for books' contents, and consequently have a significant impact on Arab's book-purchasing decisions. Furthermore, we observed that Arabic Goodreads users tend to rate books rather than write reviews, and their book evaluation is mostly based on their contents. Primary research results suggest that, with proper analysis applied, Goodreads is an effective book evaluation network/online community for Arabic readers and Arabic book consumers. It is believed that the effectiveness of the studied network is mainly due to the metrics applied, which appear to be matching evaluation criteria as preferred by Arabic readers.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Alexandra M. Hill and Hester Baer We write from quarantine, during the summer of 2020, when time feels suspended. The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, racist violence, escalating authoritarianism, and climate collapse have upended the material conditions of life and the foundations of societies around the world, opening onto increasingly precarious futures. As we write, we can only speculate on what the world will look like a few short months from now, when this issue of Feminist German Studies goes to press. The sense of time’s suspension and uncertainty about the future that characterizes our present moment only underscores the illusory quality of the narratives of progress and individualism long trumpeted by capitalism. Even as we are able to partake in the “hollow privilege” of self-isolation, mapping the spread of the virus has only showed us how interconnected we are.1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, critically examines the flawed “assumption of self-containment” which underpins so many systems that structure our lives, from “neoclassical economics” to “population genetics” (28). We are not, in fact, self-containedunits—whetherthat we refers to individual people or individual groups, nations, or species— but are in constant collaboration with others. Tsing uses the term contamination to mean “transformation through encounter,” a natural and neutral by-product of collaboration. In a global moment when we leave the house in face masks and regularly reach for hand sanitizer, contamination is exactly what we fear. And yet, Tsing’s book argues, “staying alive— for every species— requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die” (28). If we think about collaboration in the context of COVID-19, we can identify many examples that ensure survival: the surge in volunteers for Meals on Wheels, people who sewed masks or donated personal protective equipment for essential workers, and international labs working together to develop [End Page xi] a vaccine. Tsing argues, “It is unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize— counterfactually— that we each survive alone” (29). The pandemic has stripped us of that fantasy. This is also a historical moment in which we must acknowledge that “[t]he evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounter” (29). The deaths of Black Americans Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Italia Marie Kelly, David Mcatee, and Chris Beaty at the hands of the police, and the resultant worldwide protests against systemic racism, should make painfully clear that we do not live in isolation.2 In this context, we must pay renewed attention to how our disciplines and institutions support and benefit from the systemic oppression of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We acknowledge that, as Mikki Kendall writes in Hood Feminism, “the innately abusive nature of white supremacy has shaped white feminism, seen to it that investment in white supremacy is easier than investment in actual equality for [white women] with all women” (257). As white feminists in German studies, we specifically recognize the necessity of engaging in antiracist work in our personal and professional lives, including ongoing work to decolonize our field and dismantle structures of white supremacy and privilege. It is noteworthy that sales of books on antiracism have recently skyrocketed, propelling texts such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race to the New York Times bestseller list. If “[r]eading is an infection, a burrowing into the brain,” and “books contaminate” (Lepore 22), then we are actively seeking contamination in the form of reading. This is not easy reading. It is not comfortable to see the ways in which our own lives and actions emerge from systems of oppression. Tsing reminds us that “contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. Contaminated diversity implicates survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction” (33). If we can bear to accept this complicity, the question is: how will we use collaboration to transform the world? The Mushroom at the End of the World is a fitting source of wisdom as we consider the many intertwined...

Fighting Back

Fighting Back Speer Morgan Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. —Dante, The Divine Comedy While temperamentally many of us imagine human lives to be stable, a simple factual recounting of what happens through time proves that they seldom are. Surprises and shocks are in store for most of us. Bruce Feiler's new book Life Is in the Transitions discusses this idea abstractly and by example from detailed interviews of hundreds of individuals. They show that fixed patterns do not work well as life predictors in such areas as jobs, health, and personal commitments. They also suggest that insofar as we need a set of presumptions about our futures, it should allow for and expect transitions—not just small alterations but big changes. I appreciate this idea because it matches my own life experiences and because it is suggested by the radical changes in understanding in most areas of knowledge, from economics and history to the hard sciences. Feiler points out that early worldviews were based on natural and cyclical time, partly because of the prevalence of agriculture in human life. Early mythologies were seasonal, though there were exceptions that admitted to linearity or the unexpected, for example, in classic religious thought and literature. The nineteenth century moved to a worldview [End Page 5] based on mechanical time, which is regular and linear. By the early modern era, the idea of life following a circle had been replaced by a concept of its proceeding through ages or phases or stages that were essentially predictable and fixed. During the nineteenth century, people became time obsessed, and by the end of the century the linear view was the dominant model, especially in sciences such as biology, psychology, and economics, among thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Freud believed that all humans were permanently shaped by a series of relatively inevitable psychosexual stages they were expected to pass through between birth and late childhood. Such linear views were espoused as late as the 1970s with Gail Sheehy's best-selling book Passages, describing what she depicted as an inevitable midlife crisis—a theory that she borrowed from preliminary studies by psychologists. This idea of fixed phases of life and a singular dominant midlife crisis, influential for well over a decade, is now seen as largely irrelevant and perhaps one of the last widely believed linear life models. Since then, such views have evolved with changes in the sciences, and human experience is now seen as dynamic, unpredictable, or nonlinear. One of the early widely recognized examples came from meteorology. Edward Lorenz's study of weather prediction hypothesized the butterfly effect, which points out that a tiny influence at some distant and effectively undiscoverable point in a system can cause changes or even extreme irregularity. This was soon recognized to be more broadly true, especially in complex systems such as those of mathematics, cosmology, biology, and water dynamics, as well as weather. The linear model has been replaced by the nonlinear. Everyday events that reshape lives can be disrupters, and they are more common than we may expect. In human life, disrupters can include love, identity, economics, beliefs, work, or the human body. They can occur at any point in life, not just at forty-one (midlife crisis) but at six or seventy-six or just about any age. The average worker today holds twelve different jobs before the age of fifty. People with higher educations can expect to change jobs fifteen times and acquire completely altered skill sets three times. The median number of jobs a person has is thirteen; the number of moves in our lives is around twelve. The number of significant accidents is about three. Many feel that their lives are off course, out of sync, while in fact they are statistically typical. The average number of significant changes, or what Feiler and others call "life quakes," is three to five. These major [End Page 6] changes can be either personal or collective; they can be voluntary or involuntary, and a surprising number of them involve intentionally rejecting a...

Confused and Ill-Arranged: Reading Miscellaneity with Enquire Within

Enquire Within was a domestic miscellany published monthly from January to November 1856. Reprinted on completion as a volume, it quickly became one of the best-selling books of the period. It offered a bewildering range of articles, but it was not until the publication of the final number that readers received the index and so were finally able to enquire within. Randomness can be unsettling, yet difference produces meaning. Taking Enquire Within as a case study, this paper examines the role of miscellaneity in the press and considers how the miscellaneous was made meaningful.

River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean

Reviewed by: River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean Nancy Small River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey. By Sister Helen Prejean . New York: Random House, 2019. 289 pp. $27.00. River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey . By Sister Helen Prejean. New York: Random House, 2019. 289 pp. $27.00. Sister Helen Prejean is well-known for her bestselling book Dead Man Walking and her work to abolish the death penalty. So it may come as a surprise to learn that she once believed it was enough to pray to God to right the world's wrongs. Following Jesus included doing works of charity, she believed, but had nothing to do with working for social change. River of Fire illumines the twists and turns of the spiritual journey that shaped her for the work that has become her life's passion. This beautiful spiritual memoir is alive with the youthful energy of spiritual discovery and awash in the wisdom of a seventy-nine-year-old sharing lessons learned along the way. The story begins when eighteen-year-old Helen bursts through the convent doors of the Congregation of St. Joseph and announces that she has arrived. She writes with humor and honesty about the austere years of novitiate. Yet here she was steeped in the "mystical tradition [End Page 83] that taught me to stay alert to God's mysterious presence in my own heart and the world" (118). This book sheds light on the life of a nun coming of age when the church was in a major state of change. Her writing conveys the seismic impact of Vatican II and captures the spirit of a church riding a tidal wave of transformation, convinced that God was the wind filling its sails. Readers will be enriched by her understanding of how monumental the Council was for those living its changes and sisters like her who educated the laity about them. She offers valuable insights into how Vatican II changed the church's understanding of authority, morality, its place in the world, and the people of God. Woven into River of Fire is a powerful story about a heart trying to be true to God while being pulled by love in different directions. Love's power and pitfalls come to light through stories of sisters who drove her crazy, the blossoming of a lifelong spiritual friendship with a beloved sister, and an intimate relationship with a priest that tugs at her heart even as she finds herself falling more deeply in love with God and religious life. A particularly poignant story highlights a graced time when Sister Helen realizes the truth of her calling in the context of God's all-encompassing love for her. As she unpacks this experience with a trusted friend, she sees clearly what she must do to embrace the truth of God's call in her life. Her story reveals love's power to draw us more deeply into authentic relationship or pull us further away. River of Fire will speak to spiritual seekers, those discerning their call in life and all who long to live with purpose and passion. It offers spiritual wisdom gleaned from a life devoted to a deeper understanding of and relationship with God. Sister Helen heard the words that stirred her soul toward social justice at a community retreat. The candid comments of her sisters helped her recognize what she needed to do once she was awakened. They challenged and supported her, reminding the reader of the power of spiritual community and trusted friends in discerning God's voice. [End Page 84] It took years for Sister Helen to awaken to the call to work for social justice. She accomplished much in education and spiritual formation during those years. Still, there was a chapter of life that could not be written until she was ready to embrace new ways of thinking and living. Her story emphasizes how important time and watering seeds of change can be in the process of spiritual growth. It also shows how our beliefs about the right way to serve God can change in ways we might never imagine. Sister Helen speaks about the...

The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco

AbstractLong before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.

Myths of the Veiled Kingdom: Representation and Counter-Representation of the Middle East in Selected Contemporary Bestsellers

The present research stems from an interest in contemporary Western cultural stereotypes of the Middle East and the counter-discourse, which seeks to dismantle such images. One can argue that a monolithic approach to the East still exists, which is based on an opinionated mythic discourse. In his Mythologies, Roland Barthes notes that, in such a discourse, myth “distorts”. It is “an inflexion” (1972, 129). Many bestsellers, which depict images of the Middle East, cater to a long-borne stereotype of a secluded “veiled” realm that conjures up sketches from The Arabian Nights. For example, in her bestselling book, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (1995), Geraldine Brooks delineates her experience of travelling in several Islamic countries and her perspective of what she depicts as an exotic world, very much alien to Western culture, yet satisfying Western curiosity. The paper, thus, raises the question of whether, at the turn of the twenty-first century, bestsellers from the Western world still represent and interpellate the Middle East by means of a mythic discourse, or, whether they have shifted to a more impartial vantage point. Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh (2007), among others, is an example of a bestseller from this pivotal region of the world, proposing a counter-discourse as it attempts to dismantle the myth and tell a different story. The paper will shed light on selected bestsellers from the Middle East, which interpolate cultural misrepresentation.

Get the picture?

Geologist and science writer Nina Morgan hears of a formidable force in palaeobotany Morgan, N. Distant Thunder: Get the picture? Geoscientist 29 (9), 26, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1144/geosci2019-052; Download the pdf here Passionate about palaeobotany, and a pioneer in the study of coal geology, Marie Stopes [1880-1958] is best known to the public at large as a sex symbol for her enthusiastic promotion of birth control and best-selling books such as Married Love, first published in 1918. Blessed with a formidable intellect, as well as a flamboyant and determined nature, she was nothing if not controversial. Left, Marie Stopes (taken in 1904) [Author unknown; Public domain] In 1902, at a time when few women attended universities, Stopes obtained a double honours degree in botany and geology from University College London (UCL)—after just two years of study. She went on to become the first woman to obtain a PhD in botany from the Botanical Institute in Munich, where university rules had to be altered to allow her to graduate. In 1904, she was appointed Demonstrator in Palaeobotany at Manchester University, overcoming opposition from some in the Senate who opposed the idea of a young woman teaching men. In 1905, she became the youngest Doctor of Science in Britain, and in 1907 she travelled to Japan to spend two years carrying out palaeobotanical research. Along the way she prepared museum catalogues, participated in international discussions, went down coal mines and carried out pioneering work on Carboniferous calcite-rich concretions known as coal-balls. Strong minded In 1910, Stopes was elected a fellow of UCL and, for the rest of her life, made regular appearances in the geology department. As a young Assistant Lecturer at UCL during the 1950s, Eric Robinson [born 1929] recalls how he was delegated to receive her when she visited the department because the then professor, Sydney Hollingworth [1899-1966], chose not to meet her.

Still Unmarried: Black Women and Relationship Advice Literature

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which racial patriarchal tropes from E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s public-policy report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) have been reconstructed for the present via relationship-advice literature marketed to heterosexual black women under the guise of love and increasing the rate of black marriage. A close analysis of the connection between historic pathological narratives of the black family and the current self-help genre exposes racial and gendered politics, concessions, and negotiations within the black community. Utilizing popular relationship-advice literature that achieved New York Times bestseller list status—Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (2009), Tyrese Gibson and Rev. Run’s Manology: Secrets of Your Man’s Mind Revealed (2013)—this article focuses on the culturally embedded linkages among the concepts of worthiness for respect, sexual propriety (chiefly in heterosexist terms), and behavioral decorum—especially when directed at women. It also looks at the gate-keeping function these norms serve in regulating and limiting black women’s right to full political and social recognition. In so doing, this article reveals the ways in which relationship-advice literature maintains black women’s subordinate position within the black community, as well as within the dominant white society.

STYLISTICS AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN SUE MONK KIDD’S THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

The goals of this study are to find out kinds of figurative language used by Sue Monk Kidd in his novel, The Secret Life of Bees, to investigate how the artistic effect and linguistic evidence achieved through figurative language and to describe how figurative language supports the theme. The research deals with the use of figurative language in a literary work, novel. Hence, this study contains the figurative language and also Sue Monk Kidd’s stylistics. The Secret Life of Bees was a New York Times bestseller list, it won 2004 book sense book of the year awards, and it was nominated for the orange broadband prize for fiction. This novel also adapted to film directed by Gina Prince-bythewood.

The aestheticization of restraint: The popular appeal of de-cluttering after the global financial crisis

The concept of consumer restraint has had a popular makeover. This is seen in the worldwide popularity of books, video tutorials and online discussion groups devoted to de-cluttering, and specifically the stunning success of professional organizer Marie Kondo and her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. De-cluttering sits on a broad continuum of alternative consumption that champions the benefits of consumer restraint, on multiple fronts: economic, environmental, psychological, and so on. Through Kondo, this is framed in positive, uplifting ways. This is distinct from the more critical, nuanced, or anti-consumerist rhetoric associated with more subversive advocates of alternative consumption, such as voluntary simplifiers or Occupy Wall Street. That said, just as the Occupy movement channeled growing frustration with how the reigning tenets of capitalist culture had shackled and misled the “99%,” de-cluttering finds cultural traction in the midst and wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Unlike Occupy though, Kondo’s appeal rests less on the logic and language of political economy than the more emotive vernacular of pop psychology. In this way, de-cluttering positions restraint as reflective of a highly developed and sophisticated sensibility, whereby individuals “own” their consumption choices and in turn craft carefully curated spaces. Therein lies the aestheticization of restraint: freed of any negative connotations (dour, miserly or miserable), the de-cluttered subject is autonomous, self-aware, and chic. Crucially, it also pivots on the slippery assumptions of the (new) neo liberal economy, which requires individuals to be agile, creative, and empowered.

Re-aligning scientific and lay narratives of Alzheimer's disease

It is unsettling to realise that Amazon's best-selling books on Alzheimer's disease claim that scientists have so far got it all wrong, and that the disease can be reversed with appropriate nutrients and lifestyle changes. In March 2019, the number one hit of a Google image search for “top world Alzheimer's physicians“ was the cover of a book with similar claims. Others go even further and suggest that Alzheimer's disease is a medical construct artfully devised to expand the drug market. With evident disregard for the many clinical trials of symptomatic treatments, the French national health agency has withdrawn reimbursement of dementia drugs and forbidden producers of amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) tracers to sell their regulatory approved products in the country. Some practitioners claim that the diagnostic workup of academic memory clinics, consisting of imaging and CSF biomarkers, is but an expensive intellectual exercise, as it is not actionable (ie, followed by effective interventions). In these circumstances, we argue that the disease narratives of scientists and society are increasingly divergent and that the scientific community should become aware of the divide, try to align the two narratives, and progress in synergy with society towards finding a cure. Preclinical Alzheimer's disease: a valid conceptIn The Lancet Neurology, Frisoni and colleagues1 present a thoughtful and topical Insight, but I disagree with their recommendations. They point out that, although the National Institute on Aging–Alzheimer's Association (NIA-AA) research framework2 recommends defining the disease biologically (by abnormal biomarkers denoting both amyloid and tau deposits) independent from symptomatic presentation, most in the lay community understand the term Alzheimer's disease to mean a progressive cognitive impairment that leads to dementia. Full-Text PDF

Magic, Matriarchs, and Manuscripts: The Alice Hoffman Papers

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of the Alice Hoffman Papers held at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. Alice Hoffman (b. 1952) is a best-selling American novelist, short-fiction writer, children's book author, and essayist. The Hoffman Papers contain personal and literary papers including literary manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and other materials—physical and digital—associated with the work, life, and creative process of this prolific, successful, and celebrated author. Among the materials from the collection highlighted are the extensive typescript drafts, proofs, handwritten notes, and marked-up copy of Hoffman's published and unpublished work, and material associated with the business side of being a best-selling author. The article also highlights letters in the collection written to Hoffman from longtime friend and editor Faith Sale, influential editor and critic Ted Solotaroff, fellow writers John Irving and Penelope Lively, and a substantial correspondence between Hoffman and her mentor and professor at Stanford, Albert Guerard, and his wife, the author and critic Maclin Bocock Guerard.