Larger Culture Research Articles

The Celluloid Teacher

Though the filmed portrayal of teachers can be inspiring or humorously satirical, the stereotype offered in those films might tell us much about how the larger culture views traditionally trained teachers and how schools can be reformed. It is argued here that Hollywood's emphasis on the need for outsiders to come in and rescue students from teachers and on the power of personality over pedagogy is potentially damaging to the image of the profession.

Effects of temperature, photoperiod and culture vessel size on adventitious shoot production of in vitro propagated Huernia hystrix

High production costs due to low growth rate in vitro and high labour costs are among factors limiting commercial application of micropropagation techniques. The low growth rate could be due to unfavourable or sub-optimal environmental and chemical conditions of the cultures. The effects of temperature, photoperiod and culture vessel size were investigated on adventitious shoot production of Huernia hystrix. There were significant increases in shoot proliferation with increased temperature in cultures maintained under a 16 h photoperiod. Slow growth observed at low temperatures (15 and 20°C) offers a potential strategy for cost-effective in vitro storage of H. hystrix germplasm. The maximum adventitious shoots produced per explant and percentage of explants producing shoots (4.2 ± 0.74 and 94% respectively) were observed in cultures maintained at 35°C, the optimum temperature for photosynthesis in plants possessing crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM). The nocturnal accumulation of organic acids in cultures incubated under a 16 h photoperiod further suggest the presence of CAM in this species. On the other hand, cultures kept under continuous light appear to shift to a C-3 photosynthetic pathway. There was a significant decrease in fresh weight of adventitious shoots regenerated per explant as temperature increased. The use of larger culture vessels further increased the shoot proliferation to 5.6 shoots per explant with a potential production of 3,429 shoots per m2 in the growth room compared to 2,750 shoots per m2 using culture tubes.

Eric Klopfer: Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games

The history of educational technologies is one of ups, downs and far too many 'no significant effects.' Resnick (2002) writes "In most places where new technologies are being used in education today, the technologies are used simply to reinforce outmoded approaches to learning... ideas about and approaches to teaching and learning remain largely unchanged" (p. 32). To properly investigate the impact of these technologies, a holistic approach to investigating their uses is needed an approach that looks not only at what they can replace, but what affordances they bring and how they can shape the learning and teaching that takes place in the classroom. Into this environment comes Eric Klopfer' s Augmented Learning, published by the MIT Press in 2008. Klopfer' s stated goal for Augmented Learning, to describe "the educational and gaming landscapes" in which mobile learning games are located, directly responds to Resnick' s critique. In Augmented Learning, Klopfer situates us in the larger culture that surrounds the field of educational mobile games. He offers us the historical antecedents of mobile learning games and discusses how they can respond to and shape today's learning needs. By situated the field both historically and culturally in this wider context, Klopfer lays a strong foundation for his assertion that mobile learning games have potential "to make a substantial impact on education" (p ix). While much of the literature on technology integration in education stems from a 'solution looking for a problem,' Klopfer begins his narrative more appropriately by discussing the changing climate in which education exists today: new priorities, philosophies and strategies.

War of the Words

Page 6 American Book Review about the limitations of the Freudian model. We are daring ourselves to envision a selfhood beyond conventional selfhood while contemplating the devices by which we tell, retell, and untell ourselves. We are remembering Czesław Miłosz’s sparkling observation : “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.” Remembering Ludwig Wittgenstein’s: “One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I.’” Re-learning what Samuel Beckett, KathyAcker, Ben Marcus,Young-Hae Chang, Patrik Ourednîk, et al. have already taught us…but from within the text we are scripting instead of from without. Re-learning that every narratological move we make, every technique we employ, carries with it philosophical and political consequences, whether or not we can at first articulate them, whether or not at first we are even aware of them. Every time any of us speaks in a “creative” writing classroom, we also challenge us all to reflect upon the institutional framework in which our words sound—what a “workshop” is; what it might be; how it exists within the power fields of a given department; what economic purposes it serves, and what cultural; how the university expresses itself through it and us; how the larger culture does; how that might change; why we teach creative writing… Lance Olsen’s next novel, Head in Flames, will appear from Chiasmus this fall. He teaches innovative narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as chair of the Board of Directors at FC2, associate editor at ABR, and fiction editor at Western Humanities Review. Act Truly Julie Shigekuni Years ago, a therapist friend jokingly defended her style of handling interventions: “I decide what’s true, and I act accordingly.” I’d wondered how she could bear to hear people’s problems all day long, and I’ve continued through the years to reflect on her insight revealed to me in jest. I offer it here as my response to the question, “Why teach creative writing?” I can think of different responses, such as Richard Hugo’s smart assertion that a good creative writing course saves the young writer time and effort by teaching the writer early on what not to do—or the stance taken by several writers to whom I’ve posed this question that goes something to the tune of how the well being of any culture can be measured by its production of literature. I find both positions edifying; it’s hard to sidestep the appeal of a solid, altruistic answer. But the question for me remains personal, and I find that my friend’s half-joke’s halftruth provides a better, if more selfish, answer. As a writer, I decide what’s true, and I act accordingly. Decisions I make on the page often send me spiraling into a conundrum. I teach creative writing because engaging with students is my way out. Students don’t tolerate self-deceit. They’re hungry for discourse that feels satisfying, and in interacting with them, I must change the way I think—often in surprising ways, always in ways that I had not imagined on my own—and thereby must change what I write. In the years since I began teaching, I’ve come back to the position that led me to teach creative writing in the first place. I write having tried other things and failed. I wish I could sing, or dance, or spend my days in a white lab coat. But since I don’t have the talent or the training, I write. I observe what other people do, and I document what I see in a way that makes sense to me.And when I emerge from this difficult task of attempting to set myself straight, I enjoy the company of other writers who have been similarly preoccupied. Writers need writers, and writing programs offer writers a venue. This clustering of writers who are necessarily solitary creatures leads to other questions that concern me: such as what does it mean when a good poem written by a woman of color becomes...

Transactivism and Postmodernity: An Agonistic Analysis of Transliterature

Historically marginalized people must find alternative forms of remonstration to liberate themselves within repressive societies. In using an agonistic analysis of transliterature and following examples of social protest by an earlier generation of feminists, Black Power activists, Native American demonstrators, and participants in the Stonewall Rebellion, this study argues that contemporary transgender liberation movement activists incorporate a postmodern approach accommodating their specific needs within the larger culture. Specifically, transactivists incorporate polysemy, polyvocality, and community building through individual identity construction not witnessed in previous social movement rhetoric research.

Holding Creativity Together: A Sociological Theory of the Design Professions

The literature on the professions betrays a uniform assumption that a profession, like any profession, must possess a distinct body of knowledge. Because of this default theoretical position, this literature expends much effort trying to define the putative contents of this distinct body of knowledge. But the results have been unclear, as we show below. Here we propose a different view of the ontology of a profession: instead of an epistemological starting point, we propose a distinc tiveness to the professions which, we argue, is really their key distinguishing signature. The theoretical underpinnings of our argument derive from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962),1 specifi cally, from the postscript he added to the 1969 edition of his book. In this postscript Kuhn first propounded the concept of the disciplin ary matrix,2 which is comprised of four components: (1) symbolic generalizations; (2) commitment to models; (3) values and ( 4) exemplars. It is this matrix that helps us map the differ ences between non-design professions (medicine or accounting, for example) and professions (architecture or industrial design, for instance). We will define design profession more precisely as we proceed. One might ask why look to Kuhn, since his theory deals with disciplines in the sciences and not in design? The answer is as follows. While Kuhn's 1962 theory indeed explains paradig matic shifts in scientific knowledge, the components of his 1969 matrix describe how scientific communities manage such knowl edge. In other words, the matrix made the implicit elements embedded in Kuhn's original theory more explicit. Here we show that, while the components of the matrix in non-design disciplines manage domain-specific knowledge internal to a profes sion, in the professions the same components of the matrix orient externally towards the larger culture, precisely because of the absence of explicit bodies of knowledge. The result is that the components of the disciplinary matrix act as a kind of sociological wrapping around the professions to, as it were, hold them together to achieve social identity and standing. That the extant literature on the professions assumes domain-specific bodies of knowledge is probably due to the socio Footnotes for this article begin on page 19.

Citations

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Understanding Adolescent Property Crime using a Delinquent Events Perspective

This qualitative research employed an integrated symbolic interactionist/cultural studies framework to guide its focus on 24 male adolescent offenders' perceptions of their involvement in delinquent events characterized by the commission of property crimes. Adolescents were asked to describe the situations within which their crimes were embedded, including what they were thinking and feeling throughout the course of the delinquent event. Results indicated that adolescents committed property crimes for thrills, to cope with stressors, to defend their gang, and for economic gain. In particular, each motive was associated with a certain set of interactions and conditions, which served as cues to guide the adolescents' interpretive process and eventual meaning construction. The relation between this process and the larger culture is discussed.

Why Humanistic Psychology Lost Its Power and Influence in American Psychology

Why did humanistic psychology lose its power and influence in American psychology? Previous answers have focused on the historical shortcomings of the humanistic movement, a perspective that essentially “blames the victim.” In contrast, this article suggests that two outside forces—mainstream American psychology and conservative forces in the larger culture—also played a role in undermining the humanistic vision. The article concludes that humanistic psychology lost its power and influence, in large measure, because it is inherently incompatible with the basic assumptions and values of contemporary mainstream psychology and with the conservative ideologies that have increasingly gained power in American culture since the 1960s. Implications of this analysis for the future of the humanistic movement are presented.

Ethnic/cultural identity salience, achievement goals and motivational climate in multicultural physical education classes

Objectives This study investigated the association of ethnic/cultural identity salience with achievement goals and motivational climate in multicultural physical education classes. Methods Questionnaires assessing ethnic/cultural identity salience, achievement goals and motivational climate were completed by high school students with Greek ( n = 927) and non-Greek ( n = 366) ethnic origin. The ethnic/cultural identity salience questionnaire comprised four factors suggesting ethnic belonging, assimilation, feelings of being on the fringe of ethnic identity, and lack of desire to interact with members of other ethnic groups. Results Multilevel modeling analyses indicated that task orientation and class learning oriented climate were positively linked with ethnic belonging and assimilation from the larger culture. On the other hand, ego orientation and class performance oriented climates were positively associated with feelings of being on the fringe of ethnic identity, and with lack of desire to interact with members of other ethnic groups. Conclusions The present findings encourage the conduct of intervention studies emphasizing task orientation and decreasing ego orientation to promote mutual respect among ethnicities and acculturation from the larger culture.

Before Your Very Eyes: Illness, Agency, and the Management of Tourette Syndrome

In this article, I examine the ways that people with Tourette Syndrome (TS) manage the motor and vocal tics characteristic of this neurological disorder. To mitigate the powerful stigmas associated with TS, individuals must either remove tics from public view or strive to recast the way that they are perceived. Drawing on ethnographic research with TS sufferers in Indiana, I elaborate three strategies by which this is done, strategies referred to here as displacement, misattribution, and contextualization. These processes strongly affect both the symptoms themselves and the subjective experience of the illness. They also affect the perception of TS in the larger culture, associating the disease with florid symptoms like cursing--symptoms that, although not at all typical of TS, are the ones most resistant to these kinds of management. These patterns highlight how individual agency may actively shape the cultural construction of illness.

Age And Authority: Adult-Child Relations During the Twentieth Century in the United States

Lassonde, using his own meticulous research on the twentieth century Catholic Church and the Little League, sketches the way changes in these institutions inform us about shifts in attitudes toward authority in the larger culture. In addition to the essay's particular insights, it also offers a model of how the study of youth can contribute to intellectual and social history altogether.-M.S.

Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters: Salons as Themes in African American Drama

Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters:Salons as Themes in African American Drama David Krasner (bio) Salons and magazines establish formidable institutions of aesthetic criticism. Beginning in eighteenth-century Europe, Jürgen Habermas contends, salons and magazines situate where the "lay judgment of a public" arises.1 A similar intellectually stimulating condition occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. George Hutchinson writes that the Harlem Renaissance emphasized "the emergence of a whole new matrix of magazines" allied with the New Negro movement. According to Hutchinson, magazines were "especially interesting because of the way the clustering of audiences and contributors linked people across boundaries of genres as well as of race."2 Magazines have enjoyed scholarly attention because they endure as written archives. By contrast salons, like theatre, have been undervalued largely because they belong to ephemera and oral history. Nevertheless, salons facilitated a forum for artists to evaluate each other's work. They played a critical role in the clustering of ideas, in linking people across genres, and in influencing themes germane to African American drama. This essay will examine two specific themes symbolized by two representative salons during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1922, the award-winning author Georgia Douglas Johnson opened her home at 1461 S Street, NW in Washington D. C. for artists. Gwendolyn Bennett described the salon as the "Saturday Niters of Washington."3 It was also referred to as the "Halfway House," because, in Johnson's words, it was "a place where anyone who would fight halfway to survive could do so."4 Langston Hughes reported in The Big Sea that the assembled guests, among them Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Marita [End Page 81] Bonner, discussed "poetry and books and plays."5 According to Johnson's friend and fellow playwright Willis Richardson, the meetings often lasted into the following morning.6 In 1927, A'Lelia Walker, daughter of the cosmetic entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, purchased brownstones at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem. Walker, whom Langston Hughes dubbed "the joy goddess of Harlem's 1920's,"7 converted a floor of her mansion into the "Dark Tower" named after Countée Cullen's Opportunity magazine column. Dark Tower's walls were festooned with poems by Hughes and Cullen. According to habitué Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker "saw a real need for a place, a sufficiently sympathetic place, in which [artists] could meet and discuss their plans and arts.… [Dark Tower] was to have enough quiet dignity to impart weight to the poetry evenings."8 The salon was later euphemistically known as "Niggeratti Manor" from Wallace Thurman's acerbic 1932 roman á clef Infants of the Spring. Dark Tower folded a year after its opening as a result of Walker's financial setbacks and lack of sustained interest among artists. Johnson's salon, too, declined owing to the Great Depression. Yet both left a lasting impression. The salons shared the dynamic vision of their hostesses Johnson and Walker and many participants frequented both locales (Madam C. J. Walker's beauty shop in Harlem, where she produced and sold many of her groundbreaking hair products, also served as a salon for black middle-class women). These salons symbolized two different aesthetic themes in African American drama, the first of which I call the "space of experience" and second the "horizon of expectation." Space of experience represents works that are experiential and participatory rather than abstract and literary. They represent theatrical performances rather than dramatic texts and are based on vernacular, grass-root folklore. Ralph Ellison describes this type of salon when he says that "Negro folklore, evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him."9 Horizon of expectation is art signifying possibility and transformation. It is literary rather than performative. It, too, is rooted in folk tradition, but it primarily asserts the message of redemption and uplift. W.E.B. Du Bois's description of the Spirituals best exemplifies this salon concept...

The Candor Imperative

Purpose – Candor has been hailed in the business press as a key to unlocking organizational performance, yet there has been little discussion of methods that can foster and sustain candor. The purpose of this article is to present a theoretical model for firstly, understanding the forces supporting and constraining organizational candor and secondly, promoting its practice. Design/methodology/approach – This paper builds upon existing research that explores the dynamics present in the relationship between the individual and the organization and applies it to the growing need of creating greater organizational candor. Findings – The decision to disclose ideas and information is a personal choice, an extension of an individual’s free will. Organizations that want to capitalize on this rich knowledge base need to cultivate openness within work groups and the larger culture. Practical implications – The methods presented here are intended to provide readers with options for nurturing candor in their own work and in the organizations in which they work. Originality/value – The originality of this article is in bringing forward historical research from the applied behavioral sciences and using it to respond to a current organizational need. It will be of value to those who seek to practice and encourage greater candor, personally and organizationally.

H. MICHAEL GELFAND. Sea Change at Annapolis: The United States Naval Academy, 1949-2000. Foreword by JOHN MCCAIN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xxix, 382. $34.95

In his 1979 book Neither Athens Nor Sparta? The American Service Academies in Transition, sociologist John Lovell used an ancient Greek rivalry to help readers understand where the nation's military schools fit into the larger culture. H. Michael Gelfand takes a similarly metaphorical approach in this volume, whose title suggests shifting tides and, when spoken aloud, an invitation to bear witness. The author applies anthropological and historical techniques of research. Gelfand spent two years conducting “participatory observation” at the U.S. Naval Academy. He attended classes, ceremonies, administrative meetings, reunions, and football games. He read official records and student newspapers. He took advantage of the region's rich archives. He traveled to Wisconsin to watch the 1950s television series Men of Annapolis. He networked among graduates, faculty, and staff to gain access to personal papers and conduct more than three hundred interviews. The perspective Gelfand gained shines especially in the introductory chapter. He displays mastery not only of the Academy's history, traditions, and architecture but also of the evolution of its bureaucracy and curriculum. Throughout the rest of the book, he explores ways in which the institution responded when its traditions were challenged.

Leavis's Grandchildren? New Perspectives on Science and Modernism

Leavis’s Grandchildren? New Perspectives on Science and Modernism Suzanne Black (bio) Allen Thiher. Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. xii + 297 pp. Jeff Wallace. D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman. Basingstroke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xi + 264 pp. Reviewing Richard Powers's new novel The Echo Maker (2006) for The Nation, William Deresiewicz expresses weary skepticism about aesthetically interesting connections between literature and science. Book reviewers, Deresiewicz grumbles, are expected to "genuflect" before Powers's knowledge of physics, neuroscience, and ecology, but "intellect and scientific acumen are not synonymous" (25). Moreover, Powers lacks the basic literary gifts of "narrative or psychological complication" (26). For Deresiewicz, the benefits of yoking science and literature are dubious and ill-defined: "From Matthew Arnold to C. P. Snow to today, there's been a vague feeling afloat that if only somehow these two modes of knowledge could be made to talk to each other, science would be humanized (whatever that means) and art made relevant to the scientific age (as if it weren't already)" (25–26). [End Page 569] As this comment indicates, the specter of C. P. Snow and periodically recurring versions of the two cultures debate continue to stalk the study of literature and science. Even Deresiewicz's resentment of science and his scorn for Powers's ability as a novelist echo F. R. Leavis's acerbic response to Snow. In fact, the field has long operated under the paradox that the very writers who originated it did so primarily by denying its existence. It is therefore unsurprising that the two books under review open by engaging Snow or Leavis. For Allen Thiher, Snow "set off a noisy tempest in a teapot that has somehow remained a necessary point of reference," because many humanists (like Deresiewicz) "intuitively feel that science and literature cannot be joined in any meaningful way" (4). Thiher points out that tensions between poetry and knowledge go as far back as Plato and as far forward as the science wars. Jeff Wallace makes a compatible point by arguing that "literary studies has prospered on the idea that it defends the 'human' against the reductive mechanisms of science" (2); one of his major examples is, of course, Leavis, who did much to establish Lawrence's reputation as both a major novelist and critic of technoscience. Unlike Snow and Leavis, both Thiher and Wallace reject the two cultures' tradition and traditional humanism by seeing science and literature as manifestations of a single, larger culture. This view is so frequent in science studies that it is hard to find Thiher's assumption that "science and literature share a cultural matrix setting forth presuppositions, axioms, and constraints for all endeavors to make sense of the world" a "controversial side" of his book (1). In fact, Wallace claims virtually the same thing: "The guiding principle behind contemporary studies of the relations between science and culture . . . has been that culture is their shared domain, and that we stand to gain much from a recognition of the cultural, and specifically discursive, dimensions of science" (3–4). However, as both authors point out, seeing science as entirely discursive poses its own dangers. Thiher refuses to believe that our view of reality is ultimately dependent on or easily reducible to language, preferring instead the cultural matrix, which he insists is "an empirical notion" including history and philosophy (1). His primary alternative is epistemological; Thiher's discomfort with poststructuralism (a point to which I will return) becomes clear in his single reference to Michel Foucault, which places the theorist of the episteme alongside Snow and Thomas Kuhn as another advocate of "epistemic ruptures" (5). Wallace, on the other hand, sees the discursive conception of science as potentially imperialistic, for it "mask[s] the perpetuation of an older hegemony. . . . If science is fundamentally a linguistic phenomenon, then literary studies can continue to hold a master key" (4). Instead, [End Page 570] he proposes that we consider science as expressing human values and literature as communicating facts and information, then use these reversed stereotypes to challenge humanism itself. In short, Thiher and Wallace's work, I would argue, builds...

Dismantling the Face: Toward a Phenomenology of Boxing

This article provides a critical study of violence in the intersubjective encounter through the sport of boxing. Employing a hauntological method first developed by Jacques Derrida, it uses the phenomenological work of Emmanuel Levinas and the poetically philosophical work of Guilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to focus on the facial dimension of pugilism. Written as a series of aphorisms, alternating between theoretical reflection and personal recollection, this article examines the face of boxing as it uncovers an ethical understanding of the sport and how that understanding affects the larger culture.

"Give Me Not Poverty, Lest I Steal"

Give Me Poverty, Lest I Steal1The Judges sat Grave and Mute, gave me an easy [meaning 'indifferent'] Hearing, and Pronounc'd Sentence of Death, Moll Flanders recounts. Convicted of one of 200 offenses punishable by death, in her case stealing £46 of silk cloth-919 shillings more than one shilling threshold for felony theft-Daniel Defoe's heroine had tried to mitigate her sentence with speech that mov'd to Tears that heard [her].2 This confrontation between legal subject and human messinese of motives, emotions, and especially mental impairment is subject of Dana Rabin's Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Rabin explains that legal system was equipped to deal with a coherent and cohesive punishable body, and with total, unmistakable, perfect insanity, not with pitiable human beings who insisted that temporary states of mind resulting from starvation, pain, passion, and suffering explained (and excused) their crimes, especially in age of sensibility.This important book tells story of law's confrontation with major change in larger culture: privileging of sensibility. The language of mind that accompanied this movement, Rabin argues, destabilized the definition and determination of mens rea, criminal intent, basis of all criminal law (8). Sensibility is no easy term to define, and major studies of it, including John Mullan's Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in Eighteenth Century (1988), Jerome McGann's The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (1996, which she does not cite), and especially G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992), have expanded our understanding of term, but also our awareness of its complicated and complicating impact on every facet of British life. Rabin, following Barker-Benfield, defines it as component of identity and faculty of susceptibility to one's own feelings and feelings of others (11). She usefully summarizes opinions about human nature and proliferation of theories of self and moral sense by, among others, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and then weaves together legal, social, and cultural history to tell story of juries, judges, and legal theorists grappling with new demand that they possess sensibility.The story begins and ends with James Hadfield, former soldier and silversmith who shot George III in crowded theatre. After brilliant defense by Thomas Erskine, he was found Not guilty; he being under influence of insanity act was (1). Before reading this book, phrase at time slides by unnoticed; after reading it, words glow with significance. Rabin slowly develops context in which this verdict was rendered in four chapters. After introductory one, chapter 2 clearly explains mechanics of eighteenth-century trials and major changes in century, such as evolution of lawyerized courtroom from accused speaks trial that Moll Flanders portrays. It introduces types of insanity pleas and summarizes pertinent legal opinions of such major figures as Matthew Hale, author of The History of Pleas of Crown, and William Blackstone, who wrote Commentaries on Laws of England. Chapter 3 turns to moral philosophy, history of conceptions of self, and ideas of self and responsibility that were circulating in popular literature. Rabin works with pleas involving clouded judgment, such as drunkenness and necessity, and briefly with several novels, including Moll Flanders and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Chapter 4 uses cases of infanticide committed by unmarried women to widen discussion of influence of sensibility and sources of opinion to those of trial judges and juries. …

The Implications of Survey Method for Measuring Cultivation Effects

The magnitude of the cultivation effect for perceptual estimates of social reality has been shown to be affected by a number of contextual factors such as source priming and motivation to process information during judgment construction, and these contextual factors have been linked to the use of heuristic processing strategies when constructing judgments of frequency and probability (L. J. Shrum, in press). An experiment that manipulated data collection method explored the implications of these findings. A random sample of general population respondents were randomly assigned to either telephone or mail survey conditions. Because telephone surveys generally result in greater heuristic processing than mail surveys, telephone surveys were expected to produce larger cultivation effects than mail surveys. Results showed that not only were the magnitude of the estimates of affluence, crime, vice, marital discord, and occupations generally greater in the telephone than in the mail survey but the correlation of the estimates with amount of viewing was also greater in the telephone than in the mail survey. The implications for measuring the cultivation effect are discussed.

Richard Terry, Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse. Pp. vii + 216 (Studies in Early Modern English Literature). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. £45.00 (ISBN 0 7546 0623 6).

THE objective of this series, Studies in Early Modern English Literature, is to examine individuals, trends, and channels of influence during the period between the Renaissance and the coming of Romanticism. Terry's study of the mock-heroic admirably fulfills the task. Individual writers such as Butler, Blackmore, Pope, and Cowper are considered at length, along with a flock of other practitioners of the form. Developments in this odd genre over the long eighteenth century, and in particular how mock-heroic can be seen as distinct from a similar comic form of the day, travesty, are nicely traced and explained. Perhaps most impressively, Terry theorizes how the influence of the mock-heroic extends beyond the pursuit of the form itself to become a pattern of social discourse within the larger culture. For Terry, the mock-heroic ‘is neither one technique nor one effect: it encompasses a variety of authorial attitudes and tones. Indeed, it is something of the complex, protean nature of the phenomenon that this book attempts to show’ (3). Thus, we are not offered merely an annotated walking tour of the greatest mock-heroic hits of the period (e.g. MacFlecknoe or The Dunciad, although those works certainly are discussed). Nor does this study, unlike others of the genre, stop at 1750, when the form seems to die away. Terry follows mock-heroic tendencies through the late eighteenth century, where it is redefined ‘not as a satiric form but as a comic one’ (4).