Mainstream Readers Research Articles

History in Oblivion

Abstract The new editions of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Exilée and Temps Morts from UC Press provide an opportunity for reflection on the texts’ histories. First published in 1982, just before Cha’s tragic murder, Dictée languished in obscurity until being rediscovered by Asian American critics in the 1990s. In the last few years, Dictée has gained increasing mainstream recognition, but that recognition has often been accompanied by criticism of academic scholars, who, despite their efforts in championing Cha’s work, are now viewed as gatekeepers who have avoided grappling with the facts of Cha’s life and death. Evidence that Cha’s life and work can be brought together emerges from the work of poets influenced by her, including Myung Mi Kim and Divya Victor, while the work collected in Exilée usefully places Cha’s writing in the larger context of her work as an artist. The best scholarly readings of Cha’s work, far from denying Cha’s embodiment, close the gap between word and body, following Cha’s own call to explore history “to the very flesh and bone, to the core.”[I]t is undoubtedly gratifying to see this new discovery of Cha by mainstream readers. But it’s a shame that literary scholars, who for 30 years have been her primary champions . . . are now being portrayed as gatekeepers.

Little Armageddon by Gregory Fraser

Reviewed by: Little Armageddon by Gregory Fraser Kathryn Pratt Russell (bio) little armageddon Gregory Fraser Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810143104/little-armageddon/ 79 pages; Print, $17.00 Of Greg Fraser's third collection, Designed for Flight, published in 2014, poet Richard Howard wrote, "What astonishes the reader is that the poems are not confident or even hopeful, but correct, obviously true." Now, with his most recent book, Little Armageddon, Fraser continues his clear-eyed gazing into the tiny and tremendous abysses of modern American life. This collection is a significant achievement that portrays the poetic speaker's experience of the comedy and the burden of midlife, sandwiched between generations. What makes Little Armageddon singular is Fraser's mastery of poetic form and his incorporation of both complex thought and nuanced feeling into his poetic meditations. The contemporary poetry scene (largely centered in academia) has a horror of sentimentality. This aversion has resulted in the small-press publication of many poems that are lyrical or intellectual at the expense of feeling. On the other hand, popular and spoken-word poetry have filled the resulting cultural hole with a churning mass of emotional melodrama for more mainstream readers. Fraser's collection transcends the incompleteness of both literary scenes. The truthfulness of the poems is achieved by the employment of a consistent, present-day speaker who ranges over past and present experiences with authority and compassion. Other than the rare venture into a dramatic [End Page 119] persona in the first part of the book, Fraser's voice is that of a father in middle age who empathizes both with his children's innocence and with the weary wisdom of his parents and in-laws. The first section (there are three) could quite fairly be described as "vast." The poems in this part range from poems of mystical (if comic) vision, like "Lucky Gnarl," to poems touching upon how one should live ("My Idea of Heaven") and self-judgment ("Little Armageddon"), to the ominous voicing of a conquering people's drive to dominate the weak in "Like Angels." The opening poem, "Business," is a study in the interweaving and balancing of opposite concepts to achieve an enlarged view of a man's life in the city, when this man not only works but also thinks: A man hands me his business card, and asks for mine.How should I know my business? The worldis my business, and the world is none of my business. In the hands of a lesser writer, this play on words might constitute the entire message of the poem, and be teased out and elaborated ad nauseam. Fraser's speaker, though, surges on to pile oppositions on top of this first one, questioning his own personal responsibility to take up a profession, in the fullest sense. And by the end of the poem, he does. The most formally fascinating poem here, "Nothing but a Few Bare Trees," employs both internal rhymes and end rhymes in an organic, nontraditional form to hypnotize the reader into seeing as the residents of the city neighborhood see: across acres of ice,something about their fixtureunder a hard white sky, caught and held the eye. Still, they werenothing but a few bare trees—nothing,nonetheless, a few of us at first, then more whose houses lined the south end'ssmoother shore, came to take for masts. As this first part of the book ends with an almost Yeatsian vision of a manger crèche, a forlorn, pregnant figure appears, in a foreshadowing of the explosion of childhood in the second section. [End Page 120] This next part of Fraser's collection features a speaker brought down from his intellectual and spiritual heights by the demands of fatherhood. The changing diction and mood of the first poem, "Hide and Seek," emphasize his inner fall: My kids humped under the bedspread lookLike a meal inside a python. SometimesI wish my kids werea meal inside a python. Fatherhood, I sometimes think,is a python that swallowed me whole. Then I remember my wifeis the python. The lumpy, misshapen lines here evoke hard-to-digest...

(Not) Very Important People: Millennial Fantasies of Mobility in the Age of Excess

In her fascinating but frustrating new book, <em>Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit</em>, American sociologist, Ashley Mears (2020) offers both academic and mainstream readers a titillating, cross-over tour around the “cool” nightclub and party scene of the “global elite.” It is perhaps not so much global, however, as American, in the sense of the heteropatriarchal, middle-aged, male, working rich of America (or more precisely of its financial capital New York), jetting into their traditional party hotspots of Miami, Saint-Tropez, or the French Riviera, to party with young women who are (indirectly) paid (in-kind) to pose with them. Whether intentional or unintentional, along the way Mears also offers a dark mirror to the fears and fantasies of a rather lost millennial generation, raised in a new media, image age, which has coupled fast and furious performative excess to old fashioned sexual objectification, in the guise of fun and empowerment for the beautiful people.

Objects of Empathy

Objects of Empathy

Kindergarten Training in Phonological Awareness: Fluency and Comprehension Gains Are Greatest for Readers at Risk in Grades 1 Through 9

Training in phonological awareness has brought about well-documented positive effects on learning to read in lower-primary grades. Less is known about long-term gains extending to upper-primary and junior high school. The few longitudinal studies covering at least 5 years suggest that gains in decoding are sustained, whereas effects on reading comprehension have either not been studied or produced equivocal results. The present study followed up the reading development of 209 Finland Swedish students from kindergarten until Grade 9, half of whom participated in an 8-month phonological intervention in kindergarten. The intervention group outperformed the control group in both word reading and reading comprehension in Grades 1 through 9. However, albeit statistically significant, the differences at the group level were small. The main result was a clear-cut difference in both skills among readers at risk belonging to the lowest 25% in foundational skills at the beginning of kindergarten. In Grade 6, altogether 60% of the nontrained readers at risk still belonged to the lowest quartile in reading comprehension as opposed to 24% of their peers in the intervention group. The pattern was repeated in Grade 9, with trained readers at risk performing at the level of nontrained mainstream readers.

Étoiles rouges. La littérature de la science-fiction soviétique by Viktoriya and Patrice Lajoye

185 BOOKS IN REVIEW discourses to show how genre cuts across fields and media. Jerng reconfigures what are often called “tropes” as “genres”—a seemingly subtle distinction but a powerful one. Genres create worlds that operate according to certain rules, customs, and variations on a theme. Genres create affordances, which allow some possibilities and not others, allow certain histories, futures, and interpretations to be salient and not others. Dragons are affordances of fantasy; cyborgs are affordances of sf. It is not that those figures cannot be found in other genres, but they are more salient in some generic locations than others. So too with racial genres and the figures, tropes, and interpretations they afford. This book is an important contribution to critical race studies within sf and I recommend it to any reader of SFS interested in race. Just as I suspect we as a group all accept it when Philip K. Dick turns the world inside out, I similarly predict we will easily grasp and accede to Jerng’s arguments about the power of worldbuilding and the connections between genre fiction and the “real” world. It is in his careful analysis of the mechanisms of that worldbuilding as they pertain to race that Jerng truly offers us something novel. And as is so often the case, I find myself wanting to recommend this book to people other than sf scholars. It is probably those who do not spend as much time thinking about worldbuilding who will find Jerng’s study most revelatory. We make these worlds. We could make them differently. —Elizabeth Lundberg, The University of Iowa Distant Constellations: Looking Backward at Soviet Science Fiction. Viktoriya and Patrice Lajoye. Étoiles rouges. La littérature de la sciencefiction soviétique [Red Stars: Soviet Science Fiction Literature]. Paris: Piranha, 2017. 316 pp. $49.95 pbk. Viktoriya and Patrice Lajoye are well known to French-speaking readers as the foremost specialists in Russian sf in France. From 2009 to 2014 they maintained the only serious blog on the subject, Russkaya Fantastika, articles from which were edited into book form in 2013 under the same title. Together they translate and publish Slav legends and fantasy tales, as well as works of such writers as the Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov. They have published a number of articles, together and separately. Patrice Lajoye edited an excellent sf anthology, Dimension URSS (2009), and Viktoriya Lajoye edited a collection of essays entitled Aspects des littératures de l’imaginaire post-soviétiques [Aspects of post-Soviet imaginative literatures] in a special issue of La Revue russe (#43, 2014). In their new book, after a gap of decades since the end of the 1970s when a series of their essays and publications made the French public familiar with then-still-lively Soviet (and anti-Soviet) sf, utopian fiction, and fantasy, they now undertake to revisit this literature from a contemporary perspective. The title of the book, Red Stars, obvious as it seems, brings to mind not only the revolutionary emblem and the Soviet drive for cosmic exploration, but also the 1985 essay of the same name in which Patrick McGuire investigated the political aspects of Soviet sf and, last but not least, Alexander Bogdanov’s 186 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) famous utopia The Red Star (1908), which depicts a Communist society on Mars, the red planet. The Lajoyes’ title announces the subject and at the same time suggests its intricate intertextual and intercultural problematics. Right from the start, the authors cut the Gordian knot of labyrinthine developments. They declare in their foreword that their intention is not to present the results of academic research but, rather, to offer a subjective study based on their personal opinions, an accessible introduction to this particular body of a past literary production. That is precisely what the book is, an introduction aimed at sf fans as well as mainstream readers, teenagers as well as adults. It is written in a very articulate and lively manner. Without insisting too much on the literary analysis of the texts they examine, the authors are interested in whether the sf ideas they convey are sound or dilettantish, original or clichéd, close to Communist...

Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson, and: Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict by Michelle E. Moore

Reviewed by: Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson, and: Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict by Michelle E. Moore Beth Widmaier Capo Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis. By Liesl Olson. Yale University Press, 2017. 400 pp. Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict. By Michelle E. Moore. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 264 pp. Can beauty and business, poetry and porkpacking create a vibrant artistic culture, or are they antithetical and alienating to writers? Two recent monographs come to different answers to this question of modernism and the Chicago Renaissance. Liesl Olson’s Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis argues for Chicago’s unique contributions to modernism. Beginning with the Chicago Literary Renaissance of the 1890s through 1920s, featuring Harriet Monroe and Sherwood Anderson, and continuing through the 1930–1950 Chicago Black Renaissance of Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, Olson offers a rich cultural and literary history that contributes significantly to scholarship on American literature. She argues that Chicago was the center of American modernism. Michelle Moore’s Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, [End Page 173] and Fitzgerald in Conflict focuses on eight writers’ antipathy toward the city’s business ethos. Its contribution lies in documenting connections between these writers and their public and private references to Chicago’s commercialism. Olson’s Chicago Renaissance offers a fascinating, extensively researched, and engagingly written argument aimed at a wide audience. This reach is signaled by interesting titles (e.g., “Porkpackers and Poetry”) and subtitles (“Naughty People”), eighty-eight images, and brief narrative “Interludes” between chapters. Olson “was in search of a book that would give [her] a sense of Chicago’s relation to the social and aesthetic revolutions of the first decades of the twentieth century” and, when she didn’t find one, wrote it herself (xv). The result, integrating archival work with close reading, argues that “Chicago was an extremely important site of modernist literary production through the first half of the twentieth century, at the center of an unfolding dialogue among writers, critics, institutions, and artists about what it means to be modern” (xvii). Its geographic location, patronage of the arts by business leaders, and lack of cultural tradition enabled artistic freedom in a multiplicity of styles. In addition to the Chicago connections, Olson focuses on how writers, including Hemingway and Stein, aimed for mainstream readers; she successfully hits this target as well (xix). Olson, director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library and author of Modernism and the Ordinary (2009), makes her argument in five chapters, an introduction, conclusion, and five narrative “Interludes.” The introduction uses the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 to establish Chicago as a place of growth, renewal, and transformation. Brief discussions of early Chicago realist writers and their works, including Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), demonstrate that “the greatest Chicago literature is not always about Chicago” (8) nor by writers from Chicago, and that “the subject matter of each novel is perhaps more radical than its aesthetic method” (11). Chicago modernism is not a coherent aesthetic. Chapter 1’s focus on Harriet Monroe establishes the linear organization of Chicago Renaissance but also its sense of connection and recurring characters. Highlighting Monroe’s democratic view of audience and editorial influence on modernism, Olson connects Monroe’s “openness to outside influence” (55) to Chicago’s importance [End Page 174] as a railroad crossroads. The financial support Monroe solicited from those “who had made recent fortunes from Chicago’s rapid growth” (80), including the Swift meatpacking empire, enabled her to recognize artistic labor’s value by paying contributors to Poetry, the magazine she edited. Chapter 2 describes the public reception of the 1913 Armory Show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art that introduced America to controversial avant-garde movements such as Impressionism and Cubism, and its impact on Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, and others. Lacking an artistic tradition, Chicago was more open to the radicalness of European modernism (101). Olson details the...

Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall

Reviewed by: Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall Korey D. Maas Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. By Peter Marshall. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. xix + 652 pp. + 22 plates. Over the past generation, those pressed to recommend a readable and reliable history of the English Reformation have faced a quandary. A.G. Dickens' venerable The English Reformation (1964) has not only grown long in the tooth; many of its conclusions have been subsequently and persuasively challenged by scholars such as J. J. Scarisbrick, Eamon Duffy, and Christopher Haigh. Despite the import of their findings, however, this revisionist school has not produced anything like a major overview for mainstream readers. Peter Marshall's book is advertised as just such an overview, the first in a generation—and rightly so. Organizing seventeen chapters into four chronological yet broadly thematic sections, Marshall skillfully and lucidly guides readers through the complex vicissitudes of the English church in the sixteenth century. The first section, "Reformations before Reformation," establishes the late medieval context in such a way as to emphasize that the changes of the sixteenth century were neither inevitable nor merely reactionary, but were in important respects "a flowering of late medieval developments" (xvii). Part two, "Separations," narrates the events still most familiar to a popular audience: the Luther affair and its reverberations across the channel, Tyndale's New Testament and the mediation of continental evangelicalism, Henry VIII's marital crisis and the ambiguous status of English religion following his break with Rome. Section three, "New Christianities," picks up in the final decade of Henry's reign, when that ambiguity allowed [End Page 484] proponents of various theological visions to vie for royal support— and when the same ambiguity made it just as likely that advocates of each would be silenced and suppressed. It proceeds through the brief reign of Edward VI and the tenuous evangelical establishment crowned by Cranmer's Prayer Book, and concludes with the equally tenuous but ostensibly successful reestablishment of Roman obedience under Mary I. The final section chronicles the first three decades of Elizabeth I's rule; its title, "Unattainable Prizes," illuminates the potentially counter-intuitive stopping point. By 1590 the old faith had been effectively reduced to the dissenting posture of a minority; but it had also become clear—not least because of still, and increasingly, divergent Protestant visions—that a realm united in a common faith would remain beyond reach. Marshall's outline, then, is hardly novel. But the synthesis of previous research, complemented by his own insights and interpretations, is masterful. Limpid prose and arresting anecdotes ensure that, even at 600 pages (with, as the preface forewarns, "a lot of names"), the mainstream reader will remain engaged. Other readers, including this one, will lament the lack of bibliography, and even the choice of endnotes rather than footnotes. Some will be put off by the occasionally jarring anachronism or too-clever colloquialism; the early Henrician supremacy as sports car test-drive comes immediately to mind (230). Minor quibbles aside, though, and despite the gestures to mainstream readers, Marshall's book is a monument of scholarship. Marshall consistently, if subtly, nods toward ongoing academic debates, while explicitly stating many of his own convictions up front. The "lot of names" mentioned above, for example, serves to emphasize the decisive role continually played by individual agency—and the impact of events on real human beings. Although by no means embracing an ideological history from below, Marshall is clearly dismissive of the still sometimes heard claim that England's Reformation was simply an "Act of State." He gives equally short shrift to the notion that religion itself was only a secondary, or even tertiary, concern of those involved, a mask behind which to hide political or economic motives. With an eye toward wider implications, he also notes with some regularity the manner in which the Tudor Reformation did not merely change the religion of the [End Page 485] realm; it also changed the way many, even into the present, would come to understand the nature of religion itself. Given what Marshall here accomplishes, and the flair with which he...

Summer Reads

WORLDLIT.ORG 77 We’re standing up for Turtle Island and the waters, we’re standing up for the future we refuse to gamble away as if it doesn’t matter, as if it should be someone else’s story, someone else’s problem. We may not be Skins in Space but we invented Science Fiction—the awareness that almighty science divorced from wisdom is a reckless beast. The dominant society made a fiction of our science though their breakthroughs are leading them back to what we knew all along, what we tried to tell them in the very beginning. They’ve been educating us for years, for several lost generations, but we’re up-ending that one-sided desk, that one-sided conversation that can only tell stories in a single direction. Don’t tell us we’re finding our voices in some new academic-artistic renaissance you can study at conferences or exploit in pages on Amazon.com—we’ve been speaking all along as poets and rappers, counselors and prophets, healers and politicians. The problem was, no one was listening to our parents and grandparents, and for certain not our great-grandparents who were too busy facing down guns to hand over their dissertation. You may not want to listen now, but that’s okay, we’ve learned your language and can ride our ponies through communication highways that cross reservation lines. Our ancestors never gave up and they’re singing us awake. We’re inside and outside, listening and speaking, standing up and dancing, connecting and reaching—we’ve got a world to save, yours as well as ours. Saint Paul, Minnesota There are three recent books from the University of Oklahoma Press that I know would make great summer reading. My own Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity deals with current social and cultural issues essential for understanding the Latino community and what they are working through during this difficult time. A. Gabriel Meléndez’s The Book of Archives and Other Stories from the Mora Valley, New Mexico is a haunting collection of stories that takes readers into a vibrant and magical community in New Mexico that they otherwise would never know about. Alfredo Véa’s The Mexican Flyboy is one of the most notable novels of the recent era, a book with the combined appeal of Roberto Bolaño, Rudolfo Anaya, and Thomas Pynchon. – RC DavisUndiano , Executive Director Robert Con Davis-Undiano Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity This book tries to demonstrate already-existing cultural connections between the US and large patterns of historical development evident throughout Latin America. It focuses on six ways that Mexican Americans and Latinos have changed mainstream American culture since the 1960s, ultimately arguing that US mainstream culture needs to stop making Latinos the “enemy” and that Mexican Americans and Latinos need to take the final steps toward full assimilation through political involvement and greater success in education. A. Gabriel Meléndez The Book of Archives and Other Stories from the Mora Valley, New Mexico This beautiful book works with the actual history of the Mora Valley in New Mexico and weaves a large southwestern cultural fabric that many mainstream readers will know little about. Mora is a small village in which people still speak Spanish and English as two primary languages and celebrate their ties to traditional lands that house aspects of themselves, their families, and their pasts. This book’s treatment of the Book of Archives, a literal and figurative connection to tradition and the past in New Mexico, is a tour de force. Alfredo Véa The Mexican Flyboy This is one of the most impressive books to appear in English in recent years. Véa’s previous three novels— La Maravilla (1993), The Silver Cloud Café (1996), and Gods Go Begging (1999)—are known to followers of high-quality experimental fiction. This new novel—about Simon Vega’s use of a time machine to wander through history to save people who died unjust, tragic deaths—will bring Véa into a new circle of importance among contemporary novelists. We’re standing up for Turtle Island and...

Compensatory Reading among ESL Learners: A Reading Strategy Heuristic

This paper aims to gain an insight to the relationship of two different concepts about reading comprehension, namely, the linear model of comprehension and the interactive compensatory theory. Drawing on both the above concepts, a heuristic was constructed about three different reading strategies determined by the specific ways the literal, reorganisation and inferential skills of comprehension interact. The concepts of apt and smart reading strategies were introduced, which refer to two possible ways of compensatory reading. Applying the reading strategy heuristic to the secondary analysis of a large reading assessment data from Malaysian secondary school 3567 ESL learners, compensatory reading was found to be used by a significant group of those students who struggle with poor reading skills. Furthermore, one of the compensatory strategies, namely, smart reading, was found to be positively correlated with the learners' motivation to read and their belief about own reading competence, the proportion of positive answers among smart readers being 3.5% and 3.9% higher than among the mainstream readers, respectively. The findings suggest that the language talent of apt and smart readers (18.2% of the current sample to be discovered and cultivated in the L2 classroom, especially among low-achiever learners who would most benefit from the recognition of compensation as a legitimate skill of reading comprehension.

Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US by H. Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman (review)

Reviewed by: Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US by H. Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman Stuart Davis and Nikole Miller Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US. By H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xviii, 205. ISBN 9780199812981. $24.95. In this intriguing and well-documented monograph, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman take up various language-related instances in Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign and use those instances as a vehicle to examine the relationship between language, race, and power in America. A&S are able to document that Obama’s conscious linguistic awareness and his ability to style-shift depending on the audience played an important role in his being elected president. As they state: ‘Barack Obama’s mastery of White mainstream ways of speaking, or “standard” English, particularly in terms of syntax, combined with his mastery of Black culture’s modes of discourse, in terms of style, was an absolutely necessary combination for him to be elected America’s first Black president’ (20). While this comment is hard to evaluate when taken out of context, A&S make their case very convincingly, especially in Ch. 3 in their analysis of Obama’s famous March 2008 ‘race speech’ in Philadelphia. This important speech occurred as a response to the Reverend Wright controversy, which at the time had the potential of eliminating Obama from being a serious candidate in the eyes of mainstream America. Articulate while Black consists of six chapters, plus a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson and a preface, ‘Showin love’, by A&S. We are intrigued by A&S’s collaboration in that they represent different generations of African American scholars working on Black language from a perspective that comes from within the Black community. S is certainly the most well known of a group of scholars on Black language who came of age in the 1970s. It was during that time that Smitherman 1977 was published, and she was deeply involved in the Ann Arbor Black English case. Moreover, for many linguists who do not specialize in African American English or sociolinguistics, but who have to discuss the topic of Black language in teaching introductory courses or in conversations with colleagues in other disciplines, our basic knowledge of the legitimacy of Black English as a linguistic system derives from exposure to S’s work, even if only in one of various anthologies that contain excerpts. A is a leading scholar of a younger generation of African American linguists approaching the study of Black language from the in-community perspective. While A’s research often deals with broader issues of language and urban education, his work on the analysis of hip hop is probably unprecedented in terms of its linguistic sophistication and his intimate knowledge of hip hop culture (e.g. A’s 2003 analysis of the rhyming schemes of the artist Pharoahe Monch). A&S’s collaboration thus represents a generational bridge for Black linguists. Characteristic of both A’s and S’s academic writing styles over the years is the incorporation of Black language as [End Page 280] part of their work. This style-shifting is also found in this book, often occurring when A&S make a side comment or bring home a particularly important point. While mainstream readers of the book as well as some linguists may feel a little uneasy about this, it can be seen not only as an effective rhetorical device, but also as an important way to try to break down—at least to a certain extent— the pervasive language ideology that many readers of the book will have. Each of the first five chapters is organized around an incident or an event that occurred during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign in which some aspect of language and/or communication was highlighted. This then is used to lead into more general discussion about the nature of Black language and the issue of how race in America is often viewed through the guise of language. A&S make clear Obama’s mastery of Black modes of discourse and his ability to style-shift...

Consensual non-consent: Comparing EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Pauline Réage’s Story of O

This article explores questions of sexual agency and consent in mainstream representations of BDSM using Pauline Réage’s Story of O and EL James’s Fifty Shades trilogy as examples. It addresses normalizing tendencies and explores to what extent BDSM can be represented before being rejected by mainstream readers. Based on critiques of both novels, I outline the degree to which the concept of consensual non-consent, that is, the illusion of suspended consent in order to facilitate erotic power play, works in both novels. A close reading reveals a return to more traditional notions of femininity and female sexual agency in Fifty Shades, as well as a growing tendency to normatively limit the depictions of sadomasochistic desires.

Stark Style Solidarity. Reader Identification and Emotional Immersion in Rebecca Brown’s Literary Minimalism

The work of the contemporary lesbian author Rebecca Brown (born 1956) can be read in the light of Richard Rorty’s claim that literature is the primary medium for an exploration and expansion of our notion of the human. Brown seizes upon the convention of literary minimalism to place lesbianism at the heart of a canon traditionally embodied by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Through typical minimalist methods pertaining to character and narrator, her writing arguably encourages the reader’s emotional immersion as well as a heightened reader identification. This makes her mainly lesbian protagonists vital actors in literature’s stimulation of empathy via role‐taking opportunities. Almost forcing readers into imaginatively identifying with frequently abjected “others” by means of minimal and consequential characterization, anti‐sentimentalism, and narratorial neutrality, Brown’s work strives to evoke solidarity in mainstream readers – they are pushed into seeing subjects who are as yet largely excluded from a general idea of “the human” as “one of us.”

On Teaching Harriette Simpson Arnow

On Teaching Harriette Simpson Arnow Erica Abrams Locklear (bio) When I began doctoral study in English at Louisiana State University in 2003, I thought I knew a little something about Appalachian literature. I had read James Still, Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, and several other mountain writers, and I was vaguely familiar with a handful of other related sources, like Joyce Dyer's collection, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers. Then I took a Southern literature seminar with John Lowe who, during one of our conversations about Appalachian literature, offhandedly remarked that he really loved Harriette Simpson Arnow's The Dollmaker. Before that day, I had never heard of Arnow or any of her works. Looking back on that conversation now, I wonder how this was possible. After my class ended, I read The Dollmaker and was astounded. I remember being completely enthralled by the story in general, but more particularly I admired Gertie's perseverance, empathized with Reuben and Cassie's longing to return home, loathed Mrs. Whittle's treatment of Reuben, and wanted to think more deeply about how Arnow portrayed the identity conflicts that ensued after the family moved to Detroit. I decided to write about it in my dissertation, and later in my first book. I was similarly moved by Arnow's other novels, especially Hunter's Horn. As I learned more about her work, I became increasingly confused as to why she is now read so infrequently by academics, students, and mainstream readers. Upon further investigation, I learned that The Dollmaker won wide critical acclaim during its time and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1955, losing to William Faulkner's The Fable (Eckley 44). Twenty-three years later, in 1978, Tillie Olsen lamented that, as a woman's "book of great worth, [The Dollmaker suffers] the death of being unknown, or at best a peculiar eclipsing" (40). Considering that the novel tells a powerful story about Appalachian out-migration and the consequences of moving from an agrarian society to an industrial one, all while dealing with issues related to education, gender, and so much more, the "eclipsing" Olsen notes is peculiar, indeed. When I talk about Arnow's work with fellow academics, I often hear similar explanations of why they have chosen not to teach her work in [End Page 53] their courses. They usually tell me that while they applaud novels like The Dollmaker, teaching such a long work of fiction seems overwhelming at best and impossible at worst. But in this brief contribution to a longer reflection on Arnow, I want to contest that belief and argue for the inclusion of novels like The Dollmaker on course syllabi for undergraduate and graduate students alike. Certainly The Dollmaker would make a great novel selection for a course on American or Appalachian literature, as it would for a class that explores issues of migration, industrialization, unionization, and labor struggles in general. But here I want to make a case that The Dollmaker is also an ideal candidate for Women's Studies courses, particularly those that rely on literature to broaden student understandings of women's lives and experiences. In 2009 I taught a special topics course at UNC Asheville called Working Women. In it, we explored real and fictional narratives that contained depictions of women's labor, and students interviewed women in the community so that they could examine how their interviewees' stories did or did not align with those that we spent the semester reading. Early in the course,, students responded well to Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, to Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: A Novel of the Thirties, and to other texts, but I was nervous about introducing The Dollmaker. Were they really going to read a six-hundred-plus page novel? I was not sure. To my surprise, the book was a splendid success, generating some of our best class discussions of the semester. When we encountered The Dollmaker, we had already talked about socially constructed gender roles and the often repressive reality of subscribing to gender binaries. Right away, students noticed Gertie's resistance to these limitations, and together we cheered her refusal to adhere to society's expectations...

Serious Play: Drag, Transgender, and the Relationship between Performance and Identity in the Life Writing of RuPaul and Kate Bornstein

RuPaul’s and Bornstein’s life writing is influenced not only by their identifications with gay or transsexual traditions, but also their “disidentifications” with the assimilationist queer politics gaining force in the 1990s. Each negotiates identities on the boundaries of multiple categories while struggling to engage mainstream readers as active participants in creating textual meaning and challenging repressive politics.

Chekhov: Poetics; Hermeneutics; Thematics by J. Douglas Clayton

I I82 Reviews of his readers. This leads him to set up an ironic double reading inmany of his works, providing an outer frame for 'self-deceived mainstream readers' alongside 'an approach toauthenticity' for thosewho sought it (p. 327). Powelstock rightlyempha sizes the importance of The Journalist, the Reader and the Writer in this context and makes an interesting case for regardingMaxim Maximych as the embodiment of the 'metafictionalmoralizing reader' (p. 348) inA Hero ofOur Time, his reappearance at the end of The Fatalist reinforcing this role. Powelstock does not neglect Lermontov's use of language. Lermontov is seen as favouring Romantic ineffability:he often prefers 'sonic texture' to 'logos' (p. I44). At the same time he frequently uses words, concepts, and settings which have es tablished connotations-Borodino, theCaucasus-or which come with pre-supplied associations. Even epigonistic poetic language and 'conventional poetic formulas' are taken and reanimated by Lermontov (p. 449). Such a process illustrates a tension between 'expression' (that there ismeaning prior to verbalization) and 'semiosis' (that verbalization produces meaning), and thus Lermontov's language, too, reflects the conflict between a desire for individual uniqueness and for recognition within a cultural paradigm that can be found at themacro-level of his work (p. 464). Powelstock's periodic references toStoicism in relation toPechorin's behaviour are an intriguing ingredient of thework. They remain somewhat apart from themain ar gument and tantalizingly inconclusive. Comparisons aremade between Pechorin's be haviour and Stoic indifferenceand between his fatalism and theStoic logos. Itwould be interesting toknow more about this:did Lermontov, likeCaptain John Smith and Gordon ofKhartoum, always have hisMarcus Aurelius about him or arewe dealing with more general affinitiesbetween themartial temperament and Stoic ethics? In conclusion: the merit ofPowelstock's approach is that it isgenuinely systematic. He has created a binary model based on self and other, inner and outer, public and private, which manages coherently to interpret the disparate areas of Lermontov's ceuvre. Perhaps one might ask why Lermontov so readily yields to this analysis and one may be tempted to seek the answer in areas of Romantic aesthetics and idealist philosophy which Powelstock does not venture into.But within theparameters itsets itself the studyworks verywell. KEELE UNIVERSITY ROBERT REID Chekhov: Poetics; Hermeneutics; Thematics. Ed. by J.DOUGLAS CLAYTON. Manotick, ON: Penumbra Press for theSlavic Research Group at theUniversity ofOttawa. 2006. vii+3I9. CAN$20. ISBN 978-o-88927-287-3. This isyet another collection of papers from a conference tomark the 2004 centenary ofChekhov's death, and it isby nomeans the least interesting.For one thing,Douglas Clayton has succeeded ingathering together themost prominent Russian (and other former Soviet) chekhovedy together with themost distinguished North American scholars. Herta Schmid fromPotsdam is the soleWest European contributor to this volume, although other Europeans did participate in the conference. Many readers will be relieved, some disappointed, that the subtitle 'Poetics; Her meneutics; Thematics' does not really unite the approaches and themes of the con tributors, even though these are often the parameters of a paper. The significant recurring titleword is 'Revisiting', or 'Restor(y)ing': most papers remind one of a detective returning to a cold case ofmurder with a determination to find missed clues and use more refined techniques to analyse data that have been stored fordecades. Hence, on poetics, Aleksander Chudakov's Poetika Chekhova (Moscow: Nauka, I97 3) isconstantly recalled, and on thematics very littlenew is said by anyone, particularly MLR, 103.4, 2008 I I83 when they revisit The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, or such key stories as 'The Lady with theLittle Dog' (Julie de Sherbinin) and 'lonych' (Yury Domansky). Where new ground isbroken, it is in the labours of love for which American scholars deserve praise: returning toChekhov's comic trivia and finding in them, not with out hindsight, elements of genuine artistic innovation, Robert Jackson's treatmentof 'Small Fry' (Meliuzga) is in itsvery choice of subject original, and even convincing in the implied argument that the storydeserves a place in thecanon ofChekhov's Easter stories, not tomention stories where 'running (away or about)' is a recurrentmotif. Elsewhere, intertextuality clears new territory:Zhekulin findspreviously unnoticed parallels between the trioof servants inTurgenev's Fathers and Sons and the...

Ecosublime: environmental awe and terror from new world to oddworld

Lee Rozelle examines the natural environment's place in American literature and culture through the lens of what he calls the ecosublime, an aesthetic moment that in its awe and terror provokes a cognitive and spiritual re-conception of place. Focusing on a variety of literary works and cultural artifacts, Ecosublime explores 19th-century, modern, postmodern, and millennial texts as they portray the changing ecological face of America. In the 19th century, Rozelle argues, Isabella Bird and Edgar Allan Poe represent the western wilderness as culturally constructed and idealized landscapes - gardens, forests, and frontiers - conceptual frameworks that either misrepresent or uphold ecological space. Modernists like Nathanael West and William Carlos Williams, on the other hand, portray urban space as either wastelands or mythical urban gardens. A chapter on Charles W. Chesnutt and Rebecca Harding Davis analyzes a new breed of literary eco-advocate, educating and shocking mainstream readers through depictions of ecological disaster. A later chapter probes the writings of Edward Abbey and the Unabomber Manifesto to delve into the sublime dimensions of environmental activism, monkey-wrenching, and eco-terrorism. In each instance, Rozelle finds evidence that the ecosublime - nature experienced as an instance of wonder and fear - profoundly reflects spiritual and political responses to the natural world, America's increasingly anti-ecological trajectory, and the ascendance of a post-natural landscape.

Myth Launchings and Moon Landings: Parallel Realities in Susan Power's The Grass Dancer

Myth Launchings and Moon Landings:Parallel Realities in Susan Power's The Grass Dancer Lee Schweninger (bio) In her novel The Grass Dancer (1994), Dakota writer Susan Power describes the United States' scientific and technological advances in the context of the lives of the members of several families on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. She juxtaposes the 1969 moon landing reported on television, for example, with the traditional preparation of corn soup as Margaret Many Wounds lies on her deathbed. Through such juxtapositions, Power reexamines and questions the significance of the technological revolution, showing that her characters derive their worldviews as much (or perhaps more) from ancestral histories and ideologies, from non-mainstream beliefs, as from post-World War II technologies such as lunar modules and televisions. Power offers the reader new ways of understanding the place of mainstream Western technology and Western epistemologies, and her characters also suggest alternative ways of perceiving reality. The author thus calls into question Western or mainstream conceptions and understandings of what constitutes reality, and she thereby problematizes the typical boundaries of realistic fiction. Like the character Pumpkin, the mainstream reader may well "have to put aside one worldview—perhaps only temporarily—to take up another."1 Although Pumpkin identifies one worldview with what she calls "the Indian community," I intend no such generalization. Mainstream readers in my context here may well be Native American just as some non-Native readers may be fully enculturated into the specific Dakotan culture Power describes. In this particular context, I argue that the author's challenge is to demonstrate to an uninitiated or mainstream reader the power and presence [End Page 47] of an alternative reality. This essay suggests the ways Power does indeed make evident the possibility of such realities. William Cronon epitomizes the typically-privileged, mainstream view of what constitutes realism when he argues that "stories cannot contravene known facts about the past;" he maintains that "the biological and geological processes of the earth set fundamental limits to what constitutes a plausible narrative."2 Arnold Krupat has challenged Cronon's ethnocentric worldview, writing in Red Matters, for instance, that "both mythical and historical stories are true. [. . .] History is public knowledge of the past [. . .] public in the sense of being culturally shared;" Krupat also writes that we need to "abandon the ethnocentric insistence that there can be no history without fact, accuracy, and scientific rationality."3 In his essay "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Hayden White concludes that historians have "a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can be only imaginary."4 White argues that story or narrative actually shapes reality and that, therefore, one cannot attain any objective truth through narrative. Whereas Cronon and White are writing about history and historical narrative specifically, Catherine Rainwater suggests that considerations of historical narrative are equally applicable to literature. Both are forms of storytelling. In one specific context, for example, Rainwater suggests that the "Pueblo-Navajo cosmological material may be judged 'true' or 'mythical-imaginary' depending on the reader's epistemological screen."5 There are, to be sure, significant differences between history and literature, but it remains important to examine the ways in which both forms of storytelling manipulate or organize the facts. In order to maintain the illusion of reality and the verifiable, realistic fiction must observe Cronon's "known facts" of the physical world typically accepted by the reading community. Like history, realistic fiction presumably must deliver a faithful representation of life; it must adhere to what its readers deem the actual and verifiable. In the nineteenth century this notion of realism was expressed by such writers as William Dean Howells, for example, who maintained that fiction should be "true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life [End Page 48] of actual men and women"6 In a brief introduction to theory, Hoffman and Murphy paraphrase Frank Kermode, writing that as fiction "has moved away from the realistic presentation of the nineteenth century, it has attempted more and more radically to represent how reality is perceived and experienced."7 In the...

Moving from the margins: a Chicana voice on public policy

Immigration reform. Bilingual education. Affirmative action. Such issues trigger knee-jerk reactions from many people, and in California those reactions are likely to fall along strict ethnic lines. A white majority has long called the shots in voter initiatives, but with Mexican Americans becoming the majority population in southern California, their views on these matters can no longer be ignored. In Moving from the Margins, an outspoken member of the Mexican American community explores issues that have molded politics over the past decade in a state where division seems more common than unity. Addressing immigration, education, health care, and economic and political concerns, Adela de la Torre provides a distinctly Chicana perspective that often differs from that of mainstream readers and voters. Drawn from the author's syndicated column in the Los Angeles Times along with writings from other publications, Moving from the Margins includes incisive and often provocative commentaries that provide insights into the roots of ethnic tensions in the Golden State. The book also includes readers' reactions to the articles, creating a dialogue of ideas while confronting fears of what many Americans view as an alien culture. Whether addressing entitlements granted to noncitizens, the future of public schools, or access to health care, de la Torre challenges readers to move beyond their own frame of reference and consider new points of view. The issues she faces have shaped today's California and they also lie at the heart of urban public policy in America for the twenty-first century.

Envisioning a "Network of Tribal Coalitions": Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko's second novel, Almanac of the Dead, attempts to overcome the limitations of the American Indian Movement by presenting readers with the model of "tribal internationalists," individuals who work with international alliances to reclaim their Indigenous land.1 In Almanac Silko suggests that cross-cultural spiritual coalitions made up of "tribal internationalists" would provide a more powerful means of combating the social, political, and economic injustice faced by American Indians (and many oppressed peoples around the world) than secular politics based on ethnicity and race alone. In a 1976 interview with Per Seyersted, given toward the end of the American Indian Movement's heyday, Silko critiques the secular organization for being "too similar to other American political groups."2 Silko implies that although some positive changes resulted from the American Indian Movement, it failed to bring about the total amelioration of injustice because it mimicked the oversimplifications and divisions of secular identity politics. She states, "I feel it is more effective to write a story... than to rant and rave. I think it is more effective in reaching people."3 For Silko novels and stories offer a more effective way to enact social change because they are capable of "reaching people" on a profound emotional level and connect them "through time—back to a time before this person was born."4 Almanac attempts to succeed where the American Indian Movement failed by overcoming the divisiveness and limitations of secular politics with the expansiveness of coalition politics that connects individuals "through time" and space to each other, living and long dead. Silko sees this connection as one of the "spirit," connecting living readers to the spirits of dead ancestors and the spirits of the earth and natural world.5 Silko believes that these cross-national spiritual connections have the power to resist injustice in the Americas more effectively than secular political and nationalist movements. It is not surprising that this aspect of Silko's fiction has drawn powerful critiques from scholars. In Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, [End Page 623] Elizabeth Cook-Lynn states that Silko, like other successful contemporary American Indian writers Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, James Welch, and N. Scott Momaday, "may have moved away from nationalist concerns in order to gain the interest of mainstream readers."6 Cook-Lynn suggests that to ignore American Indian nationalist concerns regarding tribal sovereignty is irresponsible because literature can act as a basis for political action. Although Cook-Lynn includes Silko in her list of irresponsible American Indian writers because of her earlier works, she praises Almanac of the Dead for its "nationalist's approach to historical events."7 She argues that the novel ultimately "fails in this nationalist approach," however, because Silko's focus on "pan-Indian" connections "might seem unworkable or even offensive to those nation-states that insist upon the accuracy of their own specific histories."8 She explains Silko's "offense" as perhaps a product of the Laguna Pueblo tribe Silko was raised in because Laguna's nation status is secured under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, unlike most American Indian sovereignty claims based on tribally specific treaties. In a similar attempt to explain Silko's "misjudgment" in focusing on cross-cultural connections, Arnold Krupat argues that rather than presenting a nationalist or Indigenous position, Silko's status as a "mixed-blood" leads her to explore "post-Indian" cosmopolitanism.9 His reference to Silko's mixed racial heritage hearkens back to Paula Gunn Allen's famous critique of Ceremony as being a novel "about a half-breed," written as a "plea for inclusion by a writer who felt excluded and compelled to depict the potential importance of breeds to Laguna survival."10 The word "breed"—alerting readers to Silko's mixed American Indian/white heritage—is used by Allen to attempt to explain why Silko's first novel presented...