Work Of Miller Research Articles

Readings on Evolution and the Nature of Science: One Christian’s Perspective

Readings on Evolution and the Nature of Science: One Christian’s Perspective

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen

The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books by Jennifer Miller

Reviewed by: The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books by Jennifer Miller Jessica Lussier (bio) The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books. By Jennifer Miller. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Jennifer Miller's The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books provides a foundational entry-point into the study of the field. Working from a corpus of over 150 English-language picture books from the 1970s to 2018, Miller chronicles the evolution of LGBTQ+ topics and themes over time. While many critics have criticized LGBTQ+ children's picture books for being homonormative and conservative (often upholding dominant social institutions instead of consciously dismantling them), [End Page 426] Miller intentionally chooses to view these texts through the lens of critical optimism, highlighting the transformative potential of these texts to "demand LGBTQ+ visibility and challenge stigma associated with LGBTQ+ identities and experiences" (27). Chapter 1, "The Politics of LGBTQ+ Children's Literature," serves as the introduction to Miller's work, outlining the existing scholarship surrounding LGBTQ+ children's picture books, her methodology, and critical influences. Miller affirms the importance of a thorough, comprehensive archive, arguing that too many scholars make too general conclusions from too limited data sets—something that she, herself, was guilty of and wished to correct in this work (18). In drawing from such a large archive, Miller analyzes the selected works from a more optimistic place, positioning them within their historical contexts and teasing out the ways that even very homonormative works can prompt societal transformation and change. Chapter 2, "A Genealogy of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books: The Early Years," charts the development of LGBTQ+ children's picture books over the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This general overview of common tropes and themes provides a foundation for their specific exploration in later chapters. Miller identifies two clusters of tropes during these years: first, the tropes of the "sissy boy," queer exceptionalism, and "boy-meets-skirt"; and second, the emergence of the tropes of "virtually normal" lesbian- and gay-parented families, family diversity, and the gay uncle (38). The persistence and evolution of these tropes across these three decades (and into the 2000s and 2010s) reflect dominant cultural understandings and ways of being. Chapter 3, "Virtually Normal: Lesbian and Gay Grown-Ups in Children's Picture Books," examines the evolution of this trope in post-2000s picture books. Miller notes the limiting tendency of these texts to generally only feature LGBTQ+ adults in a familial role or when exceptional enough to be featured in a biography, subsuming LGBTQ+ adults into a homonormative framework and making them seem "just like" heterosexual couples (78). Yet, these characters still offer transformative potential in their very visibility, making LGBTQ+ lives available and imaginable to young readers. Chapter 4, "Beyond the Sissy Boy: Pink Boys and Tomboys," dives into the transformation of the "sissy boy" trope first found in pre-2000 picture books. The "sissy boy" is characterized by an association and like of feminine objects and activities. These desires are often viewed with embarrassment or anger by the adult figures, but over time, the embarrassment has shifted away from the sissy boy and onto the policing figure, making them seem silly or out of line. Most recently, the sissy boy has transformed into the "pink boy," who also evinces a desire for more feminine objects, such as wearing dresses, but with a crucial distinction: to cast the desired objects as gender neutral (109). While this focus does render the intricacies of gender expression more banal, Miller recognizes the manners in which these [End Page 427] texts also promote flexible definitions of gender and gender expression. Chapter 5, "Queer Youth and Gender: Representing Transgender, Nonbinary, Gender-Creative, and Gender-Free Youth," investigates trans and nonbinary gender expressions in LGTBQ+ children's picture books. These texts center around the importance of resilience and staying true to oneself, building upon the characterization of sissy boys, pink boys, and tomboys in the previous chapter. Like with pink boys, sissy boys, and tomboys, the depiction of transgender characters emphasizes the role of the supportive nuclear family—to the exclusion of a wider queer community. While this depiction may be accurate for many...

Gröbner geometry for skew-symmetric matrix Schubert varieties

Matrix Schubert varieties are the closures of the orbits of B×B acting on all n×n matrices, where B is the group of invertible lower triangular matrices. Extending work of Fulton, Knutson and Miller identified a Gröbner basis for the prime ideals of these varieties. They also showed that the corresponding initial ideals are Stanley-Reisner ideals of shellable simplicial complexes, and derived a related primary decomposition in terms of reduced pipe dreams. These results lead to a geometric proof of the Billey-Jockusch-Stanley formula for a Schubert polynomial, among many other applications. We define skew-symmetric matrix Schubert varieties to be the nonempty intersections of matrix Schubert varieties with the subspace of skew-symmetric matrices. In analogy with Knutson and Miller's work, we describe a natural generating set for the prime ideals of these varieties. We then compute a related Gröbner basis. Using these results, we identify a primary decomposition for the corresponding initial ideals involving certain fpf-involution pipe dreams. We show that these initial ideals are likewise the Stanley-Reisner ideals of shellable simplicial complexes. As an application, we give a geometric proof of an explicit generating function for symplectic Grothendieck polynomials. Our methods differ from Knutson and Miller's and can be used to give new proofs of some of their results, as we explain at the end of this article.

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Reviewed by: Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller Sebastian Egholm Lund (bio) Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; pp. 304. Princeton UP, 2021. $95.00 cloth In a time not long ago, I, a rosy-cheeked graduate student, contemplated applying for a position as a PhD fellow as I, a child of climate change, was intrigued by the enormous diffusion of fossil fuels and sites in the literature of the Victorian era. I soon realized that one of the authoritative figures in the field of Victorian studies, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, was amid such a project—naturally, one designed in a much, much more erudite manner than mine. I am glad, however, because Miller has written a book far beyond [End Page 128] the scope of my capabilities. It is brilliantly thought out, wonderfully well written, and extremely well executed. In short, the book is not so much about a genre or a topos (e.g., "coal literature" or "the mine") as it is a piece of eco-historicism that deals with the matrix of what Miller terms "extractivism": a "complex of cultural, economic, environmental, and ideological factors related to the extraction of underground resources on a large, industrial scale" (6). Indeed, Miller's digging into the past is founded upon the wish to examine the multivalent traffic between matter and ideas (13). She seeks to show how changes in narrative conditioned by changes in energy systems function as feedback loops conditioning infrastructural paths and environmental change (14). More specifically, these endeavours are channelled through Miller's global project of describing how the industrialization of underground resource extraction shaped literary form (1830–1930) just as different genres "contributed to new ways of imagining an extractible Earth" (2). As such, Extraction Ecologies deals with literary-environmental exchange. It rests on the idea "that discourse makes environment as environment makes discourse" (3). It is a piece of naturecultural literary history. Miller's archaeological study of the "extractivist" discourse and its feedback flows, therefore, implies an ecological view of genre as an archive of sediment that testifies to environmental changes over time. Extraction Ecologies seeks to think historically about extraction, ecology, and literature through the lens of our troubled present, thus providing a humanist genealogy of our current fossil fuel calamities. Overall, Miller's work contributes to the onrushing field of ecocritical Victorian studies, which has been developed in recent landmark studies such as Jesse Oak Taylor's The Sky of Our Manufacture (2016) and Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds (2021). Like Menely's and Taylor's, Miller's ecocritical method is solidly based on a materialist reading of the interchange between language and environment. Extraction Ecologies's singular perspective on extraction, nevertheless, places it firmly in the interdisciplinary field of energy humanities, with clear references to previous work by Allen MacDuffie in Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014) and Cara New Daggett in The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (2019). Extraction Ecologies is organized conceptually into three distinctive parts devoted to the three central categories of time, space, and energy. These categories, Miller argues, undergo fundamental changes in the three corresponding genres of provincial realism, adventure literature, and speculative fiction. Each chapter of the book is devoted to one category and one genre. All parts deal with tracing how extractivism formats each conceptual domain. This study of literary form has evolved out of Miller's hypothesis that orders of time, space, and energy alter profoundly with the rise of extraction-based life (18). [End Page 129] In the first part of the book, through enlightening readings of prominent works, such as Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852) and D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), as well as more obscure books, such as Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford: or, The Miner's Strike (1853), Miller shows how the rise of extractivism alters the experience of time and futurity in a way that defies typical novelistic temporalities of provincial realism (30). According to Miller, these novels all share a chronotopic linkage of place and time that...

The Alignment of Stress Management to the Behavioural Management Movement

Stress management is a wide spectrum of techniques and psychotherapies aimed at controlling a person’s level of stress, especially chronic stress, usually for the purpose of and for the motive of improving everyday functioning. Although there are several stress management techniques, that of Job redesign, Job rotation, Social support, and Employee counseling were adopted from the work of Miller (2008). Stress management was aligned with the Behavioural school of management thoughts. First the paper delineated the importance of stress management in individual, group and organizational life, detailing the four techniques mentioned earlier. Secondly, the article evaluated the behavioural management philosophy ; which gives primacy to psychological considerations, but treats fulfillment of emotional needs, mainly as a means of achieving other primary economic goals, and finally the alignment of the behvioural management philosophy with stress management .In conclusion , the behavioural management philosophy provide the antidote foundation for the ultimate elimination of dysfunctional stressors, while it was recommended amongst other; management should utilize job redesign to check emotional exhaustion. This would ensure increased quality of work life and employee job satisfaction.

Pass Fe WhiteandHomestretch: Joan Miller's Satirical “Reads,” Refusals, and Affirmations

AbstractThis article examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos,Pass Fe White(1970) andHomestretch(1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.

Narrative containment of the same-sex underworld in contemporary Vietnam. A critical exploration of the police presence and function in Bùi Anh Tấn's fiction

ABSTRACT Drawing from D.A. Miller's work on The novel and the police (1988) in Victorian fiction, this paper looks at narrative strategies through which the same-sex underworld is portrayed, policed and contained in contemporary Vietnamese fiction. The pioneering works of the prolific policeman-author Bùi Anh Tấn have spearheaded a strong connection between sex and crime in his representations of homosexuality. These potentially subversive representations take place within a liminal underworld, often depicted as an alternative space constitutive of personal identity characterized by same-sex desire outside of recognition by legal authorities or public morality. A critical exploration of the police presence and function within the narrative can uncover the underlying techniques and technologies of surveillance and discipline whereby depictions of the same-sex underworld are policed by and therefore complicit in an operational regime of pervasive hetero-normativity. By examining the thematics of criminality, sexual/social outcast, self-renunciation/acceptance, and cultural ambiguity in the sizable LGBT-themed oeuvre of Bùi Anh Tấn over the past two decades, this paper explores how this body of works partakes in the construction and containment of a transgressive yet marginalized homosexual underworld. Marked by the police presence and subjected to the policing function of the texts, this same-sex underworld is transformed into an object of increasing attention and fascination for an ever so curious yet still ambivalent Vietnamese society.

Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

In Memoriam: Gerald Freedman (1927–2020)

Acclaimed theater and artistic director Gerald Freedman passed away on 17 March 2020. In a career spanning almost seventy years, Freedman became one of the more accomplished and influential directors in American theater. His credits are almost too numerous to list, but highlights include directing book scenes for the original Broadway productions of West Side Story and Gypsy, and a long association with Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, where he directed the world premiere of Hair and served as artistic director. His other stints as artistic director include The Acting Company with John Houseman and Stratford, Connecticut's American Shakespeare Theatre. Additionally, Freedman had a long tenure as artistic director of the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1985 to 1997. He also served as Dean of the School of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.Freedman holds a significant place in the production history of Arthur Miller's work. Miller's 1972 play The Creation of the World and Other Business had much trouble during the rehearsal period over artistic differences between Miller and the production staff. The original director Harold Clurman and most of the cast, including Barbara Harris and Hal Holbrook, were replaced, and Miller rewrote much of the material. Freedman took over the direction, but the Broadway production with Zoe Caldwell, Bob Dishy, and George Grizzard was largely panned and ran for only twenty performances. Freedman had greater critical success with his direction of the 1990 Roundabout Theatre production of The Crucible, which was the first major New York revival in almost twenty years. At the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in 1994, Freedman directed Death of Salesman, featuring Hal Holbrook as Willy Loman and Elizabeth Franz as Linda. The production subsequently went on a seven-city U.S. national tour.When the Arthur Miller Society was formed in 1995, Freedman graciously accepted an invitation to join the honorary board. The theater world is forever changed because of his significant contributions.—Steve Marino

No Villain

No Villain

Aeaea is Revisited: Revisionist Mythmaking Strategies in Madeline Miller's Circe

Bu çalışmada Amerikalı yazar Madeline Miller'ın en son romanı Ben, Kirke, Alicia Ostriker tarafından ortaya atılan ve tanımlanan revizyonist mit yaratımı aracılığı ile incelenmektedir. Revizyonist mit yaratımı, mitleri ve masalları kadın bakış açısıyla yeniden yorumlayarak ve yeniden yazarak bu anlatılar içerisine gömülü cinsiyet stereotiplerine meydan okumayı ve onları çürütmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Ben, Kirke romanında Miller, Yunan mitolojisinin sihir ve büyü kullanarak denizcileri domuza dönüştürmesiyle nam salmış cadısı Kirke'nin hikayesini yeniden ele almaktadır. Miller, Kirke'nin geleneksel "cadı" imgesini kullanır; ancak bu imgenin doğasında belirgin değişiklikler yapar. Miller, yüzyıllar boyunca söz hakkı verilmemiş Kirke'ye kendi hikayesini anlatması, deneyimlerini aktarması için bir şans tanır. Geleneksel anlatıların aksine, Kirke, kıskançlık, öfke, çaresizlik, mutsuzluk, acıma, aşk, hatta postpartum depresyonu gibi çok çeşitli duygu durumları yaşayan, gelişen ve değişen bir karakter olarak karşımıza çıkar. Miller'in amacı Kirke'nin cadı imgesinin doğasında bir takım düzeltmeler yaparak bu imgenin kullanımında ve bu imgeye olan bakış açısında kültürel bir değişiklik elde etmektir.

Communes in America, 1975–2000 by Timothy Miller

Reviewed by: Communes in America, 1975–2000 by Timothy Miller Devin R. Lander (bio) Communes in America, 1975–2000 By Timothy Miller . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019. 280 pages, 6″ x 9″. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Timothy Miller, professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, has done more important work on the history of intentional communities in the United States than any historian I can think of. Communes in America, 1975–2000 is the third and final book in his series that examines the history and relevance of American communes from 1900 to 2000 and includes the previous volumes The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America (1998) and The '60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (1999). Collectively they represent a groundbreaking approach to the subject by deeply mining the archival record, oral history, and quantitative methods. According to the Foundation for Intentional Community's database, there are currently forty-seven "established" (including four or more adults in residence and in existence for at least two years) intentional communities in New York State, which is more than any other state except California, Washington, and Oregon. 1 New York has a long and varied history as the home of prominent intentional communities ranging from the Shakers settling in New Lebanon in the late eighteenth century, the Oneida Community's founding in 1848, and the establishment of the turn-of-the-century communal art colonies of Roy-croft in East Aurora and Byrdcliffe near Woodstock, to the Gate Hill Cooperative avant-garde artists' commune cofounded by John Cage in 1954 near Stony Point and Timothy [End Page 392] Leary's psychedelic commune residing on a 2,500-acre estate in the village of Millbrook, all of which are touched upon in Miller's series. His most recent work also notes the important communal Hindu ashrams Shree Muktananda Ashram in the Catskills and Shanti Mandir in Walden, as well as the Buddhist communes Dai Bosatsu Zendo and the Zen Mountain Monastery, also both in the Catskill mountains. The number and variety of intentional communities that called New York State home is truly amazing. In the preface of Communes in America, 1975–2000, Miller outlines his criteria for inclusion in his study, which is consistent with the previous volumes and includes the following four "must haves" that a group must possess to be considered an intentional community: 1. The group must be gathered on the basis of some kind of purpose or vision and not simply just people living together by chance or family ties. 2. The group must live together on property that has some clear physical commonality. 3. The group must have some kind of financial or material sharing. 4. The group must consist of at least five adults who are not related by blood or marriage. Miller adds that to be considered for the study, a group also must have "a sense of being withdrawn or set apart from conventional society," which is why he does not include Native American tribes, which he rightfully defines as being of the conventional society of their time and place, not outside it. Miller also does not include groups such as monasteries or convents belonging to traditional religious institutions. Communes in America, 1975–2000 is broken down into seven thematic chapters and two appendices. Chapters 2 and 3 illustrate how intentional communities reacted and adapted to social and environmental challenges in the larger society through such innovations as cohousing communes and ecovillages. Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to intentional communities with a spiritual purpose, and chapter 6 outlines activist and social justice communities, including feminist and LGBTQ groups. Chapter 7 investigates the often negative public perception of intentional communities during the period of 1975–2000 as a result of tragedies such as the mass suicides at Jonestown and Heaven's Gate and the deadly assaults on MOVE and the Branch Davidian compounds. Miller cautions the reader not to paint all intentional communities with the same brush based on these horrifying (but rare) catastrophes. The appendices provide excellent quantitative material drawn from the entire series as well as Miller's other works on the subject. Appendix A uses evidence going back...

Interview with Director David Thacker

David Thacker is a longtime director of Miller's work and directed the British Premier of The Last Yankee at the Young Vic in 1993. He decided to revive this play in 2019 at the Bolton Library Lecture Theatre. Currently the head of the BA (Hons) Theatre and Performance Degree at the University of Bolton and former Artistic Director at the Octagon Theatre, Thacker was interviewed post-performance on 13 March 2019.

From the Co-Editors

From the Co-Editors

Finishing the Picture

Finishing the Picture

The Crucible (Czarownice z Salem)

The Crucible (Czarownice z Salem)

The Crucible

The Crucible