Official Word Research Articles

The Dilemma of an Official Word

The Dilemma of an Official Word

Grace Is a Practice

There was certainly much about the hurried switch from in-person to online teaching and learning in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that inspired angst. The decisions that many colleges and universities made to halt on-campus activities and deconcentrate their communities left scores of us scrambling to pack up some of the things we hoped would help us withstand a few weeks away from our offices and classrooms. When I think back on those frenzied days, I often chuckle at how naive I was about the extent to which the pandemic would radically upend our lives, forcing us to rethink every aspect of our ways of being in the world. I was in the middle of leading a discussion on The Tempest in my dramaturgy course when the official word came down from university administrators that all classes would move online and most students would have to vacate their residence halls. A palpable feeling of dread quickly swept over the stuffy classroom. Students began to weep and to wonder out loud what the news would mean for, say, their senior thesis projects or the department's futuristic mounting of The Tempest, which would have to shutter before its second weekend of scheduled performances. I tried my best to remain optimistic, even as I too began to question what the fast-moving changes would mean for how we would finish out the semester. I felt a special call to offer comfort, reaffirming my commitment to supporting students no matter what was ahead.

СТАНІСЛАВ БАРАНЬЧАК – ЛІНГВІСТИЧНА ПОЕЗІЯ ПОКОЛІННЯ 68

The work focuses on recognizing the features of each individual language-centered poetics, refer ring to philosophy of common person and aesthetics. For instance the Generation 68 of Polish linguistic writers involves opposite results to the imperative “to protect my own language from fabrication and depravation”. The opposition “trustfulness-distrustfulness” does not cover all possible complications within the realm of poetic metareflection. These reflections are located between poetical optimism and pessimism. The latter is highly related to what is called “the crisis of language”. The work investigates the role of linguistic poetry of Stanisław Barańczak in breaking down the conventional optimism of Polish belles-letters style. The article explores the use of irony as a form of linguistic dissidence in the poetry of a Polish poet, Stanislaw Barańczak. It offers an analysis of poems, written in the period between 1968 and 1978 and which expose political and social preoccupations of PRL (Polish People’s Republic) at the time. It shows that the ironic stance serves as a dissenting voice against the politics of the state as well as the social situation, while the employment of extra-literary language serves the purpose of discrediting the “official word”.

A Brief History of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition

A Brief History of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition G. Thomas Tanselle and Meaghan Fritz The fifteen-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, completed in the fall of 2017 with the publication of “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings, had its beginnings in the early 1960s as part of a broad academic movement. In 1962 a series of conferences was held under the auspices of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America, responding to a widespread recognition among American literature scholars of the need for reliable texts of the major American writers. The result was the establishment in early 1963 of a Center for Editions of American Authors as an MLA committee with several functions: to promote responsible editorial standards for producing unmodernized texts reflecting their authors’ intentions; to secure grants that would assist in paying for the research involved and then to allocate the money to individual editions; and to provide an inspection service that would review editions before publication and allow them to include an emblem reading “An Approved Text” if they met the required standards of editing and presentation of evidence. In the summer of 1963, a few months after the CEAA was set up, it began holding a series of fifteen planning sessions for individual editions. Through the advocacy of Harrison Hayford, a Northwestern University English professor and Melville scholar who was a member of the original CEAA committee, the first of those sessions was devoted to Melville. Hayford then proceeded to work out an agreement for the sponsorship and publication of a Melville edition among Northwestern University, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University Press; and he oversaw grant applications, where the textual situation was summarized this way: “The reasons for the urgency in Melville’s case are readily stated. Melville is now widely regarded as our greatest imaginative writer. . . . Yet there is no scholarly complete edition of his works. Indeed, the only relatively complete edition, published in London in 1922–1924, is [End Page 9] available only in the major libraries, and is in any case not textually reliable; its textual principles are indeterminate, and no effort was made to find and follow Melville’s own intentions—spelling, for example, was completely Anglicized. At present, scholars, along with classroom teachers and the common reader, must piece together Melville’s works from a motley assortment of uncertainly reliable separate editions. The respectably scholarly editions among them were prepared on various textual principles and are not in any case readily identifiable by nonspecialists. Teachers are likely unwittingly to assign a bowdlerized Typee, an abridged Moby-Dick, or a garbled Billy Budd.” Official word of the award of a grant to the Melville edition from the United States Office of Education (in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) came in early 1965. (The CEAA’s first grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities did not arrive for another year; and because the Melville edition had already received funds, it was not included among the eight editions, involving 150 scholars and eight university presses, to which the $300,000 grant was allocated: those for Crane, Emerson, Hawthorne, Howells, Irving, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Whitman.) With a grant in hand, the Melville edition could proceed under the editorial team Hayford had already established. He was to be General Editor, assisted by two of his former students: Hershel Parker as Associate General Editor and G. Thomas Tanselle as Bibliographical Editor. Hayford had recently completed (in 1962) a complex editorial project with Merton M. Sealts, Jr., a landmark edition of Billy Budd, Sailor that included the first careful transcription of Melville’s uncompleted manuscript; he and Parker had already started work on the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (which was published in 1967); and Tanselle had begun research and writing on American publishing history, descriptive bibliography, and editorial theory. The editorial procedure recommended by the CEAA, and followed by the Melville edition, was derived from W. W. Greg’s 1950 essay “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” as adapted by Fredson Bowers for use in connection with nineteenth-century writings. (The CEAA did not set it out in published form until...

Criatura e/ou Criador:transformações do Supremo Tribunal Federal sob a Constituição de 1988

Resumo Atualmente, o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) ocupa hoje posição central no processo político nacional. Suas decisões são a última palavra oficial sobre os temas a que se referem, concentrando poderes para resolver conflitos políticos e morais, para além das esferas majoritárias. Esse cenário, porém, é muito diferente dos anos 1990, quando o STF não ocupava posição tão destacada na política brasileira. Neste artigo, discutiremos essa configuração do poder e do papel do STF por meio de análises do tribunal que a constituinte criou, mas também do que os ministros criaram por meio de práticas institucionais e interpretações de seus próprios poderes. Exploraremos algumas consequências mais recentes da manifestação do próprio poder conferido ao STF nesse processo de reconfiguração institucional, delineando, de maneira preliminar, novas tendências na forma de atuação política do tribunal. Argumentamos, também, que, em vez de atuar apenas como ponto de veto a decisões majoritárias, como câmara revisora do que faz o Congresso, o tribunal já sinalizou disposição para receber (e aceitar) provocações para funcionar como uma espécie de primeira câmara legislativa.

The Vicissitudes of Folk Narratives in Republican Turkey

The article examines the attempts to modernize folk narratives in Turkey, with a special emphasis on the ones characterized by grotesque imagery, including shadow theatre and Keloğlan tales. During the 1930s, the early Republican regime launched a project aimed at employing folk narratives in the service of its Kemalist national pedagogy. This study argues that the transposition of humorous folk narratives was bound to fail because of the incongruity between the “cheerful folk word” and the “dismal official word.” The study also analyzes the later adaptations of Keloğlan tales and transfigurations of Keloğlan, and argues that they followed the early Republican project insofar as ideological discourses speak in and through them. It asserts that despite all attempts to suppress the grotesque elements of the folk tradition of laughter, these have permeated into modern popular culture.

Democracy in Action: The Demise of the Traditional Courts Bill and its Implications

In February 2014, following years of resistance, the Traditional Courts Bill (TCB), was allowed to lapse in Parliament. This followed intense opposition by citizens in rural areas, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities (DWCPD) and other institutions in the public consultations held by Parliament on the Bill. Despite significant structural and procedural obstacles to participation in these consultations, including the fact that the state assisted only traditional leaders to attend public hearings, many people in rural areas gave eloquent inputs on the Bill. Even though the official word is that the Bill simply lapsed, this is a direct consequence of this national resistance. It is a victory for the thousands of people who opposed the Bill, for the millions of people who will not be forced to live under the separate legal system that the Bill had proposed, and for South Africa's democratic structures which demonstrated responsiveness to public outcry.

The De(con)struction of Black/White Binaries: Critiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and Other Stories of the Color Line

The De(con)struction of Black/White BinariesCritiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and Other Stories of the Color Line Tanfer Emin Tunc (bio) When asked to elaborate on the “Negro Problem,” or the co-existence of racial inequality and democracy in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois conveyed that the “’Negro problem’ of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Kelly Miller, his contemporary and fellow National Association for the Advancement of Colored People activist, proposed a radical solution to this American dilemma: the “Negro must get along, get white, or get out” (qtd. in Brown 275). Thus the official word that African Americans received from the NAACP, arguably the most influential civil rights organization of the early-twentieth century, was that the color line, or the divide along racial lines (usually black and white), would dominate the lives of African Americans for the next hundred years. Moreover, only three solutions existed: “get along” (accommodate); “get white” (assimilate); or “get out” (leave the United States), which many individuals, including artists such as Josephine Baker, eventually did. Miller’s second solution to the Negro problem—”get white”—caused the greatest controversy within the black intellectual community for obvious reasons. Many activists, including Marcus Garvey and his supporters, believed that the future of African Americans lay not in their ability to disappear into the white race, but in their blackness—that is, their ability to resist “miscegenation” and the dominant racial hegemony of the United States. The battle that emerged along the color line during the turn of the twentieth century was chronicled in American literature, specifically through the works of writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt who devoted his entire career to the “Negro problem” (See Wright and Glass). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, but raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Euro-American in appearance but of African American heritage, Chesnutt straddled multiple worlds: North, South, black, and white. Early on in his life, he developed a double consciousness which shaped his career as a fiction writer, essayist, pedagogue, political commentator, lawyer, and legal stenographer at a time when African Americans could not even serve on juries or testify on their own behalf. This double consciousness also influenced his personal life, which he spent in the interstices of the black and white worlds (Ferguson, Introduction 2–3). Chesnutt maintained that because of the intractable racism of American society, the solution to the “Negro problem” lay not in one of Miller’s three solutions, but in the hands of middle class, educated, progressive “color line” blacks such as himself—individuals who transcended categorization by straddling the racial and cultural divide, especially between urban whites and rural blacks (Ferguson, Introduction 5; Ferguson, “Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks” 113). Moreover, “Chesnutt’s recognition of, and [End Page 676] emphasis on, these interstices, the in-between-ness of race, disturb[ed] turn-of-the-century race science; they exposed the color line as flexible and mutable, a barrier with real social consequences, but nevertheless a biological fiction” (Toth 77). In essays such as “What Is a White Man?” and “The Future American,” Chesnutt describes race as “a modern invention of white people to perpetuate the color line.” He believed that racial fusion or “amalgamation” would eventually (when racist legal restrictions on interracial marriage were revoked) bring an end to race as a category of identity by creating a mestizo, all-inclusive, “future American ethnic type” who defied boundaries: “there would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals” (qtd. in McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232). Because, as he argued, whiteness was a cultural fiction (“black and Indian blood” already flowed in the veins of many Southern whites), Chesnutt’s utopic vision of American race relations, and plan for the elimination of prejudice and “racial discord,” hinged not on peoples of color assimilating into the dominant white race, which he believed was already “impure,” but in the flexibility and adaptability of hybridity (McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232; Fleischmann...

Music Therapy for Mexican American Children: Cultural Implications and Practical Considerations

Mi agua, mi sangre read the tattoo of a young American, water, my blood. This tattoo, shared by her siblings, symbolizes how her family's roots, heritage, and culture always will be that of Mexico, even though they live in America. This is just one of many cultural identities found among Americans. Because Mexico has such rich and expansive traditions filled with musicality, family, and spirituality, there is a great deal of variability from one person to the next regarding preferences, acculturation, and identity.Since Hispanics make up the largest minority and are still growing in number in the United States, music therapists are likely to encounter individuals with this background in their professional and personal lives (Owens, 2006). Developing sensitivity to the cultural identity of Hispanic clients is challenging because there are vast differences between Hispanic cultures; this can sometimes lead to misunderstandings (McCaffrey, 2007). While other Hispanic countries may share some values and ideals mentioned in this article, this article focuses primarily upon culture, which itself is distinct from culture1 (Castro, 2001; De Varona, 1996).Research indicates that music therapists consider multicultural education of increasing importance in America (Chase, 2003a; Darrow, 1 998; Shapiro, 2005; Toppozada, 1995). Additionally, administering culturally appropriate therapy is part of the Music Therapy Association professional competencies (14.4, 1 5.4, 15.5: AMTA, 2009). Unfortunately, only one article exists within music therapy literature regarding cultural competence specific to Americans, and it focuses on migrant workers (Schwantes, 2010). The majority of music therapy articles on cultural competency address general principles (Chase, 2003a,b; Darrow, 1 998; Moreno, 1 988; Shapiro, 2005; Toppozada, T 995) or focus on other unique cultures (Chase, 2003b; Froman, 2009; Moreno, 1988). A review of literature revealed no extant music therapy literature regarding children, including musical preferences, cultural mores, and implications for clinical practice.This article is divided into three parts. The first section will describe basic information about chosen salient features of the population. The second part focuses on the musical culture of Americans and implications for music therapy with children and their families. The third part discusses the Spanish language barrier, bilingual classrooms, and implications for the music therapist.Part I: Description Of The Population In The U.S.There are 28,000,000 Mexicans and Americans living in America, accounting for 1 0 percent of the nation and 65 percent of the Hispanic population (Owens, 2006). This steadily increasing population resides in all areas of the country, but predominately California, Arizona, Illinois, and Texas (Owens, 2006). This article focuses on individuals with descent, regardless of when their family came to America or if their family has lived here from the time that parts of America belonged to Mexico.The term Mexican American is used in this article to describe individuals living in America who were born in Mexico or are descendents of people born in Mexico. For the purposes of this article, the term Hispanic will be used because it is the official word used by the U. S government (Owens, 2006). However, appropriate use of certain terms will vary from person to person; therefore, the first step is learning how each term is usually defined.TerminologyChicano/a, Hispanic, Latino/a, Mexicano/a, American, and Tejano/a are the most widely used terms to identify individuals from descent (McCaffrey, 2007; Tatum, 2001 ; Telles ?Si Ortiz, 2008). While each term has a dictionary definition, actual use of these words is not consistent. These words can carry sentimental, generational, historical, geographical and political implications (De Varona, 1996; McCaffrey, 2007; Tatum, 2001). …

Sports Injury Prevention Failure

All the warning signs were there: a $110-million luge track that turned out to be faster than the designer planned. There were several incidents prior to the Olympics in February 2010 that suggested that the track was not safe. A Hungarian slider was knocked unconscious the day before the fatal accident, while traveling at speeds in excess of 90 mph. Two days prior to the tragedy, a Swiss bobsled medal favorite withdrew from competition after sustaining a concussion and other injuries on a training run. Metal beams within 5 feet of the 98-mph track were not only exposed but not padded. Finally, a 21-year-old luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, told his father that he feared the track. Tragedy struck on Friday, February 12, 2010, just 7 hours before the official start of the Olympic Games at a training run at Blackcomb Mountain in Whistler, British Columbia. The young luger was on the final curve, number 16, called Thunderbird, when his sled climbed the wall, catapulting him off the track and into a steel beam. Emergency crews were at his side almost immediately, but anyone who witnessed the crash realized what the outcome would be. Protective equipment, including the best-made helmets, cannot protect human beings at those speeds when crashing into immovable objects such as steel beams. The Olympic Games opened as planned that fateful day on a very somber note. The remaining Georgian athletes wore black armbands at the Opening Ceremony and were greeted by a standing ovation in memory of their lost teammate and fellow Olympian. Olympic officials were visibly shaken as the second-guessing began. Luge officials met late into that night to determine if competition could begin the next day. Multiple factors were discussed, including the weather at Whistler Mountain, which was warm and rainy. Although rain can make ice dangerously slick, the warm weather should have softened and slowed the course. Three years before the Olympic track was built at Whistler, the organizers of the games were told that the track would send racers through the course at record speeds, prompting 2 modifications of the course. After the Whistler course was completed in 2007, promotional materials called it “violent and rough . . . and not for the faint of heart.” (Wall Street Journal, Saturday, February 12, 2010). The Whistler Sliding Center course featured 20° slopes, almost 500 feet of vertical drop over its 1500-yard length, and is the steepest of the world’s 15 international sliding venues. The chief executive of the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation emphasized the inherent dangers of the sport, saying that pushing for higher speeds is the nature of the luge. The International Luge Federation spokesman, Wolfgang Harder, called for safety changes to the track after the World Cup Competition in February 2009. Yet, after the fatal accident, the official word was that the young luger had failed to control his sled. In the aftermath, IOC chief Jacques Rogge said that “everyone was responsible” for the young luger’s death (Wall Street Journal, Thursday, February 26, 2010) and that the “IOC had a moral but not legal responsibility for the death.” Fatal accidents are not uncommon in the winter sports venue. Four occurred between 1964 and 1992; only one of those was from the luge. Three groups continue to investigate the fatal accident: the coroner, the Canadian police, and the Bobsled Federation. What other factors will be uncovered is not yet known, but this we do know: the luger was traveling very fast and the track had some dangerous features. The toughest luge run of the Olympic Games may have come from the first luger to go through the course after the accident. Tony Benshoof, a top US medal hopeful, was the slider. He cruised through a modified track without incident, no doubt with mixed thoughts and a heavy heart. Benshoof navigated a shortened course, which began at the women’s start. Three turns were eliminated to slow down the racers; the ice on the track was modified to prevent lugers from climbing the wall; 12-foot-high wooden barriers were erected around curves; and metal beams were padded. Before the Olympic Games in Vancouver ended, IOC president Jacques Rogge wrote a letter to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games organizers in Sochi, Russia, asking them to put “safety first” (Wall Street Journal, Friday, February 26, 2010) Hopefully, that will be the case. In the end, it is hard not to ask why this tragedy had to happen. All the warning signs appeared to be there: the speed, the warnings, the injuries. It may be our own fascination with speed seen in so many other venues that convinces athletes, coaches, designers, and organizers to venture into dangerous territory. Let’s all hope that we can learn from this unfortunate tragedy.

“Unapproved Road”: Poetic Roadblocks and Animal Traffic in Paul Muldoon

I. Cross-border Traffic and Roads Paul Muldoon's Unapproved lifts its title from the official word on Irish border traffic. Four years after partition created a land border between the newly formed Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1922, and three years after the 1923 customs barrier instituted a parallel economic partition (Nash and Reid 272), the Free State's 1926 Statutory Rules on Road Signs and Traffic Signals Regulations declared that Where a road crosses the frontier the approach to the frontier shall be indicated by a direction sign to be erected ... at a point one quarter of a mile from the frontier. Whether traffic is or is not permitted to cross the frontier on the road shall be indicated ... by the words road, or unapproved road, the case may require. (Government of Ireland) The repetition of specific words in these rules and regulations is already complicit with material circulation, given their apparent power to make the border itself visible (from a distance of one-quarter mile) and to permit or prevent cross-border traffic, whether human, automobile, or other. (1) By importing its title across the border's troubled history, Muldoon's Unapproved itself smuggles into lyric poetry the persistent political tensions and capital motivations of border traffic and so presents the two crossover critical opportunities that I take up in this paper. The first is generic; the second topical. At least since John Stuart Mill's definitive and defensive What is Poetry? (1833) and culminating in New Criticism a century later, the genre has been defined habitually and read lyrically if separate and separable from any historical, material, and economic contingency. (2) But rather than remove Muldoon's border poem (among others) from circulation by reading it an autonomous or even autopoietic lyric (Jackson 56), I will read it to reveal the genre's inevitable traffic in a larger economy, approved or not. (3) Correlated to this generic traffic, Unapproved also pre-empts any immobilization of the Irish border if exclusively political or statically symbolic. In their recent Border Crossings, Catherine Nash and Bryonie Reid address the border's changing cultural, material, and economic significance throughout the twentieth century and encourage a reading of its double meaning as material and imagined, literal and (267). I add a literary and theoretical register to their call by focusing on the ways in which poetic and capital traffic in words and goods--especially of the illicit or invisible kind--crosses or remains stalled at the Irish and Muldoonian borders. Besides redirecting genre and border studies, crossing poetic with capital traffic at the border can reveal the inevitable accidents and effects of their shared but ironically inverse logic: a desire for automobile circulation if natural and perpetual (without borders), yet perpetually foiled by its own vehicle made visible. I examine this cross-border traffic particularly through the vehicle of the animal, which figures doubly in the logics of poetic and capital circulation: in the movement of animal figures or alongside vehicles within Muldoon's poems (4) and against the background of smuggling material animals and goods--from cows and cigarettes to electronics and guns--across the Irish border (also in and vehicles). The animal and animals appear a common and largely invisible means to poetic and capital ends, otherwise imagined to be self-starting and self-perpetuating (that is, automobile). (5) In the same way that material animals grease the wheels of capital's cross-border circulation, so their figurative counterparts seem to ease linguistic traffic, specifically vehicles through which to render their poetry in motion natural or primal. Critically and poetically, each of Muldoon's poems dramatizes the tensions (and collisions) within this fantasy of perpetual and autonomous motion by literalizing it in the otherwise allegorical vehicle, be it animal, automobile, or both. …

Mother’s Day, 2003, Flying Westward, and: Jeanne d’Arc, Imprisoned, and: The Changeling

Mother’s Day, 2003, Flying Westward, and: Jeanne d’Arc, Imprisoned, and: The Changeling Sarah Kennedy (bio) Mother’s Day, 2003, Flying Westward An hour out of Gatwick, we’re cruising at however many feet—I can’t remember numbers—but, outside, clouds colonize the air, one dissident [End Page 101] shredded by our wing. The war is “won,” the casualties, well, they’re justified, our president’s convinced. I could read about postmodern fashion in this magazine, but it’s too hip. If I wanted deconstruction, I’d listen to the news. Today, they interviewed the parents of some soldiers stationed overseas, proud Americans, still sure we’re enlightening the Middle East. My daughters, to my shame, support the occupation, too. Dawn disappears behind the plane. I see nothing out there now but the jet-trail of other travelers vandalizing the sky. I’d like to turn, go back, fly again into Rome where pace flags brighten windowsills. But it’s too late. I’ve had my holiday, the family expects its mother home, not running around in European churches, praying God protect the world from us. It’s not evening yet, though we have lost the day, but our approach, descending through rain, looks dim, the West already settling, anticipating night. [End Page 102] Jeanne d’Arc, Imprisoned And they call me possessed—royals, clergy leaders of state circling and chanting die, my comrades, sisters and brothers, stunned dumb to imagine me lashed to a pole. Do they hope I will sprout horns or fly away? I have renounced the voices of the saints and for that lie—a moment’s fear—do I suffer what they call reprieve. Now English, now Latin, the message is always death when an earthly empire speaks. But I am baffled, fatigued. Have I mistranslated? St Catherine still whispers war in my ear, perhaps it is parable. Metaphor. Single girl in a world of politic kings. It’s slippery in here, which label must I wear today? Heretic, herald of wisdom, witch, woman who dares to wear men’s garments. Guards toss me dresses, then they threaten rape. Who wouldn’t choose breeches, I am skirted with evil, I am under surveillance, occupied. They’re at my door, hoping to catch a snatch of treasonous [End Page 103] speech, though the official word is that I only talk to myself. I will say no more than a prayer when they conjure up their terror, set a torch to my skin and press in for a better view of the fire. I see the godly ones stirring my ashes, measuring bone, adding a pinch of lime. And they call me touched, traitor to the Right. With my halo of pain, my sanctified mind, I am the holiest thing they know. The Changeling Testimony of Johanna Kennedy Burke at the trial of Michael Cleary for the murder of his wife, Bridget Boland Cleary, 1895 Are you a witch, are you a fairy, / Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary? –Schoolyard rhyme, County Tipperary Picture her now, no sheehoguey thing spirited from the mountain by fairies to cough and curse down her husband’s house. But neither my cousin Bridget. One gold earring still in place, black stockings on her charred legs, the rest a burned sack of meat and bones. I never liked her, I admit. Dress-proud. She made herself the word on every gossip’s tongue but [End Page 104] even I could see that a chest cold does not mark a woman for murder unless that drunk Jack Dunne is called in, and what did Michael expect from him, a fairy doctor, but “That is not Bridget Boland”? I think of her now, the fevered face, her fear when she pulled me down to the pillow to whisper, “He’s making a changeling of me.” I saw only tuberculosis, blood on her mouth, and if her husband was brutal, well, I saw only the bed she had made and would have to lie in. Forgive me, I was asleep when he doused her with the paraffin, I should have seen it would come to that, the fire was in his...

Casualties of Reform

IN ALL the debate about what it will take to realize the grand promises of No Child Left Behind, we've somehow managed to miss the most important truth: it isn't going to work no matter how much money we feed it. The principles that drive NCLB are fundamentally flawed, and though it might achieve some good in the Third World conditions of our nation's worst schools, in places accustomed to success, performance levels will inevitably decline as all concerned discover that mediocrity has become the new excellence. This is a lesson we're learning the hard way here in New York, where our own school reform program, now nearly a decade old, not only embraces the same core principles as NCLB but even goes the feds one better. Not content to simply leave no New York child behind, we are holding each of them to new, higher standards in the process. In fact, when our reform bears full fruit--when all our high school students can pass the Regents Exams with a score of at least 65%--we will have honored the reformers' pledge to raise the bar for all our students. That's the official word, and by all official accounts the process is going splendidly. Test scores are up. The charts and graphs look good. Best of all, advocates for this test-them-till-they-bleed approach say the numbers the testing is generating are finally imposing accountability on an unruly system. But that's not how it looks down here in the classroom. What we see in practice are not higher standards, but lower standards. They're not lower for everybody all the time, but they're lower for such a large and significant portion of the population that it seems fair simply to say they're lower. And now, for growing numbers of teachers, particularly the older and crankier among us, our new, higher standards--a phrase difficult even to utter without first spitting on the ground--have many of us, sadly and for the first time, looking for the exit sign. And while that last bit of news might strike ardent teacher-bashers as an indication that the program is succeeding, even they should be able to appreciate the one special qualification that veteran teachers bring to the table when the subject is reform. Nobody has been reformed more than we have. We are the real experts in the field. Over the years we've been retrained, newly sensitized, paradigmatically shifted, and whatever else so much that many of us no longer even recognize this as the job we were originally hired to do. To us, the recent history of public education reads like a study in the grotesque distortions that can be wrought on a system subjected to endless helpings of well-intended expertise. In fact, those of us who were around two and three decades ago lived through the golden age of school reform, when the coming of each new year was marked by the annual Rites of Autumn: opening day and the ritual unveiling of that year's plan to rescue public education. In those heady days, legions of competing theorists angled for the grand prize, the opportunity to treat our classrooms as their real-life laboratories. Over the years, we've seen a great many of these beauties come and go--and sometimes even come back again, the second time with a new name and sponsor. Yet of all those well-intended failures, none can top this current crop for sheer destructive potential, no small claim in a system that's produced some truly memorable stinkers. Remember the self-esteem movement? Surely it was never meant to spawn a generation with such a disproportionate number of frightening young egotists, but it did. And nobody meant for the noble intentions of the special education reformers to evolve into a nightmare of expense and bureaucratic excess. But that happened too. We didn't bring that nonsense to the schoolhouse; we endured it. But our endurance was not without resistance. In truth, forced participation in those and so many other assaults on good sense inspired in many of us a long stealth campaign of mitigating the harm done by the worst such plans by simply ignoring them in the classroom while speaking of them to officials and in the correct jargon of the moment. …

Narrative Fiction in Galiza:1 The Long Path between Oblivion and Memory

Narrative Fiction in Galiza:1 The Long Path between Oblivion and Memory

Irony as a Form of Dissidence — the Poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak and Paul Muldoon

The article explores the use of irony as a form of linguistic dissidence in the poetry of a Polish poet, Stanislaw Baranczak, and a Northern Irish poet, Paul Muldoon. It offers an analysis of poems by both poets, written in the period between 1970 and 1990, and which expose political and social preoccupations of both countries at the time. It shows that the ironic stance of both speakers serves as a dissenting voice against the politics of the state as well as the social situation in both countries, while the employment of extra-literary language serves the purpose of discrediting the "official word".

The Public Interest Obligations Initiative: Lost in the Digital Television Shuffle

Amidst all the discussion of digital television issues, such as transition deadlines, mandatory tuners, and must-carry provisions, one very important issue has fallen off of policymakers' radar screens. That is the issue of the public interest obligations of digital broadcasters. Back in 1997, this issue was front and center in the digital television policy arena. Unfortunately, today the public interest obligations issue has been forced aside by changes in the political climate and by a variety of persistent technical and economic complications. However, given the time, resources, and effort being devoted to completing the digital television transition, policymakers must regain their focus on the public interest obligations issue if the video service is to make a meaningful contribution to the media system and to American political and cultural life. In March 1997, the Clinton Administration established the Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. The Committee--a mix of industry executives, academics, and public interest advocates--was charged with the task of determining how the principles of public trusteeship that have governed broadcast television for more than 70 years should be applied in the new television environment (Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters, 1998, p. 136). The Committee met eight times over the next 15 months in different venues around the country to solicit input from the general public and from outside experts, and ultimately produced a set of recommendations that was submitted to the White House. These recommendations addressed a variety of issues, such as disability access, the promotion of diversity, disaster warnings, funding for public broadcasting, and the establishment of a voluntary code of conduct for broadcasters. The Committee's report did not, for the most part, move very far beyond the regulatory framework and requirements that have been in place for analog broadcasters, and generally avoided providing specific details in regards to its recommendations. The report, however, did include the very controversial recommendation that digital broadcasters be required to provide five minutes of free air time to political candidates each night during the 30 days before an election. With its combination of well-established and radical new public interest recommendations, the Advisory Committee's report represented an important starting point for a meaningful examination and reassessment of how broadcast television could better contribute to American political and cultural life. The Committee's report prompted an FCC Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on digital broadcasters' public interest obligations (Federal Communications Commission, 1999). Then-FCC Chairman William Kennard originally had planned to issue a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) that included the Advisory Committee's free air time proposal. Congress reacted negatively to the free air time proposal, going so far as to threaten to cut the FCC's budget. Congress' reaction led Chairman Kennard to introduce a more tentative Notice of Inquiry instead of the NPRM. In the NOI, the Commission sought comment on a wide variety of issues, including the free air time proposal and most of the Advisory Committee's other proposals as well, but did not propose specific rules. This NOI led to an NPRM that focused specifically on children's television obligations for digital broadcasters (Federal Communications Commission, 2000). The FCC has issued no further decisions or rules on the variety of public interest obligation issues raised in the NOI and the children's television NPRM. The last official word on the public interest obligations issue came from then-Chairman Kennard's (2001) Report to Congress on the Public Interest Obligations of Television Broadcasters as they Transition to Digital Television. In this report, Kennard presented a variety of recommendations, including a minimum public affairs programming requirement (Napoli, 2001b), the reinstitution of community ascertainment requirements, and a five-minute free air time requirement for political candidates. …

A Day That Will Live In … ?

A Day That Will Live In … ?

Silences and Lies: How the Industrial Fishery Constrained Voices of Ecological Conservation

In combination with historical research, this paper uses interviews of fishers, fishery workers, scientists, and Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) enforcers and observers to recount the communication processes that occurred before the 1992 collapse of the cod fishery in Atlantic Canada. As the fishery industrialized over the course of the twentieth century, those who worked in the industry became increasingly segregated. Distinct discursive realms emerged, among them "fishers' vernacular," "scientific language," "product talk," and DFO's "official word." There was little dialogue between the groups and little collective opposition to the overfishing. DFO's "official word" claimed that the stocks were strong despite protestation to the contrary from several fishers' groups and DFO's own scientists. The outcome for the region was economically and ecologically devastating.

The Official Word vs. the Horse s Mouth: Descriptions of Wisconsin for the German Emigrant in the 1850s

The Official Word vs. the Horse s Mouth: Descriptions of Wisconsin for the German Emigrant in the 1850s

‘Twisted relations’: Method and meaning in Britten's Billy Budd

In Herman Melville's story, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the potentially mutinous reaction of the Bellipotent's crew to Billy's execution is quelled by a call to order:For suddenly the drum beat to quarters, which familiar sound happening at least twice every day, had upon the present occasion a signal peremptoriness in it. True martial discipline long continued superinduces in average man a sort of impulse whose operation at the official word of command much resembles in its promptitude the effect of an instinct.