Work Of Park Research Articles

Practicing Motherhood and Forming Matrilineal Solidarity: A Counter-cultural Response to the Patrilineal Confucian Family in the Works of Park Wansuh (1931–2011)

This paper analyzes four fictional works by Park Wansuh (1931–2011) that thematize the issue of son preference and sex-selective abortion against the background of the recent decriminalization of abortion. Prior to 2021, although abortion was illegal in Korea it was widely practiced, providing the environment in which sex-selective abortion could also be accessed. However, in arguing for women's reproductive rights, feminists have largely relied on Western discourse without considering the implications of this local practice that allowed women the choice without the legal rights. As shown in Park's works, in reality, both abortion and sex-selective abortion served the modernization of the patrilineal Confucian family as it faced the normativization of the monogamous relationship. In penalizing unmarried pregnant women and sonless married women, the popular religious practice of Confucian patriarchy overrode the illegality of abortion and made it culturally acceptable. Against this practice, and also against feminist discourse, Park's works argue for women's right to choose to become mothers regardless of marital status or sex of the fetus. Park's argument is all the more informative for local practice as it does not rely on the Christian narrative of life but on the virtuous motherhood of Confucian practice and on her relationship with her mother-in-law, who was not Christian but whose death eventually led Park to becoming a Catholic.

Planted in the Shadows: Centering Sexual Violence in Prairie Lotus, Little House on the Prairie, and Oliver Optic's Hope and Have

Criticism of Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus (2020) has focused on this text as a rewriting of Little House on the Prairie, particularly the idea that this work—which stars an Asian American heroine—corrects the more troubling aspects of Little House. This essay instead focuses on the sexual violence that seeps into and concludes Park's work. I examine this alongside a 19th century text by Oliver Optic that also features sexual violence in the American West; in so doing I reframe Prairie Lotus as a text worth examining as a reflection of the history of sexualized violence against Asian American women and girls.

Introduction: How to Make a Map

IntroductionHow to Make a Map Sara K. Day My finger travels the course marked in red Sharpie,the paper crisp beneath my finger. Sani pulls up a list of touristy things on his phone. It's not a road trip if we don't explore;Backtrack and get a little lost. —Amber McBride, Me (Moth) In her verse novel Me (Moth), Amber McBride follows the title character and her traveling companion Sani as they undertake a pivotal road trip from Virginia to New Mexico. Along the way, the pair stops at several historical landmarks, natural wonders, and manmade oddities, though the greatest emphasis is placed not on the places themselves but how Moth and Sani occupy these spaces with an awareness of their rootedness in the past, both personal and political. Throughout their trip, they are mapping their world—these physical locations and the roads and borders between them, as well as their understanding of where they belong. Along the way, they also come to the realization that there's not always a road to follow or a clear sense of how to get where you're going, even if you know where you want to be. Recognizing the value in exploration, Moth thinks, "Each pit stop [is] a treasure on the map." Like many road trip novels, Me (Moth) is about directions and destinations, but it is also about rethinking how lines have been drawn and by whom. What connects one place to another? What connects us to places? What connects us to each other? The difficulty Moth and Sani face in answering these questions is brought into relief by their awareness of the struggles adults in the novel face as they attempt to navigate their own lives. At the same time, the teens grapple with the ways in which those who have gone before may still shape our paths. Of course, these concerns are hardly unique to young readers; they're also crucial to the work we do in reading, analyzing, and teaching texts for children and young adults. The questions that launch a fictional road trip also resonate [End Page 247] with us as scholars looking across the landscape of texts for and about young people, thinking about connections, locating ourselves in relationship to what has come before, setting out to find something and help others who will come after. The four articles in this issue offer us especially useful examples of how to make maps, identify directions forward, mark paths to follow in our approaches to children's and young adult literature. In "Planted in the Shadows: Centering Sexual Violence in Prairie Lotus, Little House on the Prairie, and Oliver Optic's Hope and Have," Abigail S. Woodward reflects on the ways in which lessons from the past may help us approach current and future texts more intentionally. As Woodward notes, upon its release in 2020, Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus immediately generated critical response that focuses—in some cases, almost exclusively—on its role as a corrective to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. This article complicates that one-to-one comparison by revisiting the now largely forgotten work of Oliver Optic both to highlight the role of sexual violence across these texts and to urge children's literature scholars and reviewers to resist readings that ultimately flatten Park's work. In the process, Woodward follows a map set out by Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck that works to problematize the "reproduction or resistance" dichotomy that often informs approaches to social injustice and inequality. Wesley Jacques's article "Toward a Minor Lit: Reading Power in Douglass, Caulfield, and Breedlove" explores the powerful disruption made possible by thinking about children's and young adult literature as a minor lit. By taking up and refreshing Deleuze and Guattari's ideas about minor literatures in conversation with children's literature scholarship about power, Jacques demonstrates that "a minor lit speaks to the collective literary value of minor subjects, the many evocations of childhood and adolescence in literature as an assemblage of meaning that resists traditional interpretation." Moreover, by performing close readings that engage and destabilize familiar takes on works by Frederick Douglass, J. D. Salinger, and...

Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries ed. by Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young (review)

Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young, eds. Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries. London: Routledge, 2014. Pp. xii + 228. $130.00. Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young introduce their book of interviews and commentaries on playwright Suzan-Lori Parks with an essay titled Watch Me Work, which takes its name from one of Parks's more recent performance projects in which she sits on an elevated platform in the lobby of a theatre and performs the act of playwriting for anyone to watch. This title also moves to the central objective of Suzan-Lori Parks in Person, which is to provide primary insight into the methods, techniques, and inspirations for Parks's prolific and award-winning body of work. As they set the stage for her thoughts, confessions, and revelations in the collected interviews, Kolin and Young bring focus to Parks's literary influences (which include Baldwin, Kennedy, Joyce, and Faulkner), the stylistic innovations of her new ... stage and her sustained mission to fill the great (w)hole of through radical inclusion across her work from 1985 to 2013(1,5). The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 includes eighteen interviews with Parks and her collaborators, and part 2 consists of commentaries from the directors who have worked most closely with her or critics and scholars who have distinguished themselves through their work on Parks's drama (151). The interviews in part 1 are organized chronologically, from a 1992 piece that considers the groundbreaking linguistic work she creates in The Death of the Last Negro in the Whole Entire World at Yale Repertory Theatre to a 2011 conversation with Parks the director/playwright as she prepares The Book of Grace for the ZACH Theatre premiere. The book also moves beyond newspaper interviews that surround specific productions to include pieces from magazines, collected essays, academic journals, and even a one-on-one piece where Parks interviews Adrienne Kennedy, a playwright who had a profound effect on her own writing. A large portion of the commentaries in part 2 are transcribed from a Hunter College symposium on Parks's work in 2004. One of the panels at the symposium featured critics and scholars including Robert Brustein and Alisa Solomon, and the other panel focused on the directors who have staged the premieres of Parks s major works, including Richard Foreman and Liz Diamond. In total, Suzan-Lori Parks in Person is an engaging work that offers insights into the playwright's mind and work, from her undergraduate thesis to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog and her international project 365 Days/365 Plays. Kolin and Young provide texts that explore not only how she works but also how she develops seeds of ideas into fully realized productions. The one mildly frustrating aspect of the book is that, by the nature of the art of interviewing, the questions and the answers in the eighteen interviews often repeat and overlap. This happens most often when there are multiple interviews from the same period or surrounding the same play, with Parks offering anecdotes about the writing process or illuminating some aspect of history that inspired the work. However, the repetitions that develop throughout Parks's own narrative across the book actually become the threads that weave together the major themes and effects of her writing. In particular, three threads become prominent in the discussion of her writing: her use of language, her stylistic choices, and the way she makes and mines history (9). From the beginning of Parks's interactions with critics, scholars, and audiences, the way she uses language to delineate a character's race, class, and emotional trajectory has been a marker of her innovative genius. Not only does Parks strive to explore African American linguistic sound, rhythm, and pattern, but she imbues the language with specificity, emotion, and meaning, creating poetic dialogue that ranges from heartfelt plaintive yearnings to blistering condemnations (35,69). …

Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works ed. by Philip C. Kolin (review)

Reviewed by: Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works ed. by Philip C. Kolin Stefanie A. Jones Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; pp. 220. Editor Philip Kolin's collection Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works covers a wide range of the playwright's work, investigating topics as various as hip-hop and jazz, the place and power of the writer, and critiques of capitalism, as well as expected "Parksian" (3) themes like the "Great Hole of History" (Parks's dual conception of American history as simultaneously a place and a lack) and stylistic techniques like "Rep & Rev" (repetition and revision) and "Radical Inclusion" (Parks's concept that the playwright should welcome and fully engage every idea that comes to mind). Taken collectively, the essays reveal several unifying threads that knit the broad topical range of Parks's work into a comprehensive oeuvre. The volume's first chapter, Kolin's "Puck's Magic Mojo: The Achievements of Suzan-Lori Parks," provides biographical and critical background on Parks and identifies several key themes in her work. Comparing her to Shakespeare's Puck, Kolin discusses the metatheatricality and showmanship of her work, revealing it to be a realm of spectacle and linguistic experimentation that invites us to explore both its fictional worlds and the social world they model. Rena Fraden's "Everything and Nothing: The Political and Religious Nature of Suzan-Lori Parks's 'Radical Inclusion'" follows with a consideration of politics and religion in Parks's plays, understanding the playwright's strategy of Radical Inclusion [End Page 299] to be directed toward the creation of a politics of world citizenship and a wide embrace of spiritual and religious traditions. Arguing that the writing of 365 Days/365 Plays was a "religious and political act" (23), Fraden's essay resonates with Jennifer Larson's contribution, "Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Days/365 Plays: A (W)hole New Approach to Theatre," which appears later in the book. In it, Larson compares the concept of the "Great Hole of History" from The America Play to its more inclusive appearances in 365 Plays/365 Days, permitting the (w)hole to function as a "formal metaphor" (138) for history that includes a place for the writer. Jon Dietrick's essay "'A Full Refund Aint Enough': Money in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red Letter Plays" identifies the characters' need for money as a driving force in Fucking A and In the Blood. Dietrick finds that the characters' agency is limited by economic demands, which nonetheless stimulate their desire for stability in an unstable world. Because of this desire, the characters struggle to establish a fixed relationship between the symbolic and the real, allowing economic value to supplant other forms of worth, including the value of human life. In her piece, Nicole Hodges Persley expands jazzbased analyses of Parks's history plays by including the hip-hop techniques of sampling and remixing to reconsider her treatment of repetition. Building on previous scholarship on Rep & Rev, Persley reframes moments of repetition as sampled or borrowed from historical and intertextual referents (or from within each play) and remixed or used differently. She explores how Parks uses this method to expose or emphasize historical injustices and their continuing impact, especially when categories of racial subjugation are reinscribed on the body. Jochen Achilles likewise complicates our understanding of Rep & Rev in "Does Reshuffling the Cards Change the Game? Structures of Play in Parks's Topdog/Underdog." Drawing on game theory, Achilles finds that Parks stages and reframes two major kinds of ludic interaction—determinative play and free play—in order to pose questions about who retains symbolic power. Attending to the performance history of Parks's work, Shawn-Marie Garrett's "'For the Love of the Venus': Suzan-Lori Parks, Richard Foreman, and the Premiere of Venus" argues that Richard Foreman's direction of the 1996 world premiere of Venus should not be considered the definitive interpretation of Parks's play. Documenting differences in Parks's and Foreman's interpretations, Garrett claims that the latter's production, while honoring the playwright's...

The Theater of Hustle and the Hustle of Theater: Play, Player, and Played in Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle. So long, Red. --The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) None of Suzan-Lori Parks's plays is more highly regarded than Topdog/Underdog (2001), for which Parks became, in 2002, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Topdog features two characters, brothers named Lincoln and Booth, whose names prefigure the play's outcome and whose relationship drives its portrayal of wounds and healing. (1) Lincoln, the older brother, performs in a sideshow act where he impersonates his namesake, affording patrons the opportunity to play John Wilkes Booth, who was himself actor, by reenacting the famous assassination at Ford's Theatre. One of Lincoln's regular customers adds a touch of philosophy to his part of the performance, whispering into Lincoln's fight ear just before he shoots him in the left. As the brothers recount this episode, they split one of the play's most resonant and evocative lines: BOOTH. Whatd he say, that one time? Yr only yrself-- LINCOLN. --when no ones watching, yeah. (34) The line is fitting inasmuch as it is shared: the two brothers divide it just as they divide their time on stage, alternating between topdog and underdog, player and played. The line is also fitting inasmuch as it is borrowed, originating not with either brother but rather with a shadowy figure, Lincoln's Best Customer (33). The very idea of African American Abraham Lincoln impersonator, moreover, is one that Parks borrows from herself: one of her earlier works, The America Play (1994), features a similar, though not identical, character. Thus one gleans the many borrowings in Parks's work and the many plays within her plays. (2) While such metatheatrical twists and turns are a hallmark of Parks's experimental style, they run counter to the content of the brothers' shared line, which implies a private, autonomous identity that emerges only in solitude--a concept distinctly out o place on Parks's stage, where it seems that one can only be oneself precisely when others are watching. (3) In Topdog, as in her other works, Parks flaunts a concept of identity that is shared and borrowed, social and theatrical; identity is a role one performs publicly for audience rather than a private essence one contains inside. The Best Customer implies, contrariwise, that identity is a matter more of authenticity than performativity, of signified ultimately trumping signifier. Such understanding would corroborate the reception of Topdog as Parks's turn away from her signature postmodern metatheater to a more traditional naturalistic drama. However, if one suspects, as this essay suggests, that Lincoln's Best Customer is actually his brother, that it is Booth playing Booth to Lincoln's Lincoln, then the plays within Parks's play only proliferate in this line, whose performative utterance belies its denotative content. Perhaps even, or especially, that which appears most natural in Parks's play is a performance, or a hustle. Topdog represents both apex and a swerve in Parks's career, for just when it seemed that everyone was watching--the play not only landed Parks a Pulitzer, it also landed her on Broadway--Suzan-Lori Parks seemed not to be herself. (4) Parks's early work audaciously breaks with traditional dramatic structure in order to explore the performativity of identity and the theatricality of history. If indeed her experimental style is an acquired taste (Bigsby 311), that may be because it presents what George C. Wolfe, who has directed a number of Parks's plays, including Topdog/ Underdog, describes as a not-easy-to-digest vision of American history, black culture, the family (qtd. in Als 79). Topdog, however, struck reviewers as more palatable, manifesting certain naturalistic features more reminiscent of a play such as A Raisin in the Sun than of some of Parks's earlier works. …

Factors Associated with Hospital Bankruptcies: A Political and Economic Framework

Between 2000 and 2006, 42 U.S. acute care hospitals filed for bankruptcy protection under federal law. This article explores hospital bankruptcies over a six-year period. Bankrupt hospitals are compared with their competitors, and hospitals surviving bankruptcy are compared with those organizations that eventually close. Finally, this article identifies nonfinancial factors associated with the filings and categorizes these factors into a political and economic framework. A literature review of hospital trade publications is used to identify organizations filing for bankruptcy during this period. Data gathered from these resources are used in concert with American Hospital Association data to identify hospital characteristics and publicly available information on factors surrounding hospital bankruptcy filings. Data on the status of hospitals after filing are also collected to determine whether bankruptcy reorganization is successful or results in hospital closure. Results indicate that 67 percent of hospitals filing for bankruptcy during this time eventually ceased operating. Bankrupt hospitals are smaller than their competitors. They are also less likely to belong to a system and more likely to be investor owned. Factors associated with filing organizations are placed into a political and economic framework derived from Park's work on municipal bankruptcy filings. Common nonfinancial factors associated with hospital bankruptcies include mismanagement, increased competition, and reimbursement changes.

Civilisation, Culture and the Hybrid Self in the work of Robert Ezra Park

Contemporary discussions on hybridity in cultural and ethnic studies have overlooked the work of the Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park. Park's idea of the “marginal man” and his work on cultural and racial hybridity can shed further light on the construction and representation of the hybrid self. The contribution that Park has made to a social theory of hybridity has been overshadowed by research conducted within post-colonial and cultural studies. I do not suggest that recent conceptualisations of hybridity are inadequate; rather that Park has something to contribute to contemporary accounts and in some cases anticipates some of the themes and issues surrounding the concept of hybridity. The following examination connects Park's work on hybridity with ideas such as civilisation, culture and modernity and argues that a mild form of primitivism underlines his notion of the “marginal man”.

A dialectic of racial enlightenment

For over a quarter of a century, Stanford M. Lyman has been engaged in a dialogue with the ghost of Robert E. Park. His oft-cited essay on Park's race relations cycle constitutes his initial meditation on the continued rele? vance of the "ambiguous generality" that characterizes Park's formulation of a processual four-stage model of race relations. Lyman (1968) argued at that time that despite the problematic dichotomy that Park introduces by, in effect, separating process from events, his work nonetheless has much to offer those engaged in current efforts to comprehend the differential potentials for conflictual and harmonious race relations. Since the essay was primarily a critique, the brief on behalf of the relevancy of Park's model was necessarily no more than a skeletal outline. Militarism, Imperialism and Racism (1992) puts flesh on the bones. To appreciate the Park that emerges from Lyman's most recent archival forays and hermeneutical endeavors, it is important to contextualize this volume in terms of recent exegetical work by a range of other scholars. In recent years we have witnessed a widespread renewal of interest in the work of Robert E. Park, as sociologists and historians alike have sought to reassess his place in the history of the discipline, his role in shap? ing the form and content of the Chicago School, and the matter of whether or not his work is of enduring relevance to the discipline as it positions itself for the twenty-first century (Matthews, 1977; Raushenbush, 1979; Wacker, 1983; Vidich and Lyman, 1985; Faught, 1986; Harvey, 1987; Hel? mes-Hayes, 1987; Deegan, 1988; Lengermann, 1988; Smith, 1988; Kivisto, 1990; Lai, 1990). This interest in Park's work is somewhat surprising for at least two reasons. In the first place, Park's political and economic views ? or what com? mentators take his views to be ? have been the object of sustained criticism. Even the sympathetic former student, Horace Cayton, would de? pict Park's economic stance as "conservative, if not reactionary" (quoted

Robert E. Park's congo papers: A gothic perspective on capitalism and imperialism

In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's "work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's writings in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and the Gesammelte Aufs?tze zur Reliqionssocioloqie, and if he had studied and pondered Durkheim's and Mauss's writings."1 Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology ?he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s2?nor was he ignorant of the contributions of Durkheim and Mauss to sociological thought ?in the index to the famous "Green Bible," i.e., the Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Park and Ernest W. Burgess, to which Shils finds occasion to refer in another part of his essay,3 Durkheim is referenced in twenty-five places and Mauss in two.4 The problem does not arise because of any lacunae in Park's reading; indeed, Shils has misstated the issue. Currently, Park's work is in process of devaluation ? (e.g., Lewis Coser has consigned his efforts to those of "a great teacher who managed to inspire his students . . . [but who] wrote relatively little himself . . . [and who] was content ... to develop a series of general ideas and sensitizing concepts . . ,"5) ?and diminution ?(e.g., the fifteen references to Park in Neil Smelser's edition of The Handbook of Sociology mention, and then only briefly and usually to criticize, his conception of "emotional contagion"; his ecological and biotic orientation to the study

Robert E. Park and the Theoretical Content of Chicago Sociology: 1920–1940*

Drawing on the entire body of Robert E. Park's work published in the period 1921–1944, this paper describes his general theoretical system at three points in time: in 1921, between 1922 and 1929, and from 1930 to 1944. Park refined and altered his general theory of society over this period partly because of ambiguities in his original 1921 formulation and partly because of pressure from changing social and intellectual milieux. Park is treated as the leading theorist of the Chicago School of Sociology, and this account of his theoretical system is used as a base for assessing the validity of five different contemporary claims about the theoretical contributions of the Chicago School of Sociology.

Ferdinand Tönnies and Robert Park on Public Opinion: A Comparison and Analysis

Even if he did not intend it to be so, Park's work serves as an extensive critique of many of Tönnies' central concepts, contributing substantially to continuing discussion concerning social dynamics and social goals.

Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology

attention being paid to the complexity of his ideas, shifts in his concerns and changes in emphasis in many of these areas. Moreover, Matthews' interest in how Park's work reflects the svariety of doctrines current in a confusing and overcrowded period in the history of social thought' overshadows a concern for either what was original and creative in Park's outlook, or, the emergence of the innovative style of social research expressed in the monographs of his students. Thus, although Matthews has produced the best researched and most insightful study of Park to date, puzzlement regarding 'the rise and fall of the Chicago School' has by no means been put to rest. Barbara Ballis Lal Goldsmiths' College University of London

Manson Medal for Tropical Medical Research

THE Manson medal for tropical medical research, given triennially by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, has this year been awarded to Dr. Theobald Smith. In association with Kilborne in 1893, Theobald Smith showed that red-water fever in cattle is transmitted by ticks, and at the same time demonstrated the passage of infection through the ova of one generation of ticks to the next. This discovery proved that a protozoal parasite of mammals could be disseminated by the bite of a blood-sucking arthropod. Probably because Theobald Smith was dealing with a cattle rather than a human disease, this great event in the history of medicine received scant recognition, though it preceded the better-known work of Bruce on the transmission of sleeping sickness and that of Ross on malaria. Indeed, Theobald Smith was the first to transfer the insect transmission theory of protozoal disease from the realms of hypothesis to those of established fact. In 1904, Theobald Smith reported anaphylaetic symptoms in dogs and rabbits, and, in a letter to Ehrlich, wrote the original description of the classical anaphylactie shock in guinea-pigs often known as the Theobald Smith phenomenon. In 1907 he proved that it was possible to immunise guinea-pigs actively by the injections of a balanced mixture of diphtheria toxin and antitoxin, and two years later suggested further investigations of the method with the view of its ultimate application to human beings, thus anticipating Von Behring and Park's work by several years. The previous recipients of the Manson medal have been Sir David Bruce (1933), Senator Ettore Machiafava (1926), and Sir Ronald Ross (1929).