Popular Reading Research Articles

Ulysses as Self-Help Manual? James Joyce’s Strategic Populism

This essay uses “self-help” guides to James Joyce as an occasion to illuminate the buried history of modernism’s engagement with popular morality. It suggests that the birth of Joyce’s aesthetic—and, by extension, of modernism more broadly—is attributable to early twentieth-century debates over literature’s social use, debates that had far-reaching political and national implications. As a corollary, the essay undermines idealized portraits of “oracular” Joyce by showing Ulysses to be firmly a product of the contentions of its day. Far from a source of alienation, didacticism offers a means of reclaiming literature for popular readers.

On Byzantine origins of figural miniatures of Belgrade Alexandride

The late antique literary biography of Alexander the Great known as Pseudo-Callisthenes? Alexander Romance was remarkably popular reading both in Byzantium and in the West in the middle ages. This literary work was also translated into Serbian Slavonic. Two extensively illustrated manuscripts of the ?Serbian Alexandride?, and one decorated with only a few drawings are known. The paper discusses the iconographic features of the oldest of the known manuscripts, the so-called Belgrade Alexandride, which is commonly dated to the second half or the end of the fourteenth century. The research is particularly focused on the costumes of the depicted figures. The findings of the research suggest that the iconographic solutions of the miniatures are of Byzantine origin and that earlier views suggesting West-European influences on their shaping are not founded.

The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America

JAY WATSON University of Mississippi JAIME HARKER University of Mississippi The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America ON FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2005, OPRAH WINFREY MADE A STARTLING announcement: Oprah’s Book Club (OBC), her enormous reading group, had chosen for its summer selection three of William Faulkner’s most critically acclaimed novels. As I Lay Dying was scheduled for June, The Sound and the Fury for July, and Light in August, appropriately, for August. The program amounted to a whole “Summer of Faulkner,” as she billed it. Reactions were swift and for the most part skeptical. The mayor of Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, bookseller Richard Howorth, expressed doubts to The New York Times that Oprah’s readers would last the summer: “With a good reading-group leader, they’ll make it through ‘As I Lay Dying.’. . . But they’re going to start ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and say, ‘What is this?’” Howorth “then feigned throwing a book over his shoulder” (Wyatt). A writer for The Nation saluted Oprah’s seriousness of purpose but still expressed reservations: Faulkner? Oprah? Really? The announcement amounted to nothing less than a sneak attack on the whole idea of beach reading—and on the intelligentsia’s perception of [Winfrey] as the Queen of Midcult. . . . By proposing to read not one but three works by a dead white male whose prose laid siege to the conventions of narrative fiction, and whose furiously lyrical exploration of race and the American South still manages to unsettle readers, Oprah is taking a major gamble on her audience’s attention span and political sensitivities. (Tyree) From the start, then, it was clear that the promise and threat of the Summer of Faulkner lay in the encounter it was staging between an interpretive community consisting of hundreds of thousands of nonacademic readers and a writer alternately celebrated and vilified for his high modernist impenetrability. 356 Watson and Harker I How did Faulkner get here? What brought him to this juncture, at which a twenty-first-century media giant and popular tastemaker could seemingly set out to recover a trio of his modernist masterpieces for a popular reading audience? Was Faulkner’s work even in need of recovery for a general readership? Had he ever really gone away? Or could we understand the Summer of Faulkner instead as a reclamation of Faulkner’s work not so much for as on behalf of a mass audience to whom that work had been more or less continuously presented for seventy-five years, from the moment in September of 1930 when Faulkner, already the author of four published but little-read novels, placed his first short story with The Saturday Evening Post.?1 Evidence for this popular Faulkner, an artist engaged with and available to popular audiences up to and including Oprah’s huge online reading community, abounds if you just look in the right places. And a good place to begin is Faulkner’s career-long, eagerly pursued relationship with the Post, one of the largest-circulating US magazines of his era, where he published twenty stories and novel excerpts during his lifetime. Faulkner scholars like to cite the poor sales figures for his novels during the 1930s and early 1940s, his most fertile creative period, in order to present the writer as a misunderstood, underappreciated modernist genius, ahead of his time in the provincial US South and out of place in middlebrow America. But when Faulkner published in the Post during these same years, his work became available to millions of readers—indeed, tens of millions, if we take account of how “slicks” like thePostactuallycirculatedincontemporaryhouseholds,neighborhoods, offices, and waiting rooms, passed along from reader to reader. Many of Faulkner’s Post stories were crowd-pleasers—“Ambuscade,” “Two Soldiers,” and “Shingles for the Lord” are just a few that come to mind—demonstrating Faulkner’s facility with popular genres and his clear interest in finding, and resonating with, a large audience. He may not have wanted to be a literary celebrity or a public figure, but he indisputably wished to be read, and read widely.2 1 The story was “Thrift,” The Saturday...

S201044 科学書に見られる間違った霧吹きの原理の拡散([S201-04]技術教育・工学教育(4))

The phenomena with relation to fluid mechanics are often taken up in scientific books for popular readers. However, the explanation on principle of them has been described under misunderstood knowledge on fluid mechanics in many books. It seems the reason that the many authors are not understood fluid mechanics enough. Also, there is the further reasons in the descriptions involved mistaken explanations in many books. In present study the mechanism of transmission of so misunderstood explanations has been considered, and the diffusion of them has been investigated on principle on a spray. It is also examined and proposed how to prevent the transmission and diffusion of the misunderstood knowledge.

The History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 ed. by Christine Bold (review)

Reviewed by: The History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 ed. by Christine Bold Georgia Clarkson Smith The History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920. Edited by Christine Bold. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 704 pp. $160.00. Oxford's sixth volume of The History of Popular Print Culture takes as its subject matter English language script and imagery between the American Civil War and the First World War. It is a valuable contribution to book history that is diverse in disciplinary backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and methodological approaches. Despite the range of methods inevitable in such an ambitious history, the Oxford volume maintains a sense of cohesion, with a materialist theoretical grounding that concerns itself with inquiries into the processes of production, the specificity of forms, and the influence of the popular on readers and reading practices. The collected essays seek to resituate popular texts within the wider economic, cultural, and political contexts in which they were produced and received, and to reconstitute popular readers as active agents who held a variety of positions in relation to mass culture. Moving beyond the mere descriptive histories and single author or title studies that have been symptomatic of popular print inquiry in recent years, the essays in this volume answer larger questions about the operation of power through the analysis of print "networks and movements" (13). Its contributors make a convincing argument for continuing critical "questions about how cultural hierarchy was constructed, in whose interests, and with what ideological effects" (5). The relationship between print and ideology is, for the Oxford volume, non-homogenous and non-linear, a process of struggle between warring economic, political, cultural, racial, ethnic, class, and gender divisions that were played out within and upon the publishing industries. Politics and culture—even individual identities and pathways of representation—both shaped and were shaped by the "profuse, diverse, and powerful" popular print networks of the era (1). Christine Bold's introductory chapter identifies the central assumptions of this volume as an acknowledgement of the ideological diversity of the "popular," which "contains within itself antithetical meanings" that "merge and compete" (3); an acknowledgement of "culture" as a diverse set of practices by which meaning and value is (re)produced; an insistence on unsettling the traditionally constructed boundaries between forms and genres that eschews hierarchies between textual and visual culture, high and low culture, fiction [End Page 188] and literature, public and private media, and print and new media; and, finally, a recognition of the blurring between national, linguistic, regional, and temporal borders that confront the scholar of the "popular." The diversity of the era's print network is reflected in the volume's structure; each section exceeds its spatial boundaries, communicating with those that come before and after. The volume is organized into three major sections: the first establishes the specific practices and patterns of the market, the second provides a generic organizing mechanism for the period's prolific body of texts, and the third deconstructs these organizing principles by attending to the ways in which particular texts and readers circumvented the ideological aims of production, as well as the ways in which ideologies crossed the boundaries between regional, national, and transatlantic presses, raced and gendered audiences, and visual and textual formats. While it is impossible to give adequate attention to all of the contributions in a volume this large, none of which are without their merits, these collected essays together speak to the boundlessness of their subject matter and offer an array of useful histories, as well as some fresh perspectives. Mark Simpson's chapter explores "postcard culture" in America (169); Lydia Cushman Schurman provides a history of reprint libraries; Keith Gandal excavates the era's photojournalism to explore "cross-class encounters between the photographer . . . and the 'slum' dwellers" of the urban poor (573). More directly focused on periodical culture in particular are Richard Abel and Amy Rodger's "Early Motion Pictures and Popular Print Culture: A Web of Ephemera," which includes fan magazines in its discussion of the importance of "intermedial relations" between film and print in creating and sustaining an industry of...

What is Locke's Theory of Representation?

On a currently popular reading of Locke, an idea represents its cause, or what God intended to be its cause. Against Martha Bolton and my former self (among others), I argue that Locke cannot hold such a view, since it sins against his epistemology and theory of abstraction. I argue that Locke is committed to a resemblance theory of representation, with the result that ideas of secondary qualities are not representations.

Marginalia and Community in the Age of the Kindle: Popular Highlights in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Marginalia and Community in the Age of the Kindle: Popular Highlights in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Lauren Cameron (bio) In our digital age, as Lawrence Lessig has influentially noted, “text is one part—and increasingly, not the most powerful part—of constructing meaning” (39). Literature in general, and that which has entered into the public domain through copyright expiration in particular, is increasingly being accessed in digital form, including through e-book readers like Amazon’s bestseller, the Kindle. In these digital interfaces, more information than just text is on the screen, and this additional information can affect how the words are processed by readers. Among the Kindle’s many innovative—and automatic—features is what Amazon calls Popular Highlights, a feature by which an e-book underlines passages that have been highlighted by at least three distinct readers and displays the number—though not the identities—of readers who have highlighted them. Any reader can highlight any passage, but every reader will see the highlight unless they turn off this function. For Victorians, reading was often a social activity, with family, friends, and neighbours gathering to listen to the reading of a book; the Kindle is again enabling the possibility of widespread communal reading, though the individual reader of the e-book engages with an anonymous, quantified, and somewhat mysterious online community. What differences does this form of technological community make in the reading of Victorian literature? This essay explores this and other questions raised by such digital marginalia through the case study of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a free e-book that has been promoted by Amazon in a prominent press release. Using The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I examine the rhetoric of the e-reader interface and the social reading experience that is made an inherent part of engaging with the Kindle e-text. How does the collaboration behind the Popular Highlights feature affect readers’ experiences of the book? What kinds of reading might the Kindle’s popular highlighting enable or close off? How do such popular readings conflict with or complement scholarly readings of the same text? What might such popular readings have to offer to scholars’ understanding of Victorian literature in a digital age? [End Page 81] In order to tackle the above questions, I tracked the highlights in the Kindle’s Sherlock Holmes over a three-month period (June through August 2011) to chart the rise and fall in popularity of particular passages. Such quantitative data provides a concrete sense of how the Popular Highlights function affects a Victorian e-book over time. Thus, this essay is part reception study and part critical analysis of a massively popular interface that has not yet been studied by scholars—a new form of consumption of literature that merits further and deeper scholarly exploration than is possible in the scope of this essay. The Kindle offers a new method and new data for scholars interested in reader-response criticism and also opens up a number of pedagogical opportunities, through its Popular Highlights and Public Notes functions. Amazon’s Kindle Amazon’s Kindle is not the only mobile reading device on the market: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad (albeit more a multipurpose tablet than purely an e-book reader), Sony’s Reader, and the Kobo eReader also merit mention. But the Kindle has thus far outsold its competitors, including those e-readers that were on the market prior to its introduction in November 2007, such as Sony’s Reader. As of early 2011, the Kindle represented sixty-seven per cent of the American e-reader market, while the Nook had twenty-two per cent (Flamm). Amazon has been notoriously secretive about the number of Kindles sold, citing “the competitive nature of our business” in explaining its policy “not to give out information on the inner workings of our company” (Pathepuram). Instead, the company’s press and investor releases vaguely reference “millions of third-generation Kindle devices” sold in a particular quarter or compare sales of e-books to paperback and hardback books, showing ratios of 115:100 and 3:1, respectively.1 In the press release announcing production of the first Kindles, the company...

The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley (review)

Reviewed by: The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley James J. Donahue Ron Briley. The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011. 214 pp. Paper, $40.00. Ron Briley, editor of two previous collections of essays for McFarland on baseball and American culture, has just published the first book-length critical study devoted solely to the baseball film in postwar America. And while there is much in this volume of interest to popular readers and fans interested in the role of baseball in popular American culture, unfortunately as an academic study this work is of limited value. In the study’s preface, Briley notes that “the baseball film genre of the post-war era was more than just a nostalgic enterprise in which young people [ . . . ] could seek to escape reality” (3). Accordingly, Briley reads the films from the period as evincing the various tensions that had beset postwar American society, in particular tensions related to gender, race, and class. Further, this preface sets up a useful thematic organization for the following films, though this organization is not employed by the study itself. Such an organization, in this reviewer’s opinion, would have strengthened the reading of the films and provided better, more fluid connections between the individual chapters. This is especially the case with the biopics, as Briley is often referencing earlier discussion in his later chapters. Instead, the chapters are arranged mostly chronologically, with the notable exception of chapter 8, “Baseball and Supernatural Intervention: It Happens Every Spring (1949), Angels in the Outfield (1951), and Rhubarb (1951),” a chapter organized thematically by discussing three of the four “supernatural” films included in the study. Other than the resulting length of the chapter, this reviewer sees no reason why the discussion of Damn Yankees (1958) could not have been included in this chapter. In a similar vein, all of the biopics could have been included in one larger section, given Briley’s particular strength in the individual chapters for establishing the importance of the biopic as a subgenre within the baseball film. All that said, there is much value in the discussion of the various movies. The individual chapters (with one exception, noted above) focus on one film and read that film both within the context of American social anxieties of the time as well as against the historical figures and events depicted in the films. This, of course, would be of particular interest to fans of the players whose biopics are included in this study: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Dizzy Dean, and Jimmy Piersall. It is this reviewer’s opinion that the chapters focusing on biopics are the strongest chapters because they demonstrate the best balance between discussion of the film, situation within social/cultural contexts, and comparison to the historical record. Fans of the individual players whose lives have been depicted (or [End Page 158] romanticized, as Briley smartly demonstrates) in these films will find much valuable discussion in these pages. In short, Briley is at his best as a historian of baseball and American culture. The remaining chapters, unfortunately, do not cohere into a clear thematic pattern, which may be one reason for Briley’s choice to discuss the films (mostly) chronologically. That said, Briley convincingly demonstrates the cultural importance of several films which are often considered little more than mere entertainment by film scholars and popular audiences alike. Films such as Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) and Damn Yankees explore gender tensions in postwar American culture; films such as The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and Jim Thorpe: All American (1951) force audiences to confront racial tensions in professional baseball as a focal point for American society at large. Similarly, The Stratton Story (1949), The Winning Team (1952), and Safe at Home! (1962) all engage the battle between individual achievement and the merits of teamwork, which Briley smartly connects to the larger cultural response to “the organization man.” There are a couple of instances in this study where Briley’s engagement with the larger discussion of the history and culture, unfortunately, detracts from the discussion of the...

Learners’ Perspectives and Use of Different Learning Methods on Blended Learning in English Classes

The purpose of this study is to examine the participants` perspectives on online and blended learning, and how two different learning methods can benefit participants` active involvement in offline classes. 81 university students enrolled in general English classes participated in the study. These particular classes were taught with a popular English reading textbook. Specially designed online practice site included additional readings with various types of activities and exercises which were provided in order to enhance students` ability in English. In the study, two different learning methods, previewing and reviewing were adopted for both classes to determine which learning method can be more beneficial in helping them participate and engage more in offline classes. For the measurement, three questionnaires were administered and records of online exercises were presented to demonstrate students` learning process throughout the semester. The results indicated that the participants were not keen on adopting online learning at the beginning of the semester, but gradually, they were quite satisfied with the blended learning. Regarding the two learning methods, there were mixed results. Pedagogical implications of implementing more effective blended learning methods and the future research are discussed.

At Your Leisure: Establishing a Popular Reading Collection at UBC Library

Objectives – This study investigated the leisure reading habits and preferences of students, faculty, staff, and community members at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in order to determine if a leisure reading collection would fulfill a need and, if so, what form that collection should take to best serve the population. 
 
 Methods – This study, conducted in October 2010, consisted of a 19-question online questionnaire distributed to a random sample of UBC undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and community library users and an identical, open participation questionnaire for the entire UBC community, including staff and community members. In addition to some demographic information, the questionnaire gathered information about leisure reading habits, tendencies, and the participants’ preferences for a potential future leisure reading collection at UBC Library.
 
 Results – There were 467 valid responses out of 473 total responses received from UBC undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff, and community members. Of the valid responses, 244 were received from the 1,500 random sample invitations (a 16.3% response rate). Additionally, the questionnaire was advertised for open participation for those not invited, resulting in the remaining 229 responses. Results of this study indicated overwhelming support for a leisure reading collection at UBC Library, with 94% of respondents stating they might or would use a leisure reading collection. This study also revealed strong leisure reading habits among all response groups. However, only 6% of respondents currently acquire most of their leisure reading materials from UBC Library. Additional analysis found that UBC Library already owns 81% of the titles and authors requested by respondents in the survey.
 
 Conclusions – Based on the findings, the strong support for a leisure reading collection, and the fact that many UBC campus residents are not eligible for a free municipal public library card and borrowing privileges, there is a genuine need for a leisure reading collection at UBC Library. The data indicates that if accessible and convenient, a leisure reading collection could provide an opportunity for those who do not already read for leisure to do so. Additionally, a UBC Library leisure reading collection could attract community members, including those who are not UBC Library cardholders. In response to the results of the study, a pilot leisure reading collection was created in September 2011. This will make leisure reading materials easier to access and will allow the Library to further analyze the potential of such a collection, ultimately determining its future.

Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature Terence Tucker Brian Norman . Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. vii + 214 pp. At first glance, Brian Norman's Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature would seem to be an extension of Kenneth Warren's thesis that African American literature is at an end, a claim based on the idea that African American literature is inseparable from and beholden to its relationship with white America and white oppression during the Jim Crow years after Reconstruction and before the Voting Rights Act. Warren's claims are part of a larger push to proclaim a "postracial" moment, an argument that conflates the end of de jure segregation with the end of Jim Crow. Yet one of the primary elements of the celebration of diversity and postraciality has been dissipating and delegitimizing African American voices and perspectives that openly speak about the despair of the black poor, the conflicts of the black middle class, or the reassertion of white supremacy. However, Norman rejects the very premises on which Warren bases his claim and which many use to express their hostility toward antiracist work and programs. In particular, Norman sees the terms "post-Jim Crow" and "post-Civil Rights" as especially vexing because they ignore the structural inequalities that continue to marginalize, appropriate, and exploit African American culture and experience. Initially, Norman's promotion of the neo-segregation narratives might seek to capitalize on the success of the neo-slave narrative. However, to Norman's credit, and ultimately to the book's, he knows what he's getting into and productively wrestles with the potentially troublesome terms (for example, "neo") that could sabotage his efforts in his introduction. In fact, throughout the first two chapters, Norman casts the neo-segregation narrative alongside the neo-slave narrative tradition and uses it to lay out the parameters for a definition of the neo-segregation narrative. Norman's first chapter uses Lorraine Hansberry's screenplay adaptation of her play A Raisin in the Sun as a brilliant starting point. Hansberry's unfilmed version of Raisin disrupts popular readings of the play as a universal family drama and produces a more explicitly critical viewing of integration than it appears in the play or the multiple film adaptations. In choosing Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Norman finds the perfect companion to Hansberry. The novel, like Norman's book, makes a compelling case against a mainstream narrative that promotes integration but retains its racial hierarchy, often to destructive effects on African Americans. Morrison's work is particularly useful because Beloved, like David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, is [End Page 415] part of the neo-slave narrative tradition that Norman engages. In fact, Norman makes a daring play for Chaneysville as a neo-segregation narrative. More importantly, his claim stands as the guiding edict for the book as a whole: "The novel does not pose segregation as just an extension of slavery, as is common in neo-slave narratives, but rather poses slavery as another form of the longstanding and intricate maintenance of the color line in the legal sphere. Jim Crow remains the pivotal point of reference for all eras" (60). To drive home his point, Norman focuses on Alice Walker's The Color Purple and an obsession with the white gaze. In highlighting the womanist politics in Purple, Norman produces a community that centers on "a decidedly minoritarian perspective" (55). Nevertheless, Norman smartly avoids wedding himself to any strict theoretical or political ideology. Chapter 3 reveals his eclectic collection of works by performing a virtual resurrection of Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters, a novel that Norman claims uses black-face as a radically political act. The pairing of Brown's novel with Spike Lee's film Bamboozled makes blackface minstrelsy a dramatic point of reference that signals virtually no change in the representations of African Americans in the mainstream imagination. Norman willingly engages volatile terrain and challenges us to consider the complex meanings that sit behind the donning of the blackface mask and, by extension, Jim Crow. In...

Has Japan’s Lost Decade(s) Changed Economic Thinking?

Many elements of Japan’s economic stagnation in the 1990s are reasonably well explained in a modern, ‘synthesis type’, new‐Keynesian model. The actual occurrence of some of the elements, such as deflation and zero interest rates, was, however, rare in contemporary experience. As a result there has been a disconnect between what is theoretically understood by economists and the public discourse about Japan’s ‘lost decades’. The implications for policy are not very controversial in theory – fiscal policy should work and monetary policy could work but not via interest rate transmission. But the length of time that Japan remained below its potential GDP fuelled a debate about the effectiveness of traditional policy measures. This gave rise to real questions about the first ‘lost decade’ (1991–2001): why didn't policy work? Was this some new mystery ailment for which known remedies were ineffective? These questions are still debated and they remain important because the popular reading of Japan’s experience is ill‐informed and is being mis‐applied to current policy settings. This paper argues that Japan’s economic experience of the last two decades does not provide unambiguous evidence that demand stimulus policies are ineffective. The paper describes the ways in which economic theory has been changed by the lessons from Japan.

Amazon Kindle Fire (version 6.2.1)

Amazon Kindle Fire (version 6.2.1)

DISABILITY AND GENDER IN THE VISUAL FIELD: SEEING THE SUBTERRANEAN LIVES OF MICHAEL FIELD'SWILLIAM RUFUS

When the UK'sGuardiannewspaperfeatured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself. Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves. Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure inLong Ago(74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision inSight and Song(1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays, the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.

Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (review)

Reviewed by: Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Dan Colson Barbara Foley . Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . Durham: Duke UP, 2010. xii + 448 pp. Nearly twenty years ago, Barbara Foley's seminal Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Literature, 1929-1941 reshaped the way we read radical fiction. Along with Cary Nelson, Alan Wald, and a handful of others, Foley helped instantiate "radical literature" as a valid and rich—albeit still marginal—area of study. By [End Page 161] offering both a functional definition of and extensive taxonomy for proletarian literature, Radical Representations crystalized the often-fragmented field, providing a touchstone for subsequent studies of radical fiction. Two decades later, Foley's latest effort, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, is perhaps even more ambitious. In it, she takes on not a collection of little-known and marginally canonical works that typically comprise "radical literature," but one of the most studied twentieth-century novels. Foley continues her critical fascination with literary Leftism, yet Wrestling with the Left holds value for all students and scholars of Ellison, African American literature, and literary modernism, demonstrating the far-reaching impact of the twentieth-century American Left and the continued importance of politically engaged scholarship. As Foley consistently reminds us, the popular reading of Invisible Man finds its genesis in the contemporaneous New Critical reception of the novel and in Ellison's self-aware construction of his intentions. While retaining the critique of American racism, he stripped the novel of any overt involvement in the post-World War II ideological battle and, after its publication, sought to avoid being "branded a 'Negro writer'" by claiming literary kinship with Shakespeare, Virgil, Aeschylus, Herman Melville, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot (69). In part a reaction to the political exigencies of the Cold War and in part literary self-fashioning, Ellison's insistence that the book owed a great debt to classical mythology, Freudian criticism, Burkean rhetorical theory, and high modernism—while ignoring and denying any impact by his earlier dalliance with the Left—established parameters for the analysis of his novel that were consonant with the predominant political and aesthetic sensibilities of the era and that have lingered for more than fifty years. Wrestling with the Left is designed to correct this narrow perspective, not by denying Ellison's claimed influences, but by detailing Ellison's engagement with Left political discourse throughout his career, thus adding the Left as an ambivalent opponent that complicates and informs earlier readings of Invisible Man. Foley adds this layer of content/context in two ways: in Part I, she analyzes previously unknown and severely understudied works that reveal Ellison's explicit involvement with Leftist literary magazines, his attraction to Marxian political philosophy, and his praise for others writing from Leftist perspectives. Wrestling with the Left does not portray Ellison as an uncritical champion of pre-World War II communism, thus avoiding the prototypical, pre-war Leftist, Cold War conservative trajectory of rejection of many 1930s radicals. Instead, Foley produces a shifting snapshot of a writer drawn to the Left, yet profoundly troubled by the American Communist Party's and [End Page 162] the international communist movement's actions vis-à-vis race as anti-fascism changed strategies and Black Americans were asked to make difficult (perhaps untenable) wartime sacrifices. Part I argues that Ellison's intellectual engagement with the Left—with proletarian fiction, with left-leaning anthropologist Stanley Edgar Hymen, and with Richard Wright (who himself struggled to address cohesively the intersection of race and Left politics)—structured political and aesthetic stances that are a necessary prehistory to Invisible Man. Only through the type of careful attention to Ellison's early writing that we find in Wrestling with the Left can we come to terms with the content and the absences of his magnum opus. Part II then builds from this foundation with an exhaustive reading of Invisible Man. Foley's extensive analysis weaves together the novel as it was published in 1952 with the large number of available excerpts, rewrites, and revisions that show a...

SECURING THE ENGLISHMAN'S CASTLE: SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In 1839, the Constabulary ForceCommission, created by Parliament to study the conditions of crime and policing beyond London and to make recommendations for jurisdictional reforms, published its findings in theFirst Constabulary Report. To illustrate for readers the necessity of establishing constabularies modeled after London's Metropolitan Police Force in counties and boroughs throughout England and Wales, Edwin Chadwick, utilitarian reformer and principal draftsman of theReport, interwove the Commission's recommendations with numerous testimonies from representatives of the so-called criminal classes that pervaded nineteenth-century society. These sometimes graphic confessions were calculated to shock as much as persuade, which made for popular reading, notwithstanding widespread political opposition to the Commission's proposals (Philips 69). Section twenty eight, for example, contains the account of “J– R–,” a nineteen-year-old ex-sailor from Manchester who had committed a series of petty larcenies before turning to more serious burglaries of homes and businesses, at which he became quite adept. This young-but-seasoned offender's confession included what were intended to be alarming revelations about the physical vulnerabilities of English houses. JR testified that he had “[f]ound none or very few difficulties in the way of committing crime. The readiness with which property was got . . . was an encouragement” (Lefevre, Rowan, and Chadwick 27). In recounting the details of his crimes (and citing anecdotal evidence from fellow thieves), he pointed out that most houses were entered easily with the use of skeleton keys or through cellar windows, and that householders and servants practiced few if any serious security precautions (27–28). JR concluded that he did “not know of any places or kinds of property so protected as to induce depredators to refrain from attacking them” but added, no doubt with pressure from the interviewer, that the “most important obstruction which could be placed in the way of depredations is a more efficient police” (29).

“He Fell Just Short of Being News”: Gatsby's Tabloid Shadows

Wilson's essay examines The Great Gatsby's depiction, displacement, and appropriation of the urban tabloid journalism of its day. By offering a direct look at the rhetorical forms and visual cues of the tabloids surrounding F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel—and in particular the “intermedial” strategies that were designed to mobilize readers to engage news stories and insert themselves in such tales—this essay argues that Fitzgerald's reenvisioning of tabloid culture permeates both his aesthetic technique and Nick Carraway's attempts to provide an account of the scandalous “death car” crime at the heart of the book. Rather than competing with the novel's modernist form, mass culture therefore helps to constitute it: suffusing Fitzgerald's account of popular reading, shaping the text's experimental use of background and foreground, and ultimately complicating the portrait of Jay Gatsby's criminality. In the end, these tabloid shadows allow us to challenge the recent revisionist arguments about the corporate and Fordist character of Gatsby's gangsterhood, and to reassess Fitzgerald's contribution to the form of vernacular modernism we now call American noir.

Aristotle on the Starting-Point of Motion in the Soul

Abstract In Eudemian Ethics 8.2, Aristotle posits god as the starting-point of non-rational desire (particularly for the naturally fortunate), thought, and deliberation. The questions that dominate the literature are: To what does ‘god’ refer? Is it some divine-like entity in the soul that produces thoughts and desires or is it Aristotle’s prime mover? And how does god operate as the starting-point of these activities? By providing a careful reconstruction of the context in which god is evoked, I argue against the popular deflationary reading of ‘god’, showing why Aristotle’s prime mover must be the end of these natural activities, and how it serves as a final cause for the rational and desirative parts of the soul. I contend that EE 8.2 provides evidence against the traditional notion that god operates as a final cause by drawing natural potentialities to their completion, and suggests instead that it serves as a final cause by entering into the explanation of natures and natural activities as their ultimate end.

Książki, które zbłądziły pod strzechy – dziewiętnastowieczne edycje dzieł romantyków przechowywane w Bibliotece Wydziału Filologicznego UMK

Artykul prezentuje dziewietnastowieczne edycje dziel romantykow, ktore są przechowywane w Bibliotece Wydzialu Filologicznego UMK, powstalej wraz z uformowaniem sie torunskiej polonistyki. Autorka omowila edycje: Adama Mickiewicza (Zywila. Legende Lithuanienne par Adam Mickiewicz, Paryz 1866; Poezye Adama Mickiewicza, t. 2, Petersburg 1829; Adama Mickiewicza Dziadow cześc trzecia, Paryz 1833; Poezye Adama Mickiewicza, t. 1, 3, 5–8, Paryz 1838), Wincentego Pola (Kilka kart z krwawego rocznika, Lipsk 1864; Poezye Wincentego Pola, t. I-V (Dziela Wincentego Pola wierszem i prozą, Seria: I, t. I, III, V, VII, IX), Lwow 1875-1878), Zygmunta Krasinskiego (Niedokonczony poemat, Paryz 1862; Listy Zygmunta Krasinskiego do Konstantego Gaszynskiego, Lwow 1882; Listy Zygmunta Krasinskiego do Adama Soltana, Lwow 1883), Teofila Lenartowicza (Aniol ziemi. Srebrny śpiew przez T. L., we Lwowie 1870; Album wloskie przez Teofila Lenartowicza, we Lwowie 1870), Konstantego Gaszczynskiego (Pisma prozatorskie przez Konstantego Gaszynskiego, Lipsk 1875). Zrekonstruowano rowniez zasady trafiania ksiązek pod strzechy, na ktore miala wplyw cenzura, majetnośc odbiorcow, trudne warunki rozwoju zycia literackiego, rozbicie kultury na emigracyjną i krajową czy tez wolnościowe idee zawarte w tekście.

Se llamaba Elena Arizmendi

“Adriana” is one of the most famous characters of Mexican literature. She first appears in José Vasconcelos’s Ulises criollo and later in La tormenta (volumes 1 and 2 of his four-part biography). A stunning woman, intelligent and sensual, a modern compañera for Mexico’s premier revolutionary intellectual, Adriana is almost the “perfect” lover — that is, until she leaves him. Then, this “glorious Eve” is transformed into a devourer of men, the femme fatale of Mexican literature. Now, thanks to the exhaustive historical research, deft analysis, and fluid prose of Gabriela Cano, we have a biography of the real Adriana with excellent photographs. As the title establishes, her name was Elena Arizmendi, and she was a woman to be reckoned with.Arizmendi was born in 1884 into a comfortable family, granddaughter of Liberal general Ignacio Mejía. She spent her early years at her grandfather’s Ayotla sugar mill in Oaxaca and was later sent to Mexico City for a suitable education. She went on to study nursing in San Antonio, Texas, where she was befriended by Francisco and Sara Madero. Arizmendi founded the Cruz Blanca Mexicana Neutral (Mexican White Cross, equivalent of the Red Cross) while Madero was president. When problems arose in that organization, the Maderos sent her to get legal advice from the young Maderista lawyer, José Vasconcelos; thus began one of the most famous love affairs in Mexican history.A passion for literature and music along with an intense erotic relationship united this modern couple. Snubbed and slighted by the gente decente for carrying on an illicit love affair with a married man, Elena confidently defied her middle-class upbringing. She traveled with Vasconcelos to the United States when he was forced into exile during the revolution. As she developed intellectually, she tired of being la otra and broke off the relationship in 1916. Infuriated, Vasconcelos published a short story in 1920, “The Torment,” in which he proclaimed: “The serpent that has been coiled around my heart for some years, finally, has slithered off, leaving me only venom” (endnote, p. 209). Dominican writer Pedro Henríquez Ureña later observed: “Vasconcelos pursues her with horrendous threats and accusations to people from whom she is seeking employment. He seems to have lost his mind, crazed by her flight [ . . . ] Poor woman!”(p. 121).But Elena Arizmendi was anything but a poor woman or a femme fatale; she was a resourceful and independent woman who was determined to chart her own course. She married and separated from an American businessman, Robert Duersch, and moved to New York City in the 1920s to be on her own. She made a living by teaching music and writing articles for newspapers and journals. She focused her major energies on promoting the Liga de Mujeres Ibéricas e Hispanoamericanas, also known as the Liga de Mujeres de la Raza, and edited Feminismo Internacional, the first international journal dedicated to Hispanic feminism.As Cano underlines, “within modernist conventions, woman is only a theme and receptacle of masculine desire” (p. 23); for Vasconcelos, Adriana was the “best booty of the Revolution.” Facing these stereotypes, Arizmendi struggled to represent her own life and opinions on women’s capacities. She published a short biographical novel in New York City in 1927, Vida incompleta: Ligeros apuntes sobre mujeres en la vida real, in order to explain her vision of male-female relationships and feminism. It is unclear if this work was responding directly to Vasconcelos’s 1920 short story or to gossip, since Ulises criollo was not published until 1935 (by 1938 it had gone into 22 printings). Nevertheless, it was Elena Arizmendi Mejía’s attempt to set the record straight and to gain recognition as a mujer moderna. Given its limited diffusion, this novel failed to challenge the powerful literary figure of the femme fatale. Ironically, her later years paralleled those of Vasconcelos: although a pioneer of Hispanic feminism, Arizmendi, too, became Conservative, anti-Semitic, and a Falangista fellow traveler.Previously, Gabriela Cano’s skill in unraveling contradictory representations of female revolutionaries (who unfortunately leave no personal papers to make the historian’s task less arduous) provided readers with her provocative study of Amelio Robles, the transgendered Zapatista colonel (in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Gabriela Cano, Duke University Press, 2006). Now, Arizmendi’s biography, accessible to academic as well as popular readers of Spanish, facilitates not only a better comprehension of changing gender norms and the limitations of middle-class feminism in revolutionary Mexico but also the ongoing struggle of women to represent their own lives.