Reader Engagement Research Articles

Usandsynligheder, overkrydsninger og umuligheder. En retorisk tilgang til brud på den mimetiske karakternarrations kode

IMPROBABILITIES, CROSSOVERS, AND IMPOSSIBILITIES | Extending and to some extent revising some of his earlier work, James Phelan in this essay examines three kinds of “unnatural”departures from the mimetic code. Paralepsis (or implausible knowledgeable narration), simultaneous present-tense character narration, and a kind of departure not previously noticed, which he calls cross over narration: “an author links the narration of two independent sets of events by transferring the effects of the narration of the one to the other.” In spite of being rather different ways of breaching the mimetic code, the three breaks form a useful cluster for investigating underlying conventions of reading that can explain why readers often do not notice the breakes. Phelan thus induces two Meta-Rules of Readerly Engagement: The Value Added Meta-Rule underlies the principle that disclosurefunctions trump narrator functions, and stipulates that readers overlook breaks in the mimetic code when those breaks enhance their reading experience; the Story over Discourse Meta-Rule stipulates that once a narrative foregrounds its mimetic component, readers will privilege story elements over discourseelements, and thus be inclined to overlook breaks in the code. Four additional Rules are derived from the Meta-Rules in a reading of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which serves as an example ofimplausibly knowledgeable narration. Rules and Meta-Rules are then deployed in reading a passage of The Great Gatsby, exemplifying crossover narration. A discussion with Henrik Skov Nielsen about the simultaneous present-tense narration in Glamorama marks both the closeness and a certain differencein perspective between rhetorical narratology and Nielsen’s concept of narration without narrators.

Reader Engagement in English and Persian Applied Linguistics Articles

There is an increasing interest in the way academic writers establish the presence of their readers over the past few years. Establishing the presence of readers or what Kroll (1984, P.181) calls imagining “a second voice” is accomplished when a writer refers explicitly to their readers using explicit linguistic resources (reader engagement markers). Although there are some cross-disciplinary studies and only one cross-cultural study (Hinkel, 2002) which has investigated how writers in different disciplines/cultures acknowledge the presence of their readers, no contrastive study has ever been reported to have examined how academic writers from Persian and English writing cultures address their readers in their texts.Drawing on 60 applied linguistics articles (20 English articles written by native English applied linguists, 20 English articles written by native Persian applied linguists and 20 Persian articles written by native Persian applied linguists), this study aimed at seeing how native Persian and English writers engage their readers in their articles. Hyland’s (2005a) interactional model of stance and engagement was used as an analytical framework to identify the type and frequency of reader engagement markers in these three groups of articles. The result of the analysis showed significant differences in the way native Persian and English represent their readers. Also, considerable differences were observed in categorical distribution of reader engagement markers.

Applied utility and the auto-ethnographic short story: persuasions for, and illustrations of, writing critical social science

In some quarters it is argued that, narrative researchers might be classified as being either story-analysts or storytellers. They go on to suggest that one feature of storytellers is that they undertake a form of analysis as the process of writing unfolds. With these sentiments in mind, in the present paper, we consider how auto-ethnographical accounts of traumatic and challenging life events might, through the analysis contained within, demonstrate value within the realm of applied pedagogy. In making our case we embrace and adapt the literary genre of storytelling, more specifically, the short story. The story presented here, ‘Travel Writer’, offers an opaque, multi-contextualised and lifelong view of career transition. The present paper, in more general terms, considers the capacity of auto-ethnography and, more specifically, the short storied version of it, to engender critical reader engagement, to encourage personal reflection in others, and to act as a point of stimulus for the enactment of applied debate through the lens of critical social science. With regards to the assumptions of critical social science, the final discussion also considers how the auto-ethnographic text, as a pedagogic tool, might help others to contest and challenge the meta-narratives that, we argue, risk stagnating established thinking.

Meeting the Reading Challenges of Science Textbooks in the Primary Grades

Four primary grade teachers overcame challenges of textbook‐based science reading through a focus on reading strategies and an emphasis on making meaning. Teachers used whole‐class and small‐group guided reading instruction to focus students on organizational and textual features of the science textbooks. They also used teacher‐guided talk and student‐to‐student turn‐and‐talk strategies to focus on meaning. Children acted out concepts found in the textbook and used technology as a tool to enhance content area learning. Science reading using textbooks poses challenges that teachers can overcome with specific attention to reading comprehension and innovative approaches that promote reader engagement.

Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology. By Michael Fishbane

Michael Fishbane's Sacred Attunement is fascinating not only in what it says explicitly, but also in what it does not say. On one level, he presents a series of innovative insights into the parallels between modes of textual interpretation and modes of spiritual–ethical “interpretation” of the concrete details of lived human existence. In laying out such parallels, he succeeds—in a way that will engage both specialists and nonspecialists—in translating into a contemporary idiom the classical rabbinic notion that engagement in the study of scripture can function as a self-transformative practice. At the same time, though, we might also understand his project as implicitly putting forth a fundamental reconception of the very idea of “doing theology”—whether Fishbane himself consciously intends such a challenge or not. Prior to presenting the “Jewish” side of his project, Fishbane's first chapter lays out his understanding of “theology” in a general sense. He thus explicitly frames the chapters that follow as a specifically Jewish instantiation of a humanly universal “attempt to speak of the reality of God and direct the self toward this truth” (1). In this account, a Jewish theology does not entail claims of exclusive access to divine truth; rather, a theology is Jewish insofar as it engages in the human theological endeavor by means of close readings and constructive re-readings of the particular traditions and textual sources of Judaism (44). In this opening chapter, he emphasizes that his primary concern as a writer lies not with abstract theoretical constructions of God's being, but rather in an attempt to stimulate the reader's sensitivity to the easily overlooked depths and ethical demands that are inherent in the particulars of earthly life. For Fishbane, God is precisely in the details. The second chapter of Fishbane's book constitutes the core of his project and is where he truly breaks new ground. Taking his cue from four traditional Jewish modes of interpreting scripture, he lays out a striking account of the ways in which different ways of reading texts can serve as spiritual exercises. The same practices that make for careful interpretation can, Fishbane asserts, shape a person's mode of viewing existence as whole, train the reader's mindfulness to the details of the created world, and enhance one's ability to make active and conscious judgments in response to the choices and responsibilities that confront us in each moment. Thus, for instance, he notes the way in which the mode of peshat (plain sense) interpretation helps attune a reader to scripture's contextual particularities. Through its demand for close attention to the fine points of the written text, engagement in peshat reading counteracts the tendency to skip over the text's details in an attempt to arrive too quickly at one's own desired interpretation. In requiring care and concern for scripture's syntactical configurations that exist independently of our interpretive will, this mode of reading is “an exercise in attentiveness to the details of the text and its modes of presentation; and it is an exercise in the patient subordination of the self to the otherness of the language which has been selected by the author, but which requires one's readerly engagement to come alive” (71). After leading the reader through a peshat interpretation of Jacob's dream of the “stairway to heaven” in Genesis 28, Fishbane shifts our lens from a reading of textual phenomena to a reading of the phenomena of nature and of existence. The development of attunement to the alterity of scriptural words and phrases, he argues, will better enable a person to respond with ethical responsibility and patience to the alterity of things and persons that one encounters in daily life.

Newspaper Blogs: The Genuine Article or Poor Counterfeits?

Blogging began as a grassroots alternative phenomenon, and it was some years before the mainstream media took notice, let alone responded by introducing their own blogs. However, the blogs of Australian journalists (especially those of News Ltd) have been criticised as being ineffective, although such criticism is based on anecdotal evidence rather than substantive data. This article presents the findings of a pilot study that examined the popularity, interactivity and hyperlinks of twelve political blogs across mainstream and alternative media sites. The greatest challenge of blogging has been to one of traditional journalism's weakest points: its lack of personal contact with readers. The results of this study indicate that there are Australian journalists who have taken up the challenge, with their blogs outshining their alternative counterparts, especially in terms of reader engagement. This represents an exciting new trend, where blogging, rather than being a threat, may reinvigorate mainstream media and help democratise news processes.

Where Do We Go From Here? Readers' Responses to Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction has excited huge interest amongst scholars and experimental artists since the pioneering work of Michael Joyce in the 1980s. However, it has not reached out to a wide community of writers and readers, largely because of the twin problems of poor reader engagement with fractured narrative structures, and the heavy cognitive demands of the interfaces used by hyper-writers. This article reports upon an empirical study of readers’ responses to a range of interactive fictions, a study which aimed to uncover in detail the key factors affecting readers’ experience of this narrative form. On the basis of the study’s findings, it is argued that interactive fiction can offer an enjoyable reading experience, if core issues around narrative structure and interface design are addressed by writers. The article suggests guidelines for writers, based on the findings of the empirical study.

Educational Implications about Online Debates on a Socio-Scientific Issue from a Postmodernist Perspective: Focus on the Mad Cow Disease

This study aims to characterize debate on a socio-scientific issue in the Internet and to provide implications from a postmodernist perspective. This study concentrates on disentanglement of the complex relationship among society, economy, politics and science in an issue and characterization of the given text centering on its originality, the relationship between writer and reader, and the purpose of utterance. Sixty-six most read articles on a web message board were chosen and analyzed as a typical case of a socio-scientific issue in the internet. In them, five scientific disputes were identified: the cause of mad cow disease (MCD), specified risk material and the incubation period, the cause of new variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (vCJD), vulnerability of vCJD and the relation of Alzheimer and vCJD in American patients. Each argument is intertwined with social, economic and political problems such as its impact on the domestic beef market, feeding environment of imported cattle and the retaliation against denial of importation. With regard to originality, it is found that the originality of an author is weakened but communal through repetitive quotation of 'Peom', cutting and pasting, and engagement of readers with their comments. Furthermore, in order to close the gap between writer and reader, identity and personal narrative of the writers are often introduced into their writing. In terms of purpose of utterance, these are intended to deliver one's feelings or facilitate human behavior rather than inform through verification of a principle.

Sex, Lies and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke (review)

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 250 pose lost its power in both literary and reformist terms.The story here is not simply the emergence of a new, more self-consciously theoretical“realism” that improved upon the verisimilitude of the earlier novelists. It has also to do with the shifting meaning of“Anglo-America,” from a“willed affiliation” based on a shared set of reformist commitments and sustained by ties of trade, politics, and intermarriage to an often racialized (“Anglo-Saxon”) alliance rooted in imperial conquest. Claybaugh’s reading ofTwain’s own complex musings on imperialism, civilization, and violence provides a fascinating coda. Claybaugh convincingly demonstrates the coherence of an expansiveAngloAmerican literary marketplace and reform network in which, cultural nationalist squabbling aside, a“literature in English” thrived, but her work seems less clear on how national differences mattered. Such questions may be beyond the scope of her study, but her fresh and skilful handling of the material here suggests she would have interesting observations to make on the topic. The Novel of Purpose is a most welcome addition to nineteenth-century studies and should appeal to historians and literary scholars alike. Leslie Bu tler Dartmouth College • Sex,Lies and Autobiography:The Ethics of Confession by James O’Rourke; pp. xiv + 215. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. $35.00 cloth. In Sex, Lies andAutobiography, literary texts function as unique sites of ambiguity and contradiction.Within these indeterminate spaces, O’Rourke’s fascinating study identifies the“counterformations” (6) that shadow and fracture the legitimating narratives “that give our lives a sense of ethical coherence” (1). The“ethical aporia[s]” (7) that result are examined through a Janus-like close reading of six diverse first-person narratives: Rousseau’s Confessions, William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, andVladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. O’Rourke’s juxtaposition of conventional autobiographies with fictional texts provides this study with a useful reflexivity, offering nuanced critical readings that view the latter genre as a metafictional interrogation of its historical counterpart. At the heart of O’Rourke’s “ethical turn” is a call for active reader engagement . Using a Foucauldian model of local, contingent, and negotiable power, O’Rourke reimagines the writer and reader of autobiography as“exhibitionist” and “voyeur” (13) locked in a fraught bilateral relationship.The voyeur must read for and recognize the legitimate and shadow narratives within a text, confronting the ethical conflicts that are exposed while being aware that the 251 Reviews exhibitionist writer will seek to evade this surveillance. O’Rourke makes good use of this conceptual model throughout his study, and each chapter of the book illuminates further the potentialities and complexities of ethical readerly engagement.After first establishing how readership is involved in this shifting balance of power, O’Rourke demonstrates how the diverse and contradictory narratives within a single text impede a reader’s ability to make definite moral judgments. Insightful close readings of these ethical complexities follow, culminating in O’Rourke’s surprising but compelling assertion that inflexible moral judgments are not only impossible but undesirable. He favours instead a fluid textual engagement capable of “weighing out the exact distribution of power” (189) between narratives, a nuanced reading practice that facilitates greater ethical self-awareness. O’Rourke’s first two chapters map the working dynamics of his reading model.This dyadic structure is at its most interesting, however, when the bilateral arrangement between writer and reader breaks down and one side gains ascendancy. For example, Rousseau’s Confessions is bifurcated into“veritable” and “bizarre” (19) economies that engage with the material world and the sexual imagination, respectively.The first is marked by real consequences and guilt; the second is marked by an ambiguously innocuous shame. Rousseau is able to play with the voyeuristic power of the reader within the bizarre economy, raising expectations of sexual explicitness only to disappoint, performing a textual coitus interruptus that teases readers but leaves them unsatisfied. However, such “bonds[s] of intimacy” are “sever[ed]” (46) in the veritable economy where inescapable consequences and feelings of guilt curtail playfulness, breaking the “contract between Rousseau and his reader” (47). Power becomes unilateral as the reader...

Beauvoir and the Question of a Woman’s Point of View

Recently, philosophers have taken to announcing a revival or a renaissance in the study of the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir.1 Sonia Kruks argues that feminist Beauvoir studies, having passed through an early ( 1970s) phase in which women related to Beauvoir as an icon, and through a middle (1980s) phase in which feminist thinkers related to Beauvoir as an adversary, has now entered a phase of serious philosophical engagement.2 This latter phase tends to be celebratory and corroborative, and is marked by and creative unwindings and rewindings of Beauvoir's arguments.3 The new feminist work on Beauvoir is, to my mind with great success, in the process of repudiating a series of claims that were frequently stated with certainty during the age of antagonism: that Beauvoir was simply Sartre's mouthpiece; that she in fact disparaged women and particularly loathed female bodies; that she was an essentialist; alternately that she was a radical constructivist with a voluntaristic notion of sexual difference; and that she unequivocally and unapologetically adopted a of view.4 The repudiation of these claims has required detailed attention to the now well-documented failures of the (still, though this is soon to change) only English translation of the text;5 careful studies of the many philosophical influences on Beauvoir's work besides Sartre;6 studies that attempt to show, through engagement with Beauvoir's autobiographical and literary works in relation to the philosophical works of both Beauvoir and Sartre, that she in fact influenced him;7 and attention to the originality of Beauvoir's philosophical method and often parodie voice.8 When I teach Beauvoir, my students are quickly moved by the new scholarship to acknowledge that Beauvoir cannot be reduced to Sartre; that there is both compassion and passion for women in her account; that her Marxist-influenced existential phenomenology can neither be reduced to essentialism nor to constructivism. But they often remain convinced that Beauvoir is taking up a masculine of and in fact advocating that other women, as well, adopt male values, projects, and perspectives.9 There is still a great deal of work to be done to show in sufficient textual detail that Beauvoir's point of particularly in The second Sex, or rather the multiple points of that help build this polyphonic and complex philosophical text, can in no way be sufficiently described as masculine. In fact such a description proves to be reductive in the extreme. A decidedly non-masculine of view, one that is anti-masculinist, or feminist to put the matter more positively, emerges in the text itself, as a close reading of a particular moment of such emergence will show. As importantly, the opening toward such a of is perhaps the primary performative effect of the reader's engagement with the text. This second claim, that the text does something to change the relationship of its readers to the masculinist world they are immersed in, is frequently mentioned but too little studied.10 It is my contention that Beauvoir keeps the promise that she makes at the end of the introduction to volume I of The second Sex, about what she will do in volume II. After showing us how women have been constituted as the Other from a man's of view, she pledges, then from of I shall describe the world which is offered to them: and thus we shall be able to understand the difficulties they run up against, at the moment when, endeavoring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned to them, they aspire to full membership in the human Mitsein.11 Of course, the very notion that there can be something like a woman's of view is the source of some criticism of Beauvoir, while others criticize her for failing to achieve it. '21 am more sympathetic with the first claim, those who make it note that Beauvoir's women are white and European and educated for the most part, so that even if some women 's point of view emerges in the text, it certainly won't be every of view-which is not to say that it might not be worth engaging nevertheless, even if one doesn't find oneself well-represented by it. …

A Renaissance Reader's English Annotations to Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's Works

This article introduces a heavily annotated copy of the first collected edition of Chaucer's Works, published by William Thynne in 1532 (Beinecke Library, Osborn fpa 5). Over 1100 annotations, in English, record one near-contemporary but anonymous reader's engagement with the content and style of texts in this edition. The marginal comments demonstrate this annotator's predilection for proverbial material and figurative language, perhaps as a first step in transferring excerpts to a commonplace book or other place of record. This Renaissance reader evidently understood Chaucer's language, so does not provide glosses to the existing diction, but reflects individual linguistic preferences in summarising and recasting the texts in the marginal annotations, at times commenting on Chaucer's imagery or turn of phrase. This study indicates the range and type of annotation in this unique book, and suggests some implications for our knowledge of the reception of Chaucer in the sixteenth century.

The system of comics

The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. This edition of Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics makes available in English a groundbreaking work on comics by one of the medium's foremost scholars. In this book, originally published in France in 1999, Groensteen ranges broadly through the history of comics to explain clearly the subtle, complex workings of the medium and its unique way of combining visual, verbal, spatial, and chronological expressions. The System of Comics uses examples from a wide variety of countries including the United States, England, Japan, France, and Argentina. It describes and analyzes the properties and functions of speech and thought balloons, panels, strips, and pages to examine methodically and insightfully the medium's fundamental processes. From this, Groensteen develops his own coherent, overarching theory of comics, a system that he builds on existing studies of the word and image paradigm while adding innovative approaches of his own. Examining both meaning and appreciation, the book provides a wealth of ideas that will challenge the way scholars approach the study of comics. By emphasizing not simply storytelling techniques but also the qualities of the printed page and the reader's engagement, the book's approach is broadly applicable to all forms of interpreting this evolving art. Thierry Groensteen is a comics scholar born in Brussels, Belgium, the founding publisher of Editions de l'An 2, and the curator of the Angouleme Comics Museum in Angouleme, France. Bart Beaty is associate professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary. Nick Nguyen is an archivist at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario.

Marketing the library: using technology to increase visibility, impact and reader engagement

Based on a paper presented at the 30th UKSG Conference, Warwick, April 2007 Technological advancements are changing the way people com- municate, and methods of teaching, learning and research are becoming more varied and dynamic. The role of the library is central in responding to these changes, and in identifying opportunities for using technology to support the intellectual growth and success of the individuals and institutions that they serve. Fulfilling this role is increasingly requiring librarians to learn and apply marketing skills – understanding user and stakeholder needs, creating awareness and stimulating interest, building loyalty and demonstrating value. Technology is key in supporting effective marketing, and can be used by libraries to increase visibility, to raise levels of information literacy and to deliver a personalized service that anticipates the current and future needs of users.

‘Small bits of textual material’: A discourse analysis of Swales’ writing

Despite his considerable influence on the development of ESP and all our professional lives, almost nothing has been written about John Swales’ distinctive prose style. Based on a 340,000 word corpus comprising 14 single-authored papers and most chapters from his three main books, this paper sets out to identify the main features of this style. Using frequency, keyword and concordance analyses, I compare the Swales’ corpus with a broader applied linguistics corpus of 710,000 words and identify self mention, hedging and attitude, reader engagement and considerateness as characteristic of Swalesian rhetoric. I conclude with the view that this is a disciplinary voice informed by a keen assessment of his readers and representing an independent creativity shaped by an accountability to shared practices.

The effect of a protagonist’s emotional shift on situation model construction

We examined whether readers monitored protagonists' emotional shifts and whether reader engagement influenced situation model construction. Participants read narratives that included an emotional shift in the middle of the story. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to read stories appreciatively and to empathize with the protagonists. In Experiment 2, readers were instructed to read the stories normally, as if they were reading novels. The results from the two experiments suggest that readers monitor temporal and causal shifts as well as protagonists' emotional shifts in stories. Moreover, in Experiment 1 readers detected temporal and causal shifts regardless of th e degree oftheir engagement during the empathetic reading, while in Experiment 2 the high ego involvement group detected causal shifts during the normal reading. Thus, these results show both that readers monitor protagonists' emotional states and that reader emotional engagement c an influence situationmodel construction with normal reading.

Bewaarder van die stilte: Gedagtes oor J.M. Coetzee se etiek van skryf

Summary In two of J.M. Coetzee's early works, Life & Times of Michael K ([1983]1987aj and Foe ([1986]1987b), two voiceless, unessentialised figures are portrayed. These figures are not only manifestations of the Other, but also idiot‐figures, ignorant consciousnesses with a restricted language ability ‐ radical outsiders. This article is a study of how Coetzee portrays these subjectivities in an ethical way in his writings. Firstly it is argued that the construction of a centralised subjectivity is a technique of subjection of the modern State. The article then shows how the two characters escape the processes of interpretation of the power structures. Furthermore it analyses how as an effect of Coetzee's ambiguous style it appears as if the characters also escape the attempts of the narrator to interpret them or give them a voice. It will become clear that reader engagement is effected despite the detached way in which the characters are portrayed. This is exactly because their irreducible being cannot be essentialised by the text. In the end the article argues for an ethical position where the equation of the narrator's voice with that of the Other is relinquished, so that the texts are portrayals and linguistic expressions of a refusal to speak on behalf of an unknown and unknowable subjectivity.

Writing back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s

English lyric poetry of the mid-Tudor period is characterized by responses and counter-responses to poems sent between friends and fictional speakers.1 Poets engaged with forms and ideas circulating within their social spheres and represented that circulation in their published collections, often including work by other writers alongside their own. These networks represent the sociable origins of the poems, which offer some validation for their existence. They also place readers inside the work, ensuring that the first imagined readerly engagement is constructive, sympathetic, and respectful. One of the sources of this culture of replying was Ovid's Heroides, and specifically the non-Ovidian tradition of replying to the single Heroides I-XV (as opposed to the rather different paired reply poems between Paris and Helen, Hero and Leander, and Acontius and Cydippe, which are a distinct group). This tradition of replying is a curious one, in which every instance seems to offer some problem of authenticity or interpretation, and this quality resurfaces in English appropriations of the genre. From the outset the status of any poems answering the plangent outpourings of Ovid's heroines seems doubtful, despite the fact that Ovid himself is the first to refer to these replies when he catalogues his works in the Amoves:

Éros rebelle: littérature et dissidence à l’âge classique by Michel Jeanneret (review)

MLRy 99.2, 2004 487 'Cceur contemplatif' and other allegorical personifications, whereas the Fort chasteau pour la retraicte de toutes bonnes ames fait par le commandement du glorieux Sainct Esperit adopts the popular fiction of the allegorical edifice (here a kind of fortified convent) in order to create a refuge forthose seeking spiritual improvement and mystic union with the creator. Berriot-Salvadore's edition of these intriguing texts contains a full set of black-and-white reproductions of the numerous illustrations that adorn Gabrielle's manuscripts. While the practice of including illustrations in editions of this kind can only be welcomed (in this case it is clear that they were commissioned by the author, and that they are closely linked to her text), itis perhaps regrettable that the decision not to publish them in colour has made close study of them impractical. The introduction contains useful contextual information on Gabrielle's life and ancestry, her intellectual background and links to contemporary writers and theologians, but is not entirely freefrom errors of detail, especially in the identification and attribution of works in Gabrielle's library (the Vergierd'honneur is, for instance, wrongly attributed to Octovien de Saint-Gelais, and Valerius Maximus is credited with Les Faits des Romains instead ofthe Facta et dicta memorabilia). Of more concern, however, are the shortcomings of the edited texts themselves. While it is true that single-manuscript works, like those of Gabrielle, pose a particular set ofproblems (especially to editors as conservative as Berriot-Salvadore), readers would have been better served by a greater willingness on the part of the editor to deal with obvious scribal errors, note rejected readings, and to explicate, and indeed comment on, the interesting linguistic peculiarities of the manuscripts ('sabas' forfd-bas surely requires a separate glossary entry,for instance). In addition, simple collation of those sections of Gabrielle's work present on the pages reproduced in the book's illustrations with the edited text itself reveals numerous minor misreadings, silent emendations, and orthographic modernizations. This is unfortunate, since such problems tend to detract from the modern reader's engagement with a group of texts that shed fascinating light both on women's writing of the early modern period and on the private devotions of a 'grande princesse'. University of Durham David Cowling Eros rebelle: litterature et dissidence a Vage classique. By Michel Jeanneret. Paris: Seuil. 2003. 332 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-02-041687-5. Michel Jeanneret's book presents erotic literature fromthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of political and social opposition to a centralized and in? creasingly repressive power and as a response to the tightening hold of religious authorities on individuals' lives (he insists, for example on the role of the confessor) as Louis XIV rises to absolute power. Using authors such as Ronsard, Theophile de Viau, Corneille, and Moliere (with the third and final part devoted to the theatre), Jeanneret argues that the Renaissance's relaxed attitude to eroticism as an intrinsic part of human nature was replaced by the notion of 'libertinage', which was under? stood by both its proponents and its detractors as a form of social rebellion. As the seventeenth century progresses, battle lines are drawn between 'libertins' and bigots ina confrontation that will culminatein Moliere's wrangle with the 'devots'. In Part I the author suggests that a transition took place, around the turn of the century, from an apolitical, 'bon enfant' eroticism to a farcruder and willingly provocative form of writing whose function was not only erotic but also ideological. The most dramatic change seems to be, according to Jeanneret, that whereas Renaissance erotic writings were often seen to glorifylove in all its forms,including the physical, later writings aim to shock rather than titillate, and to do so, they sometimes vilifyrather than celebrate the body. Part II, 'La provocation', therefore deals with the philosophical and social 488 Reviews implications of 'libertinage'. It also takes into consideration the scientific approach to the body, in Descartes in particular, which puts it in opposition to the mind and reduces it to a 'machine' which must be controlled, a dichotomy which will form the basis of the 'passion vs. reason' discourse. Jeanneret...

Of women, poetry, and power: strategies of address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou

The haunting legacy of Emily Dickinson's life and work have shaped a romantic conception of poetry as private, personal, and expressive that has governed the reception of subsequent American women poets. Of Women, Poetry, and Power demonstrates how the canonization of Dickinson has consolidated limiting assumptions about women's poetry in twentieth-century America and models an alternative reading practice that allows for deeper engagement with the political work of modern poetry. Analyzing the reception of poems by Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou, Zofia Burr shows the persistence of these critical outlooks and dispels the belief that we have long since moved beyond such limiting gendered expectations. Turning away from an obsessive concern with a poet's biography, Burr's readings of contemporary women's poetry accentuate its engagement and provocation of readers through its forms of address. Burr shows how displacing the limits of dominant reception is possible by approaching poetry as communicative utterance, not just as self-expression.

Why reading literature in school still matters: imagination, interpretation, insight

Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight explains how a reader's involvement with literary texts can create conditions for developing deep insight into human experience, and how teachers can develop these interpretive possibilities in school contexts. Developed from the author's many years of research, this book offers both a theoretical framework that draws from an interdisciplinary array of sources and many compelling and insightful examples of literary engagement of child, adolescent, and adult readers, as well as practical advice for teachers and other readers about how to create interesting and expansive sites for interpretation that are personally rewarding and productive. Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight : *provides an overview of theories of human learning that influence beliefs about language, culture, and identity; *shows how these theories of learning influence beliefs about and practices of and interpretation; *introduces new ways to conceptualize that emphasize the relationship between individual and collective identities and language/literacy practices; *explains why access to information does not guarantee that understanding and/or insight will occur--by emphasizing the importance of re-reading and close reading this text shows that development of deep insight depends on interpretation skills that must be taught; and *presents a reconceptualized view of pedagogy. This is an essential text for education courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and a must read for teachers and for anyone interested in more deeply understanding how literary works of art can create conditions for learning about oneself, one's situation, and one's possibilities.