Reading Of Literary Texts Research Articles

Samuel Daniel. Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme (review)

214 Reviews But for m a n y readers, the book will chiefly be of interest in that i t allows unmediated access to the words of a w o m a n . The voice which emerges is engaging, both modest and confident, and Carol Neel draws special attention to this tension between her self-deprecation and the boldness of her educative purpose. She brings out, without adjudicating between, different approaches to the text opened up by feminist scholarship: for example, can it be taken as the voice of a distinctive female piety, or does it reveal a flattening of gender distinctions? Neel has done a fine job. Her book is a paperback reprint of a work published in hard covers some years ago, with the addition of new material at the end, where an exceptionally helpful Afterword engages with some of the surprisingly large volume of relevant recent work and suggests ways in which it facilitates the reading of the text. Dhuoda's work is rendered into clear English, to which an introduction, pitched roughly at undergraduate level, eases the path. The notes make available much material accumulated by Pierre Riche for his publication of a critical edition, and are generally helpful, although I a m not sure whether to believe the suggestion that the letters in the term 'tD+Mt', which abbreviate the Latin 'dis manibus', stand for 'into the hands of God'; perhaps Dhuoda mistakenly thought they did, but the original meaning is 'to the spirits of the dead'. The book effectively presents a text which is interesting in many ways, and deserves a wide readership. John Moorhead Department ofHistory University of Queensland Hiller, Geoffrey G , and Peter L. Groves, ed., Samuel Daniel. Selected Poe and A Defense of Rhyme, University of North Carolina, Asheville, Pegasus Press, 1998; paper; pp. xii, 251; R.R.P. US$12.95. As I read this fine book I often thought of Shylock's exclamation: ' come to judgement; yea a Daniel!' For not only have the editors and the publishers donean excellentjob, butDaniel's work, as offered in this selection, embodies many of the qualities that at this stage our discipline is much in need of: such as discipline, c o m m o n sense, sound workmanship, and above Reviews 215 a l latotallyunprejudiced, shrewd, independent and unfashionable judgement of the world—perhaps particularly the literary world. As the editors point out, 'Daniel was highly regarded in his o w n time and much of his poetry was innovative and influential' (p. ix), but he has suffered from neglect by modern scholars, not least editors, and this selection, which presents him as a poet rather than dramatist, including a well-chosen sampling of his poetic output and the justly famous A Defense of Rhyme (which, fortunately, has not been neglected, though i t still deserves more attention) should do something to redress the balance. Whether it will do so or not to the extent that Daniel deserves remains to be seen at a time like the present, which is still characterised by much sweeping, politicised comment on the 'Early Modern' period in general rather than careful reading of literary texts of any kind, leave alone texts as understated, unspectacular, and subtle as those of this poet. But that is all the more reason w h y w e need this edition. A Defense of Rhyme, for example, is an outstanding example of English empirical common sense, accompanied by such theoretical insight as is needed for i t s job (but fortunately no more), warring against outrageous theorising based on undue admiration for foreign writers. Daniel seems to m e even better in this treatise than the editors would allow. They feel that he would have benefited from 'the advent of modern linguistic theory' (p. 19), but i t appears that he needed to learn little from that, and that he has a clear enough grasp of what he is discussing. Daniel exposes as purely dogmatic and silly Campion's thinking that the English should discard rhyme because the ancients did not use i t , and, more importantly, successfully dismisses the foolish experiment with 'quantitative' verse that some of his contemporaries...

The Ecocritical Insurgency

u m i cocriticism is a new movement, of '90s really, still at an wA early state of unfolding. Although term was coined twenty JL?Jyears ago, although critical readings of literary texts and move ments in relation to ideas of nature, wilderness, natural science, and spatial environments of all sorts have been pursued for better part of a century, only in last decade has study of literature in relation to begun, quite suddenly, to assume look of a major critical insurgency. The Who's listening? question that nagged me when I began such work in late 1980s has given way to How can I keep up with all that's coming out? and Can I even keep track of, let alone stay in touch with, all players? Will this burgeoning of literature-and-environment studies continue? Almost surely so, for at least two reasons. First, field of application for environmentally-valenced critical inquiry is immense in duration and range. Given that human beings are inescapably biohistorical creatures who construct themselves, at least partially, through encounter with physical environments they cannot not inhabit, any artifact of imagination may be expected to bear traces of that. From this it follows that scope of inquiry extends in principle from oldest surviving literary texts, such as Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, to literature of present moment?as is borne out by sweep of such critical books as Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadows of Civiliza tion and Louise Westiing's The Green Breast of New World, both of which start with Gilgamesh.1 Second, as human civilizations enter fin de si?cle, the environment looms up as a more pressing, multifarious problem than ever before. If, as W. E. B. DuBois famously remarked, key problem of twentieth century has been problem of color line, it is not at all unlikely that twenty-first century's most pressing problem will be sustainability of earth's environment?and that responsibility for addressing this problem, or constellation of problems, will increasingly be seen as responsibility of all human sciences, not just of specialized disciplinary enclaves like ecology or law or public policy. So literature-and-environment studies are here to stay, no doubt about it. But what has ecocriticism achieved thus far? Where has it succeeded, New Literary History, 1999, 30: 699-712

Mythen, Metaphern und Metamorphosen : Weibliche Parodie in der zeitgenossischen griechischen Literatur

Reviewed by: Mythen, Metaphern und Metamorphosen: Weibliche Parodie in der zeitgenössischen griechischen Literatur Gregory Jusdanis Michaela Prinzinger, Mythen, Metaphern und Metamorphosen: Weibliche Parodie in der zeitgenössischen griechischen Literatur. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. 1997. Pp. 252. Who could possibly have expected a decade ago that the field of comparative literature would find itself in a crisis today? For this field has flourished first in Europe then in North America for about a century. Yet almost every theoretical study of this discipline today refers to a crisis, to a lack of relevance, declining enrollments, and absence of purpose. When it emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century in continental Europe, comparative literature was intended as a hydrant to douse the raging fires of nationalism. By that time literature had been serving the interests of the nation-state for many decades. Alarmed with this appropriation of literature by the nation-state and with the unceasing spread of nationalist feelings, writers and philosophers began to foster an ecumenical outlook. Critics and readers, they argued, should be preoccupied with not just one but several literary traditions. They wished to promote the universalist values of a comparative discipline. [End Page 186] It is strange, therefore, that this very discipline should flounder at a time of rampant globalization. For while practitioners of comparative literature mourn their declining fortunes, students of cultural studies, diaspora, and multiculturalism sing the praises of transnationalism. How can this be? The answer is simple—language. When multiculturalists celebrate diversity they mean by this term cultural rather than linguistic heterogeneity. Who wants to study languages these days in the English-speaking world in such depth as to be able to read literary texts? How many critics can actually deal with literary texts in two or three languages? It is thus with pleasure and relief that one picks up a study like Michaela Prinzinger’s. For it exemplifies the best in comparative literature—the ability to move through several literary traditions. The aim of Prinzinger’s book is to look at Greek women’s writing from contemporary theoretical perspectives. After outlining her theoretical presuppositions, Prinzinger provides a useful summary of the state of women’s writing from the 1870s until today. This chapter is followed by an examination of feminist discourse in Greece and abroad since the 1970s. Prinzinger thus is able to locate her own analysis historically with regard to the span of Greek fiction by women and theoretically with regard to contemporary feminist discussions. Having established this background for her readers, Prinzinger then moves to the main body of her analysis, an exploration of three well-known women authors: Rea Galanaki, Alexandra Deligiorgi, and Margarita Karapanu. Specifically, she examines how these authors use the literary trope of parody in order to come to terms with as well as criticize Greek society and the Greek literary tradition. In so doing, she investigates how their relationship to this tradition differs from that shared by men authors. As Prinzinger explains, the women writers of the 70s and 80s appropriate such male myths as the murder of the father or king by the son—myths transformed by Harold Bloom into a theory of literary influence—in order to change them through “textual metaphors” (13). The pose they adopt vis-à-vis their literary forebears is, in other words, ironic. While in the previous section Prinzinger shows her broad knowledge of Greek literature and literary theory, in this part she displays her capacity for detailed analysis of the writings by Galanaki, Deligiorgi, and Karapanu. Her readings are fascinating and well documented. Particularly interesting for me was her analysis of Karapanu’s enigmatic, disturbing, and challenging novel Kassandra and the Wolf. Her reading of this difficult text is illuminating because she is able to connect it not only to a greater theme, in this case the costumes and disguises of the carnival, but at the same time to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and Henry James’s short-story “The Turn of the Screw.” Prinzinger is thus able to show that Karapanou’s text is a meaningful document because it shares links not only with Greek social issues but also with works of art...

Recenti sviluppi nell’educazione letteraria

The first Minister of Education of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 was Francesco De Santis, the author of the first «History of Italian Literature»: he shaped the notion of literary education for the Italian school - a notion still in use after 140 years. According to his vision, teaching literature meant teaching the history of literature. This vision has been upset in the late 1980s in the teaching of foreign literatures (compulsory in the final three years of «Licei»): teaching literature means teaching how to read literary texts, how to detect and criticize their «literaryness», how to connect them to the production of the author and to the social and cultural setting of the times. This approach to the text, rather that to the author, is spreading slowly in the teaching to Italian Literature in schools.

The two-fold thought of Deleuze and Guattari: intersections and animations

French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari worked together extensively from the 1960s into the 1990s, and the resulting intersections of their different sensibilities and modes of knowing fuelled powerful alternatives to Marxian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies. Yet readers approaching Deleuze and Guattari's works are often frustrated by the paucity or unfamiliarity of specific examples that might clarify their complex arguments. This timely volume animates key concepts and terminology by applying them to provocative readings of literary texts, films, and cultural phenomena--from Apocalypse Now to Cajun music and dance. Drawing extensively from primary and critical sources to elucidate Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical contributions, Stivale reinvigorates their two-fold thought for use as an analytical tool in the humanities and social sciences. The book also offers a clear introduction to the precollaborative phase of each thinker's work, an interview Stivale conducted with Guattari, and the first-time English translation of a 1967 essay by Deleuze.

Reading literary texts

The transmitor (author) through lexical selectionproduces meaning: the onomasiological operation. In the literary text, the author creates a metaphor stemming from a common sema. The receiver (reader) understands the metaphor through the semasiological operation. The author of this article offers an analysis of the word «blood», in Jorge de Lima's piece of poetry, O grande desastre aéreo de Ontem.
 How to reference this article:
 Fanganiello, G. (1998). Leitura do Texto Literario. Íkala. 3 (2), pp 79 – 88 

LEARNER'S PERSPECTIVES ON AUTHENTICITY

The use of authentic texts has become integral to communicative and proficiency-oriented foreign language teaching. However, researchers and teachers alike are still engaged in a debate on several pertinent issues: for example, (a.) whether the definition of authenticity as produced by native speakers for native speakers is sufficient; (b.) how learners react to authentic materials, particularly whether they find them irrelevant to their language learning and difficult, and (c.) whether to grade (modify) texts or tasks. This paper describes a survey which asked 190 university-level learners of German to rate 53 situations (composed of 12 authenticity factors ) on their level of (a.) authenticity; (b.) contribution to language learning; (c.) ease/difficulty; and (d.) resulting anxiety/enjoyment. Findings show that learners view authentic materials as essential to language learning and enjoyable. In contrast, positive correlations between authenticity and perceived difficulty were rare. Finally, learners assigned great importance to native-inception (produced by a native speaker) when rating situations for their authenticity and considered native reception (produced for native-speakers) as less important. Overall, the number of authenticity factors (quantity) which were present in a given scenario appeared more important than whether any particular factor was included (quality). In conclusion, learners enjoy interacting with authentic materials but are appreciative of pedagogical support, especially in listening situations and when reading literary texts. In short, learners choose grading tasks over grading texts.

The Longest Revolution: Cultural Studies after Speciesism

This article is a provisional exploration of the field of cultural studies from a committed animal rights perspective. It argues that cultural studies will need to be reformed in response to increasing public concern about animal welfare issues and the growth of environmental consciousness. A number of critical readings of literary texts are employed to exemplify how this reformation might manifest itself in practice. It includes a review and critique of some current work in the field and suggests that cultural theory is presently unable to respond fully to the place of animals in cultural production.

The Longest Revolution: Cultural Studies after Speciesism

This article is a provisional exploration of the field of cultural studies from a committed animal rights perspective. It argues that cultural studies will need to be reformed in response to increasing public concern about animal welfare issues and the growth of environmental consciousness. A number of critical readings of literary texts are employed to exemplify how this reformation might manifest itself in practice. It includes a review and critique of some current work in the field and suggests that cultural theory is presently unable to respond fully to the place of animals in cultural production.

Sprachliche Entfremdung als Phänomen des Umbruchs in der früheren DDR

Linguistic alienation as phenomenon of the transformation in the erstwhile DDRThe Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic have not yet grown into a coherent unity since the political unification of the two 'Germanies' in 1990. The reason for the lack of sympathy and the irritations on both sides possibly lies in the fact that the actual developments did not meet the general expectations during the first years after 1990. The thesis of my article is that the more profound reasons for the alienation between the western and the eastern part of Germany can be found in the little interest on the western side for the developments in the GDR from 1949 until the fall of the Wall in 1989. The lack of interest in the forty years of the GDR’s existence finds its expression in the alienation of language. In order to improve communication between the Germans of both spheres, the reading of literary texts from the former GDR by members of the entire new Federal Republic of Germany can be a reconcilliatory device. In this way the reader can obtain insight into forty years of history.

Cultured Toys

Cultured Toys Paula T. Connolly (bio) Lois Rostow Kuznets. When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. From Barbie to cyborg, ancient Greece to visions of the future, novels to comic strips, Piaget to Lacan, Lois Rostow Kuznets explores not only the depiction of animated toys in literature, but also the representation and function of toys as cultural artifacts in When Toys Come Alive. Kuznets traces the myriad and complex ways toys and toy-like objects have functioned as cultural markers—how their uses have ranged from fetish and sacred object to a way of socializing children. In her discussion of the economics of toys, for example, Kuznets explores how toys have served as a means of commercialization as well as aesthetics. As emblems of conspicuous consumption, expensive toys have become markers of financial success for the adult collector and the privileged child. In such critiques as this, Kuznets often frames her discussion as an exploration of tensions—how toys have served as a means of ritual play and as tools of advertisers; how collecting dolls both signals a struggle between adults and children for the meaning and possession of toys and how it cites, for adults, a reaction against the development of technology (19). A central point in Kuznets’ argument is that toys cannot be isolated in a single category, that they “blur . . . the line” (15) between generations and functions. Kuznets makes no claim to provide an exhaustive study of toys in literature, and she notes that “choices of both topics and texts owe much to my own tastes and fancies” (3). Yet her foci are both wide-ranging and incisive. Her study includes both children’s and adults’ books, ranging from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Her close reading of texts is complemented by a range of critical interpretations, including feminist and psychoanalytic. Further, the scope and sophistication of her reading of literary texts is informed by multidisciplinary [End Page 148] analyses; as Kuznets herself states in the Preface, “[m]y scholarly and imaginative reading led me into not only fiction but history, psychology, anthropology, literary theory, and finally computer science’s struggle with artificial intelligence” (xi). In short, Kuznets presents a many-layered exploration of literature and culture, examining the varied notions of toys as well as the intersections of literature and toy as material culture. Indeed, the connections between toys and literature have been longstanding. As Kuznets recounts from her research, John Newbery often used toys as a way to market children’s books, toy books have functioned as a hybrid of the two in play, and actual toys have inspired the illustrations of such books as the golliwog stories and the Raggedy Ann and Andy series. Kuznets moves between a cultural and literary analysis in each chapter, anchoring the literary texts within a cultural context. In the chapter, “Magic Settings, Transitional Space,” for example, she provides a fascinating study of how dollhouses set up hierarchies of class and race. Her examination of cultural artifacts even extends to museum exhibits, as she points out that “[n]o matter how much museum literature might like to emphasize the educational ‘facts’ about dollhouses, it often slips into anthropomorphism.” She finds evidence of this at a London museum where exhibit descriptions note how dolls have “settled comfortably” and are “living in the house” (120). Her reading of dollhouses then informs an analysis of Beatrix Potter’s use of the dollhouse in The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Later in the chapter, the function of dollhouses as transitional space is counterpointed with a reading of the dolls and dollhouses in such books as Sylvia Cassedy’s Lucie Babbidge’s House and E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. Kuznets’ discussion of play theories draws from Piaget, Winnicott, and Sutton-Smith, and she thus balances a study of developmental stages and psychoanalytic theories with cultural anthropology as a way to inform a close reading of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne (whom she mistakenly refers to as Alan Arthur, rather than Alan Alexander) and Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Kuznets describes how...

Literary Criticism after the Revolution, or How to Read a Polemical Postmodern Literary Text

Literary Criticism after the Revolution, or How to Read a Polemical Postmodern Literary Text Janet Sarbanes My paper will formulate a model for reading literary texts written either at the inception or as a continuation of the politics of subjectivity that nineteen-fifties came into existence in the United States in the organized around racial, advocate rights, representation and, in some instances, revolution. Like many literary texts and theories of language of the postmodern era, these texts treat politics and language as inextricably intertwined, though their primary aim is not so much to dismantle the dominant discourse as to generate minor political subjectivities. sixties, a politics and gender and sexual identities to From a poststructuralist critical perspective, these texts often appear unreadable because they approach the intersection of politics, identity and textuality differently than other literary or for that matter, philosophical texts. The language of these texts is the language of force, polemic and struggle, rather than the langue of domination, structure and empire. It is also the language of the body, not as text, but as vehicle for transforming individual subjectivity into group subjectivity. With their construction of the felt or lived body as the vital link between language and material- ity, individual and collective, politics and literature, these writers which not merely subverts but in certain instances defies the sociolinguistic rules of the create a discourse of the other-as-other I am reading after must also refer to the revolution in our understanding of subjectivity wrought by the dominant discourse. The revolution Western metaphysical and literature in unprec- edented ways. Vincent Pecora summarizes the subversive legacy poststructuralists, whose critique of the tradition connected politics, philosophy of poststructuralism in terms of its critique of essentialism, the argument that stable identities are in effect linguistic fictions or its historical constructions; critique of representation, the insis- tence that language is not neutral or fixed but slanted and unstable; and its critique of utilitarianism and instrumental thinking

Exposures: Literature, woman, and the pleasure of the reader

Mary Lydon's Skirting the Issue: Essays in Literary Theory offers close, elegant readings of literary texts, paintings, and films by the likes of Colette, Duras, Truffaut, Wilde, Beckett, Proust, Mallarm?, and Duchamp (to name but a few). As the title of the book suggests, each analysis addresses the question of theory, although Lydon does not profess to apply, explicate or illustrate theoretical discourses. Tearing apart language and rebuilding it anew, tracking down chance meetings of theory and art, positioning her work at the very intersection of literature and criticism, Lydon instead puts forth a series of theoretical performances; for Lydon, theory is a praxis, and reading is an activity, an event, an exposition. Indeed, Lydon's essays must be viewed as expository, despite the fact that they explain nothing (criticism, for Lydon, is specifically not explanation), precisely because these texts nei ther posit nor impose but expose the theoretical as such. I emphasize exposure in order to turn to eros. Lydon's insightful, crea tive readings of individual texts are superseded, in Skirting the Issue, by the overall goal of the work: the theorization of a feminist politics of pleasure. Following loosely in the buried footsteps of the final works of Roland Barthes, and situated somewhere before the writings of Slavoj Zizek (a theorist to whom Lydon does not refer), Skirting the Issue should perhaps be read as the hook that links (via Lacan and feminism) Barthes to Zizek, a reading which would thus generate a series?Barthes, Lydon, Zizek?in which different sorts of erotic enjoyment surface as the condition of pos sibility for cultural, political, and aesthetic analysis. Lydon in fact endlessly veils and unveils an erotics of reading and writing: the pleasure of the text. Or better said, this veiling and unveiling, this dressing and undressing, this skirting and unbuckling?in short, this repeated expos??is the erotics, the pleasure itself: the pleasure of the reader (Lydon as reader of texts) and the writer (Lydon as writer of Skirting the Issue). This politics of pleasure?

Translating Theory into Practice: Toward Developing Critically Literate Readings of Literary Texts

Translating Theory into Practice: Toward Developing Critically Literate Readings of Literary Texts

The computer in literary analysis: UsingTACT with students

TACT, a freeware program from the University of Toronto's Centre for Computing in the Humanities, is a highly sophisticated tool for text retrieval; although written for experienced critics and researchers, it can teach undergraduate students to read literature in new, fresh ways. Without requiring that the user become either a programmer, linguist, mathematician, or statistician,TACT introduces the literature student to the computer as a research tool. Studies of imagery and symbolism, of structural patterns, and of prosody can result from the student's careful tagging of a literary text and can yield significant insights into the work of literature. Students who use the computer as such a tool learn to read literary texts more closely and to think more clearly about literary problems.

The Culture of Redemption (review)

Reviews393 them accessible to readers who do not know Spanish. Sadly, I am afraid this book would only discourage English-speaking readers from getting better acquainted with Cervantes's work. Pomona CollegeMichael McGaha The Culture ofRedemption, by Leo Bersani; 232 pp. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1990, $25.00. Leo Bersani has used a powerful metaphor, summarizing a complex set of assumptions, as the tide of this intricate work. He has brought together a farreaching set of readings of premodemist and modernist texts by authors as diverse as Baudelaire, Joyce, Bataille, and Pynchon; the shifts which he highlights within these texts illustrate either the adherence to or negation of the culture of redemption. Just what is that culture? It is the post-Kantian, post-"art-for art's sake" transferrai to art of a powerful authority to redeem experience; in this sense, art assumes a role previously assigned to religion and philosophy. But we can only surmise the historical narrative to which the metaphor of redemption alludes since Bersani never plays with or analyses it, despite its commercial and theological power. Bersani states clearly that he is not interested in pursuing questions of "genealogy," so his concerns with a particular aesthetic tradition of idealization are without historical contextualization. Again, extracting from the text, one can surmise that he is demonstrating in a particularist fashion the ways in which modernist literary texts, along with certain precursors and successors, undercut an "authorized" narrative within literary history or unconsciously submit to it. The epilogue to the book, a reading of passages in Genesis relating to Ishmael and Sarah, in the context of George Segal's sculpture, "Abraham's Farewell to Sarah," comes the closest ofany section of the book to addressing the issues of legitimacy, selfhood, culture, power, and aesthetics which the governing metaphor implies. Bersani rejects a tradition that assigns to art the power to transform "experience " or "life" by either transcendence or repression. His are materialist readings of literary texts in that Bersani implies that the phenomena of individual material experience constitute reality and that collective material experience constitutes culture. These are also post-Freudian and post-Deconstructive readings. Desire is the driving force which produces art, and "psychoanalytic realism" not "psychoanalytic idealism" should govern our understanding of the sublimation which affects the aesthetic process. The transformation of the object of desire in the aesthetic experience leads neidier to 394Philosophy and Literature mystification or transcendence, but to a shift to the self as the object of representation . Bersani rejects "humanistic criticism" with its "reparative nature of cultural symbolisation" (p. 7) because it devalues historical experience, misreads art as philosophy, reaffirms an authoritative tradition of powerful selfhood, and misrepresents the process of cultural symbolization. The textual choices and readings are intriguing, ranging from Proust juxtaposed with Melanie Klein to Malraux's La Condition humaine to Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity's Rainbow. The method owes much to Derrida and de Man. The shifts or moves of the text show a neutralization or negation of representation, idealization, or transcendence or an actualization of these forms ofredemption, in spite of the supposed scepticism of the author. The latter is most evident in the chapter, "Against Ulysses," in which Joyce, in contrast to Beckett, is seen as reaffirming cultural memories and "the enormous power of sublimation in our culture ... as the appeasement and even transcendence of anxiety" (p. 176). Given Bersani's assumptions, an observant reader may come away with the feeling that his canonic authors are Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Bataille, Melville, and Pynchon, and the unfortunates are Proust, Joyce, Benjamin, and Malraux. Bersani speaks of the "possibility of pursuing not an art of truth divorced from experience, but of phenomena liberated from the obsession with truth" (p. 26). This is what he values; readers who share his materialist scepticism will admire his readings. Those who do not will be troubled by his failure to address the far-ranging ontological and historical assumptions which govern his criticism. Vanderbilt UniversityPatricia A. Ward Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding, by Julie Ellison; xv & 306 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, $16.95, paper. We are stiU trying to sort out the complex legacy of romanticism. "We" here...

Fifteen jugglers, five believers: literary politics and the poetics of American social movements

This study argues for an affiliation between literary and political action. What can the literary theory learn from social movements, and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist and neo-Marxim? In new interpretations of texts in four different genres - Agee and Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ellison's Invisible Man, Mailer's Armies of the Night and the Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s - Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help to overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined efforts to combat racism, sexism and economic inequality.

Multiple semiotic sources as scaffolding for young children’s emergent reading of picture-story books

The significance of children’s literature in early reading development is supported through linguistic analysis of literary texts for young children and the transcripts of classroom interaction deriving from the reading of these texts. This paper will provide a sample analysis of texts for young readers. It will examine the use of colour coding in illustrations, alignment of textual cues in illustrations with corresponding segments of the main text and the use of speech bubbles to repeat selected dialogic exchanges from the main text. The analysis will show how these features interact with Thematic variation of projecting and projected clauses in dialogic segments of the main text. This interaction provides textual scaffolding which assists beginning readers to actively engage in meaningful shared reading of literary texts for young children.

Narratives of Socialization: Literacy in the Short Story

The particularity that James Boyd White posits for law and rhetoric holds true in amended fashion for fiction as well: fiction revels in specificity, in particular places and characters that are constructed out of the language of a given place and time. All fiction historicizes problems of socialization, including literacy; it dramatizes conflicts between characters from specific language communities and highlights differences between dialects and usage. With its compact form, the short story tells a particular kind of narrative, a of arrested that ends with characters who, having glimpsed new language and cultural possibilities, find their own speech inadequate and the new speech problematic. In the end, these characters remain suspended between languages; in such endings, short fiction freezes or crystallizes the problem of literacy. By studying these stories, we can learn much, for they tell us much about historical attitudes toward and, by comparison, much about our own. Thus, literary texts, particularly short stories, can provide forums for studies of literacy, and just as importantly, the study of can inform our readings of literary texts. Nathaniel Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux tells of a young man's moral and psychological initiation into the adult world of sexuality and violence. It also recounts the conflicts between the American colonists and the British government and records the shift from a rural to an urban center (see Bremer; Cohen; Duban; Gross; Smith; Stott). But for this study, I want to focus on My Kinsman as a story that defines Robin's through the subject of language. As such it is what I would call a narrative of socialization or literacy narrative: a fiction that dramatizes the collision between competing discourse communities, their language conventions, and their inherent social logics, a fiction that invites us to analyze constructed characters as they negotiate and appropriate various discourses and world views. Throughout My Kinsman, Major Molineux, the protagonist Robin misinterprets the voices and values around him and articulates his experiences in the

On the outside Looking in: A Study of Remedial Readers' Meaning-Making While Reading Literature

This study compared remedial readers to more proficient readers in their meaning-making processes during the reading of literary text. Six children attending a university-based Literacy Center read aloud two stories and verbalized their thoughts during reading. Langer's categories (1990) were used to compare the resulting think alouds. Langer found readers assume four stances as they make meaning while reading literature: (a) being out and stepping into an envisionment, (b) being in and moving through an envisionment, (c) stepping back and rethinking what one knows, and (d) stepping out and objectifying the experience. Langer described readers as always working toward an evolving understanding of the whole, and their envisionment of the whole affects their momentary understandings. A qualitative analysis was also conducted as other categories emerged and all the responses were recategorized for difficulties experienced by remedial readers. Analysis revealed that the remedial readers spend a disproportionate amount of being out of envisionments—either attempting to step into one or failing to step in. Also, these readers consistently failed to construct evolving wholes and struggled with the language of literary discourse. The overall picture of remedial readers gained from this study is one of being on the outside looking in. Implications for and of instruction are discussed.