Text-centered Approach Research Articles

A Corpus-Based Text-Centric Approach to the Scientific Discourse Actualization in the Process of Forming the Professional Language Personality of Linguistic Specialties Students

The article analyses the effect of the corpus text-centered approach on the development of the personality of a linguistics student in the changing socio-pedagogical and professional context of modern society. The ways of scientific discourse actualization in the digital linguodidactic space are investigated, a systematic and in-depth justification of its forms is given, practical and didactic measures affecting the formation and harmonious development of the professional language personality of students are considered. The key characteristics of scientific communication necessary for future specialists for successful professional development in the field of linguistic knowledge are being clarified. The specifics of teaching students a foreign language based on a text-centric approach based on the online corpus dictionaries and digital word cloud technology use are being clarified. The purpose of the article is to investigate and demonstrate the conceptual model and principles of the modern didactic system, which is based on the corpus text-centered approach in the teaching of scientific discourse to language students and the development of their professional language personality. Methodology. In addition to quantitative methods, the pedagogical experiment aimed to find out the characteristics of the formation and development of the scientific discussion skills of students in the field of education “Professional education (according to industry)” a text-centric approach was used. In conclusion, it can be stated that the effectiveness of the corpus text-centered approach in the development of the professional personality of language students has been demonstrated. Recognizing the specifics of scientific communication, this approach helps students improve their reading, writing, speaking skills and understanding of foreign scientific discourse, as well as expand their vocabulary and develop logical thinking and communication skills.

A STRATEGIC ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF CHARACTER EPITHETS IN THE NOVEL “A DREAM OF RED MANSIONS” BASED ON THE THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR

In the novel “A Dream of Red Mansions” the author Cao Xueqin connects the characters’ nicknames with the characters themselves and the themes of the work, forming the epithet metaphor. The translation of these metaphors has a far-reaching significance for cross-cultural communication. Thus, the object of our research includes the personal names and nicknames of the novel’s characters, with a special focus on their translation into Russian. The aim of the paper is to confirm or question the adequacy of the translation technique adopted by the translator in each particular case. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, this paper sorts out some epithets in the 1958 Russian translation of “A Dream of Red Mansions,” explores the formation mechanism of epithet metaphor in the combination of literary and cultural contexts, and puts forward corresponding translation strategies for different interpretations of metaphor in different cultural contexts. The originality of research consists, first, in examining both personal names and nicknames and, second, in evaluating each technique employed by the translator in the light of both the linguo-cultural and text-centered approaches.

Toward an operationality perspective on fandom: Exploring Chinese fans’ emerging practices in platform-mediated environments

The rise of platforms has reshaped fan participation. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study examined celebrity fandom in China, where the Internet-powered entertainment industry and fan economy have flourished. We propose an operationality perspective as a wider-angle lens to conceptualize the multitude of fan practices emerging in platform-mediated environments. Moving beyond the text-centered approach, the operationality perspective sees fans’ platform practices (e.g. cross-platform engagement, curation of fan texts, data work) as a new logic of participation in digital fandom that could generate distinct identities and lifestyles. Operationality can be understood as a set of strategies fans employ in response to the growing influence of platformization. Operationality not only enables fans to align their practices with platform interests, but also affords them opportunities to negotiate their identities and adjust their degree of involvement in fandom.

TOROSLARDA YAKILAN İSTİKLAL ATEŞİNİN ROMANI KAYIP SANCAK’TA YAPI VE İZLEK

Geçmişte yaşanan olayların yazarların muhayyilesinde yeniden yorumlanarak kurgulanması sonucu meydana gelen tarihî romanlar, kimi yazarlar tarafından millî kimliği oluşturan değerleri muhafaza etmek ve millî bilinci uyanık tutmak amacıyla kaleme alınır. Türk edebiyatında geçmişten günümüze birçok tarihî roman kaleme alınmıştır. Mehmet Uluğtürkan’ın kaleme aldığı Kayıp Sancak romanı da bunlardan biridir. Yazar, özgün bir bakış açısıyla Millî Mücadele döneminde Güney cephesinde yaşananlara dikkat çeker. Adana’nın düşman işgalinden kurtuluşuna ithafen yazılan romanda Adana halkının Millî Mücadele’nin kazanılmasında gösterdiği kahramanlık ve mücadele gözler önüne serilir. Romanın olay örgüsü, 31 Ekim 1918 tarihinde Mustafa Kemal’in Adana’ya gelişiyle başlar ve 5 Ocak 1922 tarihinde Adana’nın düşman işgalinden kurtuluşunun kutlama gösterileriyle son bulur. Bu zaman aralığında yaşananlar bir tarihî süreç şeklinde aktarılır. Romanda Millî Mücadele döneminde Mustafa Kemal tarafından Adana’nın işgalden kurtarılması amacıyla görevlendirilen başkişi Tekelioğlu Sinan’ın ve çevresindekilerin verdiği direniş hareketi anlatılır. Bu çalışma boyunca metin merkezli bir yaklaşımla Kayıp Sancak romanı yapı ve izlek açısından tüm yönleriyle incelenecektir.

Is the Text still Alive, or Apology of an Autonomous Piece of Poetry (Based on Joseph Brodsky’s Poem «She Puts on the Stockings, and Fall Comes...»)

The article notes a marked preference given by the philological investigations of the last decades for the discourse-centered approach to analyzing a literary text, a poetic text in particular. The major idea that makes the sense and pathos of this
 publication is that the text-centered approach, as distinct from the discourse-centered one and applied much less frequently, is feasible due to the fact that any «high-grade»
 literary text is of value by itself: its faultless perception and correct assessment by the recipient do not require involvement of cultural and historic context and appeal to
 the broad literary context. Moreover, the first and foremost condition of the existence of a unique cultural
 artifact, i.e. a quality literary text, is nothing but its formal and semantic self-dependence, therefore it is self-containment, that is autonomy. The prime example is Joseph Brodsky’s 16-line poetic miniature «She Puts on
 the Stockings and Fall Comes...» written in 1994. It undergoes a deep line-by-line semantic and stylistic analysis with a focus on the parameters demonstrating the choice of a dominant sensory canal (vision, audition, partly smell), an object of poetic
 description (a portrait, landscape, indoor scenes), a dynamic / static description. The article has noted the textual semantic «frame» reflecting expressly realistic impres-
 sions; at the same time, everything embraced by the «frame» reflects the inner world of the character, his flash-back, doubts, self-reflection, emotions. The conclusion of the paper is as follows: the author’s literary skill, his technique, mastery of the language means and control of speech including its «accelera-
 tion» and «moderation», individual poetic taste and intuition are all embodied in the literary result that needs no special search for any extra-textual links and their obligatory involvement in the perception and comprehension of the text. Brodsky’s
 poem is not an only literary example; it clearly demonstrates a case when the poet, without too much effort, manages «to button up the beauty», i.e. the aesthetic dominant of his personal world (outlook), art, senses, thoughts, soul, «in the dark tower
 of poem» (Pasternak), turn this dominant into something hermetic and intimate, and on the other hand open to an attentive reader.

Translating Texts: An Introductory Coursebook on Translation and Text Formation

Translating Texts: An Introductory Coursebook on Translation and Text Formation, a textbook intended for trainee translators in both language-specific and language-neutral translation courses, as well as for language students, provides authentic materials designed to promote text awareness. It offers students an opportunity to gain insight into a text-centered approach to translation, fostering systematic reflection on macro and- micro-textual features of selected genres.

КОРОТКА ФОРМА ПРИКМЕТНИКА У СУЧАСНІЙ НІМЕЦЬКІЙ МОВІ В СВІТЛІ ГРАМА ТИЧНОГО В ЧЕННЯ ПРО СЛОВО

The short form of the adjective in present-day German, which stems from the Indo-European protolanguage and for that matter is found both in the Germanic and Slavic languages, in the German language took its evolutionary path along the way of the rise and establishment of the morphological features and syntactic functions re-forging itself from one of the forms of expression of a qualificator word into a representative nominator of the morphological paradigm. It widened its syntactic functioning on account of the qualitative adverb that due to the reduction of final vowels, i.e. its grammatical markers, coincided by sounding and meaning with the short form of the qualificator words. In German, these processes brought about the appearance of a new part of speech known as Artwort with the categorical meaning of the qualificator attribution. It realizes its grammatical potentialities in the substance-predicate structure of the sentence revealing in this way a bipolar functionality. Proceeding from the lexicon-centric approach to the categorical meaning of the word including the "amorphous” word of the kind of GUT an attempt is being made to describe the specificity of this type of meaning. In the opinion of the authors the categorical meaning of the "amorphous” word”, which determines its morphological paradigm and syntactic behavior, is vested at the level of the mental lexicon of the speaker as awareness and linguistic experience of using this kind of word in communication. In this way the short form of the adjectives comes in possession of all the features of the elementary sign which non-discretely combines the lexical and categorical meaning. The text-centered approach to the identification of the grammatical concept of the elementary sign reduces the word to the root morpheme. The latter attains the categorical status in its usage which is detrimental to the hierarchical construal of language. The syntactically polar bi-functionality of the short form of the adjective as the elementary sign is foregrounded in the system of actual, real and potential predications and, specifically, in the structure of Paul’s "degraded predicates” as well as in the propositions of the sentence deep structure getting explicated by means of logical implicates that represent a bipolar syntactic functionality of qualificator words. The implicit propositions reveal homonymous ties of the short form of the adjective with the first constituents of compound words which in most cases show themselves as units of the phraseological level of language structure.

КУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ СОСТАВЛЯЮЩАЯ ПРИ ОБУЧЕНИИ ШКОЛЬНИКОВ ЗАИМСТВОВАННОЙ ЛЕКСИКЕ: ДОСТИЖЕНИЕ ЛИЧНОСТНЫХ РЕЗУЛЬТАТОВ

The article describes a Russian language lesson in the 10th grade. The lesson is dedicated to achieving personal results of students within culturally oriented work with borrowed vocabulary. The article describes a cultural model of the lesson based on a text centered approach and developed in accordance with the requirements for a modern Russian language lesson. The lesson is devoted to the analysis of F.I.Buslaev’s text about borrowed and native Russian words, the study of some foreign words using various dictionaries, as well as a description of the peculiarities of the formation of value attitudes towards the Russian language among schoolchildren throughout the study of borrowed vocabulary.

Beyond Text

The study of Islamic juridical pronouncements (fatwas) has come to occupy a prominent position in the field of Islamic Studies. These works on fatwas, though deeply insightful, are characterized by a text-centric approach. The text of the fatwa is seen as standing in a virtually sanitized environment free from the complexities of form, process, context and language. Challenging this bias in scholarship on fatwas, I argue for a broadening of the traditional text-centered approach to fatwa analysis by highlighting the importance of examining the fatwa issuance process as well as the broader context of fatwas that is jointly constructed and negotiated during the fatwa issuance process by the jurisconsult (mufti) and the questioner (mustafti). I substantiate my arguments by drawing on theories of language, works on the interview and writings on context and embodiment. To elucidate the significance of my propositions and recommendations, I supplement my discussions with examples from the field, including my own ethnographic work. As this article asserts, the merits of this approach to fatwa analysis include a drastic widening of the scope in which a particular fatwa can be understood and interpreted.

PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT THREE-FACTOR MODEL OF EDUCATING HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS FOR PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

The aim of the presented publication is to discuss the changes in the practice of professional higher education which consist in strengthening and emphasis of an educational component in educational process. Methods. The methods involve the analysis of a condition of higher education and the provisions of the Federal Law on Education regulating its functioning in the Russian Federation; text-centered approach to education of the person of culture – the professional specialist, responsible for the activities. Results and scientific novelty. It states that some drawbacks of the existing present-day education organization are being constantly discussed by a pedagogical community of the Russian Federation: the absence of development stability; the absence of effective strategies and technologies of their implementation; the triumph of national nihilism confirmed by high schools and individual scientists participation in different foreign educational projects, usually having world notorious reputation; penetration of commercial principals in to an education system, the latter having been turned in to an education service, etc. As a result the personality quality itself has greatly deteriorated as well as Russia society intellect, on the whole, according to some law, psychological, philosophical and pedagogical analysis. The article stresses that the way out maybe found in restoring Russian national traditions and lost values and returning them to Russian education via adequate upbringing process. The authors describe their innovative model comprising three directions: 1) the integral three-factor spiritual, moral and intellectual upbringing of the students; 2) specially selected text content professional information using text-centered approach and 3) peculiar interaction of two education subjects: a student and a teacher. Their cooperation envisages the following stages: first, teacher’s strict guidance of a student; then – teacher’s soft support of a student; after this – teacher’s accompanying a student at a special request and, at last, – wise consulting a student if needed. In the long run, in the author’s opinion, this system should succeed in creating some special platform for student’s further self-upbringing and self-learning. The model described in the paper is considered on the example of the discipline «A foreign language in the professional sphere». The just described model was worked out for effective foreign language education process perceived as a part of professional high-school education. Due to this system, foreign language becomes a source of professionally demanded and personally valuable information. Practical significance. The model provided in the paper gives the chance to the student to be lifted to self-education level, to plan professional self-development and to build an individual trajectory of professional career.

Distanz und Bedeutung. Ovids Metamorphosen und die Frage der Ironie by József Krupp (review)

Reviewed by: Distanz und Bedeutung. Ovids Metamorphosen und die Frage der Ironie by József Krupp Marie Louise von Glinski József Krupp. Distanz und Bedeutung. Ovids Metamorphosen und die Frage der Ironie. Bibliothek der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, 126. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009. Pp. 200. €40.00. ISBN 978–3-8253–5678–1. Irony in Ovid’s poetry resembles the smile of the Mona Lisa. Impossible to resist, yet hard to pin down, irony presents a challenge to the interpretation of Ovid’s texts, in this case the Metamorphoses, a poem that in itself embodies flux. Krupp’s monograph, a revised version of the author’s dissertation, picks up this challenge in a series of close readings of central passages of the poem, such as Lycaon, Actaeon, Narcissus and Echo, Adonis and Atalanta, and the “little Aeneid”. He aims to show not whether (ob) but how (inwiefern) the Metamorphoses can be considered ironic. Krupp builds on the work of Barchiesi, Rosati, and Hardie on textual and visual illusion as well as on the intricate puzzle of narrative instances. He uses the notion of Romantic irony to tease out the tension produced by the distance between sign and signification.1 Krupp’s first chapter serves as a critical introduction to the history of irony from antiquity to Schlegel, and to the work of Derrida, de Man, and Gadamer. He sees the distance between what is said and what is meant as the central feature of irony, leading to a break in the text’s meaning (Textsinn), a subversive force that opens the text to a multiplicity of references (Bedeutungen). Taking his cue from Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Krupp sees irony as a test case for the interpretability of the Metamorphoses in its fragmented, nonlinear, and heterogeneous nature. With the second chapter, Krupp takes the wolf by the ears in the much-discussed first metamorphosis of the poem, Lycaon. The episode provides a methodological introduction as Krupp distances himself from reading irony as a tool of Augustan subversion. He mistrusts Ovid’s overt parallel of Jupiter and Augustus and teases out how the codes, or levels, of the narrative, namely the gods, Rome, and the intruding narrator, resist such easy compartmentalization and instead threaten to blend into each other. The next chapter deals with Actaeon’s ironically cut-off vision of Diana, which is suggested by the expectations of the reader rather than explicitly described. The limitations of sight and speech are also present in the fourth chapter where Krupp considers Narcissus and Echo. Krupp shows their inability to shape their unresponsive environment as Narcissus fails to animate art (unlike Pygmalion) and Echo speaks a language that negates communication even as it follows its own linguistic logic. The fifth chapter concentrates on the linearity of narrative in the inset tales of Orpheus telling of Venus telling of Atalanta. The interruption of Venus’ tales by kisses draws attention to the parallels of narrator, narratee, and subject resulting in an oscillating effect. In his last chapter Krupp considers the incorporation of the Aeneid in which parody and irony work within the framework of the Metamorphoses to rob the hypertext of its teleological outlook and its narrative necessity while exposing its fictionality. Krupp’s book is a subtle and persuasive appeal to tolerate and explore inconsistencies and contradictions of the Metamorphoses. With his focus on irony, [End Page 316] Krupp has found a red thread through much of recent Ovidian scholarship, and successfully combines theory and his own sensitive close readings. Krupp’s radically text-centered approach deliberately excludes the poet from the picture, a move that would have probably amused Ovid, given his own ironic stance towards the self-sufficiency of the text changing under his fingers (see Met. 1.2). That, perhaps, is a case of Schlegel’s “irony of irony,” and for another book. [End Page 317] Marie Louise von Glinski New York, NY Footnotes 1. The omission of Don Fowler’s seminal article on Romantic irony is surprising, given Krupp’s otherwise meticulous research: D. Fowler, “Postmodernism, Romantic Irony, and Classical Closure,” in I. J. F. de Jong and J. P. Sullivan (eds.), Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (Leiden 1994), 231...

Unrecognized ambiguities in validity of intervention research: an example on explicit phonics and text-centered teaching.

Unrecognized ambiguities in validity of intervention research: an example on explicit phonics and text-centered teaching.

Narrativity and enaction: the social nature of literary narrative understanding

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones.

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Swinburne, Impressionistic Formalism, and the Afterlife of Victorian Poetic Theory

Nicholas Dames' recent, illuminating study, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007), testifies to a resurgent scholarly interest in Victorian literary theory. Eschewing the text-centered approach that has traditionally dominated criticism of Victorian novels--an approach aimed at discovering the organic form total structure of literary productions--Dames uncovers a rival strain of interpretation that has its origins in the Victorians themselves: physiological theory, which attends to the mental and bodily responses of the reader during the (ideally silent) reading act. Armed with this forgotten method, which he ascribes largely to a group of bohemian writers affiliated with periodicals such as The Fortnightly Review and Mind---G. H. Lewes, Alexander Bain, E. S. Dallas, and others--Dames argues that Victorian novels, through their prodigious length and undulating form shaped the consciousness of the solitary Victorian mind. Forming a training ground for industrialized consciousness, these works mentally and physically conditioned readers for the demands of increasingly mechanized reality, rather than merely furnishing them with escape from it. (1) The Physiology of the Novel is often gripping book, in large part because it reminds us of a fact that ought to be obvious but that literary criticism has nevertheless tended to forget: that the Victorians developed sophisticated hermeneutical models for understanding contemporary texts, and that these models have much to tell us as critics who would engage meaningfully with these same texts. Dames' characters were formalists of a sort, and the innovative manner in which they understood form presents a fresh alternative to the more familiar conceptions of the New Critics. More precisely, these writers thought about form as something time-bound: through analogies with waves and music, they temporalized form, revealing it to be dynamic, inescapably processual, not frozen in time as many twentieth-century theorists would fantasize (Dames, pp. 128, 10). In this aspect of their thinking they were very much akin to another Victorian critic, one whose ideas are no less provocative but whose criticism, like their own, has been largely forgotten or cast aside: Algernon Swinburne. Virtually no scholarly ink has been spilled on this subject of Swinburne's formidable critical output over the last three decades: following Thomas E. Connolly's Swinburne's Theory of Poetry (1964), Robert Peters' incisive The Crowns of Apollo (1965), Meredith B. Raymond's Swinburne's Poetics (1971), and Jerome McGann's witty, jocund Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972), there was a momentary effluence of academic work on the topic--most notably David G. Riede's Swinburne : A Study in Romantic Mythmaking (1978)--but after the late seventies it seems that, with certain isolated exceptions, people simply ceased talking about Swinburne as a critic. (2) Why is this? How is it that this writer, a critic every bit as voluminous, and arguably as discerning, as Matthew Arnold--though deeply antithetical to him in most respects--gets so frequently overlooked in discussions, not merely about Victorian criticism, but about the history of criticism generally? Should it strike us as peculiar that so many of the magisterial critical voices of the first half of the twentieth century appear to have grappled with Swinburne's critical legacy and walked away from it altered in some way? What are we to make of the fact that Northrop Frye announces, in the preface to Fearful Symmetry, that his study is an extended critical essay in the Swinburne tradition? (3) What has Frye, the politely Linnaean and Aristotelian literary theorist, ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada, to do with the scandal-ridden, foppish proponent of free love, atheist, and disciple of Baudelaire? Why do scholars as wide-ranging as I. A. Richards, E R. …

Defining proficiency

In this study, various proficiency classification methods are explored in order to describe the relevant levels on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF) that are represented by a group of 127 incoming English students at a Dutch university with respect to academic writing. The weakness of the widely-used group-based institutional status approach is demonstrated with two distinct student-centered approaches, self-assessment and test scores, both of which highlight the within-groups variation that is hidden in group-based approaches. Between-texts variation is further explored through the comparison of self-assessment and text-centered approaches to classification such as test item (response) scores, and widely used measures of lexical variation and syntactic complexity. Findings demonstrate the potential variation in the understanding of academic writing development depending on the the methods of proficiency classification used.

Border crossings: interdisciplinarity in new working-class studies

The study of working-class culture crosses disciplinary borders, reveals important insights, and builds productive intellectual networks in ways that contribute not only to scholarly conversations but also to public understanding of working-class people and communities. Yet despite several decades of academic discourse about the value of interdisciplinarity, working across disciplinary borders remains challenging. This article describes a text-centered approach that facilitates comparative and connective analysis of varied sources, a method the authors have used both in their own research and with students, who often find interdisciplinary work especially difficult. The article illustrates how a ‘text analysis rubric’ can provide a framework for analyzing a short video and a map, highlighting connections between very different types of sources and thus facilitate critical analysis that integrates labor history, labor geography, and representations of work, economic conditions, and place.

ОБУЧЕНИЕ РОДНОМУ ЯЗЫКУ В НОВОЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ПРОГРАММЕ ДЛЯ ГИМНАЗИЙ ЭСТОНИИ

This article considers the content and structure of the new State Curriculum for high schools in Estonia, in which drafting the authors participated. The curriculum was applied in 2011/2012 academic year, and has being put into action gradually, starting from the 10th form. It is totally separated from the curriculum for middle schools. The main objective of teaching and education in high schools is that students are to find a field of activity of their interest and ability, which will be included in their further training. They are formative assessment and feedback that are of great attention in the new curriculum, as well as the need for conducting researches is emphasized, including mother tongue. Under the requirements of the new curriculum, studies in every subject are student-centred, i.e. they are brought in accord with students’ interests and everyday needs, e.g. in mother tongue courses the need of text-centred approach is highlighted. The number of required courses is reduced; there are more opportunities for options. In comparison with the previous curriculum, the courses on mother tongues (Estonian and Russian) are unified. Before, only 3 courses on Russian as a mother tongue were set-out, now 6 compulsory courses and 1 elective course are scheduled (like Estonian). While developing curriculum for the Russian (native) language, cross-cutting topics were taken into account. The article thoroughly describes the structure and content of the subject; it is shown how the new curriculum is being implemented in teaching practice; the realization of new text-centered courses “The Perception and Creation of an Oral Text” and “The Perception and Creation of a Written Text” as an implementation for the basic concept is instantiated. Key words: curriculum, teaching at high school level, mother tongue, text-centered approach, students’ needs.

Stowe, Byron, and the Art of Scandal

The media firestorm that followed Harriet Beecher Stowe's exposé of Lord Byron's supposed incest (which she first detailed in an 1869 Atlantic Monthly article and later in the book Lady ByronVindicated [1870]) provides an apt cultural site for analyzing the intersections among notions of authorship, moral authority, and literary value in the second half of the nineteenth century. Noting that a significant strain of commentary on the scandal sought to separate Byron's literary genius from the matter of his personal behavior, Ryan argues that this case study allows us to situate the declining relevance of authorial character to the question of literary valuation rather earlier in the century than scholars have typically claimed. Further, the Stowe-Byron scandal prefigures the unevenness and contestation that would accompany that development as well as the degree to which it would be complicated by the very identity categories and political investments that such a text-centered approach seems intent on eliding. Ryan notes that book advertisements and other archival sources support the view—advanced by both nineteenth-century commentators and twentieth-century scholars—that the scandal enhanced Byron's status and sales. The ensuing damage to Stowe's career, on the other hand, has been much exaggerated. The article concludes by exploring the critical and pedagogical tensions that authorship's reputational economies still engender.

The Burden of Ambiguity: Nicodemus and the Social Identity of the Johannine Christians

Nicodemus is an enigmatic literary character who is wavering in no man's land in John's narrative between Jesus' opponents and his true disciples. Some scholars have taken Nicodemus as an example of someone of inadequate faith who remains an outsider throughout the narrative, while others have traced his development from initial and tentative faith to open and public commitment to Jesus. The present article, however, agrees with those who have acknowledged that no single trait determines Nicodemus's portrait, but, in the end, this portrait remains ambiguous. In the article, a text-centered approach to Nicodemus is complemented by asking how this ambiguous literary character may have functioned as a symbol for those who shared John's dualistic tendencies. The article draws upon the social identity approach in order to explain how Nicodemus's ambiguity may have helped the Johannine Christians to accept the uncertainties in their social environment without abandoning the stereotyped and fixed thrust in their symbolic world.