Wellesley College Research Articles

Liliana Cavani at the fourth edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies conference, Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media, The American University of Rome, 13–15 June 2024

Liliana Cavani accepted the invitation to participate in the fourth edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media (JICMS) studies conference, held at the American University of Rome from 13–15 June 2024. Cavani attended a panel dedicated to her depictions of St Francis before taking the podium for an interview that was moderated by Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College), the co-organizer of the conference and principal editor of JICMS, and Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton University), a leading scholar on Cavani’s body of work from Princeton University. Cavani reflected on her enduring fascination with St Francis despite her upbringing in a secular household, discussed many of her other films, and shared her opinions on the current state of affairs in Italy and beyond. At the end of the session, after Cavani hinted at her plans for the future, the moderators and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome), who co-organized the conference with Laviosa, presented the director with a plaque in recognition of her Inimitable Contribution to World Cinema.

Nancy Elinor Adler (1946-2024).

Nancy was born in Manhattan in 1946. As a young girl, she was charmed by books about the teenage detective Nancy Drew and felt the books gave her an indelible enthusiasm for solving mysteries. Nancy graduated from Wellesley College (1968) and received her PhD from Harvard (1973) in social psychology. An APA Fellow, Nancy is one of the most cited scientists (top 0.1%) in the world (2022, Clarivate). She was a pioneer who shaped several key movements, including defining the field of Health Psychology, and deepening global recognition of social determinants of health. She won numerous honors and awards, including the David Rall Medal from the National Academy of Medicine. Nancy died at 77 at her home, on January 4, 2024, surrounded by loving family. The UCSF Center for Health and Community is establishing an annual Nancy Elinor Adler Endowed Lectureship Award for scholars who "illuminate the field of social and health disparities and conduct meaningful interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media: Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies – fourth international conference, The American University of Rome, 13–15 June 2024

The fourth international conference of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies (JICMS) was held at The American University of Rome on 13–15 June 2024. The co-organizers were Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College) and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome) and this year’s title was Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media. Participants from five continents and various countries, with diverse academic backgrounds, including film studies, Italian studies, media studies, social sciences and industry practice, came together for three days of stimulating discussions and productive exchanges of ideas and perspectives. The keynote address ‘Non-fiction filmmaking in contemporary Italy’ was delivered by Áine O’Healy from Loyola Marymount University. The conference was further enriched by the presence of directors Paolo Benvenuti, Monica Guerritore and Liliana Cavani. This report provides an overview of the conference.

Spirit of the Age

This essay turns a spotlight on Elizabeth Barret Barrett's unpublished 1822-26 notebook (now in Wellesley College Library). A seldom-cited archival text, the 231-page notebook opens a window on Romantic culture and writers in the years it spans. It also illumines the intellectual and artistic formation of the gifted juvenile author who would become England’s most internationally influential woman poet by 1850 under the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The notebook includes drafts of original compositions, memoranda (for example, “Stray Thoughts,” “List of Books I wish to have”), and extracts or analyses documenting EBB’s self-education through wide-ranging reading across genres, fields, and national boundaries. The largest category of entries is made up of review-like commentaries, principally on recently published books, in which EBB hones a critical voice shaped by the periodical press of the period. Writers treated range from major literary figures like Lord Byron, Letitia Landon, Madame de Staël, and Mary Shelley, to others influential or emerging at the time (e.g., Robert Southey, James Hogg, Anna Jameson, James Fenimore Cooper), to authors of memoirs, biographies, histories, and works of political philosophy. Examination of the hybrid form as well as the mixed contents of the notebook indicates that it both participates in the commonplace book tradition and reflects Romantic transformations in that tradition exemplified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks. In the process, EBB’s 1822-26 notebook offers a perspective on the mid-1820s very different from William Hazlitt’s in The Spirit of the Age (1824-25); it also demonstrates the budding acumen as a literary critic later expressed in her contributions to Richard Hengist Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Notably too, the notebook underscores the cosmopolitanism and engagement with contemporary subject matter that underpins her later artistic practice, especially in her representation of “this live, throbbing” modern age in Aurora Leigh (1856).

Making the (Letter) Grade: The Incentive Effects of Mandatory Pass/Fail Courses

Abstract In fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regression-discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23 percent of a standard deviation. We evaluate causal channels of the grade effect—including sorting into lower-grading STEM courses and declining instructional quality—and conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.

The External Validity of College Remediation Effects: Caveats about Compliers in Fuzzy-discontinuity Designs

Abstract Fuzzy regression-discontinuity evaluations of college remediation often find negative and null estimates of local average treatments effects (LATEs), but with substantial heterogeneity. We find that a remedial quantitative skills course at Wellesley College has a modestly positive LATE on participation in mathematically intensive fields of study—including the sciences, mathematics, and economics courses. Yet, LATEs are a weighted average of average causal effects (at the passing cutoff) in two principal strata: students who voluntarily comply with remediation, and those who are coerced to comply after scoring below the cutoff on an optional retest. In the retest sample, we show that average causal effects are close to zero among (1) coerced compliers, and (2) never-takers. By implication, there are even larger effects among a smaller group of voluntary compliers at the cutoff. The results help interpret the mixed findings in the literature, in which compliance varies widely, and demonstrate methods for assessing external validity in fuzzy-discontinuity designs.

Women’s Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants

Many observers argue that diversity in Economics and STEM fields is critical, not simply because of egalitarian goals, but because who is in a field may shape what is studied by it. If increasing the rate of majoring in mathematically intensive fields among women is a worthy goal, then understanding whether women’s colleges causally affect that choice is important. Among all admitted applicants to Wellesley College, enrollees are 7.2 percentage points (94 percent) more likely to receive an Economics degree than non-enrollees (a plausible lower bound given negative selection into enrollment on math skills and major preferences). Overall, 3.2 percentage points – or 44 percent of the difference between enrollees and non-enrollees – is explained by college exposure to women instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women’s colleges in increasing women’s participation in Economics. HIGHLIGHTS In US colleges, men are more than twice as likely as women to major in Economics. Enrollees are twice as likely as non-enrollees to major in Economics. The difference is a plausible lower bound given patterns of selection on observed variables. Over 40 percent of the difference is explained by the gender of students and faculty.

Sarah Frances Whiting, pioneer of laboratory instruction in astronomy

Sarah Frances Whiting developed innovative and influential laboratory work in her introductory astronomy classes at Wellesley College in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Whiting was strongly influenced by Edward Pickering and the early physics laboratory education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article explores the early development of laboratory work in astronomy education at Wellesley and Whiting's underlying philosophy of education. By laboratory work, Whiting meant day-time work, including work with astronomical photographs and spectroscopy. Her pedagogy was encapsulated in her phrase “to sharpen the pencil sharpens the mind,” which referenced the importance of a student's familiarity with tools as well as the role of drawing in astronomical work. Whiting further modeled her instruction after the work being conducted at the Harvard College Observatory in order to prepare her students for potential future employment as astronomers.

Contributors

Contributors

Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner

Reviewed by: Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner Richard F. Hirsh (bio) Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future By James Morton Turner. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. Pp. 234. With floods, droughts, and wildfires wreaking social and economic havoc around the world, policy-makers have begun taking climate change—and efforts to mitigate it—more seriously. Electric vehicles (EVs) have gained popularity because they operate without fossil fuels and produce no emissions. Government incentives in Norway, for example, helped make EVs the choice of 65 percent of new passenger car purchases in 2021. Meanwhile, California regulators approved policies in 2022 to require all new-car sales to be electric starting in 2035. The utility of electric vehicles depends on rechargeable batteries, which in turn require large amounts of exotic and often toxic materials. And here lies the crux of the EV policy quandary, as James Turner, a Ph.D. historian and environmental studies professor at Wellesley College, expounds in Charged. Although electricity storage devices have become more efficient in recent decades, the author explains, their components are largely mined and processed in distant countries. Moreover, those nations' governments generally allow exploitative and dangerous extractive techniques that impose environmental, health, and economic burdens on people who have little capacity to bear them. Climate change mitigation, in other words, comes at the cost of various injustices. Charged is not a traditional historical monograph that delves deeply into the technical or social origins of a technology. Turner honestly admits as much, explaining that his study does not include "the attention to contingency, agency, and context that historians of technology value" (p. 14). Rather, the author describes facets of batteries' evolution to highlight misgivings about the current path of energy policy. For example, for more than a century, lead-acid batteries have become the most frequently employed rechargeable energy storage devices in the telephone, electric utility, and automobile industries. Recognizing that lead in the batteries causes environmental and human health harms, the manufacturing industry has managed to recycle more than 97 percent of the metal, making the power packs appear benign. Yet Turner notes that during the mining, processing, and recycling of lead, small amounts of the metal still enter the environment, resulting in lead poisoning (and ensuing cognitive deficits) in about one in three children globally. Recycling alone, therefore, does not constitute a solution to problems associated with the processing of dangerous materials. Turner further invalidates misapprehensions about single-use batteries that inhabit so many of our remote controls, flashlights, and other electronic devices. Incremental innovation has yielded increasingly powerful and portable forms of energy, but their production consumes tremendous resources. Happily, manufacturers have eliminated mercury in widely used [End Page 595] alkaline batteries, such that they impose little environmental damage when discarded with everyday garbage. But the author argues that whereas recycling such batteries may make people think they are acting responsibly, the process remains inefficient, with the cost of recycling far exceeding its benefits. He even admits that, as a result of his research, he trashes his own single-use batteries. Such myth-busting analyses provide a relevant introduction for discussing the development and use of the lithium-ion batteries employed in electric vehicles. Improvements to these batteries have occurred rapidly since the 1990s, enabling them to store about three times the energy available in earlier rechargeable technologies. But the future demand for the materials going into the batteries, such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel, will require massive mining and processing enterprises around the world. Even recycling 100 percent of today's batteries will not yield the ingredients needed—about six times more than we currently use—to achieve clean energy goals. The production and processing of those substances have already been accompanied by social abuses (such as the exploitation of child labor) and environmental degradation in South America, Africa, China, and Russia. Overall, Charged provides an insightful (though not truly historical) understanding of the rarely considered consequences of electric-vehicle policies. The book also offers recommendations, such as the need to expand American mining and refining of critical metals to reduce supply...

An Accidental Historian

An Accidental Historian

Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray

Reviewed by: Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray Jennifer Carr Gray, Margaret E. Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French. UP of Wales, 2022. ISBN 978-1-78683-860-5. Pp. 257. Visual culture is increasingly ubiquitous, suffusing everything from entertainment to political rights claims staked in visibility. Meanwhile, gender studies and its disciplinary tributaries have couched our understanding of gender in terms of performativity and display, further reinforcing visuality's primacy in daily life. Against this backdrop, Stolen Limelight explores how twentieth-century French and Francophone fictions have harnessed readerly fluency in viewing practices through their narrative framings of gender, with Gray's analysis hinging on scenes of slippage, when seemingly legible instances of gendered display cede to a destabilizing hypervisibility. Gray foregrounds literary representations of excessive, even monstrous gendered display, productively complicating the tendency to conflate visibility and agency, and to reduce dynamics of spectatorship to the stable binary of observer and observed. Rather, she suggests, textual scenes of gendered display can displace both subject and object of the gaze—whether these positions are embedded in the narrative or embodied by readers—sowing epistemological doubt in their wake. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, art history, museum studies, and film theory, Gray attends to the effects of this "visuality of text" (6) in a corpus that spans the twentieth century and multiple geographies, resolutely canonical authors and lesser-studied ones. Stolen Limelight is divided into two sections of three chapters each that focus, respectively, on culminating scenes of corporeal display in Colette's Le blé en herbe, Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy, and André Gide's La porte étroite, then on more abstract narrative strategies of display in François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, Sébastien Japrisot's Piège pour Cendrillon, and Marguerite Duras's dual renderings of the same narrative: L'Amant and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Gray acknowledges the disparate contexts that produced these fictions (and subsequent film adaptations) while teasing out their shared investment in a dynamic of display-as-displacement that is inextricable from gender politics. Incidentally, this dynamic is echoed in Gray's analytical moves, which effect their own displacements by insisting that previous scholarship has looked in the wrong places, focused on the wrong things. For instance, in the chapter on Piège pour Cendrillon, Gray identifies generic subtexts—namely, the feminine-coded love story and fairy tale—that surreptitiously displace the novel's obvious engagement with detective fiction. Reprising Shoshana Felman's analysis of Japrisot's text, Gray contends that Felman's investment in Piège pour Cendrillon's undoing of detective genre conventions neglects the love story between women that is the narrative's foundational impetus. Gray's readings of Oyono and Duras likewise refocus critical attention, in this case on gendered displays whose stakes are heightened [End Page 274] by colonial contexts of racial oppression. These chapters highlight the risks of dissonance attendant to thematically uniting a disparate corpus, as Gray's instructive insistence on racialized gendering in Oyono's text is seemingly diluted by her interpretation of L'Amant's Chinese lover as a mother-surrogate whose feminization enacts a salvatory displacement of maternal madness, its potential imbrication in racist logics addressed only glancingly. Still, Stolen Limelight consistently offers engaging models of creative close reading that will appeal to literary scholars interested in interdisciplinary analyses' capacity to locate "trans-versal connections" (177) among apparently dissimilar texts. [End Page 275] Jennifer Carr Wellesley College (MA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Diane M. Nelson (1963–2022)

Diane M. Nelson (1963–2022)

A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance by Rani-Henrik Andersson (review)

Reviewed by: A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance by Rani-Henrik Andersson Elena Tajima Creef A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance. By Rani-Henrik Andersson. Foreword by Raymond J. DeMaille. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. viii + 401 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth. Rani-Henrik Andersson's impeccably researched book makes a substantial contribution to the literature on the Ghost Dance that swept across Lakota country in 1890 during one of the darkest periods of tribal history marked by extreme famine, governmental and Christian assimilationist policies, persecution, and forced relocation into the new reservation system. White settler and government fears of the Ghost Dance set into motion the tragic events that would ultimately culminate in the 7th Cavalry's massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation on December 29, 1890. Building from his previous work, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), Andersson breaks new ground by privileging a wide range of Lakota voices as the exclusive subject of this study of the Ghost Dance. His research is rich in primary materials that he carefully curates while pointing out how certain Ghost Dance accounts have become standardized over others, and how some Lakota language sources have been riddled with errors and mistranslations. Andersson revisits over 100 firsthand Lakota accounts pulled from across an impressive collection of archives and organizes these "voices" into four distinct categories that make clear there never was a single Lakota perspective on this historic ceremony inspired by the Paiute prophet Wovoka. Andersson also notes there have been very few recorded accounts by Lakota women on the Ghost Dance. To his credit, he brings women into the conversation by including several of their voices in this study—most notably Alice Ghost Horse and Josephine Waggoner. The handful of other women are cited as "anonymous woman" or "anonymous Lakota girls"—stark reminders that their voices and identities have long been half-hidden in the shadow of the archives. Andersson wistfully acknowledges in the final pages of A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country that there is a fifth category of Lakota voices that remains beyond his reach as a non-native scholar. Lakota stories of the Ghost Dance and its aftermath have been carefully passed down through an oral tradition across eight generations of descendants. It will be up to a new generation of rising Native scholars and historians alone to decide what from this private collection of firsthand accounts can be respectfully shared with those who wish to learn more about the Ghost Dance beyond the limits of the archive and the written page. [End Page 113] Elena Tajima Creef Women's and Gender Studies Wellesley College Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Women's Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants

Women's Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants

50 Years After the Tuskegee Revelations: Why Does the Mistrust Linger?

AffiliationsJames H. Jones is an independent historian who taught at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, and University of Houston, Houston, TX. Susan M. Reverby is McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita in Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.

Davenport and Walters, eds., The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Volume 3: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897-1904

Reviewed by: The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. 3: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897–1904 ed. by Tim Davenport and David Walters William E. Cain The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. 3: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897–1904 Edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2021. Pp. 733. Illustrations, index. Clothbound, $75.00; paperbound, $36.00.) Expertly organized and edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters, this is the third in a six-volume project from Haymarket Books. Covering the period from 1897 to 1904, it is essential reading for everyone interested in Eugene V. Debs, socialism in America, radical politics, and the bitter and often bloody struggle, here and abroad, between labor and capital. Debs supported the Democratic/Populist William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896. Bryan was decisively defeated by the Republican nominee William McKinley, and, on New Year's Day 1897, Debs announced, "I am a socialist." He took direct aim at capitalism, pledging "with all the emphasis of which my words are capable, my implacable hostility to this system, and my determination to battle with all my power for its overthrow" (p. 59). In 1900, Debs was the Social Democratic Party candidate for the presidency, but the outcome was a disappointment: he received only 0.6 percent of the popular vote. He was on the ballot again in 1904, this time as the candidate of the Socialist Party, and he did better with 3 percent. During these campaigns, indeed in everything he said and wrote, Debs called for the political education and organization of the working class. "The labor movement must be class conscious," he maintained (p. 432). Debs also highlighted the importance of the ballot—"a revolution can be brought about by this method," for "the ballot is the weapon"—and he was an advocate for women's suffrage (pp. 229, 409). For Debs, the labor movement was national and international; he condemned militarism and imperialism. He railed against business leaders and financiers (John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan), politicians (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt), and their agents in the pro-corporate media. In contrast to these adversaries, Debs invoked a range of heroes, models, and precursors, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Edward Bellamy. At the center for Debs was the Socialist Party, "the only party that stands squarely upon the class struggle as the basis of its revolutionary character" (p. 559). He was fervently optimistic, convinced that the signs were pointing to the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism: "The future is bright" and socialism "is coming just as certain as the rivers find their way to the sea" (pp. 252, 327). Debs's strengths were many, but this volume also dramatizes his limitations. He said hardly a word about the resources and connections of working-class cultures; his emphasis was [End Page 344] always on the worker's degradation, oppression, exploitation, ignorance, and victimization. Debs's position on race and racism was also problematic. He was a stalwart champion of equal rights, but it was the class-based war against capitalism that governed and propelled his views on race relations. "The class struggle is colorless," he asserted; socialism, for the Black worker, "will strike the economic fetters from his body, and he himself will do the rest" (pp. 516, 546). On nearly every page of this collection, Debs contends that workers are "slaves," and, furthermore, that wage slavery is worse than the chattel slavery that the Civil War had terminated. This feature of his rhetoric comes too often and too easily. The common identity of all workers as "slaves," in a nation permeated and disfigured by anti-Black racism and racist violence, is a graphic and attention-seizing claim, but a reductive one as well. There is much to learn, much to debate and argue with here. The 160 primary texts that Davenport and Walters have selected, the excellent introduction, incisive and illuminating notes, and cogent illustrations—this is an important book, superbly done. William E. Cain Wellesley College Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Indiana University

For director-at-large: Malika Jeffries–El

Northeastern Section. Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. Academic record: Wellesley College, BA, 1996; George Washington University, MPhil, 1999, and PhD, 2002. Honors: C&EN Trailblazer, 2021; ACS Fellow, 2018; ACS Stanley C. Israel Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences, 2015; ACS Women Chemists Committee Rising Star Award, 2012; Percy L. Julian Award, National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), 2021; Alpha Alpha Alpha National Honor Society, 2021; Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Fellow 2021; Iota Sigma Pi Agnes Fay Morgan Award, 2014; Lloyd Ferguson Award, NOBCChE, 2010; National Science Foundation Career Award, 2009; Science Spectrum Magazine Emerald Honors, 2008; 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, 2008. Professional positions (for the past 10 years): Boston University, associate dean for the graduate school in arts and sciences, 2020–; professor, 2022–; associate professor, 2016–22; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Martin Luther King Visiting Professor, 2014–15; Iowa State University, associate

Contributors

Contributors

The Land of Short Sentences by Stine Pilgaard

Reviewed by: The Land of Short Sentences by Stine Pilgaard Thomas Nolden Stine Pilgaard The Land of Short Sentences Trans. Hunter Simpson. New York. World Editions. 2022. 268 pages. stine pilgaard's slim novel digs into the psyche of a young woman who finds herself displaced into a remote corner of her native Denmark where her boyfriend has landed a teaching position. Pilgaard's narrator shares with us how painful life can be if cast into an environment where conversation with your new neighbors "should be on unremarkable details," features "the situational before the personal," and, by all means, eschews anything related to "reproduction." As a neighbor counsels her, "if you stay silent for long enough then eventually they'll start to talk." But then again, the writer isn't really motivated by a desire to parse the unforgiving reticence that covers the Danish provinces under a blanket of silence from which only a few "short sentences" occasionally will escape. Instead, she ponders how [End Page 78] such provincial surroundings may mute the voice and ambitions of the young outsider, the mother of an infant who faces the difficult lot of the young woman whose every minute is consumed by mundane tasks, isolation, and the absence of any goals in reach besides getting through to the end of yet another endless seeming week of childcare. Pilgaard knows that this story has been written many times before and has accepted the challenge to add to this subgenre a take that indeed is a bit harder to find. To be sure, she rejects any temptation to tilt her story toward the famed "awakening" in which writers since Kate Chopin have questioned the wifely allegiance to husband and child. There is none of the ideological education that characterized Doris Lessing's depiction of young mothers, and no allusion to racial denigration that shocked us in Toni Morrison's stories about Black motherhood. Likewise, the author refuses to drown her protagonist in the silent despondency that marked the narratives of feminist chroniclers of motherhood or to elevate her to the brilliant and self-sufficient heights of the independent mothers conceived by Elena Ferrante. Pilgaard outwits the at-times painful descriptions of the quotidian banality that erases anything joyful in the life of the "trailing spouse" by equipping her with a sarcasm and acerbity that does not engender the reader's empathy with the pathetic situation of the young woman. The author goes to great lengths to furnish her with a voice that annoys even the readers of the advice column in which the young narrator shares her unconventional look at human relations. She counsels one of the letter writers seeking advice from her: "Don't ask yourself who you want to marry, ask who you want to divorce." Realizing how the narrator outdoes herself in responding with bile to any articulations of sentiment or sentimentality is one of the few dynamics of this short novel that may keep us as readers involved—aside from the question of whether she will indeed pass the driver's permit exam, which makes up another large part of the narrative. Digging into the psyche of the thirtysomething, we see that she understands how deeply she is boxed into a life littered with wet wipes, dusty houseplants, the feeling of invisibility, and a vague infatuation with men out of her reach. As Pilgaard doesn't permit us to sympathize with her protagonist, we become entirely detached spectators of an inconsequential account that voices in glib witticisms how flat the emotional landscape of Denmark is. The Land of Short Sentences handles what eventually may be of consequence in one short list: "A frightened panda with a mouthful of bamboo. The dissemination of the rainforest, endangered species, starving war refugees, battered women, … sad Muslims in need of a mosque." With this quick swipe of a narrative wet wipe, all that messiness that one could write about is conveniently cleaned up. Thomas Nolden Wellesley College Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma