Writers Encounter Research Articles

Eyzehu M'koman Shel Zevakhim? [What is the Site of the Ritual Sacrifice?] Yiddish Writers Encounter the Chicago Meatpacking Industry

Eyzehu M'koman Shel Zevakhim? [What is the Site of the Ritual Sacrifice?]Yiddish Writers Encounter the Chicago Meatpacking Industry Jessica Kirzane (bio) Yiddish poet Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum's poem "Vintn" ["Winds"] depicts Chicago by following the path of winds that sweep through the city, rushing in from Lake Michigan where the poet loves to stroll, making their way through the smog of the city and back out of the dense cityscape to its wide parks at the city's outskirts.1 The poem begins and ends with beauty and natural expanse, the pleasures of a walk on the shoreline, the elegant symphony of the winds dancing through the parks. In its center, though, winds howl through crowded, dusty streets, past the "raykh zaln" [halls of wealth], presumably the business district and stock exchange, and the "geshtank fun dayne shlakht-heyzer" [stink of your slaughterhouses].2 According to the poem, the central features of the city itself were these twin entities: wealth and poverty, capitalism and industrialism, steel-framed skyscrapers and stockyards. Pomerantz-Honigbaum's concise description of what she understood to be the emblematic features of her city was consistent with the way the city was represented and understood within and beyond Yiddish-language writing in the early twentieth century. For Yiddish writers, the word "Chicago" was often synonymous with the stockyards or shekht-heyzer [slaughterhouses] with which they closely associated the city and its role in American industrialism and the abuses of capitalism.3 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stockyards of Chicago stood as symbols of the new industrial economy of America, its modern innovation and its human costs, not just for Yiddish writers, of course, but the world over. The "Square Mile" of packinghouses and animal pens was encircled by railroad lines that pumped livestock into the Chicago market and meat out into the world. Visitors to [End Page 31] Chicago by rail were immediately confronted by this spectacle of thousands of cattle, calves, hogs, and sheep being led to the famed meatpacking plants.4 The stockyards were a tourist destination that defined Chicago for a fascinated public in the post-Civil War era and beyond.5 Together with the wealth of the city's wide boulevards and skyscrapers, the stockyards came to be central to an understanding of the economic role of the city, and the meaning of modern American capitalism itself. Yiddish writers, whether visiting or living in Chicago, were taken by the spectacle of the meatpacking industry, where the efficient factory-style slaughter attracted thousands of tourists eager to witness the processes that constituted the pinnacle of modern human productivity. They expressed their impressions of the factory in a distinctly Yiddish and Jewish idiom, drawing upon Jewish language, ritual, and memory, as well as shared leftist politics, to represent the stockyards for their reading communities. By examining Yiddish writers' views of the Chicago stockyards, one can explore the Jewishly inflected ways that writers approached their participation in a popular tourist activity that is not specifically understood as a Jewish or immigrant activity. One can also discover the ways they participated in broader American literary culture and linked it to global Yiddish politics and writing. An examination of these sources demonstrates how the Yiddishreading community understood and judged the social and political landscape of America using the interpretive tools and cultural understandings they embedded in their shared Yiddish language and culture. An examination of these sources also illuminates what seems to have been a common phenomenon of Yiddish writing about Chicago—that it was often describing a transient experience. Chicago boasted a large Yiddish-speaking community, much of it concentrated around the city's Near West Side, with a wealth of Yiddish newspapers, charitable and relief organizations, schools, and other institutions. But a significant percentage of Yiddish writing depicting Chicago was penned by tourists, visiting literary figures giving readings or lectures, and individuals who spent only a short time in Chicago before moving on to other Yiddish communities such as Los Angeles.6 A focus on Chicago Yiddish writing could easily overlook these perspectives in order to paint a picture of Chicago Yiddish writers from among the literary figures and cultural activists living...

Demystifying Problems and Opportunities of the Persianophone Physical Education Ph.D. Academic Writers in Writing English Research Article Abstracts for International Journal Publication

Writing effective and persuasive manuscripts for submission to the high-indexed Iranian and international English-medium journals for the purpose of publication deserves having to-the-point knowledge and proficiency, which the Non-Native English writers of the non-English speaking countries seem to be lacking. Therefore, researchers need to identify problems and challenges that the group of writers encounter in the field of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP). Therefore, this study aims to identify the ERPP needs of the Physical Education Ph.D. students and writers. Hence, interviews were conducted with a group of Physical Education content experts and Ph.D. students to identify the writers’ problems and challenges. The interviews were tape recorded as the participants had already been informed of the recordings and research aim. The tape recordings were then transcribed and analyzed in the thematic analysis and the grounded theory methods. The data analysis came up with four major themes (gained in the selective coding stage), 20 sub-themes (gained in the axial coding stage) and 83 themes (gained in the initial/open coding stage). The four major themes were `problem with language,’ `problem with content,’ `problem with journals,’ and `the demotivating factors.’ The fourth major theme, i.e., `the demotivating factors’, consisted of the sub-heading the technological illiteracy problem, which should be regarded as the novelty feature of this paper. The research is useful for material designers and instructors of the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) and others to offer tailor-made education to the tertiary level Physical Education students.

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability by Emily B. Stanback

Reviewed by: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability by Emily B. Stanback Jared S. Richman (bio) Emily B. Stanback. The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. v + 337. $84.99 hardcover. Disability studies scholars have for decades challenged the stability and efficacy of normalcy as a cultural and biological category. Now, the first full monograph with specific critical focus on Romanticism and disability, [End Page 116] Emily B. Stanback's The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, makes its remarkable debut. Her study locates disability as a crucial conceptual framework for subjective experience through Romantic writers' meditations on their own disabilities and those of others. The book centers on the Wordsworth-Coleridge coterie: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, but also John Thelwall, Thomas Beddoes, Humphry Davy, and Thomas Wedgewood with attention given to Robert Southey, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb, Thomas Poole, William Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, and Sara Coleridge. The study embraces a valuable interdisciplinary approach by ranging across genre and form to engage short fiction, letters, journals, poetry, medical treatises, print satire, and memoir. Stanback convincingly demonstrates how aesthetic concerns related to and shaped by disability make their way into a wide range of cultural productions both public and private. Ultimately the book shows how works by writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge revealed a consciousness of disability that was culturally constructed during an era of rapid social change. The book's introduction operates in part as a cultural history of Romantic medicine, tracing its professionalization between 1790 and 1810 alongside the simultaneous growth of Romantic writing. Throughout, Stanback's delineation of disability demonstrates how norms related to health and illness had yet to be established at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply interested in the conditions of literary production, Stanback shows us how encounters with non-normative embodiment demanded, generated, and shaped new forms of expression, thus revealing the essential aesthetic value of disability within Romantic discourse. "The story I wish to tell," she explains, "is one of the productively diverse field of Romantic medicine and its relation to a correspondingly broad range of cultural attitudes towards those thought to be under the purview of medical authority—those who, by virtue of their non-normative bodies and minds, we might now call 'disabled'" (2). Stanback takes "disability" to be a sociocultural category with a foundation in medical structures, but one grounded in subjective experience. Aesthetic questions take center stage here and put Stanback's work in dialogue with important disability theorists such as Ato Quayson and Tobin Siebers. Moreover, she convincingly demonstrates how "Romantic disability aesthetics" is an essentially interdisciplinary mode, a claim borne out by an impressively detailed and rigorous textual analysis that testifies to the porousness and multimodality of Romantic discourse (3). Moving from humoral theory to Enlightenment conceptions of deformity through the early years of Georgian medicine, Stanback shows how the practice "for naming, describing, and studying diseases … [participated] in the cultural project of establishing embodied norms, and specifically to help [End Page 117] construct ideals of 'health'" (14–15). She ably negotiates a variety of social and political categories here, from gender construction to race theory to ethnography, from colonialism and empire to pathology and physiognomy. One of the great strengths of Stanback's approach is her emphasis on mental and psychological difference alongside the physical and the sensual. Such attention to the mind and brain allow her to explore senses of wonder, the sublime, and even disgust as Romantic writers encounter and experience the non-normative. Yet even while foregrounding "affective response," Stanback does so in order to "emphasize the role of corporeality in Romantic aesthetics" (45). The second chapter begins with the poet and elocutionist John Thelwall, whose background in medicine shaped his exposition on vocal disability, the Letter to Henry Cline (1810). Stanback identifies Thelwall's elocutionary practice as deeply democratic, and in her reading of his self-help ethos, she connects him to the physician Thomas Beddoes, whose novella, The History of Isaac Jenkins (1792), delineates principles of preventative care and frames the legacy of popular medicine, amateurism, and the rise of the medical professional. Here...

A Chinese doctoral student’s experience of L2 English academic writing in Australia: Negotiating practices and identities

Increasing numbers of international students are choosing to study abroad at English speaking universities, where their L2 English academic writing is assessed alongside local students’ L1 writing. Research has investigated the difficulties these student writers encounter, the deficits in their L2 academic writing products, and the strategies used to address these deficits. However, there has been little investigation into the experiences of L2 student writers of academic texts in particular international contexts, and the identity work associated with negotiating linguistic, cultural and institutional dimensions of these experiences. This narrative-based, qualitative case study addresses this gap in the literature by investigating the L2 English academic writing experiences of one Chinese student in an Australian university over the four years of her PhD candidature. Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogic theories of language and identity, in association with Gee’s theorising of identity, the authors show how the challenges experienced by the Chinese student both constrained and facilitated her writing practices. An ongoing process of negotiating tensions in her writer identity mediated these practices, surfacing differing dimensions of the student’s bilingual, transcultural, researcher-writer identity. The study offers recommendations for how students, academic supervisors and institutions can support this nuanced process of negotiation.

Tracing the Emergence and Growth of Ecocritical Language

During the last few decades, the disturbance in the environmental conditions has given rise to a great threat to Earth and the organisms residing in it. Under these circumstances, a new theory of reading texts came into existence known as Ecocriticism. Ecocritism is a literary theory which shows the interconnectedness between the human and the non-human agency, but it has not yet achieved that attention which other theories have. In this context, ecocritics strive to influence readers and writers by introducing and developing a specific vocabulary in their works. This paper can assist readers in understanding how ecocritics have developed a vocab ulary of their own. This paper aims to find and trace the emergence of ecological linguistics and its growth. Also, the aim is to perform an up-to-date assessment of its current state. Since Ecolinguistics work upon the role language plays in the life-sustaining interactions of humans and their physical environment, the main aim is to explore this language as used by ecocritics in order to reach the eco-critical judgements about certain texts—both the provisional and the temporal judgements. The language has a soft, respectful and rigorous influence on the envi ronment, so in this perspective, ecocritics establish tools in order to determine the influence of narrative techniques and the structures on readers. Readers and writers encounter varied narra tive styles when discussing environment and ecology, this paper will show how the attempt to create a specific vocabulary in this regard will better solidify the foundations of this field.

Toward Wayfinding: A Metaphor for Understanding Writing Experiences

In this essay, we map out four major approaches to the study of writing experiences: (a) worlds apart, (b) literacy in the wild, (c) ecologies and networks, and (d) transfer. We examine how the primary metaphors used in each approach have contributed to our field’s understanding of writing. In focusing on specific dimensions of writing, each framework privileges a different aspect of the writing process, writing development, and/or writers’ context(s). Building on these approaches, we propose the concept of wayfinding to emphasize how writers navigate their own writing development, skills acquisition, and changing knowledge about writing over time. Wayfinding offers a metaphor that resonates with recent work on lifelong learning and meaningful writing. Among other characteristics, wayfinding emphasizes how writers encounter a continuous potentiality in writing and how they navigate unanticipated challenges and opportunities.

Reconciling Arabo-Islamic culture and feminist consciousness in North African women’s writing: Silence and voice in the short stories of Alifa Rifaat and Assia Djebar

This article sets out to explore the theme of silence and voice in selected short stories by two North African women writers, Alifa Rifaat and Assia Djebar. In their representations of women’s lives in Egypt and Algeria, respectively, both Rifaat and Djebar present different strategies employed by women to counter gender oppression. Although the female characters portrayed by both writers encounter diverse, and sometimes opposing, circumstances, they tend to share a common plight – the need to break free from the constricting fetters of patriarchy. A comparative reading of selected stories reveals that Rifaat’s characters resort to silence as a means of self-preservation, while Djebar’s characters, on the other hand, use techniques ranging from writing to outright protest to show their rejection of gender-based segregation. In spite of this difference in approach, it can be said that both Rifaat and Djebar have made a great contribution to feminist literary creativity in North Africa.

From The Editors

From The Editors

Questions of Intent

This article establishes how rhetorical intention is affected by the situation of writing instruction. Intention could be defined as the means through which a writer orients purposeful activity based on the projection of a desired outcome. The role of writing as a vehicle for communication is often taken as a given in instructional activities. Yet writers encounter the classroom primarily as a socially relevant situation, which often results in writing oriented toward compliance or in the service of extrinsic reward. Those within writing studies would recognize this problem as a part of the conversation regarding the acquisition of thinking dispositions and theories of transfer in writing pedagogy. Drawing upon what is known about intention from studies of communication disorder, this article posits that inquiry-based writing becomes procedural in instructional settings through a writer’s affective response to perceived exigence : the activation of rhetorically situated communicative intent in response to a question to be answered or a problem to be resolved. As such, this article draws upon theories of cognition and learning in order to explore possible strategies of question generation in relationship to writing pedagogy.

Mature Taiwanese Writers’ Development of Writing and Voices between Different Academic Environments

The present study explores four L2 mature writers’ development of writing and voices in English between different academic environments, and seeks to create more meaningful grounds for teaching academic ESL writing in the U.S. and college writing in Taiwan. The approach of this study is influenced by Hirvela and Belcher’s (2001) reading of terms they define as voicist—in other words, terms that refer to voices and identities. Qualitative research methodology is adequate for this exploratory study because of its capacity to gain in-depth and interpretive understanding of the composing process that second language writers employ in different contexts. The study results have highlighted some of the major challenges of academic writing Taiwanese L2 writers encounter when studying abroad at graduate level. One of the salient problems is inadequate academic writing skills, and the sub-problem is a failure to express ideas with a strong individual voice and to position themselves appropriately in their texts (e.g. having a narrow scope of positioning themselves, applying limited linguistic features to position themselves and lacking confidence to express their ideas and to position themselves in texts).As a result, they face great challenges in the Western educational system, but with their development of academic writing skills, voice, critical thinking through academic writing practices, L2 writers can overcome the challenges and become successful writers which can in turn lead to successful academic careers and publishing. Keywords: Second language writing, voice and positioning, academic writing

Turning Honey into Gold

This article describes the writer's encounter with bees that appeared not only in her yard but also in her dreams. In addition, these pesky creatures became the focus of a short story she was writing at the time. The article captures the synchronistic quality of these events and how they played themselves out in both her psyche and her external world. The author realized that an inner process was being articulated in these various mediums.

Customizing A Computerized Text Analyzer For ESL Writers

The number of computerized writing aids has grown dramatically in the past decade. One of the newest and most controversial of these aids is computerized text analysis. This paper reports a study which examined a widely available text analyzer and tested its adaptability for use with a specific population of ESL writers. Though the study found that the text analyzer could be customized to address certain problems ESL writers encounter, important questions remain about the cost and the gains involved in adapting text analysis for the ESL composition classroom.

"A Blankness To Run At and Dash Your Head Against": On Conrad's The Secret Agent

In this essay Michael Fried reads Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent in the light of an understanding of literary impressionism developed by him in earlier writings--"Stephen Crane's Upturned Faces" in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (University of Chicago Press, 1987) and "Almayer's Face: On 'Impressionism' in Conrad, Crane, and Norris" ( Critical Inquiry , 1990). Briefly, Fried sees literary impressionism as arising out of (also as thematizing in numerous ways) the writer's encounter with the blank page and the tools of writing. In Conrad's case, this leads to a problematic of what Fried calls "erasure," the constant return to a primordial blankness, which in The Secret Agent is further inflected by a commitment to an "ironic" approach to his topic as well as to a materialist epistemology.

Reconciling Arabo-Islamic culture and feminist consciousness in North African women's writing: Silence and voice in the short stories of Alifa Rifaat and Assia Djebar

This article sets out to explore the theme of silence and voice in selected short stories by two North African women writers, Alifa Rifaat and Assia Djebar. In their representations of women’s lives in Egypt and Algeria, respectively, both Rifaat and Djebar present different strategies employed by women to counter gender oppression. Although the female characters portrayed by both writers encounter diverse, and sometimes opposing, circumstances, they tend to share a common plight – the need to break free from the constricting fetters of patriarchy. A comparative reading of selected stories reveals that Rifaat’s characters resort to silence as a means of self-preservation, while Djebar’s characters, on the other hand, use techniques ranging from writing to outright protest to show their rejection of gender-based segregation. In spite of this difference in approach, it can be said that both Rifaat and Djebar have made a great contribution to feminist literary creativity in North Africa.

Giving Grades, Taking Tolls: Assessing the Impact of Evaluation on Developing Writers

This article uses one basic writer’s experience with assessment as a vehicle to explore whether the assessment practices struggling writers encounter on their essays effectively usher them into academic discourse or simply scare them away from that ambition entirely.

"A Disgrace to the Map of Israel": The Wilderness Journey of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace

A Disgrace to the Map of Israel":The Wilderness Journey of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace Ranen Omer-Sherman (bio) The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness—for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world. —Isabelle Eberhardt When it comes to Israeli literature, even before the advent of "post-Zionist" discourse, the writer's encounter with the timeless desert disrupts certain polarities and essentializing gestures of mainstream Zionist conventions. The desert, with its sands and stark visual display of erosion, is the site that a surprising number of Israeli writers use to explore the difference between national loyalty and diasporic dreaming. In the novels of Amos Oz (b. 1939), who calls the small Negev town of Arad home, the desert serves potentially as a transformative space that lays bare the cracks in the individual's commitment to national identity. In the Hebraic imagination, long before the collective journey of the people under Moses, Abraham's self-exile from Ur into boundless desert space embodies the brave individuation of one [End Page 97] who transcends the concept of the tribal norms into which he was born. It is as if almost in spite of itself, by privileging anecdotal narratives of protest and spiritual restlessness alongside the law and ritual, the Bible credits the desert as the site of a supreme skepticism that unsettles all nationalist complacency. Given the powerful residual traces of this counter-narrative in the Jewish literary tradition, it seems worth addressing its role as a catalyst for the literary imagination of Oz.1 Relevant to this is critic Joseph Cohen's astute argument about Oz's delicate relation to serving both art and politics in the context of contemporary Israeli reality. Cohen notes Oz's powerful capacity for "bypassing polemicism to move upward to a substantially higher plateau of metapolitical writing. ... Oz is nothing less than a modern mythmaker who has been highly successful in taking the exoticism of Israel's location in the desert and Mediterranean Sea, a country already saturated with a biblical, mystical, apocalyptic and miraculous history, and combining it with the myriad realities of contemporary life" (179). In short, the desert is unrivalled as a formidable influence in the mythopoetic dimensions of Oz's imagination. Yet rather than being seduced by an escapist mystical vision, the novelist is drawn to the desert as a source for clarity in framing complex national realities. Oz, who has for many years lived close to the desert, embraces the biblical sense of the wilderness as a site of "translation" rather than a consolatory haven of inner mystical retreat. His characters often flee homogenous and complacent insularity—they question the classic kibbutz ideology that Zionism touted as one of its proudest achievements and hedonistically long for a distinct sense of independent selfhood. Thus Oz offers a highly complex response to Israel's existential difficulties. Consciously, he distances himself from an earlier generation's collectively sanctioned ideas.2 Nowhere is this more evident than in the novel A Perfect Peace,3 which bears witness to a significant cultural rupture. The solidarity with the collective that had characterized the Palmach generation of the late forties and early fifties is no longer a sacrosanct assumption of Israel's artists and intellectuals. In this novel, a young man, raised in the shadow of his father's deep faith in the socialist Zionist revolution, fully wakens to the reality that his comfort is centered on a community of dispossessed Arabs, and suffers a violent existential crisis. In Oz's apparent challenge to the colonialist dimension of the Zionist enterprise, he seems to anticipate boldly what has been identified as the post-Zionist spirit of Israel's youngest writers. Yet ultimately, the reader cannot be certain whether Oz is prepared to fully sanction the political implications of his character's angry questioning. [End Page 98] Perhaps the most widely read novelist among his generation, a formidable influence among the...

Coming back to voice: The multiple voices and identities of mature multilingual writers

Compositionists often speak of the need to help students acquire a voice or identity in their writing. This interest in teaching voice is understandable but also problematic. Satisfactorily defining “voice,” especially from a second language (L2) point of view, is one of those problems. Another is a reliance on various conceptualizations that privilege a “Western” or a romantic or individualistic notion of voice in classroom situations where many students do not share such a background. In this paper, we use three case studies to address a third problem: a tendency in L2 writing instruction and research to overlook the voices, or identities, already possessed by L2 writers, many of whom at the graduate level bring a history of success as professional/academic writers in their native language and culture to the L2 writing classroom. We examine the role voice can play not as a teaching device but rather as a means by which to investigate and understand the voice-related issues these mature writers encounter in L2 contexts.

Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa

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The Spleen of London 1900–1902: A Japanese Writer's Encounter with Late Victorian English Culture

The Spleen of London 1900–1902: A Japanese Writer's Encounter with Late Victorian English Culture

Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa.

Map: Cote d'Ivoire Map: Beng Region Cast of Characters Preface Pt. 1: Arriving 1: Premonitions (October 1-November 5, 1979) 2: Choosing a Host (November 6-November 28, 1979) 3: Trespassing (November 29-December 20, 1979) 4: Adrift (December 21, 1979-February 19, 1980) 5: The Elusive Epiphany (February 20-April 30, 1980) 6: Bedazzled, Beleaguered (May 1-June 30, 1980) 7: Divination and Trial (July 1-August 2, 1980) 8: Transgressions (August 3-October 3, 1980) 9: Metamorphoses (October 4, 1980-Spring 1981) Pt. 2: Returning 10: A Parallel World (June 11-August 13, 1985) Glossary Acknowledgments Index