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Reviews the history of praxis itself in the development of cultural studies. Proposals for conferences devoted to the development of practical skills and methods; Cultural studies as both interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary.

Inspired by a blend of narrativity studies and cognitive narrative theory, and based on an updated conception of the epistemic plot, this paper sets out to investigate how fictional cognition propels narrative progression from the earliest compositional stages of Henry James's tales as documented in his notebook synopses. Placed in a wider context, moreover, and given James's conviction of the storyness of the representation of consciousness, this paper also invites debate on his role as a remote harbinger of the narrativity of the mind, so characteristic of contemporary cognitive approaches to the fictional genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of linguists have recently suggested that the distinction between the kinds of phrasings we regard as "nativelike," or "natural," and those that strike us as jarring, stilted or just plain wrong, has more to tell us about language than the time-honored opposition between grammar and vocabulary. In the light of these trends, my paper revisits Coleridge's critical claim that "it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare [... ] without making the author say something else, or something worse, that he does say." The paper argues that the strange sense of naturalness Coleridge is evoking in this metaphor, and in the Biographia Literaria 's theorization of poetic diction more generally, can be clarified by that recent linguistic work, and discusses the writings of linguists Bybee, Goldberg, Hoey, Hopper, and Pawley and Syder to this end. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Biographia Literaria can contribute to those linguists' discussions in turn, by illuminating the cognitive processes through which new language is coined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the future of work has become a significant public concern, political theory has not yet considered work to be a central concept within the discipline. The five papers in this symposium provide a range of perspectives on what it means to take work seriously within political thought. This introduction will give an account of why work should be considered as important by political theorists, contextualize the broader landscape into which these papers intervene (characterized by the issues of automation, precarity, and social reproduction), and situate them within existing writing on work within political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman , or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we learn about a manuscript that was probably lost at sea? How can such an elusive text help us to historicize transatlantic reading practices? In this paper, I trace the reception of a book we famously cannot read or recover: Margaret Fuller's history of the Italian Revolution. In July 1850, Fuller drowned with her husband and son when the Elizabeth wrecked within sight of Fire Island, New York; she was returning to the United States after traveling as an international correspondent for the NYDT. Like her body, her book never surfaced. While many believe the manuscript drowned or was looted by pirates, many others believe it never existed, that Fuller never finished or even started writing it. Literary surmising about Fuller's manuscript survives in wide-ranging archives, which I study as interconnected critical responses: powerful interpretations of Fuller's historical sensibilities as a revolutionary journalist-activist. Fuller's manuscript persists, then, in literary histories that are transatlantic in the most real sense of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jason Reynolds's Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (2020) joins a centuries-long tradition of adapting adult books for children. This paper argues that Stamped is an antiracist text that raises important, interconnected questions about adaptation, purpose, and audience. Like many history texts about Black experiences in the US such as Julius Lester's To Be a Slave (1968) and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Stamped reveals the line between children's and adult literature is fabricated, as racism is not restricted by age, and racism impacts Blacks and non-blacks across generations. While To Be a Slave and The Fire Next Time are among a number of possible precursors, Stamped aligns with these two nonfiction texts because just as Stamped was written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the other two were also born out of significant social movements and can be read as antiracist texts. Reynolds's style, storytelling techniques, and formatting transforms Kendi's history book, Stamped from the Beginning , to a text with a broader audience and purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intricate relationship between precarity and coloniality. It argues that discussions and experiences of precarity—defined as the increased vulnerability to exploitative working and living conditions—are historically steeped in colonial and racial violence. It stages a critique of the recently-emerged scholarship on the future of work that tends to both trivialize the experience of precarity as the deprivation of futurity, and ignore the racialized dynamics through which these experiences are distributed. Through a meditation on the anti-work politics of Autonomia and the armed struggles of the Zapatistas , the argument concludes that it is only by reconnecting the resistances to precarity to the project of decolonization as one against dehumanization that discussions of precarity will find their resonance, strength, and efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether there are reasons to be worried about two controversial expansions to the concept "work" —sex work and emotional labor. It asks, through the lens of Sally Haslanger's ameliorative conceptual analysis, what happens when an activity is described as "work" and examines the political and theoretical implications of such conceptual creeps. It argues that when an activity is claimed as "work," a claim is simultaneously made about "work." It concludes that we need not be pedantic about the application of the "work" to new areas, but that careful attention should be paid to semantic shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the examples of Melvin Burgess' Doing It (2004), Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (1989), Justin Richardson's and Peter Parnell's And Tango Makes Three (2005), Paul Ruditis's Rainbow Party (2005), and Michael Willhoite's Daddy's Roommate (1991), this paper explores a series of scandals in the genre of children's literature, examining the taboos surrounding children and their exposure to particular literary forms and content. Figured as the most vulnerable members of society, children are at the center of the most vitriolic and numerous of public debates, as gatekeepers such as parents, schools, libraries, community agencies and the church contest what kinds of material—and what kinds of ideas—are appropriate for the developing minds of the nation. Focusing on scandalous children's texts concerning sexuality, the paper explores how literature functions as a vehicle through which to prosecute both dominant and marginal agendas with the aim of protecting—or transforming—emergent identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assembles a historical narrative about the Asian-American presence at the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in the earlly 1970s by examining three sources: a series of contemporary articles from the newspaper Gidra, Shawn Wong's novel Homebase (1979), and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel I Hotel (2010). In contextualizing this moment within the larger history of cross-racial coalitional politics during the 1960s and 1970s, this paper illustrate how minority nationalisms of the time emerged in "mimetic dynamism": a process of contiguous interchange that changes the conditions by which it exists. This paper focuses on the Asian-American appropriation of the concept "self-determination" and its relation to land occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT If experimental literature consistently challenges us to think through the relations between language and the social, how might experimental electronic literature likewise challenge us to think through those relations within the context of the digital in particular? What unique critical purchase might the experimental dimensions of electronic literature provide on the political, and moreover on the politics of the digital? In this paper I pursue these questions through Shelley Jackson's Snow, an ongoing work consisting of images that Jackson has posted to the social media site Instagram since 2014. Each photograph in Snow (of which there are 428 at the time of this writing) documents a single word carved in snow by Jackson; taken together, these words form the beginning of an as-yet-unfinished story, thus far largely comprised of a girl's monologue describing different types of snow. I suggest in this essay that Snow is a slow-media intervention into the temporal dynamics of technology and ecology. Jackson's slow publication of the text subverts the normative temporality of social media, locating and implicating it within the longue durée of geologic time. Collapsing text and image, her multilayered inscriptions take snow as both message and medium, and as suggested by the gaps, pauses, and delays in her feed—moments where there is no snow to write in and photograph—the project's implication of social media is not only narrative but also material and ecological. On one hand, these images capture and preserve a series of profoundly ephemeral inscriptions, words written in snow that are otherwise deeply subject to the contingencies of local and global climate change. Yet viewed in light of the increasing ecological impact of data centers built by major technology corporations, this digital preservation is itself an ecologically fraught practice. In an uncanny double bind of the digital archive, the preservation of snow within Jackson's project—every image, every like, every comment—cannot be separated from the ecological depletion of that same snow. I situate Snow at the intersection of critical thinking about ecological change, electronic literature, media studies, and experimental writing, arguing for the ways in which the inscription that Jackson's work exemplifies serves as a critically productive means for thinking through ecomedia aesthetics and the stakes of the Anthropocene. At the overlap of these multiple complementary practices, Snow stages an urgent engagement with the relations between text and image, heat and cold, nature and infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article traces the extent of Sylvia Plath's engagement with the Irish modernist, James Joyce. It contributes to a significant strand of Plath scholarship by increasing knowledge of the literary networks Plath and her work engages. It does so by first examining the evidence extant in her published work and archive. It establishes Plath's long-standing interest in Joyce's writing, and traces in her notes and marginalia a consistent focus on Joyce as artistic example. It then establishes a relationship between Plath's reading of Joyce and the künstlerroman genealogy that Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Bell Jar share. This article shows that The Bell Jar self-consciously performs Joyce's influence, with his Finnegans Wake featuring prominently in The Bell Jar as an alienating canonical authority. Finally, in showing The Bell Jar 's departure from the linearity and self-assuredness of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it identifies Plath's künstlerroman as superseding the modernist conventions performed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This paper thus traces the twin imperatives of Joyce's influence identifiable in Plath's reading and writing; a recursive tendency, emphasizing Plath's literary tradition, and a focus on the past, and a heuristic tendency, advocating for Plath's own innovation, looking to the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two most prominent critical readings of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" assert that Edna Pontellier's final actions represent either the mythical triumph of self over a restrictive patriarchy, or, contrarily, the tragic, inevitable defeat of a woman striving to combine motherhood with personhood. Challenging these readings, this paper argues that Edna's actions reveal the danger of withdrawing from all available social roles in favor of an identity-less, though ultimately elusive and destructive, freedom. This paper also argues that "The Awakening," although traditionally aligned with realism and naturalism, implicitly questions the values associated with these modes of representation. Portraying identity as a social fiction one inhabits with a certain amount of willpower, the text complicates realism's insistence on the empirical; depicting women who wield significant power over their lives, as well as a protagonist who erroneously believes she has no say over her own, the novella undermines naturalism's tendency toward fatalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines "The Leopard's Spots" by Thomas Dixon Jr., a noted proponent of white supremacist thinking who wrote and was popular during the early twentieth century. The paper focuses on whiteness and how Dixon seems compelled to represent it in his novel, and how the visual markers and visual metaphors that he deploys throughout his work both uphold and undermine his white supremacist position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a case study in the pedagogical uses of literary MOOs in a discussion-based undergraduate literature classroom. Student responses to experiences in the author's "FrankenMOO," a MOO based on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," test the revolutionary pedagogical promises of cybertext theorists like N. Katherine Hayles, David Bennahum, and Espen Aarseth. This paper examines cybertext theory's relationship with older reader-response theory of Roland Barthes and Wolfgang Iser as a basis for understanding the ways current theoretical approaches to interactive electronic hypertext environments succeed or fail to revolutionize pedagogy and actual classroom practice. The paper highlights practical approaches to using literary MOOs to enhance student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay shows that despite the psychoanalytic critique of the human search for happiness as futile and illusory, there can still be a positive contribution to the question of happiness from psychoanalysis. To that end, the paper turns to Lacan’s Seminar VII, and more specifically, to the Lacanian “sublimation” as “the happy satisfaction of the instinct.” Whether we can achieve a non-illusory kind of happiness through sublimation or we stay trapped in the pursuit of an illusory happiness depends on the extent to which we succeed or fail in the following two issues: 1. asking whether we have ceded on our desire and 2. accepting that no object of desire can ever be completely satisfying. Lacan offers two examples of a problematic relation to desire: these of Creon and Antigone; Creon fails to ask the question about his desire altogether, while Antigone asks the question but fails to accept that she cannot have it all. A critical reflection of these two cases can allow us to find a positive and sustainable version of happiness in psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ethical dimensions of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, in spite of--indeed, because of--the play's apparent negation of all positive talk of human value and community. In the first part of the paper, I examine Stanley Cavell's suggestion, put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988, that Beckett's play can be read as a work that embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. In part two, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell's ethical outlook, I then ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form, something that I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett's play. While retaining some important features of Cavell's "thematics of perfectionism," this approach aims at the same time to move beyond it in order to grasp how Endgame might, in Beckett's own words, provide "an inkling of the terms in which our [human] condition is to be thought again." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads Charles Dickens's "The Chimes" through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's study of class ethics and his problematization of working-class disinterest. Arguing that nineteenth-century British literature tends to characterize working people as either obsessed by financial schemes or economically disinterested, it suggests that Bourdieu's non-dualistic epistemology can change the way we understand class in literature, and indeed in any discipline that offers images of working people along the lines of an economic/ethical split. Bourdieu's way of seeing economic practices in ostensibly non-economic activity, while seeing in that economic activity a deep stratum of ethics, rectifies representations or interpretations of class where a simple working-class pragmatism that capitulates to the economic alternates with an inherent working-class moral superiority. Dickens's Christmas story, "The Chimes," is interpreted using Bourdieu's materialist ideas so as to model how other representations of class can be rethought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Posy Simmonds's graphic novel "Tamara Drewe" (2007) as a post-feminist text that negotiates the contradictions of the eponymous heroine's desire to get "away from it all" in order to "have it all." Despite its twenty-first century concerns, "Tamara Drewe" also alludes to nineteenth-century forms in its loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel, "Far From the Madding Crowd" (1874) and Simmonds's mimicry of Victorian landscape painting for the background of her text. This anachronistic approach enables "Tamara Drewe" to resist the totalizing efforts of the "post" and dismantle the singularity implied by "feminism." Specifically, Simmonds exploits the graphic novel's scopic regime to critique the presumed irrelevance of issues coded as "feminist," such as "the gaze" to post-feminist culture. Finally, "Tamara Drewe" represents the experience of feminism as itself necessarily anachronistic, consisting of simultaneous and often conflicting histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article briefly outlines the history of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) Patrons and Performances website project. Its aim is to enable users to gain access to the complete picture of professional performance activities (drama, music, dance, acrobatics, animal acts, and what have you?) outside London before 1642. The article is designed as a guide to individual on-screen exploration of some of the capacities of the website; readers can follow step-by-step the guide to the site by reading the paper while logged onto the site and following one or another of the four major search paths offered on the home page, to search for information about Patrons, Events, Venues or Troupes. Readers can access the GIS map on-line to investigate playing routes, venues and other geographical details. As well one can search the Bibliography, carefully compiled to reveal the information sources used to assemble the data presented on the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the use of writing poems against war if they reenact rather than alter the binaries and brutalities of the war imagination they claim to protest? Why does so much contemporary war poetry only compound war's depleting effect instead of offering us energy for resistance? In "The Life of Poetry" (1949), Muriel Rukeyser defines poetry as a vital but underused national resource for a culture dominated by war. As a creative transfer of energy, poetry complicates and resists habits of imagination that sustain war. Using Rukeyser's analysis to contrast a representative poem from the volume "Poets Against the War" (2003) to several poems by Forche, Celan, James Wright, Blake,Yeats, Oppen, and Levertov, this paper discusses ways in which poetry about war and wartime can provide useful, life-giving energy without replicating the very violences it claims to oppose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Franz Kafka's writing career coincides with the era of silent cinema, he was clearly ambivalent about this mass-cultural phenomenon and was apparently at pains to keep his prose free from any references to cinema or the many of the films he saw. This is for the most part also true of his letters and diaries; nonetheless, his vividly visual and gestural prose shows a close kinship to forms and techniques silent cinema, which he dismissed late in his life as a "marvelous toy." This paper explores how aspects of his late, overtly autobiographical and retrospective story, "Investigations of a Dog" (1922) evinces the subliminal impact of cinematic experience upon the formative period of writing that preceded his creative breakthrough in 1912. The story also marks the culmination of one of Kafka's major thematic concerns—food and hunger—which the canine narrator, who is a nutritional scientist, links to his pubescent encounter with a troupe of dancing dogs whose silent apparitional nature, I content, allude to the vestigial presence of cinematic experience in Kafka's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines four Shakespearean film adaptations from the point of view of four directors' perceptions of race and ethnicity, and the reactions they seek to elicit in their audiences. In applying the tools developed by cognitive enuroscience and narratology the paper explores how Oliver Parker's "Othello," Tim Blake Nelson's "O," James Gavin Bedford's "Street King," and Uli Edel's "King of Texas" variously use the generic codes and conventions of contemporary cinema—time, language, imagery, sound, perspective, and editing—to prime, cue, and trigger a number of determinate cognitive and emotive responses in their audiences. It also explores how these directors stylistically and thematically retool such cinematic conventions not only to creatively reshape Shakespeare's stories, but to do so in ways that complicate their audience's cognitive and emotive scripts of ethnic identity and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lady Macbeth's reference to motherhood and infanticide near the end of act one of "Macbeth" remains one of the more enigmatic moments in all of Shakespeare's drama. Fearing Macbeth's wavering commitment to their succession scheme, Lady Macbeth declares that she would have murdered her infant to realize an otherwise unachievable goal. Scholars have traditionally read this declaration as evidence of Lady Macbeth's attempt to seize a masculine power to further her husband's political goals. While she clearly seeks power, such power is, I would argue, conditioned on the maternal, an ambiguous, often conflicted status in early modern England: one which enables Lady Macbeth to slip the gendered constraints that bind her. This paper examines representations of murdering mothers in Elizabethan and Jacobean assize records alongside Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, arguing that the maternal ultimately represented a threat to the process of patrilineal transmission in early modern England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albertine's discourse on the ices in "La Prisonnière" has proven fertile ground for Proustian criticism. Some critics have interpreted this passage as "homosexual discourse in the guise of a lesbian discourse" (qtd. in Gray, 111). Others have cited its architectural tropes as a prophetic allusion to the narrator's imminent masterpiece. A few have interpreted the passage as a "fantasy of fellatio" amply supported by the proliferation of phallic images. Finally, a body of criticism has interpreted this passage as evidence of a self-parodying, authorial mastery. Reading against the rain of this tradition, Margaret Gray develops a provocative reading that asserts the precise opposite: that Albertine's discourse on the "ices" evidences the loss of authorial mastery to the emergence of a "feminine ecriture," In this paper, I develop the subversive elements of Albertine's discourse on the "ices" while contesting Gray's assertion: if Albertine's discourse evidences the loss of Marcel's mastery over her, it leads to the recuperation of his authorial mastery by virtue of the suffering it inflicts on him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines economic ideas in Beat writing that pave the way for economic thought in the 60s counterculture. It first describes economic concepts advanced by William S. Burroughs and by Kenneth Rexroth. Burroughs explores the imprisoning effect of economies through his "algebra of need," depicting economic relations in terms of addiction and tracing a pattern of "need" virus in all forms of relation. Rexroth views economics in terms of a "cash nexus" that negates person-centered "I-Thou" relations that express the truest condition of relation of self to other. Using these two models, the paper traces economic themes in work by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac, showing how these authors shift between descriptions of addictive, reductive conditions of need and escapes from this need through transcendent vision. It concludes by considering how Gary Snyder moves away from the polarity of addiction and transcendence through his commitment to non-duality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing cities lend themselves to reflections on memory, on what is lost and what is gained. Many of the major theorists of modernity lived in cities that were undergoing rapid development. The history of modernity in Ireland is no exception to this combination of urbanism and modernism. Each phase of the modernization project in Ireland's capital has produced debates about architecture and planning alongside literary and historical reflections. We see these debates in the 1960s, during which reforms geared toward internationalizing the economy and society were enacted, and we see them in the 1990s, when a new wave of globalization transformed the urban center of Dublin into a tourist destination and financial hub. Into this mix of gentrification and renewal came a literary upsurge, the updated urban memoir. This paper theorizes the relationship between memory, memoir and urban renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the reign of neoliberalism with its growing commercialization of everyday life, the corporatization of higher education, the dismantling of the welfare state, the militarizing of public space, and the increasing privatization of the public sphere, it has become more difficult to address not only the complex nature of social agency and the importance of democratic public spheres, but also the fact that active and critical political agents have to be formed, educated, and socialized into the world of politics. Lacking a theoretical paradigm for linking learning to social change, existing political vocabularies appear increasingly powerless about how to theorize the crisis of political agency and political pessimism in the face of neoliberal assaults on all democratic public spheres. As the vast majority of citizens become detached from public forums that nourish social critique, political agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-based driven form of cultural politics in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and confessional culture become a substitute for systemic change. This paper argues that in the face of a virulent neoliberalism that spawns a vast educational propaganda machine, educators, cultural workers, and others need to rethink the entire project of politics within the changed conditions of a global political/pedagogical sphere. This article attempts to address the current crisis of meaning and political agency as a fundamental challenge to educators, public intellectuals, social movements, and others who believe in the promise of global democracy. In addressing this challenge, it argues that the urgency of the times demands a notion of global politics in which pedagogy, international alliances, and new forms of solidarity play a prominent role in the call for educators and others to be able to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using women's war memoirs and poetry from World War One and the Vietnam War, this essay explores how women's gaze on war reveals the trauma of their experience. In particular this discussion focuses on the relationship between what is seen and not seen, examining how the diversion of the gaze and the attendant paradoxical presence of an unseen text is fundamental in understanding the connection between seeing and writing war. The paper begins by examining the gendered question of authenticity that connects "seeing" with "knowing" in wartime. It goes on to look at the extent to which cultural prescriptions and the trauma of the experience itself influence what is seen and not seen and therefore what is revealed and not revealed in the text itself. It argues that in reading war writing we must be alert to the meaning of the traumatic experience that can only be located in what is absent: unseen and unwritten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]