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The article introduces the publication of one of the "Notebooks from the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator." Thirty handwritten brochures composed in 1932–1933 by inmates of the special political prison of the NKVD in Verkhneuralsk (Cheliabinsk region) were discovered accidentally in early February 2018. It was known that the imprisoned Trotskyists produced a samizdat journal the Bolshevik-Leninist in Verkhneuralsk, but nobody had seen it before the thirty notebooks were found in February. At this preliminary stage, when some of the notebooks have not even been read due to their poor condition, it can be said that several of them represent issues of the journal Bolshevik-Leninist .

This essay examines the phenomenon of rare or unique poems found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript collections, positioning them within the familial, collegial, or coterie environments within and for which they were written. These include verses composed by compilers, politically dangerous or obscene texts, and texts related to scandals or topical events of local interest. These poems rarely feature in literary surveys, but they open a unique window onto early modern society and its mores, and indicate the social breadth, depth, and extent of literary composition.

Expanding on the relationship between word and image that already exists in the illustrated novel versions of The Graveyard Book (2008), P. Craig Russell spearheaded the project to adapt Neil Gaiman’s novel as a graphic novel, published in two volumes in 2014. A different artist or team of artists adapted each individual chapter, forming a total of eight distinct visual approaches to Gaiman’s source text. Critic Linda Hutcheon’s approach to adaptation is particularly useful when thinking about the illustrations that Dave McKean and Chris Riddell first produced for Gaiman’s novel, as well as the eight distinct visual adaptations that make up the graphic novel version of the text. Hutcheon reminds her readers that, thanks to the complexities of new media and the new platforms on which stories are now available, adaptation is always a collective process. These ten distinct visual approaches showcase the partnership between and among adaptors of Gaiman’s novel. All of these illustrated versions of The Graveyard Book point to the creators’ specific visual responses to Gaiman’s novel, individual aesthetic responses that also expand and broaden the audience base for The Graveyard Book . In turn, fans, readers and viewers can receive these illustrated versions of the same novel as palimpsests of one another that balance the concept of “repetition with variation” that is so central to the process and product of adaptation.

In 1794, Mary Robinson—author, celebrity figure, and former actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales—debuted her new comedy Nobody at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. It caused a near-riot. This chapter maintains that allusions in Robinson’s drama to “Nobody,” a graphic image often figured as a woman wearing an empire-waist gown with “no bodice,” stage a crisis of embodiment in which the ills of the state are imaged through fashionable folly. The drama provides fresh insight into the politics of fashion, and how authors engaged print media and performance networks to generate suggestion and critique. Moreover, it reveals how Robinson intended, through Nobody, to write herself into being—to rescript her social role from a stylish trendsetter into a respected author.

For the last fifteen years or so, I have been teaching a university course at Lund University, Sweden, which combines the academic study of one of Shakespeare's plays (through lectures, the submission of essays, and so on), with a more practical approach: the students are cast in, rehearse (with me as their director), and finally perform a slightly abridged version of the play, in English, in full period costume, before an audience. The performance constitutes the students' "oral exam" although the grading is based on their written work. This hands-on approach is engrossing, exhausting, and enjoyable in equal measure, and surprisingly often it yields substantial food for thought. As anyone who works on Shakespeare from a practical angle knows, seeing a play through fresh young eyes almost invariably proves to be a way of discovering brave new worlds within it. Recently, after two productions of The Winter's Tale--surely the saddest of Shakespeare's comedies--I felt that the logical next step had to be exploring Romeo and Juliet, the funniest and most farcical of his tragedies. Not that there is anything essentially new or original in regarding Romeo and Juliet as a play that thinks it is a comedy, of course; it is an idea that has been exploited by many directors and thoroughly analyzed by academics. But as my students studied, rehearsed, and ultimately performed Romeo and Juliet (or Four Funerals and a Wedding as it was occasionally referred to in the group), the comedy element spontaneously came to be a core part of our stage work, and on the whole, this approach originated with them (although I was very willing to go along with it). Thus, in our work, one of the main concerns somehow became how to confound audience expectations and avoid playing the tragedy before it actually happens, and how to achieve an encounter with it as unprepared, perhaps, as that of a sixteenth-century penny-stinkard sneaking into the playhouse late and missing the Prologue. As a consequence, we wanted our Verona to be a comfortably ordinary place for as long as possible, and for as many sublunary citizens as possible--a place full of people busy playing the leads in their own lives rather than attendant lords in someone else's, intent on their own joys and cares, most of the time treating the Montague/Capulet brawls as so much white noise. In the rehearsals, discussions, and analyses, we repeatedly found ourselves exploring the boundary between comedy and tragedy, our question being this: exactly when, and how, are we allowed, or even encouraged, to laugh at tragedy and death in Shakespeare's plays--and are we able to laugh at dead bodies onstage today? I have no definite answers to offer, only the solutions we found for ourselves in our staging; and in this paper, I want to discuss them further. Most people--be they scholars, spectators, or those involved in performance--would probably agree that the transition from comedy to tragedy happens in 3.1: the bewildering reversal comes with the almost accidental, almost incidental, stabbing of Mercutio. (1) This is where Mercutio finally (in Robert Maslen's words) attests to "the proximity between rapier wit and violence with rapiers." (2) Following Coppelia Kahn, Maslen sees the tragedy as a result of the clash between violent masculinity and heterosexual desire and claims that "the lightness with which he undertakes the quarrel stakes Mercutio's claim to manhood." (3) There is no question that there is plenty of testosterone in this scene, of course, but to me, it seems that the main reason that Mercutio undertakes the quarrel so lightly is that it is at that point a light, almost playful fight, reminiscent of the wrestling and biting of young puppies, which nobody, least of all Mercutio, expects will have a fatal outcome--and that this is also what makes the reversal so shocking. Even Romeo, who tries to stop the fight, does so invoking not physical danger but the law ("the Prince expressly hath/Forbid this bandying in Verona streets"). …

1. The Modern Rejection of Authority It has often been observed that one characteristic of the modern world is the utter rejection of authority, or at least, the rejection of authority in so far as that is possible without leading to societal collapse. The need for political authority is grudgingly accepted to avert social disaster, but the fact that there is no moral authority is generally thought to be too obvious to require argument. For example, Patrick Hurley claims in his college textbook on logic that the appeal to authority for a moral judgment is an example of the Ad Verecundiam fallacy: "If someone were to argue that abortion is immoral because a certain philosopher or religious leader has said so, the argument would be weak regardless of the authority's qualifications. Many questions in these areas are so hotly contested that there is no conventional wisdom an authority can depend upon." (1) Not only does Hurley think it is obvious that there is no moral authority in disputed domains, but his reason for thinking so is just that those domains are disputed. He does not consider the possibility that someone could actually have the authority to give moral prescriptions. The rejection of authority extends to most domains of belief, not only moral beliefs. The ascendancy of modern science is usually credited with convincing people of the untrustworthiness of traditional sources of belief, including, of course, the teachings of the Church. The prestige of science has made scientific experts the closest thing we have to authorities over belief, and if there is any vestige of authority left in the epistemic realm--the realm of belief, then it is science. But although people will often accept the word of experts in an esoteric scientific field, scientific experts are not authorities in any robust sense. It is entirely up to the individual person whether she chooses to believe an expert. There is no question of commanding belief, and no duty to obey. Are there any good reasons for rejecting authority in belief and morals? I think there are two interesting and influential reasons. One comes from John Locke, who argued that nobody may command belief because it is impossible to obey it. "It is absurd that things should be enjoined by laws which are not in men's power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true does not depend upon our will." (2) If authority is the right to command, there is no authority over beliefs. Locke's claim that belief is not under the control of the will has a measure of truth that has led to an extensive debate in epistemology, but I do not see that it is any harder to believe on command than to believe what ordinary people tell me. It depends on the circumstances. Suppose my friend Ann says to me, "She will never marry him." Surely it is possible for me to believe her, and if I have good reason to think she is reliable and sincere, I can also be justified in doing so. We all believe plenty of things we are told, often with good reason. But imagine the same situation except that Ann chooses her words a little differently. Instead of saying to me, "She will never marry him," she might say, "Believe me, she will never marry him." She could even make the command mode stronger by saying, "She will never marry him. You must believe that." In each case I know that Ann intends for me to believe what she says, and I know that she believes it herself. Whatever reasons I have to think that Ann is privy to inside information on our friend's marital intentions can be the same in each case. I may not like the tone of the last case, but I see no reason to think that I am unable to follow the command. If I can accept Ann's testimony about this particular matter, why would I find myself unable to do so once she turns her testimony into an explicit imperative? The real issue is not whether I can believe on command, but whether I ought to. There is a second reason why authority over beliefs has been widely rejected in the modern period, and this reason has tremendous significance for almost every area of human life. …

Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, eds. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xi, 221. CAD $90. The introduction to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty, written by editors Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, opens with an acknowledgement of Lessing's irritation at having her landmark novel misread by many readers and reviewers at the time of its publication, in 1962. In 1971, Lessing famously reacted to the audience's response in a preface that is included in all subsequent reprintings of The Golden Notebook. After explaining the concept of breakdown as self-healing, the "inner self's dismissing false dichotomies and divisions," Lessing writes: "But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled ... as being about the sex war" (8). She asserts that "the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalize" (Lessing 10). Despite Lessing's instruction and her "stated objections to analytical critique," contributors to the compilation challenge Lessing's interpretation of her own novel, approaching The Golden Notebook from a variety of angles, "even against authorial authority itself" (Ridout et al. 3). Unsurprisingly, Lessing's warning against division is similarly unheeded, given the novel's length and thematic and formal complexity. In Julie Cairnie's words, "critics carve up The Golden Notebook according to our own proclivities" (19). The collection, put together to celebrate Lessing's text after five decades, is afforded "[j]ust over a half-century of chronological distance from the novel and its mid-fifties setting and preoccupations," which enables "new geopolitical, theoretical, social, aesthetic, and autobiographical approaches through which to appreciate and reevaluate this ever-provocative text" (3). Cairnie discusses the sections set in Rhodesia in the 1940s and their relevance to black and white Zimbabwean women writers; Ridout makes a delightful comparison between Tlte Golden Notebook and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, and Jonah Raskin reminiscences about a day spent interviewing Lessing on a bed in an old farmhouse. In these examples alone, the collection addresses vastly diverse topics, all circling Lessing and her novel, which continues to "challenge, surprise, and inspire twentieth-century readers" (9). The book includes a comprehensive introduction and twelve contributions from "established and emerging scholars across several generations and nationalities--American, Canadian, British, Australian" (3). The pieces range in topic and approach, are categorized into three parts, and clearly demonstrate that Lessing's novel still has much to offer contemporary criticism over fifty years after its creation. In Part I, "Politics and Geopolitics," four contributors discuss political aspects of Lessing's novel--the African setting of the black notebook (Cairnie), nuclear deterrence and the Cold War as important to the book's narrative (Mark Pedretti, Cornelius Collins), and a discussion of feminism and homosexuality/homophobia in the text (Singer)--from a contemporary viewpoint and trace the implications of The Golden Notebook past the time of its publication and into the book's future. Pedretti's "Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence" is one of the most compelling pieces in the collection. He focuses on an area that is largely ignored in previous scholarship about the text: the importance of the nuclear bomb. …

[...]Chapter Nine addresses the fundamental, underlying issue of “translatability” by presenting and rejecting Jeffrey Stout’s criticism of MacIntyre and even MacIntyre’s own acknowledgement that translation between “traditions in conflict” is in fact possible: “As we will see . . . even MacIntyre’s account is finally insufficient.” There he states, in a manner that one may be allowed to see as a clear expression of neoorthodoxy, that he does not “believe in the division between philosophy and theology” and claims that MacIntyre errs in “trying to solve the problem [of translation] he creates by his description of traditions without resorting to explicitly theological descriptions of change/conversion.” [...]theology provides the answer to a problem supposed to be distinctly philosophical, not just with regard to the comparison between Stoicism and Christianity, but also with regard to scholarly thought in the humanities much more generally (including religious studies) Hermeneutical issues aside (although they are central to the book), readers of this journal will be interested to learn whether Rowe’s accounts of his chosen Stoics, in particular, are adequate—perhaps even illuminating—or whether they “suffer” from his explicitly adopted Christian perspective. [...]if the Sage was as rare as the Phoenix, nobody would ever have lived such a life.) Actually, I am convinced (oddly, with Rowe himself) that the very strong idea of the (supposed) necessity of living for understanding is a quite modern thought, which is not to be found in early Christianity either, nor in that sense in Wittgenstein, whom Rowe presents as his ultimate philosophical support.

Schoenberg and Redemption. By Julie Brown. (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [xiv, 259 p. ISBN 9780521550352 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781139949965 (e-book), $79.] Music examples, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Julie Brown's Schoenberg and Redemption newly testifies to the power of a composer's self-expressive prose. Two documents from 1934 to 1935 unlock the door to Brown's original intervention in the populous arena of Schoenberg scholarship: an understanding of the motivation behind Schoenberg's turn to atonality, or as he called it, the emancipation of dissonance. Schoenberg's confessional private essay "Every young Jew" (1934) and his Mailamm (American-Palestine Institute of Jewish Musical Sciences) address of 29 March 1935 are fundamental to Brown's evaluation of Schoenberg's early acceptance of Richard Wagner's Deutschtum and his anti-Semitic tract, "Judaism in Music" (1850). As she argues, the two works provide key evidence for Schoenberg's motivation to strike out on a new path in composition as a means to redemption for himself as a Jew, and of German music. Reinhold Brinkmann has observed: "Schoenberg's foundation of the Viennese atonality as a new paradigm for contemporary music, besides being embedded in a music-historical process, was indeed the reflection of a very specific and problematic historical, social, cultural and psychical situation in Vienna around 1900" (Reinhold Brinkmann, "Schoenberg the Contemporary: A View from Behind" in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 197). To this understanding of the relationship between Schoenberg's cultural circumstances and his compositional practice, Brown's book adds a new perspective on his turn to atonality, rooted in his statements of 1934 and 1935. Instead of a study predominantly driven by music-theoretical analysis of Schoenberg's works (such as Jack Forrest Boss, Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]), Brown presents "Schoenbergian modernism as cultural discourse" (P-2). Schoenberg's Mailamm address reveals his youthful devotion to Wagner's Deutschtum--that "nobody could be a true Wagnerian if they did not believe in Wagner's philosophy, his Deutschtum (Germanness)"--and to Wagner's "anti-Semitic views about Judaism in music" (p. 25). Brown adds, "The implications of this claim have been little explored in the literature." And even less explored is "Every young Jew," which was "unpublished at the time," and, Brown observes, "only touched upon by previous commentators" and "never translated into English"(p. 25). Although Moshe Lazar, Steven J. Cahn (in his Ph.D. dissertation), and Sabine Feisst have translated short segments of "Every young Jew" into English, Brown includes her own full English translation. Schoenberg's Nachlass, the collection of his manuscripts, notes, and correspondence, record his life's journey: his conversion to Lutheranism in 1898; his immersion in the cultural and political atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna; his moves between Vienna and Berlin during the rise of National Socialism; his return to the Jewish faith, beginning in 1921 with the anti-Semitic incident in which he was denied access to the Mattsee spa and then formalized in 1933; and his exile to North America after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. For Brown, the Nachlass, including documents like the Harmonielehre, provides insight into the foundation of his two major developments in composition: atonality and the twelve-tone method. In "Every young Jew," Schoenberg mentions six times his early longing to be redeemed from disgrace and shame for being Jewish. Brown views "Every young Jew" and Mailamm as expressions of Jewish "self-hatred." I would look beyond the surface of the words "self-hatred" to see the documents as a "cry of despair uttered by those who experience at first hand the fate of mankind," to paraphrase Schoenberg's 1910 aphorism in which he characterizes the creative act that is art (Arnold Schoenberg, "Aphorismen," Die Musik 9 [1909-1910], 159; trans. …

"If Stalin was 80 percent violence and 20 percent propaganda," Rus- sian journalism professor Igor Yakovenko once told me, "then Putin is 80 percent propaganda and 20 percent violence." Media are crucial to Vladimir Putin's rule. When he was first appointed prime minister in the late 1990s, Putin was considered by many to be a bland nobody with few political prospects. But after a war in Chechnya and a massive TV- makeover that recast him as a strong military leader, Putin managed to win the 2000 presidential election and later cement his hold on power. One of his first moves after becoming president was to capture televi- sion and put it under his direct control. Russia's media moguls—both those who had supported Putin's rise and those who had opposed him— were arrested or forced into exile. Russian television had begun spinning political pseudorealities as early as 1996, when oligarchs such as Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky helped to keep President Boris Yeltsin in power by broad- casting claims that the candidates running against him were part of a fas- cist-communist menace. Yet for most of the 1990s, Russia's oligarchs opposed one another, creating a sort of perverse system of checks and balances among the various campaigns of disinformation. With power centralized under Putin, however, the Kremlin could run both television and politics like one vast scripted reality show. At the center of the show was the president himself: Putin bare-chest- ed, riding on a horse; Putin stroking tigers; Putin in leather, riding a Har- ley. The staged images of Putin as B-movie hunk were used to cultivate his image as superhero-czar and to set him above the fray of real politics (a regular set piece on Russian news has Putin scolding government

Over the past decade, fictionality has been at the center of new work in novel studies and novel theory. Exemplified by Catherine Gallagher's "The Rise of Fictionality," recent scholarship on the history of fictionality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England has provided a means of reframing and rethinking the conventional narratives of the rise of the novel and the development of realist fiction. (1) Yet the history of fictionality in early America has largely been ignored or casually dismissed. For example, Gallagher, noting the prevalence of "Founded in Fact" narratives in the early Republic, has declared that [f]ictionality seems to have been but faintly understood in the infant United States" (345). Gallagher's characterization of the early Republic, however, overlooks the significant body of early American fiction that emerged in dialectical relation to the early Republic's famous antifictional discourse. Those American novelists who broke the taboo against fictionality did so with a sense that the mode provided distinct advantages for their novelistic projects. Responding to fiction's critics in their texts and paratexts, these writers advanced sophisticated metafictional arguments for the value of fictionality within republican culture. This essay takes up one such fiction, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), which posits fiction as an ideal mode for carrying on political debate. Many early Americans, dedicated to the ideals of classical republicanism, saw the popularity of fiction as a sign of modern degeneration: for these critics, the rise of fiction in the United States reflected the young Republic's distance from the virtuous republics of antiquity and served as a harbinger of its failure. (2) Brackenridge, however, saw in fiction not a sign of modern corruption, but a genre uniquely suited to address the challenges of modern republicanism. (3) In Modern Chivalry, he argues that the suppositional reference of fiction and especially the suppositional personhood of fictional characters--what Gallagher refers to as their nobodiness"--allow fiction to achieve a greater impersonality than other forms of discourse, giving it the potential to serve as a uniquely virtuous mode within republican print culture. Confronted with the rise of the partisan press and the intensifying of conflicts between competing regional and political groups, Modern Chivalry approaches the factious political discourse of the young Republic as a problem of genre. For Brackenridge, the genres most closely associated with classical republicanism were insufficient for the challenges of the modern republic. In his landmark reading of Modern Chivalry, Christopher Looby shows how Brackenridge lampoons the pretenses of the Ciceronian oratory that was closely identified with classical republicanism, presenting classical republicanism as an anachronistic and even quixotic political framework for the modern United States (Voicing, 203-65, esp. 236). Faced with the inadequacy of these older forms, Brackenridge posits fiction as an alternative to both antiquated modes of political oratory and the scurrilous, partisan attacks of contemporary periodical writing. Modern Chivalry presents the suppositional reference of fiction as a better way of creating truly impersonal discourse than the norms of anonymity that governed the political public sphere in early America, which Brackenridge regards as providing a screen for interested political action. Modern Chivalry complicates our current narratives of fictions development. Tracing the emergence of novelistic fictionality across the long eighteenth century, Gallagher has linked fictionality's "rise" to its depoliticization, showing how suppositional reference came to serve as a sign of privacy, politeness, and distance from political scandal (Nobody 88-115). Responsive to the exigencies of republican culture, Brackenridge sought to reverse this very depoliticization, arguing for fiction's value within the very realm of public, political struggle to which it was generally regarded as opposed. …

I begin by comparing two women's descriptions of their transportation to prison. Sometime later they rudely woke us at night and ordered us to ready ourselves for departure. They put us in vans with the logo "bread," literally jammed us in, so we could hardly breathe. The van began to move. The air became so stifling that several women fainted.... The van stopped, and we were put on cattle carts outfitted with plank beds. On the floor, in front of the doors was a small hole--our toilet. The plank beds were made for two people. For those who were thin, it was not that bad, but for the bigger women there was very little space. Soon the train started. We were given herring and bread, and a bucket of water. The trip was exhausting and we lost count of the passing days. Nobody knew where we were being taken. At last on dawn of one day the train stopped and we were taken out. The station sign said Pot'ma, so it was in the Mordovian republic.... What a picture it was! A line of women of various ages surrounded by a convoy of young soldiers, walking along a forest road. Behind them several carts with their belongings. The line seemed endless. It was a whole train. We walked for a long time. There were rest stops, when we ate some bread. We were very thirsty. If one had to go to the toilet, it was done without any shame, right there, in the crowd of women. (Liudmila, 1937) (1) We didn't know where we were going. We were herded into these cells to wait for the convoy to arrive and collect the matrioshki. They took us to the station; it was cold, winter, and we were left in these voronki in the freezing cold for one and half hours waiting for the train. Then the train came; first they took one load, then another--men, and then the women. There was a four-person compartment, but they put ten of us in, along with our cases. Ten people there, all with bags in the compartment ... we traveled like that on top of one another the whole way. Some young girls were traveling with us; they went further; we were all together even though they were juveniles ... HIV- and tuberculosis-infected should have traveled separately, but we were all in together ... we were only allowed to go to the toilet every twelve hours. They gave us prison rations--a jar of dried potatoes and a jar of oats but no hot water ... it was a nightmare.... And the guard was some young man, and he told us we had to entertain him, tell him jokes. It was just awful ... so demeaning.... There was one girl who had a very high temperature, but the convoy said she was putting it on. She was dripping wet with sweat all the way there, and they wouldn't let her go to the toilet alone--you had to be accompanied. But she took two steps and fell, so they just pushed her back in. (Sonia, 2007) (2) The first quotation is taken from the memoir of Liudmila Ivanovna Granovskaia, arrested in 1937 and transported from Leningrad to Mordovia to serve a five-year sentence; the second is from a women prisoner whom I interviewed in 2007--transported more recently from Moscow, also to Mordovia, to serve an eight-year sentence. The circumstances of these two women were different: Liudmila was a political prisoner, arrested as a wife of an enemy of the people, while Sonia was sentenced for drug dealing. The context of their punishment also differed. Liudmila Ivanovna was not protected by Russia's signature on the European Convention on Human Rights, and after her release she was exiled in northern Russia. Sonia, in contrast, benefiting from an amnesty introduced to relieve prison overcrowding in the early 2000s, was allowed to return home in 2008, there to await her partner's release from his twelve-and-a-half year sentence, also for drug dealing. There is a compelling similarity to these women's stories of penal transportation; they both experienced it as humiliating, demeaning, and as a denial of their individual personhood, the markers, as we shall see below, of "harsh punishment. …

����� ��� Florence, the aunt of James Baldwin’s protagonist in Go Tell It on the Mountain, has little faith in the transformative effects of religious conversion. Near the middle of the novel, she says, “These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers. They got the same old black hearts they was born with” (182). She uses her brother Gabriel as her prime example of this failure to change. Florence repeatedly challenges Gabriel’s assertion that he has changed, saying that he “was born a fool, and always done been a fool” (38–39), that he is “born wild, and [he is] going to die wild” (44), and that “he ain’t thought a minute about nobody in this world but himself” (84). It is not only Gabriel’s abuse of his family that leads Florence to believe that he does not and cannot change, but also the secret he keeps from his family and from members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized. While Gabriel claims to be sanctified and living a holy life, he has committed adultery, fathered an illegitimate son, and then abandoned the woman and his child. To Florence, he is the same man he was before his conversion experience: selfish, lustful, and oppressive, “no better than a murderer” (84). Critics tend to share Florence’s negative perception of her brother. Depending on their perspective on Christianity, Gabriel is either a personification of a vengeful, misogynist, and even racist God (see Macebuh; Warren; Ikard; Csapo), or an example of a “bad” Christian who uses religion as a front to bolster his own power while secretly engaging in “sinful” activities that he preaches against in public (for example see Lunden; Hardy; Porter). Both Trudier Harris and Vivan May take the latter line of critique a step further, suggesting that Gabriel fakes his conversion in order to gain tyrannical authority over those around him. Even more sympathetic readings of Gabriel end up condemning him. Peter Powers sees Gabriel’s struggle against his sexual desire as sincere but interprets his conversion as a “gimmick” that enables him to maintain a position of social power in the face of a racist society, ultimately emphasizing Gabriel’s failure (800). I want to suggest that these scholars misread the novel’s critique of the African-American Christianity in general and the Black Holiness Christianity in particular. 1 I argue that Go Tell It on the Mountain does not portray Gabriel simply as a villainous character who commits emotional

How can dance—a performing art often expressing emotions through virtuosic bodies—portray its antipode: absence, the imperceptible, and death? Beginning with Martha Graham’s 1930 solo choreography Lamentation , this essay will consider how a dancer’s partnership with an elastic fabric can awaken spectators to a corporeal, kinetic sense of grief. Perceiving the life of the dancer within the fabric and this dynamic duet between the animate and inanimate, Lamentation argues that the division between living and dead is porous and that grief is not a purely mental affair. Both contentions are further developed in choreographer Sasha Waltz’s noBody (2002), where dancers perform duets with apparent corpses and fabric animated by invisible dancers. Both Lamentation and noBody are complementary, supplementary, and antagonistic to dominant psychological approaches to dealing with the dead. The choreographies exemplify practices of grief marginalized or pathologized by Freud and contemporary thanatologists, such as a continuing sense of the departed’s physical presence and/or attempts to communicate. The partnership between the living and the supposedly inanimate presented in Lamentation and noBody strengthens Merleau-Ponty’s analogy between phantom limbs and grief, while the phenomenological articulation of the ambiguous existence possessed by phantoms aids in accounting for the multiplicity that coalesces in these dances of grief. Finally, the blurring between the living and dead within Lamentation and noBody provides choreographic commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s late chiasmic philosophy, which challenges a sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate.

R. Ben Penglase, Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. 224 pp.On the enormous 250-step staircase in Lapa known as Escadaria Selaron, a hand-painted tile called "Favela" features a surreal self-portrait of the artist Jorge Selaron along with a bit of sage advice about favela life: "Living in a favela is an art. Nobody robs. Nobody hears. Nothing is lost. Those who are wise obey those who give orders." Ben Penglase's book, Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life, takes up the task of more fully elucidating this "art" of favela living. The book carefully and sensitively addresses what the author calls "(in) security," as it shapes favela residents' daily lives. Drawing on long-term experience in the community of Caxambu, Penglase seeks not simply to explain (in)security, but to "portray it, describe it, and perhaps give a sense of what it felt like" (26). What emerges is a highly nuanced and subtle ethnography which teases out the complexities of (in)security and gives equal attention to resident perspectives.One of the books' major contributions is the elaboration of Michel de Certeau's (1984) distinction between "strategies" (for the powerful-ways of enacting change at the level of wider structures of society) and "tactics" (for the less powerful-ways of exercising agency that manage risk at a smaller scale) in the favela context (6). The focus on tactics resonates particularly well within the Brazilian cultural context and is effective in highlighting the ways in which residents are able to exercise agency, even if their agency is ultimately circumscribed by larger power structures.Knowing how to live in Caxambu, the author explains, "meant maintaining a constant attentiveness to how to dodge, evade, or turn to one's advantage the obstacles that life placed in one's path" (7). Each of the substantive chapters of the book looks at an obstacle or moment of crisis, weaving together a skillful analysis of violence in wider Rio with ethnographic details the author captures in Caxambu.In the opening chapter, Penglase situates his work within the anthropological study of violence. He emphasizes that violence is a productive force, "generating new meanings, emotions, practices, and forms of subjectivity" (18). Though the ethnographic details of the book reveal these forms of production for the reader, the author is mindful not to present violence or insecurity as somehow separate from larger social practices. Race, class, gender, and space all intersect in vital ways with everyday (in) security in Caxambu. Penglase further emphasizes that experiences of violence are often uncertain and contradictory. (In)security is unstable. At the same time, residents themselves employ ambiguity as a mitigating tactic.Chapter 2 situates the author as an actor by discussing his own experiences of (in)security as a researcher and examining how he unwittingly reproduced tropes of safety and danger in accounting for his fieldwork. In this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, Penglase does a commendable job of locating himself in the narrative in a light, yet meaningful way. In particular, I found his discussion of "feeling estressado (stressed) without even knowing why" (64-66) to be an insightful way of helping the reader to understand the embodied experience of living in a state of (in)security.Chapter 3 looks at the spatial dynamics of the favela "familiar," meant both in the sense of familiar and family based and, at the same time, full of what Penglase calls "dangerous intimates"-drug traffickers with deep ties to the community. Shared history and spatial organization create an intimacy that complicates (in)security. The task for residents then, is "how to manage to be both close enough to these dangerous intimates to avoid their violence or perhaps even secure some of their assistance and yet distant enough to avoid becoming entangled in their violence" (97). …

Wind blew the thirty-year-old white dress across Bernadine's calves that were as white as heavy cream. Her nipples showed through the sheer chiffon fabric like big brown pennies. On a Creole girl's body, if she is indeed Creole and not just high-yellah, the most brown you'll ever see or ever taste is the dark caramel color of her nipples on a milky-white body. Bernadine was so white she was almost see-through. And in the antiquated, junky application of color distinction, even in modern-day Mississippi River decrees and degrees, she was indeed black and indeed fair enough to be considered a "real Creole." This meant she was touched enough in the head to swirl through antebellum notions, while the soul train of deep blackness still chugged around in her spirit. What version of a brassiere did Bernadine have on in such hot weather today? Or did she forget to put one on all together? In spite of the thick Mississippi mugginess, the gust lifted up the homemade hem to reveal my sister's thick and salty thighs. Any man that has bitten Bernadine's legs knows that they are as salty as smoked sausage-and boy, did Bernadine like having her legs bitten by a man. But here she was now, in my brother's backyard, dipping and posing for photographs in my white dress. Might as well have been her wedding dress the way the cameras came looking for her like she was some fluorescent bride-a Creole candelabra of luminescence for the paparazzi, made up of Cousin Joe, Benoit, and Little Earl.I am just red with nappy hair, rolls of fat from eating too many threepiece-fried-chickens and fries from Popeyes in the middle of the night. Nobody ever whistles at me from across the neutral ground. I never hear nobody holler, "Say, Red!" at me, thanks to God, I guess. They save the whistles for my sister Bernadine, even though nothing on her is "red." Red is sweet like the plums in Miss Violet's backyard and plummy like Parrains tomatoes for jambalaya. She ain't red but they call her "Red" anyway- even though she'd shoot you a look if you ever made the mistake of calling her high-yellah. Her ass wagging welcomes whistles. And, my ass? I have no ass even though I am full on meaty in all other places.All I promised this time was to pick her up from the airport and be done with it. So I don't know how I came to be here at Bernadine's cursed birthday party today, witnessing such thievery over my dress, driving her bitchy self around Chackbay in my car wasting my gas. I wished the Lord would have saved my eyes from seeing all this today. I swore to myself that I wouldn't go to her party 'cause I couldn't believe the nerve of the humble request "Madame Queen" Bernadine asked for her fortieth. Plus, Lisa Ledoux had asked me to go to a disco party of hers in Abbeville the same night. I had been planning all around it, already bought my Afro wig. Already started practicing my Wilona-and-Jay-Jay dancing in the mirror.Bernadine has eight hundred Facebook friends, postings of her with Jay Z, Congo Bongo Man, and Erik Estrada, floods of photos of her surrounded by flouncy, prissy-polished gay guys in tuxedos and dresses: a real life Madonna in the "Material World" video, but without the materials. How could she be so royal and raggedy at the same time? I peer through the window of Facebook, my excited eyes tiny and squinting like little green peas at forty friends. Forty is something, but forty Facebook friends ain't nothing-nothing but a bunch of weirdos I don't know, plus Lisa Ledoux. So, how could Bernadine, with all her popularity and friends, be appeased with a small family gathering for her fortieth birthday? Some ice cream and cake? Since when does she want something so humble and really believe that she'll get it? From her cell phone, two-minute increments of her bossy-family-quality-time with me sounds like this:"I just want y'all to be there. Just the family. Nobody else. Just Mamma and y'all. I want a kiddie party with just my lil nieces and nephews, pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs, Stevie Wonder songs, some chicken salad sandwiches, prizes, funny hats, you know-so we can all feel like children with balloons to pop. …

Theater, like the movies, is a collaborative art. In addition to the playwright, one needs a director, actors, a set designer, and numerous lesser contributors. It also helps to have a supportive community capable of providing a dependable audience base. Assembling all this, and keeping it together, can be no mean task, especially in this electronic age of the short attention span. But it can successfully happen. One of the most successful collaborations in American theatrical history took place in St. Paul, Minnesota, beginning in the late 1970s. That’s when a newly arrived nobody, calling himself August Wilson, teamed up with the fledgling Penumbra Theater and, with the help of money from the state’s Bush, McKnight, and Jerome foundations, began to produce and stage a succession of remarkable plays exploring the black experience in America. The Yale Repertory Theater and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in faroff Connecticut would help too over time, as would the Minneapolis Playwrights Center, but in the beginning it was largely a St. Paul show. The late Claude Purdy, a black stage director and cofounder with Lou Bellamy of Penumbra, deserves credit for luring Wilson to St. Paul in the first place. Purdy himself had come out to the city from Pittsburgh in 1975 to direct a Penumbra production of The Great White Hope and had liked the experience and St. Paul so much that he decided to stay. He and Wilson had been pals back in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson was known primarily at the time as a poet. Purdy, while still in Pittsburgh, had convinced Wilson to convert a number of linked poems about an Old West character named Black Bart into a satirical play. In 1977 he called Wilson from St. Paul and urged him to come there and rewrite it. He even bought Wilson the plane ticket to do so. “He sent me a ticket and I went,” Wilson recalled to an interviewer in 1984, “and I said, ‘This is a nice place, I should move up here.’ And a couple of months after that I did.” Simple as that: he came, he saw, he stayed. In an interview with Minnesota

"There's something about him when he's fried. You leave that skin on, cut him, and just eat him from the inside out. Spot is good, buddy, I can tell you that." --overheard at the Bayford Oyster House, Bayford, Virginia, November 21, 2011 "I fry mine hard and eat the bones, the tail, and all ... I always cook that head because I like crunching on it. I love crunching on it! I leave the tail on. The head and tail, I leave on." --Katie White, Painter vie., Virginia, August 6, 2014 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Late summer the phone rings in the Bayford Oyster House on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. "Bayford," H. M. Arnold answers. "Yes ma'am," he says a few seconds into the conversation, "I don't have any spot today. They don't seem to be running. Nobody I know has them. I have some hardheads though, if you want to drive down and get them. Thank you." H. M. shakes his head and sits down in his plastic chair by the stainless steel counter where he shucks oysters for the winter trade from Thanksgiving to New Years. The afternoon steams August hot, a bit of breeze ruffles the water on Nassawadox Creek outside the door. The tide is rising and soon enough will seep under the sills and into the dock end of the venerable shucking house, sheeting over the old concrete floors, compelling H. M. and his visitors first to walk on boards and then to slosh their way past the soft-shell crab shedding tanks now all but closed down for the season. Tank, the monumental Chesapeake Bay retriever who lives up the hill, stands in the boat launch with a chunk of pine branch clenched in his jaws, waiting for someone--anyone will do--to seize the wood and pitch it into the water. Strangers shy away from the massive dog; regulars ignore him. Tank perseveres. And so do the callers seeking spot, a panfish deeply savored in this corner of the world. The phone rings. "Bayford," H. M. answers. Spot, it seems, have diminished in their numbers since 1890, when a fish census noted: "Large numbers of young spot from 3 to 4 inches in length were seined in the bay at Cape Charles City. They were present in abundance, numerous schools being seen ... As a pan fish, the spot is the most highly prized of all fishes sold in the Norfolk market."' Writing from North Carolina, Hugh M. Smith reported in 1907, "The spot, which gets its name from the round mark on its shoulder, inhabits the east coast of the United States from Massachusetts to Texas, and is one of the most abundant and best known of our food fishes." Smith concludes, "The spot ranks high as a food and is by many persons regarded as the best of the pan fishes. There is a good demand for North Carolina spots in Baltimore, Washington, and other markets of the Chesapeake region, and the fish is also rated high as a salt fish for local consumption." (2) Spot, another observer reported, "are the smallest members of the croaker family that are sold with any regularity. Most specimens weigh only about 1/4 pound. Spots are easy to recognize by their spot right behind the gill opening." (3) The spot's distinguishing markings, Pooh Johnson, oysterman and cook in Onancock, Virginia, asserts are the marks of Christ's fingertips imprinted when He divided the loaves and fishes for the multitude in Mark 6:41. (4) Communion of a different variety causes H. M.'s phone to ring. Uncommonly common in the lower Chesapeake and in North Carolina's sounds, the spot (also known regionally as Jimmy, chub, roach, Goddy, and Lafayette) lives inshore from late spring through autumn and winters in deeper offshore waters during the cold months: "The waters of the Chesapeake Bay off Norfolk, Virginia, are such prime spot fishing grounds that out-of-town menus often list this small, sweet fish as 'Norfolk Spot' ... Prior to spawning season in the fall, the spot takes on a golden color much like its cousin the croaker. At that time the fish are often referred to as 'Ocean View Yellow Bellies' because they congregate to feed off Ocean View, a Norfolk neighborhood on the Chesapeake Bay. …

In the Edo period, all the missionaries from the capital used to “summer” up here, to escape from the heat. I suppose we have the missionaries to thank for naming these mountains “the Japan Alps.” Why do people always have to compare things with abroad? (Like Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, that always set my teeth on edge.) Nobody knows what the locals used to call the mountains before anyone knew the Alps, or even Europe, was out there. (Am I the only one who thinks this is depressing?) (Mitchell, Number9dream 250)

In the modern world, we like our elected politicians to be consistent on the major issues, because we want to believe that we can know what to expect from them. The late antique Roman Empire was, obviously, a wholly different world, and nobody expected to predict an emperor’s behavior. Yet, in spite of the complex interplay between older tradition, newer tradition, and experimentation that marks the period, we still find constancy valued and inconstancy criticized. This article focuses on Julian, the last pagan emperor, whose short but eventful rule allows for widely differing interpretations on many counts, one of them the question of his consistency of character. This article concentrates on two key issues, his relationship to Christianity, and his assumption of the throne. While Julian depicts himself as consistent almost to a fault, our pagan and Christian sources emphasize his variability, and see it as a flaw. After examining his “conversion” and “usurpation,” and showing how and why Julian might have preferred to portray himself as inconsistent in these circumstances by preference to other options, I then treat what our Julianic sources have to say about consistency in general, and about Julian’s in particular: surprisingly, they seem unconvinced by his self-portrait.

This article draws upon 18 months of participant observation with 50 street-based sex workers living in a transitional housing facility Subsequent in-depth interviews with 50 different women actively working on the street also inform analysis presented here, which explores discursive practice as one of the most salient means by which women maneuver within a socio-legal system that targets them as individuals engaged in criminalized behavior. Findings presented in this article build upon the larger project's goal of articulating the complex and highly individualized ways in which US street-based sex workers struggling with addiction negotiate the move from membership in a criminalized group to what more than a few women describe as "being a productive member of society."1 Street-based sex workers engage in this complex shift while embedded in what I term an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces which involve both governance in the form of the criminal justice system and engagement with the courts and other state agents, and regular patterns of action, including myriad forms of discrimination resulting from stigma. This article discusses three narrative forms that partially enable street-based sex workers to negotiate the exclusionary regime: recovery narratives, war stories, and nostalgia. These highly context-bound expressive forms function as powerful tools that help women to obtain resources and status, as well as convey the complexities of their experiences in ways that move beyond the otherwise constrained identities available to them. [Keywords: Street-based sex work, discourse, transitional housing, addiction]Recovery Narratives, War Stories, and Nostalgia: Street-Based Sex Workers' Discursive Negotiations of the Exclusionary Regime[Keywords: Street-based sex work, discourse, transitional housing, addiction]...Narrativas de Recuperacao, Historias de Guerra e Nostalgia: Negociacoes Discursivas de Prostitutas de Rua e Regime Exclusionario[Palavras-chave: Prostituicaoe rua, discurso, alojamento de transicao, adicao]...(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Nobody stays out there forever," Kristi said to me as we shared a cigarette on the porch of a transitional housing facility for street-based sex workers.2 Her gaze focused in the distance, toward her own personal "out there," the ten-block stretch where she had spent the past seven years precariously housed in motels known for drug and prostitution activity. We could walk there in about ten minutes. "Ain't nobody can stay out there forever" she repeated, "no hustler, no dope man, no prostitute. Crack, prostitution, it ain't nothin' more than a dirty devil's game. I ain't never going back to all that." Kristi's words left me confused as I recalled an experience we had shared just hours before, driving through an area of the city that she calls her "neutral zone," which is very near, but not in, the neighborhood where she used to engage in sex-for-crack and sex-for-cash exchanges.We were waiting at a stop light when she pointed to dozens of bright red balloons floating above a used car dealership and said, "Man, them balloons better feel lucky that I'm not in my addiction anymore. Back then, I used to spend the whole day just runnin' around stealin' balloons. I'd get my money, do what I needed to do, then go steal balloons." "What'd you do with them?" I asked as we laughed together. "That's not the point!" she exclaimed, "I was doin' it because / could. When I was in my addiction I did whatever I wanted. I was free." Listening to Kristi recount this playful tale of liberation under the influence of crack's exhilarating powers seemed discordant with her rather ominous characterization of the same lifestyle as a "dirty devil's game" just hours later. Yet what I initially envisioned as oppositional ways of talking about street-based sex work and addiction are, in fact, much more intimately connected. …

In the novel, fictional characters may be thought of as the richest of signifiers. Traditionally, it is the character who mediates fictional worlds for our benefit, who calls out to us, engages our attention, and encourages us to inhabit those worlds, either briefly or in a more enduring manner. Yet character has become a very embattled and precarious topos in contemporary fiction. Marie Cosnay's writing offers representations of humans that are especially thin, most particularly in Villa Chagrin (2006), which puts conventional notions of character on trial in strategic fashions.

When I was working in the Random House archives at Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New York, I discovered a series of letters exchanged among William Faulkner, his editor Robert Haas, and a young aspiring writer James Culpepper. These letters can be found in a box labeled "General Correspondence; Col-Daz," among rejection letters sent by Random House to aspiring writers. Tire correspondence of Faulkner, Haas, and Culpepper in the Random House archives is completed by a small cache of letters held in the Brodsky collection at Southeast Missouri State University. I have been able to identify a total of twenty-six letters, dated from January 6 to September 24, 1949. (1) An exhaustive search of all relevant sources shows that nobody has ever commented on or published these letters. In the late 1940s, Culpepper attempted to secure Faulkner's patronage in order to sell his own writings to Random House. Culpepper had a very high opinion of his work and was determined to become a literary star. However, he was well aware that the rise to fame would not be easy; not only did he live in Atlanta, Georgia, far from the literary centers of the East Coast, but he was also unemployed and under pressure from his wife and family to start making a living. In several of his letters, Culpepper reminded Faulkner that fame does not happen magically. When Faulkner himself was a young writer, he had been helped by the more experienced Sherwood Anderson. Culpepper stopped at nothing to make sure that Faulkner got his message; he went to Faulkners home unannounced and posed as a journalist, he repeatedly threatened to visit again if Faulkner failed to help him, and he also wrote to Estelle Faulkner to ask for assistance. At this point, Faulkner started to worry for the safety of his wife and daughter, and he reluctantly agreed to help Culpepper with the publication of his novel. In a letter to Haas, however, Faulkner explained that he was being blackmailed by Culpepper and discouraged Random House from publishing the manuscript. A form letter of rejection was subsequently sent to Culpepper, who reacted angrily. On March 8, 1949, he wrote: "If I were the wife of some great writer, or his sister, or his drinking companion, or if I drank champagne in New Yirk (sic) with the literary crowd in some Fifth Avenue apartment--it would be different: anyone down here knows that." (2) It is difficult to evaluate Culpepper's claim to literary talent. His manuscript is not in the archive for Random House returned it to the author. There is evidence that the publisher never ordered a reader's report. We know only two things about Culpepper's first novel: its length (210 pages) and its title: Jack Shall Have Jill (a line from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream). Culpepper eventually decided to write a second novel. In September, he told Haas that he was going to stay for some time in Oxford, Mississippi. (3) With this letter, all traces of Culpepper disappear from our view. Of course, Faulkner had many reasons to dismiss an intrusive and bothersome young man such as James Culpepper. But his general indifference to aspiring writers deserves closer scrutiny. Drawing on previously unknown archival documents, my article highlights Faulkner's refusal to follow the example of his own mentor, Sherwood Anderson, in helping young writers get published and noticed. Convinced that all good writers were eventually published, he showed no interest in the "have-nots" of the literary world. My central argument is that Faulkner's dealings with would-be authors such as Culpepper exemplify his postwar image as a self-made writer who kept away from literary groups. The strange case of James Culpepper should therefore be read in the context of the Cold War at a time when Faulkner celebrated the ideology of individualism and rejected any kind of literary communities. My article is complementary to Lawrence Schwartz's study of the Faulkner revival of the late 1940s. …

Mediated Performances: Negotiating the Theater of War on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage and PageMary Robinson's two-act farce Nobody (Drury Lane, 1794) features a humorous scene in which Nelly Primrose, a bumbling servant woman, reads the newspa- per to her aristocratic employer, Lady Languid:Theatre Royal Drury Lane-Just imported a large Quantity of Excellent Spirits-A certain Lady of the Beau Monde-Stray'd from a Field near Hackney-with Twelve waggon Loads of Flannel Shirts-for our gallant Troops on the Continent (I hope they'll arrive safe with all my Soul) At Mrs. Cassino's last Ball-no one was more Admir'd for Beauty-than the Arabian Savage & the Kangaroos-The best Concert this year was perform'd by the Brunswick & the Vengeur (I suppose that was a French Tune) The Piece concluded with Rule Britania-Gone Off, a large quantity of Indian Crackers-"whoever will bring them back?"1Nelly's reading across the width of the newspaper page rather than vertically down a column would no doubt have provoked audience laughter, but her misreading is less nonsensical than it may seem. In fact, it reveals striking as- sociations between the playhouse (Drury Lane), fashionable life and scandal (the "Excellent Spirits," the "Beau Monde," "Mrs. Cassino's last Ball," "a cer- tain Lady . . . stray'd"), nationalism and war (the "Troops," patriotic hymns, the 1794 naval battle between the English Brunswick and the French Vengeur), and colonialist spectacle ("the Arabian Savage," "Kangaroos," and Indian fire- works). Through the newspaper 's dazzling juxtaposition of reports, Robinson exposes the modern, complex cultural matrix of dramatic, social, and imperial performance.It is this very phenomenon that Daniel O'Quinn addresses in his insightful new study Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium 1770-1790 (Johns Hop- kins, 2011). In this book, he contends that the mediation of political and the- atrical events, both on the dramatic stage and newspaper page, became a way for British imperial culture to negotiate the anxiety and loss that resulted from losing the war with America. Carefully situating his argument within a histori- cal trajectory, he reveals how the close of the Seven Years' War, the rise of the dominant four-page newspaper such as the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, and the public demand for entertainment resulted in the increased inter- play between martial events, theatrical productions, and journalistic reportage. It was in this highly mediated environment, O'Quinn argues, that the theater and the press worked in tandem, not only to inform their audiences about the transatlantic military crisis but also to reflect upon the intimate link between political and public life. At a time when British colonial identity was fracturing, the theater and the press became integral in conceptualizing and articulating anew what it meant to be a Briton.As O'Quinn shows, the recalibration of British subjectivity in the years dur- ing and after the loss of the American colonies was dependent, in particular, upon a reconfiguration of aristocratic sociability-one that exorcized effete and dissipated masculinity in favor of a potent and virtuous male governance un- marred by bellicosity. In many ways, it entailed-a la David Garrick's Miss in Her Teens (Covent Garden, 1747)-a rejection of Fribble and Flash for the he- roic Captain Loveit. But, as O'Quinn demonstrates throughout his monograph, such a maneuver was neither as straightforward nor as simple as Garrick's afterpiece might suggest. Indeed, it involved complex cultural negotiations in a number of social arenas both at home and abroad. O'Quinn documents this transition through an interdisciplinary and multilayered examination of London stage plays (by dramatists such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Han- nah More, Arthur Murphy, Charles Dibdin, John Home, Hannah Cowley, and George Colman the Younger), performance events (from theatricals, to outdoor festivals, to musical concerts), media commentary (newspaper reports and po- litical cartoons), music (by George Friedrich Handel), and poetry (by William Cowper). …

In October 1941, David Kaufman, a Moscow student and aspiring poet, wrote in his diary: "The Civil War was our fathers. The Five Year Plan, our older brothers. The Patriotic War of '41, this is us.... The people of our generation, from diverse walks of life, now have but one path: everyone to the front. Here are heroes, cowards, and ordinary people. Nobody is excluded from the war. If I must write, I will write about how this sense of duty came to govern us. There is only one feeling that should be instilled in people from the cradle: duty." (1) Kaufman, later published under the pseudonym David Samoilov, would become one of the most beloved poets of the Soviet intelligentsia. His generation was raised under Soviet power and did not know or recognize any other. He belonged to a cohort of educated, urban young people, many of whom rushed to recruitment offices on 22 June 1941, fearful of missing out on the war. On that very day, when so many young enthusiasts were rushing to sign up as volunteers, Olimpiada Poliakova, a resident of the town of Pushkin, outside Leningrad, wrote in her diary: Could our liberation be at hand? Whatever the Germans may be, they can't be worse than our own. And what are the Germans to us? We'll live somehow without them. Everyone has the sense that, at last, the thing we have awaited for so long but did not even dare to hope for-although we did hope for it very much in the depths of our consciousness-has finally arrived. Without this hope it would not have been possible to live. And there is no doubt about the coming German victory. Lord forgive me! I am not an enemy of my people or my homeland. I'm not a degenerate. But you have to look the truth straight in the eyes: all of us, all of Russia, fervently desires the victory of the enemy, whoever he may be. This accursed regime stole everything from us, even our feelings of patriotism. (2) Clearly, Poliakovas claims about "all of Russia" wishing for the victory of the enemy are grossly exaggerated, as are Kaufman's touching words about the spirit of duty animating his entire generation. What is clear is that, more than 20 years after the revolution, Soviet society was still not homogenous: a significant part of it would have been happy to witness the disappearance of the Bolsheviks. Historiography The war was to be the most serious test of the Stalinist systems durability, becoming, in the words of Robert Thurston, "the acid test of Stalinism." (3) The nature of public opinion about the Soviet regime and the outbreak of the war continues to be one of the most important, and consistently controversial, questions for the history of Soviet society during the war period. Meanwhile, the year 1941 constitutes an important chronological boundary for scholars of Stalinism. According to Stephen Lovell, among historians "the war is usually recognized as traumatic and important, but ultimately is granted the status of a cataclysmic interlude between two phases of Stalinism: the turbulent and bloody era of the 1930s and the deep freeze of the late 1940s.... Nonmilitary historians do not quite know what to do with the war." (4) Historians whose work relates to the history of Soviet society during the war years have starkly different assessments of popular attitudes toward the state and the war. In the literature of the early 1950s, one already finds the idea that the defeat of the Red Army in 1941 and the vast number of prisoners taken at that time reflected the unwillingness of Soviet soldiers to fight for the regime. (5) According to Martin Malia, Soviet soldiers in 1941 "felt no ardor" for the defense of the Stalinist system, and "even clearer signs of collapse appeared among the civilian population." (6) In accordance with authors who argue that Red Army soldiers in 1941 were forced to fight under threat of reprisals, Mark Edele and Michael Geyer have claimed that desertion and evasion of service were not restricted to the catastrophic events of 1941-42 but were in fact characteristic, albeit to a lesser degree, of the entire war period. …

The heroine of Frances Burney's Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), concludes her first letter to her guardian Reverend Villars by writing, "I cannot to you sign Anville [her pseudoanagrammatic pseudonym] and what other name may I claim" (19). By the end of the novel, she is able to subscribe a letter "for the first-and probably the last time" with her legitimate patronym "Belmont" (335). Both Wolfram Schmidgen and Catherine Gallagher have argued, in different ways, that it is Evelina's lack of a patronym, her being nobody or nullius filius, that allows for the novel to be written and that thus underwrites the authority of both Burney as author (insofar as she published anonymously) and Evelina as character.1 The question of what name the heroine can claim-manifested in how she signs her letters-is undoubtedly crucial to any consideration of identity and authority in the novel.2 However, discussions of how Evelina signs her letters do not account for the way in which the novel also explores the problem of address. In Evelina, the problem of how and to whom a letter is addressed, and not only how it is signed, forms the condition of possibility for the epistolary novel. This aspect of epistolarity becomes particularly clear in a letter that Evelina's mother Caroline Belmont writes shortly after Evelina's birth, but which is only very belatedly and posthumously delivered to Sir John Belmont by Evelina herself. In this letter, Caroline signs her own name seemingly without trouble or consideration, but she cannot decide "in what terms" (279) she can address the husband who refuses to acknowledge her. Despite the fact that this is not Caroline's novel, it is this letter that constructs and makes possible the fictional space of Evelina, for it is this uncertainty of address that allows Evelina (the novel and the heroine) to escape from two powerful and constricting discourses of paternity: the romance ideology of blood as destiny; and the legal definition of paternity as a fiction.3Caroline's letter, with its uncertainty of address and its belated delivery, is a peculiarly physical object. Its effect is not only to produce or reveal a character's mental state, but also to cause a physical or sensual reaction. The fact that this letter has both a symbolic and a physical significance makes it structurally similar to the problem of paternity, and it is through her innovative engagement with epistolary form that Burney addresses the vexing problems of paternity. In particular Evelina deals with the tension between a form of paternity defined by the social and symbolic question of a child's place within a determined social hierarchy, and a form of paternity that maintains a physical and sensible relationship between parent and child, and especially between father and daughter. By looking at how the letter in Evelina is a part of the material world of sense, and is not merely a narrative mechanism for producing psychological interiority, we can understand the conflict between symbolic and physical aspects of paternity in the novel. The letter is more than a literary conceit in the same way that Belmont is more than a name, and we need to understand this so that we can understand why Evelina has such a visceral, physical reaction to meeting her father. The hyperbolic physical reactions of both Evelina and her father in the scenes in which they meet prove that Evelina's subjectivity depends at least as much on a material as on a symbolic connection to her father, at least as much on the body as on the "no-body" of her anonymous status as nullius filius.Evelina thus uses the complexities of epistolarity to comment upon the paradoxes of paternity, and particularly on the theory of paternity operative in the legal institutions of patriarchy. The novel shows how both letters and fathers are at once ideal and material. With regard to paternity, this means that the father is at once a "legal fiction," an ideal entity produced by the fiction of the law, and a sensual and sensuous figure, the materiality of whose connection to his child (and especially to his daughter) always exceeds and disrupts the ideality of the fiction. …

This essay speculates on possible digital manipulations of the relationships between Dickinson texts—the letters and poems—and their spatial contexts and posits that such approaches are ripe for exploration by Dickinson scholars. The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive is used as a case study to explore how literature scholars might locate research questions that would be supported by visualization approaches. The article explores the potential for representational and interpretive approaches to visualization, positing that interpretive uses hold the most scholarly promise. Examining possible tools that might be used by scholars, including GIS and Neatline, the article argues that such tools help us, as Jerome McGann writes, “imagine what we don’t know.” The article ends by cautioning scholars to resist simple, positivistic spatial representations that fix representations. Instead, the article encourages scholars to use visualizations to disrupt, reorder, and expose new forms of inquiry.

On Veterans Day 2009, the PBS newsmagazine Newshour with Jim Lehrer devoted its program to returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans' struggles and particularly to what by that point was a widely accepted epidemic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicide. The program featured a profile of Jeremiah Workman, a marine veteran who had won the Navy Cross for his 2005 heroics in Fallujah and had subsequently authored a memoir of his struggles with PTSD and suicidal tendencies, Shadow of the Sword: A Marine's Journey of War, Heroism, and Redemption (2009). Workman's chief message was that veterans needed to recognize that it was acceptable to seek treatment. "Nobody wants to raise their hand," he told reporter Betty Ann Bowser, "Nobody-there's such a stigma out there involving PTSD, that nobody wants to be associated with it."1In the segment that followed, former navy psychologist Heidi Squier Kraft, herself the author of the memoir Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital (2007), agreed. Asked how to improve the situation, she replied that "it continues to be the stigma . . . the line needs to continue to buy into this and have every level of the chain of command buy into it, that these injuries are just that, injuries, and not disorders."2 Yet her copanelist, former air force psychiatrist and Iraq War opponent Jeffrey Johns, disagreed. "While the President talks that we will take care of our own," he told the Newshour's Judy Woodruff, "we're really shortchanging our troops and not providing them the care that they need. So, this problem is pervasive. It is extensive. And we need to be doing a lot better job to take care of these troops."3Without much commentary, these two segments exposed two prominent positions within a critical debate regarding veterans' mental health care during the second half of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. While there was nearly universal agreement that returning soldiers' mental health struggles constituted a legitimate crisis, there was considerable disagreement regarding what had caused earlier failures and what would constitute adequate improvements. Military and Depart- ment of Veterans Affairs officials emphasized a culture that stigmatizes mental illness and that has made veterans reluctant to seek care and sought to validate personality disorder, a diagnosis that attributes postwar mental health struggles to prewar mental maladies. Veterans and their advocates, however, have frequently agreed with Johns's claim, blaming an underresourced, unresponsive, and perhaps malicious system; beginning in 2005, they appealed for more responsive treatment in a series of congressional hearings.4 In relating their stories of postwar struggles and requesting assistance, these veterans have often compared their situation to that faced by Vietnam veterans. Continuing a discourse long central to Vietnam veterans' activism and to popular culture about the war, contemporary veterans have particularly pointed to their failures as partners and parents as evidence of the wars' psychological impact.These issues not only have arisen in congressional hearings and media but also have been significant within representations of veterans' experiences that have emerged in the wars' later years. This essay examines three memoirs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that particularly explore veterans' psychological struggles: Kraft's Rule Number Two and Workman's The Shadow of the Sword, as well as Craig Mullaney's The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education (2009). These memoirs, more than other well-received memoirs about the wars, pay significant and explicit attention to veterans' postwar psychological struggles, their causes, and their resolution.5 Moreover, as Workman's and Kraft's Newshour interviews, public appearances, and well-received memoirs make clear, these authors have achieved some cultural capital in the wars' aftermath.6 Roll Call referred to Workman as "an extraordinary veteran of this country's most recent war," and the Washington Times termed him "an expert on the disorder. …

One of the vilest reality shows in the history of American television, Repo Games, premiered on Spike in 2011 with no fanfare and a simple premise, delivered in a voiceover intro: "Nobody wants to meet the repo man. But when this repo man comes, you'll get the chance to ditch those late notices for good." A little more than a minute later, we see a man built like a professional wrestler pull up in front a woman's house, along with a camera crew that rushes into her driveway like a SWAT team. The owner's "REPO REPORT" then flashes across the screen: "Name: Wallace. Age: 44. Vehicle: '96 Dodge Caravan. Intel: Her weave alone will whoop your ass." Heavy metal plays in the background. A tow truck backs in under the van, which Wallace does not appreciate, and then the wrestler, co-host Tom DeTone, proceeds to describe the situation in which Wallace now finds herself.

The period of Joyce’s early life is one of huge turbulence around the question of land and property law but also of unresolved tensions which do not start to relax until 1904. Between 1878 and 1904, a period running more or less from Joyce’s birth to his departure from Ireland, the question of land and property law assumed a new dimension and took on an altogether new intensity. In thinking about Joyce and property law in a British-Irish historical context, at least four crucial factors are worth keeping in mind. First, there was the historical priority of Brehon Law. Second, however, the cause of the nightmare was not the imposition of the colonizer’s alien legal system. Had English property law been comprehensively and scrupulously applied in Ireland, the political benefits would have been substantial, if not decisive. Hence, third, throughout the nineteenth and into the early-twentieth century, land law and politics were inextricable from one another. Fourth, as far as land and property law is concerned, imaginary oppositions of agrarian issues to urban ones are delusive. The Joyce of Ulysses responds to this situation in complex ways: by presenting his registrations or perceptions of a state of affairs as less strictly nationalist than nationalist-oriented; by providing a critique of nationalist responses, a skepticism as to their integrity, and a desire to get them in (comic and ironic) proportion; and by offering us, somewhere quite deep beneath the surface of Ulysses , an obscure, melancholic, socialist dream of the end of property law.

We misread Thomas Heywood’s city plays, I argue, when we read them as city plays, or as plays concerned with the city as a distinctly urban space separate from the world beyond its walls. Instead, Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II and Wise Woman of Hoxton resist this sense of “London exceptionalism” by drawing attention to the complicated ways that London fits within the extra-civic nation or kingdom. By exploring the curious social, cultural, and political position of the city in Heywood’s plays, this article draws attention to the confused status of the early modern city within its world: Was London the metropolitical center of a nation? Was it a key node in a cosmopolitical network of relatively de-nationalized “world cities”? Was it a semi-autonomous city-state thanks to its historic liberties and economic might? In some sense, it was all of the above, and Heywood’s plays help to make this fraught space ideologically knowable to their audiences.

The main thing is to tell a story. / It is almost / very important.-Frank O'Hara, "Fantasy" (1964)'A leading designer of video games might seem an unlikely exponent of the purity of genres and media (attitudes more commonly associated, as Marcie Frank notes in her introduction to this issue, with high modernism), but Jeffrey Kaplan, former design-team chief of the extremely successful video game World of Warcraft, sounded very much like an advocate of just such separatisms as he reproved his fellow game makers for what he called their "medium envy" at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Rather than concentrating on what he sees as the specific and singular capacities of the video game, Kaplan argued, his colleagues were allowing their work to be driven by their alleged envy of writers and writing, consequently "drowning the player[s]" of their games in "reams of dialogue and narrative." Kaplan stated bluntly, "[W]e need to stop writing a fucking book . . . [when we design a] game because nobody wants to read it," and concluded, "We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game."2It is striking that despite Kaplan's disdain for print narrative as a model for video-game design, story is still his way of specifying what it is that he and his fellow designers have to offer those who play their games. This is consonant with Walter Benjamin's pronouncement in "The Storyteller" that "what distinguishes the novel from the story ... is its [i.e., the novel's] essential dependence on the book," on the medium of bound print. "The dissemination of the novel becomes possible only with the invention of printing," Benjamin goes on. For Benjamin, no such relation of medium dependence binds "story" to (printed) book. In the mediascape that emerged in the twentieth century, novels-remediated as films, television series, graphic narratives, etc.-frequently became something other than their native genre. "Story" generally names a number of the kinds of things that novels became. As Kaplan presents it, "story" is entirely compatible with what he calls "uniquely video game" modes of production-what he argues his fellow designers will have succeeded in doing when they have "stop[ped] writing a fucking book."Story is also a term that has circulated widely in the twentieth century for screenplay, soap opera, and other extended nonnovel narrative forms. It is the long-arc serial narrative-as it has informed a number of genres across several media, ranging from the seventeenthand eighteenth-century comedy of intrigue to nineteenth-century melodrama to twentieth-century sitcom and soap opera-that I intend to focus on in these pages. In looking at a somewhat different (although at some points overlapping) set of media archives from those that Frank considers in her introductory essay, I want to consider some of the ways in which certain genres and media forms have drawn extensively on the traditions of melodrama production, performance, and reception: both those that we ordinarily think of as obviously and essentially melodramatic (radio and TV soap operas, for chief examples) and those that we tend to think of as distinctly other to and different from melodrama (radio and TV sitcoms and newspaper comic strips).One route that I want to follow takes up the distinction that Frank discusses in her introduction-the distinction made by Gilbert Seldes in 1924 between early cinema, which he saw as emerging from melodrama and newspaper comic strips, and the cinema that succeeded it. As Seldes sees it, film took a catastrophically wrong turn in shifting away from the most popular entertainment forms of the time toward putatively prestigious forms of drama and "serious" theater for its models. In saying this, Seldes sounds somewhat like Kaplan at the Game Developers Conference in 2009, warning his fellow designers away from a tendency to imitate print too closely, urging his colleagues to "accept that we are not Shakespeare [or] Tolstoy. …

[I]f whole ages rolled away in dreaming, why should we suppose that we posses any more reason than they did? To believe that our own age is wiser than the preceding, is exactly such an arbitrary assumption, as that of adhering to any religion, because it is the religion of our own country-a compliment paid to self, and no proof either of our faith or our wisdom.-Horace Walpole, "Spectator; No. None; Written by Nobody," 1772It is relatively easy to imagine Horace Walpole declaring, "I shall not make my head into a parchment and scribble old, half-effaced information from archives on it"-a passing complaint about intellectual labor in fact found in the marginalia of Immanuel Kant.1 Although in the history of ideas, the Enlightenment philosopher Kant and the gothic novelist Walpole would appear to have little in common-one a citizen of the world, the other a mock-castle dweller at best-the incongruity that we experience in conjoining these contemporaries has less to do with the actual flux and fermentation of intellectual history than with assumptions since entrenched about the mutually entangled domains of eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and history. Indeed, as Walpole illustrates in his parody of The Spectator above,2 if the Enlightenment signals a radical departure from the past, an indelible partition between the ancient and modern; the sacred and secular; the fanatic, the fantastic, and the philosophical (as Scottish Enlightenment figures like David Hume are then proposing), then a neglected religiosity coextends with the advent of the Enlightenment project itself; namely, faith in a historical discourse that can affect the semblance of our birth-or the birth of our respective nations-into modernity.Incredulity about the religiosity of Enlightenment skepticism itself is what leads Walpole to downplay skepticism about the empirical world and foreground instead the manner in which that world is ideologically repackaged in narrative. The same incredulity explains Walpole's early and sometimes lone skepticism with regard to otherwise widespread, if not ubiquitous, Enlightenment phantasms, whether it be the nostalgic revival of purportedly indigenous epics (Fingal), the Eurocentric conjuring of a far-flung race of Patagonian giants, or, as this essay will stress, the revisionist and ultimately too little skeptical historiography of Hume's History of England.3 Of the giant hysteria, Percy Adams queries: "There were skeptics who argued and scoffers who laughed, but within a matter of months most of the dissenting voices were stifled-some even recanted-and the people of Europe and America believed in giants.... Why, in an Age of Reason, was the world still so ready to accept stories like these?"4 To answer that question, Walpole would no doubt point to the increasing dependence on, and gullibility about, the printed media upon which that much-vaunted reasoning is so frequently based. Walpole's works routinely adopt the core tenet of the Enlightenment-skepticism about the rites, relics, and received opinions once endowed with sacred or metaphysical meaning-while nonetheless applying that same skepticism to the tales of erudition and exploration with which the proponents of the Enlightenment construct and disseminate their claims to reason. In thus taking to task the myriad phantasms about the past, including the reputed pastness of that past (fantasies which usher in the deep, undaunted conviction in modernity, in print if not reality), Walpole ultimately helps deflate and destabilize the miraculous "once upon a time" storyline of the Enlightenment project itself.In fact, when Walpole famously conjures the canonical William Shakespeare to defend his carnivalesque intermixture of high tragedy and low comedy in The Castle of Otranto (1765-66), he provides a fine parable of his literary, philosophical, and historical endeavors alike. Of the twin subversions of social hierarchy and aesthetic decorum that Augustans roundly rebuffed in Julius Caesar-the "clumsy jests" of the populace and the "affectedly-unaffected" oratory of Brutus-Walpole avers: "These touches remind one of the Grecian sculptor, who, to convey the idea of a Colossus, within the dimensions of a seal, inserted a little boy measuring his thumb. …

INTRODUCTIONThis essay uses Michel-Rolph Trouillot's notion of power and the production of history as a starting point to explore the ways that Assotto Saint (1957-1994), a gay Haitian American who was once a well-known player in the Black gay and AIDS activist cultural movements in the United States, is remembered and written about in contemporary venues.1 I argue that the politics of remembrance pertaining to Saint's cultural work and activism has significant consequences for our understanding of late twentieth century social and cultural movements in the United States as well as gay Haitian history. I explore the fact that Saint's work has fallen out of popularity since his death in 1994, except in limited identitarian, mostly literary venues. The silences surrounding his work thatI describe in this essay are peculiar considering that Saint not only had important social connections with artists who are well-known today, but also, unlike artists with less access to financial resources, he left behind a huge archive of materials housed in the Black Gay and Lesbian Collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as a rich and prolific corpus of published work. By offering a re-reading of these archival materials and placing them in their socio-historical contexts, I also make a restorative gesture to commit Assotto Saint's legacy to public memory. Through investigating the life, activism, and cultural work of this self-proclaimed diva of the Haitian diaspora, this essay ultimately attempts to offer a dynamic understanding of the movements Saint took part in as well as a re-reading of the dominant narratives about Haiti and gay sexuality.I begin with a biographical sketch of Assotto Saint to highlight the connections between events in his life and major historical occurrences in Haiti and the United States. The subsequent section provides an overview of the range of his cultural work in terms of medium, genre, and theme. I also emphasize Saint's efforts as an institution builder for the Black gay cultural movement as well as the broader AIDS activist cultural movement. This overview builds a foundation that allows us to understand why Assotto Saint has not received the same kind of posthumous recognition as his contemporaries. His work has been recognized, primarily by circulating his essay "Haiti: A Memory Journey" in recent anthologies of Caribbean writing; this, however, has also in some ways reduced the complexity of the transnational critiques fiercely presented by this historical figure in his lifetime. In the final sections of the paper, I describe what is at stake in the "practice" of remembering Assotto Saint with all his complexities, thus rectifying the essentializing and silences that have surrounded his literary contributions and activism.The Life and Death of Assotto Sainti was born on all angels daybut throughout my lifei've been a bitch out of hell/don't nobody show up at my funeralto call me nice or some shit like that/save it for turncoat cocksuckerswho on their deathbedsopen their mouths wide to claim god/-Assotto Saint, "Devils in America"Assotto Saint died of AIDS-related complications in New York City on June 29, 1994. The week of Saint's death, the city swelled with queers: drag queens, gays, lesbians, transgender people, and AIDS activists among others. Drawn by an act of celebration-the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village-and of mourning and frustration-a decade and a half of the ongoing AIDS crisis-the gathering of queers in New York City coincided with Saint's death in the uncanny way that so many of his major life events paralleled the social and political changes of his time. The poet, playwright, performer, and activist was born in Les Cayes, Haiti as Yves Francois Lubin on October 2, 1957, the same week that the infamously repressive, US-backed dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier was elected president. …

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In his eighty-four years, Rufus Thomas worked with hundreds of colorfully named musicians and radio personalities--like "Hot Rod" and "Honey Boy," "Moolah" and "Gatemouth"--but other than calling himself "the world's finest teenager," Thomas never needed a funky handle to distinguish himself as a singer, songwriter, and disc jockey in Memphis, Tennessee. His career was entwined with virtually every great blues, RB yet, Thomas believed that as a pure entertainer he had no equal. As he put it: "There is nobody alive, on the face of the earth, who can do Rufus like I do Rufus." Thomas had a run of memorably goofy top-ten R&B hits in the 1960s, but listing them ("Walking the Dog," "Do the Push & Pull" ...) or mentioning the dozens of bands who paid tribute with covers (The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith ...) misses the point. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, after all, doesn't feature Rufus Thomas. Instead, his influence derives from the bawdy figure he cut and the freewheeling tone he set. Whether performing on Beale Street, recording for the legendary Sun and Stax labels, emceeing fund-raising revues, or misbehaving late at night in a radio studio, he communicated something essentially spiritual. He gave hot-blooded young male musicians from Mick Jagger to Busta Rhymes the grammar for thinking and talking and joking about their deepest, darkest, nastiest urges. With unabashedly raunchy good humor, he helped define the tradition of the fun-loving trickster, the likable lech. Until shortly before his death in 2001, Thomas continued to work Saturday mornings from six to ten, co-hosting a radio show at WDIA-AM. After a guest appearance a few years earlier, he simply kept coming back, and nobody minded. After all, it was Thomas, as much as anyone, who once made WDIA the most important radio station in the country--the nation's first to switch to all-black programming. Everyone knows what a big deal it was when, in 1953, a nineteen-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley paid a visit to Sam Phillip's Sun Studios to make a record for his mom. But WDIA quietly debuting its "Tan Town Jamboree" four years earlier may have had farther-reaching effects on American culture and the history of popular music. At the time, African Americans in Memphis couldn't visit the city's fairgrounds or zoo. The city's lone African American police officer wasn't permitted to arrest, or touch, anyone white. But suddenly, with all these smart and funny African American voices enlivening the air, playing down-home "race music," and discussing the great and small concerns of the African American community of the Mississippi Delta, WDIA brought together the urban and rural, the poor and well-to-do, the schooled and unschooled, in one powerful demographic. Profit had been the original motive, of course, but once the white station managers switched to an all-black format, they didn't hedge their bets. They went out and hired the most audacious on-air personalities in a town brimming with audacious personalities. And then they did something amazing: they let Rufus Thomas and his colleagues simply be themselves. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Rufus, you are one handsome devil!" Thomas exclaimed, within minutes of my dropping by WDIA'S scruffy, shag-carpeted studios in 1999. Visiting Memphis was a musical pilgrimage, and WDIA's downtown studios were my first stop. "Well-dressed all the time!" Thomas went on. "Even on your off days! You can hear them saying it as soon as they pass you on the street: 'Damn, that Rufus is sharp! Uh-huh!' And for a man your age, who is still able to go out on the street and look sharp, it's remarkable. Or there's another word you can use: It's incredible! It truly is. Whatever you put on, you make something happen that nobody else do. …

Mamma wants me to catch somebody, and to be caught by somebody; but that will not be; for, do you know, I think somebody is nobody. --Maria Edgeworth, Ennui (205) Maria Edgeworth's Ennui, a fictional memoir by the Anglo-Irish Earl "Lord Glenthorn," was published in 1809, shortly after Ireland's union with Britain, and is set in the years surrounding the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Marilyn Butler notes in her introduction to Castle Rackrent and Ennui that Edgeworth was writing this novel "in the immediate context of the traumatic events of 1798, when she and her family witnessed atrocities, and were themselves threatened, as a Rebellion of Protestants as well as Catholics was bloodily put down" (35). In her contribution to her late father's Memoirs, Edgeworth describes the danger to the family at Edgeworthstown as the French advanced on Longford, and she narrates with great detail her father's efforts to maintain the peace--efforts that put him into considerable danger from Protestant militia leaders (chapters X and XI). Although the novel makes no direct reference to the union, and while it appears to give only slight attention to the rebellion itself, most critics are in agreement that Ennui should be read, to use Butler's dramatic description, as a "fictional allegory on a sweeping scale" (introduction 2). Composed during this time of turmoil, Ennui is Edgeworth's first effort to represent in fictional form the conflict in Ireland and the subsequent political absorption of the nation into the United Kingdom. As an Anglo-Irish writer, Edgeworth clearly had divided loyalties. She was born in England, spent a great deal of time there, and, with her father, was closely connected to AngloScottish intellectual life. At the same time, the Edgeworth family was at pains to bring enlightened, modern, nonrepressive forms of management to their Irish estate, and they generally resisted recognizing and fostering factional and religious differences. In her continuation of her father's Memoirs Edgeworth notes that even during the rebellion, Richard Lovell Edgeworth refused to acknowledge differences of religion or faction when considering local legal cases (207). Edgeworth has, however, in the fairly recent past, been represented by some critics as a colonialist writer and an apologist for the Anglo-Irish Ascendency (Deane, Dunne, Hollingworth); but vigorous defenses against this charge have been mounted by Butler and Mitzi Myers, both of whom make compelling cases for a much more complex understanding of Edgeworth's ideological allegiances (Butler, "Irish Culture and Scottish Enlightenment"; Myers, '"Like the Pictures in a Magic Lantern'" and "Completing the Union"). The complexity of Edgeworth's position on Ireland is best understood if we, like Butler, Myers, and a number of other scholars, consider her as an author with a broad, cosmopolitan, and, importantly, an Enlightenment-based outlook on economic and social issues (Brundan, Easton, O Gallchoir, Wohlegemut). At a time of widespread turmoil--a time of terror, repression, and rebellion--Edgeworth turns to Enlightenment concepts of economics and education for both diagnosis and cure. Rather than hold English colonial practices, religious sectarianism, or native Irish intransigence responsible for the unrest, Edgeworth clearly blames the semi-feudal socioeconomic system in which the aristocracy and peasantry have been educated, and in which the character of the classes has been formed. The violent and terrifying rebellion is shown in the narrative to be a conflict stemming from the environmental conditioning of the two antagonistic groups. In her understanding of human development and the cultural formation of classes, Edgeworth is both a Lockcan and a Smithian. The coauthor of Practical Education--an empirically based instructional manual for parents--Edgeworth believed, as did most educated Britons of her day, that individual character was formed through experience, through education writ large. …

This question was hidden deep within some conversations in Cape Town, South Africa, a couple of years ago, sponsored by the Royal Society of Canada and the Academy of Science of South Africa. They involved colleagues from both countries with experience both within and beyond the college and university community, representing-imperfectly, and sometimes awkwardly-the diverse intellectual, artistic, and cultural heritages both within and between the two countries. That diversity, even though it was limited by the nature of academic representation, prompted a set of questions that seemed to be an important part of rethinking and reconstituting the humanities, here or there or everywhere. To what extent are the humanities shaped by, or bound by, the different traditions of thought and feeling and of language that characterize the different communities that make up our two countries-or, indeed, countries anywhere, and to what extent do the humanities entertain the ideas and embrace the often harsh realities of land and livelihood that condition different people's lives and trouble their social, political, and economic relationships to each other? The conundrum is there, too, and has become a modern preoccupation, in the different ways we define identity, by blood (over which we have no control) or by allegiance (which we choose), and this in turn recalls an ancient dialogue between two concepts of community, as an organic entity to which we belong, willy-nilly like our family or as a chosen people, or as an organized group which we choose to join, like a neighbourhood or (in one of its guises) a nation. How we think and speak of many issues in the humanities-such as the expression of collective identity in literature or law or the liturgies of secular and sacred congregation--depends a lot on which side we take and that in turn influences how we understand our responsibilities. Nobody at the gathering was insensitive to these questions, but we found ourselves retreating into those ways of thinking about the humanities that have shaped its current institutional character, and much of our discussion consequently reflected an anxiety about issues that primarily affected our own livelihoods as academic scholars and teachers, even as we celebrated our role as the primary agents of challenge and change with a general (but perhaps increasingly threatened) proxy from the wider society. So we outlined an agenda for future conversations and collaborations that would take us beyond these undeniably urgent concerns and commitments, and we are in the process of planning a follow-up meeting in Canada during the coming year that might address the needs, inter alia, to reinterpret European knowledge systems, or at least identify their relevance for a twenty-first century in which African and Asian heritages are becoming hard currency and to reconcile what might be called orthodox inquiry in the humanities--whether western or eastern, northern or southern--with the traditional intellectual and spiritual inheritances of the indigenous peoples of both countries, inheritances which (among other things) often redefine accepted distinctions and directions in the sciences. There was a sense that the humanities, revised and reconstituted, might also provide new ways of negotiating the terrain between the arts and the natural and physical sciences and among environmental, social, and political issues that preoccupy the public domain and affect the well-being of all societies, interrogating all disciplinary, institutional, and cultural orthodoxies and unsettling conventional perspectives on the human condition. Also, with new technologies animating a new generation of inquiry and communication, there was a keen sense that we might be witnessing something as remarkable as that chain of transformations that began with printing (when distance education essentially began) and to which in any event neither the familiar revolutionary nor reactionary responses may be adequate. …

We see four women posed and positioned in front of a chain- link fence. Two are sitting on a concrete ledge and the other two standing. Behind them is a pier in New York City in the mid- 1960s, the water's waves providing refracting reflections through the pattern of chain link, as long shots alternate with close- ups of each of the women's faces looking offscreen, some made obscure with dark sunglasses, their hair mussed by visible wind and other extradiegetic unknowns. The actors, seemingly nonprofessional in their carriage, exude a distressed, fatigued ordinariness that evinces the primacy of in depen dent cinema's association with traditions of hardscrabble realism and the seepage of an actual situation, a condition of the film's production. Trash blows along the street, collecting at their feet. A female narrator, speaking in a collective mode on behalf of the profilmic figures, insistently intones: You've seen us before, maybe not here, but it could have been in Chicago, in Hollywood, or in a bikini along the hotel strips in Miami. You've seen us on every street where a pretty body is an easy mark for a price. Our names, it really doesn't make any difference, you won't remember, nobody ever does. To the rackets we're Zero Girls, no present, in the future even less. Nothing. Zero. We're all owned by the Syndicate, body and soul. Or should I just say body. Because after a few nights you don't remember being a woman, or even having a soul. Men ask the usual questions, how did a pretty girl like you get started in this racket? Money. We don't even own ourselves. Standing and sitting, waiting and wasting time, these women are announced to us as emblematic- of both the film we are about to see, its oncoming narrative pretext of prostitution, and of a larger social and existential condition- of a gendered labor, of bodies that have labored and will labor, and of their substitutability within a seamy market of exchange. Authenticating a place, a situation, a certain mode of production, the women perform a listless inbetween temporality, a dead time between work, which is also another kind of work, working for the camera (see figures 1 and 2). In its realist textures as well as its melodramatic hyperboles, this scene marks the opening of The Sin Syndicate, a 1965 sexploitation film directed by the New York filmmaker Michael Findlay.1 This film- as well as many others of its era and of its par tic u lar mode of production- presents us with a challenge: how to theorize the conjunction of screen per for mance and labor both through and despite the terms in which they are made visible? This essay thus explores the problem of labor's visibility in analyses of nonprofessional acting and looks at the aesthetic stakes of per for mance in low- budget in depen dent cinema. If craft, skill, training, and professionalism- in a conventional understanding of screen acting- necessitate a dematerialization of the conditions and techniques of work in the interest of diegetic illusion, naturalism or verisimilitude, what constitutes the labor of such visible, if emphatically ordinary, per for mance? Discourses of film acting and screen per for mance as effortful work have a complex history in film studies, although the bulk of attention has been devoted to stardom, actors unions, and studio industrial or ga ni za tion.2 The immaterial nature of cinema was considered, especially in classical film theory, to dispossess the actor from the presence of his or her audience and the audience from the live presence of the actor (Benjamin); to reduce the actor to a function of editing (Kuleshov), cinematography, and mise- en- scene (Balazs); and to collapse performing and being, actor and character.3 Indeed, the work of performance- screen acting itself- can be seen as a form of what recent po liti cal theorists and phi los o phers have come to call "immaterial" labor, as it has always been wrapped up in ontological concerns of cinema as a machine, a reproductive technology, and of the medium's capacity for aesthetic dispossession. …