JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION最新文献

{"title":"Fluid Faiths: Reading Religion Relationally in Asian American Literature","authors":"Jack O'Briant","doi":"10.1353/mml.2022.a924154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a924154","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>While the designation of Asian American literature as a field dates back to as recently as the 1970s, it is nevertheless surprising that, to my knowledge, there is not a single scholarly monograph on the topic of religion in Asian American literature. However, in religious studies and the social sciences, there is a growing body of scholarship examining the role of religion in Asian American communities, and particularly, but not exclusively, the prominence of various expressions of Christianity therein. Despite this prominence, criticism within the field of Asian American literature has largely interpreted the presence of Christianity primarily in terms of its associations with oppressive colonial regimes. This article demonstrates the value of supplementing such readings with greater attentiveness to the specific religious histories underlying Asian American literature in order to better account for the ambivalence—rather than outright antagonism—toward Christianity that seems characteristic of many Asian American literary texts. Such an approach implies, just as national and racial identities are historically complex and often contested categories, that religion's cultural fluidity makes it an equally rich site for understanding literary expressions of the painful loss and transformation as well as the unexpected richness and beauty manifested within the conditions and consequences of global migration. Drawing on Shu-mei Shih's notion of relational comparison, the article turns to scholarship on the history of Christianity in both Korea and Vietnam to demonstrate how these histories inform and aid in interpreting the ambivalences of Christianity's presence in the novels <i>Dictée</i> by Theresa Hak Kyung and <i>The Gangster We Are All Looking For</i> by lê thi diem thúy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"379 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ends of Imagination: Trauma Narrative in Arundhati Roy's Prose and Politics","authors":"Jamie Chen","doi":"10.1353/mml.2022.a924156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a924156","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Arundhati Roy became an overnight literary sensation in 1997: <i>The God of Small Things</i> was published to great acclaim from the critics, with Roy receiving a million-dollars advance and publishing houses snapping up the rights in more than eighteen countries within months of the novel's completion. Roy had spent four years working on the manuscript and would take another two decades to write her second novel, <i>The Ministry of Utmost Happiness</i>. In the meantime she published more than a dozen nonfiction books, whose topics ranged from critiques of nuclear armament to dam development. This article applies a postcolonial lens to the changes that Roy's prose seeks to achieve, focusing particularly on how her fictional and nonfictional work pushes the ends of her writerly imagination to work through personal and collective trauma. I use the term \"work through\" as LaCapra defines it in <i>Writing History, Writing Trauma</i>: \"one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something as having happened to one … which is related to, but not identical with, here and now\" (66). LaCapra's emphasis on distinguishing between the past and present is linked to recognizing change or growth in this analysis, relating back to Roy's work both in terms of its activist applications as well as its experimentations with formal repetition. The article compares stylistic techniques in her nonfiction and fiction, specifically the printer's marks in <i>The Greater Common Good</i> and <i>The God of Small Things</i>, and analyzes how they are functioning differently in a trauma narrative. The article's title is a reference to Roy's first political essay, \"The End of Imagination,\" and the analysis looks at the two interpretations of \"ends,\" both in terms of limitations in her works as well as the conclusion she seeks to achieve through them, positing that Roy's multiple forms of storytelling indicate an imagination that is endless.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ralph Ellison's Acoustic Stereoscope: Reading Invisible Man through Günther Anders's Phenomenology of Music","authors":"Paul Devlin","doi":"10.1353/mml.2022.a924153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a924153","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article is a reading of Ralph Ellison's <i>Invisible Man</i> (1952) in light of Günther Anders's phenomenology of listening (1931) and hypothesized acoustic stereoscope (1949), proposing the latter as a source for the narrator's speculative desire to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong's \"(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Bliue\" playing simultaneously. Anders's obscure theories and notions about listening offer a way to conceptualize some of the novel's most enigmatic moments, including its descriptions of echo and its notoriously ambiguous final sentence. The article also explores Anders's career, possible social connections to Ellison, as well as Ellison's renewed interest in music in the late 1940s after years of ambivalence following his decision to stop pursuing music as a career. This recovered interest included working for inventor and sound engineer David Sarser. This part-time employment intersects with the philosophical questions and aural metaphors under investigation here, pointing to a different intellectual context for the novel's prologue and epilogue (1951) than for parts of the novel composed in the 1945–48 period.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited ed. by Lasse R. Gammelgaard et al. (review)","authors":"Alex Crayon","doi":"10.1353/mml.2022.a924157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a924157","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited&lt;/em&gt; ed. by Lasse R. Gammelgaard et al. &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Alex Crayon &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Lasse R. Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, James Phelan, Richard Walsh, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen. Ohio State University Press, 2022. 338 pp. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited&lt;/em&gt; is a collection of essays that, building on Richard Walsh's 2007 book &lt;em&gt;The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, seeks to probe the nature of fictionality: a theoretical approach (grounded in but not restricted to fiction) that \"gets its purchase on the actual by inviting us to set aside the constraints of direct reference to the actual and assume invention or some other mode of indirection\" (5). Underscoring the pervasive occurrence of fictionality across forms and contexts—novels, advertisements, speeches, and comics, to name a few—and emphasizing that fictionality is distinct from the truth–falsehood binary, this anthology stakes a claim that fictionality is a rhetorical mode of effective and affective communication. One contributor puts it simply: \"rhetorical fictionality compels us to look more closely at what fiction does, and to what effect\" (81). This book is well-suited for use in English courses across the disciplinary spectrum—literature, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing—as either the central text or as an anthology from which an instructor might excerpt an essay. As a fiction writer myself, I found this analytic text both challenging &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 165]&lt;/strong&gt; and illuminating; this collection of essays prompted me to reexamine my own writing process and product. Altogether, &lt;em&gt;Fictionality and Literature&lt;/em&gt; is a comprehensive interrogation of the rhetoric of fictionality—its origins, its applications, and its potentials—that centers utility and implementation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;After the introduction, the book delves into the second part of its title—&lt;em&gt;and Literature&lt;/em&gt;—by addressing a wide-ranging array of literary terms and concepts to push the boundaries of what, exactly, fictionality is and can do. Beginning with a consideration of authorial intent (central to a rhetorical understanding of fictionality), and moving to the concepts of narrator, plot, character, consciousness, metaphor, paratext, and intertextuality, these essays examine the rhetorical characteristics embedded in both fictional and nonfictional works. The book then examines metafiction and metalepsis, the novel, poetry, and literary nonfiction to highlight a cross-section of genres and forms where fictionality might and does arise. Finally, the concluding sections on ethics and social justice gra","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The City-Sin: Collective Responsibility for the Plague in Early Modern London","authors":"Andrew Fleck","doi":"10.1353/mml.2022.a924151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a924151","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>The epidemic of bubonic plague that struck London in 1603 created its own culture of collectivity. Instead of seeking to place blame on others, the writers responding to the epidemic understood the disease to be divine punishment and a call to collective moral reform. Analyzing the plague pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, William Muggins, Thomas Middleton, and a Dutch refugee residing in London, Jacob Cool, this article argues that the focus on personal moral responsibility for the plague and the need for collective reform created an unexpected culture of collectivity in early modern London.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 by Cristina Stanciu (review)","authors":"Ellyn Ruhlmann","doi":"10.1353/mml.2022.a924158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a924158","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924&lt;/em&gt; by Cristina Stanciu &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Ellyn Ruhlmann &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924&lt;/em&gt;. By Cristina Stanciu. Yale University Press, 2023. 370 pp. &lt;p&gt;After America declared its sovereignty, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur sought to define a unique American identity in &lt;em&gt;Letters from an American Farmer&lt;/em&gt; (1782). His question, \"What is an American?\" (48), set off a centuries-long debate that grew especially strident during peak immigration years at the turn of the twentieth century. Cristina Stanciu's illuminating new book, &lt;em&gt;The Makings and Unmakings of Americans&lt;/em&gt; (2023), traces patterns of inclusion and exclusion marking America's treatment of two so-called \"problem\" groups in the debate, Indigenous people and new immigrants (1). Historians have uncovered similar patterns before, but Stanciu advances the scholarship by demonstrating parallels in how these two groups responded to their common plight of not counting as \"Americans.\" The book doesn't try to answer Crèvecœur's sweeping question, since the criteria for being considered American are fickle and, as Stanciu observes in describing the \"myth\" of an American identity, often contradictory (26). Rather, it builds a case through compelling and comprehensive archival research that, during the period of Stanciu's study, Indigenous people and new immigrants employed strategies to both adapt to and rewrite the ever-evolving terms of being accepted as American—hence &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 171]&lt;/strong&gt; the phrase \"Makings and Unmakings.\" Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this back-and-forth process of assimilation, exploring it within legal and cultural frameworks.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In the first chapter, Stanciu sets the groundwork for her study by describing legal strategies the US government used to regulate citizenship among the two groups—strategies that show a shifting sequence of inclusion and exclusion policies dating back to the 1787 Constitutional Convention (35–36). During one week in 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act and the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA). The Immigration Act established a quota system that discriminated against settlers from southern and eastern Europe, gradually barring them from citizenship because of \"new hierarchies of difference and (racial) desirability\" (29). Meanwhile, the ICA freed Native Americans from the necessity of renouncing tribal affiliations but at a great cost: colonization, genocide, territory dispossession, and finally, forced American citizenship (30). After discussing key legislative acts, Stanciu turns to ideological constructs of the term &lt;em&gt;Ame","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pedagogies of discomfort in the world language classroom: Ethical tensions and considerations for educators","authors":"Melina Porto, Michalinos Zembylas","doi":"10.1111/modl.12919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12919","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this article is to examine the ethical tensions and considerations that arise in the world language classroom from using pedagogies of discomfort. Although pedagogies of discomfort have mostly been seen through a positive lens in the literature for engaging students with difficult issues in the classroom, there are ethical concerns, particularly in relation to the harm that students might experience. To illustrate these ethical concerns and their implications in the world language classroom, we draw on data from a number of projects in which pedagogies of discomfort have been used in university classrooms. The analysis of examples shows that while some sort of ethical violence is inevitable, there are pedagogical ways to minimize the harm on students. The article concludes by raising further ethical and pedagogical questions for exploration in the context of using pedagogies of discomfort in the world language classroom.","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140533216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sociolinguistic competence and varietal repertoires in a second language: A study on addressee‐dependent varietal behavior using virtual reality","authors":"Mason A. Wirtz, Simone E. Pfenninger, Irmtraud Kaiser, Andrea Ender","doi":"10.1111/modl.12918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12918","url":null,"abstract":"The present study takes a variationist perspective to explore the varietal repertoires of adult learners of German as a second language (L2), that is, their variable use of standard German, Austro‐Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Forty L2 learners completed a virtual reality task involving interactions with dialect‐speaking and standard‐German‐speaking interlocutors. Using Bayesian multilevel modeling, the goal was to explore differential outcomes in the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by determining whether participants adjusted their varietal behavior to match that of the interlocutor (i.e., varietal convergence). The results show that there were no interindividual addressee‐dependent convergence tendencies. A holistic person‐centered analysis of individual learners’ intraspeaker variation revealed that only select L2 learners adjusted their usage patterns but did not entirely invert their usage of dialect and standard language as a function of the variety of the interlocutor. Introspective qualitative data speak to potential drivers behind the differential development of L2 (multi)varietal repertoires.","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140331215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Issue Information ‐ Copyright Page","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/modl.12916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12916","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139994665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Issue Information ‐ TOC","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/modl.12915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12915","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42049,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139994647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}