ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES最新文献

{"title":"Surface and Retreat","authors":"Jerry C. Zee","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293129","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay is an experiment in figuring the pandemic through its reconfigurations of Chineseness. It departs from the Sinophobic cliché that conflates race, geopolitics, and epidemiology: the “China Virus” and its cloud of cognate slurs. It considers the slogan-slur as both an epithet and a conceptual and political challenge to imagine the pandemic as it is lived, still, as a disorientation of Asian and Asian American life, time, and death. The essay pauses at each of the three Lunar New Years of the pandemic, so far, to consider how Chineseness—as a national example, as a mode of racialization, and as a site of racial suspicion—might upset a US-based accounting of the pandemic, which frames it only through its arrival on American shores.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48448764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Academic Labor, Shared Governance, and the Future That Awaits Us","authors":"M. Bérubé","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay draws on the author's experiences in the Faculty Senate at Pennsylvania State University and cochairing a committee on COVID-19 and shared governance for the American Association of University Professors.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"61 1","pages":"63 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49084635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fascist Culture, Critical Pedagogy, and Resistance in Pandemic Times","authors":"Henry A. Giroux","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293151","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers an overview of the threats posed to our democratic and educational institutions by neoliberalism and neofascism and articulates a pedagogy of \"educated hope\" based on the work of Ernst Bloch, Paulo Freire, and James Baldwin to restore a sense of civic and democratic agency in the classroom and other public settings.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"61 1","pages":"51 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43533545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Unfinished Business of American Insurrection","authors":"Alexander Mazzaferro","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293217","url":null,"abstract":"H ow can literary scholars productively engage with the contradictions of revolutionary violence, both as a historical phenomenon and as a legacy that continues to script contemporary politics? In particular, how might we situate major upheavals like the American Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and US Civil War— when violent insurrection proved central to dismantling and defending figurative and literal forms of slavery—alongside latter-day instances of antidemocratic, white-supremacist violence that reveal the as-yet-incomplete nature of those very events? This essay takes up these questions by considering three recent publications. Shelby Johnson’s 2020 article, “‘The Fate of St. Domingo Awaits You’: Robert Wedderburn’sUnfinishedRevolution,” andBetsy Erkkila’s 2021 article, “PhillisWheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the AtlanticWorld,” each consider an early Black Atlantic theorization of insurrection forged at the crossroads of antislavery activism, evangelical Protestantism, and revolutionary ideology. Reading these works in dialogue with Chris Hayes’s January 7, 2021, interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about the January 6 US Capitol insurrection clarifies racism’s paradoxical role as democracy’s limit case and its most inexorable summons to fulfillment. Johnson’s eloquent and provocative article offers a reading of The Axe Laid to the Root, an 1817 periodical produced by themixed-race, Jamaican-born abolitionist and radical activist Robert Wedderburn (1762–1835?). Taking as her point of departure the text’s prophetic warning of an “imminent Jamaican insurrection”modeled on the Haitian Revolution, Johnson analyzes The Axe’s formal quirks to excavate Wedderburn’s “radical historical sensibility.”1 Informed by early nineteenth-century millenarianism and ideas circulating in London’s radical underground, the text elaborates a complex political temporality that “layer[s] past and future history” to imagine “a revolution that . . . hasboth alreadyhappened and is yet to come.”2 In so doing, Wedderburn simultaneously evinces a “commitment to revolutionary inevitability and a recognition of its profound contingencies.”3 For Johnson, Wedderburn’s literary ventriloquy—his evocation of multiple voices, including those of the enslaved and the deceased—diffuses revolutionary agency inways that at once defer and guarantee liberation’s eventual arrival. Transforming the liability of individual human “finitude” into an asset through acts of imagined collectivity, The Axe “conjures out of revolution’s unfinishedness a wholly new future.”4","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"61 1","pages":"102 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42433410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afterword","authors":"Priscilla Wald","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293195","url":null,"abstract":"With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself returning in my thinking, reading, writing, and teaching to the classical understanding of plagues as messages from the gods that something was out of order in the social world. The pandemic has highlighted many aspects of the social world in the United States (and elsewhere) that are out of order, including structural racism, socioeconomic inequities, climate change and environmental devastation, and inadequate and unjust health-care systems. The authors of these essays, of course, did not need a global pandemic to spotlight those concerns, but the pandemic has made clear the imperative to address them and has forced us, through necessary adaptations, to take the time to think differently about our habitual practices in our work as scholars and teachers of literature and culture.The word crisis has its origin in medical terminology—from medieval Latin, by way of Greek krisis, “decision”—a turning point in the illness in which the patient either recovers or dies. The pandemic has been a crisis of crises. Even as it has brought each of the social, economic, and environmental crises more sharply into view, it is itself a kaleidoscopic expression of their consequences. Each of those crises is a contributing factor in turning an outbreak into a global pandemic. The conversation in which these essays are collectively engaging is one I have been hearing informally as SARS-CoV-2 has circulated among us: What can we contribute specifically as professors of literature and culture through our scholarship and our pedagogy? And what have we learned through this experience that might change our practices both on the page and in the classroom?While those are standard questions that surface routinely in our circles, the pandemic, as these essays suggest, has brought them into focus with a stark clarity reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin describes, in his lyrical meditation “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as memories flashing up “at a moment of danger.”1 The intensified insight that has surfaced with the pandemic has shown the need for institutional change, from the governance structure of the university (as in Michael Bérubé’s essay) to the habitual practices in our classrooms. Note, for example, Barbara Fuchs’s description of one of the most sobering moments in [her] research [that] came when [she] realized that the questions of form and genre that preoccupy a critic were in this case literally matters of life and death: as the unions argued over whether streamed theater counted as theater or film, the health insurance of hundreds of artists hung in the balance, given that they needed to work for a certain number of weeks per year in their respective modes to qualify for the benefits that Equity and the Screen Actors Guild provided exclusively to those working on their own turf.Each of the crises addressed in these essays is a Benjaminian “moment of danger,” as, of course, is the pandemic. “In the","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135518243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In the Time of Pandemic, the Deep Structure of Biopower Is Laid Bare","authors":"Lennard J. Davis","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293107","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The pandemic revealed the workings of biopower in relation to people with disabilities. In focusing on lives worth living, decisions were made based on metrics about the quality of life of various groups. Ultimately, the pandemic revealed the power structure lurking behind a rhetoric of “care and compassion.”","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"148 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135518244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing Pandemics","authors":"Andrew Gilbert","doi":"10.1215/00138282-10293118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293118","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes the 2007 board game Pandemic in light of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The essay explores the connections between the reality of Pandemic and the play of COVID-19. To do this, it uses Ian Bogost's interpretation of systems (both real and imagined) to invite a dialectic of reality and game simulation. The interaction of such systems, in a game whose theme became real, highlights a major tenet of game studies—the borders between reality and games are thin, blurred, and mobile, if they exist at all. Games, in their simulation of the real, are mimetic, and, in turn, reality has become gamified. The essay examines the board game and highlights its mechanics, which include cooperation and mitigation of risk. It also explores how the game and reality blur their borders in this instance of play, inviting further study into the ramifications of simulated games and the fantasy of the real.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"61 1","pages":"22 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46592613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Smartness Aloft”","authors":"Marylaura Papalas","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890747","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines descriptions of women and airplanes in the pages of American and French interwar fashion magazines. Samples from Femina, La Gazette du Bon Ton, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies Home Journal, Vogue (American and Paris editions), and Women’s Wear Daily illustrate how the relationship between women and transportation technology evolved to promote messages of female independence, illustrated by aviatrix ensembles from Madeleine Vionnet and Elsa Schiaparelli. These designs and representations of them in transatlantic media fused the body with the machine, presenting what Jessica Burstein describes as “cold modernism.” But these same publications also played on an imperialist sense of superiority, trafficking in racial slurs and cultural bigotry, a preponderant phenomenon described by Anne McClintock in her book Imperial Leather. Ultimately, the spectacularization of aviation and style in fashion media exposed borders that represented either freedom or confinement for women: borders between the nimble body and the clothing that restricted it, between sedentary flesh and flying machine, between the stationary present and the fast-moving future, between the familiar “I” and the unknown other. This article uncovers those technological thresholds and the fashionable women who dared to cross them.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42901038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Avalanche of Cultural Rejections","authors":"David T. Mitchell","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890868","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46825517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fashion in Așǫs","authors":"Aymê Okasaki","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890813","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article discusses the concept of Afro-Brazilian fashion in Candomblé, considering their transatlantic symbolic exchanges in an aesthetics of dress, based on the four vectors proposed by Cunnington—fabric, color, shape, and mobility—through which fashion is expressed. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Brazil received ships from the African coast with așǫ oke, a handwoven fabric created by the Yorùbás to be used as head wraps or to be sewn and worn as shawls by Black women. This and other fabrics, such as wax prints, enter the terreiros as a search for aesthetic identity through clothing, especially during the second half of the twentieth century with the (re)Africanization movement. In this scenario, fabric and color join the shapes and silhouettes of Candomblé costumes to create aesthetic crossovers. While silhouettes common to Brazil’s colonial period meet the various forms of fabric binding in traditional Candomblé costumes, the (re)Africanized terreiros bring more rectangular shapes to their dress. Adorning these costumes are the insignias worn by the òrìṣàs, which act as an extension of their gestures. Wielding, wearing, and adorning themselves with different insignias on their arms, head, and legs, the òrìṣàs dramatize their mythical stories, in narrative and symbolic performances of dress. Thus the Afro-Atlantic fashion seen in these costumes escapes the boundaries of Euro-Western fashion.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43870530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}