PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA最新文献

{"title":"Sensitivity Training","authors":"Erica Fretwell","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000111","url":null,"abstract":"ERICA FRETWELL is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke UP, 2020). Her current research tracks the nineteenth-century literary and craft practices from which the concept of haptic mediation emerged. Aesthetic education is a labile term that variously denotes art appreciation, fostering the imagination, and the cultivation of taste. But we tend to overlook an elemental definition: learning to perceive. This meaning indexes the aesthesis that underwrites European aesthetic philosophy, first defined by Alexander Baumgarten as the “scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (“science of sensitive knowing”; qtd. in Davey), or the study of intuitive knowledge arrived at through the senses. This “sensitive knowing,” Friedrich Schiller posited in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), has a civilizing function— hence aesthetic education is a liberal project of spiritual cultivation that has the potential to engender the moral freedom necessary for a self-governing community of taste. In this Schillerian vein, the early-twentieth-century educator Maria Montessori wrote, “The sensory education which prepares for the accurate perception of all the differential details in the qualities of things . . . helps us to collect from the external world the material for the imagination” and thereby renovate society (Advanced Montessori Method 248). One way to understand aesthetic education, then, is as sensitivity training: as learning to differentiate “details in the qualities of things” through the micro-operations of perception. At the granular level of sensory experience—distinguishing periwinkle from purple, or velvet from satin—sensitivity training takes part in the broader imperative of aesthetic education to realize sensus communis, a community organized around shared judgments or sensing in common, by “negotiat[ing] the tension between democratic autonomy and cultural authority,” in Jesse Raber’s words (15). While Schiller’s philosophy is a useful reminder of aesthetic education’s basis in sensitivity training, it is eighteenthand nineteenthcentury literacy training that discloses what sensitivity training looked like in practice. Literacy is typically considered a technical skill, a","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80619020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Too Sad, Too Diverse, Too Poetic","authors":"Kandice Chuh","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000056","url":null,"abstract":"KANDICE CHUH is professor of English, American studies, and critical social psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Duke UP, 2019), Chuh is currently completing a volume of essays on pedagogy under the title The Disinterested Teacher. When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka’s award-winning historical novel, draws on her family’s experiences of internment. Her grandfather was arrested for suspected espionage on the heels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and his family was interned at the Topaz, Utah, camp. Narrated through multiple voices identified only as “the woman,” “the girl,” “the boy,” and so on, the novel prioritizes the perspectives of those interned, and in this categorical way gestures to the manifold others who have suffered at the hands of the US state. When the Emperor Was Divine brings forward the disruption to and fragmentation of families and communities, the inescapable dust and heat of the camp that are lived realities as much as signs and metaphors of persistent, assaultive discomfort, together with the incomprehensibility, uncertainty, and anger characterizing the lived experience of internment. Otsuka’s novel is also the book at the center of current politicalcurricular contestation in the Muskego-Norway school district, located in southeastern Wisconsin. After the novel was selected by the district’s curriculum committee for the district’s Accelerated English program, its inclusion was challenged by school board members, including one who ran for election with the slogan “Critical thinking not critical race theory” (Lueders). Wisconsin journalists, situating the book’s critics squarely with “the MAGA crowd,” report that those contesting its inclusion in the curriculum described the book as too sad, too diverse, and too poetic—the charge of diversity related to the efforts of the curriculum committee to identify work by nonwhite authors. Concerns were also expressed over “balance,” given that the curriculum already includes a ten-page excerpt of Farewell to Manzanar, the 1973 memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston that gives us internment as part of her family’s experience of life in the United States. The charge of","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72825483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MLA volume 138 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000081","url":null,"abstract":"For information about advertising in PMLA, please go to www.mla.org/pmla -advertising. Cover II Bedford / St. Martin’s A2 Bloomsbury A3 Cambridge University Press A7 Johns Hopkins University Press A4 University of Minnesota Press Cover III MLA and the Public Humanities Cover IV MLA Bookstore A5 MLA Job List A7 MLA Outreach A6 Princeton University Press A8 Wiley Blackwell (The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Dale Salwak)","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72914560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MLA volume 138 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1632/s003081292300007x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s003081292300007x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88391406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Illegible Histories, Invisible Movements: Indigenous Refusal in Blake Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears","authors":"Gabrielle S. Friedman","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922000979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000979","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay analyzes Blake Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears to explore the complexities of rendering history visible—both viewable and knowable—in the context of settler colonial capitalism. The novel centers on a virtual reality (VR) experience called the Tsalagi Removal Exodus Point Park (TREPP), which allows tourists to experience the Cherokee Removal as an educational and entertaining experience. Through the trope of VR, the novel articulates how historicizing invested in visibility risks turning Native people and knowledge into consumable objects. Instead of seeking colonial recognition by making their history visible, characters in Riding the Trail of Tears mobilize invisibility to jam the machine of settler colonialism. Their surreptitious movement leads to direct action that counters settler appropriation. The novel thus highlights the importance of Indigenous refusal and models specific strategies for enacting it.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73653230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In the Spirit of the Wanderers","authors":"B. Kohlmann, K. Janeva","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922000931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000931","url":null,"abstract":"KALINA JANEVA is a PhD candidate in English and American studies at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, as well as a research assistant at the University of Regensburg. Her research project examines female hunger, with a particular emphasis on voluntary food abstinence, as communicated in women’s prose in English from the early modern to the mid-Victorian periods. In Memory of Glyn Salton-Cox","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72530667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Invitation to the Archives","authors":"B. Edwards","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000160","url":null,"abstract":"One of the advantages of the decision in 2021 to publish the journal through an agreement with Cambridge University Press on behalf of theMLA is that the full run of PMLA since its founding in 1884 is now accessible to all MLA members through Cambridge Core. The dedicated website for PMLA (www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla) can serve not only as a passive repository of back issues but also as an interface that allows a renewed and revisionary engagement with the history of the journal, which of course is also in no small sense a record of the history of the Modern Language Association itself. To this end, moving forward the website will feature short posts highlighting elements from the journal’s past. The first few have been commissioned by the PMLA Editorial Board and will appear on the site this spring. I think of this modest new initiative as responding to and building on calls in the field of archival studies to “activate” records: to proliferate avenues of access, to invite participation and “recontextualization” (Ketelaar 137), to foster novel and even sometimes contrarian, irreverent, and transgressive uses. In 2001 the influential Canadian archivist Terry Cook argued that there had been a “paradigm shift” that had transformed the archival profession: “a shift away from viewing records as static physical objects, and towards understanding them as dynamic virtual concepts; a shift away from looking at records as the passive products of human or administrative activity and towards considering records as active agents themselves in the formation of human and organizational memory” (4). The same year, the Dutch archive theorist Eric Ketelaar argued in a similar vein that “every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of the record.” The archive is not a vault for a precious artifact with a fixed signification, he insisted, but instead the site of an “infinite activation of the record” (137). Over the subsequent two decades, there has been an ongoing conversation among processing archivists working with materials in fields as various as photography, film, and community activism about strategies to activate the archive, especially through digital curation and access.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79506916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Time: Temporal Imagination and the Late Novels of Henry James","authors":"K. Case","doi":"10.1632/s0030812922001031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812922001031","url":null,"abstract":"KRISTEN CASE is professor of English at the University of Maine, Farmington, where she teaches courses in US literature, environmental writing, and the intersections of literature and philosophy. She is the author of American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011) and two books of poetry. She is director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago I learned this fact about reading: when we encounter an individual word in a sentence, we activate all possible meanings and associations of that word at once, keeping open the whole range of semantic possibilities that word might suggest, until the syntax of the sentence narrows the field of meaning. I picture this process unfolding in time as a kind of wave: each word flaring out into its range of possible senses before gradually settling down again, each little explosion of possibility immediately followed by another, remaining active for overlapping intervals in an ongoing rhythmic unfolding. In the small town in western Maine where I live, August is exceptionally pleasant. The bugs are gone, and there are lakes and rivers and ponds to swim in five minutes away in any direction. Kids run around outside until nine at night; the ice-cream stand is open till ten. The college students who stay in town get seasonal work, and in general there is a feeling of plenty, of fullness and possibility. By the end of the fall semester, Maine winter has set in. Sometime in November the churches start opening during weekday hours for older people who can’t afford to heat their homes all day and night. The university’s classrooms and hallways are muddy from boot traffic. The students start to run out of money, and some of them stop showing up. They can’t afford to fix their car, or their boss won’t give them the hours off, or they can’t pay their tuition. By December it’s dark by four o’clock. Putting The Golden Bowl on the syllabus for my senior seminar on literature and philosophy this fall was in every way an August decision. Later on, I would remember loosely calculating the hours it would take my students to read one hundred pages of James’s prose, and while I held in my head the word difficult while making","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82950380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Resistance to Aesthetic Education","authors":"Michael W. Clune","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000020","url":null,"abstract":"MICHAEL W. CLUNE is Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. His most recent critical work is A Defense of Judgment (U of Chicago P, 2021). The tenth anniversary edition of his book White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin will appear in March 2023. Twenty-first-century aesthetic education is so pluralist in its choice of objects, and so diverse in its audiences and practitioners, that it can seem, as Nicholas Gaskill and Kate Stanley remark in their introduction, that it represents the profession’s shared commitment. While I admire their hopeful stance, this is at present far from the case. Resistance within and without the academy presents the major obstacle to realizing the diverse projects described by this stimulating set of essays. The struggle for aesthetic education defines perhaps the major intellectual gulf dividing contemporary literary studies, and this struggle animates each of the authors. The fact that they find it impossible to make the case for aesthetic education without identifying that which blocks it signals their awareness of conditions in the neoliberal university. Naming the forces aligned against this pedagogical model represents the surest way of evoking the political and educational values that it seeks to secure. For Kristen Case, the opposite of the aesthetic educator is the professor who knows. She rejects the figure of the teacher secure in political, moral, historical, or literary knowledge, for whom instruction involves the application of this knowledge to literature. Case writes that “as the years have passed,” “not knowing” has “become more and more central to my idea of what it is I am doing when I teach literature.” Unless professors cultivate the capacity to have their minds changed by the work, a capacity we might, after Keats, call “negative capability,” then their hopes for facilitating the transformation of their students will fail. Case describes this attitude toward knowledge as developing over the course of her career, introducing an apparent paradox. It might seem as if the attitude of openness, of not knowing, is the novice’s attitude, but in fact the reverse is true. Not knowing requires practice, discipline, and confidence.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91359216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Anne Sexton Listening to Anne Sexton – CORRIGENDUM","authors":"Tanya E. Clement","doi":"10.1632/s003081292200092x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s003081292200092x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83812209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}