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

{"title":"Criticism as a Practice of the Commons","authors":"Joseph North","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922000992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000992","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last decade many literary academics have been reflecting on aims and methods. Those of us gathered in this section are, shall we say, tolerably united in our view that we should give new thought to the category of the aesthetic, though we understand this task differently. For my part, I have proposed elsewhere that literary studies would be better able to contribute to the central struggles of our time if our highly developed existing program of historical and cultural analysis (“literary scholarship”) were accompanied by an equally sophisticated program of aesthetic education (“literary criticism”). Some have found this proposal thought-provoking; others, not. In any case, it has caused at least some to wonder what “literary criticism” might look like under such a paradigm. In this short essay I experiment with one idea worth considering: What if we articulated the aims of criticism by way of the category of “the commons”? I take it that a version of this thought has occurred to many people, and I am not proposing anything radically new—but I do hope to offer a clear point of entry into this line of thinking, the better to assess how promising it might or might not be. I suggest that the language of the commons may help us address two important problems: the problem of how a specialized critical institution might understand its relationship to critical practices circulating in the society at large, and the problem of how a specialized critical institution might justify its role in cultivating necessarily value-laden practices of aesthetic judgment (though because of space constraints I focus mainly on the first of these). I also briefly express some doubts about this line of thinking, chiefly the fact that many of today’s commons exist largely at the pleasure of states and markets.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":"44 1","pages":"151 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90611248","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":"26 1","pages":"f1 - f10"},"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":"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":"105 1","pages":"218 - 222"},"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":"6 1","pages":"b1 - b10"},"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":"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":"20 1","pages":"194 - 199"},"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":"4 1","pages":"212 - 217"},"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":"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":"90 1","pages":"9 - 19"},"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":"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":"91 1","pages":"83 - 97"},"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":"68 1","pages":"102 - 109"},"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":"Teaching the Art of Judgment","authors":"J. McGowan","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922001055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922001055","url":null,"abstract":"JOHN McGOWAN is Hanes Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of six books, including Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, and is on the editorial team of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. As a teacher, I have no right to tell my students how to vote or what religion to practice. I don’t see that telling them to prefer Mrs. Dalloway to The Da Vinci Code is any different. My job is to enhance my students’ abilities to judge, not present authoritative judgments to them. Any student, even one in kindergarten, has already developed preferences, even if the reasons for those preferences are mostly inchoate. Articulating those reasons—submitting them to scrutiny through public conversation—should be one aim of aesthetic education. In this essay, I consider what teaching the art of judgment entails. Working from and through the example of an aesthetic object is particularly effective in leading students to understand the processes of judgment formation and to consider the bases of their own judgments. Traditionally, judgment names the ability to recognize the full nature and import of something encountered in experience. Thus, the teacher is aiming to enhance powers of apprehension. But apprehension bleeds inevitably into selection. One chooses to spend time with this object, experience, or person, not that one. Criticism, the articulated response to the encounter with an aesthetic object, is often thought to invariably involve a judgment about whether that object is any good. Statements like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is better than Moby-Dick” litter works of aesthetic theory from David Hume on despite being just about meaningless absent the specification of criteria. Particular qualities, contexts of use, and purposes must underwrite any judgments of worth—and those criteria simply are assumed to be held in common with others when blanket statements of value are offered. That readers in 1856 would have preferred Stowe’s novel to Melville’s, while “settled opinion” by 1956 gave the palm to Moby-Dick, tells us about revaluations of sentimentalism, of direct versus indirect political rhetorics, and of melodrama, not","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":"42 1","pages":"206 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76151094","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}