Recent english_ucla_oapdeposits items

Feeling Implicated: An Introduction

Wed, 5 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Feeling Implicated: An Introduction

GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION: TRUMP AND THE "JEWISH QUESTION"

Wed, 5 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION: TRUMP AND THE "JEWISH QUESTION"

Lived multidirectionality: “Historikerstreit 2.0” and the politics of Holocaust memory

Wed, 5 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020–2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today’s controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached...

Bodies Behaving Badly: The Eucharist and the New Philosophy

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Bodies Behaving Badly: The Eucharist and the New Philosophy

“Dons and Dragons: Beowulf and ‘Popular Reading’”

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

“Dons and Dragons: Beowulf and ‘Popular Reading’”

A Canterbury School of Literary Theory:

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A Canterbury School of Literary Theory:

Judicial Processes for and against Bishop Reginald Pecock: New Perspectives on the Mechanisms of His Downfall

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Judicial Processes for and against Bishop Reginald Pecock: New Perspectives on the Mechanisms of His Downfall

Luther at Augsburg, 1518: New Light on Papal Strategies

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Leo x’s brief Cum nuper, which authorised Cardinal Cajetan to put Luther on trial but did not restrict debate between them, was sent not on 11 September 1518, as has been generally believed, but on 2 November. It referred to a lost brief countermanding the order of 23 August for Luther's arrest: this brief instead offered a safe conduct to Rome. However, Luther's abrupt departure from Augsburg prevented this offer from being made. Exsurge Domine (1520), which convicted Luther without trial on inflated charges of heresy, made the false claim that he had rejected an invitation to Rome.

Galileo's Non-Trial (1616), Pre-Trial (1632–1633), and Trial (May 10, 1633): A Review of Procedure, Featuring Routine Violations of the Forum of Conscience

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Galileo's confrontations with the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition in light of the rules and technicalities of inquisitorial procedure as set forth in theCorpus juris canonici, officially issued in 1582 under the auspices of Pope Gregory XIII. The primary decretal governing inquisition comes from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which also established the regulations of sacramental confession and the seal of secrecy. Inquisition was intended for the prosecution of public crimes, but when it was adapted to pursuing heresy, the rights of suspects were regularly disregarded, and, rather than being charged with public crimes, they were forced to incriminate themselves, even on secret deeds and previously unuttered beliefs. When first summoned in 1616, Galileo was not questioned, but merely warned not to espouse heliocentrism. In 1632, Holy Office investigations resulted in a summons, and when he appeared in April 1633, he was interrogated without being...

Adam Citings before the Intrusion of Satan: Recontextualizing Paul's Theology of Sin and Death

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The article surveys early references to the story of Adam and Eve, which are surprisingly few in number, beginning only around 200 bce, with the Book of Tobit. The common notion that Adam was punished by death for his sin is verified neither in Genesis 2–3 itself (and the surrounding chapters) nor in any pre-Pauline texts. Paul's focus on Adam's sin was out of the ordinary, and his conclusion that he was punished by some kind of death does not resemble interpretations in any other contemporary source, including Philo. The equally common idea that the Devil was assumed to participate in causing Adam's sin does not occur in early texts (for instance, Wisdom or the books of the New Testament), being first found in Justin Martyr. Therefore, assessments of biblical theology that depend on these concepts should be emended.

Judicial Torture in Canon Law and Church Tribunals: From Gratian to Galileo

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Church historians have thought that the ancient and medieval Church disallowed torture in court proceedings. This view draws on Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140), but Gratian cites canons that permit judicial torture. Deutero-Gratian (c. 1150) added canons from Roman civil law; Huguccio (c. 1190) and the Ordinary Gloss to the Decretum (1215 and later) also adopted Roman criteria but stipulated that the clergy could not apply coercion involving serious injury or bloodshed. Heresy inquisitors added a twist to this practice well before Galileo's trial in 1633: a defendant admitting a heterodox deed but denying evil intent must be examined under torture.

Racialization and Reproduction: Asian Immigrants and California’s Twentieth-Century Eugenic Sterilization Program

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

During the twentieth century, state health authorities in California recommended sterilization for over 20,000 individuals held in state institutions. Asian immigrants occupied a marginalized position in racial, gender, and class hierarchies in California at the height of its eugenic sterilization program. Scholars have documented the disproportionate sterilization of other racialized groups, but little research exists connecting the racist, gendered implementation of Asian immigration restriction to the racism and sexism inherent in eugenics. This study examines patterns of coercive sterilization in Asian immigrants in California, hypothesizing higher institutionalization and sterilization rates among Asian-born compared with other foreign- and US-born individuals. We used complete count census microdata from 1910 to 1940 and digitized sterilization recommendation forms from 1920 to 1945 to model relative institutionalization and sterilization rates of Asian-born, other foreign-born,...

Life, Labor, and a Coolie Picturesque in Jamaica

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Although the signs of Indo-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican cohabitation are present in a late-nineteenth-century photographic archive, the visual power of an imperial picturesque obscures the evidence that exists in plain view. The illusion of self-contained villages of imported Indian workers that photographs create is informed by even as it reinforces a colonial order of racial segregation. By identifying the photographic traces of Indians’ indentureship, this essay introduces time and motion into still photography that reduces Indian lives to single ethnographic instances. It also deploys dougla—the name for people of mixed Indian and African descent who exist as a “flaw” in the British colonial hierarchy of race—as a critical lens for exposing photographic flaws that rupture the smooth surface of the picturesque in ethnographic tableaux of “coolies” and Orientalizing portraits of “coolie belles.”

Salve, Viator!

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Salve, Viator!

When Spirits Talk: Reading Erna Brodber’s Louisiana for Affect

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Spirits Talk: Reading Erna Brodber’s Louisiana for Affect

Plunder and play-Edouard Duval-Carrie’s artistic vision (Interview)

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Plunder and play-Edouard Duval-Carrie’s artistic vision (Interview)

Rereading Hisaye Yamamoto and Ty Pak after Black Lives Matter

Tue, 2 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Rereading Hisaye Yamamoto and Ty Pak after Black Lives Matter

An Empathetic Art: Renwen仁文Masculinity in Asian American Literature

Tue, 2 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This essay advances a masculinity that blends the Confucian ideals of ren 仁 (benevolence, mutual care) and wen 文 (literacy, artistry, cultivation) with the feminist ethic of care. Through the works of David Wong Louie, Russell C. Leong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, I track a unique Asian American legacy and inscribe a new benchmark for masculinity in the literary arts. For Asian Americans historically threatened with (ex)termination, and now, by anti-Asian violence around the Covid-19 plague), renwen is a survival imperative:

Performing (In)Attention

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The central regulatory document of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform, Æthelwold of Winchester’s Regularis concordia, contains an important performance piece: the Visitatio sepulchri, which standard theater histories understand as an anomalous originary text that marks the reemergence of drama in the European Middle Ages. This article resituates it alongside the schoolroom colloquies of Æthelwold’s student Ælfric of Eynsham and his student and editor Ælfric Bata to argue that these texts together cultivated monastic self-possession by means of self-conscious performances of its absence. By staging (in)attention, they thereby modeled extended engagement in moments and spaces that could otherwise seem too quiet or empty to hold concentration for long, from the classroom to the sepulcher to the page, while also exposing the limits of “distraction” and “attention” as analytical terms.

Thinking “Diaspora” with Stuart Hall

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract This article revisits Stuart Hall’s writing on “diaspora” to highlight its potential for future work on the topic. Although Hall has been faulted for excluding modern Africa, his historical and geographic approach to black cultural identities introduces the possibility for an inclusion. Since his “diaspora aesthetics” is based on black British films, photography, and visual art, this reassessment of his work concludes with a consideration of the Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumè’s La Bouche du Roi. This room-size multimedia slave ship installation brings a history of transatlantic slavery together with that of colonialism and globalization to make a statement about African identities, both in the past and in the present. Hazoumè’s artwork provides a visualization of Hall’s mobile model of “diaspora,” with its shifting perspectives, geographically dispersed centers, and unsynchronized temporalities.

What Use Is the Imagination?

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What Use Is the Imagination?

For Archie

Fri, 9 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For Archie

Confessing in Old English: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt and the problem with penance

Wed, 2 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Confessing in Old English: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt and the problem with penance

Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth

Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We cannot think of a time that is oceanlessOr of an ocean not littered with wastage—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic...

Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light

Routes and roots

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories...

ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES1

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the ways in which European colonialism positioned tropical island landscapes outside the trajectories of modernity and history by segregating nature from culture, and it explores how contemporary Caribbean authors have complicated this opposition. By tracing the ways in which island colonisation transplanted and hybridised both peoples and plants, I demonstrate how mainstream scholarship in disciplines as diverse as biogeography, anthropology, history, and literature have neglected to engage with the deep history of island landscapes. I draw upon the literary works of Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid and Olive Senior to explore the relationship between landscape and power. © 2004 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repository’s digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment. Through contributions from a large group of distinguished international scholars, the volume assesses the impact of being able to access and interpret these early manuscripts in new ways. The focus on Parker on the Web, a world-class digital repository of diverse medieval manuscripts, comes as that site made its contents Open Access. Exploring the uses of digital representations of medieval texts and their contexts, contributors consider manuscripts from multiple perspectives including production, materiality, and reception. In addition, the volume explicates new interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis for the study of the relationship between texts and their physical contexts, while centring on an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges effected by the digital...

Finding Consolation at the End of the Millennium

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing a connection between a fire (at Fleury in 974), a letter (from Lantfred of Fleury to Dunstan of Canterbury), a poem (Carmen de libero arbitrio), and a manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 6401), this essay reconstructs two potential trajectories of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as it crossed and re-crossed the Channel between Winchester, Fleury, and Ramsey in the decades on either side of the year 1000. The study of the early medieval English reception of Boethius’s Consolation usually centers on its translation into Old English at the beginning of the tenth century. By turning instead to the end of the century and to the beginning of the next, this essay demonstrates the resiliency of Boethius’s dialectical original—and claims another, more diffuse Boethian tradition for early medieval England. In short, Boethius’s Consolation may have arrived in England from the Continent ca. 900, but it did not stop moving—its travels demonstrating not only the...

Rethinking the Real with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This essay reimagines the relationship between Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and David Hume's skeptical philosophy, a relationship previously defined by Ian Watt's suggestion in The Rise of the Novel (1957) that Hume's emphasis upon man's essentially social nature in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) stands in refutation of Defoe's iconic portrayal of human isolation. Instead, I argue for affinities between Hume's secular skepticism and Crusoe's religious faith and suggest that both Defoe and Hume channel the same spiritual allegory of the pilgrim as shipwrecked traveler. More than rhetorically similar, both texts, I argue, dramatize epistemological crises that precipitate a renewed sense of life's contingency. Both Defoe and Hume employ Puritan spiritual autobiography, and in each case this literary mode's questionable referential status reproduces the epistemological uncertainty that each text represents. Crusoe and Hume model how such epistemological uncertainty...

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Vicissitudes of the Eighteenth-Century Subject

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Vicissitudes of the Eighteenth-Century Subject

Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds

Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss

1 Getting intimate

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval English studies, Dating Beowulf: studies in intimacy playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. This volume presents an argument for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice versa, while offering a riposte to anti-feminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, feminist criticism, literary theory, Old English literature, and medieval studies alike. To this end, the chapters embody a range of critical approaches, from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to Actor-Network theory, all organized into clusters that articulate new modes of intimacy with the poem. What would it mean to ‘date’ Beowulf? And what do we learn when we try? This playful pun on one of the more controversial...

Dating Beowulf Studies in Intimacy

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To this end, the essays embody a range of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to actor-network theory.

Reading Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation of Philosophy from Alfred to Ashby

Fri, 4 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This chapter provides a holistic overview of the reception of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in medieval England, from the Old English Boethius to George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections, as well as chapter summaries for the essays in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives.

Passing cash from bank notes to bitcoin: standardizing money

Thu, 5 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This essay is about the modern bank note and bitcoin and how each standardizes money. Whether constituted by paper or protocol, whether performing (or failing) as a store of wealth, a medium of exchange, or unit of account, bank notes and bitcoins enact interchangeable equivalence with themselves, every one-pound note or bitcoin the same as another, and their mode of passing hand-to-hand or peer-to-peer also conscripts their holders as readily interchangeable. This essay examines the different ways that these two types of currency engineered this standardization, and I show how the new blockchain technology of Bitcoin innovated upon the standardizing process that made bank notes interchangeable. As I recount in the essay’s first half, standardizing physical bank notes involved re-imagining them detached from the temporality of any specific contractual transaction so as to be, like coin, grasped as immediately physically interchangeable, and the bank note used print and the act...

赛珍珠和冰心：跨太平洋女性文学谱系中的殖民政治

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This article describes the connection between Pearl Buck and Bing Xin, especially the impact of Pearl Buck's ascerbic critique of American missionaries on Bing Xin's "The Photograph" (1934), which anticipates postcolonialist and Asian Americanist theories advanced decades later.

Transpacific Poetics: Ideographic and Prosodic Transpositions in Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” and Marilyn Chin’s “Summer Sleep”

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Through intercultural poetics, the speakers in “Persimmons” and “Summer Sleep” chart their journeys from “foreign” pupils disciplined by English authorities to bilingual wordsmiths. Lee’s speaker, punished by a schoolmarm for his inability to differentiate between English words that look alike, later uses Chinese sight rhyme in English to replicate the semantic use of ideographic “radicals” in Chinese poetry. Chin’s speaker, scorned by her mentor for being “mediocre,” grows up to become a sought-after instructor versed in prosodic sleight of hand. Both Lee and Chin address the loss of ethnic heritage and reclaim their inheritance by literary cross-pollination. Where Lee attempts to align the two dominant cultural traditions, Chin subverts both. This article demonstrates how transpacific literary exchanges can be advanced by different strategies that also require attendant linguistic knowledge and comparative analysis on the part of the critics.

Slanted Allusions

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Slanted Allusions

(Refugee) Children's Stories: Untold Truths from the San Fernando Valley Refugee Children Center

Tue, 9 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This volume was produced in collaboration with the San Fernando Valley Refugee Children Center, an organization committed to supporting unaccompanied minors who are seeking asylum after making the dangerous journey from Central America to the United States. Looking across the U.S. southern border, it draws together vivid first-person accounts from children at the SFVRCC with current research and testimonials from immigration attorneys, trauma therapists, and case workers to form a kind of children’s book for adults–that is, for the children to narrate and for adults to listen to. This collaborative project thus challenges the current discourse surrounding refugee experience and immigration policy by documenting and sharing the untold stories of the families involved. Together with our partners at the SFVRCC, we hope to educate and mobilize readers by providing a more holistic understanding of the refugee experience through the voices of those who have been excluded from the very...

Premodern and Postcritical: Medieval Enigmata and the Hermeneutic Style

Wed, 5 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Premodern and Postcritical: Medieval Enigmata and the Hermeneutic Style

The Archive and Affective Memory in M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Archive and Affective Memory in M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!

Hybrid forms: translating Boethius in Anglo-Saxon England

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

AbstractCritics have long wondered about the setting and intent of the Old English translation of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, first into prose and then into prosimetrum. This article situates the dual translation within the broader context of ninth- and tenth-century literary culture, challenging the received view of the two versions as separate projects and arguing instead that the Old English Boethius was conceived and received as a vernacular opus geminatum, or ‘twinned work’. While the opus geminatum and the prosimetrum are generally thought to maintain distinct generic identities, this case study allows for a more capacious understanding of both modes, which I demonstrate were inescapably linked in Anglo-Saxon circles – and which were shaped by a broader aesthetic of prose-verse mixture.

Is Shakespeare "Translatable"? Cinematic Adaptations by Kozintsev, Kurosawa, and Feng Xiaogang”

Fri, 3 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Through an analysis of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear, and Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet, this essay contends that what makes Shakespeare popular across cultures—his prismatic vision—also makes his tragedies especially difficult to render faithfully in foreign adaptations. Intent on tracking a moral trajectory the Japanese, Russian, and Chinese auteurs are unable to replicate a distinctive hallmark of the mature tragedies—dubbed variously as “negative capability” (John Keats), “complementarity” (Norman Rabkin), “Comic Matrix” (Susan Snyder), “indefinition” (Stephen Booth), and “polyphony” (Marvin Rosenberg). But in adapting and incorporating scenarios and lines from the English original into different cultural milieus, these directors bring out dimensions hitherto uncharted in the two plays.

才子如斯--文外文中徐志摩

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This article illustrates the masculine ideal of wenren or poet scholar exemplified by Xu Zhimo, a Chinese poet who appears as a bicultural literary vanguard adored by both British and Chinese intellectuals in Pang-Mei Natasha Chang's "Bound Feet and Western Dress" and as Pearl Buck's romantic soul mate and lover in Anchee Min's "Pearl of China." His allure can be traced to his cultural hybridity, spirited personality, intellectual generosity, and the ability to draw together a literary community. This paper also revives a matching feminine ideal, epitomized by the brilliant women of letters to whom Xu is irresistibly attracted.

Identity, Assimilation, and Representations of American Judaism in Philip Roth's American Trilogy

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Roth critics have long acknowledged that the American Trilogy elucidates the life of three men whose identities were formed based on their historical time period (the Vietnam War, the McCarthy era, and the Clinton impeachment). What has not been acknowledged is the extent to which the American Jewish community’s identity wars of the 1940s and 50s influenced the men’s lives. A history of self-hatred, anti-Semitism, and fear of a Holocaust in America informs the men’s lives as much as their contemporary moment. In the American Trilogy, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman writes novels about the lives of three real men after their deaths. In his narration, he reveals that he is actually reexamining his own past through the three men in an attempt to rediscover himself and define his identity. This thesis explores Philip Roth’s American Trilogy in order to establish a new definition of American Judaism — one that is predicated on choice rather than on birth or religious practice. Roth is...

"Rebellious 'Malignants' to the Last": Disease, Revolution, and Moral Reform in St. Giles

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the course of this paper, I analyze the ways in which bourgeois British social reformers utilized metaphors of disease in depictions of the St. Giles Rookery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I examine manifestations of this technique from a variety of angles—including, but not restricted to, the epidemiological, political, socioeconomic, and moral upper viewpoint of the upper classes on the Rookery. While I have divided my discussion roughly into three sections (epidemiological/economic, political, and moral), my overarching goal is to illuminate the ways in which these dialogues are highly interconnected. In the epidemiological section, I discuss the influences of contemporary academic medical discourse surrounding anticontagionism and contagionism on social reform depictions of the Rookery. I then analyze the ways in which conservative politicians and reformers associated political radicalism with disease, and the implications of this connection...

Optics in the Works of Joseph Conrad

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis explores optical physics in two novels by Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim and Nostromo. The first part of this thesis concerns the Patna incident in Lord Jim and explores how Conrad uses the physics of 19th century dioramas to outwardly express the psychology of the novel’s eponymous lead. The Patna’s masthead light, I suggest, follows Jim throughout the novel, manifesting in different forms and movements of light. The second part of this thesis explores the final chapter of Nostromo, “The Lighthouse,” and argues that Conrad offers readers two lighthouses in the chapter. The first “lighthouse,” the Custom House, confronts Nostromo with death through a transition from shadows to silhouettes, while the latter, Great Isabel lighthouse offers him immortality through light and materiality. Through my analysis, I hope to show how Conrad overcomes the restrictions of language to communicate through optics otherwise inscrutable truths of his characters.

John Ruskin's Fors Clavigera: The Hero as Educator

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

1871 marked a turning point in John Ruskin’s career. At that point in his career, he had become an established intellectual authority with his appointment at Oxford, Ruskin Sr. had passed away and left him both a fortune and free reign over his intellectual pursuits, and he had taken over his own publishing methods. These momentous changes helped Ruskin turn to more closely examine questions of readership and what he saw as those readers’ needs: educational reading practices in particular and better education in general. My honors thesis seeks to examine the major project John Ruskin embarked on to ameliorate the needs of his readers: Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871-84). This project examines how Ruskin came to write Fors: the material and biographical circumstances surrounding its production, Ruskin’s authority at the time, and the implied audience he was writing for. Here I explore the letters and investigate their...

The Team

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Team contains the first four chapters of a young adult novel in progress. After a house party, a student, Colin Turner, supposedly dies of alcohol poisoning. However, following further inspection, the police suspect foul play and decide to investigate the incident as a homicide. This murder mystery trails four female college ultimate frisbee teammates, Birdee, Sloan, Cookie, and Trix, as they attempt to cope with the death of their fellow student and their potential involvement in his death. Although the girls are wrongly suspected of murder themselves, when it seems they may have been among the last to see Colin alive, they feel obligated to discover the truth of what happened that night. The plot explores the concepts of guilt and culpability, while simultaneously playing with the concept of the team dynamic through the shifting of character perspectives with each chapter.

Illuminating the Fall: Negotiating Hubris and Hope in Representations of Radiation

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis examines depictions of nuclear technology in two contemporary novels, Ocean Roads by James George and Accident: A Day’s News by Christa Wolf, investigating in particular how the authors of these texts represent the cultural ramifications of the Cold War and of man-made radiation in the environment. It shows how the texts employ radiation as a trope representing a new outlook on global systems of ecology and also on the human body that has arisen since the dawn of the Atomic Age. Entering an ecocritical discussion on how the authors’ framing of ecocatastrophe as tragic or comic influences the overall message of the novels, it explores how they employ these genres to reveal humanity’s current relationship to its environment as problematic and to call for changes in that relationship. This thesis asserts that both novels invoke elements of tragedy in order to critique the overly rationalistic and dominating approach of science that can lead to unintended...

Killing Pigeons: A Play in One Act

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Killing Pigeons: A Play in One Act

Heroism, Sensibility, and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft's Feminist Politics in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

My senior thesis examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s trajectory of thinking from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) to investigate how her notions of heroism and sensibility influence her feminist politics. I contend that Wollstonecraft gradually comes to recognize the double potential of sensibility to either subjugate or empower women, and that she redefines sensibility as a social and heroic virtue in her later works. Wollstonecraft’s reconstruction of sensibility and the figure of the sentimental heroine allows her to create a positive model of femininity, with which she hoped to inspire her female readers to work towards political, legal, and social reform. Investigating Wollstonecraft’s feminist politics, as they operated under the conventions of eighteenth-century British society, leads us to a fuller understanding of the progress and shortcomings of the feminist movement within the past few decades.

"I Will Tell It Softly": Facing the Limits of Epistemological Certainty Through Touch in The Winter's Tale

Fri, 8 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

While studies on the subject of epistemology in Shakespeare’s plays have long centered on the tragedies or surveyed the romances and late plays as a collective group, few pieces turn to the problems of epistemology in The Winter’s Tale alone. Among those who have undertaken such a study, many simply touch on the limits of knowledge in this play and in turn pass over the manifold comic-restorative ways in which this play helps us come to terms with these barriers. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare enters a dialogue that has been overlooked since the Renaissance and only recently been revived in twentieth-century biological studies, one that thrusts the tactile sense to the forefront of the ways by which we come to interact with others and manage the anxiety that stems from our inability to entirely know them. In this thesis, I revive such a conversation by proposing that touch is able to confront the philosophical “problem of other minds” in ways that the other...

Asia and the Historical Imagination

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In A Map of Betrayal Ha Jin interweaves his personal experience with his historical and political concerns to create a novel based loosely on the case of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a PRC spy who infiltrated the CIA for thirty years. The protagonist, Gary Shang, is a composite of Chin and Jin. The author infuses his sensibility as an accidental immigrant caught between worlds in mapping Gary’s geographical, psychological, and linguistic odysseys. The trope of doubling runs through the text, underscoring the themes of duplicity and self-division and creating a contrapuntal score. Thematically, the novel interrogates the relationship between the state and the individual by exploring reciprocal betrayal, dual national allegiance, bilingualism, repressed historical trauma, political and personal loyalties—themes connecting Jin, Chin, Gary and his grandson, Ben. Structurally, it alternates between Gary’s third person account and her daughter’s first person account, covering two historical periods,...

"Chinese American Literature in the New Century 新世纪的美国及海外华裔美国文学." Jiangnan Magazine [江南] 2018 No. 2: 146-159.

Fri, 9 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Dialogue on Chinese American and Diasporic Chinese Literature among 12 scholars / writers

Interracial Encounters: Face and Place in Post-1980 Asian American Literature

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This chapter furnishes a rainbow cross section of California through Asian American lenses. Unsettling memories about Asia and racial preconceptions haunt the Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese newcomers, weakening their footholds on the West Coast. Several Bay Area authors envision the possibility of building an inclusive community. The Southern Californian writers, in contrast, paint a grim picture of race relations, exposing mutual prejudices and structural inequalities that erupt in hostile behavior and urban strife. Most individual quests are embedded in the broader historical drama.

Ethnic Ethic and Aesthetic: Russell C. Leong and Marilyn Chin

Sat, 6 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Using four works by Marilyn Chin and Russell C. Leong, this essay engages with Ethical Literary Theory and Criticism on several fronts. It shows the ethical impulses that have galvanized many ethnic American writers since the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It questions the possibility of a purely “objective” Ethical Literary Criticism given that ethical or literary criteria are invariably inflected by race, gender, class, ethnicity, politics, and religion. Instead of placing ethics above aesthetics, it demonstrates their interdependence and inextricability. This article also introduces the topics of class exploitation, homophobia, sexual harassment, and marginalization of minority writers into the sphere of Ethical Literary Criticism.

"Introduction: The Transnational Turn, " in the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature

Wed, 1 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Yogita Goyal, "Introduction: The Transnational Turn," in the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature , ed. Yogita Goyal, 1–17 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

ASIA-KEI JOSEI SAKKA RON CHINMOKU-NO KOE-WO KIKU

Mon, 4 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a Japanese edition/translation of Articulate Silences

National Self-Critique Prompted by Immersion in (An)Other Culture: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, and Pearl Buck

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This essay reveals how three closely related writers looked askance at their native cultures through their visceral identification with foreign cultures. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge don, helped Chinese poet Xu Zhimo enroll as a special student at King’s College, and Xu became lifelong friends of several Bloomsbury members. Pearl Buck admitted that two of her fictional characters were based on Xu, who was widely believed to be the Chinese writer who prevented The Good Earth from being cut by her editor. Dickinson idealized Chinese culture and published a series of articles chastising England for its materialism and gunboat policies toward China. Xu, who admired the British Romantic poets, spoke out against repressive Confucian propriety. Buck, who translated and extolled the Chinese classic Water Margin, wrote scathing critiques about American missionaries and testified against the Chinese Exclusion Acts before Congress.

The Other Father in Barack Obama's Dream From My Father

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Other Father in Barack Obama's Dream From My Father

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve's "Series" by David Watt (review)

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve's "Series" by David Watt (review)

The Other Father in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Other Father in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father

女战士对抗太平洋中国佬：华裔美国批评家非得选择女性主义或英雄主义吗？

Wed, 8 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

女战士对抗太平洋中国佬：华裔美国批评家非得选择女性主义或英雄主义吗？

タイトル: アジア系女性作家論ー沈黙の声を聴

Mon, 9 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

タイトル: アジア系女性作家論ー沈黙の声を聴

Tao Qian and Emerson: Alignment of Mindscape and Landscape

Mon, 9 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Tao Qian and Emerson: Alignment of Mindscape and Landscape

Chinese American Literature without Borders Gender, Genre, and Form

Sun, 1 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This book bridges comparative literature and American studies by using an intercultural and bilingual approach to Chinese American literature.

Somewhat Queer Triangles: Yiyun Li’s “The Princess of Nebraska" and "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl"

Sun, 1 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This chapter analyzes two love triangles involving not only same-sex love, but also liaisons between two men who are a generation apart, and between two women a generation apart. These stories reveal the invasive social gaze on individuals who do not conform to traditional gender codes; the heteronormative pressure that drives gays and lesbians to seek refuge in sham heterosexual unions; and the contrast between the interdependent Chinese ethos that values lasting commitment and the independent US ethos that prioritizes personal fulfillment.

Encountering the Dartmouth Brut in the Midst of History

Tue, 6 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Encountering the Dartmouth Brut in the Midst of History

Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England

Tue, 6 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts ...

margaret connolly and raluca radulescu (eds). Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain.

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

margaret connolly and raluca radulescu (eds). Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain.

Chinese and Chinese American Life-Writing

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Through a comparison of Chinese and Chinese American (auto)biographical accounts, this article facilitates a transpacific literary exchange that tracks cultural persistence and diffusion, offers a transnational perspective on the alleged absence of indigenous Chinese autobiography and the controversial use of fake “Orientalist” material in Chinese American life-writing, and highlights the need for bicultural literacy in grappling with this literature. Contesting Frank Chin’s categorical condemnation of autobiography (as a Western Christian contraption laden with self-hatred), I trace its manifestations in transpacific texts and the convergences in those texts: melding of autobiography and biography, salience of maternal legacies, and interdependent self-formation. Unlike the Chinese authors who lavish compliments on their forebears, however, the Chinese American authors do not scruple to disclose unseemly family secrets or to defy the boundaries between history and fiction—practices...

“Disarming the Swordsman: Post-Olympic Reflections from Beijing.”http://www.uschinamediabrief.com/ee_disarming.shtml

Fri, 29 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections by the author, a Chinese American woman, on the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in China.

The Heath Anthology of American Literature

Fri, 29 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Heath Anthology of American Literature

斯基普 . 盖茨与王家湘

Wed, 6 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This news piece describes my encounters with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Professor Wang Jiaxiang, award-winning translator of Gates's COLORED PEOPLE: A MEMOIR.

Pedagogies of Resonance

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Pedagogies of Resonance

"The Dream in Flames: Hisaye Yamamoto's 'A Fire in Fontana.'"

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

"The Dream in Flames: Hisaye Yamamoto's 'A Fire in Fontana.'"

Headnote to Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et. al.

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Headnote to Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables" in The Heath Anthology.

Headnote to John Okada's No-No Boy. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et. al.

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Headnote and introduction to John Okada's No-No Boy in the anthology

“The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?”