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At Home In The Revolution: What Women Said And Did In 1916: An Interview With Lucy Mcdiarmid

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

Lucy McDiarmid is a scholar and writer. Her academic interest in cultural politics, especially quirky, colorful, suggestive episodes, is exemplified by The Irish Art of Controversy (2005) and Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal (2014; paperback 2016). She is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her most recent monograph is At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916 (published 2015). The Vibrant House: Irish Writers and Domestic Space (co-edited with Rhona Richman Kenneally) was published …

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

English and Film Studies Faculty Publications

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.

Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.

Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh

The Goose

Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.

“This Is The Way I Was”: Urban Ethics, Temporal Logics, And The Politics Of Cure, David R. Anderson

The Goose

This article employs Eli Clare's concept of the "politics of cure" in order to discuss issues of disability, temporality, and ethical relations to rehabilitation, restoration, and cure in the Sex and the (Motor) City: Ecologies of Middlesex special cluster.

Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu

The Goose

Drawing upon Cal’s eventual metamorphosis into “The [white] Man” in Middlesex, and an examination of the Real of ecological crisis, Hsu explores the intersection of environmental racism, climate change denial, and intersex discrimination in order to advocate for a renewed awareness of ecological interdependency and the need for self-determination of people of colour in ecological and environmental justice discourses.

Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima

The Goose

Taking up Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning,” Kojima analyzes the character of Julie Kikuchi, the Japanese American love interest of the grown-up Cal. Taking Julie seriously as a character beyond mere plot contrivance and cultural reference, Kojima invites us to consider the intertwined histories of economic rise and fall, trans-Pacific wars, and other intimacies that Middlesex remains entangled in yet fails to fully acknowledge.

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

The Goose

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.

Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins

The Goose

Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.

Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour

The Goose

Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.

Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Goose

Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.

On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard

The Goose

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.

Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …

Where The Weather Comes From, Morgan Vanek

The Goose

When Andreas Malm observed that “not even the weather belongs fully to the moment,” he was looking forward from 2016, considering the cumulative impact of present emissions on “generations not yet born.” The reverse is also true: present storms have their origins in past consumption. Up to this point, though, analysis of how human activity will intensify future weather has focused on change in a limited set of quantifiable conditions, like precipitation and temperature – and in this respect, too, the weather of the present is the weather of the past. Both this set of variables and its status as …

Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu

The Goose

Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.

Snc Day: A September Tradition

St. Norbert Times

• News
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  • The CVC Goes Green
  • Religion Meets Art: The St. John’s Bible
  • SNC Moves Up in National Ranks
• Opinion
  • The Importance of Arguments
  • What the Future Might Hold
  • Living Simply: A Reflection
  • Just Do It
• Features
  • Ruth’s Marketplace Remodeled
  • SNC Annual Involvement Fair
• Entertainment
  • Student Spotlight
  • Sudoku
  • Trivia
  • Where is Hip-Hop Going?
  • Winners and Loser of Summer 2018
  • Music Opinion
  • Junk Drawer: Reboots We Want to See
• Sports
  • Men’s Soccer Defeats Lakeland, 14-0
  • “QB: 1 Beyond the Lights” Review
  • Diving Into New Tradition
  • Friday Wrap Up: Volleyball, XC

Exploration Of Creative Nonfiction Writing In Reykjavik, Rachel Dalrymple, Joohn Bennion

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to increase my understanding of nonfiction writing by collaborating with prominent nonfiction writers at the NonfictioNow conference in Reykjavik in June 2017. Following the conference, I created a portfolio of nonfiction essays. Selections of these essays were submitted to BYU’s Fall 2017 literary journal Inscape, and they will be submitted to the 2018 Carroll, Mayhew, and Mckay essay contests.

Poets Of Resistance: Restoring Life To The Student Writings Of The Intermountain Indian School, Terence Wride, Michael Taylor

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In hopes of permanently removing them from their Indigenous cultures and communities, from 1950 to 1984, thousands of Navajo and other American Indian children were sent to Brigham City, Utah to attend the Intermountain Indian School, the largest of nineteen postwar federal Indian boarding schools that remained in operation. Despite the deplorable tactics of a final institutionalized attempt to “kill the Indian and save the man” through the federal boarding school system, this project has celebrated the creative achievements of IIS students and their ability to actively resist assimilation and preserve their Indian identities through the production of sophisticated literary …

Perscriptivist Rules By Type Finding The Values In English Usage Manuals, Delaney Barney, Don Chapman

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The popular view of usage manuals like Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) and Garner’s Modern American Usage (2003) is that they contain a well-established set of rules. We expect to find the same language rules we’ve been practicing since elementary school: say may I instead of can I when asking for permission, spell with “I” before “E,” and don’t split infinitives. Because most people only have one or two usage guides that they consult regularly, it’s easy to believe that they all have the same rules. I was interested in finding out how much variation there is from book to …