English Language and Literature Commons^™

Of Þam Him Aweaxeð Wynsum Gefea”: The Voyeuristic Appeal Of Christ Iii, Paul Dustin Stegner, Timothy D. Arner

English

Christ III’s representation of the rewards offered to the blessed in Heaven raises this question: Why would anyone offered the opportunity to enjoy the beatific vision turn his gaze toward the suffering of the damned in Hell? The poem’s emphasis on vision has conventionally been interpreted as indicating its didactic purpose of effecting repentance in the reader. Critics such as Frederick Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and, most recently, Sachi Shimomura have connected the poem to standard theological interpretations of the Last Judgment and the penitential tradition.1 However, the unique, and perhaps troubling, issue of how and why the blessed choose …

Rewriting The Passing Novel: Danzy Senna's Caucasia, Kathryn Rummell

English

No abstract provided.

The Making Of ‘American’: Race And Nation In Neurasthenic Discourse, Brad Campbell

English

This paper considers the underexamined racial and nationalistic components of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neurasthenic discourse to propose that neurasthenia was as much a discourse of modern American identity as it was a discourse of disease. By closely reading the medical and general texts which helped to popularize it, and by scrutinizing the context of its vogue and supposed subsequent decline, this paper shows how neurasthenia was intimately bound up with the era’s politics of race, nationalism and citizenship. Countering traditional understandings of the disease, this study suggests that neurasthenia did not simply anticipate but was pre-eminently preoccupied with …

Giving Grades, Taking Tolls: Assessing The Impact Of Evaluation On Developing Writers, Brenda Helmbrecht

English

This article uses one basic writer’s experience with assessment as a vehicle to explore whether the assessment practices struggling writers encounter on their essays effectively usher them into academic discourse or simply scare them away from that ambition entirely

Graduate Students Hearing Voices: (Mis)Recognition And (Re)Definition Of The Jwpa Identity, Brenda M. Helmbrecht, Connie Kendall

English

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Conflicts: (Re)Engaging Students With Feminism In A Postfeminist World, Meredith A. Love, Brenda M. Helmbrecht

English

No abstract provided.

"Try What Repentance Can": Hamlet, Confession, And The Extraction Of Interiority, Paul Dustin Stegner

English

In his film adaptation of Hamlet (1996),Kenneth Branagh under scores the confessional themes present in the play by setting two scenes in a Roman Catholic confessional box. In the first scene, Polonius interrogates Ophelia about her relationship with Hamlet-an interaction that reinforces the common association of the confessional with an obsession over female sexuality. In the second scene, Hamlet listens to Claudius's penitential prayer and becomes,as Mark Thornton Burnett notes, "an unpunctual but unconsoling father confessor."l By depicting Hamlet and Claudius in the confessional box, Branagh introduces a conspicuous anachronism since the device was never used in early modem England …

Visual Communication And The Map: How Maps As Visual Objects Convey Meaning In Specific Contexts, Amy Propen

English

This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.

Heading South, John C. Hawley

English

Terminology is always a site of politics, and “global South” is no exception. Many of the places proposed as likely areas for discussion in the pages of this new journal are not, in fact, south of the equator. Nor are other areas that are, in fact, south of the border necessarily as appropriate for discussion in this journal. Yet it is appropriate to reach for another terminological alleyway like this one to help us reimagine, yet again, the peoples and topics in question. “Postcolonial,” either with or without a hyphen, is contentious; “commonwealth,” of course, has been long abandoned (and …

World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations In Film And Performance. [Review], Douglas M. Lanier

English

World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Edited by Sonia Massai. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xiv + 199. $110 cloth, $34.95 paper.

Reviewed by Douglas M. Lanier