Faculty Bookshelf by Essay Collections

Signets is an essential resource for those interested in H. D., modernism, and feminist criticism and writing that brings together the best essays of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have gathered the most influential and generative studies of H. D.’s work and complemented them with photobiographical, chronological, and bibliographical portraits unique to this volume.

The essays in Signets span H. D.’s career from the origins of Imagism to late modernism, from the early poems of Sea Garden to the novel HER and the epic poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Diana Collecott, Robert Duncan, Albert Gelpi, Eileen Gregory, Susan Gubar, Barbara Guest, Elizabeth A. Hirsch, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, Cassandar Laity, Adalaide Morris, Alicia Ostriker, Cyrena N. Pondrom, Perdita Schaffner, and Louis H. Silverstein.

Susan Stanford Friedman is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her works include Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. and Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction.Rachel Blau DuPlessis is Professor of English at Temple University. She is author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of the Twentieth-Century Women Writers and H. D.: The Career of that Struggle.

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Did James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce’s works–revolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and central. It includes ten essays–all but two of them published here for the first time–that identify repressed elements in Joyce’s writings and examine how psychic and cultural repressions persistently surface in his texts.

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Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory breaks new ground in postmodern literary theory, including feminist theory, by moving the focus away from narrative fiction and onto poetry. The book responds to the need for more adequately theorized approaches to poetic literature by bringing together new, previously unpublished essays by fourteen accomplished critics.

Varied in subject, scope, and theoretical orientation, the essays consider poets from Aemilia Lanyer and Emily Dickinson to Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The issues addressed range from the gender ideologies of the lyric to the construction of gendered narrative voice in Chicana poetry, and from the honoring of African-American spiritual traditions by acknowledging the reality of ghosts to the relevance to Adrienne Rich’s poetry of Irigaray’s recent writing on ethics. These diverse essays share a common interest in a theoretically self-conscious exploration of gender’s role in poetic production.

Contributors include Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Margaret Homans, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, and Suzanne Juhasz. Several pieces by poet critics, most notably those by Marlene Nourbese Philip and by Joan Retallack, radically revise the generic expectations of literary criticism. By emphasizing the intersection of theoretical and poetic discourses, the book moves beyond the simple application of theory to text; it opens up the possibilities of the academic essay. The collection will be of vital interest to scholars and students interested in feminist literary criticism and women’s poetry, and to readers of American poetry and twentieth-century poetry.

Lynn Keller is Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Cristanne Miller is Associate Professor of English, Pomona College. She is the author of Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar.

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This collection of essays forges a new definition of Romanticism that includes the wide range of women’s artistic expression.

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This book brings together a collection of current research on the assessment of oral proficiency in a second language. Fourteen chapters focus on the use of the language proficiency interview or LPI to assess oral proficiency. The volume addresses the central issue of validity in proficiency assessment: the ways in which the language proficiency interview is accomplished through discourse. Contributors draw on a variety of discourse perspectives, including the ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, language socialization theory, sociolinguistic variation theory, human interaction research, and systemic functional linguistics. And for the first time, LPIs conducted in German, Korean, and Spanish are examined as well as interviews in English. This book sheds light on such important issues as how speaking ability can be defined independently of an LPI that is designed to assess it and the extent to which an LPI is an authentic representation of ordinary conversation in the target language. It will be of considerable interest to language testers, discourse analysts, second language acquisition researchers, foreign language specialists, and anyone concerned with proficiency issues in language teaching and testing.

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In this brilliant collection, literary scholars, philosophers, and teachers inquire into the connections between antifoundational philosophy and the rhetorical tradition. What happens to literary studies and theory when traditional philosophical foundations are disavowed? What happens to the study of teaching and writing when antifoundationalism is accepted? What strategies for human understanding are possible when the weaknesses of antifoundationalism are identified? This volume offers answers in classic essays by such thinkers as Richard Rorty, Terry Eagleton, and Stanley Fish, and in many new essays never published before.

The contributors to this book explore the nexus of antifoundationalism and rhetoric, critique that nexus, and suggest a number of pedagogical and theoretical alternatives. The editors place these statements into a context that is both critical and evaluative, and they provide for voices that dissent from the antifoundational perspective and that connect specific, practical pedagogies to the broader philosophical statements. For those with an interest in rhetoric, philosophy, comparative literature, or the teaching of composition, this book sets forth a wealth of thought-provoking ideas.

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“One of the book’s strengths is that it speaks to many of its potential competitors. Reading this book will lead people new to the study of the Shoah to read other books. This is a rare book, one that is interesting not only in terms of what it says but in terms of what it prompts its readers to reconsider.” – David Metzger, Old Dominion University

The Holocaust presents an immense challenge to those who would represent it or teach it through fiction, film, or historical accounts. Even the testimonies of those who were there provide only a glimpse of the disaster to those who were not. Between Witness and Testimony investigates the difficulties inherent in the obligation to bear witness to events that seem not just unspeakable but also unthinkable. The authors examine films, fictional narratives, survivor testimonies, and the museums at Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in order to establish an ethics of Holocaust representation. Traversing the disciplines of history, philosophy, religious studies, and literary and cultural theory, the authors suggest that while no account adequately provides access to what Adorno called “the extremity that eludes the concept,” we are still obliged to testify, to put into language what history cannot contain.

Michael Bernard-Donals is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and the author of The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Academy and Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism. Richard Glejzer is Assistant Professor of English at North Central College. They are the coeditors of Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy.

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For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy. They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia.

Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy.

Contributors: Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease

Russ Castronovo is the Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States, published by Duke University Press. Dana D. Nelson is Professor of English and Social Theory at the University of Kentucky and author of National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, also published by Duke University Press.

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This collection of previously unpublished, cutting-edge research discusses the conversation analysis (CA) approach to understanding language use. CA is the dominant theory for analyzing the social use of language and is concerned with the description of how speakers engage in conversation and other forms of social interaction involving language. Its proponents are not only linguists but sociologists and anthropologists as well. The unifying theme of these chapters is the intersection of practice and form through the construction of turns and sequences.

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African Drama and Performance is a collection of innovative and wide-ranging essays that bring conceptually fresh perspectives, from both renowned and emerging voices, to the study of drama, theatre, and performance in Africa. Topics range from studies of major dramatic authors and formal literary dramas to improvisational theatre and popular video films. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are analyzed as a kind of social performance, and aspects of African performance in the diaspora are also considered. This dynamic volume underscores theatre’s role in postcolonial society and politics and reexamines performance as a form of high art and everyday social ritual. Contributors are Akin Adesokan, Daniel Avorgbedor, Karin Barber, Nicholas Brown, Catherine Cole, John Conteh-Morgan, Johannes Fabian, Joachim Fiebach, Marie-José Hourantier, Loren Kruger, Pius Ngandu Nkashama, Isidore Okpewho, Tejumola Olaniyan, Ato Quayson, Sandra L. Richards, Wole Soyinka, Dominic Thomas, and Bob W. White.

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Witnessing the Disaster examines how histories, films, stories and novels, memorials and museums, and survivor testimonies involve problems of witnessing: how do those who survived, and those who lived long after the Holocaust, make clear to us what happened? How can we distinguish between more and less authentic accounts? Are histories more adequate descriptors of the horror than narrative? Does the susceptibility of survivor accounts to faulty memory and the vestiges of trauma make them any more or less useful as instruments of witness? And how do we authenticate their accuracy without giving those who deny the Holocaust a small but dangerous foothold?

These essayists aim to move past the notion that the Holocaust as an event defies representation. They look at specific cases of Holocaust representation and consider their effect, their structure, their authenticity, and the kind of knowledge they produce. Taken together they consider the tension between history and memory, the vexed problem of eyewitness testimony and its status as evidence, and the ethical imperatives of Holocaust representation.

Michael Bernard-Donals is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Richard Glejzer is associate professor of English at North Central College in Illinois. They are coeditors of Between Witness and Testimony.

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This collection of original papers by eminent phoneticians, linguists and sociologists offers the most recent findings on phonetic design in interactional discourse available in an edited collection. The chapters examine the organization of phonetic detail in relation to social actions in talk-in-interaction based on data drawn from diverse languages: Japanese, English, Finnish, and German, as well as from diverse speakers: children, fluent adults and adults with language loss. Because similar methodology is deployed for the investigation of similar conversational tasks in different languages, the collection paves the way towards a cross-linguistic phonology for conversation. The studies reported in the volume make it clear that language-specific constraints are at work in determining exactly which phonetic and prosodic resources are deployed for a given purpose and how they articulate with grammar in different cultures and speech communities.

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This is the first anthology to bring together the key texts of African literary theory and criticism. Covers all genres and critical schools. Provides the intellectual context for understanding African literature. Facilitates the future development of African literary criticism.

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This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

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The essays in this volume address foundational questions in phonology that cut across different schools of thought within the discipline. The theme of modularity runs through them all, however, and these essays demonstrate the benefits of the modular approach to phonology, either investigating interactions among distinct modules or developing specific aspects of representation within a particular module. Although the contributors take divergent views on a range of issues, they agree on the importance of representations and questions of modularity in phonology. Their essays address the status of phonological features, syllable theory, metrical structure, the architecture of the phonological component, and interaction among components of phonology. In the early 1990s the rise of Optimality Theory—which suggested that pure computation would solve the problems of representations and modularity—eclipsed the centrality of these issues for phonology. This book is unique in offering a coherent view of phonology that is not Optimality Theory based. The essays in this book, all by distinguished phonologists, demonstrate that computation and representation are inherently linked; they do not deny Optimality Theory but attempt to move the field of phonology beyond it. Contributors: Juliette Blevins, Charles E. Cairns, Andrea Calabrese, G. Nick Clements, B. Elan Dresher, Morris Halle, Harry van der Hulst, William J. Idsardi, Ellen Kaisse, Andrew Nevins, Thomas C. Purnell, Eric Raimy, Keren Rice, Charles Reiss, Bert Vaux, Aaron Wolfe.

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MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Honorable Mention 2009

Despite tremendous growth in attention to and scholarship about Asian Americans and their cultural work, little research has emerged that focuses directly on Asian American rhetoric. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric addresses this need by examining the systematic, effective use of symbolic resources by Asians and Asian Americans in social, cultural, and political contexts. Such rhetoric challenges, disrupts, and transforms the dominant European American rhetoric and it commands a sense of unity or collective identity. However, such rhetoric also embodies internal differences and even contradictions, as each specific communicative situation is informed and inflected by particularizing contexts, by different relations of asymmetry, and, most simply put, by heterogeneous voices. The essays in Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric examine broadly the histories, theories, and practices of Asian American rhetoric, situating rhetorical work across the disciplines where critical study of Asian Americans occurs: Asian American studies, rhetoric and composition, communication studies, and English studies. These essays address the development and adaptation of classical rhetorical concepts such as ethos and memory, modern concepts such as identification, and the politics of representation through a variety of media and cultural texts. As these essays collectively argue, Asian American rhetoric not only reflects and responds to existing social and cultural conditions and practices, but also interacts with and impacts such conditions and practices. To the extent it does, it becomes a rhetoric of becoming–a rhetoric that is always in the process of negotiating with, adjusting to, and yielding an imagined identity and agency that is Asian American.

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Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity’s troubled history for today’s writers, critics, and artists.

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Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet, and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global way.

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This volume explores the interplay of syntactic variation and genre. How do genres emerge and what is the role of syntax in constituting them? Why do certain constructions appear in certain types of text? The book takes the concept of genre as a reference-point for the description and analysis of morpho-syntactic variation and change. It includes both overviews of theoretical approaches to the concept of genre and text type in linguistics and studies of specific syntactic phenomena in English, German, and selected Romance languages. Contributions to the volume make use of insights from attempts for text classification and rhetorical views on genre and reach from quantitative, corpus-based methodology to qualitative, text-based analyses. The types of texts investigated cover spoken, highly interactive, and written forms of communication, including selected genres of computer-mediated communication. Corpus data come from both synchronic and diachronic linguistic corpora, such as LOB, Brown, FLOB, Frown, ARCHER, and ICE-Jamaica. This spectrum both in approaches and data is meant to provide a theoretical foundation as well as a realistic view of the inherent complexity of form-function relationships in syntax. At the same time, genre is treated as a category relevant beyond discourse studies, consisting of forms and conventions at all levels of linguistic analysis, including syntax. The book is therefore of interest to linguists and graduate students in the area of syntax, discourse analysis, and pragmatics, as well as to sociolinguists and corpus linguists working on register variation.

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As the “Theory Wars” of the late twentieth century have subsided and as literary critics increasingly practice a pluralism that combines formal analysis with history, philosophy and aesthetics, the moment has come to reconsider two of the most basic concepts of literary interpretation: “text” and “meaning.” In doing so, the present volume addresses a number of fundamental questions: Where do we locate the material, linguistic and cultural boundaries of a text? What role is played in the establishment of meaning by intention, production, and reception? Does the meaning or significance of a text—whether literary or non-literary—change over time, and if so how?

The essays that constitute this volume are organized into five parts. “British and Irish Literature,” “American Literature” and “German Literature” approach “text and meaning” from historical and theoretical perspectives, interrogating the ways in which these concepts have evolved from the Middle Ages to the present, while examining how they operate within given literary periods. “Textuality and the Visual Arts” moves beyond traditional notions of textuality to include image and text, as well as the dynamic that exists between the two. Finally, “Linguistics, Philosophy and Interpretation,” seeks to define the theoretical assumptions that inform how we construe meaning and to establish principles of validation within the realm of interpretation.  Topics covered include everything from Medieval literature and art, Renaissance drama, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American literature to modern and contemporary literature and art, German literature, the visual arts, philosophy and linguistics.

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Narrative theorists have lavished attention on beginnings and endings, but they have too often neglected the middle of narratives. In this groundbreaking collection of essays, Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, nine literary scholars offer innovative approaches to the study of the underrepresented middle of the vast, bulky nineteenth-century multiplot novel. Combining rigorous formal analysis with established sociohistorical methods, these essays seek to account for the various ways in which the novel gave shape to British culture’s powerful obsession with middles. The capacious middle of the nineteenth-century novel provides ample room for intricately woven plots and the development of complex character systems, but it also becomes a medium for capturing, consecrating, and cultivating the middle class and its middling, middlebrow tastes as well as its mediating global role in empire.

Narrative Middles explores these fascinating conjunctions in new readings of novels by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and William Morris. Contributors: Amanda Claybaugh, Suzanne Daly, Amanpal Garcha, Amy King, Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Kent Puckett, Hilary Schor, and Alex Woloch.

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How do we approach the rich field of nineteenth-century American literature? How might we recalibrate the coordinates of critical vision and open up new areas of investigation? To answer such questions, this volume brings together 23 original essays written by leading scholars in American literary studies. By examining specific novels, poems, essays, diaries and other literary examples, the authors confront head-on the implications, scope, and scale of their analysis. The chapters foreground methodological concerns to assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, disability studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, and other cutting-edge approaches. The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature is thus both critically incisive and sharply practical, inviting attention to how readers read,how critics critique, and how interpreters interpret. It offers forceful strategies for rethinking protest novels, women’s writing, urban literature, slave narratives, and popular fiction, just to name a few of the wide array of topics and genres covered. This volume, rather than surveying established ideas in studies of nineteenth-century American literature, registers what is happening now and anticipates what will shape the field’s future.

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This collection displays the fascinating range of intellectual possibilities generated by representations of these medieval ‘objects,’ and through the interdisciplinary collaboration of its contributors produces a fresh view of the multiple intersections of the spiritual and the material in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It also includes a new and authoritative critical edition of the Middle English Arma Christi poem known as ‘O Vernicle’ that takes account of all twenty surviving manuscripts.

The book opens with a substantial introduction that surveys previous scholarship and situates the Arma in their historical and aesthetic contexts. The ten essays that follow explore representative examples of the instruments of the Passion across a broad swath of history, from some of their earliest formulations in late antiquity to their reformulations in early modern Europe. Together, they offer the first large-scale attempt to understand the arma Christi as a unique cultural phenomenon of its own, one that resonated across centuries in multiple languages, genres, and media. The collection directs particular attention to this array of implements as an example of the potency afforded material objects in medieval and early modern culture, from the glittering nails of the Old English poem Elene to the coins of the Middle English poem ‘Sir Penny,’ from garments and dice on Irish tomb sculptures to lanterns and ladders in Hieronymus Bosch’s panel painting of St. Christopher, and from the altar of the Sistine Chapel to the printed prayer books of the reformation.

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With its epicenter in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, the Harlem Renaissance was a singularly
influential period of African American history. A cultural revolution that combined artistic expression
with political activism, the movement would help to heighten social consciousness and foster racial pride.
A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive guide to the literature and culture of
the unprecedented artistic flourishing that took place in the African diasporic community of the United
States from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. Featuring original contributions from eminent and emerging scholars of the era, chapters critically explore numerous themes relating to the origins, evolution, aesthetics, genres, and historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance. Combining primary texts and contemporaneous accounts with innovative new perspectives, initial essays explore the historic and philosophical underpinnings of the “New Negro” Movement, followed by selections addressing canonical authors and minor writers who emerged during the period. Further essays examine salon culture and the influence of music and dance on literature; themes relating to race, identity, and sexual politics; and the Harlem Renaissance as a global movement. A final series of essays considers the enduring influence of the Harlem Renaissance in the latter twentieth century and into the new millennium. Combining a remarkable breadth of coverage with impeccable scholarship presented in an engaging manner, A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance is an essential resource to understanding this
transformative time in black history.

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Audible Empire rethinks the processes and mechanisms of empire and shows how musical practice has been crucial to its spread around the globe. Music is a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation, and the contributors highlight how it has been circulated, consumed, and understood through imperial logics. These fifteen interdisciplinary essays cover large swaths of genre, time, politics, and geography, and include topics such as the affective relationship between jazz and cigarettes in interwar China; the sonic landscape of the U.S.– Mexico border; the critiques of post-9/11 U.S. empire by desi rappers; and the role of tonality in the colonization of Africa. Whether focusing on Argentine tango, theorizing anticolonialist sound, or examining the music industry of postapartheid South Africa, the contributors show how the audible has been a central component in the creation of imperialist notions of reason, modernity, and culture. In doing so, they allow us to hear how empire is both made and challenged.

Contributors: Kofi Agawu, Philip V. Bohlman. Michael Denning, Brent Hayes Edwards, Nan Enstad, Andrew Jones, Josh Kun, Morgan Luker, Jairo Moreno, Tejumola Olaniyan, Marc Perry, Ronald Radano, Nitasha Sharma, Micol Seigel, Gavin Steingo, Penny Von Eschen, Amanda Weidman.

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How has the state impacted culture and cultural production in Africa? How has culture challenged and transformed the state and our understandings of its nature, functions, and legitimacy? Compelled by complex realities on the ground as well as interdisciplinary scholarly debates on the state-culture dynamic, senior scholars and emerging voices examine the intersections of the state, culture, and politics in postcolonial Africa in this lively and wide-ranging volume. The coverage here is continental and topics include literature, politics, philosophy, music, religion, theatre, film, television, sports, child trafficking, journalism, city planning, and architecture. Together, the essays provide an energetic and nuanced portrait of the cultural forms of politics and the political forms of culture in contemporary Africa.

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