Research & Innovation

Burke in the Archives brings together thirteen original essays by leading and emerging Kenneth Burke scholars to explore provocatively the twenty-first-century usefulness of a figure widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential rhetorician. Edited by Dana Anderson and Jessica Enoch, the volume breaks new ground as it complicates, extends, and ultimately transforms how the field of rhetorical studies understands Burke, calling much-needed attention to the roles that archival materials can and do play in this process.

Although other scholars have indeed looked to Burke's archives to advance their work, no individual essays, books, or collections purposefully reflect on the archive's role in transforming rhetorical scholars' understandings of Burke. By drawing on an impressively varied range of archival materials--including unpublished letters, newly recovered reviews, notes on articles, drafts of essays, and even comments on student papers from Burke's years of teaching--the essays in this volume mount distinct, powerful arguments about how archival materials have the potential to reshape and invigorate rhetorical scholarship.

Including contributors such as Jack Selzer, Debra Hawhee, and Ann George, this collection pursues Burke behind the arguments of his major works to the divergent preoccupations, habits of mind, breakthroughs, and breakdowns of his insight. Through the archival arguments and analyses that unify its essays, Burke in the Archives showcases how historiographic and methodological work can propel Burke scholarship in new directions.

As more and more of our cultural heritage migrates into digital form and as increasing amounts of literature and art are created within digital environments, it becomes more important than ever before for us to understand how the medium affects the text. The expert contributors to this volume provide a clear, engrossing and accessible insight into how the texts we read and study are created, shaped and transmitted to us. They outline the theory behind studying texts in many different forms and offer case studies demonstrating key methodologies underlying the vital processes of editing and presenting texts. Through their multiple perspectives they demonstrate the centrality of textual scholarship to current literary studies of all kinds and express the sheer intellectual excitement of a crucial scholarly discipline entering a new phase of its existence.

This volume considers women’s roles in the conflicts and negotiations of the early modern world. Essays explore the ways gender shapes women’s agency in times of war, religious strife, and economic change. How were conflict and concord gendered in histories, literature, music, and political, legal, didactic, and religious treatises?

 

Four interdisciplinary plenary topics ground this exploration: Negotiations, Economies, Faiths & Spiritualities, and Pedagogies. Scholars focus upon many regions of the early modern world–the Atlantic world, the Mediterranean world, Granada, Indonesia, the Low Countries, England, and Italy–inflected by such religions as Islam, Catholicism, and Reformed Protestantism, as they came into contact with indigenous spiritualities and with one another.

 

Essays and workshop summaries analyze how gender and class are implicated in economic change and assess the ways gender and religion map onto voyages of trade, exploration, or imperialism. They investigate how women, as individuals and as members of political or family networks, were instrumental in transmitting, promoting, supporting, or thwarting different religions during times of religious crises. This volume also offers methods for teaching and researching these topics. It will be invaluable to scholars of medieval and early modern women’s studies, especially those working in history, literature, languages, musicology, and religious studies.

The night before we met Mark Grace, dad had too many Michelobs and was more generous than usual with his baseball assessments.

His omniscient eye took in the surfaces of cities, the nuances of speech, dress, and manner, and, above all, the microscopic interactions, hesitancies, betrayals, and self-betrayals that are the true substance of relationships. The entirely new Portable Henry James provides an unparalleled range of this great body of work: seven major tales, including Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Jolly Corner”; a sampling of revisions James made to some of his most famous work; travel writing; literary criticism; correspondences; autobiography; descriptions of the major novels; and parodies by famous contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.

This paper highlights the potential for ARGs to promote 21st-century literacy skills. We propose a meta-level framework for 21st-century literacies composed of seven core literacies: gather, make sense, manage, solve, create, respect, collaborate. We then describe how the unique properties of ARGs can be used to teach these core literacies, drawing upon expert interviews and examples from numerous ARGs. Finally, we outline the major challenges and opportunities for using ARGs in the service of education, focusing on reuse, budgetary issues, scale, and improvisation. We end with an outline of key research questions that need to be addressed to merge ARGs and education.

In Early Modern Theatricality, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 230–49, ISBN: 9780199641352

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The late sixteenth-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would haunt the legal, philosophical, and moral problem of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on a historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of Bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default.

Such an education would help students to obtain a deep understanding of subjects related to civic life, such as the law, political philosophy, and ethics. Equally as important, this rhetorical education would give students practice in a broad range of strategies for deliberating with other citizens about public matters. And, finally, through such rhetorical education students ideally would be exposed to and learn to inhabit the culture’s values, commonplaces, and worldviews.

It was a few weeks before Christmas, and she was standing at the row of vegetables in Biedronka, turning a head of cabbage over in her hands.