Research & Innovation

Drawing on a long tradition of teaching rhetoric that extends back to the late antique and even Hellenistic periods, the Byzantine rhetorical commentaries offer a unique witness to a “syncretic” pedagogy. This article examines the Byzantine commentaries on four figures from the Hermogenic corpus, the standard “textbook” used in rhetorical education in Byzantium. Somewhat “untraditional,” these figures—known as period, pneuma, akmê, and antitheton—are assumed to have significant value in the invention and arrangement of arguments.

Beweise aus den scholia vetera und scholia recentiora bezeugen, daß rhetorische Ausbildung in den Händen der Grammatiker in Byzanz schon früh begann. Sie explizierten die klassischen Texte anhand von Begriffen aus den Progymnasmata und führten rhetorischen Analysen der Texte durch. Die Terminologie in den scholia ist nicht ganz in Einklang mit der die man in ‘mainstream’, auf Hermogenes gegründete Rhetoriklehrbücher findet, und kann aus älteren, vielleicht peripatetischen, Quellen entlehnt sein. Doch der Konflikt der Begriffe war nicht eine Quelle des Unbehagens für den byzantinischen Lehrer, sondern ein Instrument zum flexiblen Denken.

What would a novel with a Proustian inner life look like if it also threw itself into the political fray and took a more than passing interest in other tribes and the fate of civilization? What would postmodernism look like if its ironies and self-reflexivity were yoked to a form in which characters, settings, and dialogue had a full-bodied, nineteenth-century amplitude and in which ethical and social concerns were not sidelined? At issue is not only the compatibility of these literary modes—representing, in broad terms, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, the three great epistemes in fiction of the past two centuries—but also what kind of perception can arise when they are held in creative tension. The nature of this perception, it seems to me, would have wide-ranging implications in the fields of literature, philosophy, and social theory, among others.

Because the epistolary record of her later relationships with Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis is so thin, the Pound documents— the six letters to Pound housed at Duke University and several letters to Lincoln friend Mariel Gere in the Willa Cather Foundation Archives that detail the highs and lows of Cather’s passionate collegiate attachment—have been the focus of attention and controversy among biographers and critics.

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Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler celebrates the work and explores the influence and legacy of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler. Author Nisi Shawl and Rebecca J. Holden have joined forces to bring together a mix of scholars and writers, each of whom values Butler's work in their own particular ways.

Found in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship.

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?

As with many of us, the life of acclaimed novelist Howard Norman has had its share of incidents of “arresting strangeness.” Yet few of us connect these moments, as Norman has done in this spellbinding memoir, to show how life tangles with the psyche to become art. Norman’s story begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. In the Arctic, he receives news over the radio that “John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA.” And years later, in Washington, D.C., another act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. Norman’s story is also stitched together with moments of uncanny solace. Of life in his Vermont farmhouse Norman writes, “Everything I love most happens most every day.”

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.

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.