The purpose of this paper is to engage in a mythological discussion which enriches current scholarship regarding the title character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While major scholars suggest that Beloved as a character is either a solid ghost or—as Zora Neale Hurston suggests based on the quote “people who die...
The focus of postcolonial studies has shifted in the last decade or so from a struggle over history, the narratives of winners and losers—as recorded by the winners and resisted by the losers—to a struggle over geography. Power inequities formerly embodied in Manichean conceptualizations (Colonizer/Colonized, Oppressor/Oppressed, Occidental/Oriental, Self/Other, First World/Third...
Although literacy programs in North African countries vary in method, management approach, and in content emphasis, their discourse is strikingly similar: It focuses too often on learners' deficits and considers the condition of these “illiterate” subjects, i.e. persons lacking the 3Rs, as a “disease” against which a war of eradication...
This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor’s marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers...
Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond reveals two potentially contradictory desires, one of which can be linked to agrarian reform, and the other to ecological knowledge. Thoreau conceived his Walden project in a cultural milieu in which agrarian reform was receiving incrasing attention, and the Walden experiments was, in important ways,...
This essay argues that changes in American energy infrastructure from carbon-based power plants to distributed, renewable energy networks precipitate changes in American literary regionalism. Examining recent regional fiction including Jay Tyrell’s Wind Army, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter,” and Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, I argue that stories of climate-change...
Football today, most conspicuously at the professional level (National Football
League) is the economic and cultural colossus of American spectator sports. To
speak of its “life cycle,” then, would seem nonsensical: although it has a clear
“birth,” to speak of its “death” might seem ridiculously premature. Yet recent
developments make...