... primarily in terms of its communicative practices. On the one hand, a deliberative democracy would appear to need some minimal “common standards” of what constitutes reasoned communication. On the other, it also seeks to allow as much genuine difference to enter into democratic deliberations as possible...

... in the historically male-centered canon of US metafiction, Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) conscientiously engages the power relations of watching. In the background of the novel and at its chronological center are the 9/11 attacks and also, incidentally, the launch of the iPod. In a sense...

...)coloniality. It also links his thinking to Western philosophy, including Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, in which the task of thought is frequently understood in terms of an awakening. Tuhkanen suggests that in Wright and Husserl the slippery distinction between dreaming and wakefulness is best represented by...

... reception reveal the challenges of creating art that is aimed at social reform and confirm the difficulty in assessing the political function or, in Fredric Jameson's sense, the political unconscious of American literature. As a celebrated example of political theater, The Exonerated also provides a forum...

... money or food, for example, took a variety of forms, and they also took on erotic connotations. This article reads the erotics of begging in little-known literature from the Great Depression, especially Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935), and argues that when a man on the down and out “makes” a...

... acoustics of white power, this laughter also found a significant place in the poetry of Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. In what Emily Thompson has called an “increasingly `sound-conscious'” era, these poets registered and analyzed the emergence of this new, combative black laugh and...

... ideas in his only novella, “The Heroic Slave” (1853), in which Madison Washington, leader of the 1841 Creole mutiny, declares his independence in a forest glade that functions as a chapel of natural rights. This kind of radical republican pastoralism also shapes My Bondage, My Freedom (1855). The...

...Jennifer Putzi Published in 1860 under the pseudonym “Florence Percy,” “Rock Me to Sleep” quickly became one of the most popular and widely circulated poems of the nineteenth century. It also became the subject of a heated literary controversy, with multiple claimants coming forward to insist that...

...Sandra Tomc Abstract This essay examines early nineteenth-century US literature that fought for increased compensation and copyright protection for authors. Instead of dismissing this literature as a form of complaint, as many scholars do, I take writers’ concerns seriously, but I also look at the...

... historical sensibility, Marrs demonstrates, not only leads him to conjoin the South's rebellion to an extended series of upheavals, from the bloody coups of ancient Rome to the peasant rebellions of medieval France, but also stimulates the very form of his poetry, in which damaged rhymes, broken meters, and...

... Northern and Southern commentators as a form of political discourse, Brooks's caning of Sumner also reverberated with a broad set of concerns over telegraphic communication. Many noted that the cane with which Brooks assaulted Sumner was constructed of gutta-percha, the substance that was used to insulate...

... American fascination with the figure of the Muslim terrorist as a symptom of the modern West's own contradictory and incomplete process of secularization. At the same time, also under the influence of John Brown and his volunteer army, Emerson articulated a model for practical action that depended neither...

... ” not only provides a more accurate picture of Lin's transnational literary development; it also opens a space for a reading of Lin's novel Chinatown Family that dramatically alters the typical Asian American understanding of his work and offers an important contribution to the larger critical discourse...

... leaders face little resistance from faculty in perpetuating the current funding system? In part this is because faculty mistakenly believe that their own interests are served by the current system. In fact, Newfield shows, the current funding model also creates inequities in research funding that have...

... thinking about the role of form in relation to political change. Hunt's work shows that formal innovations—in this case, a particularly strange use of ecological metaphor—need not merely reflect historical ruptures, but can also be understood to produce bodily affects that are themselves constitutive of...

... the Reade novels, however, also contains motifs that resist direct analogues to imperialism. Senarens's earliest stories frequently feature elements that undermine the conceptualizations of race and nationalism that enabled U.S. global territorial expansion. This approach reaches its fullest...

... scope and range—in fact, superseding the interests of the national body politic—Douglass and Melville also had to conceptualize how conflict was attendant with this enforcement, how conflict manifested both on a grander scale and in specific instances and intensities. The figure of the fugitive allowed...