...Lindsay Reckson This essay tracks the gesture of touching a button across a series of early twentieth-century photographic and literary texts, mapping the uneven shock and pleasure of electrified contact as it emerges under the body politic of Jim Crow. Examining William Vander Weyde's images...

... across three primary media sites: Jacques Derrida’s writing, criticism of the televisual laugh track, and Miranda July’s 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know . Proposing we consider not only parentheses as textual marks but also “parentheticality” as a relational structure, Scheible’s essay weaves...

...Carrie Hyde Hyde reassesses the relationship between natural and civil rights by tracking the climatological metaphors that shape representations of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole , in which 135 slaves obtained freedom by redirecting a US ship to the British territory of Nassau, Bahamas...

... the history of sentimental and domestic discourse in the United States and the pivotal role that discourse played in the formation of a two-track US welfare state. Attentive to the racist effects of the New Deal’s long-term provisions for African Americans, Wright’s novel gives us the story of a marginal man...

...Douglas S. Ishii Abstract “The Diversity Requirement” takes on anti-neoliberal criticisms of the post-2008 US university as emblematized by quit lit , the essay genre in which tenure-track hopefuls announce that they are leaving academia, as deracinated yet totalizing theories that ignore how...

...” of slave spirituals by Northern missionaries and educators at Port Royal, this essay tracks how later writers, performers, and sociologists returned to the Sea Islands to reimagine the promise of free labor. The archive thus assembled includes Civil War–era ethnographies, memoirs, and reports...

...Jason Gladstone Abstract This essay argues that what most characterizes the late twentieth century is not, as is often assumed, the threat posed to the human by technology but rather that imposed by technology’s failure. The essay does so by tracking the development of a postwar literalism...

... of the relations between privacy and personhood, as inscribed by the recent Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas and the military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy. Rather than tracking the curve along which U.S. notions of privacy transformed during the antebellum period and after, Insko's essay explores...

... foregrounds the mechanics of avatar agency, Whitman's lyric imagines what such an agency would entail given something approaching the full range of nineteenth-century American experience. By tracking the emergence and use of these ludic avatars, Guerra sheds light on the affordances, both liberating...

...John Levi Barnard Abstract This essay tracks the interrelated histories of the cod and the whale from John Smith’s colonial American vision of abundance to the near disappearance of the living resources he described as inexhaustible. Working at the intersections of animal studies, food studies...

... Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road and the concluding analysis of Cecile Pineda’s Face, bracket three chapters of paired works read as autobiography: Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the 6363...

..., the network” (3). Like Punday and Starre, Beal tracks the historical displacement of a technological figure of thought. Unlike them, he performs the displacement himself, bringing the vocabulary of contemporary network theory into conversation with modernists whom he sees “casting about for such a vocabulary...

... © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 Brief Mention General Melville’s Bibles. By Ilana Pardes. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. 2008. xiii, 192 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $24.95. Through close textual analysis, Pardes tracks the nuanced ways in which Mel- ville...

... of the quotations that Dauvergne uses, and he does not name specific environmental activist organizations in his calls to action. By contrast, he tracks many corporations in depth and tends to use citations from business leaders to map out the ideology of Silicon Valley. In this way, AI in the Wild risks becoming...

.... An ex- ample of the first type, according to Mostern, is Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, and of the second, Angela Davis’s Autobiography. Most readers will recognize in the book’s structure...

...-critical methods as a problem, since the reigning social constructionism of the field resists attempts to define universal human properties or to identify biological bases for complex social phenomena. Samuel Chase Coale’s Quirks of the Quantum is a fine example of the former. Coale tracks...

... . Edited by Wall Cheryl A. , 945 – 49 . New York : Library of America . ———. (1942) 1996 . Dust Tracks on a Road . New York : Perennial-Harper . ———. (1937) 1998 . Their Eyes Were Watching God . New York : Perennial-Harper . Kaplan Amy . 1998 . “ Manifest Domesticity...

... the deferred or the missing. Starting from an analysis of Derrida’s use of parentheses in “Signa- ture Event Context” (1988), in which Derrida argues that any mark can break with its context and engender new contexts; then moving on to the parenthetical structure of the television laugh track...

... on the development of American literature from 1785 to 1885, this study tracks the increasingly visual nature of the nation’s print culture. Barnhill shows that illustrations had the power to heighten the perceived value of printed content and in this way helped to consolidate a distinctly American literary...

... or transatlantic, as a mode to consolidate and manage difference. In eight richly textured and deeply historical chapters, Apap charts three major developments of this mode. He first tracks its emergence in the literature of the 1820s, including geographical textbooks, Thomas Cole’s paintings, novels by Catharine...