Project MUSE®: Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 44 (2011) through current issue (published out of order)Latest Articles: Journal of the Midwest Modern Language AssociationTWOProject MUSE®Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association2162-62940742-5562Latest articles in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Reinterpreting “Intelligence”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968073
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In their highly influential, first-to-market book Teaching with AI (2024), José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson address concerns that new large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) platforms such as ChatGPT might facilitate student cheating. Ultimately, they suggest these concerns stem from newly prominent uncertainties surrounding the very aims of student assessment: “How much of the fear around AI cheating is really a fear that we can no longer identify human work anymore?” (148). When human and AI work are indistinguishable—when students can use AI platforms to quickly and reliably produce college work that is C-level or above—what does “assessment” mean, and what does it entail? In their chapter
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallIntroduction: Reinterpreting “Intelligence”2025-08-17text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Reinterpreting “Intelligence”2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®132242026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Reframing Intelligence in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968074
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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author, academic, and artist from the Alderville First Nation, who dedicates her work to Indigenous resurgence, decolonization, and the revitalization of Anishinaabe knowledge systems. She employs poetic yet unapologetic language to explore these themes in her 2020 novel, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (hereafter, Noopiming). Challenging dominant notions of intelligence and intensifying the call for new definitions, Simpson weaves a model of Anishinaabe epistemology that subtly runs through the story. Her 2017 work, As We Have Always Done, provides further context, demonstrating how intelligence is deeply embedded in her writing but rarely conforms to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallReframing Intelligence in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies2025-08-17text/htmlen-USReframing Intelligence in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®698922026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Emotional Intelligence at Work (at Work): Enacting Emotional Labor during the First Year of a University-Wide QEP Writing Initiative
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968075
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Writing Program Ad mini strators (WPAs) often struggle to establish a supportive framework among their colleagues, even within the English department, given faculty members’ tendency to set their own teaching and research apart as wholly unrelated, or even implicitly superior, to the work of rhetoric and composition experts (Costello and Navickas 99; Micciche 29–39, 74; Payne 280–81; Sicari 110). In addition, the growing corporatization of universities over the last twenty years has squeezed the resources of humanities dramatically, shrinking both the work-force and funding of these divisions (discussions in Alemán 108; McCrary and Holmes; Payne 281). It is now often the case that literature and creative-writing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallEmotional Intelligence at Work (at Work): Enacting Emotional Labor during the First Year of a University-Wide QEP Writing Initiative2025-08-17text/htmlen-USEmotional Intelligence at Work (at Work): Enacting Emotional Labor during the First Year of a University-Wide QEP Writing Initiative2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®1066372026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Early Machine Learning and Artificial Animal Intelligences
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968076
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Anthropomorphism is pervasive in contemporary discourse about artificial intelligence. It is now common for researchers and the corporations developing and marketing generative AI (GenAI) and AI-enhanced products to describe their models as if they possess the cognitive abilities of a human at a particular developmental stage. A company might claim, for instance, that the latest version of its model or chatbot has the intelligence of a secondary-school graduate. The next version, right on the horizon, we are promised, will possess PhD-level intelligence. While these markers are comparable, at least in form, to industry or research benchmarks that track performance on standardized tasks, the attempt to signal the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallEarly Machine Learning and Artificial Animal Intelligences2025-08-17text/htmlen-USEarly Machine Learning and Artificial Animal Intelligences2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®890402026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Queer Machine Reading and Close Reading in Literary Studies in the Age of AI
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968077
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In a seismic moment during the technology-reliant recovery phase of the apocalyptic COVID-19 pandemic, OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2022 introduced the public to generative artificial intelligence (GAI, or AI). The data AI had previously worked with was structured and controlled. The generative AI associated with programs like ChatGPT, however, marked a radical break from this past. Using unstructured text data, AI algorithms could now render and disseminate further displaced forms of unstructured output. In response, many academic sectors began fervently exploring the technology in both research and instruction, recognizing generative AI’s potential to reshape text data from an underutilized asset
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallQueer Machine Reading and Close Reading in Literary Studies in the Age of AI2025-08-17text/htmlen-USQueer Machine Reading and Close Reading in Literary Studies in the Age of AI2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®1184702026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Artificial Intelligence, Ancient Wisdom, Collective Consciousness: An Interview with Akil Kumarasamy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968078
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Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (2022), Akil Kumarasamy’s debut novel, weaves together the story of a young woman, working in training an uncannily perspicacious AI program in the near future, and the collective memoir of a group of medical students from the end of the twentieth century, which she is translating from Tamil into English. Thematically, these parallel narratives offer a thoughtful exploration of multiple tensions central to our contemporary understanding of intelligence: between the emotional and the cerebral, the artificial and the biological, the individual and the collective, between how the mind works and how it communicates itself outwards. In the following interview, conducted over email
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallArtificial Intelligence, Ancient Wisdom, Collective Consciousness: An Interview with Akil Kumarasamy2025-08-17text/htmlen-USArtificial Intelligence, Ancient Wisdom, Collective Consciousness: An Interview with Akil Kumarasamy2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®213902026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Generative AI and Professional Writing: Collaborating with Students on Classroom Policy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968079
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In their 2024 book Teaching with AI, C. Edward Bowen and José Antonio Watson argue that “AI is the new C work. Unique but mostly average” (149). The authors recommend recalibrating grades with this in mind. If AI can produce average or passing work on an assignment, they argue, then instructors should stop assigning Cs for average work that AI could spit out without any added human finesse. This recalibration will, they reason, help students outshine AI’s output and graduate with translatable job skills (Bowen and Watson 150–51). The rubric changes advocated by Bowen and Watson encapsulate my argument that based on industry trends, instruction in generative AI collaboration should include scaffolded training on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallGenerative AI and Professional Writing: Collaborating with Students on Classroom Policy2025-08-17text/htmlen-USGenerative AI and Professional Writing: Collaborating with Students on Classroom Policy2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®302372026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Confident Confabulations: Gerard Manley Hopkins in London—AI + Cambridge University Press Publication
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968080
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In November 2022, OpenAI, parent company of the dialogue interface ChatGPT, launched (some might say unleashed) ChatGPT-3.5. The program thrilled and surprised users with its capabilities. Cognitive psycho-linguist Steven Pinker called the technology “truly impressive,” and Bill Gates described it as the most important technology advance in decades. More practically, Tobias Rees, founder of Limn, noted that ChatGPT’s digests are “almost always concise; and the text it generates on the basis of prompts is most often surprisingly consistent” (168). In March 2023, OpenAI rolled out an even more impressive multi-modal version, ChatGPT-4, which was trained on even larger datasets to provide better feedback and be more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallConfident Confabulations: Gerard Manley Hopkins in London—AI + Cambridge University Press Publication2025-08-17text/htmlen-USConfident Confabulations: Gerard Manley Hopkins in London—AI + Cambridge University Press Publication2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®413972026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Machine Brains or Human Hearts: AI, Reading, and Detective Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968081
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Speculating on the act and meaning of reading long novels in the age of artificial intelligence, or AI, entails both defining and redefining how we perceive and comprehend text. The rapid development of AI “reading” technologies (otherwise known as text processing) requires rethinking our established notions regarding the speed of reading: whether the book is short or long, how much information one must process, and how fast one can or must do it. These changes pose significant challenges for literary critics and educators, because they disrupt traditional practices and pedagogical frameworks, in an age dominated by rapid, large-scale information processing. As a result, we must find ways to coexist with, and at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallMachine Brains or Human Hearts: AI, Reading, and Detective Fiction2025-08-17text/htmlen-USMachine Brains or Human Hearts: AI, Reading, and Detective Fiction2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®787642026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 ed. by Daniel Morris (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968082
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The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 is an extensive collection of essays detailing the relationship between poetry and politics in the last century; it covers a vast range of aesthetic movements, historical events, and poetic perspectives on political engagement. Edited by Daniel Morris, professor of English at Purdue University and author of several monographs on poetry, this text brings together eighteen scholars whose contributions address twentieth-century poets’ engagement, or lack thereof, with politics. Each contributor identifies the political concerns of specific poets while acknowledging that no single poet exhaustively defines the relationship between poetry and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallThe Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 ed. by Daniel Morris (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USThe Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 ed. by Daniel Morris (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®106542026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible by F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968083
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This study analyzes the stylistic influence of the King James Bible (KJB) on Walt Whitman’s poetry, focusing on the poet’s early notebooks, poetry drafts, and earlier editions of Leaves of Grass. Dobbs-Allsopp acknowledges the “trope” (2) in Whitman scholarship that often gestures at the English Bible as a broad influence. This trope typically manifests as forward looking by examining Whitman’s desire to create a “new Bible” for a radical new democratic morality, for instance, in Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price’s Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (2005). W. C. Harris’s 1999 article, “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible” stands as the canonical essay on Whitman’s “new Bible” initiative, and it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallDivine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible by F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USDivine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible by F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®127912026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968084
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In an opening memory of a series of drives (some of them assisted by self-driving technology) through the mountains in Epirus, Greece, James Bridle maps a geography of artificial and more-than- human intelligences that extends far beyond this one corner of Europe. In many ways a collection of anecdotes chronicling brief interactions with nonhuman intelligences that perhaps should not have surprised the researchers involved as much as they did, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence attempts to take other ways of thinking seriously, even and especially when they do not match up with an Enlightenment understanding of intelligence as human reason. Bridle uses his time in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallWays of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USWays of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®110272026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions ed. by Silvia Anastasijevic, Magdalena Pfalzgraf, and Hannah Teichler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968085
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In its dedication, The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature has a second subtitle: “Essays in honour of Frank Schulze-Engler.” The volume is a Festschrift to mark Schulze-Engler’s retirement from the Goethe University Frankfurt, and it celebrates “his lifelong commitment to shedding light on the in-between, on entanglements, cross-fertilizations as well as frictions that the postcolonial world is so replete with,” which is to say, “the many aspects and also problems of ‘all things transcultural’” (27). Acknowledging the tension between the Teutonic Festschrift and the volume’s “many worlds,” the editors recast their collection as another kind of intellectual gesture, intending to diverge from the Festschrift as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallThe Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions ed. by Silvia Anastasijevic, Magdalena Pfalzgraf, and Hannah Teichler (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USThe Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions ed. by Silvia Anastasijevic, Magdalena Pfalzgraf, and Hannah Teichler (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®128392026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968086
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Taking as its subject the vast sweep of recent cultural production, Anna Kornbluh ’s Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023) proposes immediacy as a twenty-first-century “master category,” a cultural dominant capable of coordinating prevailing sensibilities in aesthetics, politics, economics, and theory (6). Immediacy, as Kornbluh uses the term, signifies in two directions. In the first, it connotes urgency, or the intuition that things might already be too far gone, too late. If we want to avoid rampant ecocide (the immediatist assumption goes), or capitalist depredations, or neofascist organizing, or the failure of institutions and states, then we need to act now—or, better, yesterday. In the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallImmediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USImmediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®109062026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis by Sofia Ahlberg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968087
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Sofia Ahlberg’s Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis is an intervention into environmental humanities as well as pedagogical praxis, weaving together arguments around literary theory, activism, and education, in service of mapping a new climate-sensitive pedagogy. Central to Ahlberg’s argument is that literature has a specific way of addressing the uncertainties of the present moment—particularly in times of ecological crisis. She proposes that magic, as an agent of unforeseen transformation, may be invoked pedagogically and conceptually to develop resilient and adaptive imaginations in students. The book argues that the future requires much more than rational thinking alone;
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallMagic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis by Sofia Ahlberg (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USMagic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis by Sofia Ahlberg (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®105542026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction by Samir Sellami (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968088
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In our age of truncated attention spans and the attendant popularity of short fictional forms, Samir Sellami ’s Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction takes an alternative approach to contemporary fiction, looking back to the tail end of postmodernism and its penchant for dense encyclopedic opuses. Notably, though, his approach differs markedly from many of the earlier scholars of maximalist fiction, opting to bypass the classic works of Gaddis, DeLillo, Coover, and Barth in favor Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Thomas Pynchon’s all too often overlooked Against the Day. These texts serve as examples of a new subgenre, what Sellami coins as “hyperbolic realism.”The inherent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallHyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction by Samir Sellami (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USHyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction by Samir Sellami (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®109272026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art ed. by Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diez Couch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968089
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While reading The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art, I took notes by cutting and pasting key quotations from an electronic copy of the book into a Word document. After finishing the ten essays collected in this book, I had to rethink the relationship between those notes and this review. I suspect most of us would see that relationship as a synecdoche: the notes are part of the writing process that produced the review. Reading The Part and the Whole, however, made me consider whether that relationship might be more of a metonymy, where my notes are a response to the book in their own right and are not necessarily subordinate to this published essay. Matthew Pethers and Daniel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallThe Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art ed. by Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diez Couch (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USThe Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art ed. by Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diez Couch (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®99382026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi by David Wiles (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968090
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David Wiles’s Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi reflects upon the phenomena of demagoguery and political pandering by situating these topics in the long history of discourse on theater and its relationship to the politics of democracy. Written explicitly as a meditation on the state of democracy following the elections of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, Wiles demonstrates the clear relevance of rhetorical awareness to understanding political theatricality.From its introduction on, Wiles details the long historical life and afterlives that theater and democracy, as intertwined subjects, have led. Political honesty, Wiles argues, is continually in tension with pandering and affective
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallDemocracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi by David Wiles (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USDemocracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi by David Wiles (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®105592026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Literature and the Telephone: Conversations of Poetics, Politics and Place by Sarah Jackson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968091
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When my cousin gave birth to the first of our family’s next generation, the family was informed, as is customary these days, via group chat. As people find themselves needing to move abroad due to various circumstances, telecommunication technology is essential to maintain connections. This makes Sarah Jackson’s Literature and the Telephone: Conversations of Poetics, Politics and Place a timely contribution that asks readers to think about how the telephone—and telecom technology in general— affects people’s lives and the way written communications function similarly. When Jackson tells readers that “[t]he uncanny effects of the telephone . . . prompt a number of epistemological questions,” the “uncanny effect” she
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallLiterature and the Telephone: Conversations of Poetics, Politics and Place by Sarah Jackson (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USLiterature and the Telephone: Conversations of Poetics, Politics and Place by Sarah Jackson (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®113642026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us by Karen Tongson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968092
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Complicating generic conventions in media studies seems to be the crux of Karen Tongson’s latest work. Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us draws upon queer theory, affect theory, and culture and media studies to define “norm-porn” as “a subgenre of sentimental realist drama that’s been featured on network television since at least 1987” (11). Usually labeled as drama-comedies or dramedies, normporn television shows— some examples being Friends and Seinfeld—function as a cultural archive of narratives that force queer people to “confront the fact of [their] own normalcy and [their] own privilege, inherited or attained” (12). Having been produced at various socio-cultural and political pivot points in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallNormporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us by Karen Tongson (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USNormporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us by Karen Tongson (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®116752026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968093
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“[R]adical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible,” writes Ruha Benjamin (23). Benjamin’s fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto does not, as some may be inclined to assume, glorify escapism, since Benjamin considers theories and imaginaries to be our “first draft[s] of reality” (105). While Benjamin acknowledges her indebtedness, as a sociologist, to C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (1959), she quickly clarifies her own deployment of the term imagination as a more unruly approach. Although Benjamin sets forth her usage of the terms imagination and imaginaries as interchangeable, it might be more apt to call her usage of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallImagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USImagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®132672026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Antonio Buero Vallejo: Tragedy, History, Memory by Katrina M. Heil (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968094
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Antonio Buero Vallejo: Tragedy, History, Memory is a meticulously researched and thought-provoking analysis of the work and legacy of Antonio Buero Vallejo, one of Spain’s most celebrated playwrights. Katrina Heil examines how Buero’s tragedies serve not only as artistic achievements but also as powerful tools for addressing historical trauma and promoting collective reflection. The book positions Buero as a largely overlooked pioneer of Spain’s historical memory movement, highlighting his critical engagement with the lasting traumas of the Spanish Civil War and his resistance to Francoist propaganda. Central to the study is Buero’s distinctly Spanish tragic tradition, the Tragedia esperanzada (Tragedy of Hope)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallAntonio Buero Vallejo: Tragedy, History, Memory by Katrina M. Heil (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USAntonio Buero Vallejo: Tragedy, History, Memory by Katrina M. Heil (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®105572026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Thinking Blue | Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human by Stephen Tumino (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968095
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Leftist infighting is a clichéd pastime that Stephen Tumino makes no apologies for perpetuating in Thinking Blue | Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post) Human. Tumino targets prominent contemporary critics in feminist-queer theory (Judith Butler), psychoanalysis (Slavoj Žižek), and especially Marxism (Badiou) who inadequately address the emerging Marxist moment of the twenty-first century. Tumino urges these critics to return to orthodox Marxism rather than mourn its critical failures of the twentieth century. The distinction between thinking “blue” and writing “red” implied in the title is hence the tendency to lament (blue as a color code for sadness, “the blues”) instead of advancing the scientific basis of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallThinking Blue | Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human by Stephen Tumino (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USThinking Blue | Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human by Stephen Tumino (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®97072026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance by Joseph Mansky (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968096
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In the opening pages of Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England, Joseph Mansky observes that the Elizabethan libel demonstrated “that debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand” (4). This observation ultimately serves as the launching point of an analysis of the way in which libels were manifested not only on the stage but outside the theater as well. Mansky steps back from New and Old Historicism and builds his study, instead, on Public Sphere Theory—the idea that the theater can serve as the breeding ground for public opinion and ideas. He places himself alongside recent scholarship, such as that of Jeffrey S. Doty, Musa Gurnis, and Peter Lake, proponents of the view that the theater
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallLibels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance by Joseph Mansky (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USLibels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance by Joseph Mansky (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®96462026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times by Robin Reames (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968097
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A heated political argument with that one uncle at the Thanksgiving table. A feisty Face-book comment section between two strangers. Angry banter from political pundits on cable news. Whatever the platform, the current political climate feels overwhelmingly polarized and isolating. It can oftentimes feel as though there is a crisis everywhere we turn and that every conversation, no matter how innocently it begins, always ends in an irreconcilable feud. The situation is exhausting and, more urgently, unsustainable. Historical rhetorician Robin Reames feels the same way. In her book The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself, she attempts to cut through the incessant political noise and to offer a way toward a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallThe Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times by Robin Reames (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USThe Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times by Robin Reames (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®98052026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c.1700–1830 ed. by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968098
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The eighteenth century has been a focus for print history scholars because of the period’s innovations and industrialization. However, few works have considered the role that women have played in shaping print history. Female Printmakers, Print-sellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c.1700–1800, edited by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman, is a collection dedicated to recovering the lost lives of women in print media. It is comprised of fifteen chapters that present archival findings and analyses about women involved in the print trade across varying social classes and nations. Martinez and Roman explain in their introduction that the collection is intended to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallFemale Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c.1700–1830 ed. by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman (review)2025-08-17text/htmlen-USFemale Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c.1700–1830 ed. by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman (review)2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®125932026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968099
<p></p>
HATICE BAY is an instructor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting (English) at Cappadocia University, Nevşehir, Turkey. She studied English Literature at Middle East Technical University, in Ankara, Turkey, and graduated with a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on contemporary literature, literary urban studies, American literature, and literary theory.JENISE HUDSON is an assistant professor of English at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, in Tallahassee, Florida.JAMES E. DOBSON is an associate professor of English and creative writing, Special Advisor to the Provost for AI, and the director of the Writing Program at Dartmouth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/517/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-08-17text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-08-172025TWOProject MUSE®64552026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-08-17