Project MUSE®: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 95 (2012) through current issueLatest Articles: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary JournalTWOProject MUSE®Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal2161-63020038-1861Latest articles in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Incarceration and the Art of Reconciliation: Resentment, Recognition, and Reframing Past Wrongs
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978982
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Two men stand by a river: one has recently returned from San Quentin State Prison; the other, his father, is ashamed of his son. The two have never gotten along: "The only touch shared between these two men had been blows." Neither is the forgiving kind. "And yet." They stand by California's Tuolumne River, recalling its history: the son's birth on the nearby reservation and their ancestors who came for the salmon. "This is the Indian river," the father says. "You come here when you have questions. You come here when you need …" Decades later, two women sit by a fire: one has lately learned why her dad was sent to San Quentin all those years ago; the older one, her half-sister, is furious. Their father raped a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallIncarceration and the Art of Reconciliation: Resentment, Recognition, and Reframing Past Wrongs2026-01-06text/htmlen-USIncarceration and the Art of Reconciliation: Resentment, Recognition, and Reframing Past Wrongs2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1141452026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Heavy Losses, Not Fatal: The Future of Higher Education—and Our Species
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978983
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In April 2025, with universities like Harvard and Columbia soundly in the sights of the Trump administration, I overheard a frustrated university president proclaim, "Harvard University existed long before the US government, and Harvard University will exist long after the US government is gone." What a remarkable thing to say. A month later, the news arrived that Alasdair MacIntyre had died. He was ninety-six and no stranger to readers of Soundings. Twice he published essays in this journal, in 1982 and 1984, just as his 1981 book After Virtue was gaining traction.1 One of those essays was reprinted in 2017 as Soundings wrapped up a yearlong celebration of its one hundredth anniversary. MacIntyre's death at a time
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallHeavy Losses, Not Fatal: The Future of Higher Education—and Our Species2026-01-06text/htmlen-USHeavy Losses, Not Fatal: The Future of Higher Education—and Our Species2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®860092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Poetics of Process: Whitman, Rich, Long Soldier, Chen
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978984
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In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, featuring elliptical absences inside the poetic line that foreground the process of becoming over the embedded fixity of genre, grammar, and poetic form. This poetics mirrors the very process of becoming Whitman wishes to inspire in readers, displaying dynamism of discovery at the level of poetic line. The very next year in republishing and expanding Leaves of Grass, Whitman removed most ellipses. The subject matter of process remains a Whitman theme, but less so in the poetics. A poetics of process also is present in Adrienne Rich's fin de siècle poem "Midnight Salvage," where she seeks escape from commercial dystopia without knowing how or where to go. Layli
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallPoetics of Process: Whitman, Rich, Long Soldier, Chen2026-01-06text/htmlen-USPoetics of Process: Whitman, Rich, Long Soldier, Chen2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®832562026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Grieving an End We Created: Learning to Die in the Climate Crisis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978985
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All things end. Many things care a great deal about their end. Humans are unique in caring not only about their ends but also the end. Non-human creatures, including the simplest, show awareness of death, often in quite elaborate ways, and orient their lives toward it, whether by staving off death as long as possible or preparing for it. For them, life is a struggle against or preparation for death. We know of creatures that will go to great lengths to find food, fend off enemies, protect their young, doing anything and everything to stay alive. We also know of creatures who come into the world seemingly aware they will die and spend their lives preparing for it, often by bearing offspring. All their lives these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallGrieving an End We Created: Learning to Die in the Climate Crisis2026-01-06text/htmlen-USGrieving an End We Created: Learning to Die in the Climate Crisis2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®549362026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Peking Man in American Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978986
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At the confluence of the archaeological and the literary, the Peking Man 北京猿人 fossils and the attendant written works about them provide a rich archive of artifacts concerned with the mysterious origins of humankind. While the narratives about this set of fossils are less than one hundred years old, the fossil materials themselves have a much older provenance: by most estimates many hundreds of thousands of years, by some even close to a million. Unearthed through the joint efforts of American, Chinese, and European investigators, the Peking Man fossils present a central locus in the history of science, while also offering a compelling theme in the history of science fiction.Novelistic treatments of Peking Man
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallPeking Man in American Literature2026-01-06text/htmlen-USPeking Man in American Literature2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1064942026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Space, Power, and Resistance: Women's Utopian Spatial Desires in The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978987
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The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is one of Margaret Atwood's most acknowledged novels. Scholars regard it as a dystopian fiction comparable to George Orwell's 1984. The Testaments, which won the 2019 Booker Prize, is a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. Critics have analyzed these two novels from the perspective of feminism, ecology, religion, trauma, and the notion of history. The dystopian and utopian aspects in both novels are also the major focus of criticism. Scholars have long debated whether these novels are completely dystopian.Dominick M. Grace confirms the dystopian tendency in The Handmaid's Tale by analyzing the ending part, "Historical Notes."1 Amin Malak writes of The Handmaid's Tale with reference to "such
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallSpace, Power, and Resistance: Women's Utopian Spatial Desires in The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments2026-01-06text/htmlen-USSpace, Power, and Resistance: Women's Utopian Spatial Desires in The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®636072026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Walter Benjamin on the Banks of the Sabarmati: Boosterism, Hindutva, and the Murmurings of Utopia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978988
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Like an archaeologist excavating a hoard, then attempting to piece together the shards of broken artifacts, Walter Benjamin spent the better part of a decade in the Bibliothèque National in Paris, sifting through the city's nineteenth-century prose and pictorial detritus. In part, Benjamin was trying to understand the phenomena of modernity and early consumer capitalism. But the Arcades Project, as it came to be known, was no mere reconstruction, for as Benjamin chronicled his discoveries, various fragments of Paris's nineteenth-century material culture sparked insights into his own epoch, the interwar years in Europe, in which Weimer democracy flourished and collapsed, economies recovered and crashed, and National
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallWalter Benjamin on the Banks of the Sabarmati: Boosterism, Hindutva, and the Murmurings of Utopia2026-01-06text/htmlen-USWalter Benjamin on the Banks of the Sabarmati: Boosterism, Hindutva, and the Murmurings of Utopia2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1068352026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Disney's Colonial Cartographies: Constructing the Imaginative Geographies of America's Favorite Theme Parks
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978989
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Mickey Mouse first appeared in the cartoon "Steamboat Willie" in 1928, marking the beginning of a brand that is now identified as a cultural signifier of the United States of America.1 For the first twenty years of his career, Walt Disney focused on cartoons; it was not until the 1950s that construction of a park began. Walt had some setbacks in his dream to build a theme park. When city officials turned down his plan for a small park across from his Burbank studio, it was because they didn't "understand the difference between Disney's dreams and carny fairs."2Today, Disney theme parks are fun destinations offering attractions inspired by comic book characters, books, and movies, ranging from the original
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallDisney's Colonial Cartographies: Constructing the Imaginative Geographies of America's Favorite Theme Parks2026-01-06text/htmlen-USDisney's Colonial Cartographies: Constructing the Imaginative Geographies of America's Favorite Theme Parks2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®711422026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Sociology and Critical Pedagogy in India: Proposals from Rege and Hegde in Historical Context
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978990
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Trends in academic discourse sway in one direction or another for various reasons. The professional association of a discipline—especially one that also publishes an influential journal—can impact trends in the discourse of that discipline. Other indisputable factors influencing academic discourse are political movements and policy changes. This was never more apparent than in the 1990s and 2000s in sociology in India. The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the steady domination of neoliberalism worldwide. During this time, the Indian government used the category Other Backward Classes (OBC) to demarcate 52% of the population as socially and educationally backward and provided them reservations in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallSociology and Critical Pedagogy in India: Proposals from Rege and Hegde in Historical Context2026-01-06text/htmlen-USSociology and Critical Pedagogy in India: Proposals from Rege and Hegde in Historical Context2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1017812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Helping a Woman by the River: A Comparative Study of a Gendered Trope
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978991
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In a striking parallel between a Confucian and a rabbinic text, a similar principle is outlined, stating that one should violate taboos concerning gender relations for the sake of saving a drowning woman. The resemblance cannot be explained through a historical connection; rather, each of these cultures separately arrived at the same conclusion, framing it in similar terms on their own. In order to understand this trope better, our study will also examine two further related texts: an early Christian tale from the Desert Fathers and a Zen story. The inclusion of a Confucian text among these three distinctly religious traditions does not ignore the debate over the definition of Confucianism as a religion.1 It seems
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallHelping a Woman by the River: A Comparative Study of a Gendered Trope2026-01-06text/htmlen-USHelping a Woman by the River: A Comparative Study of a Gendered Trope2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1574532026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Environmental Justice, Tradition, and John Muir
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978992
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Long before the reckoning on racial justice that occurred across the United States in the summer and fall of 2020, American environmentalism's own reckoning with its history of bias was well past due. Since the 1980s, the movement for environmental justice has emerged to raise a critical awareness around the problems that stem from environmentalism's overwhelming whiteness. Environmental justice advocates laid bare mainstream environmentalism's ingrained political prejudices and spotlighted its racist history. Critical discourses about central figures in environmental history became more common than ever before.One such figure at whom that critical discourse has been directed is John Muir, the renowned
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/564/image/coversmallEnvironmental Justice, Tradition, and John Muir2026-01-06text/htmlen-USEnvironmental Justice, Tradition, and John Muir2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1096492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06