Project MUSE®: English Language Notes - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in English Language Notes.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 54 (2016) through current issue
Latest Articles: English Language NotesTWOProject MUSE®English Language Notes2573-35750013-8282Latest articles in English Language Notes. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Where History Lies: Putting the Past Before Us
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985753
<p></p>
History is both everywhere and nowhere. It is omnipresent in the sense that time creates a past, a reality (often in the form of decay) for all things as the earth rotates around the sun. This ever-present reality of history cultivates a sense of its enduring relevance and thus encourages the observation of patterns, even if the nature of those patterns is difficult to discern. In this fashion, Mark Twain once pithily opined that “history never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legend.”1 That sense of familiar circumstances and responses in different places and eras to history invites the idea of comparison:
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallWhere History Lies: Putting the Past Before Us2026-03-19text/htmlen-USWhere History Lies: Putting the Past Before Us2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®1013042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19To Improve the Instrumentality of History: The Metaphysical Turn in Traditional Chinese Historiography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985754
<p></p>
The instrumentality of history, or the function of history, has been the raison d’être of historians since the dawn of civilization. Whether ancient or modern, historians have consciously or unconsciously shaped their work to serve societal needs—whether preserving traditions, educating future generations, or supporting power structures. However, the degree of attention paid to instrumentality and the ways it has been practiced have varied considerably, not only between different cultures but also within a single civilization at different times. To preserve the memory of the Persian War between the Greeks and their Asian neighbors, for example, Herodotus took upon himself the task of “inquiring” into the causes,1
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallTo Improve the Instrumentality of History: The Metaphysical Turn in Traditional Chinese Historiography2026-03-19text/htmlen-USTo Improve the Instrumentality of History: The Metaphysical Turn in Traditional Chinese Historiography2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®928042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19How Mesopotamia Became Western: Emerging from the Long Shadows of the Bible and Ancient Greece
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985755
<p></p>
Mesopotamia, occupying the region of present-day Iraq and its environs, is where the world’s earliest cities and empires arose from the late fourth through the mid–first millennium BCE. These polities, some vast and long-lived, some ephemeral, are remarkable for their achievements across a striking array of cultural spheres: poetry and literature, sculpture, metalworking, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and many other realms of art and science. They are also remarkable for the degree to which their vast material remains were lost and forgotten (at least until the mid-nineteenth century), even as they retained a potent and vivid— but also strikingly nebulous—place in Western art (figs. 1 and 2), imagination, and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallHow Mesopotamia Became Western: Emerging from the Long Shadows of the Bible and Ancient Greece2026-03-19text/htmlen-USHow Mesopotamia Became Western: Emerging from the Long Shadows of the Bible and Ancient Greece2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®1648262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19History’s Fragments and the Hebrew Bible
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985756
<p></p>
“History is the story of fragments—what survives and what does not.”1 In the case of the Hebrew Bible and the Southern Levant, the fragments are both literal and figurative: They include archaeological and textual remains as well as fragmentations of views and representations of the past.2 Some of the more figurative fragments come from the written sources, which present varied, often contradictory readings. Others occur in the space of interpretation, among the myriad readers and scholars who craft their own histories from these ancient sources. And intersecting with the space of interpretation is the discipline of biblical studies, meaning the proliferation of methods and practices that result in an increasingly
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallHistory’s Fragments and the Hebrew Bible2026-03-19text/htmlen-USHistory’s Fragments and the Hebrew Bible2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®1236912026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19In Search of Agonist Time: Ethnomusicology as Historico-Philosophical Practice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985757
<p></p>
How is it that rationalization leads to the fury of power?The past lies, and we lie with it. Not only lie, but colonize, kill, and extract culture in service of the past’s lies. Historians do it, as do historical subjects. In my research, I have been preoccupied by how people creatively rewrite the past while writing, performing, disseminating, reworking, and interpreting music. In the modern city of Jerusalem, simultaneously a site of divinity and a space of violent conflict and colonial domination, and the place where I have conducted most of my research to date, people sing songs that narrativize their sense of being in the world: as religious adherent, as ethno-national chauvinist, as liberal citizen-subject
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallIn Search of Agonist Time: Ethnomusicology as Historico-Philosophical Practice2026-03-19text/htmlen-USIn Search of Agonist Time: Ethnomusicology as Historico-Philosophical Practice2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®770272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Jewish Catholicism? Ancient Judaism, (Anti-)Catholic Polemics, and Historical Scholarship in Southern Germany, 1820–1870
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985758
<p></p>
Catholics have been written out of the history of scholarship on ancient Judaism after 1800. Some accounts pass over them in silence. Hans-Joachim Kraus starts his classic history, tellingly, with the Reformation, opening with a chapter titled “The Protestant Scriptural Principal and the Beginnings of Biblical Criticism.” From the Enlightenment onward, only Protestants appear in its table of contents.1 When Rudolf Smend first published German Old Testament Scholars in Three Centuries, he included not a single Catholic in his portrait gallery.2 Thirty years later, in 2017, he expanded the chronology another century and the geography slightly beyond the German lands but incorporated only a handful of non-Protestants:
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallJewish Catholicism? Ancient Judaism, (Anti-)Catholic Polemics, and Historical Scholarship in Southern Germany, 1820–18702026-03-19text/htmlen-USJewish Catholicism? Ancient Judaism, (Anti-)Catholic Polemics, and Historical Scholarship in Southern Germany, 1820–18702026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®2404742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Experiences of Defeat: Lost Causes, Empathy, and Dissent in British Historiography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985759
<p></p>
It is just over twenty-two years since the death of Christopher Hill, the prolific historian of seventeenth-century England, and 2024 marked the fortieth anniversary of the publication of one of his most interesting postretirement books, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries.1 Intended to clarify and refine some of Hill’s arguments in earlier works such as his masterpiece on radical culture, The World Turned Upside Down, Hill’s Experience focuses on the “losers” in the English civil wars, especially those of a more radical frame of mind, beginning with the Levellers but including others across the political and religious spectra. Though this was far from the first work to study
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallExperiences of Defeat: Lost Causes, Empathy, and Dissent in British Historiography2026-03-19text/htmlen-USExperiences of Defeat: Lost Causes, Empathy, and Dissent in British Historiography2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®2684132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985760
<p></p>
When Hamlet, hoping to discover the truth about his father’s death, stages a play that implicates King Claudius as his murderer, he is, as many scholars have explained, making a statement about political theater and performance, among other things. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King,” he explains. In turning the “play” into a mechanism of interpretation, however—“the play’s the thing”—Hamlet also invites us to think about the relationship between gaming, on the one hand, and narration, on the other. A far cry from the board games and video games that are the subject of this issue’s “Of Note” installment, Hamlet’s play within a play nevertheless raises questions about simulation
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-03-19text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®51292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19The Video Game Is a Gag
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985761
<p></p>
The history of video-game criticism has been a history of media comparisons. To conceptualize the emerging medium, develop a critical vocabulary, and stake a disciplinary claim, early scholars of games argued for many different guiding metaphors. Video games have been regularly compared to theater for their highly structured yet improvisatory performances and multimodal environments.1 The prevalence of text-based adventure games led to many early comparisons with novels and poetry, a link sustained by the waxing of post-structuralism and narratology in 1990s English departments.2 Cinema has offered ways of thinking about mise-en-scène, genre, and camera framing.3 Even links to other playful activities—sports, board
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallThe Video Game Is a Gag2026-03-19text/htmlen-USThe Video Game Is a Gag2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®188142026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19You Say “Games,” I Hear “Board Games”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762
<p></p>
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s 2024 “I Can’t Hear You: Gestures, Stereotypes, and Brushings Against the Player in Dota 2” focuses on a 2019 Dota 2 tournament to discuss gestures in esports.1 Emily Louisa Smith’s “Fallout of Shakespeare: Playing and Video Game Theater,” also published in 2024, is concerned with performances and adaptations of Shakespeare within the game world of Fallout.2 Eric Hayot’s 2021 “Video Games and the Novel” explores the hermeneutics of games stories, some of their cultural history within games studies, and ways in which player choice might bend stories toward player-pleasing happy endings, and then outlines examples of games that disrupted this curve.3Three distinct areas of focus
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985762">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/721/image/coversmallYou Say “Games,” I Hear “Board Games”2026-03-19text/htmlen-USYou Say “Games,” I Hear “Board Games”2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®174232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19