The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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The Brontës, Alcott, and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected 'Transatlantic' Female Figure
No full textTabitha Aykroyd, Martha Brown, Nancy and Sarah Garrs were just a few of the very many girls and women working as domestic servants in early Victorian Britain. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the precise context and conditions in which they were employed in Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontë sisters lived for most of their lives (1820–1855), and the influence that they had on the well-being of this famous family and on the imagination and literary activity of the sisters. Aspects connected with the following will be explored and problematized: the value and respect that the Brontës attributed to or showed these domestic laborers and their work, including sharing in their tasks and duties; brief but useful connections of these figures with the sisters’ own professional activities as middle-class women (namely, when serving as teachers and governesses themselves); and also comparison with some relevant literary representations of the figure and role of the “female servant” in the Brontës’ novels. A complementary purpose is of a more transatlantic nature: to compare their earlier British domestic context with Louisa May Alcott’s later American one, and their literary representations of the female servant with Alcott’s own extensive treatment of that neglected figure in some of her fictional works. The justification for this comparison does not lie so much in the known influence that the works written by the Brontës, in particular Charlotte’s, had on Alcott, but more in their sharing of very similar concerns as regards this topic, in spite of very specific (transatlantic) differences that can be revealing of their respective attitude towards servitude
Mary McCarthy and the Genealogy of Progressive Liberalism
No full textThree decades after graduating from Vassar, in 1963, McCarthy published her bestselling novel The Group – a phenomenal commercial success that brought her fame, wealth, and plenty of scorn from her fellow New York intellectuals. In The Group, she revisits the site of her political and aesthetic awakening, Vassar College, by focusing on the lives of eight – or, at closer counting, nine – Vassar girls, a group of friends from the class of ‘33, who have just graduated, and now are off to put their Vassar-bred ambitions into practice, or not. At first sight, the novel is not concerned with politics. Yet indirectly, it reinterprets and reevaluates the liberalism of the 1930s. And it does so, curiously, by hanging on, in some crucial ways, to the model function of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, though what it appropriates from Dos Passos no longer corresponds to the young McCarthy’s enthusiasm of the year 1933
Service in the Long 19th Century
No full textThis special issue focuses on “Transatlantic Women at Work” in the 19th century, with attention paid specifically to the labor women performed that was deemed by family, community, government, and often the women themselves as “service.” Our introduction briefly describes the six articles and responses included in this issue, and their origins in an online forum in 2021 and 2022, three poems, and one fictional work. The overview of contributions is followed by an attempt at theorizing the understanding and conception of the idea of “service” from a diachronic perspective. This exploration of varying notions and the accompanying politics of “service” is organized in sections as follows: “The Evolving Concept of ‘Service’ in the Long 19th Century,” “Theorizing: What Is this Thing Called Service,” “The Tradition of ‘Service’ as a White, Middle-Class Notion,” “Women’s Service and Reform,” “Municipal Housekeeping as Service to the Community,” and “Women of Color and ‘Service to Their Race’.” Our examination of 19th-century conduct books and reform texts by and for women illuminates how evolving notions of service as benevolence was primarily connected to a well-to-do class of White women and conceptualized against a notion of servitude as hard (enumerated) labor associated with poor women and Women of Color. We show how since the beginning of the century Black activists fought against such racial essentialism. However, White service notions lastingly influenced both 19th-century (segregated) ideas of women’s social roles and 20th/21st century women’s historiography that continued to center White concepts of True Womanhood. We conclude by acknowledging that in our own 21st century, women (especially Women of Color) too often continue in the vicious cycle of being relegated to lower paid and lower status service work, professions which remain lower paid because they are held by women. As we point out, the recent Covid pandemic shed renewed light on this transatlantic reality
Poems in Dialogue
No full textJessica and Ellen are old friends, living continents apart who met up in Regensburg in May 2022. Upon exiting a circular stairwall of the Old Town Hall, they noticed a bronze nail bent, rusted and lying on the ground. Jessica held it in her open palm and suggested that they each write a poem about the nail. What may appear to contain shades of a Shelleyesque challenge was not a competition at all, but a mutual encouragement to write a poem
Still Mad–On Feminism, Anger, and the Current State of U.S. Women's Rights
No full textThe current state of Women’s Rights in the United States is a matter of grave concern and thus, without question, a core topic for an issue on “American Crises.” An altered Supreme Court and individual state legislation like the 2021 Texas Heartbeat Act raise distinct concerns over human rights issues, women’s reproductive rights, and the potential dismantling of Roe v Wade. The Trump administration and the January 6 insurrection gave new urgency to debates over toxic masculinity and its relation to populism and the media. The frustration over gender inequality, care work gaps, and the toll of emotional labor has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Recent Supreme Court nomination hearings have also raised new concerns about gender equity
The State, Police Violence, and Black Lives Matter
No full textThis article addresses the history of police violence and extra-legal killings of Black people and argues that social contract theory plays an ideological role to legitimate the coercive power of the state over the African-American community. The article first looks at the alarming numbers of Black Americans killed in the United States over the past few decades and compares police violence to the extra-legal lynchings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, his classic 1921 essay, the article then describes the obfuscation of an underlying truth: that, far from being a neutral arbiter between its citizens, the state is the primary inscription of violence in the body politic. The police are the face of that state, both in its law-making violence (die rechtsetzende Gewalt) and law-preserving violence (die rechtserhaltende Gewalt). In contrast to the mythology of a social contract in which all members are treated equally before the law, the state targets African-Americans to legitimate its monopoly on violence, thereby unmasking the social contract as a racial contract, which has excluded Black people from the country’s very inception. The power of the state rests in part on the psychology of police officers who see themselves as its very embodiment and believe that any resistance to their authority is both a personal and symbolic challenge to their monopoly on violence. Yet, the article dissents from the view of many who believe that the country may transcend its history of institutional racism and violence and restore the promise of the social contract. The article concludes that, despite the hopes of modern liberalism, Benjamin’s theory leads to the conclusion that there is little possibility for either the redemption of the social contract or the rehabilitation of the state
Does the Decline of the Humanities Track the Decline in Civil Society?
No full textThe following conversation took place on January 28, 2022 in Davis California between Margaret Ferguson, David Simpson, Andrea Ross and the interviewer, NASJ editor Andrew Majeske (AM). Margaret Ferguson (MF), Professor Emerita at UC Davis, is author of Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France, as well as other books and numerous articles. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is past president of the Modern Language Association, and she was co-editor for the 6th and most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Margie’s husband, David Simpson (DS), Professor Emeritus at UC Davis, retired from there as G. B. Needham Endowed Chair in English. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a former Guggenheim Fellow, and is a past president of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. He is author of many books, most recently of States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature (U of Chicago P 2019), and Engaging Violence: Civility and the Reach of Literature, forthcoming later this year from Stanford UP. Andrea Ross (AR) is the author of Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness and teaches in UC Davis’ University Writing Program
So in Video‐Mediated Communication in the Expanding Circle
No full textThe English discourse marker so can mark result, inference, connection, topic development, action prompting, and emergence of incipiency. In English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts, it also marks hesitation, self‐correction, and floor‐holding. Our paper uses quantitative and qualitative discourse analytical methodology to examine so in a corpus of video‐mediated informal conversations between ELF speakers, where it is the most frequent discourse marker. The analysis demonstrates that all functions documented in first‐language English use also occur in ELF. We also document extended uses of so to prompt inference and to illustrate pragmatic competence, particularly in combination with other discourse markers such as okay
