That ‘social text,’ that fleshy real world was inhabited by maids, laundry workers, seamstresses, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, basket weavers, laborers, stablemen–all of whom Emily knew by name. The poet may have traded on stereotypes (what Folsom and Price call vortex words) that telegraphed charged images to her readers. What’s to be made of Emily’s relationships to the people behind these stereotypes? This was the social context of her art-making, the whole roster of people who make the work possible and ‘fuel the fantasy of independence. Ironically, it is this very support that allows the practice of art making to appear as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

To learn more about Aífe Murray’s work, see her web site.

Murray, Aífe. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010.

I’ve been reading Simon Schama’s The American Future: A History over the last few weeks in preparation for re-thinking my Introduction to American Studies course for this year. Schama uses the lens of the Obama campaign to look forward and back at American history in ways that make the USA refreshingly familiar and simultaneously brand new.

“The Publication of “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker,” was written as a term paper for a graduate course on science and society at Harvard in 1997, and contains a very useful overview of the publication and reception of the original version. There are a number of links to related pieces on Rothman’s home page, including one to Terrorism, War, and the Press, a 2003 collection edited by Rothman’s wife, clearly of immediate interest as the war in Iraq drags on, and politicians continue to beat the drums of war. Consider, for example, McCain’s latest pontifications on democracy and so-called U. S. interests in relation to the current crisis in Georgia.

The main questions, as always, reverberate: What must be done? When will we ever learn?

The site now hosts several online journals, most usefully, Across the Disciplines, and a collection of digitized books discussing the teaching of writing, writing across the curriculum pedagogies, and reference guides to rhetoric and composition studies.

In addressing the needs of my students here in Miyazaki, I need to find a similar resource in Japanese addressing academic skills and the development of expertise as a writer in the L1.

Many of the audience are folks I’ve known almost my entire stay in Miyazaki, so lots of hisashiburi (Haven’t seen you in a long time!) sociability, and the strange mix of wonder and familiarity that seeing your friends’ children growing up and finding themselves as adults provokes.