Scarlet-Letter Politics: The Rhetoric of Shame in the Campaign to Unseat President Barack Hussein Obama

This essay considers the politics of racial shaming as deployed against Barack Obama, arguing that it targeted black and foreign bodies as threats to the American body politic

”Other” or “one of us”?: the porn user in public and academic discourse

The consumption of sexually explicit media has long been a matter of public and political concern. It has also been a topic of academic interest. In both these arenas a predominantly behaviourist model of effects and regulation has worked to cast the examination of sexually explicit texts and their consumption as a debate about harm. The broader area of investigation remains extraordinarily undeveloped. Sexually explicit media is a focus of interest for academics because of the way it ‘speaks’ sex and sexuality for its culture. In this paper I examine existing and emerging figures of the porn consumer, their relation to ways of thinking and speaking about pornography, and the implications of these for future work on porn consumption. </p

A Study of the Symbolic Meaning and Period Value of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter

Pearl is a distinctive artistic figure created by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his novel The Scarlet Letter. She is highly symbolic in her identity, name, appearance and character. Her existence not only drives the development of the main characters’ thoughts and behavioral changes, but also carries the author’s praise of truth, goodness and beauty, his communication of ideals and hopes, and the profound understanding of the awakening of women’s consciousness. This kind of praise, communication and understanding has wide contemporary value in today’s society

Unfriending Hawthorne

This essay examines the use of 1980s romantic comedies, particularly the films of John Hughes, by the film, Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010). I use an intertextual approach to adaptation studies to link one of the film\u27s source texts, Can\u27t Buy Me Love (Steve Rush, 1987) to Nathaniel Hawthorne\u27s The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Canons, Culture Wars and History: A Case Study of Canonicity Through the Lens of The Blithedale Romance

The act of reading a text is twofold. There not only needs to be a text present, but also a reader who understands and interprets that text. One can think of the act of reading as the creation of a second, interpretive text. This second text documents the reader\u27s interpretations of the physical text at hand. While the primary text remains relatively stable throughout time, the second, interpretive text changes with every reading. While these readings are circumscribed to individual readers, the culture and historical situation that the readers exist within also influence him/her. Michel Foucault proposed that one could look at texts as cultural production. If one were to examine enough texts from any point in time, one could draw out themes and ideas that would define the culture that produced the texts. This method of examining texts as cultural artifact has problems from a literary perspective. It makes the literary critic into a historian and reduces the study of literature to the study of historical artifact. This poses a threat to the entire idea of studying literature as an academic pursuit in its own right. The method employed in this essay is similar to Foucault\u27s, but the focus is changed. This essay constructs a biography of The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. More accurately, it constructs a biography of the readers of The Blithedale Romance. Instead of examining The Blithedale Romance as a representation of 1852, I will examine the different interpretations of The Blithedale Romance as representations of the historical periods in which they were produced. By examining the interpretations of the text and how they change throughout time, I hope to expose how historical circumstance and historically bound modes of thought influence the nature of a text itself, its popularity, and its relationship to the literary canon

The Scarlet Letter: Embroidering Transcendentalism and Anti-transcendentalism Thread for an Early American World

Published in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the dark romantic story of The Scarlet Letter was immediately met with success, and Hawthorne was recognized as the first fictional writer to truly represent American perspective and experience. At the time when most novelists focused on portraying the outside world, Hawthorne dwelled deeply in the innermost, hidden emotional and mental psyches of his characters. Despite being acquainted to both famed transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and married to the transcendentalist painter Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne was often referred to as anti-transcendentalist or dark romantic writer in The Scarlet Letter. Is he also influenced by the transcendentalist movement in his famed novel?  Evidence shows that he is more transcendentalist than anti-transcendentalist in The Scarlet Letter

A Report Card on the Impeachment: Judging the Institutions That Judged President Clinton

Reflecting on the impeachment and trial of Pres Bill Clinton, Bloch considers how well the impeachment process worked and what was learned from the experience that might be a guide in the event of another impeachment in the future. Any critique of the impeachment process should begin with the independent counsel statute

Unstitching Scarlet Letters?: Prosecutorial Discretion and Expungement

This Article argues that scholarly discussions about prosecutorial discretion need to extend their focus beyond the exercise of prosecutorial judgment pretrial or questions of factual and legal guilt. Given that the primary role of the prosecutoris to do “justice,” this Article calls for increased attention to the exercise of discretion after the guilt phase is complete, specifically in the context of expungement of nonconviction andconviction information. It offers a framework for exercising such discretion and, in doing so, hopes to initiate additional conversation about the role of prosecutors during the phases that follow arrest and prosecution

Puritanism: The Persistence of a Myth

A study of the impact on subsequent literature and criticism of the myth of American Puritanism invented in Victorian times and given its classic formulation by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter

The Development of the Academic Dress of the University of Oxford 1920–2012

One might expect that the well-trodden ground of Oxford academic dress would yield nothing new or surprising, but this is far from the truth. With an institution as old as Oxford, many onlookers assume that because they know Oxford’s traditions that they know Oxford’s rules and so do not need to consult statute. An excellent example is the number of undergraduates these days who profess that one may not wear the square cap until graduation, whereas the most cursory glance at University regulations would show their belief false. Also, I would argue that the academic dress of Oxford is of particular importance as its gowns and hoods are used as templates for many other universities in the United Kingdom and further afield. Thus an understanding of the nature and origin of the current state of academic dress is essential. [Excerpt]