Gen-X Hamlets: Imitating the Dane to Find a Personal American Masculinity

This essay examines the meanings associated with the figure of Hamlet in American popular culture, particularly as an ideal of American masculinity. Though this association between Prince Hamlet and American masculinity has a long history, this association became particularly strong in films of the 1990s. Though much critical attention has been paid to Hamlet references in big-budget films with middle-aged protagonists, less examined have been smaller-budget films that center on twentysomething protagonists struggling to find their own direction in post-feminist, post-Cold War, post-industrial American society. True Romance, Clueless, Beautiful Girls, Grosse Pointe Blank, Two Girls and a Guy and Best Men treat their references to Hamlet with wit, weaving them into the text in an offhand way, seamlessly mixing Shakespeare’s lines with contemporary dialogue–signaling more significant parallels between the two texts, in a dialogic relationship. This essay interrogates the versions of masculinity that Hamlet references are used to mark and to promote in these Gen-X films

Guillermo del Toro’s political fairy tales

While critical attention has largely focused on Del Toro’s overt fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Del Toro’s Hollywood films similarly incorporate the mythic, moral, and gothic qualities of classic fairy tales. His new fairy tales present vital contemporary lessons embedded in these archetypal journeys— and their audience’s memories. His free borrowings from fairy tales and popular culture deliberately connect the familiar to his uncanny worlds. This construction is most evident in his films Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and The Shape of Water (2017). The contemporary politics of race, sexuality, gender, and environmentalism are embedded within these original Hollywood fairy tales. This essay focuses on the intersecting political messages woven into Hellboy II: The Golden Army and The Shape of Water, messages amplified not obscured by their fairy tale delivery. Through rich textual references, intersections, and hidden subtexts, Del Toro creates new gothic fairy tales, with original protagonists, emerging from the margins. By resisting previous patriarchal and racial boundaries, these films challenge their audiences to embrace new paradigms

Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #65

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.Criticizing school district bureaucracies has become a growth industry over the past couple of decades. In the face of all this anti-district and anti–central office rhetoric, it is important to recognize the growing number of scholars who are emphasizing the importance of the district in school reform efforts and the research base that examines the role of the central office. Building on previous reviews of school district leadership, this review adds a new focus on the role of school district central offices in improving instruction and raising student achievement. We examine the functional tasks of the central office and the internal dynamics of relations between the central office and district schools (with their principals, teachers, and students). The review concludes with a heuristic model of how the central office influences classroom instruction and student achievement in district schools.Grant (No. R117-D40005) from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES, formerly OERI) at the U.S. Department of Educatio

The One with the Feminist Critique: Revisiting Millennial Postfeminism with Friends

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism

Green-Card American Fiction: Naturalizing Novels by Visiting Authors

This essay examines four contemporary novels written by Commonwealth authors who lived in the United States: DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, Salman Rushdie’s Fury, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and Zadie Smith's On Beauty. These novels offer critiques of American culture, as well as asking how they define the borders of the American novel in a global literary society. When non-American Anglophone authors write novels set in the United States, it raises the question of what defines a novel written in English as “American” as opposed to “British” or “Commonwealth,” particularly when many Anglophone authors avail themselves of residential opportunities in the United States. The question becomes particularly interesting when these US-based novels are recognized by the Man Booker Committee for Commonwealth fiction, as was Vernon God Little.These four demonstrate the fuzzy distinction between an American novel and expatriate fiction, particularly when the novel only contains American characters, with little non-American perspective apparent within the narrative. So are these novelists writing from the community of their passports, their present country of residence, or as temporary/virtual “Americans”? Are these novels an external critique of American culture–or are these novels part of an American literary tradition of social examination

Visions of Red Riding Hood: Transformative Bodies in Contemporary Adaptations

Gothic and sexual elements are embedded within both Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s tellings of “Little Red Riding Hood”. When popular culture turned to fairy tales from the late 20th century forward, reimagining them as gothic tales for adults, “Little Red Riding Hood” provided a particularly rich setting. In particular, these adaptations exploited the false binaries within these tales while making more visible the sexual abuse and recovery encoded in the narratives. This essay will first explore the particular gothic qualities within this tale, as well as the shapeshifting nature of the four characters. After establishing how the figure of Red, as well as her motifs, are key to ensemble fairy-tale narratives, I will examine adaptations that directly explore the sexuality and agency of a young woman, as she resists both predators and her family legacy. However, the last section will note that monstrosity, like victimization, can be resisted. Overall, this essay interrogates contemporary film and television adaptations of this tale, with a particular interest in the messages of recovery and agency in these new versions

Green-Card American Fiction: Naturalizing Novels by Visiting Authors Green-Card American Fiction: Naturalizing Novels by Visiting Authors

This essay examines four contemporary novels written by Commonwealth authors who lived in the United States: DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, Salman Rushdie’s Fury, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and Zadie Smith's On Beauty. These novels offer critiques of American culture, as well as asking how they define the borders of the American novel in a global literary society. When non-American Anglophone authors write novels set in the United States, it raises the question of what defines a novel written in English as “American” as opposed to “British” or “Commonwealth,” particularly when many Anglophone authors avail themselves of residential opportunities in the United States. The question becomes particularly interesting when these US-based novels are recognized by the Man Booker Committee for Commonwealth fiction, as was Vernon God Little.These four demonstrate the fuzzy distinction between an American novel and expatriate fiction, particularly when the novel only contains American characters, with little non-American perspective apparent within the narrative. So are these novelists writing from the community of their passports, their present country of residence, or as temporary/virtual “Americans”? Are these novels an external critique of American culture–or are these novels part of an American literary tradition of social examination

Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #62

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.This study reports the results of a four-year multimethod evaluation of the implementation of the Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP) in six Baltimore City schools. BCP used a combination of the Direct Instruction (DI) program and Core Knowledge as its reform curriculum. Each of the six schools was demographically matched with a similar, within-district school so that it would have a reasonable control against which it could be compared. Two cohorts of students in the BCP and the control schools were followed through the course of the evaluation—students who were in either kindergarten or grade two during the 1996–97 school year (primarily in third and fifth grades, respectively, during 1999–2000). Interviews with principals and DI coordinators and focus groups with teachers were conducted each of the four years of the study to gauge BCP-school staff perceptions of the ongoing innovation.Grant (No. R-117-40005) from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Educatio