9. Regionalism and the Realities of Naming

Complications seem inevitably to arise whenever one tries to define either regionalism in general or any specific region like the South or the Great Plains or to categorize the art and artifacts that come from or relate to that area by means of such language. Commentators occasionally try to take the easy way out of these taxonomic difficulties by simply declaring that “writing is writing,” by which reductive expression they apparently mean that all writing is “universal” in nature (the local manifestation of some “universal language”) and that, therefore, all that varies from “region” to “region” is the inflection. Inflection is a convenient word because it seems to delimit linguistic variation (or other variations) less strictly than words like dialect or idiom. A less immediately diagnostic term, inflection appears to permit a far greater range of localisms within the discourse in question. Even so, it is not convincing that what we usually think of as “regionalisms” (whether in literature, the arts, culture, society, class, or economics) actually amount to little more than differing inflections upon some universal or general language or discourse that is itself associated with a larger and more heterogeneous geographical or cultural entity like a nation, continent, or socioeconomic class. Consequently, this essay represents an attempt to articulate a slightly different perspective upon the matter of regionalism and its slippery definitions. This attempt comes with a significant disclaimer: it does not so much resolve the difficulties as suggest a different and perhaps more constructive way of regarding them

The Relevance and Resiliency of the Humanities

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly visible indicators of what many call a “war on the humanities.” The issue is a familiar one. With everyone’s finances under increasing stress, there is mounting pressure to “cut back on nonessentials,” and among both educational institutions and the broader public community, the humanities seem easy targets for the cutters and the pruners. There’s a general sense that the humanities are not very useful when it comes to objective goals like job opportunities, better paychecks, and career advancement. Even former president Barack Obama proclaimed in 2014 that “young people could make more money in skilled manufacturing than with art-history degrees.” His immediate backtracking—there’s “nothing wrong with an art-history degree” (qtd. in DeSantis)—only underscores what a throwaway the humanities have become in today’s all-for-profit culture, and the Trump administration’s declared intention to eliminate the NEH and the NEA further emphasizes the depth of this myopia. The NEH’s grim Congressional Budget Justification for fiscal year 2018 says it all, requesting only minimal funding for the “orderly closure of the agency” and stating that “no new grants or matching offers will be made beginning in FY 2018” (Appropriations Request). In what follows I discuss some of the stakes in the battle, suggest some strategies for coalition building, and contextualize the current wrangle by looking back some two centuries toward a comparably dire prognosis for art, culture, and creative humanism, concluding with a rallying cry from what may seem like an unlikely ally—today’s military. Some professional humanists have suggested that the humanities have increasingly lost their way and therefore have only themselves to blame: what used to be a clear agenda in the great books tradition, they say, has deteriorated into high school courses in Harry Potter and the history of pop rock and into college courses like The Philosophy of Star Trek and The Art of the Comic Book. Notice, though, that no one suggests that the widely popular college course called Physics for Poets is unacceptably lowbrow or that Math in the City, Consumer Chemistry, and Extraterrestrial Life are mere soft courses. If we consider what made the humanities such easy targets in the first place, we can, as engaged citizens in a society and culture whose priorities seem to be continually shifting, respond to misguided criticism of this sort. Doing so is not just wise; it is essential. And we have, perhaps to our surprise, eloquent and powerful allies in colleagues in the STEM disciplines whom we typically regard as adversaries. More important, we have the humanities themselves. Creatively refiguring and reconnecting the modes of thinking associated with the humanities and the STEM areas can—and will—work to the mutual benefit of both.In October 2013 David A. Hollinger, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley, published a wonderfully sane essay called “The Rift: Can STEM and the Humanities Get Along?” Hollinger points out that the media noise about the supposed death of the humanities ignores “the deep kinship between humanistic scholarship and natural science.” The balkanizing shifts in the academic tectonic plates in all areas of teaching, scholarship, and learning in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he writes, threaten “the ability of modern disciplines to provide—in the institutional context of universities—the services for which they have been designed.” Hollinger argues that the humanities constitute “the great risk takers in the tradition of the Enlightenment,” embracing as they routinely do the messy, risk- intensive areas of inquiry largely “left aside by the methodologically narrower, largely quantitative” disciplines. This long-standing disciplinary engagement with risk necessarily positions the humanities along those continually fluctuating “borderlands between Wissenschaft [knowledge] and opinion, between scholarship and ideology.” The inevitable product of the troubling questions that the humanities typically ask is critical thinking. While critical thinking both employs and relies on the empirical reasoning we associate with science, it nevertheless involves a large measure of imagination and speculation—of “what if?” The humanities stimulate that variety of creative inquiry that arranges various components of “what is known” (and what is not known) in different, alternative configurations, often discovering among the apparent disconnections new and unsuspected connections.A century and a half ago, writing in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill said that the greatest threat to all of us is the decline of that very sort of rugged, probing critical thinking that challenges our habit of lazy thinking—or of not thinking at all. Mill worried about what he called “the despotism of custom,” which he regarded as a collective social force that was in mid-nineteenth- century Western society increasingly warring against individuality and therefore against genuine liberty. Mill was adamant that the decline of critical thinking inevitably produces mediocrity— mediocrity that comes to characterize and over time erode entire societies, nations, cultures. No one leads; everyone follows, so that “public opinion now rules the world,” as he put it. And no one notices—or cares—that individual liberty is a casualty, because in this world of mediocrity people’s “thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers” (85). Substitute talk radio (and, increasingly, social media and blogs) for newspapers, and the relevance of Mill’s point immediately becomes apparen

Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception

One of the most exciting developments in Romantic studies in the past decade has been the rediscovery and repositioning of women poets as vital and influential members of the Romantic literary community. This is the first volume to focus on women poets of this era and to consider how their historical reception challenges current conceptions of Romanticism. With a broad, revisionist view, the essays examine the poetry these women produced, what the poets thought about themselves and their place in the contemporary literary scene, and what the recovery of their works says about current and past theoretical frameworks. The contributors focus their attention on such poets as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Mary Lamb, and Fanny Kemble and argue for a significant rethinking of Romanticism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon. Grounding their consideration of the poets in cultural, social, intellectual, and aesthetic concerns, the authors contest the received wisdom about Romantic poetry, its authors, its themes, and its audiences. Some of the essays examine the ways in which many of the poets sought to establish stable positions and identities for themselves, while others address the changing nature over time of the reputations of these women poets. Harriet Kramer Linkin, associate professor of English at New Mexico State University, is coeditor of Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period. Stephen C. Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, is author of Royal Mourning and Regency Culture. This volume takes an important step toward redefining the literary mainstream of the Romantic period. —Choice Discloses a much more populous Romantic period that we have yet been accustomed to study and teach. . . . This impressively coherent collection of essays presents a united front in arguing for a long-needed expansion of the Romantic canon, recognizing women\u27s valuable contributions to its most popular poetic genres. —Eighteenth-Century Women Those teaching women poets of the Romantic period must address a number of questions: What was the initial reception of these poets? Why did they fade from public consciousness? What circumstances have led to renewed interest in these writers today? This volume will help us address these issues subtly and creatively. —Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia Offers a range of positions and methods that challenge many of the major currents in scholarship on romantic women writers. These challenges are fresh, exciting, and absolutely necessary if the study of women writers in the romantic period is to have a vital intellectual future. —Mary Favret, Indiana University Absolutely must be read. —Romanticism on the Net An excellent collection. —Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 This valuable and wide-ranging collection will provide the reader with ample material for further investigation. —Times Literary Supplementhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1064/thumbnail.jp

Cardiac pheochromocytoma involving the left main coronary artery presenting with exertional angina

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26628/1/0000169.pd

PLoS Pathog

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a leading infectious cause of morbidity in immune-compromised patients. γδ T cells have been involved in the response to CMV but their role in protection has not been firmly established and their dependency on other lymphocytes has not been addressed. Using C57BL/6 αβ and/or γδ T cell-deficient mice, we here show that γδ T cells are as competent as αβ T cells to protect mice from CMV-induced death. γδ T cell-mediated protection involved control of viral load and prevented organ damage. γδ T cell recovery by bone marrow transplant or adoptive transfer experiments rescued CD3ε-/- mice from CMV-induced death confirming the protective antiviral role of γδ T cells. As observed in humans, different γδ T cell subsets were induced upon CMV challenge, which differentiated into effector memory cells. This response was observed in the liver and lungs and implicated both CD27+ and CD27- γδ T cells. NK cells were the largely preponderant producers of IFNγ and cytotoxic granules throughout the infection, suggesting that the protective role of γδ T cells did not principally rely on either of these two functions. Finally, γδ T cells were strikingly sufficient to fully protect Rag-/-γc-/- mice from death, demonstrating that they can act in the absence of B and NK cells. Altogether our results uncover an autonomous protective antiviral function of γδ T cells, and open new perspectives for the characterization of a non classical mode of action which should foster the design of new γδ T cell based therapies, especially useful in αβ T cell compromised patients

Review of The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920

This rich collection of essays is intellectually substantial, culturally significant, and much overdue. One of the least appreciated phenomena of American culture is its remarkable history of self-fashioning. The American continent was settled by European immigrants for a variety of reasons over some four centuries, and each wave of settlers contributed to the burgeoning mythology of the New World its own set of self-fulfilling prophecies. America was--and to a significant extent still is--a largely European construct, a cultural matrix whose outlines emerged and evolved often re-actively as individuals and groups found their expectations challenged by the stark realities of the American continent and its Native peoples. Hence much of the American experience has historically had to do with questionable attempts by non-native peoples to civilize the alien experience by recasting both its physical reality and its underlying ethos within experiential, intellectual, cultural, and mythic paradigms whose origins lay in the Old World

Originality And Influence In George Caleb Bingham\u27s Art

The work of the Missouri artist, George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), offers us a good opportunity for considering the broad subject of originality and influence in the arts. The combination of originality and convention in paintings such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The Jolly Flatboatmen, and The County Election can tell us much about the dynamics of that branch of American art which sought to reconcile the inherited traditions of formal, academic European art with the often strikingly unconventional reality of a New World. Often condescendingly labeled regional art because of its frequently eclectic emphasis upon the local and the folksy, this sort of genre painting is in fact directly related to the Romantic picturesque, as defined not only by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literary critics and practitioners but also by aestheticians from Edmund Burke and William Gilpin to Goethe and Ruskin. It follows from the new emphasis upon the real and the particular that may be traced in the poetry of Wordsworth and Freneau and the paintings of Constable and Church.1 On the other hand, the position of the neoclassical advocates of the general and the consensus who united behind Sir Joshua Reynolds is anticipated by Dr. ] ohnson\u27s Imlac, who declares that the poet must concern himself not with the individual but with the species ( he does not number the streaks of the tulip ).2 Artists like Bingham, however, were endeavoring to paint not just streaked tulips but a whole garden of flowers entirely unknown in Europe. Furthermore, that element of the unfamiliar, the different, frequently gains from the emphasis afforded by its juxtaposition with the familiar, the conventional. In many ways this study addresses the subject of tradition and the individual talent both on the personal level of the particular artist and on the broader national level of American art as it sought to distinguish itself from the European tradition that lay behind it. An artist like Bingham (or like frontier artists such as Remington and Russell) faced a dilemma in attempting to portray in formal works of art scenes, events, and experiences quite unlike anything familiar to either the producers or the consumers of conventional European art. The language of art had not yet developed the requisite vocabulary for the American experience, with the result that Bingham and others were forced both to adopt and to adapt the inherited vocabulary of the western European visual tradition for their own purposes. Ironically, this occurred even as in Europe the trend in visual and verbal art toward both romanticizing and sensationalizing the American frontier was gaining momentum.3 In any event, one discovers in the works of these American artists a visual device in many ways analogous to what literary critics call the simile. That is, an unfamiliar scene is frequently rendered in such a way that its significance is made apparent to the viewer through some degree of likeness to a picture (or pictures) with which the viewer is already familiar. This visual simile functions like its literary relative: not only is the similarity revealed, the difference-the uniqueness-is heightened in the process. Literary critics have made much of the ambiguity inherent in influence studies.4 I do not mean to suggest that Bingham or others like him set out to repudiate the European tradition in some sort of artistic patricide. Bingham does not engage in deliberate misinterpretation of his predecessors as a revision is tic means of freeing himself from any crippling fear of possibly repeating their statements in his own art. Bingham did not need, as Harold Bloom suggests many poets did, to liberate himself from his predecessors, but rather to employ their works in a variety of ways that enabled him to make statements of his own. His statements, however, do in some cases gain significance from the implied act of comparison involved in any such manipulation of source materials

Placing the Places in Wordsworth\u27s 1802 Sonnets

Wordsworth\u27s political sonnets of summer and fall 1802 recount the sights and sounds the poet encountered during the brief respite provided by the Peace of Amiens, which enabled him to return to France and to the woman and child who were the physical reminders of the time he had spent there ten years earlier in the spirited days following the French Revolution. Published together in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, they juxtapose the dispirited and pathetic state of France in 1802 with the ebullience Wordsworth recalled from that earlier time. More important, the sequence documents his return to England, tracing his anticipation of touching English soil again, his landing at Dover, his progress toward London, and his reactions to the capital\u27s decay.\u27 Interwoven with this geographical record is a series of carefully structured comparisons of France\u27s intellectual, cultural, and spiritual desolation with the state of affairs in England, a conservative mythmaking narrative that turns toward reaffirmation in a vision of a newly-and differently- idealized Britain.2 The sequence traces a crisis of patriotism arising from the poet\u27s recognition that, whatever his disappointment with his country\u27s responses to the French Revolution, he could not bring himself to desire England\u27s defeat.3 It recounts his paradoxical conclusion that the values embodied in the initial ideals of the French Revolution which he had so much admired and which had been perverted and then lost by 1802 still resided in his native country, albeit increasingly imperiled by the growth of materialist capitalism. Characterized throughout by an ambivalence that reflects contemporary public uneasiness about the Peace of Amiens and its implications,4 the sequence foreshadows the militarism of poems (like the sonnet to the men of Kent) composed during the national alarm over the prospect of a French invasion. Yet Wordsworth resists the easy jingoism that pervades the writings of many of his contemporaries and instead reverts back to the model provided by Milton some two centuries earlier in grounding his uneasy optimism about the future in a faith in an informed and appropriately self-aware British citizenry. Wordsworth\u27s increasing militancy reflects the poet\u27s sense both of public duty and private conviction in the years following his visit to France, and the subsequent embrace of patriotic domesticity-of heartfelt Englishness-signaled both in his manner of documenting his return to his homeland and in his immediate marriage to Mary Hutchinson

Review of The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonne.

The appearance of this volume by E. Maurice Bloch, the dean of Bingham studies, is a most significant event. Superseding Bloch\u27s preliminary catalogue of 1967, this impressive new volume constitutes the definitive catalogue of Bingham\u27s paintings. With more than 350 illustrations, including 23 in color, it provides a guide to both Bingham\u27s familiar works and his lesser-known subjects, documenting the artist\u27s development both as portraitist and as recorder of Western American subject matter. An insightful introductory essay of twenty-eight large, double-column pages presents Bingham .as man and artist, exploring the events and influences that shaped his art and effectively locating the artist within. the broad context of American art. The essay furnishes the general reader with an eminently readable overview of Bingham\u27s career. For the reader who wants to learn about Bingham and his art, this is-and will long remain-the place to begin

Review of The Painting & Politics of George Caleb Bingham.

Nancy Rash\u27s superb study exemplifies the sort of reevaluation that results from tearing down the artificial walls of the gallery and the salon and relocating an artist within an accurate historical and cultural context. Rash introduces Bingham the total person: artist, certainly, but also writer, politician, legislator, polemicist, and social activist. Indeed, Bingham considered himself a public servant who just happened to be also a painter. This important distinction has been blurred by generations of critics who refused to see the whole Bingham and who consequently constructed an image of an artist depicting-in the scenes of Missouri life that form the bulk of Bingham\u27s ouevre-a sentimental, mythologized view of the West. Rash corrects that misperception immediately: the mythic or archetypal qualities that scholars have found in Bingham\u27s pictures have existed more in their own minds than in the mind and work of the artist (5). Her book explodes this critical fallacy by reconstructing in painstaking, revealing detail the particular historical, political, and cultural contexts from which Bingham\u27s pictures emerged and to which they responded in ways that contemporary critics are only beginning to appreciate