Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015), ed. by Ralph C. Wood

Book review by Robin Anne Reid of Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015) ed. by Ralph C. Woo

Women & Tolkien: Amazons, Valkyries, Feminists, and Slashers

This paper reports on an early pilot project that asks women who self identify as readers or fans of Tolkien\u27s work and/or teachers who have taught Tolkien\u27s work, and/or scholars who have published on Tolkien\u27s work to answer a few open-ended questions about their reasons for enjoying his work. By women, I mean anybody who identifies as a woman. By Tolkien\u27s work, I mean any of his published novels, stories, poems, or academic essays. The study arises from the question that is often asked of fans of Tolkien\u27s work: why do women so enjoy it, given the relatively minor narrative roles women play

Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s Works

This article is the introduction to the special theme issue consisting of four essays on Authorizing Tolkien. Reid and Elam discuss medieval and postmodern theories of adaptation and interpretation and introduce the essays in the issue

Writing Against the Grain: T. Kingfisher\u27s Feminist Mythopoeic Fantasy

In On Fairy-stories, J. R. R. Tolkien defined and defended the genre of fantasy by quoting and then explicating his poem, Mythopoeia. Tolkien\u27s theory of mythopoeic literature can be applied to his own fiction, but, increasingly, scholars are applying it to other texts including superhero films and contemporary fantasy novels (Holdier, Kane). In this presentation, I argue that three of Kingfisher\u27s series, the Clocktaur War, Saint of Steel, and Paladin, set in and around Anuket City, fit some of the characteristics of mythopoeic fantasy identified by Tolkien while swerving notably from others. Thus, Kingfisher\u27s fantasy is similar to work by the writers Faye Ringel interviewed for her essay, Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring. Performing her own feminist swerve on Harold Bloom\u27s Anxiety of Influence, Ringel concludes that while the women fantasists accept some of Tolkien\u27s premises, they differ strongly with him on the subject of women\u27s roles (165). Tolkien\u27s necessary characteristics for a mythopoeic text involve textual elements and reader response. A mythopoeic fantasy is set in a secondary world that is internally consistent; the magic must be taken seriously, and the best of the genre involves the Consolation of the Happy Ending (32-33;75). Tolkien makes it clear that this genre is for readers who appreciate it, no matter what their age, challenging the assumption at the time that fairy stories were only suitable for children. Recovery, escape, and consolation are how mythopoeic fantasies impact readers. Tolkien makes it clear that fairies (elves) are not required while his epilogue places the genre firmly in his Christian belief system. Some of the elements in Kingfisher\u27s series that are mythopoeic are: the coherence of the secondary world, across three series with different characters; a version of Faërie, called the Vagrant Lands; the presence of magic, called wonderworking. Elements which swerve decisively from Tolkien\u27s criteria are the lack of kings and heroes; the presence of religious institutions and their orders; polytheism; the widespread distribution of wonderworking along with the lack of wizards; the focus on female protagonists. powerful male characters. Since Kingfisher is writing fantasy romance rather than epic fantasy, the protagonists include a forger, a perfumer, and a widowed housekeeper who inherits a magic sword. These swerves from Tolkien\u27s definition strengthen my experience of recovery, escape, and consolation as a reader, responses that grew stronger during my re-reading of her work during the first year of the pandemic. Tech Mod: Leslie Donovan

“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?” The Disorienting Phenomenology of N. K. Jemisin’s \u3ci\u3eThe Stone Sky\u3c/i\u3e

N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy made history: each novel won the Best Hugo for Novel (2016-2017-2018). Jemisin is not only the First person to win the novel award three years running, but also the First Black person and the First woman of color to win the novel award. Sony Entertainment purchased the series for adaptation in 2018 (Fleming), and Jemisin will be adapting her series for Film. The Fifth Season has an epic structure (beginning in media res, a quest, world-changing events and characters, and supernatural forces). Given the conventions of the epic genre, my interest in this presentation is how the phenomenological style of Jemisin’s multiple narrative voices, including the use of one second-person and direct address narrator, which intersects with the narrative arc of the female protagonist, a mother, whose epic quest is to save her daughter, subverts reader expectations. My approach, like my earlier publication on Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy (Reid), blends linguistics and phenomenology. I use M. A. K. Halliday’s functional grammar to analyze clauses in selected passages (the opening paragraphs of the Prologue and twenty-three chapters in the novel). Phenomenology is the branch of philosophy that focuses on “structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view” (Stanford). Phenomenological literary studies “regard[s] works of art as mediators between the consciousnesses of the author and the reader or as attempts to disclose aspects of the being of humans and their worlds” (Armstrong). My analysis is informed by Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation developed in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others: When we are orientated, we might not even notice that we are orientated: we might not even think “to think” about this point. When we experience disorientation, we might notice orientation as something we do not have. After all, concepts often reveal themselves as things to think “with” when they fail to be translated into being or action. (Ahmed, 5-6) Ahmed defines queer phenomenology is that which “disorients” the reader, specifically, she defines as “bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground” (157). I would argue a trilogy that begins with the implication and claim that “the end of the world” is not the most interesting part of the story, in a Prologue subtitled, “you are here” will disorient the majority of readers, and that disorientation is only the start of Jemisin’s disorienting phenomenology

Escherichia coli Iron Acquisition Paradigms and Host Responses in the Human Urinary Milieu

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are some of the most common bacterial infections worldwide and are increasingly complicated by high antibiotic resistance and recurrence rates. Explanations for the marked individual differences in UTI susceptibility remain incomplete. In this thesis we show that urinary colonization by uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) is influenced by urine composition and the activity of an important innate immune protein, siderocalin (SCN; also called lipocalin 2 or neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin/NGAL). During UTI, host factors limit the availability of iron, an essential nutrient for the invading pathogen. In response, UPEC modify the urinary environment with metal binding siderophores, some of which are bound by the soluble protein SCN. Interactions between these opposing factors during early UPEC colonization determine the pathogen’s ability to successfully acquire iron and grow to a density sufficient to cause infection. SCN has been described at length as an antimicrobial protein, exerting its effect by sequestering certain ferric siderophores. This has led to the hypothesis that a pathogen’s additional, non-SCN-binding siderophores are adaptations to this host pressure; however, the role of individual siderophores has been shown in some models to depend greatly on the infection environment. Because human urine is chemically complex and distinct from other sites of infection, we first investigated SCN’s effect on uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) growth in human urine from a healthy reference population. Using genetic deletions, chemical inhibition, and chemical complementation, we observed enterobactin siderophore expression to be a key factor permitting UPEC growth in SCN-supplemented human urine from a subset of individuals. Because SCN neutralizes enterobactin in non-urinary experimental systems, this result suggests a determinative role for urine-specific components in manipulating antimicrobial paradigms. Our initial inquiry showed dramatic variability in SCN’s antimicrobial activity between individuals’ urine specimens. We next used these individual differences as an independent variable, defining groups of high and low activity, in order to investigate the urinary factors controlling SCN activity. Chemical and demographic comparisons yielded a significant positive correlation between SCN activity and elevated urine pH. To determine whether further individual differences arose from differences in urinary small molecule composition (the urinary metabolome), we compared individuals using a mass spectrometry-based metabolomic approach. This approach identified aryl alcohols as significant correlates with SCN activity. These results support a model in which the urinary environment is able to influence urinary tract colonization by pathogens. To further understand how these urinary metabolites may contribute to SCN antimicrobial activity, we sought to identify key metabolite cofactors present in restrictive urine specimens that actively participate in SCN’s antimicrobial mechanism as observed above. We developed a robust biophysical screen that allowed us to look for urine fractions containing iron-dependent SCN ligands. A biophysical validation process identified several elevated aryl alcohols that bound SCN and were able to reconstitute SCN’s antimicrobial activity in simple, defined media with limited iron. Demonstrating that urinary metabolites confer elevated SCN activity in a defined media provides mechanistic validation for our proposed urinary model, and further supports a dietary component to preventative UTI therapies. The human metabolome may thus represent an underappreciated contributor to disease susceptibility and pathogen evolution, and a potential target for future therapeutic interventions. Collectively, the work presented in this thesis describes an emerging host-pathogen axis, where urinary composition plays a pivotal role in the efficacy of an innate immune response, and suggests targeted avenues for improved clinical control of UTI

J.R.R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right\u27s Crusade against the Tolkien Society\u27s 2021 Summer Seminar on Tolkien and Diversity

In Verlyn Flieger\u27s GOH speech at MythCon, The Arch and the Keystone (2019), she argues that the contradictions in Tolkien\u27s own writing (fiction, non-fiction, and letters) is a primary cause of the increasing fragmentation and polarization [among readers and scholars], concluding that [e]verybody has their own private Tolkien, more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at (9). In this presentation, I trace some attributes of the alt-right\u27s private Tolkien which they have made public in forty plus online articles, some receiving a hundred or more public comments, during 2021-22. The articles (in periodicals and personal blogs) attacked, variously: The Tolkien Society The 2021 Seminar, Tolkien and Diversity The seminar presenters The Superbowl Amazon Prime trailer The marketing photos of characters of color I use a linguistic method that involves collecting and creating a corpus (an electronic database of articles and comments) and identifying key words and collocations (words and phrases associated with key words. My goal is to analyze how these writers construct their crusading version of Tolkien, using it to attempt to repress the existence and interpretations of others, while situating my analysis in the context of contemporary religious-political conflicts