Welcome to the Land of Super-Service: A Survivor\u27s Guide. . .and Some Questions

Community college faculty accept high service demands, in addition to heavy teaching loads, as essential to tenure and promotion. Much of service work is uncompensated or very modestly compensated. If historically service was a substitute for scholarship, this is no longer the case. And the culture of our college community does not encourage a discussion of service concerns. This article poses questions for faculty, for department chairs, for administrators regarding how best to support the multiple demands being made of community college faculty, particularly women

Knowledge and Representation in The Ambassadors: Strether\u27s Discriminating Gaze

I propose a radically new reading of Lambert Strether\u27s subjectivity in Henry James\u27s The Ambassadors, one that challenges critical readings to date and suggests that Strether\u27s journey reflects a tacit but very definite confrontation with the fundamental illusion of the core self. As he follows the trajectory of his desire, initially through identification with the masculine identity of Chad Newsome, Strether comes to see the limitations of conventional notions of masculinity. He discovers that the freedom he seeks is not to be found in the illusion of power characterized by masculine control and repression but rather in the vulnerable acceptance of fragmentation

Learning Communities and the Future of the Humanities

According to Profession\u27s 2005 Presidential Forum, one reason for dwindling enrollment in the Humanities is lack of interdisciplinarity. Learning communities, courses clustered around a common theme and taught to the same group of students are a powerful example of a kind of interdisciplinarity that is flourishing on more than five-hundred campuses in the United States.This essay looks closely at the expanding learning community movement and its relevance to revitalizing the Humanities

Tintoretto and James: Exposing the Shattered Subject

Though “influence” may be too strong a word, the compositional affinities between James and Tintoretto are pervasive and worthy of comparative analysis, especially because both artists capture the moment when wonder gives way to the lonely and final uncertainty of our knowledge—of self, of others, of secular or spiritual truth. Separated by three centuries, these two artists both stage a forceful assault on the conventions of their medium and engender in the viewer or reader (as well as internal “perceivers”) a kind of vertigo—a visual and psychological dislocation that is the basis of a new kind of insight. In Tintoretto, this dislocation ushers in mannerist and pre-baroque ambiguity—a sense of alienation that is “an indispensable stage on the mind’s journey to itself” (Hauser 96); in James, fluid, inconclusive images of others, reflected through the inner drama of a perceiving consciousness, set the stage for a post-modern interrogation of the subject. Tintoretto’s spiritual encounters, reformulated in James as struggles of competing desires, are what the French philosopher, Alain Badiou, calls “events”: they disrupt our conventional understanding of being and force a new way of seeing

Isabel Archer\u27s Delicious Pain : Charting Lacanian Desire in The Portrait of a Lady

This essay offers a reading of Henry James\u27s Portrait of a Lady that examines Isabel Archer\u27s choices through a Lacanian lens. This reading traces Isabel\u27s consistent turning away from, even against, the very postulates she claims to live by. Isabel’s discovery of love through the ideal image of herself she finds mirrored in Gilbert Osmond’s gaze leads to a reversal of her most noble impulses. Her choice of a suitor also points to something that would seem the opposite of desire, but which is, in fact, its foundation. In choosing Gilbert Osmond, Isabel seeks to experience, however unconsciously, what Jacques Lacan defines as jouissance, or “painful pleasure

Henry James\u27s Poor Sensitive Gentlemen and the Quest for Meaning (and Happiness) in Three Late Tales: The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, and The Jolly Corner

“Happiness” is not an emotion we immediately associate with the life of Henry James or with the characters in his fiction. It is true that some of his characters comment on the idea of happiness, but not without persistent irony. The protagonists of James’s late tales express no explicit interest in happiness; however, their desire to understand their journeys results in an important insight into the complex, and perhaps contradictory, nature of personal fulfillment. It is an experience, I argue, that offers a moment of painful joy, and it is the closest thing to happiness possible for James’s characters, and perhaps for Henry James

Inquiry and Problem Solving in English Composition: Belonging, Exile and Migration [Composition]

In the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Meanings of War and its Aftermaths Seminar, offered to LaGuardia Faculty in the 2018-19 academic year, we examined numerous critical essays and literary texts, as well as photographs and documentaries, to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ways war continues to inhabit peoples’ lives. When I began participating in this Seminar, I had already planned a first-semester English Composition course based on the theme, Belonging, Exile, and Migration. Thinking about connections between our readings for the NEH Seminar and my course, I was particularly interested in the ways stories of displacement and photographs of migration might be used to tap into and enlarge students’ understanding of their own experiences and of events unfolding daily in the news since the current U.S. administration (2016) introduced the “immigration crisis.” As our English 101 course unfolded, we analyzed terms such as “refugee,” “migrant,” “undocumented immigrant,” and “asylum seeker,” and discussed turbulent developments at the border as they were presented in the news. We came to characterize the events at the border, and decisions regarding treatment of immigrants as a kind of “war at home.” Some students wrote about their own experiences of migration to avoid local violence, others described their family’s participation in a Visa Lottery and others spoke about their status as Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals. We watched documentaries about families fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria. In constructing the research assignment below, I was careful to offer students choices. If they preferred not to discuss personal or family experiences, they could choose from various sources in our readings. LaGuardia’s Core Competencies and Communication Abilities Course Content and Connection to LaGuardia Competencies The three key assignments presented here, and their two supporting class activities, are designed to address the Inquiry and Problem-Solving Core Competency and the Written Communication Ability required for English 101.The research essay (Assignment #1) is an inquiry and problem-solving assignment. It asks students to “seek and use disciplinary and cross-disciplinary content knowledge to address challenging issues, weighing evidence and drawing conclusions through a process of synthesis and evaluation.” Students analyzed their own experiences as immigrants, or used a primary source of their choosing, and they connected that example to the experiences of others facing migration, displacement and related emotional experiences. Assignment #1 is also a written communication ability assignment as students are asked to construct knowledge by selecting, linking and evaluating research materials related to a specific aspect of the immigration experience. Each student chose a specific stage of the journey to focus on. They examined obstacles faced, trauma experienced, and adjustments made, and they compared and synthesized personal examples with research. Depending on the topic, the structure of the essay follows an argumentation pattern or a problem-solution pattern. And in the conclusion to the essay, students are invited to impart a message to their audience related to ethical questions the topic raises about the treatment of those arriving at our borders. The photography essay, (Assignment #2), in a more subtle way, is an inquiry and problem-solving assignment because it asks students to close read the photograph, research its context, connect that context to the migration theme, and to consider ways a photograph communicates differently from a written text. Similarly, the final reflective essay (Assignment #3) asks students to review our class readings and screenings and to assemble and synthesize evidence from diverse sources of knowledge relevant to our theme by explaining how their selected texts enlarged their understanding

Responding to Xenophobia: Politics, Populisms and Our Teaching

This essay explores ways faculty in the humanities may guide students through current manifestations of populism, specifically, this movement’s encouragement of xenophobia. As a member of an English department at a public community college in the United States, I argue, first, that community college students, who often have deep personal connections to the experiences of immigrants, may respond to the anti-immigrant rhetoric in useful and provocative ways. Second, I suggest that the related history of anti-immigration sentiment in American politics since the beginning of the 20th century can provide students with a powerful context for understanding xenophobia today. Third, I propose that students can participate in online exchanges across national and cultural borders, an experience that can foster global literacy and encourage them to develop a deeper understanding of others, something students in a recent exchange between Johannesburg and New York City described as ubuntu

The Provocative Strangeness of Camus\u27s \u3ci\u3eL\u27Etranger\u3c/i\u3e and Coetzee\u27s \u3ci\u3eDisgrace\u3c/i\u3e

Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (1942) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), are two of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century. Their contested and exhaustive critical reception suggests that readers continue to be hailed by these texts in complex ethical ways. In each text, a white male protagonist engages in a violent encounter with an individual identified as Other. If they initially arouse discomfort by appearing to divest others of their alterity, these characters ultimately recognize and preserve that otherness, inviting readers to consider the requirement that we privilege others over ourselves in order to become subjects

Charting an Ethics of Desire in The Wings of the Dove”

James’s characters are nothing if not willful—and ultimately alone—in their quests. Like figures from ancient Greek drama, they demand everything and give up nothing, enacting Jacques Lacan’s ethical claim that “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.”[i] In doing so, they seem to call into question, or at least complicate, the Kantian categorical imperative and the ideal of disinterested action, offering a radical ethical alternative. James’s characters enact, I will argue, an ethic of desire. [i]Lacan, Seminar VII, 319