Calculating Compassion

Symposium on Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001

Calculating Compassion

Symposium on Law, Morality, and Popular Culture in the Public Sphere at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, April 6, 2001

Rereading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age

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"Old Trees Are Our Parents": Old Growth, New Kin, Forest Time

“Old Trees Are Our Parents”: Old Growth, New Kin, Forest Time We are aged by culture, as Margaret Gullette has perfectly put it, her emphasis placed on the negative associations sutured to being old in capitalist societies. What would it mean to be aged by trees? To grow old with trees as our companion species? To understand that “old trees are our parents,” embracing the knowledge that we humans share a lineage with trees? I approach these questions through the prism of the magisterial novel The Overstory (2018) by the American writer Richard Powers, singling out three scenes that offer parables of post-human aging: first, humans humbled in comparison with trees in terms of longevity; second, a new understanding of what constitutes the genetic lifeworld of Homo sapiens; third, deep knowledge of the green world on the part of humans who have learned across their lifetimes and into their seventies to embrace the wisdom of trees. If the first scene calls up feelings of awe, including the sublime, the second engenders feelings of family and kinship across species, and the third, the consolations offered by the guidance of trees, developed over the long evolutionary temporality of forest time. Forest time: the timescale, or agescale, of the life and death of trees mediates the timescales of geological long time, the emergence of life on the planet, the time of human history, and the life span of Homo sapiens. I focus on four of the major characters who, some seventy years old at the end of the novel, exemplify old growth, simultaneously feeling they belong to a forest world that is both vital and old, a sanctuary, and envisioning a regreening of the planet that is in grievous peril of being stripped of its forests. Methodologically this essay is an experiment in multi-species literary ethnography through close reading of a single contemporary novel, which has had an extraordinary impact, and in the context of recent transformative research on trees. The evocative phrase “old trees are our parents” comes from the nineteenth-century American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, suggesting a literary lineage as well as a genetic lineage across species—humans and trees

Instructional Methods for Limited English Proficient Students in Subject Area Courses

This paper studies the question of what instructional strategies are most effective for classrooms with limited English proficient (LEP) students when teaching history content courses.  Two specific instructional strategies are researched.  The first is the ordering of direct instruction and constructivist activities.  Is it best to begin with direct instruction, then move to a constructivist activity or is it best to order lessons in reverse order?  The results of the study also offer insight into the efficacy of doing only direct instruction vs. constructivist activities.  The second question studied is regarding group vs. individual work.  Which type of work results in the most and deepest content knowledge for LEP students and what is useful about each type of work? A controlled experimental method was used with pre and post quizzes, teacher/researcher observation, and student surveys and interviews.  The study finds that student learning is maximized for LEP students when direct instruction precedes a constructivist activity.  Using both instructional strategies, but in this order, was shown to be the most effective instructional strategy.  Individual vs. group work showed less clear results, but the student interviews provided insight into why LEP students sometimes prefer group work, even if their knowledge gained is not noticeably increased

Reading Affect in Literary Studies

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita Felski, Michael Millner, Janice Radway, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, Jonathan Flatley, Brian Massumi, Paul Armstrong, and Woodward; Paul Virilio and Joan Didion; and Julie Ellison, Elise Lemire, and Doran Larson

"Old Trees Are Our Parents"

“Old Trees Are Our Parents”: Old Growth, New Kin, Forest Time We are aged by culture, as Margaret Gullette has perfectly put it, her emphasis placed on the negative associations sutured to being old in capitalist societies. What would it mean to be aged by trees? To grow old with trees as our companion species? To understand that “old trees are our parents,” embracing the knowledge that we humans share a lineage with trees? I approach these questions through the prism of the magisterial novel The Overstory (2018) by the American writer Richard Powers, singling out three scenes that offer parables of post-human aging: first, humans humbled in comparison with trees in terms of longevity; second, a new understanding of what constitutes the genetic lifeworld of Homo sapiens; third, deep knowledge of the green world on the part of humans who have learned across their lifetimes and into their seventies to embrace the wisdom of trees. If the first scene calls up feelings of awe, including the sublime, the second engenders feelings of family and kinship across species, and the third, the consolations offered by the guidance of trees, developed over the long evolutionary temporality of forest time. Forest time: the timescale, or agescale, of the life and death of trees mediates the timescales of geological long time, the emergence of life on the planet, the time of human history, and the life span of Homo sapiens. I focus on four of the major characters who, some seventy years old at the end of the novel, exemplify old growth, simultaneously feeling they belong to a forest world that is both vital and old, a sanctuary, and envisioning a regreening of the planet that is in grievous peril of being stripped of its forests. Methodologically this essay is an experiment in multi-species literary ethnography through close reading of a single contemporary novel, which has had an extraordinary impact, and in the context of recent transformative research on trees. The evocative phrase “old trees are our parents” comes from the nineteenth-century American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, suggesting a literary lineage as well as a genetic lineage across species—humans and trees

At last, the real distinguished thing: the late poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams

(print) xiii, 180 p. ; 25 cmPreface ix -- 1: Introduction 3 -- 2: T. S. Eliot and the Four Quartets : The Still Point, Aging, and the Social Bond 27 -- 3: Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos : The Teachings of Confucius, the Teachings of Ezra Pound 69 -- 4: Wallace Stevens and The Rock : Not Ideas about Nobility but the Thing Itself 99 -- 5: William Carlos Williams and Paterson V : Tradition and the Individual Talent 133 -- 6: Epilogue : The Sense of an Ending 167 -- Indexes 17

Gloria Patri, Gender, and the Gulf War: A Conversation with Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly\u27s gallery size installation, entitled Gloria Patri, was first shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University in 1992. Gloria Patri focuses on the issues of heroism, mastery, and war within the context of a pathologized masculinity; that is, on the identification by both men and women with masculine ideals of mastery, domination, and control, and their simultaneous physical and psychological collapse. This crisis of masculine mastery is set against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War