Late-Victorian Novels, Microsociology, and Bad Dialogue

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of orality. Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to invisible social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of aesthetic judgment that endure into the present. Through examining two late Victorian novels specifically panned for their attempts to include talk\u27s embodied situatedness into dialogue—George Meredith\u27s One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford\u27s The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901)—this essay motivates a prior literary historical moment (before dialogue\u27s definitive separation from talk) to consider a continuing verbal bias in our own critical and creative practices. This essay speculates that an embarrassment about embodied procedures continues to underlie our sense of dialogue as a less sophisticated narratological category, and that best practices in creative writing problematically erase the body when mandating that dialogue must show interiority or further novelistic action. Ultimately, unlike orality, talk compels a confrontation with dialogue that brings attention to historical and present ways in which the notion of speech is inseparable from the power dynamics of embodied relation

Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Great New Adventure Story : Journalism in The Lost World

This essay discusses the critical engagements of Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) with the rise of journalistic professionalism at the turn of the century. With a focus on features from the novel’s serial publication in George Newnes’s illustrated periodical, the Strand Magazine, this essay argues that this popular work of fiction self-consciously positions itself against what had become a fairly mainstream ideological and generic split between literature and journalism. Through its masquerade as a first-person account mediated by a professional network of journalists and editors, The Lost World integrates conventions of literary romance and objective journalism to combat perspectives on the incompatibility of romance and modern reality

The Debate Over the 150 Credit Requirement

In 1983, Florida adopted a 150 credit hour rule in order for a CPA candidate to sit for the CPA exam. In 1989, the AICPA voted to recommend that all states follow Florida’s lead to adopt the 150-hour rule (Carpenter and Hock 2009). The events that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 raise the question of just how helpful those extra credits are in improving the knowledge of accounting professionals in their field. A previous study has shown that the 150-hour requirement does not affect pass rates (Allen and Woodland 2006). Another study has shown that when there was an increase in the pass rate after the 150 hour credit requirement was implemented, the number of people actually passing decreased, which implied that the increased requirement left less people taking the exam (Gramling and Rosman 2009). This study attempts to replicate some of the findings in Gramling and Rosman about students’ knowledge of the 150-hour rule, and to extend that study to further explore students’ perspectives and opinions about the additional educational requirement

A Review of Hye Hean Chung\u27s Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production

Beijing World Park—which opened in 1993 with much fanfare—boasts of its inclusion of over one hundred “famous scenic spots and historical sites” of the world in miniature. As tourists walk through the outdoor park’s grounds, they are promised “the world” without having to leave Beijing.1 In a single visit, they might chance upon the Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the moai of Easter Island. Jia Zhangke’s film The World (2004) takes place in the park and tells the story of two of its employees, Tao and Taisheng. As Hye Jean Chung puts it in Media Heterotopias, the lives of the economically precarious Tao and Taisheng reveal “the empty promises of economic, social, and geographical mobility that are falsely projected by the ersatz globality of the park” (156). In the end, the characters perish together in a gas leak in a scene that Chung deftly interprets as deeply ambivalent. Their deaths, shrouded by shadows and the screen turning to black, “enabl[e] them to transcend visual forms of mediated representations,” as Tao’s disembodied voice asserts: “this is just the beginning” (157). ~article excerpt

The Poetics of Talk in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island

This essay considers the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-loved adventure classic Treasure Island and his philosophical commitments to talk. For Stevenson, talking and adventuring share an experiential poetics that emphasizes responsiveness to unpredictable interactions. By examining several of Stevenson’s prose pieces, including “Talk and Talkers” and “My First Book” as well as Treasure Island, this essay argues that the novel aspires to translate the poetics of talk into a print medium. Treasure Island imagines itself as a form of “living print,” a work that, like Long John Silver’s parrot, seems more dynamic than print typically is, yet is still ultimately incapable of talk’s interactivity

Teaching Dystopia

This year, those of us who work in college classrooms kicked off our semesters with the spectacle of Trump’s inauguration: its bluffed militarism, its dark vision, its citation, in effect, of Bane, from the Batman dystopia The Dark Knight Rises. Everything about the inauguration presaged the bitter, disputatious, spectacle-driven manias that have come to mark the 45th Presidency. It was clear, on that grey January day, that dystopia was newly in vogue as he intoned: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. We all bleed the same red blood of patriots. By pointing out the dystopian stylistics of the inauguration, I don’t mean to suggest some reality of a utopian “before.” The U.S. has always been a brutal, unpleasant place for many; a nation built as much on the mythos of the founding fathers as on violence, brutality, and the systematic and continued valuation of some lives over others. What I mean to suggest, to the contrary, is that especially for those of us who regularly teach and study literary dystopias, the patterned qualities of this genre have suddenly leapt off the page in an almost cartoonish fashion. As a literature professor, this has proven both a challenge and an opportunity in the classroom. Teaching my course on children’s literature last winter, I wondered what kinds of thinking about literary dystopias we might be able to accomplish while living through a form of dystopia ourselves. ~article excerpt

Victorian Media Studies, History, and Theory

This article gives an account of Victorian media studies as a sub‐field that emerged primarily from investigations of nineteenth‐century communication technologies and the century\u27s accompanying preoccupations with transmission and the idea of in‐betweenness. Owing to unprecedented developments such as the rise of the universal postal system, telegraphy, phonography, photography, and mass print media, historicist inquiries have proven fruitful for the sub‐field. At the same time, continuities between how Victorians (such as the journalist and editor W. T. Stead) imagined communication\u27s unifying reach across Britain and the globe and twentieth‐century media theory\u27s critique of this same reach have ensured the sub‐field\u27s grounding in theoretical engagements. The second part of the article considers how alternative frameworks for understanding media beyond communication (such as immersion, virtuality, and media archaeology) are currently redefining Victorian media studies in the twenty‐first century, continuing the sub‐field\u27s robust dialectical engagements of history and theory

FestivIL 2021

A report on the FestivIL Conference 2021 from the perspective of a school librarian