thomas spitzer-hanks

By analyzing a narrative sequence of North American classical reception that enfolds poetry, prose and the built environment as instances of the communicative construction of reality, this essay responds to Hardwick’s recent call to think with classics in a new way. The specific sequence of communicative action this essay analyzes places an idealized version of Greekness in relation to a narrative of US national identity that has its roots in colonial protoethnography, spreads across the US during the 1820s, and was later associated with Lost Cause discourse. Since this narrative exists in the context of a social history of New World colonialism, the methodology this essay applies combines close reading with critical classical reception, decolonial theory, historiography, social-constructionist theory, and constructivist psychology to demonstrate that if we think anew with classical reception, we may also be able to think anew about the patterns of sociality we are imbricated in as subjects of colonial modernity.

Writing is both affective and ecological. Consequently, effective writing instructors need a deep understanding of writing's affective and ecological aspects, making composition one of the most complex and challenging areas of pedagogical endeavor in collegiate education. This is especially true in institutions whose product-oriented epistemologies make writing potentially traumatizing for many student writers. To assist writing teachers in meeting student writers' needs, this article draws on a diverse body of research to explain writing affect, its role in ecological processes of composition within early-collegiate humanities curricula, the relation of writing affect to writers' identities, and the impact collegiate corporatization may have on composition instruction. Subsequently, this article describes approaches for making writing pedagogy more process-oriented, trauma-informed and equity-centered.

This dissertation is a survey of nineteenth-century British Hellenism in texts authored between 1768 and 1895 by elite, bourgeois, and working-class people both female and male. Beginning in 18th-century Germany, the dissertation tracks the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on nineteenth-century British Hellenism, asserting that there is a characteristic cluster of representational attributes visible in British Hellenist texts that display a shared ideological emphasis. Winckelmann, who rose from humble beginnings to become the Vatican's prefect of antiquities, bequeathed a systematic art-historical approach to classical Greek art that became an idealist discourse of British Greekness through the influence of the annual lectures given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy of Art, to students between 1768 and 1792. Posthumously the 'Grand Style' aesthetics Reynolds promulgated became highly politicized, its influence clear in the debates surrounding the parliamentary purchase of the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin in 1816, in the poetry, prose, art and architecture of the 1820s and 1830s, in specific exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the anthropological debates touched off by Darwin's Origins of Species after 1859, and in Oscar Wilde's fin-de-siécle advocacy of Dress Reform and his reformed, Reynoldsian aesthetic idealism. Particularly during Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials, the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism is inescapable, being explicitly enunciated in Wilde's famous "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name" speech, but I argue throughout that nineteenth-century British Hellenism tends to create 'enfigurations' of subjectivity that constrain those who adopt them through insistent reference to an ideal subjectivity that is embodied in white, abled, elite, heterosexual male bodies resembling those found in classical Greek art. Thus I show that while the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism could be contested, the terms of the deb [...]

Contents: From the Editors -- Equity and Ability: Metaphors of Inclusion in Writing Center Promotion -- The Online Writing Center: Reaching Out to Students with Disabilities -- English for All: The Importance of Pedagogical Strategies for Students with Learning -- Disabilities in the Writing Center -- Disability in the Writing Center: A New Approach (That’s Not So New) -- Psychological Disability and the Director’s Chair: Interrogating the Relationship Between -- Positionality and Pedagogy -- Writing Centers and Disability: Enabling Writers Through an Inclusive Philosophy -- Opening Closed Doors: A Rationale for Creating a Safe Space for Tutors Struggling with Mental Illness Concerns or Illnesses -- Disabilities in the Writing CenterUniversity Writing Cente

Reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments in dialog with civil rights struggles in the United States and with decolonial thinking more generally, this essay argues that sympathy constrains the conditions for social change by restricting the legibility of Black suffering. To demonstrate as much, this essay offers a close reading of Smith’s account of sympathy and of the impartial spectator, following which this essay reads #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag and social movement whose advocacy is counteracted by antisympathetic rhetorics of white universalism, Black respectability, and masculine supremacy. In response, this essay argues in favor of decolonial acts of listening that occur in the context of a societal project of restorative justice because it is the persistence of reified colonial sympathy-allocation patterns in the United States and elsewhere that are driving the disproportionate impacts of anthropogenic climate change, COVID-19, and other historic events on nonwhite, nonmale people around the world.

Contents: Why Writing Centers Work / by Lester Faigley -- Long Night Against Procrastination: A Collaborative Take on an International Event / by Elizabeth Kiscaden and LeAnn Nash -- The Problem of “Opportunity”: Negotiating a Writing Center Administrator’s WAC(ky) Public Identity / by Andrea Deacon -- A Compelling Collaboration: The First Year Writing Program, Writing Center, and Directed Self-Placement / by Becky Lynn Caouette and Claudine Griggs -- Exploring the Representation of Scheduling Options and Online Tutoring on Writing Center Websites / by Amanda Metz Bemer -- Book Review: "Multilingual Writers and Writing Centers by Ben Rafoth" / reviewed by Brianna HyslopUniversity Writing Cente

Contents: From the Editors -- The Dangerous Method, or “Can Procrastination Ever Be a Good Thing?” -- Disclosure Concerns: The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers -- (Re)Examining the Socratic Method: A Lesson in Tutoring -- When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” in ESL Tutoring Sessions -- Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice: Problems with Multilingualism and Possibilities via Hybridity -- Are Our Workshops Working? Assessing Assessment as Research -- The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Research -- Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials to Encourage Deeper Engagement with Sources -- What do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? Tutoring Practices to Support Dissertation and Thesis WritersUniversity Writing Cente

This dissertation is a survey of nineteenth-century British Hellenism in texts authored between 1768 and 1895 by elite, bourgeois, and working-class people both female and male. Beginning in 18th-century Germany, the dissertation tracks the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on nineteenth-century British Hellenism, asserting that there is a characteristic cluster of representational attributes visible in British Hellenist texts that display a shared ideological emphasis. Winckelmann, who rose from humble beginnings to become the Vatican's prefect of antiquities, bequeathed a systematic art-historical approach to classical Greek art that became an idealist discourse of British Greekness through the influence of the annual lectures given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy of Art, to students between 1768 and 1792. Posthumously the 'Grand Style' aesthetics Reynolds promulgated became highly politicized, its influence clear in the debates su...

... Conclusion: As Through a Glass, Darkly. ... in other words, both mother and father to the reader, who in turn brings both into existence through the reading ... extremely smelly body disgusts his child adversaries, only falls to the ground unconscious after covering a magic wand with ...

Author's Original Manuscript. Using concepts of ‘total domination’ and ‘absolute terror’ to explore the links between hegemonic masculinity, anthropogenic climate change and toxic individualism, this essay reads Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union” in dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s materialist political philosophy and Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘political ecology.’ Arguing that the connections between the hegemonic masculine repudiation of the feminine Other and totalitarian ecopolitics are clearly visible within the world of the poem, this essay notes that through careful attention to “Act of Union” we can see more clearly how Heaney links the world of the poem to the phenomenal world, specifically the history of English colonialism in Ireland, while also making it possible for the critic to discern and communicate the effects of radical individualism on human assessments of the risks of late-stage climate change. Through attention to the poem’s composition process, to Heaney’s corpus and to a tradition of misogynist rape poetry in which Heaney participates, this essay also argues that “Act of Union” expresses the latent ecomasculinity lurking in Heaney’s gender poetics while ultimately foreclosing the possibility of ecomasculinity in favor of an androcenic poetics of repudiation. Concluding that through attention to the myriad links between Heaney’s poetics of masculinity and concepts from sociology, history, environmental science, decolonial and gender theory, critics can provide more effective responses to the ideological constraints operative within the modern world of lived experience, this essay suggests that interdependence rather than individuality become the hermeneutic through which we read ourselves and our world.

While scholars have theorized the emergence of early nineteenth-century British Hellenism from a preceding pan-European classicism, inflected by philhellenist Romanticism after 1822 (if not before), the literary synthesis of these dueling Hellenisms during the last years of the Georgian era and the first years of the Victorian is not well understood. It is particularly difficult to track how this synthesis was attempted in minor works written by major women writers; to begin to understand how Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning created a space for feminine, even feminist classicism in the years between 1834 and 1844, this essay first situates Romantic, activist philhellenism in the context of P.B. Shelley's famous aphorism, " We are all Greek, " before showing what the somatico-ideological contents of Shelley's seemingly-universal 'we' really are, and how Shelley and Browning forged a disjunct but largely functional relation to them at opposite ends of each writer's working life.

*Author's Original Manuscript - to cite please see Gender and Education 28.3 (2016)* In a period characterized by worries over the rise of the corporate university, it is important to ask what role feminism plays in the academy, and whether that role is commensurate with feminist values and ethics. Commercial and political pressures brought to bear on the encounter between instructor and student can rob teaching of its efficacy, and the effects of institutional limitations on research may be equally troublesome. This essay argues that through a process-model approach feminists can understand and intervene in ongoing shifts in institutional governance and mitigate their effects on teaching and research, and that process-model pedagogy is a form of microactivism existing independent of pedagogical content, making process-model feminism fundamentally materialist, radically strategic, and highly portable. Through a discussion of pedagogical and administrative practices in which process-model feminism can intervene this essay suggests a way of understanding and inhabiting feminism's current place in the 'corporate' academy.

Kristeva's theory of abjection suggests that the formation and maintenance of both individual subjectivity and group identity depends on the management of a psychological and corporeal imperfection that our enculturation requires we repudiate. What is abject in ourselves we disavow, and through transference shift onto the Other who, in turn, becomes the guarantor of our bounded selfhood and our group identifications. This ideal state, defined through metrics of subjectival coherence themselves based on a fantasy imposed by the logic of late capitalism – the fear of lack and of loss that today drives unprecedented levels of industrial and corporeal incorporativity – is one whose attainment haunts and motivates us. Abjection theory further suggests that this economistic narrative, in which boundaries and the flow of goods (and bads) define the embodied self, is closely tied to an idealist narrative of personhood whose widespread adoption creates opportunities to place subjects and social groups in a gradated, hierarchical scheme according to their accession to the ideal-as-norm. This narrative also furnishes opportunities to criminalize/diagnose and punish/treat difference from the norm it creates, and supplies an immanent logic of repudiation productive of both rhetorical and physical violence aimed at non-ideal subjects.

Abjection theory has been immensely productive, and the variety and number of contributions to the theoretical conversation continue to be impressive. Perhaps due to its critical fecundity, 'abjection theory' is in danger of becoming codified as a lesser version of the theory Kristeva actually proposes in Powers of Horror, and fundamental aspects of abjection theory-the role of sexual difference in processes of subject formation/abjection and its central importance in theorizing those processes, Kristeva's identification not only of femininity with abjection but of masculinity with normate subjectivity, the theoretical implications of an intersectional reading of Powers of Horror that acknowledges its roots in a specific psychoanalytic genealogy-are too often ignored in scholarly practice. This call for papers seeks theoretically-informed sumissions that reflect on 'the state of abjection' as lived experience, as a scholarly practice and as a descriptive/prescriptive framing of modern, Western subjectivity in texts and contexts from across all disciplines (NOT limited to the humanities), and especially seeks contributions from scholars reflecting on major texts in abjection theory (e.g. Powers of Horror, Gender Trouble, Tyler's " Against Abjection, " Scott's Extravagant Abjection) and important trends in abjection theory (e.g. recuperative or reparative abjection, anti-maternal abjection, abjection in masculinity studies, quantitative studies of abjection).

In disciplines and sub-disciplines across the humanities ‘the body’ has become an important site of inquiry, allowing scholars to note and to question the traditional division between mind and body as well as the proliferation of binaries and hierarchies to which this division gives rise. There is hope that theorizing ‘the body’ will allow us to envision previously invisible subjects and to do so from without the ideological frame the cogito imposes, and that such a position will open up new readings and new texts. However, in using ‘the body’ to escape Cartesian dualism we are in danger of collapsing a universalizing binary into a singular sign without referent, thus begging the question: whose body is ‘the body’ anyway? Through a close reading of key passages in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses (1769-90) and their subsequent role in the purchase of the Elgin Marbles by Parliament in 1816, as well their interpretive utility in relation to Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Oscar Wilde’s public identity during the Wilde Trials of 1895, this paper envisions a conceptual genealogy stretching from the Royal Academy of Art to the supermarket check-out line, one in which the depicted body Reynolds theorizes is always-already at once entirely ideal, without deformity or ornament, entirely corporeal in its sexed, classed, and racialized specificity, and displayed in pursuance of explicitly ideological aims. Normative artistic depictions of ideal bodies and the looking relations imposed by Reynoldsian idealism minimize and elide corporeal plurality and, through an idealist scopo-logic of reproduction that at once interpellates the viewing subject and makes that subject an object for other viewing subjects, increase viewers’ felt experience of corporeal plurality while codifying that experience as threatening. By theorizing the tension between ‘the (ideal) body’ of Reynolds’ theories and the bodies making up the Reynoldsian assemblage as a hierarchical and fundamentally surveillative relationship, this paper argues that by itself, ‘the body’ cannot escape the individualizing, neo-liberal logic of Cartesian dualism, while in aggregate, bodies remain objects of viewing relations modeled on a ‘logic of the One.’