In Print

On January 13, Poetry Daily (poems.com) featured two poems by Henry Taylor that appeared in the 25th Anniversary issue of Tar River Poetry, "Stones and Staves" and "You Don't Know All The Places You Take Me To." Peter Makuck's interview with Henry Taylor: "'What Writing Can Be': A Conversation with Henry Taylor" was also re-published online.  More recently, in early February 2004, Verse Daily (versedaily.org) featured more poems from the anniversary issue: "The Ex" by Gray Jacobik, "Pastoral" by Kimberly Meyer, " "Making the Cradle" by Wilmer Mills, and "The English Language" by Sherry Olson.  Both of these websites claim hundreds of thousands of hits a year.

Julie Fay's  poem "Estuary" was published in Poetry Daily's recently published unvirtual, noncyber, 100% paper anthology: Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website. See: <http://www.poems.com/pdanthol.htm>

Rick Taylor's review of Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650-1830 (Cambridge, 2002) edited by Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith was printed in Seventeenth-Century News  61 (Fall-Winter 2003).  Taylor writes, "For Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith, radicalism is a 'lived relation to cultures of fundamental social change,' a way of 'inhabiting historical moments,' and -- perhaps most intriguingly here -- a way of transmitting and interpreting subversive messages, ideologies, and radical personae across a span of time."  According to Taylor, this collection of essays demonstrates how successive generations re-read the English Revolution by appropriating its central figures, theological disputes, and political debates for use in new ideological contexts.  With an interdisciplinary approach centered on aspects and methods of cultural criticism, the book questions the commonly held judgment that the period between the English Restoration and the French Revolution was a political lull between two great upheavals.  From the regicide in 1649 (it is unclear why the editors list 1650 as their titular beginning point) to the end of the Romantic period, writers interpreted the English Revolution, both praising and condemning, to suit a range of political and religious arguments and a host of radical positions.

Laura Micciche's essay, "Seeing and Reading Incest: A Study of Debbie Drechsler's Daddy's Girl," appeared in Rhetoric Review 23.1 (2004).  Micciche says, "This essay examines the comicbook Daddy's Girl by Debbie Drechsler in an effort to show that mixed media texts provide a rich contemporary site for the study of rhetoric.  Although comicbooks are commonly dismissed as a juvenile art form, I argue that Daddy's Girl both challenges this dismissal and makes a claim for the comicbook as a site that can address the reality of women's lives.  By contrasting child-like drawings with the serious subject matter of incest, Drechsler powerfully depicts the corruption of innocence; in doing so, she subverts reader expectations concerning what is appropriate comicbook subject matter."

Pat Bizzaro's "Research and Reflection in English Studies: The Special Case of Creative Writing" was printed in College English 66.1 (January 2004).  Bizzaro writes, "The recent and continuing emergence of creative writing provides a unique opportunity for us to study how and why a subject area becomes established in English studies, much as rhetoric-composition and technical and professional writing have.  It also provides a reason to hypothesize why other strong fields worthy of greater status in English departments -- perhaps, most notably in the past decade, critical theory and multicultural literatures -- have been absorbed as they have by literary studies, much as creative writing had for nearly a hundred years.  To achieve my desired end in this essay -- a discussion of why some subjects associated with English studies achieve disciplinary status and what such status means in English departments -- I will use the example of creative writing's emergence to suggest that scholars in the field have recently opened conversations about research and pedagogy in creative writing and thus made possible further explorations into ways that creative writing might distance itself from the dominance of literary study in most English departments."

Angelo Restivo's  "The Silence of The Birds: Sound Aesthetics and Public Space in Later Hitchcock" appears in Hitchcock Past and Future, edited by Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, published by Routledge of London and New York (2004) available in March.  Allen and Ishii-Gonzales are also the editors of Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (1999).  Co-authored with Richard C. Cante of UNC Chapel Hill, Restivo's  "The 'World' of All-Male Porn: On the Public Place of Moving-Image Sex in the Era of Pornographic Transnationalism" appears in More Dirty Looks, 2d ed, edited by Pamela Church Gibson and published by the British Film Institute and U of California P (2003) available in December.  From the publisher: "Drawing on the radical work around gender, identity and sexuality within critical theory, the book continues to argue for the significance of porn in debates around gender, feminism, and masculinity and the importance of the topic in our understanding of issues of power and cultural identity.  Above all, it insists on the categorical imperative and critical necessity to continue the study of an area with such immense symbolic and social significance."

Jerry Leath Mills's essay, "The Dark Side of the Tracks in Thomas Wolfe's 'The Bums at Sunset'," was published by The Thomas Wolfe Review, 27 (2003)..  Wolfe's story, first published in Vanity Fair October 1935, is about five hoboes riding the rails during the Depression and the yearning that unites them: "Oh, will there not be some return for all men wandering the earth?  Will not the wound that pierced our hearts in April find some appeasement at summer's end?  October is the time for all retruning, and men in exile think then of their native earth."

Seodial Deena's abstract, "A Postcolonial Perspective of African American Writers' Shifting Relationship with the Bible," was published in the proceedings of the Second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, held at the Monash University Centre in Prato, Tuscany, Italy, July 20-23, 2004.  For access, please see: http://humanitiesconference.com/ProposalSystem/Presentations/P000944