Faculty Publications 2017

Everyday Words is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Zizek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Zizekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Zizek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek affirms Zizek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Zizekian criticism.   Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Zizek

Reveals how gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation in ways that impact the legal status and well-being of women and girls in the justice system.   Women and girls' contact with the justice system is often influenced by gender-related assumptions and stereotypes. The justice practices of the past 40 years have been largely based on conceptual principles and assumptions--including personal theories about gender--more than scientific evidence about what works to address the specific needs of women and girls in the justice system. Because of this, women and girls have limited access to equitable justice and are increasingly caught up in outdated and harmful practices, including the net of the criminal justice system.  Gender, Psychology, and Justice uses psychological research to examine the experiences of women and girls involved in the justice system. Their experiences, from initial contact with justice and court officials, demonstrate how gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation to impact legal status and well-being. The volume also explains the role psychology can play in shaping legal policy, ranging from the areas of corrections to family court and drug court.   Gender, Psychology, and Justice provides a critical analysis of girls' and women's experiences in the justice system. It reveals the practical implications of training and interventions grounded in psychological research, and suggests new principles for working with women and girls in legal settings.

This book analyzes early twenty-first century film and television's fascination with representing the Anglo-American eighteenth century. Grounded in cultural studies, film studies, and adaptation theory, the book examines how these works represented the eighteenth century to assuage anxieties about values, systems, and institutions at the start of a new millennium. The first two chapters reveal how films like Gulliver's Travels (2010) or the remake of Poldark (2015) use history to establish the direct relationship between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first. The final chapters examine pairs of productions for how they address and legitimate different aspects of contemporary ideology such as attitudes toward race and gender, or the connection between technological and social progress.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the beloved author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, brings to his work a great treasure--his Christian faith. Tolkien's literary works are so popular in part because, in some sense, they pertain to the real world. This present volume is an attempt to understand better the deep Christian influences on his work but also to explore the relevance of Tolkien's work for theology today. After examining Tolkien's fiction in order better to appreciate Christian influences, this volume takes a closer look at Tolkien's theology of fantasy, his response to the more skeptical origins of religion research, and applies his work to contemporary questions about method in biblical studies. Tolkien's Christianity informed all he wrote. Moreover, his own theology of fantasy holds great promise for contemporary theology.

In the Hebrew Bible, Judges 4-5 tells the lurid story of the heroic figure of Jael, a woman who seduces the Canaanite general Sisera and then nails his head to the ground with a tent-peg, thus saving Israel from the troops of King Sabin. This gruesome tale has long intrigued scholars and artists alike. The many versions of the story that have appeared in art and literature have repeatedly and creatively built on the gendered themes of the tradition, often seeing in the encounter between Jael and Sisera some fundamental truth about the relationship between women and men. In Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael, Colleen Conway offers the first sustained look at how this biblical tradition has been used artistically to articulate and inform cultural debates about gender. She traces the cultural retellings of this story in poems, prints, paintings, plays, and narratives across many centuries, beginning with its appearance in Judges 4-5 and continuing up to the present day. Once separated from its original theological context, the Jael/Sisera tradition becomes largely about gender identity, particularly the conflict between the sexes. Conway examines the ways in which Jael has been reimagined by turns as a wily seductress, passionate lover, frustrated and bored mother, peace-bringing earth goddess, and deadly cyborg assassin. Meanwhile, Sisera variously plays the enemy general, the seduced lover, the noble but tragically duped victim, and the violent male chauvinist. Ultimately, Conway demonstrates that the ways in which Jael's actions are explained and assessed all depend on when, by whom, and for whom the Jael and Sisera story is being told. In examining the varying artistic renditions of the story, this book also provides a case study of the Bible's role as a common cultural resource in secular western culture.

Since publication of the first edition in 1994, the second edition in 1999, and the third edition in 2009, many new advances in sleep medicine have been made and warrant a fourth edition.  This comprehensive text features 19 additional chapters and covers basic science, technical and laboratory aspects and clinical and therapeutic advances in sleep medicine for beginners and seasoned practitioners.   With the discovery of new entities, many new techniques and therapies, and evolving basic science understanding of sleep, Sleep Disorders Medicine, Fourth Edition brings old and new knowledge about sleep medicine together succinctly in one place for a deeper understanding of the topic. Neurologists, internists, family physicians, pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, otolaryngologists, dentists, neurosurgeons, neuroscientists, intensivists, as well as those interested in advancing their knowledge in sleep and its disorders, will find this edition to be an invaluable resource to this bourgeoning field.

"What! Still Alive?!" offers a powerful and deeply affecting examination of the complex memories of Jewish survivors returning to their homes in Poland after the Holocaust. These survivors left unparalleled testimonies of their first impressions with the Jewish historical commissions from 1944 to 1950. As many survivors found they were no longer welcome by their Polish neighbors, they chose to settle in the new state of Israel. Again, these surviving Jews left testimonies describing their postwar returns. In "What! Still Alive?!," Rice investigates the transformation of survivors' memories from the first account after their initial return to Poland and later accounts, recorded at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem between 1955 and 1970. Through close readings of these firsthand narratives, Rice traces the ways in which the passage of time and a changing geopolitical context influenced the survivors' memories.