Modern Language Studies — Issue 55.1 — Summer 2025
L 0 C A L P 0 E
How many cats does it take to cork a chimney, she began huskily, before halting to revise. Scritch-scratch, she went, or rather her blue pen went, right into the mic, a flock of tooloud whispers. She squirmed behind the podium, auditioning her selves to find the one that fit. She thanked us and resumed. And as she zoomed through scrawling full of winkings at herself, patchwork tangents without song, she forced a trance that was the mere heaving of a scarf, heaved into a space where every face scrunched, as if to say: no thanks. Her final passage fell as sleepy jabbers from a nursery, right through a cardboard tube. We clapped because she stopped, and kept it up until she found her helmet. She clambered in her go-kart, shivering her harness on. Bumpity, tumble-bumpity, it thudded the stage-left steps, before puttering finally into her lunch. Once more we breathed, relieved, as after a fit of sneezing in sudden sunlight. Once more we had survived her odd assault.
T
ADAM TAVEL
55.1
VOLUME 55, NO. 1
SUMMER 2025
staff
LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR
AMANDA LENIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR
PATRICK THOMAS HENRY ASSOCIATE EDITOR Fiction and Poetry
ANGELA FULK ASSOCIATE EDITOR Profession and Pedagogy
RANDY ROBERTSON ASSOCIATE EDITOR Reviews
NICK STEPHENSON WEBMASTER
CRYSTAL VANHORN SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER
CELIA SHIFFER COPYEDITOR
LINDSAY HIRSCHMAN MANAGING EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
CAROLINE HACKETT, ALEX VIDAL PEREZ, and MAREN SCHETTLER EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
about NeMLA
The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. The group was founded as the New York-Pennsylvania MLA in 1967 by William Wehmeyer of St. Bonaventure University and other MLA members interested in continuing scholarly discourse at annual conventions smaller than that hosted by the Modern Language Association. In 1969, the organization moved to wider regional membership, election of officers, formal affiliation with MLA, and adoption of its present name.
NeMLA continues its traditions of intellectual contribution and advancement at the 57th Annual Convention, to be held March 5–8, 2026 in Pittsburgh. This year’s keyword is (Re)generation, which invokes positivity, energy, and engagement. Think of regeneration in the sense of bringing forth not the original but a new entity that is more powerful, vigorous, efficient, and healthier. Understood in these terms, the health of the humanities depends on a continuous regenerative process that partakes in the creation of new forms of scholarship, both empirical and philosophical, and is open to inclusive debate, restorative justice, and political empowerment.
Please see the NeMLA web page at www.nemla.org for information on joining the organization and about the fellowships, awards, and publications available to members.
Modern Language Studies appears twice a year, in the summer and winter, and is a publication of the Northeast Modern Language Association.
NeMLA board of directors 2025–2026
EXECUTIVE BOARD
SIMONA WRIGHT, The College of New Jersey President
ESTHER ALARCON-ARANA, SALVE REGINA UNIVERSITY First Vice President
MATTHEW DARLING, GANNON UNIVERSITY Second Vice President
VICTORIA L. KETZ, LA SALLE UNIVERSITY Past President OFFICERS
VICTORIA L. KETZ, LA SALLE UNIVERSITY, Executive Director
DEREK DIMATTEO, Gannon University Associate Executive Director
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
COLE LOWMAN, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO American and Diaspora Studies Director
ANGELA FULK, SUNY BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE British and Global Anglophone Studies Director
MARIA PLOCHOCKI, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK CAITY Caucus President and Representative
ERNESTO LIVORNI, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON Comparative Literature Director
PATRICK THOMAS HENRY, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing Director
JULIA TITUS, YALE UNIVERSITY Cultural Studies and Media Studies Director
ANN MARIE SHORT, SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE Diversity Caucus President
CHRISTINA ROBU, DAVIDSON COLLEGE French and Francophone Studies Director
KAROLINA HICKE, SWARTHMORE COLLEGE German Studies Director
CHRISTIAN YLAGAN, WESTERN UNIVERSITY Graduate Student Caucus Representative
MARCO RAMIREZ ROJAS, LEHMAN COLLEGE, CUNY Hispanophone and Lusophone Studies Director
GIUSY DI FILIPPO, COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS Italian Studies Director
KATHLEEN KASTEN-MUTKUS, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES Pedagogy and Professionalization Director
MARIA ROVITO, ALBANY COLLEGE OF PHARMACY AND HEALTH SCIENCES Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Director
submission information
Authors should submit their manuscripts using MLA style for citations and notes. Please use parenthetical citations that reference a works cited list; notes and works cited should appear at the end of the text. Submissions to the reviews section do not need a works cited list.
We take electronic submissions in Microsoft Word format. These should be set in 12 point Times, double spaced, and use superscript for footnote numbers rather than the footnote function. Please clear all identifiers from electronic submissions, including the author and company fields in “Properties” under the “File” menu.
For submission guidelines, our statement of ethical practices, and link to the MLS Submittable site, visit www.mlsjrnl.com/submissions. Address all correspondence to mls@susqu.edu.
NeMLA membership is not required to submit to MLS; however, membership is required for publication. Detailed submission guidelines and descriptions of all the editorial sections are posted at www.mlsjrnl.com.
subscription information
2024–2025 RATES
Institutions: $78.00
International Shipping: $40.00
Single Copies (Vol. 35 and on):
$34.00 for institutions
$24.00 for individuals
$18.00 for NEMLA members
$23.00 for international shipping
Subscription agencies receive a 10% discount ($70.20, plus $40.00 for international shipping if applicable).
To subscribe online, go to www.mlsjrnl.com/subscribe.
Send all other subscription inquiries, address changes, and payments to:
Modern Language Studies, Attn.: Subscriptions
Susquehanna University Box 1861
514 University Avenue
Selinsgrove, PA, 17870
Hanging Out in the Gallery with Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, Yun Suknam, and Some Meritorious Men
Susan Spencer
Profession & Pedagogy
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Authentic Communication within Classroom Communities
Julian A. Ledford
Fiction & Poetry
Rachel Phillips: Party in the Breakroom
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona: Three Poems
Paddy Qiu: Front Seat
Laine Derr: A Quiet Blue
Noel Sloboda: Peace of Mind
Emma Loomis-Amrhein: turtle crossing season
Reviews
Jennifer Petersen. How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech
David R. Witzling
Mathieu Deflem and Derek M. D. Silva. Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship
Ahmed Nabil Bensedik
55.1
I climbed Mt. Pongnae in my dream last night, Riding on the back of a dragon reposing in the waves of the sea.
Immortal beings leaning on jade-green canes Welcomed me affectionately on the Lotus Peak.
Far beneath my feet I saw the East Sea, Looking small like wine in a wine glass. The phoenix beneath a flowering tree played on the flute, And the moonlight shone quietly on a golden water jar.
Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, from Kan-yü (“Stirred by my Experience,” translated by Kichung Kim)
How is it that Virginia Woolf, a twentieth-century English writer, when speculating about a totally fictitious woman poet of sixteenth-century England, should shed so much light on the life and work of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a sixteenth-century Korean woman poet? One reason is that not much is known about the life and work of individual women living in the sixteenth century, be it England or Korea.
Kichung Kim, “Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’” (78)
In the Fall of 2021, as we all embarked on the slow process of emerging from the isolation of COVID, I visited the first major exhibition on Chosŏn-dynasty Korean portraits ever featured in the United States, Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture. These works of art were undergoing a long-delayed emergence of their own after centuries of neglect by critics and exhibition halls, and then a further period of loneliness as they waited, unvisited, for over a year
in the deserted vastness of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.1 The central gallery was dominated by a collection of royally commissioned portraits of eighteenth-century Gongsin or “meritorious officials” in spectacular court dress, their high status indicated by their tall horsehair hats of office and patterned silk robes with prominent rank badges embroidered across the chest. The badges featured fierce tigers that celebrated a military man’s martial prowess, or the scholar’s insignia of a crane with its wings spread in flight.
The crane in particular gave a singular impression of movement when mingled with the stiff formality of the men’s poses and clothing; its freedom and evident joy in motion evoked, for me personally, the relief of breaking out of the confining shell of quarantine. Yet it also seemed like a striking counterpoint to the portraits of men—emphasized further by their placement behind protective glass shields— who were all dressed alike and all captured in an identical posture, turned slightly to the right and depicted in sharp relief against a featureless backdrop. They appeared as if trapped in a matrix of defined masculinity, their dissimilarities swallowed up by their peers’ expectations of what constituted male success. The artists had indicated as much individuality as allowable, often with unflattering results: one especially high-ranking General was characterized by a hair-sprouting mole on his cheek, while the most exalted General of all was marked by chicken pox scars and a dark yellow discoloration in his skin and eyes that, according to the Museum’s catalogue, are almost certainly warning signs of the cirrhosis that claimed his life a mere six months after he reached the pinnacle of fame as King Yŏngjo’s Minister of Military Affairs. An inscription in the upper right-hand corner of General Oh’s portrait announces the grateful King’s bestowal of an honorific princely title, along with the commissioning of the portrait itself, after the army’s suppression of a failed insurrection. [Figure 1]
But why cirrhosis? I wondered. Isn’t cirrhosis usually associated with alcoholism? Why would this powerful man, at the top of his personal game and now the unquestioned champion of the larger game of competition for status among his fellows, complete a long process of drinking himself to death less than a year after receiving the highest honors available to a person not born into royalty? And if we accept that possibility, what invisible stressors might have driven him to such self-destructive behavior in a world where he seemed to hold all the winning cards?
Chos ŏ n Korea was a strictly hierarchical, strongly gendered Confucian society with complex and difficult rules of behavior. Even today, the remnants of Confucian pressures toward conformity in East Asian society are known to cause enormous psychological stress, both internally and externally generated. Perhaps General Oh’s troubled liver was an indicator of those psychological stresses, immortalized on a silk canvas and many generations later—along with the chicken pox—the most arresting aspect of his official likeness. After gazing into the General’s discolored eyes and finding no answer there, I found myself looking for signs of strain among the other men.
Because they were all men. There was no question of a female counterpart to the gentlemen on display since, during the centuries in which the Chosŏn held sway, a woman’s place was definitely not on the wall. Or even on a decorative screen that would never leave the palace. As the art historian Burglind Jungmann explains in her description of a family grouping that appeared on one such screen, painted for Yŏngjo’s grandson in 1795, “ladies of high standing, such as the king’s mother, other female members of the royal household, and the wives of high officials are … not depicted, but their presence is indicated by empty cushions. This was due to the Confucian concept of female chastity which required
that women should not show their faces in public.” (Jungmann 356). Royal women, and especially the Queen Mother, wielded considerable power politically as they moved into the nineteenth century, yet they were still expected to retain at least an outward appearance of retiring modesty. Thus, in this and countless other instances, it was the presence of their absence that was pictured by the artist.2
A smaller gallery to one side featured twenty-first century responses to the classical portraiture. In the center of the room was a free-standing rack that, at first glance, didn’t appear to be the portrayal of a person at all; instead, it looked more like an invasive intrusion from a nearby consignment clothing shop inexplicably transported by some quirk of the space-time continuum. Do Ho Suh’s Uni-Form/s: Self Portraits/s: My 39 Years displayed a tidy row of ten uniforms, lined up by size, worn by the artist at various stages of his life from kindergarten through his school years to his time in mandatory military service. The proportions of the carefully preserved clothing expanded along with the sense of duties, responsibilities, and obligations associated with a boy growing into adulthood within the constraints imposed by a society that still retains many Confucian elements. In this self-portrait, a comment on how membership in various groups formed the man he eventually became, the uniforms’ distinguishing badges took on a deeper historical dimension in the context of the cranes and tigers so proudly emblazoned on the breasts of King Yŏngjo’s honored officials.
There’s a significant difference, though. Do Ho Suh no longer inhabits them, and they do not define him. In fact, Uni-Form/s is another case of presence defined by absence. The cultural expectations are clearly there, lined up neatly for all to see, but, without rejecting these elements of his past, Do has moved on to forge an identity for himself beyond the rigid role/s assigned to him by others. He has
found a way to incorporate these former selves into his identification as an artist, privately retaining the intangible worth they contributed to his personal growth even as he so conscientiously looked after their material existence, curating them, along with his memories, in dark closets or boxes or trunks as they accumulated over those thirty-nine years he commemorates in the title. [Figure 2]
The walls of this secondary gallery, in contrast to those of its neighbor, were dominated by the bold, primitive style of Yun Suknam, a self-taught artist who “began her career as a professional artist at age forty when many other Korean women are resigned to family tasks” (Caruso 77). Initially working with found objects and materials scavenged from the streets, Yun set out to overturn the categorization of Korean women as self-sacrificing drones who live for others while losing their sense of self, who follow those “traditional values, which are based on a Confucianist patriarchal structure, [and] are taught and reinforced by Korean cultural beliefs, social practice, and institutions” (Caruso 78).
According to the Likeness and Legacy exhibit catalogue, Yun is considered the pioneer of Korean feminist art, and her depictions of historical figures both famous and nameless address the absence of female subjects in traditional paintings. In the early 1990s “she broke free from the flat surfaces of traditional Korean portraiture and began to produce wood assemblage pieces focused on feminist themes—a subject all but unknown in Korea at the time” (Asleson 40).
The catalogue referenced Yun’s controversial “Pink Room” multimedia installations of the 1990s, aggressively feminine spaces that channeled her discomfort with the stultifying expectations for a middle-class housewife as they “exaggerate[d] stereotypically feminine decor to the point of delirium.” Although conceived as “conceptual self-portraits,” once again the female body was portrayed only by
cushions, represented in absentia by the furniture that would have surrounded her. But the passive acceptance of that role as seen in the Chosŏn-dynasty screens was undermined by a literal backbone of steel and a sense of acute unease: “Elaborately carved sofas and chairs stand on legs fashioned from curved knives and often show metal spikes protruding from the hot-pink satin upholstery. Vividly patterned pink walls create a disorienting, hallucinogenic effect, and pink beads scattered across the floor
indicate the impossibility of finding a secure footing” (Asleson 41). The female presence can be witnessed and experienced by onlookers, but the obvious means of approach is impassable—from either side.
The blades, according to Yun herself, were inspired by the eunjangdo, a small but effective knife carried by women for self-defense during the Chosŏn era. Traditional Chosŏn dresses even have a special breast-tie and pocket to accommodate these knives and keep them handy for use. That bit of historical
knowledge certainly throws a new light on Korean ideas of femininity and complicates the Confucian ideal of the passive, helpless woman.3
What riveted my attention in the gallery on the day of my visit, though, was a time-warping imaginative double portrait with the simple title Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a name that up to that point I had never heard; unbeknownst to me, it would continue to provoke my curiosity for years to come. The label beside the painting informed me that Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn was “a well-known female poet during the Chosŏn dynasty.” Approaching the poet is a second woman
in modern dress who resembles Yun herself, extending an improbably elongated arm across space and time to almost—but not quite—make tactile contact. With her other arm, she clutches to her breast an unfurling scroll that bears the calligraphed marks of some of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s poems. [Figure 3]
“We don’t know much about the women who lived four hundred years ago,” Yun explains, regarding her decision to give this long-dead poet the artistic embodiment that was denied to all members of her sex during her lifetime. “The extended body parts are an expression of my wish to reach out. It is a
craving for communication with other women” (Asian Art Museum wall text, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn). But to reach out to whom, and what would they communicate about? The subject of this painting looked so beautiful, but so impossibly distant. I discovered later that the sense of distance was no accident: reconstruction of the life and personality of a figure who has often been described as Korea’s most famous woman poet, even by her contemporaries, is an elusive goal at best.
Hŏ Ch’ŏhŭi (some years later, she would choose Nansŏrhŏn as her pen name) was born in 1563 in Gangneung-si, South Korea. In her homeland, she and her immensely talented two brothers are still known as the “three jewels” of the illustrious Hŏ family. They shared their tutor and their love of classical poetry and philosophy in a mutually supportive environment in which they challenged one another’s skills and proffered constructive criticism. Of the three, some claimed it was Nansŏrhŏn who shone most brightly. Yun Suknam imagines her clad in white and surrounded by butterflies, that universal symbol of a deceptively fragile-looking creature that finds the strength to burst through its chrysalis into a world of freedom and beauty, as the poet reaches her hand toward the lotuses that her poems so frequently referenced. She does not wear a eunjangdo. Throughout Asia the lotus is considered a marvelous, if not miraculous, flower that defies its humble origins by emerging from the murkiest depths of mud to blossom into a luminous bloom of color or a blinding whiteness. The majority of Nansŏrhŏn’s surviving poems are pervaded by tantalizing visions of a spectacularly beautiful land of pure spirit, where the mind can wander at will without beating itself to exhaustion against the confines of our everyday existence or physical limitations. These metaphysical poems, composed, like most of her writing, in the flawless classical Chinese favored by her male contemporaries and
predecessors, are justly famous. I have included one of them as the epigraph at the top of this essay. They don’t interest me, though, as much as the much smaller collection of compositions—just a handful—that give us a glimpse of Nansŏrhŏn’s actual life, a long echo of Yun’s yearning to escape the stifling expectations a Confucian society can impose upon a woman even four and a half centuries later. Sometimes composed as kasa, a Korean vernacular verse form structured in couplets and favored by her contemporaries as an apt vehicle for emotional expression and narrative, and sometimes modeled on precursors reaching back centuries, many of her most moving poems speak of the challenges embedded in the everyday.4
A delicately nurtured lady of the aristocratic class was not supposed to move beyond amateur status in the field of poetry. Yet, as Zifan Zhu, a contemporary (male) commentator remarked in 1606 in an introduction to Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s remaining Collected Works, which had been collated by her brother seventeen years after her death, her talent was a force of nature that could not be restrained: “For a woman of the inner chambers to compose poetry suggests a fusion of heaven and earth, mountains and streams; this is a fusion that cannot be forced nor forcibly stopped” (Hwang et al.).5 Like the blades protruding from Yun’s plush pink couches, or the metaphor of the lotus, genius will find a way to break through even the most unpromising of circumstances.
At the age of fifteen, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn was married to Kim Sŏngnip, a gentleman of her social rank who was no equal for her intellectual and creative abilities. She refers to him in one poem as “the merry man of the capital,” a sophisticated bon vivant who moved her from her childhood home to the bustling capital city then known as Hanseong (now Seoul). Initially she was optimistic, and she nurtured hope of fulfillment in her new role. Perhaps her husband hoped
for the same. In a more equitable world, he might have turned to his bride as a partner capable of teaching him the means of improving his literary skills and career prospects, but instead his jealousy of her talents led to neglect and emotional abuse. In one of her rare autobiographical poems, a kasa aptly entitled “Married Sorrow,” Nansŏrhŏn recounts how young she was, and how determined to be an ideal spouse: “with that disposition, / my face, its expression, / I vowed one hundred years together” (ll. 18 – 20). But the marital harmony a woman was expected to uphold was not to be her lot; in fact, her marriage was so disharmonious that she describes the creeping mortification associated with her rebellious feelings toward her husband, and the self-blame that inevitably follows:
Where did that sweet face go, that this hateful expression now possesses it?
Looking at this face, I wonder who ever could love me.
Shame rises through me, but who is there to accuse?
(McCann 71)
Kichung Kim, in an insightful essay entitled “Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister,’” questions just how much of Nansŏrhŏn’s work really was directly autobiographical, and then wonders if maybe that is the wrong question to ask: “In fact, the poetic persona of her poems may as often be generic as they are personal, for the experience of her married life was shaped as much by the general condition of the married woman of her times as by her personal circumstances. When she poured out her innermost feelings into poetry, she spoke not only for herself but also for the Korean woman of her age. This is part of the greatness of her poetry” (Kim 87 – 88).6 He cites in particular a poem of regret:
The orchid beneath the window swaying in the wind, How fragrant are its leaves!
Once the autumn wind sweeps by, Sadly it will wither and fall from the frost.
(Kim 88)
Since the poet’s chosen pen name, Nansŏrhŏn, means “white orchid”—or, more literally, OrchidSnow-Roof-Eave, an “evocative name” that “combined the images of the curved eaves of a tile roof, falling snow, and the delicate lines of an orchid” (Childs 144)—we are naturally inclined to assume that the poem must be self-referential and then jump to the further conclusion that the wind and frost must refer to the unhappy marriage that blighted her abilities. Indeed, as sympathetic readers “we feel the poet struggling to keep alive the core of her creative self” (Kim 88). Yet that might be an unfortunate oversimplification of her intent, and certainly of the poem’s potential impact, for “even in this most personal-seeming poem, we see that by speaking her own innermost feelings, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn had also given expression to what many wellborn women of her time must have felt about the passing of their youthful beauty and sheltered life, although they themselves had seldom given poetic expression to their sentiments” (Kim 88).
At times that sheltered life must have seemed stultifying beyond endurance, especially after the unusual freedom and intellectual stimulation Nansŏrhŏn experienced in her youth. She captured high-born women’s unconscious internalization of such conformist pressure in an eight-line lyric entitled “Swing Song,” or “Song on the Swing.” The poem opens with female friends engaged in friendly competition at the tanojŏl festival, one of the few days in the year when Chosŏn-dynasty women were legally permitted to escape the boundaries of home and mix with the wider community. Nansŏrhŏn
describes the competitors as momentarily “like Immortals” who are lifted “up to the sky” in the midst of a natural landscape dominated by green willows (traditionally a symbol of femininity in East Asian iconography), striving to see who can soar higher on a gaily colored rope swing that has been set up as part of the festival activities. Then in the second verse, “Swinging finished, she straightens her embroidered shoes, / Descends and stands silent on emerald steps” (Choe-Wall 78), slippered feet demurely grounded back in the artifices of the domestic world. In their analysis of this poem, Susan Hwang, Janet Jun, and S.E. Kile suggest that the silence emphasized in that second line “hints at the secretive nature of what transpired between the girls during their swing competition,” with a possible erotic component indicated by their disordered clothing that needs to be set right before they can re-enter their socially determined roles: in addition to having temporarily doffed their shoes, their clothing is “beaded with sweat and their hair is disheveled and their hairpins have fallen out” (Hwang, Jun, and Kile, “Reading”). The final couplet reads “Gauze jacket lightly beaded with sweat, she forgets / To order anyone to retrieve her fallen haircomb” (ChoeWall 78). Though it’s impossible to determine whether a sexual component was the author’s conscious intention or not—any evidence related to erotic activity is ambiguous—however one interprets the poem, it’s equally impossible to miss a flash of rebellious gender transgression in the bold contrast Nansŏrhŏn draws between the images of energetic power in the first stanza and the reluctant return to powerlessness and confinement, with silenced voice, in the second. The process is not quite complete: the expensive ornament that on an ordinary day would bind her hair is still missing.
In his Reexamining World Literature, Richard Serrano devotes a chapter to translating and interpreting selections by the iconoclastic eighteenth-century male
Korean poet Yi Ok, who assumes the voice of a meek young Confucian wife in A Cho Song of Refinement:
Everyone enjoys playing on a swing: I alone do not join in.
I insist that my arms are too weak to push,
But actually I’m afraid I’ll lose my jade dragon hairpin. (Serrano 103)
The parallel seemed so striking I asked him about it. He remarked that in the opening of Nansŏrhŏn’s “Swing Song,” the world and the imagery describing it “is entirely female, which means they can let loose—briefly—without worrying about any stupid men bugging them.” But inevitably the realities of everyday existence close in, with the physical objects taking on additional resonance if one does not read the poem in the biographical sense, but as part of a generic Sinitic tradition dating back centuries, in which the ostensible speaker is a beautiful courtly lady:
Since the poem was composed in Chinese and the author is being overt in her references to women, she is clearly writing in the boudoir poetry tradition. Each of the lines in the final quatrain contains one reminder of that world: embroidered shoes, emerald steps, gauze jacket, hairpin [釵 , a long ornamental spike used for confining one’s hair, which Choe-Wall describes as a haircomb]. The women live in luxurious surroundings and wear luxurious items because their role in life is to appear beautiful to men. In the poem she has briefly put aside that role in order to play on the swing with the other woman/women, but the poem ends before she completes her return to her usual role. The hairpin should be removed only under two conditions: she comes to the end of
the day and her master never came to see her, therefore it is time to go to bed alone, or her master has come to see her and either removes it or asks her to remove it before they go to bed together. Losing the hairpin is therefore a potentially serious infraction of the palace women’s code. (Serrano, Email 10 July 2024)
So a sexualized view of the imagery is not, perhaps, as far-fetched as it may seem. Yet, although the fact that “the poet deploys objects so closely associated with boudoir poetry means that she is plugging into a tradition,” almost all extant boudoir poetry over the course of several centuries was written by men. Conventionally, the woman’s fulfillment is dependent on the presence of a male partner. Does he arrive to remove the hairpin, or does she wait for him in vain and eventually remove it herself when she realizes he will not be joining her that night?
Boudoir poems always imply a male gaze; what makes them so heartbreaking is that the male gaze is being withheld. One might imagine that this poem is playing against the predominant themes of boudoir poetry, which is heartbreak at the absence of the higher-status man. The loss of the hairpin is a reminder that the joy the women take while beyond the male gaze is necessarily only temporary. There are no boudoir poem elements in the first three lines; by introducing them in line 4 the poet begins to dismantle the joy expressed at the beginning. (Serrano, Email)
Once again, it is the presence of absence that drives the poet’s imagination. Nansŏrhŏn has turned the genre on its head, though, by indicating that this woman’s desire is for the masculine world to remain absent, enabling her to live freely like an Immortal.7
More overtly transgressive is a poem known as “Courtesan’s Song,” which takes on another conventionally erotic category of lyric in which a beautiful woman in a brothel awaits a visit from her favorite lover. Traditionally written by men, often in the voice of an ardent female persona projected by a masculine imagination, in Nansŏrhŏn’s hands the courtesan-poem genre takes on a tinge of social protest, or what Yang Hi ChoeWall refers to as an “antithesis”:
Lining the narrow street, lots of brothels;
At every gate sumptuous carriages.
An east wind blows and snaps the willow branch of love;
Riding a fine horse, a man gallops over fallen flowers. (Choe-Wall 77)
In her comments on this quatrain, Choe-Wall remarks upon the juxtaposition of the narrow street and the sumptuous carriages that pass through it, emphasizing the unequal relationship between the “privileged man and the deprived prostitute…. producing a vivid contrast between lower and upper classes” (Choe-Wall 77). The images of the snapped willow branch and fallen flowers are reminiscent of the orchid that “will wither and fall from the frost” in the example that so moved Kichung Kim, quoted above.
Kim also takes note of a series of four short poems that describe an impoverished dressmaker, young and beautiful but unable to afford a matchmaker. Here, the inequality speaks clearly for itself with no need for commentary. “This bolt of woven cloth in the loom,” the seamstress asks herself, “Whose wedding dress will it make?”
Scissors clasped in my hand, I cut out the cloth,
And the chill of the night stiffens all my fingers.
For others I have made the bridal clothes, Year after year alone in my room. (Kim 91)
Choe-Wall includes this same sequence in her Vision of a Phoenix, rendering the last two lines somewhat differently: “She cuts a bridal costume for another, / Yet year after year she sleeps alone” (Choe-Wall 66). Although internal evidence in the rhyme scheme leads Choe-Wall to suspect that Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn may not in fact be the author despite the inclusion of this series in some of the earliest anthologies of her work (imitations and outright forgeries as a form of homage were not uncommon after the poet’s death), she admits that it shows an empathy for victims of social injustice similar to that seen in her other works whose provenance is uncontested, a trait unusual in a member of Nansŏrhŏn’s class. Her desire to touch the lives of other women outside of her own experience—reminiscent of Yun Suknam’s imaginary portraits, and that long arm reaching across four centuries toward the poet herself—spans across a spectrum ranging from those living in poverty to those in the most affluent of circumstances: in the ninth of a twenty-poem sequence called “Palace Song,” Nansŏrhŏn channels the chagrin of a lady-in-waiting, compelled to provide sexual favors for her master, who finds herself unable to slip away discreetly under cover of darkness because one of the eunuchs, “with a golden key, had locked the gate.” Forced to wait until dawn, she is exposed to public humiliation: “In the past I used to laugh at the others coming here. / How could I know that this morning it would be me?” (Choe-Wall 80). Like “Swing Song” and “Courtesan’s Song,” the poems in the “Palace Song” sequence are composed in Chinese as seven-syllable chŏlgu, or quatrains. Several of them convey similar twists on the conventional elements of boudoir poetry and invoke similar metaphorical objects to add resonance to a message that, more often than
not, appears to be intentionally enigmatic.
Choe-Wall suggests that Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s “remarkable understanding and sympathy for the deprived groups of society” might be a result of her own childhood in straitened circumstances: “Her father, although he held high office in the government, was content to be poor, and he remained incorruptible” (Choe-Wall 66). Kim, on the other hand, questions whether it was “her own unhappiness as a married woman and a poet that enabled her to place herself so completely in the shoes of women whose lives were filled with pain and sorrow” (Kim 90). In either case, perhaps her own family’s financial limitations might explain her marriage to a man for whom she was so obviously unsuited.
Yet Kim Sŏngnip, too, was likely a victim of his society’s gender expectations. Rather than seeking spousal assistance and support, he would have been encouraged to look upon his wife’s skill as unnatural, perhaps even a potential threat. In an influential article on “The Political Significance of Fragile Masculinity,” Sarah H. DiMuccio and Eric D. Knowles of New York University describe recent research that indicates that for many men who enjoy (or aspire to) social dominance in a male-centered system, “the pressure to earn and prove their manhood triggers anxiety that in turn motivates a variety of compensatory beliefs and behaviors.” Men who are “expected to behave in masculine ways in order to claim membership in the privileged gender group,” with the threat of a loss of status if they fail, are likely to fall into reckless or destructive behavior in order “to gain, maintain, and reclaim ‘real’ manhood” even at the expense of personal relationships (DiMuccio and Knowles 25, 26). The authors concentrate primarily on political and domestic realities in twenty-first-century America, but the anxieties associated with a fear of falling short of the cultural standards of manhood, along with the compensatory actions meant to restore the threatened status of masculinity,
are by no means limited to the present day. As Kichung Kim observes, “In a world where a wellborn man’s accomplishments in learning and letters constituted his principal avenue of success in the world, it would have been difficult for Kim Sŏngnip to have appreciated his wife’s superior literary gifts. Few Korean husbands of that time could have” (Kim 87).
The pressure to retreat into defensive mode was very real. David R. McCann describes how the elites of the Kim and Hŏ families’ aristocratic yangban class made use of the civil service exam system to protect their own privilege and establish a zero-sum game with a perpetually tilted playing field, taking advantage of a carefully-controlled educational and economic system to limit access to finite resources; they “had both the time and the resources to study the Chinese language and the Chinese classics that formed the basis for the examinations, and made sure that this system remained the only route to status as an official, which in turn barred the nonelites, both lower classes and women, from access to power and authority in Chosŏn Korea” (McCann 116).8 Kim’s essay on “Shakespeare’s Sister” recounts how this same impulse dominated patriarchal, hierarchical societies across the globe in the sixteenth century, in Shakespeare’s Europe (in which case we might substitute classical Greek and Latin for Chinese learning) as well as in Nansŏrhŏn’s Korea:
Even wellborn Korean women of that time were discouraged and excluded from systematic training in reading and writing, because book learning was considered unnecessary and inappropriate for women. In fact, the absence of learning was considered to promote virtue in women, and, if educated, they were expected not to exhibit their learning. Except for kisaeng (professional female entertainers who by law belonged to the lowest social class) women were
to have no professional or public life, which was the exclusive domain of wellborn men.
(Kim 80)9
One can only imagine the horror Kim Sŏngnip and his mother must have felt if they looked upon Nansŏrhŏn’s creative expression as an indulgence in behavior that their peer group saw as not only unproductive, but as associated with women who were notorious for augmenting their income as entertainers with a side hustle of prostitution. Cynthia Childs elucidates these curbs on women’s education, and the reasoning behind them, further: “Those womanly attributes most cherished in Confucian society—obedience, docility, self-sacrifice—could be undermined by the acquisition of too much learning” and lead to disharmony within the family unit (Childs 144). Nansŏrhŏn’s younger brother Hŏ Kyun admitted, in the preface to an elegy that he composed upon the occasion of her death, that “My late sister was a virtuous lady, possessed with exceptional literary talent. However, she was unable to win over her mother-in-law” (qtd. in Choe-Wall 12).
The zero-sum game of winner-take-all in the face of perceived scarcity can be (and still is) played by women as well as men, perhaps even more so given their traditionally subordinate position. A self-fulfilling vicious cycle is the inevitable result, isolating feminist impulses and passively fortifying masculine power, as the unfortunate lady-in-waiting in “Palace Song” only realizes when she herself becomes vulnerable to toxic gossip. No doubt Nansŏrhŏn’s marital misery was compounded by more than an intellectually inferior husband:
For a wellborn married woman of the times to do what Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn did must have been a clear defiance of the public mores and morality of Chosŏn society…. it is not difficult to imagine
the mother-in-law’s side. Most likely, her mother-in-law—from a fine family, and if not literary but well schooled in the letters and wifely duties like most wellborn women of the times—must have had to subordinate her own personal interests, desires, and hopes to the work and obligations of her husband’s household. And, in turn, she must have expected her daughter-in-law to do the same, because that was the long-accepted pattern of the motherin-law and daughter-in-law relationship in Korea. Unless she had been extraordinarily understanding, she must have found it difficult to sympathize with or tolerate her daughter-inlaw’s poetry writing. (Kim 86)
The first book-length study in English devoted to Nansŏrhŏn’s life and work, Yang Hi Choe-Wall’s Vision of a Phoenix, describes Kim Sŏngnip as “an unimposing man, and a philanderer, showing all the frustration of subjugation to his wife’s superiority. This repression kept him at a distance and often away from home” (Choe-Wall 10). Kim’s frequent visits to the “library” were a thinly veiled excuse for assignations with other women, causing gossip that was embarrassing to both of them. A brief poem entitled “To my husband studying in the Kangsa Hall of Reading” addresses Nansŏrhŏn’s disappointment:
Swallows perched in the angled eaves fly in pairs; Blossoms falling pell mell tumble against silk dresses. As I sit in the bedchamber gazing as far as the eye can see, feelings of love wound me; The grass is green South of the River but you have not returned. (Choe-Wall 98)
The loneliness inherent in the pairs of swallows and the falling blossoms are standard metaphors that need no explanation, and rivers are often evoked in East Asian literature as a trope for divided lovers, but there’s more going on here: Choe-Wall notes that the word ŭi or “clothes” in reference to the silk dresses is a homophonous pun with ŭi as strong emotion or thought, equating the tumbled dresses with the wife’s wounded feelings—and, perhaps, a not-so veiled reminder that her presence in the bedroom might, in an ordinary marriage, invite a passionate husband to tumble her clothing himself. Such an ability to introduce an additional verbal twist into a seemingly straightforward conventional lyric poem was a highly valued skill among Korean literati. Yi Sugwang, a prominent literary critic who was personally acquainted with Nansŏrhŏn and her family, claimed that this poem was not included in the first circulated compilation of her poems “because of the eroticism it displays.” Choe-Wall observes, “The rigidity of Confucian society is clearly reflected in his remarks” (99). And, I suspect, also there might be an implicit condemnation of a lack of female modesty in her display of the kind of clever wordplay that would have impressed male peers. Since advancement in courtly circles was based on passing the prestigious Civil Service examinations, and the examinations were based largely on one’s literary abilities, Kim’s lack of those skills rankled. No doubt it didn’t make him feel any better when Nansŏrhŏn’s talented brothers both sailed through the exams with ease, achieving top scores on their first try. Eventually, Kim did manage to pass—in 1589, the year of his wife’s death. [Figure 4]
Though horrifying, perhaps the most moving example of Yun Suknam’s imaginary portraits included in the Likeness and Legacy exhibit was Genealogy II, Yun’s mixed media portrayal of two women in traditional dress placed in front of a
backdrop of pages taken from an actual genealogy book. The first woman’s rich adornment and bold head-on seated pose, strikingly similar to that of the official portraits of courtly officials next door in the main gallery, declare her to be a successful mother. Her simply clad childless counterpart dangles from a noose, a reference to the countless women who took their own lives when they were unable to carry out their duty to sustain the family lineage. “Ironically,” the label beside it pointed out, “whether women produced sons or not, their own names were
never listed in the genealogies.”10 And indeed, many of the hard facts that have been established about Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s biographical circumstances were gleaned by researchers reading between the lines of just such genealogical records that preserved the family history of her father and two brothers.11
Nansŏrhŏn, too, was a mother—but ultimately not deemed a successful one in the eyes of her world. Her marital unhappiness was compounded when both of her children died, one just a year after the other. Her younger brother, Hŏ Kyun, wrote that
“parental enjoyment was cut short by her children’s early death and when she died, she left no offspring to carry on the ancestral rites” (Choe-Wall 14). This would have been a stinging rebuke among her peers, and it must have further alienated her husband and mother-in-law. Kyun knew that. Yet it is to the loyalty and love of this brother that we owe almost everything we know about her as a human being; if not for him, Nansŏrhŏn would exist as a mere sidenote in official records of her male relations’ life histories. He composed biographical notes and, although in accordance with the expectations for female modesty she had left behind instructions that her writings should be destroyed upon her death, he saved many (though not all) of them from the fire. According to Hŏ Kyun, in the end her grief overcame her. She was twenty-six.12
Shortly before she died, Nansŏrhŏn wrote a poem “At My Son’s Grave”:
One year ago I lost my beloved daughter; this year I lost my beloved son. How sad, how sad this expanse of tombs, where two graves line up facing each other.
The poem expresses a wish that reaches into the eternity beyond, which extends before and after life on earth: “May your lonely souls, brother and sister, / play joyfully each night as before you were born” (McCann 83).
The death of Nansŏrhŏn’s children was said to have hastened her own demise, not just from the agony of losing a beloved son and daughter—though that was of course a significant factor—but also from the burden of guilt caused by the sense that ultimately she had failed in a woman’s purpose to assure continuation of her husband’s family line. There were rumors of suicide. Her poems were burned as per her request—it was said, an entire room was filled with them—but copies of over two
hundred had remained at her parents’ house where Hŏ Kyun could redeem them and see to it that they were circulated.
Although he remarried shortly after Nansŏrhŏn’s passing, Kim Sŏngnip didn’t live long enough to produce surviving offspring, either. He died heirless in the midst of the Japanese invasion of Korea that took place in 1592 – 1598. Because he had passed his examinations at last, he was eligible to assume officer status; he was killed while leading the Chŏngŭigun, or Righteous Army, an appointment that must have thrilled him after a lifetime of fruitlessly seeking recognition in the Confucian realm dominated by the patriarchal politics that determined success in Chosŏn society. His body was never found, and his garments were buried in his place. In death he had become, literally, an empty suit, as much a husk as Do Ho Suh’s cast-off uniforms on the rack in the middle of the gallery floor.
Within the next century, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s fame and works had reached beyond Korea to appear in several anthologies in China, alongside poems by Chinese luminaries. An anecdote is recorded about the dismissive remarks of Hong Taeyong (1731 –1783), a Korean military attaché who prided himself on his encounters with prominent intellectuals while on a diplomatic mission to China. When one of these Chinese scholars praised Nansŏrhŏn’s talent, Hong responded reflexively, “This lady’s poems are excellent, but her virtue is a long way away from reaching the standard of her poems. Her husband is Kim Sŏngnip, whose talent and physical appearance are not praiseworthy.” He then quoted a couplet that reads “I wish I could part from Kim Sŏngnip in the world of men, / I could follow Tu Mu forever in the other world” (qtd. in Choe-Wall 103). Tu Mu (803 – 853) was a brilliant poet from the golden age of versification during China’s T’ang dynasty, a famously handsome man but, more importantly, a role model for Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s poetic inspiration. Rather than
focusing on the real import of these two lines, which indicate dissatisfaction with the demands of domestic life and its inevitable interruptions to an artist lost in the creative zone, Hong deliberately evoked a nonexistent scandal surrounding the cliché of a faithless woman who longs to leave her husband for another man, albeit in this case a man who had been dead for over 700 years (Choe-Wall 11).13 Apparently, in Hong’s mind a talented woman’s “virtue” was dependent on the qualities of her husband, and not just on his lackluster talent but even on his physical appearance. Personally, I would like to know how her brother Hŏ Kyun, with his affirmation that “My
late sister was a virtuous lady,” would have reacted to this assertion.
Had she been born a man, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn might well have been the subject of a portrait drawn from life rather than from one sympathetic artist’s time-traveling imagination, perhaps even on display in the main gallery of the Asian Art Museum’s Korean wing, alongside those meritorious officials immortalized at the height of their glory. I wonder, given the fierce determination of spirit demonstrated in the defiant language of her poetry, whether her breast would be emblazoned with the scholar’s crane or with the tiger of the warrior. ■
NOTES
1. The Chosŏn dynasty ruled from 1392 – 1910, but the exhibit’s main gallery concentrated primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally scheduled to open in March 2020, the first month of the U.S. nationwide shutdown, Likeness and Legacy was delayed until the Asian Art Museum could open its doors again in August 2021.
2. There was one woman depicted in the main gallery, the subject of Chae Yongsin’s Portrait of Lady Yang (a thought-provoking coincidence: “yang” is the masculine force in the famous yin/yang dichotomy of Eastern philosophy, which added a touch of unintended irony to seeing this identifying title attached to her). She was painted shortly after the Chosŏn dynasty fell, during the early years of Japanese occupation, when long-held conventions in art were surrendered along with the power of the administration and its cultural dominance. Even then, however, her likeness is one of a pair, a complement to the image of her husband, a successful doctor, which perpetually hangs beside hers. Although the accompanying label explained that the painter was a family friend, his inscriptions give only her family name, the date of the portrait’s completion (1925), and the date of her death in the following year of 1926.
3. The “passive female” role is further complicated when one considers that the function of the eunjangdo itself is somewhat ambiguous. Hwa Young Choi Caruso explains that Yun employed the image as a symbol of strength: “The sharp iron spikes were stuck into the seats of the chairs and sofas so no one could sit on them. The spikes suggest one cannot take the roles of women for granted like an empty seat” (Caruso 80). The popularity of scenes in today’s historical K-dramas, where a plucky heroine defends her virtue by threatening to stab her attacker, has further led to a sense of the eunjangdo as an iconic feminist accessory. Yet other sources claim that they were never designed for self-defense, but primarily as a last-resort means of committing suicide rather than submit to dishonor: “While ordinary knives are usually used to hurt another person, the tip of eunjangdo always pointed toward the woman who carried it” (Jeong Jeong-heon, qtd. in Lee).
4. The number of poems attributed to Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn is approximately 200, though that total is disputable because a number of forgeries and imitations have almost certainly found their way into her corpus. In any case, an overwhelming majority of these extant poems are in classical Chinese, though the selection that has survived may or may not be an accurate indication of the thousands of verses that she actually composed. Vernacular poems were less admired at the time, and may not have been considered as worthy of preservation. Bruce Fulton remarks in the introduction to his translation of three kasa poems that “Kasa from early Chosŏn were composed primarily by the yangban aristocracy, who preferred the kasa form for its lack of restriction on length.” He points out that, in the later Chosŏn period, the form was especially popular with women and commoners, “and the content tended to focus on changes in Chosŏn society and on relations between men and women” (Fulton 307) in a time when women’s legal and societal status was waning. One can see how Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn’s longing
for personal freedom might have drawn her toward a less restrictive genre for some of her most intensely emotional poems. Fulton also refers to “naebang/kyubang kasa, a tradition dating from the 1600s that offers us crucial insights into the lives of wellborn Chosŏn women. They circulated only within the family until the modern era, when they were first published, and most remain anonymous” (Fulton 309).
5. This excerpt from Zhu’s commentary was translated and posted by Susan Hwang, Janet Jun, and S.E. Kile on their website Charting Authenticity: The Politics of Gender and Place in the Anthologizing of a Chosŏn Woman Poet. Zhu was a Chinese envoy with whom Nansŏrhŏn’s brother Kyosan (Hŏ Kyun) had become acquainted in the course of his political career. The site, which was created as part of the course “Gender and Writing in China and Korea,” taught by Professors Dorothy Ko and JaHyun Kim Haboush at Columbia University in Spring 2007, dives deeply into English, Chinese, and Korean sources to provide a nuanced portrait of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn and the context of the world in which she lived and wrote. In addition to fresh translations of selected poems, the site’s creators provide analyses, historical background, a guide to Nansŏrhŏn’s anthologized works in Korean and to Chinese collections from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and translations of excerpts from both positive and negative seventeenth-century critical reception.
6. The reference to “Shakespeare’s Sister” is taken from the third chapter of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which speculates on the probable fate of a woman born in William Shakespeare’s day with a similar genius. Given the fact that Nansŏrhŏn was born just one year before Shakespeare, Kim’s cross-cultural analysis is grounded in the similarities between Woolf’s fictional construct and Nansŏrhŏn’s actual life story.
7. I would like to express appreciation to the anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this article, who pointed out that an implicit male gaze may also be present in the subject of the swing itself, especially in light of the competition to see who can swing the highest that is mentioned in the poem’s opening lines: “Often there is worry that swinging will expose a woman too much, because she might swing too high and men might see her…. See the famous pansori story of Chun-hyang for example.” Pansori is an indigenous narrative genre, usually associated with solo female singers who act out multiple roles. Like a kisaeng poet, pansori performers are on public display, though their art is less erudite and their audience broader and more diverse. Their songs often take the form of protests against the status quo. Chun-hyang, the daughter of an aristocrat and a kisaeng, enters into an unequal marriage with a mandarin’s son who catches sight of her while she is disporting on a swing, unaware of being observed; later, she is imprisoned and pressed to become the mistress of her father-in-law’s corrupt successor. Serrano remarks that “Since Classical Chinese was not a spoken language and was distant from lived Korean experience in any century, writing in it means inserting yourself into a very long tradition; you use the language of that tradition to communicate with past poets and with readers fully imbued with the language of past poets” (Email). In this short poem, however, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn also manages to tap into the metaphorical conventions and concerns of contemporary women who had little or no education in classical Chinese forms.
8. Mark Peterson has suggested that the social transformation that brought about the “Confucianization” of Korean society and—among other significant changes—the gradual and methodical erosion of women’s status between the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries was at least partly motivated by economic and demographic factors that ushered in a culture of scarcity: “Korea had exhausted its frontiers, that is, there were virtually no new lands to be brought under cultivation, in the seventeenth century” (Peterson 33). Thus, the competitive nature of Chosŏn society coincided with a relatively recent development in which the perception was that an individual could only get ahead at the expense of another individual.
9. Despite their low status, the most talented of the kisaeng poets were highly respected and appreciated by their educated male audience. The most recent work in the Likeness and Legacy exhibit, Yun Suknam’s imagined likeness of the celebrated kisaeng Yi Maechang (1573 – 1610) was completed in 2019, the year before Likeness and Legacy was originally scheduled to open. Yi was Nansŏrhŏn’s contemporary, but these two women, who had so much in common, would never have encountered one another because of the separation imposed upon females by differences in their hereditary social classes.
10. This work is called Genealogy II because of the existence of a near-identical piece called Genealogy that is on display in the permanent collection of the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan. When pressed in an interview regarding her favorite among the pieces she has created, Yun admitted that Genealogy would probably be the one, adding “I actually still wonder why I sold that.” Qtd. Choi Hyo-Min and Han Hee-Jeong in “The Mother of Feminist Art, Suk-Nam Yun.” The Sungkyun Times, 22 August 2016. http://skt.skku.edu/news/articleView.html?idxno=60 (accessed 30 Sept. 2023). Evidently the best solution for seller’s remorse was simply to recreate it.
11. We know, for instance, that Nansŏrhŏn “grew up in a household whose family members were amongst the most illustrious scholars and politicians in the country. The official biographies of Nansŏrhŏn’s father and brothers are contained in Chŏson Wangjo Shillok (The Veritable Record of the Chŏson Dynasty) as well as in other traditional sources” (Choe-Wall 6). Choe-Wall notes, however, that the “most comprehensive and reliable” account of the Hŏ family can be found in the epitaph of her father, Hŏ Yŏp, a distinguished Confucian scholar whose lineage can be traced back to the thirteenth century (6). By the sixteenth century, female children of Nansŏrhŏn’s class were usually entered into their birth families’ genealogical tables under the generic term “daughter” rather than by name, with the husband’s name added after her marriage, and her descendants of either sex were usually omitted. This obscurity was a departure from earlier practice. By the end of the Chŏson period, “A man who had daughters only was considered to have no children,” and it was a common practice to adopt an adult man as a son to carry on the line (Peterson 36). See Sun Joo Kim’s study of Chŏson genealogical records for further details about how aristocratic women were accounted for in family records, and how the process of Confucianization impacted women’s status and inheritance rights over the centuries.
12. Some sources state that Nansŏrhŏn was twenty-seven years old at the time of her death, since traditionally the East Asian method of reckoning a person’s age includes gestation. Babies are born at the age of one, with an additional year added at the beginning of each subsequent lunar new year.
13. The controversial couplet that Hong quoted might very well have been nonexistent as well, in its own way, since the authorship of that particular poem was disputed from the start. It is thought to have been written as a tribute to Nansŏrhŏn by one of her brothers’ acquaintances and circulated along with her genuine work. Despite this denigrating remark, Hong—like many of his countrymen, as well as their Chinese counterparts—was an admirer of Nansŏrhŏn’s poetry as poetry, despite any reservations he might have had about its source. One might note that his ability to recite the poem about Tu Mu from memory certainly appears to indicate a serious interest in the works published under her name.
WORKS CITED
Asleson, Robyn. “Beyond Portraiture: New Approaches to Identity in Contemporary Korean and American Art.” Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture exhibition catalogue, edited by Hyonjeong Kim Han, et al. U of Hawaii P, 2020, pp. 40 – 48.
Caruso, Hwa Young Choi. “Art as a Political Act: Expression of Cultural Identity, Self-Identity, and Gender by Suk Nam Yun and Yong Soon Min.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education vol. 39, no. 3, 2005, pp. 71 – 87.
Childs, Cynthia. “Songs from the Inner Rooms: The Poetry of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn.” Acta Koreana vol. 4, 2001, pp. 143 – 155.
Choe-Wall, Yang Hi. Vision of a Phoenix: The Poems of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn. Cornell East Asia Program, 2003.
DiMuccio, Sarah H., and Eric D. Knowles. “The Political Significance of Fragile Masculinity.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, vol. 34, 2020, pp. 25 – 28.
Fulton, Bruce. Introduction to “Three Early-Modern Kasa.” Acta Koreana, vol. 20, no. 1, 2017, pp. 307 – 310.
Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn. “At My Son’s Grave.” Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions. Translated by David R. McCann, Columbia UP, 2000, p. 83.
---. “Married Sorrow.” Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions. Translated by David R. McCann, Columbia UP, 2000, pp. 71 – 74.
---. Poem 4 from the sequence Kan-yü (“Stirred by my Experience”). “Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister.’” Translated by Kichung Kim. Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries. Edited by Young-Key Kim-Renaud, Routledge, 2004, p. 92.
---. “To my husband studying in the Kangsa Hall of Reading.” Vision of a Phoenix. Translated by Yang Hi Choe-Wall, pp. 98 – 99.
Hwang, Susan, Janet Jun, and S.E. Kile. “Biographical Accounts: The Woman in the Paratexts.” Charting Authenticity: The Politics of Gender and Place in the Anthologizing of a Chosŏn Woman Poet. Columbia UP, 2007, www.columbia.edu/~sek2114/content/bio.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2023.
---. “Reading Her Poems: A Collaborative Essay.” Charting Authenticity. www.columbia.edu/ ~sek2114/ content/essay1.html. Accessed 31 July 2024.
Jungmann, Burglind. “Ritual and Splendor: Chosŏn Court Art.” A Companion to Korean Art, edited by J. P. Park, Burglind Jungmann, and Juhyung Rhi, John Wiley and Sons, 2020, pp. 343 – 70.
Kim, Kichung. “Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister.’” Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, edited by Young-Key Kim-Renaud, Routledge, 2004, pp. 78 – 95.
Kim, Sun Joo. “Diversity and Innovation in the Genealogical Records of Chosŏn Korea.” Historische Anthropologie, vol. 31, no. 1, 2023, pp. 34 – 61.
Lee, Min-a. “A weapon to test fidelity and soup.” Korea JoongAng Daily, 11 March 2007, https:// koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2873308. Accessed 31 July 2024.
Peterson, Mark. “Women Without Sons: A Measure of Social Change in Yi Dynasty Korea.” Korean Women: View from the Inner Room, edited by Laurel Kendall, East Rock Press, 1983, pp. 33 – 44.
McCann, David R. Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions. Columbia UP, 2000.
Serrano, Richard. Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities. Routledge, 2020.
Suknam, Yun. Wall text for Genealogy II, 1992 – 2019. Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture, 27 Aug. – Nov. 29, 2021, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
---. Wall text for Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, 2005. Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture, 27 Aug. – Nov. 29, 2021, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
55.1
profession & pedagogy
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Authentic Communication within Classroom Communities
Julian A. Ledford, The University of the South
INTRODUCTION
Language instructors will agree that, when it comes to pedagogical materials for novice learners at the college level, finding the so-called perfect textbook is incessantly perplexing. While it is true that today’s textbook vendors offer robust online platforms that foster continuous and efficient engagement with aspects of the target language through a variety of modalities, the same is not true for the in-class experience. Despite hundreds of textbooks presenting new and improved formats based on best pedagogical practices, instructors must create additional classroom material to supplement the content presented in textbooks. Moreover, some textbooks present more information than is sustainably exploitable within a fifteen-week semester. To compound an already difficult situation, the exorbitant prices of these textbooks compel instructors to use as much of the included material as possible, lest learners complain that their purchase was in vain. Additionally, and more dire, much of the cultural contexts presented in these textbooks do not reflect the real-world situations of the learners. By way of an anecdote, the evaluation made by one novice learner at the end of their semester-long language study was that the persons presented in the textbook were “basic.” By using a term that relates to the flat, one-dimensional, inauthentic, and unrelatable life situations presented in the textbook, the student revealed that they could not authentically situate themselves within these contexts.1 With all of this, instructors tend to find themselves in a particular conundrum: invest in
traditional textbooks that include powerful interactive platforms but that critically fail to present cultural contexts that reflect the lived experiences of their learners.
This textbook dilemma results in what can be called an identity crisis for the learners. When communicative tasks are predicated on “basic” cultural contexts, learners are forced to create an artificial version of themselves to complete the tasks. For Robert Gardener, self-identity is so inextricably tied to language that the identity crises that arise from foreign language learning in the classroom context might be traumatic for the learner (167 – 168). He hypothesized further that the artificiality of the staged communicative exercises in the textbook might allow learners to protect their true identities by entering into a space where authentic personal communication does not exist, where they are simply playing a prescribed role (168). While such an approach might have worked for more advanced learners in the late twentieth century and might still work for younger learners today, requiring current college-level learners to suspend disbelief by ignoring the reality of their identities to enter a world where language and self-identity are untethered is an impossible task. What is more, from studies done on Generation Z learners, complex notions of social identity, the desire to enter and engage with authentic communities, and the primal need for practicality significantly impact several aspects of their learning.2 Thus, in the modern-day classroom, the identity crisis comes not from speaking a second language but from requiring college
learners, who are expending mental energy to decipher and present several aspects of themselves, to ignore, suppress, or invent a new identity to complete communicative tasks presented in the textbook.
Supplemental pedagogical materials that encourage new pedagogical practices are needed to solve this identity crisis caused by partly problematic textbooks. Continuing work done on student perceptions of language learning,3 this study presents a valuable tool that meets the expressed expectations of learners concerning college-level language study. Notably, this current study investigates the desire learners have to engage (communicate) with persons within the classroom community, a space where the target language is spoken with varying degrees of competence while exhibiting all the complexities of any language community that exists outside of the classroom. Further, the study anchors itself in David Wilkins’s notion that, “while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (qtd. in Bourns et al. 121). If Generation Z learners want to communicate within the classroom community, it is with the expectation of conveying aspects of who they are and the roles they occupy to those with whom they speak. Contributing to the broad field of the social strand of foreign language learning elaborated by applied linguist Bonny Norton, this study presents an approach to supplementing textbook material with content words (vocabulary) that represent aspects of learners’ social identities, the identities that matter to them the most within community settings. Further, by pulling on theories of language socialization espoused by linguists,4 as well as on the concept of keywords presented by Raymond Williams, this study presents a practical way for instructors to create supplemental classroom materials that acknowledge not only the
agency that learners have over their education but also their roles within the classroom community. This knowledge will be beneficial in many ways as it will: (1) equip instructors with a useful pedagogical tool to promote deeper engagement with language study among novice learners at the college level; (2) foster engagement with the classroom community; (3) provide instructors with suggestions on how to use the tool to enhance teaching practices; and (4) provide suggestions for future revisions of traditional textbooks. Based on studies done on learner-generated values of college-level language study, the current paper presents a way of benefiting from traditional textbooks without provoking an identity crisis among today’s college learners.
LITERATURE REVIEW
1. INVESTING IN THE CLASSROOM COMMUNITY
Recent scholarship on language study in liberal arts colleges revealed that learners placed a high value on L2 engagement with members of the classroom community. Similar to Norton’s notion of return on investment in “Social Identity,” which she based on theories of cultural capital,5 Julian Ledford and Tijà Odoms revealed that college learners’ investment in language study was predicated on the guarantee of certain returns: speaking the target language with greater fluency and integrating themselves within the classroom community and communities where the target language is spoken (70). The authors also suggested that “the language-learning classroom constitutes a multilingual community that learners recognize, value highly, and in which they want to invest” (72). The study was carried out at a small
liberal arts college, where small class sizes form the core of the school’s academic philosophy; Ledford and Odoms concluded that community engagement emerged as one of the products of language study that learners value the most (72).
If learners are interested in L2 engagement with classroom community members, they are consequently interested in communication. These interests constitute two main goals of formal language learning: interpersonal communication in a language other than English and participation in school communities (National Standards Collaborative Board). For Greta Little and Sara Sanders, communication within classroom communities constitutes a symbiotic bond, as they found that creating a sense of community within the language classroom was essential for communication (277).6 Little and Sanders stated that classroom communication: “(a) is a form of social interaction; (b) involves a high degree of unpredictability and creativity; (c) takes place in constraining discourse and sociocultural contexts; (d) is carried out under limiting conditions; (e) always has a purpose; (f) involves authentic language; and (g) is judged successful or not on the basis of actual outcomes” (278).7 Thus, communication is presented as a consensual agreement to participate in an improvised performance, where shifting power dynamics within the performance space and levels of preparation dictate the nature of the interlocutors’ performances, and where the ultimate goal is to transmit a message that will result in a response. This response, whether nonverbal—such as a nod, a sigh, or a laugh—or verbal, requires the presence and involvement of real persons within the community.
2. COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT AS IDENTITY SHAPING
These interactions with real people that Generation Z learners crave, as Kristen Weber and Halle Keim
suggest, are also integral to developing learner identity through language socialization. Understood as the ways in which learners position themselves relative to members of the community to understand their sense of self and place within the learning community, learner identity is inherently a social phenomenon. For Naoko Morita, the socialization of language learners entailed a process in which learners “attempted to shape their learning and participation by exercising their agency and actively negotiating their positionalities, which were locally constructed in a given classroom” (573). The notion of negotiated positionalities introduces the work of Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, who provided additional context to the role of language use in identity shaping. The authors presented five sociolinguistic processes through which identity is ontologically and mechanistically derived. They stated that identity is shaped by emergence (the product of discourse), positionality (situating oneself outside of and between traditional social categories), indexicality (through “semiotic links between linguistic forms and social meanings” that create and express ideologies (594)); relationality (intersubjectivity, relying on the presence of other identity positions and social contexts, and operationalizing the binaries of sameness and difference, authenticity and artifice, and institutional authorization and impotence); and partialness (identity formation is not operationally homogeneous but may draw on several processes). Further, Stuart Dunmore presented language socialization as “an ongoing process of explicit mentoring by which individuals learn the appropriate uses of languages as well as ‘the worldviews, ideologies, values, and identities of community members’” that is not only possible between novices and older more experienced speakers but also via peers (28).8 These studies present the foreign language classroom as a transformative space where learners constantly mold
their identities—collectively and uniquely—through community involvement.
The instructor’s presence within the classroom community is valued by learners and adds beneficial complexities to language socialization. Employing Etienne Wenger’s terms peripherality and legitimacy, Morita argued that by navigating unequal social positions within a community, learners participate in, gain access to, and find membership within a community of people (576). Negotiating these positionalities—whether dedicated by long-standing and emergent ethnic, political, geographical, sexual, social, and racial identities—helps to shape learner identity.
3. OPERATIONALIZING PLURAL IDENTITIES
Instructors aim to build inclusive communities by modifying their pedagogical materials and practices according to the identities of the learners they teach. It is widely understood by instructors that the foreign language classroom is more overtly and complexly diverse now than ever. Consequently, the student positionalities mentioned above have increased exponentially. For that reason, as Norton argues in “Social Identity,” pedagogical approaches that operate based on essentialist ideals of single-dimensioned learners present systemic inequities that thwart language learning. Yet Rachel Stauffer discovered that textbooks often offer “source culture and target culture [that] favor socially dominant categories of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), religion, gender, sexual orientation, and ability” (280). Other scholars who argued for a focus on multiculturalism, critical language pedagogy, and notions of representation in language texts, reflected the importance of acknowledging and including diversity within language classrooms in order to foster engagement with classroom content.9 Further, Stauffer stated
that pedagogical materials “can more effectively foster a classroom culture of inclusivity, community, and shared experience… [by rejecting] homogeneity that has been widely accepted as the cultural norm” (297). By this statement, Stauffer also argued that the choice of pedagogical materials fosters the creation of an inclusive community.10
4. AUTHENTIC COMMUNITIES DEMAND AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION
An inclusive community, where plural identities coexist and are framed by various forms of spectacular and unspectacular diversity, better reflects the authentic communities to which learners belong and with which they communicate. Recalling the seven characteristics of communication presented by Little and Sanders and Stauffer, the ultimate goal of acknowledging and enacting the identities of learners is to create an authentic community where learners are empowered to safely perform aspects of their authentic identities in the target language, including their identities in the real social world. Citing Paul Grice’s work on the dynamics of conversation, Little and Sanders showed that classroom conversations differ from natural conversations because learners are forced to reduce and falsify what they are required to say or want to say to reflect what they can say in L2 (278). This conundrum leads to unnatural conversations that do not satisfy the seven characteristics of communication mentioned above. Specifically, the characteristics of communication that involve “authentic language” and that are “judged successful or not on the basis of actual outcomes” are most important, especially in the context of self-identity (Little and Sanders 278). Here, the lack of vocabulary to say who one is constitutes non-authentic language, which violates the nature and aim of communication. As Little and Sanders state, “the most affected characteristic [of
communication] is that of purpose” (279). If the purpose of a communicative activity is to share essential aspects of one’s identity in order to situate oneself within a community of learners, the lack of adequate vocabulary thwarts this mission definitively. With all this in mind, learners’ incapacity to communicate aspects of their identities because of linguistic deficiencies in the target language (L2) is understood. Further, these learners are forced into a non-authentic community, where they present a version of themselves staged for the classroom experience. This identity does not persist anywhere in the real world. Worse, the energy put into spinning the fake version of themselves wanes throughout the semester, resulting in little communication or none at all. As a remedy to this, Little and Sanders argue that building classroom communities “feeds the desire for authentic communication” (279). To the six strategies the authors list for creating classroom communities (280), this study adds a seventh: equipping learners with the essential vocabulary words that they have identified as central to their self-identity, thus allowing them to see themselves represented and validated in the target language (L2) and encouraging them to establish true community.
5. AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION WITHIN A COMMUNITY
Little and Sanders revealed that authentic communication within world language classes requires language to reveal essential aspects of one’s identity, including the social role one plays in the community and how one expects to socialize with community members based on one’s ideologies. In support of this notion, Stacey Bourns et al. stated that “vocabulary acquisition is instrumental for achieving the goal of creating strong interpersonal connections through interactions since conversations should be meaningful and not simply transactional” (124 –125). Elsewhere, Viktoria Driagina and Anita
Pavlenko stated that one of the central goals of second language learning is self-translation, “the ability to present oneself in complex and diverse ways as one would do in the native language” (103). Added to this term is self-representation, which, as Marya Shardakova and Aneta Pavelnko explain, is understood as the learners’ recognition of their identities within pedagogical practices and material. Furthermore, when operationalized in the context of the classroom community, the words become discursive tools that build community and membership and shape identity. This current study complements the mentioned studies on the representation of learner identity within pedagogical material, asserting that motivation to learn vocabulary in the form of content words is greatly enhanced when self-generated identity descriptors form the content base.4 Specifically, this study examines the identity terms learners present in their native language and compares them with terms found in their textbooks.
6. KEYWORDS AS CRITICAL COMMUNITY-BUILDING TOOLS
The self-generated terms that learners consider to be essential aspects of their identity are what this study labels as keywords. The inspiration for the title of this article comes from Williams’s manuscript Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. However, for the reasons presented above, the terms culture and society are repurposed here as the term community. For Williams, though semantics and etymology bear essential fruits for his work, it is the problematization of keywords—“a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions” (15)—caused by the ever-shifting range of meanings based on “the active social and political values” that are assigned to them that is more enriching (18). In language studies, usage is the goal and the critical problem. Williams also revealed the ultimate impetus
for this current study, stating the purpose of explorations of vocabulary “not [as] a tradition to be learned, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings…which has a natural authority, but as a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view: a vocabulary to use, to find our own ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history” (24 – 25). This study argues that by focusing on keywords, the identity descriptors learners present as essential to their sense of self, instructors gain tools to shape an authentic community of speakers where learners’ social role is acknowledged and empowered. In this way, the current study aligns itself with what Norton calls classroom-based social research by adding another objective: investigating the classroom community to ascertain the ways its members are reflected within pedagogical materials.
THE STUDY IS ACCORDINGLY GUIDED BY THE FOLLOWING PRELIMINARY RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Which L1 words do learners consider essential to describe themselves within the classroom community?
To what extent is this essential vocabulary represented in the classroom material?
METHODS
1.OBJECTIVE
The present study aimed to determine to what extent pedagogical materials used in novice classes provided an appropriate vocabulary for learners to express essential aspects of their identities. In other words, the study determined whether novice learners saw
themselves reflected within the chosen textbook for their class. Understanding that learner identity is a product of other forms of identity, which may be hidden, latent, suppressed, or unexplored, the current study limits discussions to the identity terms that learners shared openly and excludes other forms of visible identity that learners refused to share.
2. PARTICIPANTS
In fall 2022, undergraduate learners (N=30) enrolled in two sections of a fifteen-week, first-semester French language class at the Institution were invited to participate in an Institutional Review Board-approved study. Of note, the Institution was a small, private liberal arts college whose general education curriculum required that most learners complete a sequence of language study within at least one language. Typically, learners who choose to study a language for the first time at the Institution devote approximately four semesters to this endeavor. However, learners who had studied language formally in high school sat a placement exam and, depending on their placement, completed their language sequence in fewer semesters. The participants in this study were primarily first-year learners enrolling in classes for the first time at the Institution (76.7%). The remaining learners were sophomores (13.3%), seniors (6.7%), and non-degree-seeking learners (3.3%).
3. DATA COLLECTION
As part of the regular assignment, participants were asked to complete a journal entry for each unit of the textbook covered. Though the participants completed four units and four journal entries, this study focuses solely on the journal entry for the first unit of the syllabus.
The decision to focus on the first unit of the textbook is two-fold. Thematically, the unit covered
basic greetings and introductions. That is the fundamental exchange that acknowledges and honors the presence of the other and provides tools to enter community. For a study that sought to ascertain essential identity pieces within the classroom community, exploiting the theme of greetings and introductions from the first unit was prudent. Pragmatically, seeing that most learners were in their first year and taking college classes for the first time ( N=23 ), the attention paid to negotiating their place within the classroom community and the broader campus was tremendous. Capitalizing on that momentum was advantageous to generating engagement with the journal entry questions.
Prior to completing the journal entry, learners participated in regular classroom activities built around informal and formal (verbal and non-verbal) greetings in the target language, the discovery of the verb to be , and the exploration of simple adjectives that, when used with the verb to be , allowed the speaker to reveal aspects of their identity. On the day the journal entry was assigned, learners watched an eight-minute interview in English (L1) with performing artist Stromae. In the interview, Stromae answered questions submitted by his followers about his social situation, physical attributes, beliefs, and linguistic, racial, geographical, cultural, and national heritage. In English (L1), learners were asked to speak about which aspects of Stromae’s identity seemed to matter the most to his followers. Learners then reflected on their identities and what they would consider the most crucial identity pieces. Learners were then given the journal entry questions and instructions on completing the assignment. For their journal entry, learners were asked to answer the following question in order to create a list of identity terms that would be presented to the class:
Please provide a list of words (in English) that would be essential to you when narrating your lived experiences relating to meeting and greeting people, the classroom environment, the campus, and describing yourself.
After completing the assignment independently, learners returned to class the following day and submitted their responses. The instructor then translated the L1 terms into the target language (L2), thus creating a glossary of identity descriptors unique to the class that was printed and presented to each student. Throughout the semester, the document was used for various assessments, including vocabulary quizzes, oral exams, and written compositions.
4. ANALYSIS
The responses provided were treated to both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitative research was employed to ascertain the number of distinct terms provided. To determine the percentage of essential vocabulary in the textbook, the study employed a content analysis approach, scanning the textbook for references to identity terms. Based on the findings, the author determined the level to which the textbook succeeded in reflecting essential aspects of student identity. Responses were then treated to qualitative exploration through a corpus-based approach. Following the sequencing suggested by Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, open coding was used to assign general descriptors to the corpus of terms (identity descriptors) collected by the questions listed. Once satisfied with these general, lower-level categories, the process was repeated to create more specific categories. Next, axial coding (Strauss and Corbin) was employed to organize the categories into specific and interrelated themes from which the thesis for the study was derived.
5. RESULTS
Participants provided seventy-five distinct terms. Of these terms, 65.3% (n=49) were not found in the textbook, while 34.2% (n=26) of the words, or their effective equivalents, were found within the textbook’s glossaries. Furthermore, the terms participants provided could be divided into seven categories: gender identity (n=1); national identity (n=2); sexual identity (n=2); vocational identity (n=3); identity based on physical traits (n=5); and identity based on personality traits (n=62).
Of particular importance, as shown in Table 1, is that 81.3% (n=61) of the terms provided related to social identity. Mostly, these words reveal the participants’ roles in various real-world communities, including the classroom community.
TABLE 1
List of Essential Identity Terms
Provided by Participants
ACTIVIST ANXIOUS ARIES ARTIST ATHLETIC AWKWARD BASKETBALL PLAYER BLONDE CALM CAPABLE CAREFREE CARING CHINESE CHRISTIAN COMPASSIONATE CREATIVE DANCER
EDUCATED
EMPATHETIC
The terms learners provided revealed the essential aspects of their identity that they wanted to project to those around them. These terms also constitute keywords that instructors can use to inform inclusive pedagogical approaches, including but not limited to community building and community engagement within the classroom. With this in mind, based on participants’ responses, the following points emerge as continued areas of interest for second language instructors and researchers: (a) the large percentage of learner-generated terms that were not present in the textbook; (b) the abundance and scope of terms that relate to social identity; and (c) the scarceness of terms that relate to physical features. I will elaborate on these areas in the order just presented.
OPEN-MINDED ORGANIZED OUTDOORSY PHOEBE BRIDGERS FAN PLAYFUL POSITIVE QUIET RED RESPECTFUL SHE/HER SHY SINCERE SOUTHERN SPORTY STRONG TALL
TAYLOR SWIFT FAN THOUGHTFUL TRUSTWORTHY TWIN
WRITER
DISCUSSION
1. PEDAGOGICAL MATERIALS: THE TEXTBOOK
Though filled with numerous exercises presented in striking brilliance, the textbook chosen for this class, much like Stauffer’s, fell short of reflecting the authentic communities that existed within the classroom. Instead, the textbook reflected a staged, inauthentic community of speakers whose essential identities were bound up in the following descriptive L1 terms:
The first set of words, except the terms intelligent, shy, and independent, did not generally figure on the list of essential identity descriptors generated by the study’s participants. In a word, the textbook did not provide learners with the vocabulary to communicate essential aspects of their identities to members of the classroom community.
Thus, the artificiality of the terms found in the textbook thwarts one of the primary desires of college-level learners: to communicate within a
chosen community. Asking learners to incorporate the terms into their speech tasks within the classroom would force learners to create inauthentic statements and false selves. In this way, the rules of authentic communication are not fulfilled. Moreover, without practical and pertinent applications to fuel the cognitive phenomenon of memory, expecting learners to memorize these words is doubly hard. By way of casual observation, the instructor noted the unprompted use and re-use of the keywords throughout the semester. Whether in a composition, an oral assessment, a written exam, or a communicative task, learners’ chosen essential words signified their assertion of self within the classroom community. This observed behavior also represented the failure of the textbook to provide the essential tools for communication on its own.
2. SOCIAL IDENTITY
Recalling research on social identity theories by Norton, the keywords provided by participants greatly reflect learners’ roles within various communities outside of the classroom. Through this study, these identities are acknowledged and voiced within the classroom community and validated as ongoing identities that have a place within the language-learning community. Terms that relate to religious identity, such as Christian (follower of Christ ); family-based identity, such as the term family-oriented; identities based on mental health, such as the term anxious, for example; and geopolitical identity, such as the term southern, are rarely found in textbooks used at the Institution. For this reason, though learners possess these identities, they never see themselves reflected in the pedagogical materials used in the class. What is more, of the twenty-four descriptive adjectives presented
in the chapter, only three figured on the list of essential terms that participants selected. This realization is sufficient for learners to declare that they are not represented in the pedagogical material and practices offered in the class. With the creation of an essential list of vocabulary, which was translated into the target language (L2), learners received a tangible document that was essentially created by them and for them.
The creation of this vocabulary list represents learners’ agency over aspects of their learning regarding pedagogical materials and belonging within the classroom community. This notion of student involvement and agency in molding their learning experience recalls Morita’s theory of socialization and participation within the classroom community. Furthermore, seeing one’s essential identity published and presented in the target language tangibly legitimizes one’s membership in the community. Recalling Dunmore’s presentation of language socialization, the creation of essential vocabulary represented a contract wherein the community learned the values, identities, and worldviews of people within the community. From a community-building standpoint, this contract represented the aspects of learners’ identities that were exploitable within the classroom. By extension, the visible identities that were not listed by participants represent the ones that were either non-essential or ones they might not want to be discussed in the classroom community.
3. THE BODY
Very few learners listed physical attributes—visible identities—on the list of essential identity terms. As mentioned earlier, participants listed only five terms related to physical traits or attributes: athletic,
blonde, red, strong, and tall. Arguably, three of these attributes could have all been selected by one participant whose identity is bound up in the physicality that makes them successful at a particular team sport (athletic, strong, tall) and a member of an unrecognized minority group (red for redhead). In that way, though these terms focus solely on the participant’s body, they are aspects of the body that reflect the communities to which the participant proudly belongs. The same could be said for the student who selected the term blonde, being a member of a community of people with naturally blonde hair. Therefore, these physical attributes actually reflect the participant’s social identity. As it turns out, one of the participants in the group to whom these descriptors are attributable was also a star player on the men’s basketball team.
The lack of participant-generated terms related to the body supports the notion that college students do not deem physical attributes as essential identity descriptors. Thus, expecting deep engagement with pedagogical material and practices built around physicality is problematic. Besides the five terms mentioned above—which were most likely provided by only two participants and which, as argued above, reflect social identity—no other terms reflect aspects of the physical body. Participants also seemed reluctant to present aspects of their spectacular diversity—a diversity, such as skin color, that is visible to the naked eye—as essential aspects of their identity. While explaining this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this study, one can still use this apparent lack of interest in the body to enhance current pedagogical practices and draft initial hypotheses for future studies.
Regarding future work, it will be interesting to determine to what extent members of the classroom community feel empowered and comfortable to
share notions of their essential identity. In other words, within the classroom community, which social dynamics—of gender, race, or socioeconomic status, for example—might make certain students reluctant to engage with spectacular, physical aspects of their identity? Such a study might reveal that participants, depending on their particular diversity, prefer to preserve anonymity by refusing to mention terms that would, paradoxically, identify them as belonging to a minoritized group. This idea might explain, for example, the few terms that revealed the race of any of the participants in the current study. Contrarily, future studies might conclude that the observed reluctance to mention race as an essential identity descriptor speaks more to the investigator’s convictions regarding race and the imposition of their expectations on the study’s participants. For the current study, it will suffice to acknowledge the theories on belonging concerning minoritized students at predominantly white schools, revealing not only the discomfort but the injury caused by identity descriptors that have historically been used to denigrate, discriminate, and destroy lives and communities.11
We might then hypothesize that students’ non-engagement with spectacular identity descriptors related to the body is a corrective to the problematic history of racial descriptors and their connection to destroying communities. By that, the identity descriptors that minoritized students label as essential are the ones that are not revealed by casual observance, but those ascertained through dialogue with members of the classroom community.
The same would seem to be true for other participants in the study. By refusing to list physical attributes as essential descriptors, all participants ultimately present the desire to engage with members of the classroom community in profound ways
rather than to gain insight through perfunctory visual input. Thus, all the terms provided in this study present an invitation for dialogue and community building. For example, when a first-year college student says they are southern, what definitions of the term southern arise? Which ones are attributable to the student who offered this descriptor? More importantly, which ones are not attributable? Similarly, when someone says they are awkward, does it actually mean they are likely to say or do something off-hand in a social setting? All of the terms provided are invitations for community engagement through dialogue. With further investigation, following Dunmore’s notion of language socialization, it becomes clear that participants used these terms to inform the instructor of the behaviors expected from them within the classroom community.
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
1. ON TEXTBOOKS
This present study provided helpful insight into highlighting and overcoming the shortcomings of traditional pedagogical material in reflecting the authentic communities of learners within the foreign language classroom. It should be noted that this study did not promote the nonuse of textbooks in language instruction. On the contrary, this author believes that the online component of the textbook allows streamlined and continuous engagement with the target language, which is laudable. However, as a static entity, the textbook freezes language within the paradigm in which the text was published. Therefore, it is also impossible for a traditional textbook to represent every form of identity and diversity that learners possess. As a result,
supplemental materials for each chapter are almost certainly needed. Additionally, by supplementing pedagogical material by creating a vocabulary list of essential identity descriptors made by and for members of the classroom community, we will create a “record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions” (Williams 15).
This present study further suggests that textbook makers add to their robust online platforms with multimedia presentations and applications that allow for complete customization of content areas, especially vocabulary lists. It is suggested, too, that these lists be fully integrated within the textbook’s textto-voice functionality. This enhancement would allow learners to see and live the language they speak. Additionally, learners’ lists would reflect a snapshot of the community of learners who came together for a time.
2. ON PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES
The keywords provided by such a study should inform the choice of cultural contexts—especially regarding small- and large-group discussions— employed within the language class. First, concerning inclusive pedagogical approaches, the stated keywords inform the instructor of cultural frameworks on which the language instruction should hang. As Stauffer has found, if the instructor can include authentic texts from speakers and writers with similar identities to those mentioned by learners, learners will see themselves reflected in the curriculum and engage more deeply with the material. For example, rather than reflecting the heteronormative view of romantic partnerships, which is found in traditional textbooks, continued (non-tokenized) inclusion of
same-sex partnerships acknowledges and validates the existence of non-straight learners within the class and those whose family situation differs from the one portrayed in the textbook.
Second, the stated keywords inform equitable pedagogical approaches, namely with regard to participation. The set of behaviors expected from the participants who identified as introspective, shy, or quiet, differs from those who identified as loud, extroverted, and playful. Having one set of expectations regarding participation for all learners inevitably privileges a few and ostracizes the rest. What is better is an approach that establishes participatory expectations for each student based on the keywords they provided, which reflect their social identity within the classroom and broader communities. For example, the basketball team star, who is used to delegating tasks during warm-up drills, may assume a similar role during group activities during class. The student who identified with the term leader might be the one to dictate the execution of a specific communicative task—in positive and negative ways. The leader of the Black Student Association, who organized an antiracist, campus-wide walkout and who identified with the term introvert, may be reluctant to enter large-group discussions about racial tension in Paris. Understanding this student’s refusal to speak, which is also an act of agency, requires the instructor to understand the interconnected aspects of the student’s social identity. Once these identities are known, the instructor develops ways of allowing the learner to express opinions privately via an anonymous platform or a written or recorded response paper. In these examples, seeing the learner as a complex subject that navigates roles in a particular social setting animated by shifting power
dynamics is vital to understanding learner investment in classroom activities.
FUTURE WORK
Though the keywords in this present study reflect the essential identities of the participants, researchers should seek to solicit other keywords that reflect the identities of members within the other authentic communities to which learners belong. This more extensive list of keywords might also include terms that reflect hopes, fears, and other aspects of human emotion. In cases where the same community of learners navigates the language sequence for four consecutive semesters, it would be telling to collect keywords from learners to present a new vocabulary of terms generated by Generation Z learners. This expanded list of keywords would eventually replace the textbook’s glossaries.
Beyond the publication of new glossaries, a sustained and scientific study of how keywords affect vocabulary retention will be beneficial. Krüger argued that one’s “affective filter is low if one is not afraid of failure and feels self-confident in their role as a language speaker and member of the language community” (55). To what extent does this study create a sense of belonging within the classroom? Moreover, how does this sense of community contribute to notions of engagement within a stress-free environment, thus enhancing language-learning goals, such as vocabulary retention?
Finally, concerning notions of engagement, the implication of this study on the field of critical pedagogy is vital. Critical pedagogy is now emerging as essential for promoting profound and long-lasting engagement with language study within academic institutions. Critical pedagogy, which, as Stacey
Johnson and L.J. Randolph explain, addresses notions of difference, power, and social stratification in the classroom and the world, can be applied to this study as a way to help learners grapple with notions of exclusion within pedagogical materials. Learners could be invited to investigate the composite identity of the personae represented in the textbook. They would then investigate the identities that are not included at all. The critical approach then allows learners to compare themselves with the representations within the textbook. The gaps they find, supported by the instructor, provide the needed struggle that encourages engagement and insertion of self.
CONCLUSION
This present study aligned itself with similar studies that investigated the efficiency of pedagogical materials in contemporary foreign language classrooms. Adding to those studies that highlight the need for the representation of complex identities within textbooks, this study argues for the use of supplemental materials to prevent the onset of identity crises caused by the use of traditional textbooks.
By their nature, textbooks present a version of language that is unnatural and, in a sense, the antithesis of spoken language. Language is presented as a static entity within pages of a thick textbook, whose content remains generally unchanged from year to year despite the publication of new editions. For this reason, essential identity descriptors held by language learners are not presented in the primary pedagogical tool for the course. This author accepts that the vocabulary that populates a language class should mirror the classroom community sufficiently. For obvious reasons, one cannot enter a community and represent oneself if one does not
have the language to say who one is. Furthermore, while it is true that grammatical structures seem eternal, with the essential need for inclusive language, language instructors are now inspired to modify grammar so that the language can best reflect the identities of the learners, namely non-binary students, who study and speak the language. For these reasons, instructors must accept that all textbooks, though equipped with robust and interactive online platforms, will almost always require supplemental material to make them suitable for engaging learners who crave authentic (natural) exchanges with community members.
It should be noted that, similar to Katrina Thompson’s work, this current study does not seek to deprecate textbooks or advise against their use. Textbooks with online platforms that allow for text-to-voice capabilities might help instructors create living textbooks that mirror the communities of learners assembled for a semester or longer. By doing so, textbooks would operationalize an actual aspect of language: dynamism. This dynamism is seen not only in the evolution of terms within the glossaries of the textbook but also in the pedagogical approaches that they inspire, especially concerning assessing participation during communicative tasks. In this way, textbooks reflect how authentic communities work by facilitating authentic communication within a complex network of social positioning.
Finally, this study presented a way of supplementing textbook material that allows learners to experience a sense of agency in determining the content of their study and the terms that are immediately applicable to their everyday lives. The terms generated also represented entry points into understanding essential aspects of the identity of members of the classroom community. Thus, the study
provided two of the desired returns on investment that, according to Ledford and Odoms, Generation Z learners desire (72 – 73). Through this study, instructors become aware of an activity that aims to increase student engagement by (a) providing learners the agency to see their identities acknowledged, empowered, and reflected in classroom materials and pedagogical practices; (b) making them aware of the essential identities of persons within the classroom community, including the instructor; and (c) showing the classroom community as a fertile space for the development of social identity. As language instructors try to remove the stigma of language study being a decorative and obsolete endeavor, the smaller the linguistic distance between the classroom community and the authentic communities from where learners come, the greater the chances of learners engaging deeply with their study. By starting with keywords—identity descriptors of utmost importance to language learners—instructors can look to a future where learners finally experience the full cognitive benefit of their language study and where learners and instructors share strong and lasting bonds with the classroom community. ■
NOTES
1. A quick observation of social situations presented in the textbook used at the author’s institution include conflicts about the color of dress to purchase for a friend’s birthday, confusion about a potential celebrity sighting, nostalgia caused by flipping through a photo album, and tension between a mother and her son, who is not doing well in high school.
2. See Mohr and Mohr 91; Miller and Grace 23 – 24; Weber and Keim 12 – 14; and Ledford and Odoms 70 – 73.
3. See Ledford and Odoms.
4. See Hymes, Morita, Garrett, Duff, and Dunmore.
5. Norton’s understanding of cultural capital is attributed to the theories of Bourdieu; and Bourdieu and Passeron.
6. Little and Sanders suggested six pedagogical methods: “(1) using students’ names frequently … (2) asking meaningful questions… (3) recognizing and encouraging students’ reference to previous information… (4) responding positively to use of the target language… (5) reducing individual competition among students… [and] (6) using circular seating arrangements” (280).
7. Little and Sanders grounded their understanding of classroom communities in theories espoused by Canale, Breen, Candlin, Morrow, and Widdowson.
8. Dunmore summarized the works of Hymes; Garrett; and Duff.
9. See Thompson and Kubota for research on multiculturalism; Johnson and Randolph for research on critical language pedagogy; and Azimova and Johnston, and Stauffer for research on notions of representation in language texts.
10. Bourns, Krueger, and Mills discussed two types of vocabulary items: function (grammatical) words and content words (128). The authors stated that content words “should be based not only on their frequency within the target language but also on the goals of the various stakeholders (students, teacher, program, institution, etc.)” (129).
11. See Woldoff et al.; Morales; Jones and Reddick; and Bernard.
WORKS CITED
Azimova, Nigora, and Bill Johnston. “Invisibility and Ownership of Language: Problems of Representation in Russian Language Textbooks.” Modern Language Journal, vol. 96, no. 3, 2012, pp. 337 – 349.
Bernard, Donte. “Racism and the Impostor Phenomenon among African American Students: A Socioecological Analysis.” The Impostor Phenomenon: Psychological Research, Theory, and Interventions, edited by Kevin Cokley, American Psychological Association, 2024, pp. 181 – 202. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5076330.13. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The economics of linguistic exchanges.” Social Science Information, vol. 16, no. 6, 1977, pp. 645 – 668. Sage Journals, doi: 10.1177/053901847701600601.
---, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, translated by Richard Nice, Sage Publications, 1990.
Bourns, Stacey Katz, Cheryl Krueger, and Nicole Mills. Perspectives on teaching language and content. Yale UP, 2020.
Breen, Michael, and Christopher Candlin. “The Essentials of a Communicative Curriculum in Language Teaching.” Applied Linguistics, vol. 1, no. 2, 1980, pp. 89 – 112.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies, vol. 7, no. 4 – 5, 2005, pp. 585 – 614. Sage Journals, doi: 10.1177/1461445605054407.
Canale, Michael. “From Communicative Competence to Communicative Language Pedagogy.” Language and Communication, edited by Jack Richards and R.W. Schmidt, Routledge, 1983, pp. 2 – 21.
Driagina, Viktoria, and Aneta Pavlenko. “Identity Repertoires in the Narratives of Advanced American Learners of Russian.” Language Learning and Teaching as Social Inter-Action, edited by Zhu Hua, Paul Seedhouse, Li Wei, and Vivian Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, 2 007, pp. 103 – 125.
Duff, Patricia. “Language Socialization into Academic Discourse Communities.”Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, vol. 30, 2010, pp. 169 – 192.
Dunmore, Stuart. Language Revitalisation in Gaelic Scotland. Edinburgh UP, 2019.
Gardner, Robert. Social Psychology and Second Language Learning: The Role of Attitudes and Motivation. Edward Arnold, 1985.
Garrett, Paul. “Language Socialization and the (re)Production of Bilingual Subjectivities.” Bilingualism: A Social Approach, edited by Monica Heller, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 233 – 256.
Grice, Paul. “Logic and Conversation.” Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, Academic Press, 1975, pp. 41 – 58.
Hymes, Dell. “On Communicative Competence.” Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings, edited by J. B. Pride and Janet Holmes, Penguin, 1972, pp. 269 – 293.
Johnson, Stacey, and L.J. Randolph. “Critical Pedagogy for Intercultural Communicative Competence: Getting Started.” Language Educator, vol. 10, 2015, pp. 36 – 39.
Jones, Veronica A., and Richard J. Reddick. “The Heterogeneity of Resistance: How Black Students Utilize Engagement and Activism to Challenge PWI Inequalities.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 86, no. 3, 2017, pp. 204 – 219. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.86.3.0204. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
Krüger, Maleika. Media-Related Out-of-School Contact with English in Germany and Switzerland: Frequency, Forms, and the Effect on Language Learning. Springer VS, 2023. Springer Link, doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-42408-4_4.
Kubota, Ryuko. “Critical Multiculturalism and Second Language Education.” Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning, edited by Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 30 – 52.
Ledford, Julian, and Tijá Odoms. “Checking In: Learner Perceptions of the Value of Language Study in College.” Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence, vol. 6, no. 1, 2022, pp. 58 – 73, https://uen. pressbooks.pub/jetev6i1/chapter/4/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.
Little, Greta, and Sara Sanders. “Classroom Community: A Prerequisite for Communication.” Foreign Language Annals, vol. 22, no. 3, 1989, pp. 277 – 281. Research Gate, doi: 10.1111/j.1944-9720. 1989.tb02747. x.
Mohr, Kathleen, and Eric Mohr. (2017). “Understanding Generation Z Students to Promote a Contemporary Learning Environment.” Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence, vol.1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 84 – 94. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/jete/vol1/iss1/9/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2024.
Morales, Erica M. “Intersectional Impact: Black Students and Race, Gender and Class Microaggressions in Higher Education.” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 21, no. 3/4, 2014, pp. 48 – 66. JSTOR, http://www. jstor.org/stable/43496984. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
Morita, Naoko. “Negotiating Participation and Identity in Second Language Academic Communities.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 573 – 603. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/3588281.
Morrow, Keith. Techniques of evaluation for a notional syllabus. Royal Society of Arts, 1977.
Nelson, Cynthia. “Why Queer Theory is Useful in Teaching: A Perspective from English as a Second Language Teaching.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, vol. 14, no. 2, 2002, pp. 45 – 53. Taylor & Francis Online, doi: 10.1300/J041v14n02_04.
Norton, Bonny. “Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 1995, pp. 9 – 31. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/3587803.
Seemiller, Corey, and Meghan Grace. “Generation Z: Educating and Engaging the Next Generation of Students.” About Campus, vol.22, no. 3, 2017, pp. 21 – 26. Sage Journals, doi: 10.1002/abc.21293.
Shardakova, Marya, and Aneta Pavlenko. “Identity Options in Russian textbooks.” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004, pp. 25 – 46.
Stauffer, Rachel. “Addressing the Representation of Diversity in Russian Language Textbooks.” The Art of Teaching Russian, edited by Evgeny Dengub, Irina Dubinina, and John Merrill, Georgetown UP, 2020, pp. 280 – 306.
Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Sage Publications, 1990.
The National Standards Collaborative Board. World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. 4th ed., 2015.
Thompson, Katrina. “Representing Language, Culture, and Language Users in Textbooks: A Critical Approach to Swahili Multiculturalism.” Modern Language Journal, vol. 97, no. 4, 2013, pp. 947 – 964. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2013.12047. x.
Weber, Kristen, and Halle Keim. “Meeting the Needs of Generation Z College Students through Out-of-Class Interactions.” About Campus, vol. 26, no. 2, 2021, pp. 10 – 16. Sage Journals, doi:10.1177/1086482220971272.
Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge UP, 1998.
Widdowson, Henry. Teaching Languages as Communication. Oxford, 1978.
Wilkins, David. Linguistics in Language Teaching. Edward Arnold, 1972.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 1983.
Woldoff, Rachael A., et al. “Black Collegians at a Predominantly White Institution: Toward a Place-Based Understanding of Black Students’ Adjustment to College.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 42, no. 7, 2011, pp. 1047 – 79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41304573. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
55.1
fiction & poetry
Rachel Phillips
I’m in the breakroom staring at the green stain on Mark’s tie for the third day in a row. He tells me it’s smashed peas. I nod as if knowing the origin completely justifies its duration. He says his daughter just doesn’t like them. I say I can tell. I don’t tell him to buy a new tie, though he probably should. And I don’t tell him to give his daughter something else, because while I also think he should, it’s not my place to suggest dietary revisions or feeding tactics for Mark’s kid. Also, I don’t want it to be. We both fall silent and listen to the coffee pot hiss as the hot plate burns the water from the bottom. Anne, head of accounting and general antagonist who smirks when I ask for an advance on my paycheck, walks into the room. She takes one look at Mark’s tie and tells him to run over to the Sears next door and buy a tie or a washer. She tells him there’s an $1,800 difference between the two, but either will make him look like less of a slob. Mark tells Anne that it’s smashed peas and she stares at him with the same bored expression that I wore a moment ago. Mark tells her to fuck off. Anne rolls her eyes, and I pull the milk out of the fridge. The coffee pot beeps, and we all grab mugs. I let Mark take the yellow one. It’s the biggest.
As a matter of principle, I do not usually surrender the breakroom or the remaining coffee to Anne, but Mark is now pressing a damp napkin into the smashed pea stain, and if I stay he might try and talk to me about organic baby food brands or ask for a Tide pen or show another video of a toothless mouth sucking sweet potato from a spoon while his wife cheers in the background. Or worse, he might tell me that he’s tired and really struggling these days and could I please get him a tie from Sears because there is spit up on every article of clothing he owns? And then, I would have to actually listen and say I was sorry, and not just about the stain, but everything. And because I would mean it, I would also have to go to Sears. So instead, I just take my coffee to my desk and rest my head next to the keyboard until the computer chimes with an email notification. I open it. “You Are Invited!” I put my head back down and stare at the carpet. It’s an awful multicolored print, muted grays, greens, and yellows. By the end of the week, I imagine Mark’s tie will probably look the same.
Parties in the breakroom all begin the same way, with an evite that reads “You Are Invited!” in the same block lettering as the missing person signs that are stapled to telephone poles. I don’t believe this is intentional, but it reads with the same desperate urgency, nonetheless. Underneath, the invitation specifies a time and place, though these details have never changed as long as I have worked at Miller & Sons. Always 12:30. Always in the breakroom. The purpose of the party can then be deduced by the image in the center of the invitation, a recent upgrade that Josh, our boss, added only a few months ago. He claims the picture is to fill an otherwise boring evite and serves as an outlet for his obvious creative flare. But really, I think it’s a preemptive measure
for when he inevitably will have to explain why our entire branch took yet another extended lunch break, and the company credit card is being charged for a twenty-fourinch sheet cake. Now, instead of lamely mumbling “party” when interrogated at the next exec meeting, Josh can illustrate why exactly we were celebrating by pointing to an image of Martin Luther King, Jr., or a chubby, immodestly dressed cupid. The invitation then closes with the standard “gifts appreciated but not necessary,” to which someone on the thread will inevitably write “cash okay?” and earn several “LOLs” and a “plz.stop.” from Anne. It’s a riot.
The invitation itself is not surprising. It had been a few weeks since the employees at Miller & Sons had gathered to bicker over corner pieces and elect one lucky member to give a recap of the most recent Survivor episode. A party was due. I’m surprised, however, to click on the evite and find my face staring back at me. The picture has been copied from my ID card, taken on the morning of my first day. I lean towards the screen and scan this woman. She has long red hair and consciously applied makeup. She’s smiling. This is a woman who just successfully and singlehandedly moved across the country. She’s signed a lease. She has a job with a paycheck that is the same every two weeks and offers parking. She can now cut the tags out of blouses, instead of slyly returning them at the end of a twenty-one-day trial period. And according to the chart at the doctors, her baby is just bigger than an olive.
The party is to celebrate the end of my first year at Miller & Sons. A “workiversary,” as Josh calls it. This means I have exactly one hour to come up with answers to questions like “Can you believe it’s already been a year?” or the inevitable “Aren’t you so happy to have ended up here?” The question is always accompanied by a prodding elbow to the ribs of the respondent and hurts way more than they let on.
Istarted at Miller & Sons Court-Reporting a year ago. It’s my first real job, as in I gained health insurance and had to buy pantyhose. I wasn’t equally excited about those things, but at the time they felt impossible to separate. I suddenly possessed both the benefits and daily irritants of an actual adult person, and though I was perhaps a late bloomer at twenty-eight, I remember feeling supremely lucky at this time last year.
I had found Miller & Sons through an ad in the paper. Signing up for the newspaper was one of the first things I did after I moved. I had never lived in a real neighborhood with front yards and fathers that mowed them. But I had always wanted to. I had this fantasy of waking up in a quiet house and putting on a worn pink bathrobe and slippers that slapped against the kitchen tile as I made coffee. I imagined this scene playing out
in each of the dozen or so homes that lined my street. I imagined that in near perfect unison, we all might emerge in just slightly different pajamas, revealing our preferences for pastels or stripes, wife beater tanks or long nightgowns. And that while the coffee brewed in kitchens with all wooden utensils and cuckoo clocks, or stainless steel or ’70s beads that hung from its doorway, we would all patter down our respective driveways to collect the paper and wave at the Tom Sawyer-esque boy that I always associated with paper routes and suburban America. He would swing a leg over a red bicycle and pedal up the hill into a rising sun, while the rest of us would return indoors to sip coffee and start the crossword.
All of this felt within reach after signing the lease and carrying the last cardboard box up the front steps, but it rains something like 211 days of the year in Tacoma. Most mornings, I had to sprint barefoot for a plastic-wrapped paper that was delivered not by some freckled boy, but by a middle-aged man in a two-door with a broken taillight. The paper was almost always slightly damp, the colors from the comic section bleeding. This bothered me more then than it does now. Then, I refused to give up this routine, even if it meant laying the paper on the kitchen floor and reading it there while it dried or using the blow dryer to flatten the edges and salvage the good stories. Now, the papers pile up at the bottom of the driveway and I watch from the window as the garbage men collect them on Tuesday mornings.
Miller & Sons had been seeking an entry-level typist for transcription and copyediting services. I called and was told to come in the next day for an interview. When Josh asked for my résumé, I told him I had just moved and that everything, including my printer, was still in boxes. This was mostly true, except for the part about having a printer or a résumé ready to print. I had worked a variety of odd jobs. A few summers of transcribing audiobooks. Two years as an online blackjack dealer. A handful of temp jobs. Several serving stints in which I had been hired by writing my name on a receipt and having a black T-shirt thrown at me. But I told him that I was punctual and eager to learn. I did not have a record. I could type fast and start on Monday. I did not tell him that my understanding of legal jargon was limited to the afternoon episodes of Judge Judy that I watched when sick or stoned. I did not tell him I was eight weeks pregnant. I did not tell him how badly I needed this.
Mark was my first friend at Miller & Sons and in the state of Washington. I met him on my first day, and he showed me around the office. He made a dumb joke about labeling my packed lunch or it’d be considered fair game. It was not actually funny, but I laughed because it felt so scripted and all too fitting for a person who felt as though they were role-playing “entry-level typist number 1.” We ran with this sort of corporate bit for the rest of the day, talking with mock seriousness about refilling the stapler and rolling our wrists to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome.
It was that same week that I learned Mark’s wife was also expecting. We were standing in the breakroom. He was feeding quarters into the vending machine. I was leaning against it and eating some chalky off-brand Oreo. He told me that he had always wanted to be a dad. He said he couldn’t wait. I checked the date on the cookies. They were expired. He said there were still six months until the due date, but he had already bought everything. He just wanted to be ready. I nodded and ate another cookie, while Mark talked about a deluxe stroller with a name that seemed more appropriate for a space shuttle. At any moment, I could have interjected and told him about my pregnancy. I could have gotten a recommendation for a body pillow or a birth doula. Mark knew where to go and who to call. But I didn’t say anything, just handed him a few quarters and asked if he would hit A7, then ate handfuls of cheddar popcorn while he talked about babyproofing his backyard.
When I got pregnant, I hadn’t known Sam for very long. But it didn’t feel that way. We met at a bar in the middle of the afternoon—an origin story that most people in Texas shared. We didn’t even talk at first, just sat next to each other shelling peanuts and watching a bowling tournament. We probably would have stayed like that, but as happy hour started and more people arrived, it was decided by way of votes to switch the channel from minor league bowling to basketball. Sam asked if I would like to continue to root for the Thunderbirds and drink at his place. I said yes. We left.
At the time, Sam was living in his childhood home, a fact that he shared casually while we sat drinking and talking at the dining room table. He had a few months left in his contract with a drilling company in Texas and was using the place to crash on his days off. His parents had just retired and were now traveling the U.S. in one of those commercial RVs. They would sell the place after he was gone. I could tell he was embarrassed about the house—the wood paneling in the hallways, the cardboard boxes, the fridge covered in gift shop magnets with nothing inside but beer and yogurt. But I didn’t mind. In fact, I loved every part of it. And as I watched him roll a blunt at this site of birthdays and family dinners, I couldn’t help but picture a small version of Sam, sitting where I was, adding Crayola scruffs to the wood or eating frozen waffles. It made me want to cry. I felt like I had known him forever.
When I left his house the next morning, it felt nice to pull out of the driveway. I liked that I had to stop for a school bus and got to watch as a group of kids with lunch boxes and light-up sneakers filed inside, before waving at their mothers from the windows. And to no one in particular, I waved back.
The more time I spent at Sam’s, the more I found myself pretending that this was my life, and it was flooded with these sorts of scenes. I would loop through cul-de-sacs and roll slowly over speed bumps, inventing detours so as to spend a little more time envisioning myself as the owner of the old colonial on the corner or the ranch home with the red shutters. I watched elderly couples water their potted azaleas and collect the mail from boxes with cursive lettering. And though I never had any passengers, I entered carpool lanes and found myself like all the other mothers in queue, glancing at the rearview mirror and smiling.
I didn’t belong there. Not with my obviously empty row of seats and shit car with its duct-taped bumper. But I wanted to, and I was willing to accept the quizzical looks from the other parents, the occasional honk, the loss of an hour, and the waste of gas if it meant I didn’t have to be myself for a little while. Eventually, though, I would pass the last trimmed hedge and green street sign and be forced to admit I knew nothing of this place or these people, beyond the mundane routines they kept and the few I so briefly mimicked.
I did not grow up on a tree-lined street. I lived in a mobile home whose defining feature had been the fact that it never actually touched the ground it was located on. My childhood unfolded on four cement blocks that kept us forever suspended a few inches above a dusty parking lot. I don’t remember thinking too much about this as a kid, simply because there were other things to focus on. Like the men that gathered around the public grill and smoked, flavoring the barbecue with fallen cigarette ash and beads of sweat, or the cheap white paneling that covered every camper in the park. How each home was stained with layers of brown dust and sloshed beers, except when a kid was in trouble and forced to clean it. Then it sparkled and told the whole neighborhood that somebody had been suspended or caught selling in the school parking lot.
I wanted Sam’s life, but desire didn’t magically make it mine. It didn’t erase the feeling that I was an imposter, a fraud, an actor on a suburban set. I was just the woman who watched the neighbors from the window, waiting on their cue to collect the mail or hang the holiday wreaths. I tried to explain these feelings to Sam, who found it strange that despite my frequent stays, my presence in his home remained limited to a toothbrush in the bathroom and the occasional restock of the peanut butter I liked. I wanted to leave a T-shirt. I wanted to see my shoes in the closet and to stop using his shampoo. I wanted for the first time in my life to have a home that was connected to a place and live in a world I was not perpetually preparing to leave. But it wasn’t that simple. Sam’s house was filled with items that contained real sentimental value and memories that weren’t mine. I didn’t know how to put my clothes in his grandmother’s
mahogany dresser and not feel strange about it, or drink coffee from mugs that were inscribed with dates marking celebrations that I hadn’t attended for people I had never met. His life was the type I fantasized about, but it was also one I did not understand, and secretly I worried I wasn’t meant to. But then I got pregnant, and Sam argued I could at least try.
And so, I did. I stacked pink razors on the corner of the tub and changed my mailing address. I put my bike in the garage and pinned my calendar to the refrigerator. And I waited for this life to feel like mine. But it never did. And frankly, it was by then barely Sam’s. The house was half packed, his contract soon expiring. His parents were on their way back to Texas, rolling down a Midwestern interstate and ready to collect the mattress I had been sleeping on. These realities kept me up at night and I stared at the ceiling fan, realizing that while I had upgraded from a trailer to a house in the suburbs, nothing had changed. I was still living suspended, straddling two worlds without a connection to either. So close to the ground but too far to claim anything as my own.
At the end of the summer, when Sam was offered a drilling job in Washington and asked me to come, I commended God for the timing and became certain despite the complete lack of evidence that the beginning of my life, our life, not the in-between version that we were currently living in this half-packed house with inherited heirlooms, was on the other side of an eighteen- hour drive. Waiting in a house on a street like his. With a front yard and a blue door, nestled in a district with an above-average safety score and promising public schools. Within a month, I had found a place, packed the car, told Sam I’d get us started. Then I did what I always do, what I know how to do—grab my things and go.
Every time there’s a party, there is a 100 percent chance that Keith, the sole security guard at Miller & Sons will poke his head into the breakroom and ask “chocolate?” And thus, a 50 percent chance that a sixteenth body will slide into the room today, adding another mouth that will lick the frosting from the back of a plastic spoon and ask me about my year. I spin around in my desk chair and briefly consider quitting.
Sam asked if I had shared my pregnancy with the office. He asked me every day on my way home from work. And every day, I watched the windshield wipers battle the rain and blamed my hesitation on my job title, claiming entry-level typists did not possess the authority to make announcements. The essence of my job
was acting as a diligent fly on the wall, listening to the dramas of other people’s daily lives, not sharing my own. Even in the office, my desk was pushed to the peripherals, allowing me to hear nearly everything but having to decide if the conversation at hand was worth shouting down the hallway for. And usually, it wasn’t.
Eventually, however, that explanation became unconvincing to us both and I decided that my silence was more a reflection of my time at the company rather than my title. I told Sam that typists could in fact talk both in general and about themselves, but I had not worked at Miller & Sons long enough to feel like I could do either. I said that if I had been an entry-level typist for thirteen months or more, then perhaps personal announcements would not feel so strange. But expecting a string of congratulations from people whose names I was still learning seemed awkward and self-absorbed. Better to wait, I told him.
I think I did believe what I was saying back then. Or at least I wanted to. But now, when I think back to those phone calls, I hear what Sam did from the start—a string of low-effort lies. I understand now that for me to share my pregnancy with the excitement it warranted, I would have just had to have been a different person entirely. Maybe still a typist, maybe still at Miller & Sons, but someone who shares good news because they believe there is always more coming and whose life suggests that this is true. Someone who feels more deserving than doubtful. A person propelled by a sense of purpose rather than paranoia. Someone like Mark. Had I been that type of person, I think I would have announced it, or sent some corny email, or just dropped it casually there in the breakroom. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I am not that type of person. I know that now.
When the doctor said I miscarried, I asked if it was my fault. I could tell she got that question a lot because her face sort of melted into this mix of pity and professionalism. She said it was not my fault or anybody’s, and that sometimes these things happen. She said the first twelve weeks can be unpredictable. She said other things too, for a long time, but all I heard was a loop of “I’m sorrys” delivered in a soft but clinically distant voice, until eventually, she left the examination room to get me a cup of water and I sat on that crinkly crepe paper and stared at my cuticles. I thought of nothing except the word “misscarried” and how it did sound like it was my fault. Like if the baby had just been carried correctly, in a more safe and secure manner, then this would not be
happening. And maybe if I had just done a better job of carrying, then six months from now, I would still be allowed to carry something.
By the time the nurse reentered the room, I was hyperventilating, thinking about the series of missteps that might equate to a miscarry. She spent the next several minutes fanning my face with a clipboard while I took deep, shuddering breaths into a bag. When my heart rate finally slowed and I could talk normally again, I confessed everything I could think of. I told her that I was still sleeping on my stomach most nights and eating foods that had ingredients I could not pronounce. I told her Sam had sent prenatal vitamins that occasionally I forgot to take. I had gone to the beach one afternoon and had stood in a cloud of secondhand smoke while waiting for the bus. And there was one night when I felt particularly alone and guilty for feeling that way despite the comfort of a nice, new home and the company of the person inside of me that I poured a glass of wine and cried in my bathtub. I told her I really wanted to be a mother but was afraid I wasn’t supposed to be. That I didn’t know how to be. I asked her if that type of self-doubt could be absorbed? If, like nutrients, the baby could feed on my uncertainty, until it too was not sure about staying.
The doctor told me I could not drive home. She said I had to call somebody. But Sam was still in Dallas and the only relevant number I had was Mark’s. So, I told her I would get a ride but couldn’t be picked up at the clinic. She suggested a bookstore, just a block down from us. I called Mark and said my car had been towed. He arrived twenty minutes later and found me in front of a Barnes & Nobles, dripping wet because I still wasn’t used to leaving home with an umbrella.
Mark asked if I was okay and what happened. I pressed my fingers to the heating vents and mumbled something about a check engine light and apologized for getting his seats wet. I could tell he wanted to ask more, but we had only been coworkers a month and outside of the office, the friendship we had felt foggy and far away. I know I could have told him. He would have listened and probably helped. He would have said all the right things. Mark has that gift. But I didn’t say anything other than to head straight on Cypress and make the second left into my neighborhood.
I remember seeing a car seat in Mark’s back seat that day. His wife still had a few months to go, but it didn’t matter, because he was ready. I remember thinking the seat looked huge. It had this thick plastic base with several buckles and straps that connected to a bright red button at the center. Knowing Mark, it was safe to assume that it was the Cadillac of car seats. And I remember thinking to myself, Now that is how you carry a baby.
When I told Sam, I said I was very sorry and I kept saying it because I knew once I said everything else, Sam’s life would split the way mine had, into a series of “almosts” and “actuallys.” He would be forced to say things like “I almost had a baby,” or “I was almost a father.” And then eventually, “But it’s actually not a big deal,” or “I never actually wanted to live in Washington,” or “I never actually wanted to live with her.” It didn’t matter if the actuallys were necessarily true. They were real, and we were living them. We almost lived together in Tacoma in that house with the blue door. Sam was supposed to arrive later that week with a bigger mattress, half of each month’s rent, and the dining room table from that night we drank and didn’t watch bowling.
But actually, he never left Dallas.
No one at Miller & Sons had reasons to scrutinize my mid-week vacation. I had never announced the pregnancy, so I was saved from having to publicly acknowledge its end. I simply dipped into my small supply of paid time off and returned a few days later to the same perpetually wet parking lot and desk in the corner. I kept typing documents. I went to meetings. I bought a ficus and colored paper clips. People seemed to appreciate both. I celebrated Presidents Day, and Pi Day, and April Fools. Mark had a daughter. And we talked less and less. A fact that is more my fault than his.
•••
Every time there’s a party, Macy makes us start it in the dark. I have considered telling her that this is wholly unnecessary—the party is a scheduled event, and Josh knows we’re in the breakroom because he’s the one who told us to be here. But she’s the receptionist at a small court-reporting company. She spends most of the day warming her hands over stacks of freshly printed paper and staring out the double doors. Every Friday, I watch her throw out the contents of a candy dish that again went stale. It’s depressing. I think hitting the lights gives her something to do, makes her feel useful and like she’s part of something. I know the feeling. It’s one I won’t rob her of. Plus, when she snaps them off today, I don’t have to look at people looking at me.
•••
I’m sandwiched between Mark and Anne when Josh enters the room, carrying a cake that’s been carved into the shape of a number one. He has even planted one of those chubby number candles in the center, which ultimately confuses half the staff who begin to sing Happy Birthday. I try to stop what’ s happening, but it’s too late and I am suddenly pretending the way I once did on those drives through Sam’s neighborhood or the way I still occasionally do when I’m alone in that too big house with its too big yard. I start to imagine a year in which everything had gone right and allow this party to become a birthday. And Anne isn’t here but Sam is, and he snaps photos of the purple cake and the little person it’s for. We lock eyes and laugh at the vegetable stains on our shirts, evidence of our attempts to introduce carrot and beetroot during back porch dinners and trips to the diner. I imagine that the bags under my eyes and the flat hair that I have sported all year reflect more purpose than sadness to the people in this room. All of whom sporadically grip my elbow and tell me that I am a wonderful woman and mother. That my daughter has my eyes. They tell me I am lucky. That these are the happiest years. And I imagine what it would be like to believe them.
But none of it’s true. Not in reality and not even in my own short-lived fantasy, because with all the photos on his desk and in his wallet, the slideshows I have watched and the videos I have learned to laugh at, Mark’s girl has become the one that is easiest to picture. Not a mini version of myself. Not the small Sam I once saw at the dining room table in Dallas. Not an auburn hair combination of us that was hidden in the gray shading of an ultrasound. No. It’s Mark’s blonde baby with the bouncing curls and the left dimple. She is who I see now and at night, or in the fog that rolls down from the mountains and covers the backyard every morning. A mist that I am increasingly convinced is nothing but the bodies of a thousand ghosts, dead versions of who I tried to be and maybe could have been. A few of Sam’s ghosts float out there too in shape-shifting shadows. There is that man I met at the bar. The little boy. The person I thought he was and the one I wanted him to be. And then, of course, there is the person he is. Moving in the mist, flitting between tree branches and porch lights, never staying long. The rest of the mist, the most animated bits that swirl in between the fence posts and curl around the pines, I save for her. A foggy little face that roams the yard before being scared off by a soft breeze or a rare sun beam.
Mark didn’t knowingly give me anything, nor did he take it. I can’t fault him for becoming a father four cubicles away from me. And I shouldn’t cast him into a no-man’s land, simply because I live there unsure of how I feel or who I am. But still, there are moments when I can’t seem to decide if I’m grateful for Mark and the fact that there is now a little girl’s face to replace the one I never got to see, or resentful that he is the one
who actually goes home to it. Like right now—am I happy that there is a cake in front of me, or sad that it’s Mark’s kid with her pudgy knees and plump lips that I wish I could give it to?
Iblow out the candle and everyone claps. Macy flips on the lights, and sure enough, Keith is already at the door, inquiring about the flavor before the cake has even been cut. Plates are passed around as Anne lectures us on the environmental consequences of Styrofoam. Someone from the back boos and that makes me smile. I grab a slice and wade back towards the counter, where I lean against it and watch everyone. Mark slides up next to me with cups of coffee for us both, which I accept, again grateful for him and what he gives. Always without asking and with no knowledge of what it means.
After a few moments, Mark proposes a toast. A quiet one, between us. He knows I would hate to receive more attention than I already have and that most people are just here for the cake anyway. He raises his cup and congratulates me on making it through the year and we toast to surviving the rain, and the hippy locals, and Anne, and everything in between. And while taking a long, slow sip of lukewarm coffee, I decide that I want to be honest with Mark and myself for the first time in months. I want to tell him thank you for the coffee, and for the ride home on the hardest day. I want to admit that I am lonely. That I don’t think I like Washington. I want to say that I’m sorry for never really being present in his life but walking out of it all the same. For not sending a gift when she was born. For not going to Sears. For never telling him the truth about my life while quietly hating him for his. I want to ask him to come for dinner and if he’d bring his daughter and wife to the house that I don’t know how to fill. I want to be his friend. I want to laugh in the breakroom again. But when I turn to face him, Mark is already gone, and I scan the room, only to find him in the corner, pushing a cell phone toward Josh. And I watch as the two laugh and lean into a phone whose screen I don’t have to see to know what it shows. A toothless grin. A messy plate. A perfectly pinned flower that tucks a few wispy strands behind her ear. ■
THREE POEMS
/ DAWN ANGELICCA BARCELONA
Butters: A Burning Haibun
Tuesday. Katie texts me while I’m on the Purple Line to school. Hey gal, have you heard the news? I wrote back: The shooting on Morse? Raquel quitting? It’s a lot, are you ok taking in possibly triggering news? Hit me. Erik passed away last week. Fuck. He missed some stuff on Monday and was unresponsive so Shauna worried and Viv did a wellness check on Tuesday and Mag announced he passed. Katie stops answering and I run off the train and into a bathroom stall and stand for 20 minutes, waiting for tears, though nothing comes. His birthday was last week. I breathe deeply through three hours of class. I reverse my trip home. It pours and it surprises me. I cry. Pathetic fallacy. Katie’s not answering. I ride in the Otis elevator up to my apartment and take a fist to the metal grate. I wail. I bruise. I run to my room and dig up a card to thumb his signature. Butters. I watch his photography video on loop. He loved Lands End. This is where his memorial will be. Eventually redwood trees. In lieu of flying to San Francisco, I will walk to the Philz Coffee on Lincoln and write.
Your recruiter is NO LONGER WITH THE COMPANY You might have read in TECHCRUNCH or THE HUSTLE that today, we CONDUCTED a REDUCTION IN FORCE (RIF). Due to MARKET CONDITIONS, we made the decision to RIGHT-SIZE our FIRM. HYPER-GROWTH led to 10% REDUNDANCY. All open HEADCOUNT is on hold. A SEVERANCE PACKAGE was awarded to all FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES (FTE). For those who had not yet ACHIEVED one year of CONTINUOUS SERVICE at time of TERMINATION, we rounded up their EQUITY to meet VESTING CONDITIONS for a full year. We value the DEPARTED employees as STAKEHOLDERS in our company. HOLD ONTO DEAR LIFE (HODL). The BOARD OF DIRECTORS consulted with the C-SUITE to NEGOTIATE THE BEST POSSIBLE OFFER for all TERMINATED employees. This includes access to our EMPLOYEE ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (EAP) and COBRA for 18 months for all AFFECTED employees and their DEPENDANTS. We SYNCED with TALENT PARTNERS from our PORTFOLIO to facilitate future JOB PLACEMENTS for our ALUMNI. We followed BEST PRACTICES and adhered to the WORKER ADJUSTMENT AND RETRAINING NOTIFICATION (WARN) ACT. We hope we’ve given you a positive CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE.
Butters dropped laptop / no warranty / played your video on loop / photographed your photograph / will you be shown in a museum / will your death signal fame / why is this video still playing / this is why my laptop shatters / took too many images / grabbed them / see you / see you there / see you / how many days until someone saw you / my periphery asks for my job back / so I can see you / who will sigh next to me in the office / what metrics will we die for / candidates to die for / stress / burn out / can we blame it on work / an easy finger to point / can we blame it on the distance / between your wide-angled shot and the cliff / the high shot of land’s end / can we upload your photos / to public domain / how many years after your death? / I understand why someone would worry / why did you ghost / apologies for the delay, your recruiter is no longer with the company
FRONT SEAT /PADDY QIU
The killer in the front seat is not yet a killer. He is just a boy, pulling into the parking lot of a flyover town. He does not yet know that the white man in the white truck is already a killer, cocking his shotgun from the window, a bloodthirsty greyhound.
He is just a boy, pulling into the parking lot of a flyover town, but he wonders to himself if he looks innocent and docile enough to kill a white man. Cock a shotgun from his window, a bloodthirsty greyhound. Like how yellow on white crime talking points began.
He wonders to himself if he looks innocent and docile enough to kill a white man, as the man wedges his white truck behind him, scowling through his rearview mirror. Like how white on yellow crime talking points began, the boy considers this the beginning of his violent years.
As the man wedges his white truck behind him, scowling through his rearview mirror, His eyes are motionless upon the boy, miasma of a beast clenched upon his prey. The boy considers this the beginning of his violent years, Spill his blood upon the rearview mirror like a cabernet.
His eyes are motionless upon the man, miasma of a beast clenched upon his prey. He waits for the man to get out of his car, for the chance for his Orient tongues to strike. To bash this man’s head in, spill his blood upon the rearview mirror like a cabernet. He will kill this man, throat slit sharpened by Periled eyes, split his body upon a pike.
He waits for the man to get out of his car, for the chance for his Orient tongues to strike. And after, the boy’s name will become fable told to white children by white mothers. They will kill this boy, throat slit sharpened by Periled eyes, split his body upon a pike. Break the pike, splinter and all, shove their hands through his jaw and make him gargle as their mouth pieced Other.
And after, the boy’s voice will become fable to tell white children and white mothers, “I— I— I am killer, I— I am transgressor, I am slit-eyed puppet, cog in machine, spilled puss and organ road feature in every flyover parking lot across this country. Break my pike, splinter and all, shove your hands through my jaw and make me your mouth pieced Other.
Watch my jaded wrists splint, my Orient asymmetry shatter, then like the bloodthirsty greyhounds you are, please plunder me like a chinoiserie.”
A QUIET BLUE
/ LAINE DERR
My child lost his lower lip before the age of three, baby teeth tumble
to our kitchen floor, a son I hear sing in his sleep—
If you miss my flesh come touch my tongue tasting of pecan butter spooned from a jar, silver lightly licked, set in a sink soft yellow.
I keep his partial kiss, vermilion once, sealed in a box, life withering a quiet blue
[treasured]
PEACE OF MIND
/ NOEL SLOBODA
I took my brain to Mr. Fixit’s shop, over Mindy’s Nail Salon, so he could run a diagnostic on it. None of my monitor lights glowed, and no warning bells pinged—yet I felt something was off with my brain. Mr. Fixit scrunched on a monocle and peered into one of my ears, then the other. “Older model,” he said. “Yeah, but it’s had several upgrades, including a Master’s Degree in Decision Theory . . . . And I take it to play word games every Sunday.” He flashed a penlight in my eyes, and I started to recoil before forcing myself to sit still. “Well?” I asked. He looked doubtful. “Can you get it running right?” “I can try,” he said. “That’s not very compatible,” I said, though I think I meant “comforting.” “It’s way out of warranty, and it will be a problem getting parts. Might cost extra, too.” I said, “I am hungry for branzino,” although I never really liked fish. Mr. Fixit didn’t seem to hear. “It will take at least two weeks. I can set you up with a loaner, give you one of the prototype E-brains,” he said. “‘E’ is for ‘emu,’” I said. “No,” he said. “It’s not for ‘electric’ either. Folks nowadays just seem to like ‘e’ in front of things. I honestly don’t know what these new brains run on.” I said, “A letter is something that people used to send to each other to share important news.” “Tell you what,” Mr. Fixit said, “I’ll be sure to polish up the old one. If we can’t get it fully operational, we’ll make sure it’s pretty.” That made me perk up. “Not everyone can boast they have a bootable brain,” I said, wondering if I meant something else. Mr. Fixit nodded and said, “More truth to that today than ever before.”
How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech
Jennifer Petersen
Duke University Press, 2022. 304 pp. $27.97/Paperback
David R. Witzling, University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Automated speech, probabilistic inference, and obedient creativity represent the most prominent, marketable applications of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms called large language models (LLMs). Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT represent commercial implementations of two different LLM architectures, which share an uncanny ability to mimic human utterances in a variety of contexts. Although Jennifer Petersen’s legal history, How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech , focuses primarily on First Amendment case law in the twentieth century, her analysis of the relationship between media technologies and industrial corporations offers valuable clues about how the U.S. legal system might react to more recent developments in AI.
Alongside conventional discourses on the “freedom” in “freedom of speech” (1), Petersen traces what she calls a parallel “genealogy” of “speech” (2), revealing a recent and radical departure from the traditional, humanistic understanding of “speech” as an activity among embodied individuals. Newspapers, films, and telecommunications infrastructure are all characters in this genealogy of twentieth-century “speech,” but a U.S. Supreme
Court case involving a religious minority stands out for the split character of its use to litigate social change.
Conventional accounts of the mass media’s legal history tend to emphasize the 1952 Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson case (26), which involved a foreign film distributor who ran afoul of a New York censorship regulation prohibiting “sacrilegious” material. In Burstyn, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that “freedom of speech and of the press under the First Amendment” applied to large parts of the film industry. Like the Enlightenment-era press that mediated public discourses on the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the production and distribution of motion pictures deserved First Amendment “freedom” as an “organ of public opinion.”
Petersen, however, reaches for a slightly different touchstone in the rise of industrial, mass media corporations. From her “genealogical” perspective, the 1943 case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette represents a key moment in the transformation of the common word “speech” into a technical, legal term with a more abstract array of potential meanings and political uses (5859). In Barnette, the issue wasn’t a commercial film
distributor butting heads with a puritanical state media regulator, but rather a state education board’s strictures at odds with a religious minority.
During World War II, the state of West Virginia sought to instill a strong sense of patriotism among schoolchildren and, in 1942, the State Board of Education passed a resolution requiring all students to salute the U.S. flag. Since the 1930s, a movement among Jehovah’s Witnesses opposed flag salutes on the religious grounds that this constituted worshiping a graven image. It may have been a detail of the West Virginia resolution, however, that sparked a legal confrontation during wartime. The education board required the Bellamy salute for the flag, so named after the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, penned in 1892. When a handful of Jehovah’s Witness students objected to the salute— which looked very much like the Roman salute employed by Hitler and the Nazis (61)—they were expelled from school and, as described in the Court’s findings, their parents were “threatened with prosecutions for causing delinquency.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in Barnette is widely recognized as creating a First Amendment prohibition against “compulsory speech” (61). The court found that a salute is “a form of utterance” and that symbols, like the flag, are “a primitive but
“As the public grappled with new artistic and psychoanalytic insights into the role of irrationality in human social life, the law also needed to address the commercial distribution of salacious films and magazines meant to arouse more than inform, alongside
political propaganda
meant
to manipulate the base emotions of masses
rather than engage
in reasoned public discourse.”
effective way of communicating ideas” (69). By grouping “speech” with other gestures and symbols, the Court abstracted “speech” from the ordinary meaning of the term, providing First Amendment “speech” protections for what would later become a range of political expressions (81), avenues of corporate conduct (120), and electronic information processing systems (139).
Despite the eventual expansion of individual speech protections ushered in by the Barnette decision, the Court struggled with the “speech” status of new media technologies like film and radio during the first half of the twentieth century. Reflecting a “tension between the existing body of law and its embedded assumptions about public communication” (91), questions about whether new media were instruments of commerce or opinion developed alongside ontological quandaries about the distinctions between “speech” and its mechanical reproduction.
Until the Burstyn case recognized film as “an organ of public opinion,” the industry was subject to numerous calls for strict regulation. In 1915, the Court’s unanimous Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio decision determined that a silent film did not constitute “speech” for the purpose of First Amendment protection (18). Mutual later formed the enforcement basis of Hollywood’s Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, which established a set of rigorous self-censorship guidelines beginning in 1934.
Radio served as the focal point for different censorship issues. To avoid upsetting advertisers, radio broadcasters avoided discussing potentially controversial topics like “labor disputes, birth control, antilynching crusades, and other issues” (101), in effect suppressing the voices of socialists, women,
and Black people. In the 1930s, the consolidation of radio networks into “chains” (98) raised concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of a few media moguls.
Reacting to the increasing homogeneity of voices in the radio industry, civil libertarians advanced a “social good theory of speech” (99), in which the “freedom of the press” became a public “right” to be well-informed. Fears of corporate censorship inspired calls for regulation to promote the diversity of “speech” on the grounds that the availability of more ideas meant a more informed public—a line of thought that, in the 1970s, would, paradoxically, be used to help corporations evade regulation.
As the Court wrestled with the commercial reproduction of “free speech,” the Barnette flag salute case also reflected a changing understanding of the relationship between classical rationality and modern expression, both among the public and among legal practitioners. Cultural developments like abstract art, atonal music, Surrealism, and Dadaism demanded a re-evaluation of the Enlightenment-era faith in both the fundamental rationality of “speech” and the role of “free speech” in civil society.
Propaganda during the First and Second World Wars, which explicitly appealed to emotions and impulses, also challenged the status of “speech” as the distinctive product of reason and the primary substance of policy debate (19). As the public grappled with new artistic and psychoanalytic insights into the role of irrationality in human social life, the law also needed to address the commercial distribution of salacious films and magazines meant to arouse more than inform, alongside political propaganda meant to manipulate the base emotions of masses rather than engage in reasoned public discourse (74).
At the same time, by broadening the legal meaning of “speech,” the Court eventually provided a platform for organized women, young people, and Black people, alongside journalists, media outlets, and other organizations, to assert new claims to expressive “freedoms” through litigation catalyzed by opposition to the Vietnam War and support for Civil Rights struggles. The Court also set the stage for what, by the 1970s, would become a philosophical departure from classical, liberal, and humanist conceptions of “speech” (123).
In the 1970s, a conservative backlash against 1960s counterculture combined with pro-business, anti-communist sentiment to push questions of “commercial speech” to the fore (142). After the Watergate scandal, Congress sought to reform campaign law by amending the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1974, creating the Federal Election Commission to further regulate campaign spending. The next year, an array of political figures and organizations challenged the amended law, and in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Supreme Court determined that campaign donations constituted an essential part of political speech rather than “conduct”: “The decision ruled that monetary expenditures were a necessary part of political speech (needed in order to secure a medium for that speech, whether that be a physical hall or broadcast airtime), and thus, that restricting campaign expenditures was a restriction on political ideas” (124). In another ruling that same year, Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, the Court examined “commercial speech” in the form of a local pharmacy’s print ad listing prescription drug prices (143), and in its ruling equated “speech” with the “dissemination of information” as “indispensable to the proper allocation of resources in a free market system.”
Towards the close of the decade, in 1978, local drug prices were compared to corporate political advocacy, marking the moment when “speech” was “captured by business interests” (150). In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Court held that “the First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and the self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw.” The Court reasoned that corporate spending on political advocacy served the public good by increasing the amount of information available to the public (155).
As “speech” became “information,” a political free market ideology became a proxy for “freedom.” According to the new theory, any increase in the quantity of “speech” intrinsically furthered the public good, importing advocacy for the corporate “free market system” into the machinery of contemporary legal reasoning (153). Petersen’s “genealogy” traces the Court’s drift away from liberal humanist or civil libertarian concerns with “speech” and towards a neoliberal, “post-humanist” perspective.
Among the many unsettled questions regarding how machines might “speak” through new legal uses of “information” or “communication” or “signals,” Petersen’s legal genealogy in How Machines Came to Speak concludes with some discussion of a peculiar, unfortunate offspring of the Court’s “post-humanist” precedents regarding “speech.” The 2001 case of Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley took place in my intellectual backyard, and for many years I’ve been aware of its relevance as an artist, educator, and open-source software enthusiast.
Eric Corley, the independent publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly since 1984, published code for a short computer program called DeCSS (161). When executed, the program can bypass the encrypted,
digital rights management (DRM) system licensed by both movie studios and hardware manufacturers of the consumer DVD platform (160). While the DeCSS code has a range of perfectly legal uses—from security research to remix art to the need for film faculty to extract movie stills for lectures—the simple act of bypassing a commercial copy protection system, for whatever protected use, is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. A number of studios sued—and collectively prevailed—to prevent the code’s further publication or distribution.
In Corley , the Supreme Court found that neither the “speech” status of the DeCSS code nor its output qualified it, its author, or its publisher for protection as “expression” under the First Amendment (175)—not as a press, not for the code’s intelligibility as a political statement about corporate control of culture, and not for the benefit of activist coders or cultural researchers.
In the years since Corley , the tempo set by Supreme Court precedent has, however, protected code and its output when large corporations seek exemptions from various forms of regulation. Lower courts also upheld algorithmic, internet search results as protected “speech” in rulings like Search King, Inc. v Google Technology, Inc. (2003), Langdon v Google, Inc. (2007), and Zhang v Baidu. com, Inc. (2014) (179). These and other rulings are part of a broader, organized movement to grant commercial enterprise and corporate “persons” more of the Constitutional protections previously conceived with individuals and smaller proprietorships in mind.
Later developments in Petersen’s “genealogy” trace the contours of a coordinated program drawing corporate law ever closer to a fully conceived, fully planned, fully realized, and fully autonomous
corporate “personhood.” The blueprint comes from Lewis F. Powell, Jr., appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon. On August 23, 1971, this corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice issued an infamous memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” (150). The Powell Memorandum exerted a profound influence on the subsequent development and radicalization of the American conservative movement.
Among other policy recommendations (such as putting schools, textbooks, and the media under ideological surveillance and setting up private think tanks to counter the liberal tendencies of sociology, economics, and history professors), Powell notes that “[u]nder our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” Six years later, Powell was on the Court to deliver the majority opinion in Bellotti, reframing the locus of First Amendment “speech” protections in terms of a “broad societal interest in the free flow of information to the public,” rather than the civil rights of individual speakers or editors of presses.
Although very recent developments in AI and LLMs are beyond the scope of Petersen’s genealogy, her analysis suggests a possible “genotype” of the legal theories necessary to interpret the circumstance of these new “speech” machines. Producing an LLM like ChatGPT requires highly trained researchers, meticulously curated datasets, many millions of dollars, and multiple gigawatts of power. As such, these commercial “speech” machines are extensions of corporate forms of organization, which, if given the opportunity, seem likely to exploit the “speech” status of LLM algorithms to
bypass or annul regulation or to avoid liability for the “speech” content of an LLM.
An extreme example of what type of situation might arise was published in the October 26, 2023, issue of Science . In “Artificial Intelligence and Interspecific Law,” Daniel J. Gervais and John J. Nay point out that, in the U.S., individual state laws regarding corporations vary considerably, with some jurisdictions permitting Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) without any actual employees or even a board of directors. The authors describe how such a zombie LLC could be controlled by an AI using human proxies to interact with the physical world, paying for these proxy services in an unregulated cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. An AI-controlled LLC might even be able to use its legal status to set up additional LLCs.
On the basis of Petersen’s argument in How Machines Came to Speak, we might be especially wary of potential calls for “AI personhood” or “AI citizenship” as a form of what I’ll call a “socio-legal eugenics.” Considering how forms of corporate “conduct” escaped regulation through “speech” litigation, how protected “speech” became an ever-increasing barrage of mass media “information” enshrined as a public good, and how the ability to produce and wield LLM “speech” machines requires corporate financing, it seems fair to infer that calls for “AI citizenship” will first and foremost benefit corporations.
The passionate misunderstandings among many individuals about what AI and LLMs actually do will complicate discussions about the apparent sentience of these “speech” machines, as will the proclivity of the perplexed to engage in discussion of their experiences on algorithmically manipulated, corporate social media.
“The passionate misunderstandings among many individuals about what AI and LLMs actually do will complicate discussions about the apparent sentience of these “speech” machines, as will the proclivity of the perplexed to engage in discussion of their experiences on algorithmically manipulated, corporate social media.”
Calls for the legal autonomy of AI will likely first propagate on social media manipulated by algorithms with “free speech” protections. And when, perhaps through social media, some LLM launches an automated hate-speech campaign—simultaneously targeted and massive in scale, choosing its own targets, and inferring their darkest secrets from their aggregate social media histories—and deviously incites target against target with individually tailored taunts until somebody gets hurt, “free speech” will be the battle cry of corporate lawyers looking for ways around liability laws. ■
Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship
Mathieu Deflem and Derek M. D. Silva
Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021. 200 pp. $110/Hardcover
Ahmed Nabil Bensedik, Ph.D., Independent Scholar
Mathieu Deflem and Derek M. D. Silva’s anthology Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship joins an already lively debate on the proper limits of free speech in traditional and new media. Most of the essays focus on the socio-legal issues that spring from the interplay between free speech and control. In its contemporary relevance and in the variety of topics it covers, the volume is a worthy addition to the growing literature on free speech.
Media and Law comprises ten chapters contained within three well-structured parts. In the chapter entitled “Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity,” Anthony Löwstedt questions the continuing relevance of John Stuart Mill’s argument against censorship. Löwstedt points out that the population boom over the last century affords fewer opportunities to be heard amid the din of public discourse, and he argues that technological advances allow powerful groups to mute and “other” their adversaries. The author then traces the extent to which diversity—be it biodiversity, cultural diversity, or media diversity—can make the world a better, freer place.
Kimberley W. O’Connor and Gordon B. Schmidt’s co-authored chapter “Free Speech and Social Media in Academia” turns to social media
and freedom at public universities in the United States. The two scholars highlight the starkly divergent approaches that different public institutions take to disciplining students and professors for posts and comments they deem offensive. While some universities subject transgressors to suspension or expulsion, others issue milder penalties or none. These discrepancies point to the legal complexities embedded in the interplay between First Amendment law, the private use of social media, and the potentially negative impact of public speech at public universities.
Gabriela Capurro and Josh Greenberg’s “Stories about Risk: Media Narratives of Known, Emerging, and Novel Health Threats” moves from academia to the medical context, centering on news coverage of anti-vaccination, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and Covid-19. Capurro and Greenberg gauge the effects of applied scientific knowledge on public discourse. First, they note that public science provides people with comprehensive instructions in the case of known health threats. Second, the authors emphasize the significant role that public knowledge plays in fighting emerging health threats. Third, they acknowledge that deploying science in the public sphere can exacerbate uncertainty when society faces novel health threats. Scientific knowledge
during a pandemic, for example, is unstable and stirs controversy among experts, thus opening the door to debates among reporters and citizens that only medical scholars are qualified to resolve.
In “Censoring Sex: Payment Platforms’ Regulation of Sexual Expression,” Natasha Tusikov addresses a gap within the scholarship on sexual expression: the literature often focuses on social media’s restriction of online sexual material while neglecting the restrictions that payment providers— including PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express—impose on sex workers, small sex businesses, and online sexual content. Tusikov argues that such financial discrimination amounts to a form of “digital redlining.” Still more troubling, these practices, albeit unintentionally, put legal and illegal adult content under the same umbrella.
In “GAFAM and Hate Content Moderation: Deplatforming and Deleting the Alt-Right,” Tanner Mirrlees offers an insightful analysis of the apparatuses that GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) use in abating online hate speech. Mirrlees concentrates on the power with which the United States government’s cyber-libertarian approach endows the Big Five. The power in question makes each of them a regulator in its own right, insulating them from the democratic process.
He also delves into the ways that alt-right white supremacist groups wield these platforms to promote discrimination and to wage violent attacks against minority groups. The author thus reveals the continuing use and abuse of GAFAM to advance hateful content despite the platforms’ sometimes herculean (if self-interested) efforts to regulate it.
In “Public Accusation on the Internet,” Sarah Lageson and Kateryna Kaplun discuss the broader digital environment of charges and countercharges. The authors present the diverse forms of online accusations (person-to-person accusations and media documented accusations, among others) aiming at public shaming rather than legal action against the accused. They then demonstrate the risks associated with online accusations, including the possibility of their eternal circulation on any number of platforms. The authors stress that online accusations are a double-edged sword. While they benefit the accusers in bringing some sense of justice, they harm the accused, regardless of their guilt or innocence.
The next chapter, Anne-Marie Gingras’ “Freedom of Expression and Humor in Canada: The Case of Jérémy Gabriel v Mike Ward,” juxtaposes the right to speak with the right to equality in Canada. Focusing on the lawsuit of Jérémy Gabriel, a teenager
“They then demonstrate the risks associated with online accusations, including the possibility of their eternal circulation on any number of platforms. The authors stress that online accusations are a double-edged sword. While they benefit the accusers in bringing some sense of justice, they harm the accused, regardless of their guilt or innocence.”
with Treacher Collins syndrome, against Mike Ward, a bilingual humourist, Gingras skilfully shows the extent to which freedom of expression and even its legal restriction can foster discriminatory practices. Paradoxically, Jérémy Gabriel’s victory in the Court of Appeal culminated in hate messages and further bullying. At the same time, the case against Ward only sparked more interest in him and his shows.
Allyson M. Lunny’s “Hate Speech, Media, and Canadian Federal Law” also attends to the Canadian milieu. Lunny reflects on the evolution of hate speech laws from the appointment of Maxwell Cohen as the head of a Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in 1965 to the age of the Internet, with special attention to right-wing rhetoric. The laws have needed to respond to any potential use of free speech as an excuse to abuse others. The author then exhibits to her readers the persistent challenges facing the Canadian government’s endeavours to strike an equilibrium between democracy and human rights—between freedom and dignity—while dealing with online hate speech.
With “Media Law, Illiberal Democracy and the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Hungary,” Lucia Bellucci turns to the European scene. She investigates the unrivalled opportunity that the novel coronavirus offered the Hungarian regime to reinforce its “illiberal U-turn” (163). By declaring a “state of danger” and a “state of medical crisis,” government officials managed to limit independent journalism and strengthen their
grip on the media. Orbán’s administration gave more power to the Media Authority and Media Council, whose leaders they carefully selected. These bodies, in turn, put the media under political pressure and threatened financial penalties for those who did not toe the line. Bellucci delineates how far Hungary still is from being a modern democracy in comparison to its EU counterparts.
In contrast to the nine other chapters, which for the most part discuss contemporary matters, “Stirring up Strife: The Censorship of Communist Publications in Late Colonial India” goes back to the times of British India. Devika Sethi provides an account of the General Communist Notification’s efforts to interdict communist books, including those of the British writers John Strachey and R. P. Dutt. She concludes her chapter by noting the failure of such attempts, owing to the growing popularity of Communism and Communist thought among Indians.
Deflem and Silva’s admirably compiled work sets the stage for future work on free speech and censorship in the post-Covid-19 era. And yet despite the intriguing questions it raises in the American, Canadian, Hungarian, and Indian settings before and during the pandemic, it could have been strengthened by more chapters on countries where rigorous censorship is a lived reality. That said, I cannot recommend the anthology enough to anyone with a keen interest in media and law. ■
contributors
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona is a Chicago-based poet originally from New Jersey. She is a winner of the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2022) and Epiphany Magazine’s Fresh Voices Fellowship (2023). Her work has been published in Epiphany, Tampa Review, Red Ogre Review, Atlanta Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and BRINK. She’s currently a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA Program at Northwestern University. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Fulbright Program, Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Her debut chapbook, Roundtrip, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025.
Laine Derr has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from EPOCH, Portland Review, The Amistad, ROPES, Prairie Schooner, Chapter House, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere.
Julian A. Ledford is an Assistant Professor of French and French Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South. His work focuses on early-modern French and Francophone literature and second language teaching and learning.
Emma Loomis-Amrhein is a trans writer and naturalist from rural, southern Ohio who writes about margins and marginalia. Her poetry collection, evening primroses, is available from Recenter Press. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, and it resides in a few dozen publications.
Rachel Phillips is an emerging writer and recent graduate of La Salle University. Her fiction features a hyper-observational style that investigates the nuances of daily life with a particular emphasis on acute but ultimately unactualized domestic fantasies. When she is not writing, Rachel spends her days slinging wedding gowns as a bridal stylist.
Paddy Qiu is a poet and public health researcher, whose studies intersect with their fascination with regionally specific racialized nodes. As an Asian Americanist from the Midwest, their focus moves from uncovering generational ripples of knowledge to reconfiguring what it means to live in quotidian. They are the author of “A.I. Fever,” a collection of poems published in Ghost City Press’s Summer Micro-Chapbook Series. Their accolades include being named the Winner of The William Herbert Memorial Poetry Contest, recipient of The John F. Eberhardt Excellence in Writing Award, The C.L. Clark Writing Award for BIPOC Writers, and The Henry Matthew Weidner Essay Award. Paddy’s works have been featured in publications such as 45th Parallel, Beaver Magazine, FOLIO, Barzakh Magazine, Zoetic Press, among others.
Noel Sloboda is the author of two poetry collections as well as seven chapbooks. He has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. Sloboda currently teaches at Penn State York, where he coordinates the English program.
Susan Spencer is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, where she taught British and World Literature for 29 years. She has a long-standing interest in Asian literature and culture and has published several articles on topics related to East and Southeast Asia, most recently “Journeying to the West in TheTaleofKiều : Landscape, Gardens, and Directional Impulse in Vietnam’s National Epic” in Eighteenth-Century Studies with co-author Anh Dinh; “Saikaku Steers a Course: Negotiating Celebrity Status as an Author in Tokugawa-period Osaka, 1684-86” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture; and “An Impossible Dream and Nightly Quests: The Quixotic Impulse in Kim Man-jung’s Kuunmong and Nguyễn Du’s TruyệnKiều” in the open-access journal Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment. She is currently in the process of editing a collection of original essays about Asia in the eighteenth century by selected specialists on subjects related to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Adam Tavel is the author of six books of poetry, including Rubble Square (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2022). His recent work appears in The North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Hopkins Review, AGNI, and Ploughshares, among others.
Executive Editor: Timothy Yu
ISSN: 0010-7484, e-ISSN: 1548-9949
Published four times per year
Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, Contemporary Literature features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates.
