Language, Literature and Performing Arts

This paper examines the feminist utopian community of Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time . Employing Martha Nussbaum's concepts of the "judicious reader" and the role that literary imagination can play in public life, I explore the success of this community in terms of the human capabilities outlined in Nussbaum's Women and Human Development . I review these capabilities, emphasizing the key distinction this approach makes between human being as means to an end and human being as end in herself. I then ask: Has this fictional society achieved the conditions necessary for human flourishing? I argue that the opposition of a dystopian and utopian world in this novel asks the reader to imagine first a diminishing and then a flourishing of her own human capabilities and that, in this imagining, she gains essential insight in order to participate in debates surrounding social justice.

This paper contributes to current research in communications, rhetoric, and discourse analysis that extends disciplinary interests into the study of citizen participation in public processes. The impetus for this study comes from the troubling consensus that many public decision-making processes tend to discourage authentic citizen participation. In order to investigate the degree to which citizen participation may be judged as authentic, talk analysis is applied to the interactions of a government-citizen group as they negotiate a policy for the management of natural areas.The investigation examines the interactive dimension of the context of situation, which offers evidence of participation that goes beyond evidence offered by texts alone. The hypothesis is that the contextual dimension of the participatory process should provide richer evidence of the interactive, moment-to-moment, strategic moves of participants. The theoretical framework for the study integrates the concepts of recontextualization and structure-in-action with recent developments in activity theory and theories of agency.The findings show that, in their meetings, participants agreed and disagreed as they worked toward a consensus on how to write policy clauses. Microanalyses of their talk show evidence of an interactive inclusiveness and meaningful participation that is not apparent in the textual dimension of the written statements the committee ultimately submitted. This method offers researchers in communications and language studies a way of expanding rhetorical analysis to include the interactive dimension of context in real-world processes of civic engagement. Keywords: authentic participation, recontextualization, structure-in-action, agency, public processes, decision-making processes

In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle, the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence. By writing from the narrative perspective of a self-identifying English Jew, Levy addresses in “The Ghetto at Florence” a history of Jewish exclusion and confinement represented by the ghetto, while also using this site to engage her complex attitudes towards Jewishness in the mid-1880s, in London. Rather than an accurate history of place, however, what is foregrounded in her article is self-reflexivity about ways of seeing and the effects of memory. This paper examines her uses of imaginative representation, race science, and the photographic gaze to attempt a tactile and affective encounter with the ghetto. In occupying a vexed space between extreme openness to imagined historical resonances alongside ironic detachment from the inadequacies of the present moment, she embodies the characteristically isolated subjectivity of the flâneur. She does so while contemplating the role of Jewishness in using the past to make sense of modern identity.

Alongside her meditations on Jewish practice and history, Grace Aguilar (1816–47) also wrote stories devoid of Jewish content and advised her female readers to ‘look to [their] English Bibles’. Consequently, contemporaries and critics have claimed that her work assimilates Evangelical literary models. The trope of women’s reading in her fiction, however, and the theorisation of this practice in The Spirit of Judaism (1842) indicates that for Aguilar, valorising women’s capacity for textual interpretation works to defend against apostasy, thus improving the status of the Jews in Protestant England.