Teaching the Novel in the Audio Age

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-426
Author(s):  
James F. English

According to Practically Every Metric of the Publishing Industry, Audiobooks are Winning the Format Wars. The Codex continues its twenty-first-century struggle to maintain market share, and the e-book has plunged into a steep decline, but the audiobook goes from strength to strength. Sales in the United States are up threefold in the last decade and more than fifty percent just in the last two years (“New Survey”; Watson). In the United Kingdom, unit sales have doubled and revenues tripled since 2014 (“Michelle Obama”). Roughly a quarter of adults in the United States, and half of all adult readers, now listen to at least one audiobook a year. To service this swelling customer base, the industry is producing over five thousand new full-length recordings every month, ten times as many as a decade ago. Audible's studio division has become the largest employer of actors in the New York City area (Kozlowski).

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Massarani ◽  
Luiz Felipe Fernandes Neves

The search for an effective solution to control the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized an unprecedented effort by science to develop a vaccine against the disease, in which pharmaceutical companies and scientific institutions from several countries participate. The world closely monitors research in this area, especially through media coverage, which plays a key role in the dissemination of trustful information and in the public’s understanding of science and health. On the other hand, anti-vaccine movements dispute space in this communication environment, which raises concerns of the authorities regarding the willingness of the population to get vaccinated. In this exploratory study, we used computer-assisted content analysis techniques, with WordStat software, to identify the most addressed terms, semantic clusters, actors, institutions, and countries in the texts and titles of 716 articles on the COVID-19 vaccine, published by The New York Times (US), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), from January to October 2020. We sought to analyze similarities and differences of countries that stood out by the science denialism stance of their government leaders, reflecting on the severity of the pandemic in these places. Our results indicate that each newspaper emphasized the potential vaccines developed by laboratories in their countries or that have established partnerships with national institutions, but with a more politicized approach in Brazil and a little more technical-scientific approach in the United States and the United Kingdom. In external issues, the newspapers characterized the search for the discovery of a vaccine as a race in which nations and blocs historically marked by economic, political, and ideological disputes are competing, such as the United States, Europe, China, and Russia. The results lead us to reflect on the responsibility of the media to not only inform correctly but also not to create stigmas related to the origin of the vaccine and combat misinformation.


Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This book provides a transnational history of Billy Graham’s revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Graham’s international ministry took shape in the context of transatlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the “Free World” and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Graham’s revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers, and church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture, and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Graham’s altar call in Europe, the contours of a transatlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Browitt

The novel Lucas Guevara, written by the Colombian exile, Alirio Díaz Guerra, was first published in New York in 1914. It is considered to be the earliest novel about Latin American immigration to the United States written in Spanish. This fact alone merits its study. A second edition was published in 2001 along with a critical-biographical introduction, which presents the novel as the precursor of a developing genre of Hispanic immigrant literature centred on the naïve Latin American migrant who arrives in the United States inspired by the opportunities which the metropolis supposedly affords, but who nevertheless suffers a series of misfortunes because of the inability to adapt to the new culture. On the level of overt content, the novel is a lachrymose, stereotypical and conventional denunciation of the supposed evils of an amoral US society and the libertine and materialistic values underpinning it. But on a much deeper level, a picture emerges of Díaz Guerra himself as a displaced, disenchanted intellectual exile who suffers (or has suffered) an acute cultural and class anxiety in the transition from a patrician Arcadia to the heart of capitalist, industrial modernity. Through a reading of the narrative voice, and by extension the implied author, we witness his difficult coming to terms with a highly-charged New York society (in comparison to his homeland), not only because of the sexual liberation brought on by secular modernization, but also because of the close proximity of volatile, eroticised bodies on the over-crowded Lower East Side of New York, the scene of the novel and Díaz Guerra’s point of entry into the United States. The novel also provides an occasion to contrast how Díaz Guerra deals with the condition of exile, in contrast to that most emblematic of Latin American political refugees, José Martí.


2003 ◽  
Vol 174 ◽  
pp. 523-525
Author(s):  
Bruce J. Dickson

This useful textbook provides an overview of US–China relations between the late 19th century and the beginning of the 21st. It gives a clear chronology of events and covers the main events and issues in the relationship. It also embeds the description of these events and issues in the larger international and domestic contexts, allowing it to mesh easily with other textbooks that focus either on China's foreign relations in general or on its domestic developments.


Author(s):  
Clint Randles

The proliferation of the use of new media and creativities are expanding the ways that humans engage creatively with music in the twenty-first century. As teachers and researchers, our methods of assessing these creativities need to expand as well. In this chapter the author points to some of the ways that music education has traditionally conceived of both creativity and the measurement of compositional activity in the classroom. However, it should be clear that formative, summative, feedback, diagnostic, and evaluative assessment are all necessary and vital to understanding and justifying the place of composition learning in music education, and that we as a profession have not done an adequate job of it in the past. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, Finland, and Australia, have done a better job of creating curricular space for composition than the United States. The rest of the world can learn from these successes.


Author(s):  
Patrice D. Rankine

This essay examines the contradiction of classics for all, evident in but not exclusive to the not-for-profit enterprise by the same name (Classics for All) that seeks to promote the Greek and Latin classics in schools across the United Kingdom. Embodying a form like the classics can mean not slavish mastery, but an improvisational artistry that alters the form so that it bends to one’s will. Issues of access, however, problematize the simple assertion of classics for all. The realities that necessitated the Black Lives Matter movement, in contrast to a more hopeful, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Du Boisan notion of the removal of the Veil of segregation, run counter to classics for all. There have been sufficient signs within the twenty-first century of the rejection of a broad, democratic, multicultural movement toward American wholeness symbolized in the election of President Barack Hussein Obama. Nevertheless, economic disparities that separate black and white in the United States remain, and the post-Obama era evidences significant backlash across the “Black Atlantic” world. The classics is caught up in this backlash.


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