Silence is Not an Option: Oral History of Race in Youth Development Through the Words of Esteemed Black Scholars

The study of race has been silenced in many areas of science including youth development research. We present this commentary in response to an invitation to address the impact of racism on the field of youth development for the Journal of Youth Development. Through oral history narratives, the paper synthesizes an antiracist agenda from the perspectives of 6 Black scholars: Tabbye Chavous, Michael Cunningham, Davido Dupree, Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Stephanie Rowley, and Robert Sellers. The narratives depict each scholar’s perspective on race research that informs youth-serving programs and the study of race in research of children and adolescents, particularly Black children. We selected scholars based on their commitment to supporting research that helps children of color thrive, and who have in-depth knowledge about racist ideologies and practices that have persisted since the inception of the science of youth development. Each scholar offered thoughtful critiques regarding racially biased measures and methodologies, the problematic use of deficit-oriented language, and the challenges that scholars of color encounter with advancing in the field. While the scholars expressed a consensus that the field has struggled to name racism in research and practice, they share hope in the complexity of future race research and practice that centers culture and context in youth development studies and programs.

Modern Woolfian Fiction

Virginia Woolf radically transformed the novel of manners, a form defined by a domestic setting, limited emotional range, and the centrality of social codes. Woolf expanded this to include the whole range of human experience, partly through the use of shifting interior voices who meditate on art, marriage, grief, love, ambition, empire, gender, and the sea. With one long beautiful narrative sweep, Woolf turned the novel of manners into a novel of ideas. This expansion has had a profound effect on subsequent novelists such as Ian McEwan, Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, and the author of this chapter. These writers have used domestic settings and interior voices to write about the whole of life, laying claim to Woolf’s powerful and elastic new form, the novel-of-both-manners-and-ideas. This chapter examines works by these writers to show how Woolf’s luminous prose and deep empathy, her intellectual control and literary potency, continue to illuminate and vivify the contemporary novel.

IHAB HASSAN POSTMODERNISM’S INDETERMINACY AND IRONY:LAURA BROWN’S INNER CONFLICT IN THE HOURS

Virginia Woolf is one of the modernist writers who write Mrs. Dalloway for which Michael Cunningham has taken Virginia’s life story into his novel, The Hours that characterized Laura Brown who reads Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham’s literary work which foregrounds the uncertainty of sexual orientation, confusion, and difficulty of identity is suitable with postmodernism’s conventions and is valid in both Woolf's and Cunningham's novels. There have been studies conducted by the scholars in terms of various technical aspects, such as narrative, design, and structure. The other topics comprise the equivalence of characters, the parallelism of scenes, and the borrowing of themes and symbolism, in order to demonstrate the effects of the adaptation process. This paper focuses on Laura Brown’s inner conflicts which are connected to postmodernism features. From the quotations in the novel, this paper showcases the novel’s analysis based on Ihab Hassan’s theory of postmodernism’s indeterminacy and irony. It is found that Laura Brown’s inner conflicts are shown from her efforts of being a good wife for Dan. She is trying hard to answer her own question whether or not she loves her husband. Ironically, the perfect status of being a wife of a soldier who takes part in winning the World War II, a woman with a perfect family, as well as a woman living a good life, do not make her happy. Mrs. Dalloway has inspired her to find her true happiness, her former self that has disappeared.

Great Poets Do Not Die: Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) As Metaphor For Contemporary Biofiction

This chapter takes as its subject Maggie Gee’s novel Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014), which imagines what might transpire if Woolf were to be resurrected in twenty-first-century New York. She is conjured by the fictitious novelist Angela Lamb, who is visiting the Berg Collection in preparation for a keynote address at an international Woolf conference. As a contemporary novelist who recalls her subject to life, lends her clothing and helps her to sign her name, Angela is symbolic of the real-life novelists who recreated Woolf in their own image and reinterpreted her works in line with their respective versions. The chapter thus contends that Gee’s recent manifestation of Woolf-inspired biofiction may be read successfully as an extended metaphor for the twenty-year-old subgenre. This originated with Sigrid Nunez (1998) and Michael Cunningham (1998) and extends to recent work by Priya Parmar (2014) and Norah Vincent (2015). The chapter first examines issues of content, focusing on Gee’s presentation of Woolf’s suicide and sexuality. The discussion is then expanded to think critically about Woolf-inspired biofiction as a subgenre, particularly the ethical issues attendant on its invasion of the subject’s privacy.

As Horas: adaptação de Virginia Woolf para o leitor comum

O filme As Horas (2003), de S. Daldry (mesmo diretor do cult Billy Eliot), adaptação cinematográfica do romance homônimo de Michael Cunningham, foi um grande sucesso na época de seu lançamento e rendeu um Oscar à atriz Nicole Kidman. Contudo, pouco se sabe que o filme representa um duplo processo adaptativo – um deles situado à frente, o outro oculto. Isso porque o próprio livro de Cunningham é, em si, uma adaptação: para escrevê-lo, o autor valeu-se de diversas obras da escritora Virginia Woolf – em especial o romance Mrs. Dalloway, mas também suas cartas e diários. À luz dessas considerações, este trabalho busca focar os processos singulares da “adaptação encoberta” feita por Cunningham em As horas. Isso porque desejamos os interstícios entre teoria da adaptação e teoria literária que possibilitaram trazer, uma vez mais, a escritora modernista Woolf para perto do leitor comum.

The Pseudo-Impressionist Novel

How impressionist style persists apparently unchanged in the contemporary fiction of W. G. Sebald, Michael Cunningham, and Colm Toibin, all of whom pay explicit homage to the original impressionist writers.