June 2014: Erik Gray is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  His criticism, including The Poetry of Indifference (2005) and Milton and the Victorians (2009), focuses on poetry, primarily of nineteenth-century England, though he is now at work on a transhistorical study of European love poetry.  Most recently he helped edit Alfred Tennyson's Selected Poetry (Broadview, 2014).

June 2014: In her research, Dr. Naomi Rokotnitz explores the intersections between literature, philosophy, and science, investigating  the relations between knowledge acquisition, inter-personal communication, moral accountability and bodily modes of reception and perception. Author of Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and numerous articles, she teaches at Tel-Aviv University. 

Questions play a prominent role in W. B. Yeats’s mature work. This essay discusses the use of questions in three of Yeats’s most renowned interrogative lyrics: “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children.” By reviewing the critical discourse regarding these canonical texts and locating a key semantic commonality linking the three poems, the article posits that questions reveal a revolutionary approach to epistemology that distinguishes Yeats as a poet whose lyric form breaks the monologic mold. Yeats’s interrogative verse is ultimately shown to offer a new form of dialogic knowledge that addresses an interrogated other as a means of inquiring what wisdom poetry affords in a world beset by epistemic doubt.

Elie Wiesel’s Night, which first appeared in French as La nuit in 1958, may well loom as the archetypal Holocaust survivor narrative. But it was only in 1994, in his memoirs, that the author addressed the fact that Night is part adaptation, part translation, of a Yiddish work he originally published in Buenos Aires in 1956: …Un di velt hot geshvign (…And the World Was Silent). Critics have read discrepancies between the two versions in various ways: favorably, as resulting from appreciation for the distinct literary idiom of each language; provocatively, as the consequence of Wiesel’s desire to cast the Holocaust in Christian, rather than Jewish, terms; and disparagingly, as part of a strategy to hide ideologically unpalatable, ethnocentric attitudes from a wider audience.

This article reviews the merits and flaws of these interpretations of differences in versions of Night. Further, it offers a new approach that involves a re-examination of Wiesel’s relationship with François Mauriac, the towering writer who encouraged his entry into French letters.

In mid-nineteenth century America, science education was often presented as a panacea, capable of providing students with mental discipline, moral instruction, and useful knowledge.  In her 1871 novel, Little Men, Louisa May Alcott assesses the ability of science education to fulfill these aims, selectively embracing some of the beliefs, goals, and methods promoted by advocates of science education while critiquing others.  Unlike these advocates, Alcott highlights the differences between children and their diverse educational goals, presenting science education chiefly as a means to an end. Alcott’s investment in science education is tempered by her commitment to moral and domestic education. Through the character of Dan she demonstrates that increased scientific literacy does not necessarily lead to moral growth or future domestic happiness.  Instead, science and the domestic prove incommensurable throughout the novel: the students who most heartily embrace science, Dan and Nan, are also the most decidedly undomestic graduates of Plumfield, as their science education gives them access to alternatives to home life, for good or for ill.

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look.  Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truthfully) is part of a larger critique of the paternalistic spirit that helped found the very place she writes about — Cooperstown, New York. More unobtrusively than Thoreau, Cooper develops her own sophisticated version of an “ecology of reading,” brilliantly anticipating recent attempts by ecocritics to imagine a “democracy of all life-forms” (Timothy Morton).

The narrative of Joseph Wright’s figures is eloquent and complex. In many ways, the sitters defined themselves and their cultural aspirations for posterity through clothing, posture and props. However, Wright subverts the tenets of eighteenth-century portraiture as he attempts to identify the physical markers that give the viewer a closer understanding of character. The painting of Thomas Day, for example, is far removed from the conventional portraiture of the wealthy gentleman. Its signifiers suggest the complexities of Day’s character. Most of what we know of the eccentric Day has come to us through Anna Seward’s unorthodox biography of Erasmus Darwin and his circle. This text is supplemented by letters between Seward and Walter Scott, which disclose the publishing censorship levelled at her memoir of Day when she attempted to find a psychological cause for his experiments with education and his rejection of wealth and luxury. Her private letters give an alternative view of the public figure that was part of her literary coterie, her “dear Quartetto.” This essay discusses the representation of character in Wright’s portrait of Thomas Day and decodes its cultural markers through a synthesis of painting and word-painting.