Surveying the current state of our “plural and dynamic multiculturalisms” and directing attention to valuable resources in anthologies and criticism, the author suggests that multicultural studies might now focus more on resistance and creativity in the face of oppression than on oppression itself; more on the multiple intersections and interactions of different groups, positions, and experiences than on single (sometimes essentialized) groups; and more on existing power relations and social inequities, and the structural nature of racism and oppression, than on individual behavior.

I 'm glad we don't know whether Chaucer raped one of my brightest students exclaimed, because if he did, I couldn't like And I want to like him if I'm going to read him. The student was responding to my lesson on Chaucer's biography. Within the scope of my upper-level undergraduate Chaucer course, I include pertinent information about his participation in fourteenth-century English social and political life, and I thought it worthwhile to mention that, according to court documents, Cecily Chaumpaigne in 1380 released Geoffrey Chaucer from omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam [sic] de aliqua alia re velcausa-'actions of whatever kind either concerning my rape or any other matter' (Howard 317). I explained to the class that no certain interpretation of this inscrutable event exists. Because raptus could refer to either a kidnapping or a rape, medievalists can do little more than conjecture about the events that transpired between Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne.' My student seized this ambiguity and therein found sufficient wiggle room in her reaction to Chaucer that she could continue to enjoy his literature without having to commit herself to liking the works of a rapist. For her, the potential ethical ramifications of aligning a personal affection for Chaucer and his literature with her contemporary social and political beliefs were alleviated by a welcome gap in historical knowledge. As happens so frequently in the classroom, we moved beyond this moment, but my student's words stuck with me uncomfortably. What if Chaucer had indeed been a rapist? How would I encourage my students to negotiate the difficult readerly terrain of enjoying great literature written by bad people? Other literature professors face similar uncomfortable moments with, for example, Malory's rape, Spenser's violent diatribes against the Irish, Byron's incest, Yeats's and Pound's Fascist sympa-

The author considers cases of literary figures whose ethics might make readers uncomfortable—Geoffrey Chaucer’s possible rape of a young woman, Flannery O’Connor’s possible racism—and argues that, even though postmodernism has “killed” the author as an object of critical inquiry, careful attention to questions of authorial and readerly ethics can still play an important role in both our students’ development as critical and engaged readers and our own.

Examining a range of visual images of executions, both legal (the executions of convicted murderers) and extralegal (the lynchings of innocent African Americans), in still photographs and in Hollywood films, the authors suggest that while such images may flatten and neutralize the popular debates and politics surrounding the issues, this is not inevitable, and that if we work at sustaining careful attention to its operations the image is neither self-evident nor doomed to obscure the political.

Tracing the revisions Frederick Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), the author suggests that, while much attention has focused on Douglass’s seizing a “forbidden literacy” in transforming himself from object to subject, the crucial, and ever-increasing, role of African American vernacular traditions in his writing should be recognized.

hile much of the critical attention paid to Frederick Douglass addresses his use of literacy to find voice and being in his ascendancy from slave to man, his employment of vernacular tradition to tell his story in his own way often goes unnoted.1 An examination of the revisions Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) reveals a skilled writer giving increasing attention to traditions within the circle that validate the cultural legitimacy of his African American antecedents. From edition to edition Douglass expanded scenes in which an African-derived presence manifested in vernacular atavisms became an alternative to the logocentrism that erased or devalued African American expression. Why, then, do most readings of his life story focus mainly on Douglass's relationship to the written word? typical critical paradigm reads Douglass as a black object transforming itself into subject by seizing a forbidden literacy. A sampling of some of the many fine scholars espousing this view includes Lisa Yun Lee, who notes, The connection between the power of thinking and speech is realized as Douglass the silent marginalized man transitions to active individual when a mistress cracks an opening in the white discourse. She offers to teach him to read(55); such a sampling would also include Eric Sundquist, who observes that Douglass's autobiographical writ-

Recognizing that critical thinking is enhanced by an engagement with diversity, the author illustrates how race can usefully be addressed in a predominantly white classroom through a local pedagogy that respects and addresses the complexities of students’ often contradictory experiences of race, rather than essentializing whiteness or identifying it only with white privilege.

Challenging views of working-class white students that either displace all white racism onto them or, at best, see them as having exchanged class consciousness for race privilege, the author argues for a critical race pedagogy that includes a more complex image of poor and working-class whites. She argues for both deconstructive pedagogies that can expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist structures and reconstructive pedagogies that can provide students with the rhetorical tools for employing language transformatively.

“As if the problem of racism outside of the academy isn’t enough,” the author says, “try thinking about the ways it has informed the very notion of academy and maintains a presence in our academic institutions.” He reflects on his own position in the academy as racialized subject, educand, and educator, departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of an “autoethnography” to engage in a “selfiography,” in the process interrogating not only notions of “blackness” but also the too-often-naturalized assumptions of whiteness.

blood American Indians/Alaskan Natives, while just over four million designate their racial identity as mixed-blood.2 In my home state of North Carolina, records indicate that fewer than 100,000 people are full-blood American Indians/Alaskan Natives, while over 130,000 people are mixed-bloods. Russell Thornton suggests that the substantial increase in the Native American population since the turn of the twentieth century is due to several factors, including increased life expectancies, higher fertility and birth rates, and decreased stigmatizing of people of mixed ancestry who admit such status. I am one of the mixed-bloods who comes from a background where people attempted to hide their origins (see Bizzaro). My family's effort to avoid being jailed for evading the evacuation of the Cherokee led them to hide in the mountains of Georgia and deny their heritage in an effort to blend into the dominant culture.

Looking at arguments put forth by courts, the State of Hawai‘i, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists, as well as constructions of Hawaiianness by Native Hawaiians and Locals on the mainland, the author analyzes a rhetorical shift from celebrations of cultural identity to assertions of nationhood and sovereignty on the part of Native Hawaiians that has at times made nonnative Locals feel displaced in the only “home” they have known. Both groups have had to deal with a legacy of U.S. imperialism and injustice, placing them at times in coalition to confront racism and at times in conflict.

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

ella Larsen's Passing has become one of the most widely read New Negro Renaissance novels in recent years, but no one really knows how it ends. By this I do not mean critics have not determined how much guilt to assign Irene Redfield in Clare Kendry's fatal fall, or to what extent the narrative is actually a lesbian story as a racial one. I mean the ending is actually unknowable, because the original last paragraph disappeared from the first edition's third printing, and no extant evidence can explain this change. There is no conclusive answer to the question of presenting this textual crux correctly-despite assumptions to the contrary by Larsen's editors-but I argue this textual problem itself bears an important lesson: the best response to a gap in textual knowledge is to acknowledge the absence and its causes, not to produce editions and teach classes gloss over such gaps, thereby passing on the social and cultural elements of these textual histories. More generally, I argue students and teachers can always benefit from attention to textual scholarship, and minority texts particularly need such study for what it reveals of the social and cultural interactions between minority writers and predominantly white, male publishers. The unbalanced power dynamics of this relationship produce what Gilles Deleuze terms a literature: that which a minority constructs within a major language (152). By focusing on the production history of the texts themselves, we can study the material evidence of this minor language.

El s Kathryn Harrison points out, one of America's most popular misconceptions, especially in the white middle-class family, is that father-daughter incest is a rare occurrence. The crime of incest often goes unreported and unpunished in part because of a silence around it. While exact figures are hard to pin down, current data suggest that anywhere from one in four to one in three girls experiences sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or surrogate fathers. In the 1980s scholars such asJudith Herman and Diana Russell provided data that suggested incest was at least as prevalent in white middleand upper-middleclass homes as it was elsewhere.2 Far from confirming that incest only happens in certain homes, this research suggests that the sexual abuse of daughters is a ubiquitous practice that cuts across racial and class lines. Nonetheless, familiar narratives of incest construct the white middle-class family as a nurturing unit in which the rapacious father is an impossible character. In particular, these narratives often relegate incest to the homes of cultural others or attempt to dismiss a daughter's first-person account of sexual violation as fantasy (Doane and Hodges 2; Wilson). In 1997, Kathryn Harrison published her controversial memoir about fatherdaughter incest, The Kiss, a book that disturbed the silence around and as-

This essay considers why some subjects associated with English studies achieve disciplinary status while others, such as theory and multicultural literature, fail to do so, suggesting that what is required for such status is the establishment of epistemological difference from other areas in the field. The author uses the example of creative writing’s emergence as a model of what it means to achieve disciplinary status, what benefits accrue to a field that does, and who stands to gain from that emergence.

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College English, Volume 66, Number 2, November 2003 Johnnie M. Stover is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of instruction and research include American literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specializations in African American, American Indian, and women’s literatures. Portions of this essay appear in her book, Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography (University Press of Florida, 2003). T Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs

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Argues that issues of generic hybridity embody multicultural literature while promoting another kind of multiculturalism that reflects the current debates about literary canons in general and the field of American literature in particular. Considers how a reading of texts that relies on all of their component parts allows literature to perform a vital function, to foster an informed and compassionate vision of the different.

Incites inquiry as to how modern American literature reflects on the problem of identity. Spotlights the contribution to modern American writing by Wallace Thurman’s "Harlem" fiction. Endeavors to link a racial imperative to a sexual imperative by means of a current theoretical discourse surrounding notions of city and community life.

frican American writers are still writing slave narratives. One hundred thirtynine years after emancipation, more than four decades after the Civil Rights movement, the experience of slavery, the costs of escape, and the pain of remembering still compel attention. Yet even as the racial realities of modern America press literary scholars, historians, filmmakers, and others to keep our dark national history fresh in our collective consciousness, the march of time makes our peculiar institution seem reassuringly distant to some, and less recoverable than ever. As we began the twentieth century, thousands of ex-slaves were still alive, many testifying to their experiences (albeit often in compromised ways) through public forums such as the Work Projects Administration interviews. As we enter the twentyfirst century, no survivors remain, and very few who have actually beheld or spoken to a former slave. An experiential and bodily connection to slavery has been lost. No one alive bears the physical scars of African American enslavement, those visible

Describes the experiences of the author as she tries to transfigure her students enrolled in freshman writing and college preparatory writing classes at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon (located in the “dry side” of the state). Addresses students' racism, homophobia, and distrust of their own skills in writing.

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-

Looks at two representative examples of the impact of multiculturalism on higher education in order to get a concrete sense of how different perspectives can affect understanding of the multicultural transformation of the college curriculum in general and English studies in particular. Notes that the emphasis on educational access should be on “geography of education.”

Discusses how “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.

Discusses how education is still a profession held hostage by images. Presents concerns dealing with racial expectations in the field of English education. Focuses and concentrates on the contents of the English language and literature professions that, although acknowledging its many diversities, avoids the distraction of “finding someone to look the part.”

Investigates how social class affects the educational narratives of working-class students—both their initial access to four-year institutions and their ability to persevere until they obtain bachelor’s degrees. Argues that a genuine concern with diversity should lead compositionists to question the selective functions of the academy and the role of composition in maintaining them.

Reed Way Dasenbrock

Investigates problems faced by minority students. Examines case studies of African-American men who had finished bachelor’s degrees in education or English at a predominantly White university. Reports case study participants’ responses to their school experiences.

Surveys previous approaches to free verse. Proposes a new method of articulating the diversity of free verse. Discusses paired poems to show the kinds of things that this new method gives educators to say when they want to talk about the verse of free verse poetry.

Locates postcolonial pedagogy within the context of institutional circuits of production and consumption, finding that instead of expanding the student’s experience with difference and diversity, it contains them through a managed encounter with otherness.

Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

Borrowing Juan Bruce-Novoa's formulation of the interlingual of Chicanismo, the essay specifically addresses how individual Chicano writers have negotiated the space between Spanish and in their works. (This issue is not exclusive to Chicanos. Paula Gunn Allen made a parallel point when she referred to the that Laguna Pueblo women spoke as a half-breed language ... that is common to half-breeds all over the country, regardless of what tribes they come from [7]). As ethnic American writers develop various strategies for negotiating the space between their cultural experiences and Anglo-American hegemony, the contest site is most often the language. Once the notion that standard English is the

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ur Ptolemaic system of literary categories goes creaking and groaning onward, in spite of the widely acknowledged need overhaul it in response multiculturalism. This is not say that there have not been attempts revise course design in light of new materials and methods. For example, G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson's Writing and Reading Differently (1985), Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson's Gender in the Classroom (1990), and James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion's Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1992) address the pedagogical consequences of deconstruction, feminist literary theory, and cultural studies, respectively, and also incorporate more diverse literatures. these attempts foster innovation in the individual classroom still leave the basic structure of English studies intact. In Kristin Ross's description of the multicultural world and cultural studies program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she comments indirectly on this problem when she identifies as one stumbling block the Santa Cruz program the faculty's unwillingness to depart from their specialized fields (668). They fended off demands diversify their course material with plaints like But I don't have a PhD in South African literature (668). Ross gives good reasons for forging ahead in spite of such protests, but she doesn't say much about the underlying structure of English studies that still makes us think our scholarship must be organized along national or chronological lines, even though these are inimical the process of integrating new materials and methods because devised serve and protect the old ones.

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The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation. Randolph Bourne

Although Canadian literature is part of a complex known as New World literatures, it differs from other American literatures in its historic recognition of both French and English as official languages. Finally-and this fact is often overlooked, even in Canada-the federal government's multicultural policy provides a climate in which other literatures are permitted to flourish in a variety of ways. Taken together, these facts have certain implications that merit exploration.

R.W.B. Lewis' biography of Edith Wharton mentions with her other late works the 1934 short story Fever as a masterpiece of rhetorical coherence, but insists that in writing the piece Wharton was unperturbed by news from Europe of a terrible ... at hand (Biography 527). He suggests that the pervading tone of calm and repose in the story underscores her virtual mastery of history, of the past-both Wharton's own past and, in particular, the question of her paternity-as as the past of the species represented by the Roman ruins. Yet her Fever questions origins, persecution, and sexual violence-Rome itself a powerful site of primal violence. Her story interrogates society's periodic demand for an ultimate return to origins: whether it be racial purification or sexual housekeeping. Lewis writes that the possibility of Wharton's illegitimacy must have edged its way into Mrs. Wharton's mind over the years that followed [1908-09: the years in which the rumor began]. . . . situation of Grace Ansley's whole lifetime is revealed in a single phrase, and just possibly, with all obliqueness, one phase of Edith Wharton's situation as well (Collected Stories xxv). question of race and origin, which is central to Fever, also centers the moment of history-the terrible revolution brewing in Europe. Many critics would agree with Lewis about Wharton's apolitical, serene, and new state of being in the thirties (Biography 524). Cynthia Griffin Wolff does not deal with Wharton's politics at all, while, at worst, other critics label Wharton an anti-Semite. Cynthia Ozick writes that Edith Wharton was compliant in the face of her friend Paul Bourget's openly-declared anti-Semitism (293). Sol Liptzin's in American Literature cites Wharton's caricature of the bounder Jew as an example of her anti-Semitism (154); Wharton's name also appears as evidence of a general cultural anti-Semitism in Florence Kiper Frank's 1930 Bookman essay, The Presentment of the in American Fiction (274; see Dobkowski 177-80). At best, Wharton is considered a social critic with her own ideological blindspots, racism and anti-Semitism among them. (She condemns Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, along with all nigger society in Harlem, in an April 1, 1927 letter to Gaillard Lapsley.)

NCTE 1986 Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, Policy Expanding Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, College English, Vol. 49, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 550-552

When I sat down to consider what I remember about the past of the National Council of Teachers of English, I came up with some admirable positions it advocated during the 1960s and 70s, and some admirable actions it took during that same period. I am, of course, using my own definition of admirable. Sometimes, it seemed to me, NCTE was influenced by and echoed the moods of the more general society, and sometimes it tried to influence those -noods. When newspapers, magazines, and television reported that literacy was at a low ebb, that the schools were doing a lousy job and something better be done about it quick, NCTE responded with resolutions opposing the worst of the so-called solutions and set up committees to demonstrate that the so-called crisis was greatly exaggerated. I remembered that NCTE has spoken out for the rights of racial minorities and made sure that they and their views were included in its own programs and committees. It has spoken out for the rights of women and-I can't say included them because we have always been a majority of NCTE's membership-but it has at least shown that it meant what it said by adopting a policy on sexism in language and by putting some muscle behind its support of ERA while that proposed amendment was still alive. It has spoken out for the rights of lesbians and gay men. It has spoken out against censoring books and against the abuses of testing. And I remembered that NCTE had acted admirably by forming three new sub-groups during those years. Through its related organization, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, NCTE formally recognized the importance of junior colleges in the educational system. Regional community college conferences were set up across the country and given financial assistance to help them along. As a result of that action large numbers of English teachers who had been existing in a kind of professional nobody's land became more professional. They met to talk about mutual problems, and more of them subscribed to and read professional journals. Eighteen years later two of those conferences are strong and vigorous, earning their own way. One, at least, is ailing and not

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