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The encounter with literature of the Holocaust, saturated as it is with unfathomable grief, loss, terror, and death, presents its readers with difficulties rare in literatures not dealing with the extreme. Specifically, usual academic discourse lacks a register for addressing the intense emotions that Holocaust narratives or poetry may generate. Indeed, in scholarly writing, affect and analysis are regularly opposed. In this article, the author begins by confronting a brief but highly charged poem with various dispassionate literary techniques; moves on to consider how scholars imagine empathy in relation to Holocaust literature; and concludes with a reading of the poem, using it as a space that may foster "both" compassion and analysis, without viewing these as polar opposites. She argues for a reconsideration of interpretive approaches to Holocaust literature and other literatures of trauma and a frank acknowledgement of the emotional complexity that these texts generate, in and of themselves and within the pedagogical situation. She also argues that within the classroom, an affective response to Holocaust literature can be blended with an analytical approach. She demonstrates how this dual perspective is possible by examining a fragmentary song found on a child who was murdered at Majdanek. (Contains 16 notes.)

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that would result from this mobilization by calling it a fully funded overseas federal fellowship. In this article, the author explains how his military service in Afghanistan left him having to reconsider his identity as a scholarly writer. (Contains 9 notes.)

Reflection in its most general sense just means thinking, so that a reflection upon nature amounts to thinking about the more-than-human world. Implied, however, is a particular kind of thinking, first and foremost a product of philosophical idealism and the analogical or mimetic imagination. This implication goes largely unexplored in "ecopoetics"--defined as the theory and practice of a creative relationship with the processes and products of one's world expressed in writing, whether poetry or prose, or in some other medium entirely. In American ecopoetics, reflection is a commonplace, a dead or dying metaphor. The purpose of this essay is to revive it, remove it from the bank of unquestioned assumptions, consider its pervasiveness in ecopoetics, and finally consider alternatives, above all "resonance", a term from systems theory that has proved attractive in current ecocriticism. Resonance is in many ways a desirable replacement for the dead metaphorical commonplace reflection, but an even stronger alternative requires serious questioning of the field's romantic and transcendentalist traditions, as well as increased attention to the physical and political contexts of writing.

Although evaluation is at the core of many of the practices associated with poetry--including teaching, editing, selecting, judging, and even writing--and although there have been involved discussions of the assessment of verse, there has been no empirical investigation of the specific values which, one supposes, lie at the heart of such judgments. Aiming to extend the conversation about the omnipresent but largely ignored issue of evaluation in contemporary American poetry, this study examines how one group of poets valued twelve poems. In pursuit of this axiological insight, the authors developed a method by which seven poets would discuss and reveal evaluative criteria that usually remain unknown and hidden, even to themselves. Once that discussion took place, the authors conducted a systematic analysis to illuminate its evaluative dynamics. The study revealed two very different models by which poems were valued as texts, and it uncovered the powerful role that context plays in assessments. The authors learned some of the unrecognized, multiple, and even contradictory ways in which poems are valued. Although such findings are intrinsically useful, the authors believe that this study is most promising insofar as it presents a technique for further such analyses, an approach that can be used by any group of people--poets, teachers, editors--interested in finding what they value in any kind of poetry. (Contains 2 notes.)

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

Trauma theory has been and continues to be important to critical work in every period of literary study. This essay argues that the subtle literary strategies of one fourteenth-century poem can help to address a blockage about representation current in that theory. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" meditates upon trauma by rendering visible the formal properties of its representation. In this article, the author argues that Chaucer's poetics--his use of trope, ambiguity, and voicing--direct to the "mobility" of trauma in culture, an issue crucial to the complex politics of traumatic witness. (Contains 32 notes.)

The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others' stories such as Art Spiegelman's "Maus," and works of fiction and poetry by writers without firsthand experience of the Shoah, he is ultimately led to wonder whether the stories of those who underwent such experiences stand utterly outside critique and appropriation and may demand of us instead only that we never forget. (Contains 3 notes.)

Focuses on the way sexual excesses inscribed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oriental discourses served to open up "queer" spaces in Romantic literature, while analyzing the degree to which the master narrative of British colonial domination was in part dependent on narratives of the sexual degeneracy of the Other. Focuses on Byron's "The Giaour" to illustrate the workings of "homotextuality." (SG)

Argues that Kenneth Burke used "The Interpretation of Dreams," as well as other works by Sigmund Freud, as a lesson on reading, taking over the central tropes of dreamwork and making them broadly dialectical rather than strictly psychoanalytic terms. Suggests that Freud's "tropology" of dreaming is crucial for reading Burke. (SG)

Notes that the minor Romantic poet John Clare commands increasing attention at academic conferences, in essay collections, and on college syllabi. Argues the practices that have kept Clare in view have also rendered him partially inaccessible to students, scholars and general readers. Suggests readers are now in possession of the materials with which to respond to and interpret Clare's work. (NH)

Gives an account in journal format of the author's experiences teaching writing and literature at a missionary school in Nigeria. Describes difficulties and conflicts of beliefs encountered over a period of time with her colleagues. Presents a poem from one of her teaching assistants and discusses reactions and meanings involved in the different cultures. (SC)

Suggests that major works of orally grounded literature, like "Beowulf," are the result of collective engagement with the question of what wisdom is. Claims "Beowulf" is the result of a set of cultural transformations and a means by which such transformations took place. Suggests it speaks to traditional verse's role in the consolidation of new mentalities. (RS)

Argues for the pervasive intervention of the Vietnam War in the cultural production of U.S. poetry. Questions the academic canon of post-World War II poetry and criticizes anthologies for ignoring Vietnam War poetry. Suggests why Vietnam War poetry has remained such an avoided subject. Lists anthologies including such poetry. (HB)

Outlines the nature of the contemporary complaints about the decline of poetry and the effects of creative writing programs. Describes generally what creative writing programs try to accomplish. Shows by way of example how these programs can aid a developing poet. (HB)

Describes the emergence of Native American writers and the problems they face with their achievement. Apendixes list publishers of native American poetry and contemporary poets. (CRH)

Presents two criticisms of Gopen's essay on why the study of poetry is the best preparation for the study of law. Includes Gopen's response. (HTH)

Presents annotated music selections for augmenting English literature courses. (HTH)

Discusses how individuals keep a canon of poetry within their subconscious and how it functions to ward off the encroaching loneliness or despair Robert Frost referred to as "Desert Places." (HTH)

Shows that Antin's talk poems satisfy basic needs. Discusses Antin's view on an art that addresses the concerns of "common life" and concentrates on feelings that do not depend on elaborate and evasively self-sustaining formal constructs. (EL)

Analyzes the banquet scene in Blake's poem, arguing that it embodies his dialectic art at its best. (FL)

Offers a list of English poetry set to music. Includes only recordings that are currently available and poetry that is commonly taught or that can be taught better because of the existence of the music. (EL)

Examines the difficulties of applying structural theory to poetry. Discusses issues of intention, meaning, and privilege. Summarizes conclusions about the nature of a poem gained from observing the struggles of structuralist critics and discusses what structural theories have indirectly taught us. (EL)

Contains comments on articles by Patrick Hartwell, Robert Scholes, and Gordon Broswell. (EL)

Discusses the work of Blake and how it situates the author in thinking about literary criticism and theory and how it affects his teaching. (SRT)

Suggests three levels of reading. The first is exemplified by E. D. Hirsch's prescriptive "cultural literacy." The second is interpretive, typified by the "strong reader." The third is critical and is best suited to dealing with the complexities of poetry. (ARH)

Contains (1) A Comment on "Protocols, Retrospective Reports, and the Stream of Consciousness" (Victor J. Vitanza); (2) "Erwin R. Steinberg Responds"; (3) A Comment on "Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent Semiotics" (Stephen Kogan); and (4) Two Comments on "College English" (Kenneth E. Eble, Jean Shepard). (MS)

Asserts that the act of visualizing is of vital importance in interpreting Wallace Stevens' poetry. Examines Stevens' use of "riddling" (using metaphors to create poetic riddles) as a literary device in several of his poems. (MM)