Although the common core state standards initiative was adopted with little controversy in forty-eight states, it soon became the target of attacks both on the right, for the mistaken perception that public education was being taken over by the federal government, and on the left, in response to the institution of an all-too-real draconian testing regime that served the needs more of the testing companies and other corporate agents than of students or teachers. Despite these attacks, it seems likely that the initiative will prevail in most states, perhaps both for better and for worse. My position is that real national standards—not simply state standards— are a desirable goal for the United States today, and long overdue. The “local control” of public education by states and school districts has been, let us admit, the greatest flaw of the K-12 system and a powerful obstruction to the reform of that system. On the other hand, I agree with many (Bryant; Hacker and Dreifus; Ravitch) who see the Common Core as a misguided effort at reform, fatally undermined by the use of punitive, high-stakes testing as the driver of implementation (Loveless). Opting for this strategy, the promoters of the Common Core unfortunately imposed a top-down procedure just where it is least appropriate. Testing, by its very nature, ought to arise from the classroom, the scene of a unique relation between teacher and students. This is not to deny that universal testing is possible and even necessary but rather to acknowledge that the more distant tests are from the scene of teaching, the more limited their informational value.

How do you read jewish? The question sounds odd. Why is it that reading jewish is catachrestic in a way that reading German is not? The obvious answer is that German is a language while Jewish is not. Yet there are Jewish languages. Hebrew is one, of course, and linguists describe many more, from Ladino (the language of the Iberian Jewish diaspora) to Krymchak (the ethnolect of a group of Crimean Jews). There is also Yiddish, the language of most European Jews for roughly the millennium preceding the Holocaust; now it lives on primarily in Hasidic communities around the world. Yiddish means Jewish; and in a sense, knowing how to read the former (i.e., decipher the Yiddish language) can imply knowing how to read the latter (i.e., decipher Jewish identity). This has been the belief of many Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present who accept the idea that language is central to national identity. Strangely, in this period the reverse notion has also been active: that knowing Jewish implies knowing Yiddish. his paradox—that you can read a language without knowing it—was catalyzed by a modernist approach to the intersection of Jewish language with Jewish identity. But it was also grounded in facets of the history and philology of Yiddish reading that opened a path to literacy through illiteracy.

The pardoner's lines in the Introduction to the Pardoner's Tale contain the nucleus of nine decades of concentrated debate. Aleslake and drynke represent but two of the elements spinning about the core of controversy. Alestake has led numerous commentators to conclude that the Canterbury caravan halted (in or) at a roadside inn and there heard a revealing narrative from one of their fellows. Partial dissenters concede a momentary pause at the pub but contend the pilgrims retook the road before the Pardoner finished his (Prologue or) Tale. Some opposing critics refuse to concede even a momentary respite. Commentary on drynke has gravitated similarly toward three conflicting forces: Some attribute the Pardoner's self-revelation to drunkenness, others see him as loose-tongued but just lightly tipsy, and still others consider him stone sober throughout.

As Schuyler's story hones in on market-driven formulations of identity, it speaks to fantasies and anxieties about increasing urban industrialization, racial assimilation, and the reproduction of raced bodies in the black modernist moment. Tracing the manufacture, promotion, and regulation of race in the novel, I argue that Black No More illuminates new market possibilities for the trade of racial property in commodity form during the Fordist era. In this way, Schuyler's narrative offers a complex and prescient understanding of racial capitalism in the interwar period, one that portends our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity and consumer culture on a global scale.

One of my favorite anthropological anecdotes is one Renato Rosaldo tells from his fieldwork among the Ilongots in the highland Philippines in the late 1960s. He was interviewing a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery. Did it ever happen, he wondered, that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse? The woman, uneasy and embarrassed, acknowledged that she did recall a few occasions when this had happened among the Ilongots:

In “seeing the disabled: visual rhetorics of disability in Popular Photography,” Rose-marie Garland-Thomson argues that representations of disability in photography, over more than a century, have generally fallen into four broad categories: the wondrous, which places the disabled subject on high and elicits awe from viewers because of the supposedly amazing achievement represented; the sentimental, which places the disabled subject in a diminished, childlike, or custodial position, evoking pity; the exotic, which makes disability strange and distant—a freakish or perhaps transgressive spectacle; and the realistic, which brings disability close, potentially minimizing the difference between viewer and viewed. In the essay, which first appeared in print in the important disability studies anthology The New Disability History, Garland-Thomson reiterates some of the central disability studies insights that have transformed scholarship in the humanities over the past decade. Simultaneously, she takes disability studies in new directions, providing a critical taxonomy that those of us in the field can use as a foundation for countless other projects.

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

Recent scholarship has located John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) in the historical context of the early modern “spice race” but has not addressed the extent to which the intra‐European tensions staged in the play also enact an international contest for symbolic and cultural resources. Taking as its starting point Fletcher's acknowledged sources, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola's Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) and Louis Gédoyn de Bellan's “Histoire memorable de Dias espagnol, et de Quixaire princesse de Moluques” (1615), this essay places The Island Princess in the thick of an appropriative process that moved from Portugal's periphery to Spain, from Spain to France, and from the Continent to England. In doing so, it also traces the contours of a mercantilist logic that linked political dominance, literary hegemony, and economic supremacy—and pursued all three as mutually reinforcing national goals.

This essay extends the study of disability and masculinity representations by exploring the transformational possibilities of poetry as exemplified in the work of Tom Andrews, Floyd Skloot, and Kenny Fries. It argues that lyricism as a process of invention and play enacts both disability and male identity as equally unfixed and that through an “accidental poetics” each author engages with maleness as a continually renegotiated experience necessitated in part by the conditions of disability. Challenging norms that pertain to them as men with disabilities, resisting the imposition of controlling ideological narratives, Skloot, Fries, and Andrews revise themselves as textual bodies whose unruliness is instantiated and celebrated in the unique structural and figurative moves of verse.

Accompanying Keith Thomas's account of its defeat by scientific rationality, supernatural magic, which I designate magic1, receives scholarly attention denied the stigmatized magic2—stage magic and the “gulling” practices popularized by Tondon's con artists and pickpockets, who exploited distraction through sleights of hand, body, language, and thought. As Othello's paratheatrical “entertainment unconscious,” competing and collaborating with theater, magic2 informs the play's sensationalism, gull's gallery, source-tale revisions, and transformation of much traditional tragedy into a genre less about epistemology than about perception. Practicing early modern magicians' fundamentals—conveyance (legerdemain, misdirection) and confederacy—and exposing his own tricks, the entertainer-villain Iago's tactics and handkerchief prop illuminate phenomena such as “inattentional blindness,” important for cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and performance. His “helpmeet” wife and apprentice Emilia emulates his misdirecting visual and conversational skills, until their team, echoing a celebrity magician-and-animal partnership, finally implodes. Situated between Montaigne's and Adorno's views on distraction, Othello transforms wonder from tragic affect into the capitalist distraction pleasure of a discursive entertainment revolution. Its hero-dupe himself adopts magic2 technology for a spectacular suicide—arguably the suicide of tragedy's tradition.

Journey to Mecca (; al-Rihla al-Makkiyya; 1941), by the distinguished Moroccan historian and legal scholar Ahmad al-Rahuni, recounts a hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, sponsored by the fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1937. Franco's support for the hajj was part of a vast propaganda effort to cast Franco's Spain as a friend of Islam and a defender of the cultural heritage of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia). Al-Rahuni's travel narrative blurs the line between Mecca and Spain by casting Spain's Islamic heritage sites as a metaphoric Mecca to which Muslims should make pilgrimage. The account thus highlights the collaboration between Spanish fascists and Moroccan elites. It also complicates the dominant scholarly narratives about modern Arabic literature, which have tended to focus on Egypt, the novel, and secular epistemologies. Al-Rahuni's text speaks, instead, to the persistence of Arabic prose genres that do not conform to a Eurocentric notion of literature.

Mindful of Josephine Miles's question: “If the problem [of imagery] is subjective, how can it result in tables and charts?” I shall offer here only the simplest classifications, for the sake of imposing a surface neatness upon the presentation of protean material. After some introductory generalizations about James's imagery, I shall appear to be discussing the whole subject in terms of the areas of existence or experience most used by James as sources for his imagery. The problem is that one cannot draw close to James's vital imagery of any single sort without knowing something about the other sorts, so cooperatively do the major images-areas complement each other; but we must star somewhere. In my second division I shall discuss images-areas used throughout the later works, but not independently thematic in any given work. In the last division I shall treat image-areas found unusually concentrated within given works; and here the given work itself will help to hold the materials together.

As a former trainer in a teaching program and an educational psychologist special-izing in disabilities, I have viewed learning from two perspectives: that of the teacher and that of the learner. My more recent role in administration has caused me to consider these perspectives in a more unified manner, concentrating specifically on the link between teaching and learning in higher education. Here at Emory, my responsibility is to view the total academic experience of students with disabilities and to work with faculty members to develop policies and procedures that will allow our students full access to educational opportunities. I am asked to build bridges between teaching and learning at an institution that has until recently taken for granted that everyone is equally endowed for learning and learns similarly. The unwritten understanding has been that if one passes the threshold of admission into this community, one does not have needs that might be considered “special.”

In August 2009, when Richard Poirier died, I was mourning the death of Michael Jackson, with an intensity that surprised me. While I had admired Jackson's talent and followed his career with steady interest for decades, my grief was out of proportion to my feeling for him when he was alive. I felt caught up in a psychic complex that had hold of the wrong object but was determined, nonetheless, to play itself out. Puzzled by the intensity of my grief, I began reading everything about Jackson I could find—books, journalism, Web postings—while listening intently to his music, trying to hear something in it that would console me and justify my frenzied mourning. But instead of hearing that, I heard Poirier had also died.