When the red harvester ant is threatened, nestmates rush to its assistance. The message is a chemical one. Distress is communicated and help summoned by the potential victim ejecting a tiny cocktail of alkanes and terpenoids. Professor E 0 Wilson, who made this discovery, is a distinguished zoologist whose writings have twice been awarded Pulitzer Prizes. His interests extend far beyond entomology, however. Why should human communication be qualitatively different from that of the ant, in being achieved by definable, physicochemical processes? And, if this is the case, surely the same must be true of other social phenomena? Having conceded so much, on what grounds can we exclude other products of human activity such as the social sciences, arts, humanities and ethics? In a mechanistic universe, the whole of human civilization is the ultimate product of the interaction between genes and environment, incredibly complex, as Wilson admits, but susceptible to fundamentally the same analytic techniques as communication in the harvester ant. Consilience (literally, a 'jumping together') is the notion that a common groundwork of explanation applies not only to the sciences but also to the arts, ethics and religion. In his book Consiliencel Wilson applies a combination of broad learning and a style of baroque exuberance to put the case for such a unity of knowledge. Wilson is thus, as he makes clear, a child of the Enlightenment, paying homage to Bacon and Newton but most of all to Condorcet, who trod the same intellectual path (and who came to grief in the Revolution for reasons probably not unrelated to his philosophy). He mourns the triumph at the end of the eighteenth century of revelatory religion fearful of the outcomes of science, and most of all of Romanticism although regrettably overlooking the

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Pp. xxii + 196, preface, introduction, acknowledgments, notes, index. $24.95 cloth, $15.95 paper) Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism is meant as a guide for identifying and confronting complex ethical issues in a multi-perspectival world. Its author, an Oxford-educated philosopher of Ghanaian-British parentage, bridges worlds. The term cosmopolitanism - the author prefers it over globalizations narrow association with economics and multiculturalismi observed tendency to prescribe - encompasses two core values: "the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even formal ties of a shared citizenship," and the idea "that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance" (xv). Terms such as tolerance, kindness, and pluralism are central to cosmopolitan thinking. Appiah presents a wide range of issues that can serve as frames through which to examine how we as individuals and professionals make ethical decisions - essential for the humanities scholar, student, and public-sector folklorist: How real are values? What do we talk about when we talk about differences? Is any form of relativism right? When do morals and manners clash? Can culture be owned? What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity? And all this is good... and yet, and yet. Too often, the resolutions Appiah proposes for these key issues are so one-sided and misleading, so bolstered by irrelevant, erroneous, and outdated sources, that they are of little help in sorting through the paradoxical interfaces of pluralism and autonomy, diversity and democracy, and globalization and protection of what is valuable in the local. In his central chapter, "Cosmopolitan Contamination," Appiah proposes a change of priorities - away from purity, peoples, authenticity, tribalism, and cultural protection, and toward individuals, mixture, modernity, rights, and what he calls contamination (his term for healthy hybridization) . His philosophical underpinning ("The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals - not nations, tribes or 'peoples' - as die proper object of moral concern" [Appiah 2006] ) is a hallmark of rightist thought and practice. The left emphasizes social, political, and environmental factors that can constrain the ability of individuals to choose freely. Both perspectives are needed, but only one is developed in this book. Many folklorists are familiar with issues of cultural change and preservation as discussed at UNESCO and WIPO. Appiah reveals no understanding of the complexities of diese dynamics. He wrongly assumes many anthropologists to be cultural relativists who tolerate such practices as female genital mutilation (15) and that UNESCO's Declaration of Cultural Diversity celebrates a pluralism that could embrace the likes of the KKK conveniently ignoring Article IV: "No one may invoke cultural diversity to infringe upon human right. …

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

List of tables Preface 1. Languages and emotions: what can a multilingual perspective contribute? 2. Emotions in the study of multilingualism: framing the questions 3. Vocal level: is the lady angry? 4. Semantic and conceptual levels: the bilingual mental lexicon 5. Discursive level: I feel zhalko tebia bednogo 6. Neurophysiological level: his coeur is where his feelings dwell 7. Social cognition: I no longer wanted to speak German 8. Emotions and multilingualism: an integrated perspective Appendices References Author index Subject index.

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Emotions and Multilingualism

TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of qualitative and quantitative research. For this issue, we asked two researchers to discuss narrative research in TESOL.

Narrative Research in TESOL: Narrative Inquiry: More Than Just Telling Stories

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

Revolution and the Word is the classic study of the co-emergence of the U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel. The book remains the foundational study of reading, writing, and publishing in the new republic and provides a unique glimpse of the culture of early America. By looking at everything from publisher's account books to marginalia scrawled in eighteenth-century books to the novels themselves, Revolution and the Word provides an engaging social history of early American readership that is also informed by the most insightful aspects of literary theory. With a backward glance at the culture wars and prognostications for what lies ahead, the comprehensive introduction of this expanded edition reframes Revolution and the Word for a new generation of scholars. It revisits topics of dissent in the early national period, the status of the Constitution as a document designed to quell the still-burning passions of the American Revolution, and the role played by the novel in publicizing and articulating complex desires not addressed at the Constitutional Convention. Cathy N. Davidson provides readers with a survey and critique of the controversial and productive thought in cultural, social, and political theory as it has evolved during the last twenty years. This astute and learned assessment of recent developments in literary and historical scholarship, colonial and postcolonial studies, race theory, gender and sexuality theory, class studies, cultural studies, and history of the book will make Revolution and the Word as urgent for this generation as it was for its original readers in 1986.

Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America

In this report, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg focus on the potential for shared and interactive learning made possible by the Internet. They argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity for world-wide community and the limitless exchange of ideas. The Internet brings about a way of learning that is not new or revolutionary but is now the norm for todays graduating high school and college classes. It is for this reason that Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions. This report is available in a free digital edition on the MIT Press website at http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262513593. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning

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The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

/pdf/the-columbia-history-of-the-american-novel-57cb13gogg.pdf

The Columbia history of the American novel

Introduction / Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson 1 Part I. Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers / Annette Kolodny 9 Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourses Studies in the Americas / Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcon 27 Race and Sensibility in the Early Republic: Ann Eliza Bleecker and Sarah Wentworth Morton 57 Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism / Lora Romero 87 Part II. Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves / Joan Dayan 109 Critiques from Within: Antebellum Projects of Resistance / Maggie Sale 145 Radical Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery / Russ Castronovo 169 White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction / Nancy Bentley 195 Part III. Masculinity and Self-Performance in the Life of Black Hawk / Timothy Sweet 219 Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography / Maurice Wallace 245 Mark Twain and the Diseases of the Jews / Sander L. Gilman 271 Warring Fictions: Iola Leroy and the Color of Gender / Elizabeth Young 293 "Alien Hands": Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race / Michele A. Birnbaum 319 Part IV. "The Direction of the Howling": Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom! / Barbara Ladd 345 Border Subjects and Transnational Sites: Americo Paredes's The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories / Ramon Saldivar 373 Remodeling the Model Home in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Beloved / Lori Askeland 395 A Zuni Racounteur Dons the Junco Shirt: Gender and Narrative Style in the Story of Coyote and Junco / Siobhan Senier 417 "We Murder Who We Were": Jasmine and the Violence of Identity / Kristen-Carter Sanborn 433 The Queen of American Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill / Lauren Berland 455 The Body Public / Karla F. C. Holloway 481 Index 497

Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This report investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of "institution" as a "mobilizing network"--emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change--and explore the implications for higher education. The Future of Thinking reports on innovative, virtual institutions. It also uses the idea of a virtual institution both as part of its subject matter and as part of its process: the first draft of the book was hosted on a Web site for collaborative feedback and writing. The authors use this experiment in participatory writing as a test case for virtual institutions, learning institutions, and a new form of collaborative authorship. The finished version is still posted and open for comment. This book is the full-length report of the project, which was summarized in an earlier MacArthur volume, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.

Cathy N. Davidson

Papers

Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

The Columbia history of the American novel

Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill

The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age