Heather Murray - Böcker

This is an analysis of English studies in higher education, addressed in particular to practitioners in the field – teachers and students. As Heather Murray states in her introduction, those who work in English are likely to have a stronger sense of critical history than of disciplinary history. She contends that, in order to understand and reform the discipline of English studies, it is necessary to shift the focus of examination ‘down and back’ – to look at ordinary and often taken-for-granted disciplinary practices (such as pedagogy), and to extend the historical frame. Murray begins with an examination of some important historical moments in the developments of the discipline in Canada: the appointment in 1889 of W.J. Alexander as first professor of English at the University of Toronto; the twenty-five-year experiment early in this century in rhetorical and dramatic education for women that the Margaret Eaton School of Literature and Expression represented; and the entry of ‘theory’ into the English-Canadian academy. The second section examines some of the common features and routines of English departments, such as curriculum design, seminar groups, tests and assignments, essay questions, and the conference, in order to establish the critical/political principles that underpin study and teaching in the academy today. In this section, Murray also focuses on the role of women as students and teachers of English. The final section surveys the literature available for further research on the discipline and for constructing a history of English studies in Canada.Theory/Culture

Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties were an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly personal correspondence and diaries, as well as through published memoirs, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, movies, and visual and print media. Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, Not in This Family covers the entire postwar period, including the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ending her story with an examination of contemporary coming-out rituals, Murray shows how the personal that was once private became political and, finally, public.In exploring the intimate, reciprocal relationship of gay children and their parents, Not in This Family also chronicles larger cultural shifts in privacy, discretion and public revelation, and the very purpose of family relations. Murray shows that private bedrooms and consumer culture, social movements and psychological fashions, all had a part to play in transforming the modern family.

Asylum Ways of Seeing is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient-as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital-that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.