Pamela L. Caughie - Böcker

The current academic milieu displays a deep ambivalence about the teaching of Western culture and traditional subject matter. This ambivalence, the product of a unique historical convergence of theory and diversity, opens up new opportunities for what Pamela Caughie calls "passing":recognizing and accounting for the subject positions involved in representing both the material being taught and oneself as a teacher.  Caughie's discussion of passing illuminates a recent phenomenon in academic writing and popular culture that revolves around identities and the ways in which they are deployed, both in the arts and in lived experience. Through a wide variety of texts-novels, memoirs, film, drama, theory, museum exhibits, legal cases-she demonstrates the dynamics of passing, presenting it not as the assumption of a fraudulent identity but as the recognition that the assumption of any identity, including for the purposes of teaching, is a form of passing.  Astutely addressing the relevance of passing for pedagogy, Caughie presents the possibility of a dynamic ethics responsive to the often polarizing difficulties inherent in today's culture. Challenging and thought-provoking, Passing and Pedagogy offers insight and inspiration for teachers and scholars as they seek to be responsible and effective in a complex, rapidly changing intellectual and cultural environment.

Woolf Writing the World addresses such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars and the centenary of the First World War, and natural worlds in Woolf’s writings. The selected papers represent the major themes of the conference as well as a diverse range of contributors from around the world and from different positions in and outside the university. The contents include familiar voices from past conferences--e.g., Judith Allen, Eleanor McNees, Elisa Kay Sparks--and well-known scholars who have contributed less frequently, if at all, to past Selected Papers--e.g., Susan Stanford Friedman, Steven Putzel, Michael Tratner--as well as new voices of younger scholars, students, and independent scholars. The volume is divided into four themed sections. The first and longest section, War and Peace, is framed by Mark Hussey’s keynote roundtable, “War and Violence,” and Maud Ellmann’s keynote address, “Death in the Air: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner in World War II.” The second section, World Writer(s), includes papers that read the Woolfs in a global context. The papers in Animal and Natural Worlds bring recent developments in ecocriticism and post-humanist studies to analysis of Woolf’s writing of human and nonhuman worlds. Finally, Writing and Worldmaking addresses various aspects of genre, style, and composition. Madelyn Detloff’s closing essay, “The Precarity of ‘Civilization’ in Woolf’s Creative Worldmaking,” brings us back to international and cultural conflicts in our own day, reminding us, as Detloff says, why Woolf still matters today.