College English - Volume 76, Issue 1, 2013

Susan Gubar reflects on her career as a woman scholar and queries in what ways women’s roles in English departments, and in academia, have evolved over the last few decades.

Sandra Gilbert reflects on her career as a woman scholar and queries in what ways women’s roles in English departments, and in academia, have evolved over the last few decades.

This article examines natural metaphors for authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers’s Cyclopædia, an influential precursor to and source for today’s encyclopedias. Carefully situating Chambers’s chosen metaphors of the honeybee and the daw within both historical and genre contexts reveals important nuances of authorial originality in reference texts that are most often understood as explicitly non-original and uncreative. His decisions concerning intellectual property were driven by his understanding of the transformative aspects of encyclopedic authorship and his ethical positioning of the encyclopedist as a gatherer and distributor of knowledge. His use of the honeybee as a metaphor for encyclopedic authorship demonstrates a rhetorical astuteness that draws from England’s rich apiary tradition as well as deeply British symbolism that positioned the honeybee as royal, moral, and virtuous. Taken together, Chambers’s argument demonstrates the need for careful attention to situated, historical factors in discussions of authorship and ownership.

Recent translations of American Yiddish poetry into English have made an important chapter in American culture accessible both to the English scholar and to the literature student. Bringing together the work of two important literary groups of predominantly male poets with the work of one of the best-known female poets in Yiddish—whose aesthetic concerns overlapped with those of Euro-American modernism—I argue that the linguistic and aesthetic choices of Yiddish poetry in America not only bridge the distance between two geographies (the Old and New Worlds), but also forge a cultural scene for what I call immigrant geographies of being and belonging. Although the use of Yiddish limited the poems’ audience when they were published and, therefore, deferred aesthetic recognition of this under-studied body of poetry, I argue that the poets’ choice to write in Yiddish ultimately rendered a simultaneous desire to become American (in subject matter as well as in the adaptation of Yiddish verse to modern prosodic and aesthetic conventions) and to resist the pressure of the melting pot precisely by writing in a language inaccessible to the larger reading public. In this act of dissimilation, Yiddish poetry—like most writing in national languages published in the United States either by the immigrant or the mainstream press—poses challenges for the literary and cultural critic and teacher.