Elevate Difference

Reviews of Wesleyan University Press

Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture

My critical theory class from university seemed far away when I started reading Harris M. Berger’s study, Stance. In that course, Reception Theory was probably the most difficult one to grasp, with the most theoretically abstract readings, readings for the most part founded in philosophy. Realistically, the world does not know enough about the brain or perception, and cultural context varies considerably from person to person.

Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

Few phrases in the English language conjure up more vivid fantasies than the words all-girl school. The education of women—especially in an all-girl environment—is highly political. The ACLU has made the argument that single-sex education has not proven to be noticeably effective, and that it in fact weakens Title IX. There is a constellation of preconceptions that swirl around single-sex education.

On Joanna Russ

Last summer, in an effort to learn more about female writers of speculative fiction (SF), I read Charlotte Spivack’s Merlin’s Daughters. While the majority of the book was a rather boring summary of what the aforementioned "daughters" had written, the introduction posited that all speculative fiction has subversive possibilities. After all, the author is imagining a new world and probably one structured by a new social order, right?

Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera

In Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera, Sarah Caldwell, the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, relates intimate stories about her experiences as a director and conductor of this dramatic art form.

The Bad Wife Handbook

If in these modern times women had to hide potentially influential books from their husbands and others around them, The Bad Wife Handbook would be included among the silent list traded through some secret alley passage.

Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie

In Action Speaks Louder, Eric Lichtenfeld's illuminating history of the action film genre, the author claims that “the action film has deserved the right to be discussed in the same terms as those used to qualify other more established genres.” This idea, while not brought up until the book’s conclusion, forms the basis of Lichtenfeld’s study, which traces action film trends from the early hard-bodied heroes and martial arts stars like Stallone and Seagal all
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