Abstract: Abstract Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Hélène Cixous, Alfonso Cuarón, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Conceptualising the Monstrous Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills 2. Jesus as Monster Robert Mills 3. Monstrous Masculinities: Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love and The book of Margery Kempe Liz Herbert McAvoy 4. Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture Bettina Bildhauer 5. The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the 'Marvels of the West' Asa Simon Mittman 6. Idoles and Simulacra: Paganity, Hybridity and Representation in Mandeville's Travels Sarah Salih 7. Demonizing the Night in Medieval Europe: A Temporal Monstrosity? Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris 8. Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of North European Devourers Aleks Pluskowski 9. Hell on Earth: Situating Devils in the Medieval landscape Jeremy Harte 10. Encountering the Monstrous: Saints and Dragons in Medieval Thought Samantha J. E. Riches

Abstract: Correspondences in vocabulary, together with divergence in plot, indicate that the authors of the adventure stories in the A and B versions of the Hisperica famina worked from a shared word list rather than from a textual model. They appear to have derived their themes from Irish oral narrative, for which the Hisperica famina may accordingly be our earliest witness.

Abstract: Focusing on the tropology of the monster within the writings of Charles Darwin and Jacques Derrida, this essay demonstrates certain significant linkages joining Darwinism to deconstruction. The monstrous relations between Darwin and Derrida--both genealogical and intertextual--reveal themselves in shared evolutionary-deconstructive approaches to the concept of species, the metaphor of the book of nature, and the mythology of the Garden of Eden. Challenging humanist metaphysics, Darwin and Derrida together advance a theoretical discourse attentive to the mutations, the perversions, the aberrations and the monstrosities of the world: a teratology that looks beyond man and humanism and towards the unknown posthuman future.

Abstract: ed, and then, perversely, the abstract form is made to stand in as the originary point; the multiplicity and complexity of the world is hence understood, as Hayles puts it, as "a 'fuzzing up' of an essential reality" (1999, 12). If in the Enlightenment project the distortion of this "reality," the monster, was understood as the colonial/racial/ sexual/class other, what is the "fuzzing up" of the "essential reality" in this new construction of the human? In the Enlightenment narratives that Shelley investigates in her novel, the other is excised, but in this new biotech story the "non-human" is entirely co-opted. The process of domination through assimilation is complete as the other is tamed. Pig valves in transplant patients or tissues grown with the aid of a cow egg or hamster eggs fertilized with human sperm to test fertility or pigs spliced with human genes are all acceptable hybrids in the construction of the new post-Enlightenment body of science because, in the process of the assimilation of the "non-human," the hierarchical divide between it and humanity is sustained. The owning, controlling, patenting, and manipulation of what is understood as nature (as excluding humanity but in its service) is left unchallenged; the boundary between the monster and human is secured; the notion of the human as a well-defined category distinct and autonomous from the nonhuman is left unquestioned even as the production of the human is enabled by the nonhuman. Unlike these acclaimed "hybrids" of modern science, however, the cow/human embryo does not allow us to imagine a world where disembodied entities are refashioned, manipulated, and mastered, which is why the experiment became such a high-profile event. On the contrary, this particular fusion, in its escape from the lab, forces us to confront the economic and social systems that are at play and that produce us-it forces us to see ourselves not as autonomous and masters of the universe but as interconnected in the web of the world. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOVINE ANXIETIES, VIRGIN BIRTHS, SECRET OF LIFE | 129 This is the place where Frankenstein and the monster start to mirror one another. The cow/human embryo is disturbing because it taps into a deep anxiety about capitalism's production of nature since modernity-the cow is a perfect example of "nature" as a product to be used, controlled, and sold. Fleshy, docile, domesticated, enslaved, injected with growth hormones and antibiotics, the cow is "us," and it is only through a strict policing of the imagined boundaries between nature and humanity that we can return to our abstract dreams of the perfection of humanity in the laboratory and, more aptly, away from our own troubling creation-not the cow/human embryo-but nature as product and us, increasingly even if resistantly, as that nature.6 Yet, the very questions that are raised by the creation of the possible human-bovine entity are effectively shut down in the unwillingness to acknowledge the interconnectedness of life forms that allow for the use of animals in medical research. The desire to establish the immortal and absolute nature of man, be it through the soul, reason, or DNA, underwrites, as we have seen, the feudal, humanist, and posthumanist narratives. Humans must, in this logic, always work to free themselves and distance themselves from the animal, the body, the inhuman; and yet the more vigorous the attempt, it seems, the more thoroughly we become, like Frankenstein becoming the monster and the monster becoming Frankenstein, entangled with them. Godwin, forecasting West's attempts to "immortalize" the human through therapeutic cloning technologies, wrote in 1798: "men ... will probably cease to propagate.... The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years" (1992, 871). This "welcome" state will come about, according to Godwin, as reason, in its triumph over the body, "soon learn[s] to despise the mere animal function." The experiments that West's companies have carried out suggest reason's mastery of matter and the body and the possibility of immortality: "now that we have these technologies in our hands, like the ability to program an old cell back to the beginning of life, applying them to medicine is simple engineering" (West 2000, 3). But in West's lab, at the very moment of triumph, the animal produces the "human" embryo, betraying Godwin's hope of getting beyond the animal. In the logic of progress, there is a move away from nature, and yet just as we This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 130 | TERESA HEFFERNAN master it we find ourselves more thoroughly implicated in it and more inseparable from it than ever. West proceeds on the basis that he has cracked the code of life and that the applications of this new knowledge are straightforward: "it's simply a matter of engineering" (2000). However, this process is never simple as Frankenstein discovers as he faces the repercussions of engineering the corpses' body parts. Frankenstein says that if "my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which produced much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and, with my imagination warmed as it was, should have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discovery" (68; emphasis mine). But the chemistry teacher, who lectures, brilliantly, on the connection as opposed to the disjunction between the ancients and the moderns (cited earlier), perhaps makes a more accurate point. The chimera, the imaginary hybrid creature, is always the potential outcome of scientific inquiry as "nature" and the "human" are radically altered in the very act of experimentation. The hybrid of the lab forces us to acknowledge not only that as we know and write nature in human terms we are being written by nature, but also that something is lost in the translation. Arthur B. Cody writes about the things we don't know about the genome, like why the number of chromosomes differs inexplicably among species-why the human genome has three billion base pairs and the tiger lily has one hundred billion, and why the zebra fish has genes in number and type very similar to humans. Moreover, he continues, the current metaphors of building blocks, blueprints, and computers fail to capture the workings of the genome that seems to operate quite "mindlessly." As Cody concludes in his discussion of the genome, "everything truly essential about the process is utterly and even radically incomprehensible" (2000, 22). When I asked my ten-year-old niece what she thought of the possibility of a bovine-human, she said that was fine as long as it wasn't used to harvest organ parts, and first-year students in my university composition course immediately expressed concern for this creation, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOVINE ANXIETIES, VIRGIN BIRTHS, SECRET OF LIFE | 131 worrying about the fact that it might face life under a microscope and a life of ridicule. And one, imagining it as a potential classmate, wondered how we could continue to eat beef-asking, "you wouldn't eat part of your friend would you?" Unlike the newspaper editorials, Clinton, and the biotechnology companies, which replay the paradox of Frankenstein in drawing the impossible and absolute divide between the human and nonhuman, these respondents implicitly seem to have understood the play between the terms. This then, simply put, is the difference in the understanding of hybridity. The biotech companies mobilize hybridity as if humans were safeguarded from it; hence nature is merely an instrument designed for "our" disposal in the pursuit of immortality. Critical posthumanists recognize that this violent differentiation between humans and nature paradoxically produces us as increasingly hybrid, as increasingly part of and produced by that other.

Abstract: This analysis examines the impact the Alien Tort Statute, enacted in 1789, could have on trade and foreign direct investment. Its history is traced from the original intent to recent court interpretations, including a look at class-action suits over asbestos and apartheid.

Abstract: If the power of reflecting on the past, and darting the keen eye of contemplation into futurity, be the grand privilege of man, it must be granted that some people enjoy this prerogative in a very limited degree. Every thing new appears to them wrong; and not able to distinguish the possible from the monstrous, they fear where no fear should find a place, running from the light of reason, as if it were a firebrand. (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]) The Creature’s descendants In an age of reproductive technology, cloning, artificial intelligence, and robotics, has Frankenstein 's futurity come to pass? Are we living in the time Mary Shelley foreshadowed? Perhaps so, although the author did not think of her work as prophesying the future. Shelley was much more interested in the science of her own day than in looking ahead. She uses the word “futurity,” an old-fashioned noun meaning a time to come, only once in the novel, and it has nothing to do with fearful prophecies. Rather, it appears in a letter Elizabeth Lavenza writes to reassure Victor that she still wants to marry him; he plays a lead role, she tells him, in all her “airy dreams of futurity” ( F 1818, III V 130). Though Mary Shelley, writing in 1816, set her novel in the late eighteenth century, Frankenstein , perhaps more than any other novel, has been interpreted as a warning about impending events. As a cautionary tale, Frankenstein has had an illustrious career; virtually every catastrophe of the last two centuries - revolution, rampant industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War I, Nazism, nuclear holocaust, clones, replicants, and robots - has been symbolized by Shelley's monster. If Shelley's work is the first futuristic novel, as some critics have claimed, then the genre of science fiction was inaugurated as a warning, not a promise, about the world of tomorrow.

Abstract: Philosophy rarely, if ever, engages psychoanalysis. It is then all the more noteworthy when a philosopher takes the risk of such an engagement. Jean-Francois Lyotard took this chance repeatedly and in different modes. While his American fame is largely based on his coinage of the term "postmodern," his early works were devoted to Freud's "libidinal economy," the tide of one of his books. In the texts that appeared after The Differend - "his book of philosophy" as he called it - the task of philosophical thinking nevertheless changed. Philosophical thought was now asked to confront that monster which scandalizes the very rules of philosophical cognition: not libido, but affect. What happens when philosophy encounters psychoanalysis at this specific site: the affect? How does this encounter affect both philosophy and psychoanalysis? And psychoanalysis in its clinical dimension? While one can find in Lyotard a precise description of the impact of psychoanalysis on philosophy, the impact of philosophy on psychoanalysis is strangely downplayed. At the end of "Emma," Lyotard's reading of Freud's famous case study, he blundy asserts:

Abstract: The main result of this work is an explicit construction of p-local subgroups of the Monster, the largest sporadic simple group. The groups constructed are the normalizers in the Monster of certain subgroups of order 32 , 52 , and 72 and have shapes 32+5+10-(Af11 xGL(2, 3)), 52+2+4-(S3xGL(2, 5)), and 72+1+2 • GL(2, 7). These groups result from a general construction which proceeds in three steps. We start with a self-orthogonal code C of length n over the field Fp , where p is an odd prime. The first step is to define a code loop L whose structure is based on C . The second step is to define a group N of permutations of functions from F2 to L. The final step is to show that N has a normal subgroup K of order p2 . The result of this construction is the quotient group N/K of shape p2+m+2m(S x GL(2,p)), where m + 1 = dim(C) and S is the group of permutations of Aut(C). To show that the groups we construct are contained in the Monster, we make use of certain lattices A(C), defined in terms of the code C . One step in demonstrating this is to show that the centralizer of an element of order p in N/K is contained in the centralizer of an element of order p in the Monster. The lattices are useful in this regard since a quotient of the automorphism group of the lattice is a composition factor of the appropriate centralizer in the Monster. This work was inspired by a similar construction using code loops based on binary codes that John Conway used to construct a subgroup of the Monster of shape 22+11+22 • (M24 x GL(2, 2)).

Abstract: Mary Shelley's waking nightmare on June 16, 1816, gave birth to one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization. Frankenstein can claim the status of a myth so profoundly resonant in its implications that it has become, at least in its barest outline, a trope of everyday life. The condemners of genetically modified meats and vegetables now refer to them as “Frankenfoods,” and the debates concerning the morality of cloning or stem cell engineering constantly invoke the cautionary example of Frankenstein's monster. Nor is the monster-myth cited only in regard to the biological sciences; critics of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons alike often make use of this monitory figure. Of course, both the media and the average person in the street have frequently and mistakenly assigned the name of Frankenstein not to the maker of the monster but to his creature. But as we shall see, this “mistake” actually derives from a crucial intuition about the relationship between them. Frankenstein is our culture's most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern “scientific” man, of the dangers inherent in scientific research, and of the horrifying but predictable consequences of an uncontrolled technological exploitation of nature and the female.

Abstract: A nationwide and demographically representative sample of 1,166 people responded to a survey exploring choices for a favorite movie monster and reasons underlying the choice. Results of the study i...

Abstract: Let Ω be a non-empty open subset of Rd, where d≥2. A modern theorem on harmonic approximation is used to show that there exists a harmonic function h on Ω behaving wildly near every boundary point of Ω. The function h is analogous to the holomorphic monster functions of W. Luh.

Abstract: Introduction Night Hoops by Carl Deuker Heart to Heart edited by Jan Greenberg Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix A Time Apart by Diane Stanley Pharaoh's Daughter by Julius Lester Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda Shakespeare by Michael Rosen Williwaw! by Tom Bodett Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac Ties that Bind Ties that Break by Lensey Namioka Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Lord of the Deep by Graham Salisbury Monster by Walter Dean Myers Annotated Professional Resources

Abstract: PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a game characteristics that a new game element is obtained from a plurality of game elements capable of involving fluctuation of game values owned by a player, and which enables a game parlor to gain constant profits. SOLUTION: In a medal game machine, a role playing game is performed to escape from a dungeon while defeating enemy monsters. When a player plays the game by operating a leading character on a game screen, two ally monsters summoned can be united into one ally monster by performing a specified operation. The number of medals (a converted value) is associated with each monster, which is expected to become greater by summoning the monster than the number when the monster is not summoned. The united monster is determined so that a total of the converted value of the monsters before uniting is equal to the converted value of the united monster. Thereby, medal put-out rates of the medal game machine is generally constant before and after the uniting.

Abstract: In Danse Macabre (1981), his non-fiction study of the horror genre, Stephen King distinguishes three Gothic archetypes that embody the central issues with which the Gothic era was concerned. To be more precise, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) deals with "the refusal to take personal responsibility for one's actions because of pride" (62); Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) portrays perverse or, in medical terms, abnormal and repressed sexuality as well as double standards of sexuality; and, finally, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) exploits the possibilities provided by the discovery of the human psyche during the Gothic period, that is, the question of the double. Taking this third archetype as the subject for this paper, I will show that one of the central issues in the Gothic era, namely the paradoxical existence of both good and evil in a single person, remains an important issue in the fiction of Stephen King. This perpetuation reveals our inability to evolve past our base instincts, to purge them completely from the human psyche. The appearance and reappearance of the Gothic double also shows us that popular fiction provides a useful repository for our deepest fear-specifically the fear that each of us is capable of great evil.The Gothic DoubleI will begin by distinguishing the Gothic double from the terms related to it. Alongside Frankenstein's monster, the Wandering Jew, and the Byronic vampire, David Punter sets a fourth Gothic character, the Doppelganger which, in his view, signifies "the mask of innocence" and which is found in, for instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (21). On another occasion, he refers to the novel as a record of a split personality (2), and since the terms are far from being identical, they need to be defined at the outset. The term Doppelganger is defined in The New International Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language (1999) as "1 A person exactly like another; a double. 2 A wraith, especially of a person not yet dead" (378). Since the German equivalent, too, primarily assumes that the word refers to two separate entities, the term Doppelganger is rejected in this context, although it is widely used in literary criticism. The term split personality is not included in The New International Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, rightly so, because such a diagnosis is no longer considered scientifically valid. After Eugen Bleuler in the late nineteenth century coined the term schizophrenia to replace the old one, dementia procox, the lay public mistakenly understood it as an equivalent to the term split personality. The confusion of the terms meant that the lay term split personality became replaced in scientific usage by dissociative identity disorder (Kaplan, Sadock and Grebb 457). The latter includes various states and signifies a personality disorder in which the person is unaware of what his "other half" is doing. Whether Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde can be diagnosed as a dissociative disorder patient or possibly a borderline personality may occupy a few psychiatrists, but the term Gothic double will do for my purposes.Like Doppelganger, the word double calls upon ambiguous interpretations and needs therefore to be defined. My definition takes as a starting point the concept of personality. According to The New International Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, personality is: "1 That which constitutes a person; also, that which distinguishes and characterizes a person; personal existence" (942). As the unity of the personality was endangered by Freudian notions, similarly, many Gothic narratives were consumed "by a paranoid terror of involution or the unraveling of the multiformed ego" (Halberstam 55). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fittingly displays this juxtaposition of the smooth surface of Dr. Jekyll and that of the "dwarfish" (18), "ape-like" (27) Mr. Hyde. …

Abstract: Collaborative projects are a natural for the language class because all language is fundamentally communicative and collaboration requires real communication to work By creating an environment in which students want to communicate in a creative manner about something that is personally interesting to them, we can encourage writing in which the students' true goal is to get an idea across rather than just to complete the assignment (Hadley, 2001; Shrum & Glisan, 2000) In this column we examine a project that brought together elementary and middle school students in France and Canada as well as a Basque school to communicate about a topic of concern to any child who has heard a fairy tale or watched a Disney movie, MONSTERS! It is hoped that other teachers may use this project as a model for similar collaborative efforts, and to this end we mention several other useful tools as well Dessinez-moi un Monstre! (Draw me a Monster!) is a collaborative project coordinated by Jane Scaplen of Sacred Heart Elementary School, Marystown, Terre-Neuve, Canada Students of French in grades 3 to 8 from over 20 different schools participated in writing about their invented monsters, sharing their descriptions, and drawing each other's creations An innovative aspect of this project is the use of the Internet as the medium for interaction, allowing more students to participate and so reap the benefits of the communication while at the same time motivating the participants by providing a larger audience with whom to share their work Students thus have the excitement of knowing that their descriptions will come alive at the hands of someone who has carefully read their work for its content and in order to actually do something with it In addition, this person may live in a different part of the world In this way, the activity brings together the interdisciplinary components of language, art, and technology The site for the project is divided into three sections: Renseignements Participants Monstres These include a detailed explanation of the projet and instructions for teachers and students, a listing of the participating schools, and the children's work, both descriptions and drawings The Project The project is set up to take place over a period of a little more than 3 months with specific dates for registering as a participant, sending in the texts and drawings, and comparing the descriptions and one's own work with the original concept of the monster's creator and receiving a certificate of participation The description of the project clearly sets forth the activities of the participants so that the children and teachers know exactly what is expected of them and what will happen throughout the course of the activity: Les participants ecrivent des descriptions et font des dessins de monstres Ils nous envoient ensuite les descriptions pour etre preparees et affichees sur une page Web Les descriptions seront aussi envoyees a chaque participant Personne ne va voir les vrais dessins jusqu'a la fin du projet Pendant la periode du 7 avril au 25 avril, les participants seront invites a essayer a dessiner des monstres d'autres participants selon les descriptions fournies A la fin, les dessins originaux seront affiches Each participating student writes a description and provides a drawing of a monster The coordinator resends these descriptions to all participants via e-mail and also places them on the Web where everyone can read them and try his or her hand at drawing the monster to fit the description At the end of the project, the original drawing by the monster's creator is distributed to all and also placed on the page so that all of the students can compare their drawings to the original To accomodate individual needs, there is also flexibility in the level of participation for a class that might not have time to devote to the entire range of project activities: Une classe peut decider de participer a plusieurs niveaux: 1 …

Abstract: Taking its theoretical cue from the work of Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler, the paper explores some examples of the construction of the body of the racially and sexually ‘other’ as monstrous, abject and ‘de-formed’, with particular reference to early modern medical treatises and Shakespeare’s Othello. Yet, the paper argues, the demonisation of these bodies does not fail to reveal the anxiety about boundaries of gender and race at the heart of the ‘dominant’. The whitest faces have the blackest souls. (Lust’s Dominion) Rosi Braidotti argues that “the peculiarity of the organic monster is that s/he is both Same and Other. The monster is neither a total stranger nor completely familiar; s/he exists in an in-between zone” (Braidotti 1996:141). S/he is the ‘foreign’ at the heart of the ‘domestic’, a paradoxical entity or non-entity the rhetoric of the ‘human’ represses but does not fully suppress. In short, s/he is the uncanny. In order to develop her point, Braidotti refers to early modern discourses on reproduction, and in particular to the quasi-paranoid connection they establish between the role played by women and women’s ‘imagination’ in the process of ‘generation’ and the production of monsters. 2 Indeed, early modern anatomical and gynecological treatises are replete with advice to women on how to conduct themselves during coition and pregnancy. To stay with the latter, I want to cite from Jacques Guillemau’s Childe-Birth (1612), 1 An expanded version of this paper, under the title of ‘Speaking in Terror: Femininity, Monstrosity and Race in Early Modern Culture’, is forthcoming in Maria Teresa Chialant (ed.), Incontrare i Mostri: Variazioni sul tema nella letteratura anglo-americana (Naples: ESI, 2002). ‘Generation’ commonly stands for ‘reproduction’ in early modern treatises.

Abstract: Erin Kaplan summed up the general disappointment of many when she remarked wryly for the LA Weekly, "It was Negro Night at the Oscars. The academy made history in giving the big awards to Black actors who between them portrayed a gangster and a ho. What's it all mean?"1 Her critique calls attention to how larger issues of representation frame the seventy-fourth annual Academy awards. Given the myriad performances by black actors that the Academy has ignored over the years, their choice of Monster's Ball and Training Day as vehicles is striking.2