The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 36 No. 2

Authors

• Kim Paffenroth
• Manfred Weidhorn
• William C. Stephenson
• Charles S. Brown
• William Casement
• George Slanger
• Richard Callin
• Albino Carrillo
• James Cushing
• Jeffrey Erikson
• Nickie J. Gunstrom
• Tom Hansen
• David James
• Walter McDonald
• Willie Reader
• Heather Sellers
• Barry Sternlieb
• Steve Wilson
• Anne Ohman Youngs
• Kathleen L. Nichols
• Daniel J. Royer
• Rebecca Viney
• Midwest Quarterly Editors

Contents

ARTICLES 

The Character of Judas in Bach's St. Matthew Passion 

Styles of Manliness in Antiquity and in Gibbon 

A New Type of Nature Writing? 

Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism: The Quest for a New Worldview 

Some Myths About the Great Books 

Computers and Writing: Two Laments  

POEMS 

Close to Where the Animal Gather 

Downpour 

Letter to a Painter 

The Things that Lie Within Our Bodies 

Blue Lint 

Taking Place 

November 

The Beginning of Another  

For All Friends Walking Avenues 

Home on the Range is a Family Game 

April Sunburn  

The Mother Tongue 

No Two Ways About It  

An Opening Volley Depicting the Matter of His Conceit 

Translating the Grass 

REVIEWS 

Susan S. Kissel; In Common Cause: The "Conservative in Frances Trollope and the "Radical" Frances Wright  

Philip Levine; The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography  

Janet Malcolm; The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes  

Abstract

KIM PAFFENROTH examines the Judas of the written Gospels and explicates Bach's sensitive musical portrayal of Judas in the recitatives and arias of the "St. Matthew Passion." A graduate student in Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Paffenroth has published articles on the death of Judas, St. Augustine's idea of friendship, and on Romans. His area of concentration is the synoptic gospels.

MANFRED WEIDHORN develops the many meanings of manliness from classical times to the present day through a study of literary and historical figures, with special emphasis on Edward Gibbon's definition. Guterman Professor of English at Yeshiva University, Weidhorn has published a half-dozen scholarly books, the latest being A Harmony of Interests: Explorations in the Mind of Sir Winston Churchill.

RICHARD CALLIN works as a public health nurse in San Francisco, California. His poems have appeared in The Plum Review, The Cream City Review, Poetry Flash, and other magazines.

ALBINO CARRILLO grew up in north-central New Mexico and teaches at Union College, Schenectady, New York. His poems have been published in The Antioch Review, Sou’Wester, Puerto Del Sol, and numerous other magazines.

JAMES CUSHING, Morro Bay, California, published a book of poetry, You and the Night and the Music (Cahuenga Press) in 1991. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Rhino, Negative Capability, and other magazines. Cushing teaches at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

JEFFREY ERIKSON has published poems in The Galley Sail Review, The Cathartic, and The Bridge. He is an assistant editor of The Rolling Coulter and lives in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania.

NICKIE J. GUNSTROM lives in Reno, Nevada. Her poems have appeared in Borderlands I and II, in Defined Providence, and previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

TOM HANSEN, Aberdeen, South Dakota, teaches at Northern State University. His poems and reviews appear in recent issues of The Hollins Critic, Kansas Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and numerous other journals.

DAVID JAMES is director of admissions for the University of Michigan at Flint. Carnegie-Mellon University Press published his book of poetry, A Heart Out of This World. His poems have also appeared in New York Quarterly, Boston Literary Review, and Black River Review.

WALTER McDONALD, Lubbock, Texas, has published numerous books of poetry and short fiction. His latest, Where Skies Are Not Cloudy, was published in 1993 by the University of North Texas Press. Three of his books have won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Recent poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Pans Review, Poetry, and The Sewanee Review. His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

WILLIE READER teaches creative writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He edited Poets in the South from 1975 to 1984. His poems have appeared in The Nation, Mississippi Review, The Canadian Forum, and numerous other magazines.

HEATHER SELLERS, a Florida native, teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her poems have appeared in The Kansas Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, The New Virginia Review, and other magazines.

BARRY STERNLIEB lives and writes in Richmond, Massachusetts. His two poems in this issue will appear in his next book, Thoreau's Hat (Brooding Heron Press).

STEVE WILSON, San Marcos, Texas, is a 1994-1995 Fulbright Scholar in creative writing at Babes-Bolyal University in Romania. His books include The Singapore Express, Allegory Dance, and The Anatomy of Water: A Sampling of Contemporary American Prose Poetry. He has published poems in New American Writing, Asylum, The Literary Review, and other journals. His work has also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

ANNE OHMAN YOUNGS teaches writing at Northern Michigan University and lives in Escanaba. She has published a prize-winning chapbook, Markers, and her poems have appeared in such magazines as Mid-American Review, Ball State University Forum, Tar River Poetry, and in The Third Coast, In the West of Ireland, and other anthologies. Her work has appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

WILLIAM STEPHENSON delineates the types and qualities of good nature writing and what about it appeals to the reader. After leaving the University of Texas to pursue a new career in solar energy research and homesteading at 9,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies and trying to make a go of his Russian fireplace company, Stephenson in 1989 returned to teaching at Northland College, a small environmental/liberal arts college in northern Wisconsin. Two years ago, after extensive reading of Wendell Berry, he purchased a marginal farm nearby, and together with his wife is working to bring it back to life and hopes to raise Scottish Highland cattle as well as organic pears and apples.

CHARLES S. BROWN critiques the case against an anthropocentric worldview posed by those espousing a radical ecocentric value structure and discovers that it is itself committed to human values and sensibilities. Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emporia State University in Kansas Brown has delivered many papers and authored a number of articles dealing with values, ecology, phenomenology, and Husserl.

WILLIAM CASEMENT offers a balanced defense of an education based on reading the Great Books that acknowledges criticism where it is merited and shows where it is not. Now an art dealer and an independent scholar, Casement spent five years at the State University of New York at New Paltz and five years before that at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida. He has published extensively on education and literature, including previous essays in this journal.

GEORGE SLANGER wonders if the word processor is not truly the tool of the devil, or at least will deprive literary critics of valuable evidence of intellectual and stylistic growth in an author's writing and will flood the market with insufficiently-considered verbiage. Professor of English and Chair of Humanities at Minot State University in North Dakota, Slanger has published writings in several English journals.

KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS is a Professor of English at Pittsburg State University. She coordinates the Women's Studies Program and has published articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers.

DANIEL J. ROYER is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. His essay, "The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass," is forthcoming in African American Review.

REBECCA VINEY holds three degrees from Pittsburg State University and is embarking upon a doctoral program in English at the University of Oklahoma. She is co-author of "For the Beauty of the Earth: A Hartshornean Ecological Aesthetic" in Proceedings of the Institute for Liberal Studies (1993).

ANNOUNCING THE ANNUAL VICTOR J. EMMETT, JR., MEMORIAL PRIZE AND LECTURE

The editors of The Midwest Quarterly invite submission of articles on any aspect of Victorian or Modern British literature to be considered for the annual Victor J. Emmett, Jr., Memorial Prize. The winning article will be published in The Midwest Quarterly, and the author will receive an honorarium and will be invited to Pittsburg State University to deliver the Victor J. Emmett, Jr., Memorial Lecture. The late Dr. Victor J. Emmett, Jr., was for many years Professor of English at Pittsburg State University and this journal's Editor-in-Chief.

Permissions to Use

In accordance with database agreements, the full text of the issue is not available for download. Pittsburg State Digital Commons has only provided the front matter for author and publication information.

Recommended Citation

Paffenroth, Kim; Weidhorn, Manfred; Stephenson, William C.; Brown, Charles S.; Casement, William; Slanger, George; Callin, Richard; Carrillo, Albino; Cushing, James; Erikson, Jeffrey; Gunstrom, Nickie J.; Hansen, Tom; James, David; McDonald, Walter; Reader, Willie; Sellers, Heather; Sternlieb, Barry; Wilson, Steve; Youngs, Anne Ohman; Nichols, Kathleen L.; Royer, Daniel J.; Viney, Rebecca; and Midwest Quarterly Editors (1995) "The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 36 No. 2," The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 36: Iss. 2, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol36/iss2/1