News from the Division of Languages and Literature

For the Guardian, Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence at Bard, writes about the recent shooting incidents in Missouri and upstate New York, where innocent young people were shot by homeowners for the simple mistake of knocking on the wrong door or pulling into the wrong driveway. Prose acknowledges that as Americans, compared to just a decade and a half ago, an “uptick in impulsive, explosive, trigger-happy rage ramps up the fear and paranoia that has us warily eyeing our fellow passengers and shoppers”—and asks, “So how do we change the belief that it’s a good idea to shoot first and ask questions later? How do we repair this broken chromosome in our nation’s cowboy DNA?”

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Bard Written Arts alumna and journalist Moira Donegan ’12 cautions that we should not be fooled by the highest court’s decision to allow the abortion drug mifepristone to remain available—temporarily staying a Texas federal judge’s ruling to reverse the drug’s FDA approval and pull it from US markets—while the case goes through an appeals process. Donegan deduces “sharp intra-Republican disagreement over how to handle the unexpectedly virulent political fallout from the Dobbs decision” among the right-wing Supreme Court justices who jointly ruled to overturn abortion access as a federal right. She asserts the ideologues want to “hit the gas” while the institutionalists want to “pump the brakes,” but that doesn’t change where they are all headed. “Do not let the mifepristone ruling fool you about where this extremist court is going,” she writes. 

While the nation waited for the Supreme Court to issue its order on mifepristone, the past week served as a stark realization of “just how far the Overton window has shifted, and just how low the standards for women’s health and freedom have sunk, in the months since Dobbs.” She notes that “developments that could only have been fairly understood as grave insults to women’s dignity were instead pitched as mercies or signs of moderation.”

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the recipients of its book awards for 2022. Bard Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s Stay True: A Memoir won the award for autobiography. NBCC Committee Chair Heather Scott Partington called Hsu’s account of a college-age friendship a “clear-eyed and vulnerable exploration of platonic friendship and lifelong loss” that “demonstrates how earnest teens seek to define themselves in dichotomies, and how it’s our routines that create our identities.” One of the most prestigious of literary honors in the United States, the NBCC awards are selected annually by a committee of book critics and review editors. The awards recognize works published the prior year and are open to books published in English in the United States.