In Love's Knowledge and Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the value of reading fiction as a means to cultivate “judicious spectatorship”—Adam Smith's term for the ethical stance of a morally competent human being and responsible citizen. However, notwithstanding the power of her argument, it is essentially an argument from authority and hence, would be would be even stronger if supported by empirical data. Although not well-known within the humanities domain, such data does indeed exist, in the form of convergent lines of recent research into the neurobiological and psychological aspects of reading fiction. Supported by the fruits of this research—the accumulating evidence that reading fiction enhances social intelligence and cognitive empathy at a fundamental level—Nussbaum's confidence in the value of fiction as a “school for the moral sentiments” would appear to be supremely well-justified, and any programmatic decisions to marginalize the study of literature within the curricular spectrum supremely ill-informed.

The amount of literature on African American English has grown considerably in the last decade. This article, although another contribution on the subject, follows a slightly different approach. It examines the uneasy relationship between Standard American English and African American English and explains why the relationship remains controversial. The article notes that many varieties of English around the world are more readily recognized as legitimate varieties of English than others; and it explains how African American English falls in the latter category. One of the issues that fascinate practitioners of critical linguistics and sociological inquiry, among others, is how power relations that exist in a society are frequently transferred to other matters such as language and culture. In the case of African American English, the article addresses the issue of whether or not the status of this language variety in America reflects the larger postcolonial struggles of its speakers.The power to determine what is language and what is not language, or the power to decide when the language is "good" and when it is not, is not the prerogative of the marginalized. The power to determine to whom the language belongs and to whom it does not, or the power to determine which language deserves respect and which language does not, is also alien to those who inhabit the "penumbra" of linguistic power and privilege. These enormous powers belong to the cultural elite and their allies who help to enforce acceptable codes of linguistic conduct. To talk about language among marginalized speakers is, therefore, to engage in dis-When English spread across the world in the 17th and 18th centuries, it metamorphosed into new varieties strongly influenced by the community of its use. English no longer existed as a monolithic language; rather, it evolved into varieties that are now frequently referred to as world Englishes. Thus, linguists began to describe and analyze English in all of its varieties: British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, Indian English, and Nigerian English (to mention only a few); all these Englishes have yielded similarities as well as major differences (see Cheshire, 1991). However, the picture for these world Englishes is more complex than the national Englishes suggest. Other varieties of English also exist within the national Englishes. And the question then is: When does a variety of English change enough so that it can actually be considered a separate language? When do the norms selected from a social class and applied to political purposes no longer have appropriateness for a group, people, culture, or community? The truth is that norms that come from within the society itself develop to establish the new norms. Almost all of the national Englishes developed in the same kind of colonial existence (also see