The genre of poetry: secondary school students' conventional expectations and interpretive operations

This study examined secondary school students' knowledge of the conventions and aesthetic operations that theorists hypothesize are associated with the poetic genre. Students read texts presented visually both in the shape of poems as well as prose. The identification of a text as a poem triggered significantly more references to the conventional expectations as well as greater appreciation of aesthetic elements that add a layer of meaning. Students also spent longer thinking about the poem‐shaped texts and rated the poems as more enjoyable, challenging, emotionally engaging, and as eliciting more imagery. If poetry triggers the tendency to engage in active and meaningful thinking by guiding us to see language in new ways, it may be one more reason to include it in the secondary school English curriculum.     

Device physics vis-à-vis fundamental physics in Cold War America: the case of quantum optics

Historians have convincingly shown the close ties U.S. physicists had with the military during the Cold War and have raised the question of whether this alliance affected the content of physics. Some have asserted that it distorted physics, shifting attention from fundamental problems to devices. Yet the papers of physicists in quantum electronics and quantum optics, fields that have been exemplary for those who hold the distortion thesis, show that the same scientists who worked on military devices simultaneously pursued fundamental and foundational topics. This essay examines one such physicist, Marlan O. Scully, with attention to both his extensive foundational studies and the way in which his applied and basic researches played off each other.