Style articles from March 2002

Style archives from March 2002

The power of the past: structural nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and The Little Girls.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Elizabeth Bowen subjects both her characters and her readers to the dynamics of nostalgia in two of her novels. The House in Paris and The Little Girls are unique in Bowen's oeuvre in their use of "structural nostalgia"--a tripartite structure...

The sounds of silence: songs in Hollywood films since the 1960s.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Since the 1960s, filmmakers have responded to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could spontaneously "burst into song" without realistic motivation. Nashville, All That Jazz,...

"What's the import?": indefinitiveness of meaning in nineteenth-century parabolic poems.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... For Poe, the "intrinsic and essential character" of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" is "a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning" and thus a "detinitiveness of [...] effect." This description may also be applied to other nineteenth-century...

The "moreness" or "lessness" of "natural" narratology: Samuel Beckett's "Lessness" reconsidered.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... In Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996). Monika Fludemik reconstitutes narativity on the basis of experientiality, i.e., humanity's embodiedness in the world, and claims that incomprehensible texts can be made more readable if one attempts to...

Trapped in language: aspects of ambiguity and intertextuality in selected poetry and prose by Sylvia Plath.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... The interplay of intertextuality and ambiguity is a major feature in the work of Sylvia Plath. Critics may avoid biographical readings of her work by combining linguistic and literary approaches. Emphasis on the linguistic and meta-linguistic...

The bog body as mnemotope: nationalist archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier.(Seamus Heaney, Michel Tournier)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... The sometimes beautifully preserved Iron-Age bodies that used to turn up from time to time in the peat-bogs of northwestern Europe have moved and intrigued writers since P. V. Glob published his classic archaeological account, The Bog People,...

"When novelists become Cubists": the prose ideograms of Guy Davenport.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Guy Davenport's narratives are hybrids of fiction, documentary, poem, and illustration, A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that...

Minding the gap: visual perception and cinematic gap filling.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Models of narrative in film narratology and cognitive psychology are problematic since they rely on linguistic models of computation and complex, high-order cognitive operations. But because visual perception and cognition operate differently...

Anti-edibles: capitalism and schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Typically, critics have read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman as either an optimistic celebration of female "liberation" or a materialist-feminist protest. But Atwood's style--primarily her manipulation of a shifting narrative point of view...

The mirror of hermaphroditus.(Salmacis and Hermaphroditus)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... In Francis Beaumont's Ovidian epyllion Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, there is a linguistic, as opposed to an anatomical, formation of the hermaphrodite. In Beaumont, the crossing of images of red and white, of intertwining "Ivy" and "Iv'ry" and...

Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. viii + 408 pp. $59.00 cloth. Although the title-page of this essay collection...

The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. (Book Reviews).
March 22, 2002... John N. Duvall. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. New York: Palgrave, 2000. x + 182 pp. $45.00 cloth. "My imagination," Toni Morrison once told an interviewer, "is more interesting...

Books received.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Bohn, Willard. The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous. Albany: State U of New York P,2001. $71.50 cloth; $23.95 paper. Boudreau, Kristin. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson...