Style articles from September 1999

Style archives from September 1999

Introduction.(An explanation of postmodernism)
September 22, 1999... I have a confession to make. I am addicted to the word "postmodernism." For a long time, I tried to live without it. "It's a stupid word," I said to myself, "and I am just going to avoid using it." But I found that I could not. So I have...

Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan.(Interview)
September 22, 1999... Born in Cairo, Egypt, Ihab Hassan followed the path that many bright young Egyptians took in the first half of this century: he trained to become an engineer. After graduating with highest honors from the University of Cairo, Hassan came to the...

Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson's Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon's Parody.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... History is unquestionably one of the most contentious areas of debate among those concerned with postmodernism. I would like to take up Fredric Jameson's and Linda Hutcheon's competing accounts of the relation between postmodernism and history...

Is Gerald Graff Machiavellian?
September 22, 1999... At first hearing, this question may sound like an accusation. The stock figure of the Machiavel, like the commonplace connotation of "rhetoric," calls to mind a calculating schemer who will use any means to attain an end, a manipulator of...

Frank Lentricchia' s Critical Confession, or, the Traumas of Teaching Theory.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... Ours is a confessional age, as the popularity of Oprah Winfrey's and other television talk-shows testifies to. Recently, the confessional mode has made its way into what--for at least the first half of this century--aspired to be a relatively...

The New Belletrism.
September 22, 1999... "Publicize Your Privates" This past fall, alongside their stolid fleet of anthologies, Norton released a postcard-sized, surprisingly whimsical book called Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Boyd). Playing off...

Flying High and Flying Low: Travel, Sabbaticals, and Privilege in Academic Life.
September 22, 1999... I myself find safety in locating myself completely within my workplace. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic Introduction. Flight Check In her recent collection of autobiographical considerations and occasions,...

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis--'Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... Recent conferences at Stanford and at Groningen commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946). [1] 'Tis fifty years since--now more than fifty--when appeared the first German edition of a scholarly volume that was...

Paul Val[acute{e}]ry: Literature as Such.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... G[acute{e}]rard Genette We read in Paul Val[acute{e}]ry's Tel Quel: "Literature is thronged with people who don't really know what to say but feel a compelling urge to write" ("Odds and Ends" 130). A sentence stating a rather harsh,...

Narrative, Reflexivity, and Ideology.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Jeffrey J. Williams. Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv + 204. $49.95 cloth. In this intelligent, well-researched, and engagingly polemical study, Jeffrey...

Joseph Valente, ed. Quare Joyce.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Joseph Valente, ed. Quare Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 97 pp. $44.50 cloth. The genesis of Joseph Valente's collection of essays Quare Joyce was the special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly he edited in 1994. Of...