Contemporary Literature articles from September 1997

Contemporary Literature archives from September 1997

An interview with Steve Erickson.
September 22, 1997... During the past decade, Steve Erickson has published six remarkable, visionary books of great stylistic virtuosity and thematic ambition. These include Leap Year (1989) and American Nomad (1997), highly personalized accounts of the 1988 and...

'Blade Runner's' post-individual worldspace.
September 22, 1997... Set in a postnuclear world that is being reassembled elsewhere in the solar system as the double of its predetonation self, Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) registers its protest against the dehumanizing...

Publish or perish: food hunger, and self-construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's 'The Woman Warrior.'
September 22, 1997... Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts is a difficult book to define generically. Kingston originally intended it for publication as a novel, but Knopf thought it would sell better as nonfiction and...

Second death in Venice: romanticism and the compulsion to repeat in Jeanette Winterson's 'The Passion.'
September 22, 1997... It is a given that Venice was a central topos for the nineteenth-century Anglo-American imagination, fascinating not only because of the Romantic attraction to "beauty in decay" and the frisson accompanying the possibility that all that...

Science, art, and the shipwreck of knowledge: the novels of John Banville.
September 22, 1997... The novels of Irish writer John Banville make for uncommonly rich reading. His fictional fabrics are always finely textured, often movingly poetic, threading together various narrative styles and genres. Because he is a very literate writer...

'Foucault's Pendulum' and the text of theory.
September 22, 1997... "Of course, denying it wouldn't have worked. The way things were, if somebody came up to you and said, `Hi there, I'm a Rosicrucian,' that meant he wasn't. No self-respecting Rosicrucian would acknowledge it. On the contrary, he would deny...

Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK.
September 22, 1997... Maggie O'Sullivan, ed. Afterword by Wendy Mulford. London: Reality Street Editions, 1996. 253 pp. 9.00 [pounds sterling] paper. The two books under review--Maggie O'Sullivan's Out of Everywhere and Bob Perelman's The Marginalization of...

The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History.
September 22, 1997... Bob Perelman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. viii + 187 pp. $39.50; $15.95 paper. The two books under review--Maggie O'Sullivan's Out of Everywhere and Bob Perelman's The Marginalization of Poetry--constitute an odd...

Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
September 22, 1997... Cathy Caruth, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. x + 154 pp. $33.50; $14.95 paper. With the publication of three important new books on the psychoanalytic concept of trauma as it intersects with literature,...

Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma.
September 22, 1997... Dominick LaCapra, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiii + 230 pp. $35.00; $14.95 paper. With the publication of three important new books on the psychoanalytic concept of trauma as it intersects with literature,...

Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma.
September 22, 1997... Kali Tal, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 95. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x + 296 pp. $54.95; $18.95 paper. With the publication of three important new books on the...