College Literature articles from February 1994

College Literature archives from February 1994

Curriculum mortis: a manifesto for structural change.
February 1, 1994... Since the early 1980s, in the wake of the paradigm shift from New Criticism to the politically self-conscious postmodernism and poststructuralism currently dominant in English studies, teachers of literature have been under attack from...

Eskimos, hippopotamuses, and straw men: tools for rebuilding textual determinacy.
February 1, 1994... Literary hermeneutics has ostensibly moved away from the rigid determinism associated with the New Critics' claimed beliefs, but while critics embrace the indeterminacy of texts and the interpretive freedom that results, many feel a need to stake...

The two handles of 'Israel Potter.' (Herman Melville's 'Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile')
February 1, 1994... Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, first published serially in Putnam's between July 1854 and March 1855, holds a place among those works that mark Herman Melville's temporary return to critical favor after the debacle of Pierre. As such,...

Writing power in Duras' 'L'Amant de la Chine du nord.' (author Marguerite Duras)
February 1, 1994... It has been a matter of theoretical concern that "difference" or the "feminine," like the principle of "carnival" or of the disorderly woman, might remain a simple reversal of values, reversal that ultimately serves to reinforce the power...

Brutal naivete and special lighting: hyperspatiality and landscape in the American travel text.
February 1, 1994... I want to begin with a dramatic moment in Umberto Eco's long account of travel in the United States, "Travels in Hyperreality." Eco has in fact been on a "pilgrimage" to various sites that represent what he takes to be the quintessentially...

Kafka and the dialect of minor literature. (Franz Kafka) (Special Section: Critical Theory and the Sociocultural Opening in Eastern Europe)
February 1, 1994... In one's own language, however, were one only to say something as exactly and as uncompromisingly as possible, one might also hope through such relentless effort to become understandable as well.(1) The phrase in my title "the dialect of minor...

The birth of the mummy from the spirit of ideology. (Special Section: Critical Theory and the Sociocultural Opening in Eastern Europe)
February 1, 1994... The task of this paper is to trace the process, begun in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, that led to a translation of the concept of ideology from the Western critical tradition to the language of the Eastern revolutionary endeavor, a...

Postmodernity and the technology of power: legacy of the Vidici group in Serbia. (Yugoslavian journal) (Special Section: Critical Theory and the Sociocultural Opening in Eastern Europe)
February 1, 1994... Ten years before the dream of Yugoslavia ended in a bloody nightmare, the Belgrade journal Vidici published its last issue under the editorship of Slavica Stojanovic. The entire issue was conceptualized as a glossary of terms used by a group of...

Critical theory and the Glasnost phenomenon: ideological reconstruction in Romanian literary and political culture. (Special Section: Critical Theory and the Sociocultural Opening in Eastern Europe)
February 1, 1994... Nov. 1989. Fischer, Mary Ellen. Nicolae Ceausescu: A Study in Political Leadership. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989. Genette, Gerard. Palimpsestes: La litterature au second degre. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu. Scena literaturii:...

Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis.
February 1, 1994... AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp, AIDS: The Literary Response, edited by Emmanuel Nelson and Writing AIDS, edited by Timothy Murphy and Suzanne Poirier are engaged histories of the AIDS epidemic. Their primary...

Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism.
February 1, 1994... Three interdisciplinary movements are challenging legal studies: law and economics, critical legal studies, and law and literature. The earliest of the three, law and economics, relies on authoritative interpretation and the principle of wealth...

Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France.
February 1, 1994... Since Ian Watt published The Rise of the Novel in 1957, he has been an inescapable father figure for students of the novel, especially the English novel. Many have criticized his disarmingly simple thesis, but few have escaped it. Even the two...

Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience.
February 1, 1994... Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience studies six anonymous works written by men for women in the thirteenth century. The theoretical basis of the study, which incorporates new historicism, genre analysis, cultural studies, and...

Women and the New German Cinema.
February 1, 1994... Those of us who are studying and teaching the New German Cinema often have the feeling that the work by German women filmmakers is the best-kept secret in film studies. This is particularly exasperating when we remember that there are more women...

The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism.
February 1, 1994... William V. Spanos's book, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, is less a contribution to the well-publicized ongoing debate on the politics of pedagogy than its critique. Like an intruder introducing genuine opposition into one of those...

Teaching Children's Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources.
February 1, 1994... Teaching Children's Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources, edited by Glenn Edward Sadler, is the eleventh volume in the Options for Teaching Series from the Modern Language Association. The series surveys issues and subjects in college...

A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties.
February 1, 1994... Adewale Maja-Pearce is a controversial, iconoclastic Nigerian critic who has dethroned a number of literary reputations (Naipaul, Tutuola) while rescuing lesser ones from neglect, notably those of Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta. In his book A...

Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.
February 1, 1994... Just as scholars are thinking, "Not another book about Virginia Woolf," here comes another book about Virginia Woolf. It is apt, however, that "Vita" comes first in the title of Suzanne Raitt's Vita And Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V....