College Literature articles from January 2008

College Literature archives from January 2008

Exhausting ennui: Bellow, Dostoevsky, and the literature of boredom.(Essays)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... Now since boredom... is the root of all evil, what can be more natural than the effort to overcome it?... My method does not consist in a change of field, but resembles the true rotation method in changing the crop and the mode of...

Through the looking glass: reflexivity, reciprocality, and defenestration in Hitchcock's Rear Window.(Essays)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... Rear Window has long been recognized for its thematics of watching, connecting the voyeurism of L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies (James Stewart) with the spectator's curiosity about the lives of those one watches on the screen. (2) Examinations of the...

William S. Burroughs and the Maya gods of death: the uses of archaeology.(Essays)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... The role of the Maya in William S. Burroughs's writing, though often noted, has not been extensively explored. Burroughs's readers may know that he studied Maya culture and language at Mexico City College in 1950-1951, but those unversed in...

Melville and Balzac: the man in cream-colors.(Essays)(novelists Herman Melville and Honore de Balzac)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... In their detailed commentary as part of the Northwestern Newberry edition of The Confidence-Man, the editors proposed the accepted theory that Herman Melville began writing his novel after reading a newspaper article about the re-appearance in...

John Steinbeck's Sweetheart: the cosmic American bus.(Essays)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... It isn't going to take a little time to write but a long time and I don't care, for my bus is something large in my mind. It is a cosmic bus holding sparks and back firing into the Milky Way and turning the corner of Betelgeuse without a hand...

Economic hauntings: wealth and class in Edith Wharton's ghost stories.(Essays)
January 1, 2008... In the last decade or so, Edith Wharton's ghost stories have finally begun to attract the critical attention they deserve. Although the stories are diverse in their approach, scholars tend to emphasize themes of repressed sexuality, and/or how...

A.S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia": prolegomena to any future theory.(Essays)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... In a recent essay on A.S. Byatt's resistance to theory as dramatized in Angels & Insects, Michael Levenson argues that theory is a belated intellectual event, "a late, parodic form of a once momentous conflict" (2001, 162), specifically "the...

How do stories convince us? Notes towards a rhetoric of narrative.(Essays)(Essay)
January 1, 2008... I tell you he got more arguments out of stories than he did out of law books, and the queer part was you couldn't answer 'em--they just made you see it and you couldn't get around it. I'm a Democrat, but I'll be blamed if I didn't have to...

The trauma of empire in Shakespeare and early modern culture.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... When she did well, what did ther elce amiss? When she did ill what empires could have pleased? (Sir Walter Ralegh, "The Ocean to Cynthia" (qtd. by Montrose 2006, 91) I press'd me none but good householders, yeoman's sons... Such a...

Recalling empire: Anglo-American conceptions of imperialism and the decline of the nation-state.(Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World; Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism; Empire, The National and Postcolonial 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction; Enlightenment Against Empire)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Porter, Bernard. 2006. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. $30.00hc. 224pp. Doolan, Andy. 2005. Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota...

Books received: July 16, 2007 to October 15, 2007.(Appendix)(Bibliography)
January 1, 2008... Abbott, Craig. 2007. Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. $34.00 hc. 192 pp. Aleman, Jessie, and Shelley Streeby, eds. and intro. 2007. Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An...