College Literature articles from June 1993

College Literature archives from June 1993

Facts have no meaning: writing literary history in the shadow of poststructuralism.
June 1, 1993... How else could we entitle that word "history," now, except in speechmarks, under the sign of vocative instability, outside any assumed consensus? As perhaps the most over-employed item in the vocabulary of literary-critical and cultural analysis,...

Disturbing the peace: writing in the cultural studies classroom.
June 1, 1993... It is becoming increasingly more difficult to assess what Cultural Studies is either as a political project or as a postdisciplinary practice.(1) For some theorists, it is precisely the emergence of Cultural Studies outside of the university and...

Lady credit and the strange case of the hoop-petticoat.
June 1, 1993... O Garment, heavenly wide! thy spacious Round Does my astonish'd Thoughts almost confound. (The Hoop-Petticoat) The hoop-petticoat is a rich icon of eighteenth-century life and, more importantly, of the distance between that life and our own....

(De)forming the Romantic canon: the case of women writers.
June 1, 1993... In 1798, the poet, novelist, actress, and journalist Mary Robinson published "Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination." Robinson ends her letter with an assertion of the female literary tradition: "There...

Empowering the sister: female rescue and authorial resistance in The Heart of Midlothian. (novel)
June 1, 1993... Most of what has been written about the pervasiveness of the idea of rescue in the Victorian age presents it as a male fantasy. Adrienne Auslander Munich, for example, looking at the Andromeda myth "and its cognate, St. George and the dragon"...

Vicious binaries: gender and authorial paranoia in Dreiser's "Second Choice," Howells' "Editha," and Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." (Theodore Dreiser; William Dean Howell; Ernest Hemingway)
June 1, 1993... William Dean Howells' "Editha" (1905), Theodore Dreiser's "Second Choice" (1918), and Ernest Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber" (1936) are three frequently anthologized short stories that operate in apparently very different...

Metaphysics and sexual politics in Lawrence's novels. (D.H. Lawrence)
June 1, 1993... When Gudrun Brangwen abandons the manly Gerald Crich in Women in Love (1920), D. H. Lawrence dramatizes his greatest anxiety: that men have lost their potency, their power, their capacity for life. Moreover, Gerald is a historical type, and his...

Qui est La?: displaced subjects in Wide Sargasso Sea and Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. (Marguerite Duras; Jean Rhy)
June 1, 1993... The scene corresponds exactly to the !hysteric's^ symptom. . . . In the scenes as well as the symptom, the continuation and in Jacques Lacan's sense, unrealized life of a desiring body enters into play. (David-Menard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan...

The Jewish-American woman as artist: Cynthia Ozick and the "Paleface" tradition. (Philip Rahv's essay, "Paleface and Redskin")
June 1, 1993... A few years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of Philip Rahv's essay, "Paleface and Redskin," Sanford Pinsker considered the current relevance of the 1939 analysis that became a touchstone critique of American literature. The nature of the...

"A woman speaks ... I am woman and not white": politics of voice, tactical essentialism, and cultural intervention in Audre Lorde's activist poetics and practice. (Audre Lorde, African-American poet)
June 1, 1993... Audre Lorde -- self-defined African-American, feminist, lesbian, poet -- is an uppity woman. She talks back, speaks out, uses language as a crucial means of intervention in a sociocultural field structured by systemic inequities -- sexism,...

Replacing The Waste Land: James Merrill's quest for transcendent authority. (The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot)
June 1, 1993... became more refined, the feeling became more crude" (274). At the other extreme, Eliot explains here and elsewhere, the influence of the "sentimental age" valued feeling instead of or at the expense of thought, thus exacerbating the dissociation....

An iconography of difference: internal colonialism, photography, and the crofters of the Highlands and islands of Scotland.
June 1, 1993... IMPROVEMENT, ROMANCE, AND CROFTING Michael Hechter argues that the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of a long process of internal colonialism in Britain and Ireland, whereby Celtic populations were transformed into ethnic peripheries...

Canonical texts and context: the example of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street."
June 1, 1993... Recent interest in expanding the canon has resulted in recovering "other" writers who often differ significantly from "classic" authors in terms of race, class, ethnicity, and gender.(1) Because these "other" texts resonate literary, cultural,...

The problem of the two testaments: pedagogical motives for shifting from "Old Testament" to "Hebrew Bible."
June 1, 1993... In undergraduate courses using literary approaches to both Bibles, I find it useful to exhibit an element of rebellion against Christian hermeneutics by renaming the "Old" and "New" Testaments as the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Here, I offer a...

The Zuni Man-Woman.
June 1, 1993... Beth Cuthand, a Canadian Cree writer, believes "there's something happening in |contemporary~ Native American writing" (Lutz 40). In the collective sound of American Indian writers' voices, she hears an emergent "contemporary story" with...

A Poetics.
June 1, 1993... Charles Bernstein straightforwardly, and without apology, represents a difficult area of United States cultural production -- experimental poetry. Though he is introduced at lectures and in jacket blurbs as the author of nineteen (or more) books...

African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance.
June 1, 1993... Veit Erlmann's carefully documented study of the evolution of black musical performance in South Africa from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century is a comprehensive and detailed history culled from several...

Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the World.
June 1, 1993... Sentimental Modernism performs a double operation of feminist revision of the canon and of recuperation. The canonical tradition under scrutiny is high modernism. Clark focuses closely on modernist poetics (antibourgeois, impersonal, obscure,...

Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.
June 1, 1993... Race, Nation, Class is a collection of thematically and conceptually related essays by two of the most significant living Marxist theorists. These essays are stimulating, insightful, and -- unlike a great deal of what passes for political theory...

The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome.
June 1, 1993... Jane McIntosh Snyder's survey of ancient Greek and Roman women writers rescues from obscurity the fragments of twenty authors and places them beside the one well-known female poet of antiquity, Sappho. The book proceeds from clear and accurate...

Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum.
June 1, 1993... The title of this uneven collection of essays refers specifically to government-mandated changes in the British secondary school curriculum, which, while broadening the range of English studies to include greater emphasis on film, video, and...

Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man.
June 1, 1993... According to David Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, the study of literature is going to hell, one further sign of the end of the world and the collapse of Western civilization. The culprit is the pervasive...

Writing Into the World: Essays, 1973-1987.
June 1, 1993... In 1976 Terrence Des Pres completed The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, a landmark study commemorating the human capacity to remain sane, and the fierce determination to survive, even under the most appalling conditions. Des...