College Literature articles from June 1997

College Literature archives from June 1997

Decolonizing the terrain of Western theoretical productions. (Jewish philosopher-critic Jacques Derrida's denial of his Algerian roots)
June 1, 1997... In time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. The farther the facts, the more history petrifies into myth. (Derek Walcott 23) Jacques (or Jackie) Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar (Algeria),...

Afrocentric voices: constructing identities, [dis]placing difference. (scholars who promote curriculum that centers on African-American studies)
June 1, 1997... Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. (Fanon 206) In a recent article, "Nubian Treasurers Reflect Black Influence on Egypt," published in The New York Times, John Noble Winford...

Lacan in context: an introduction to Lacan for the English-speaking reader. (writer Jacques Lacan)
June 1, 1997... "Lacan reads Freud," Malcolm Bowie announces decisively, "This is the simplest and most important thing about him" (Freud 100). Yet Lacan also reads Aristotle. He reads Plato and Plautus. He reads Nicolas of Cusa, Kierkegaard, and Merleau-Ponty....

History, narrative, and authority: Poe's "Metzengerstein.' (Edgar Allan Poe's novel "Metzengerstein")
June 1, 1997... It is perhaps fitting that in "Metzengerstein," his first published tale,(1) Poe explores the authority a writer wields over his narrative. What makes the tale interesting, however, is the strategy Poe employs: he uses a writing character's loss...

Mark Twain's cross-dressing oeuvre. (Twain's tales on transvestites)
June 1, 1997... Mark Twain apparently enjoyed nothing better than writing a rollicking transvestite tale. Beginning with his uncompleted short story "A Medieval Romance" (begun in 1868) and continuing in his 1894 novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain was irresistibly...

Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl: extending the boundaries of the body. (novel about an aging master who plotted the ruin of a slave girl who works for her)
June 1, 1997... Willa Cather's powerful final novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) remains read and in print, despite being subject to periods of critical neglect, followed by intermittent attempts to redefine its essence and purpose in Cather's canon.(2) A...

The AIDS Quilt and its traditions.
June 1, 1997... Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and...

Teaching the conflicts as a temporary instructor. (teaching literature that deals with the temporary employment status of college teachers)
June 1, 1997... When students enter my introductory literature classes, they are well prepared for traditional discussions of character development. Many have learned in high school that authors emphasize ideas and themes by highlighting "epiphanous" moments, or...

A pedagogy of postcolonial literature.
June 1, 1997... Have you ever had that peculiar sense, when teaching postcolonial, multicultural, and other non-canonical literatures to mainstream students, that a tape is being replayed, and you'd really rather move to another song? At first your students...

American studies and studies of "America."
June 1, 1997... The multiple nations within "America," the uncertainty about how far "America" extends, the critical sense that "America" was invented through untenable exclusions, the forlorn sense that "America" has lost defining narratives of its past and...

The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800.
June 1, 1997... The multiple nations within "America," the uncertainty about how far "America" extends, the critical sense that "America" was invented through untenable exclusions, the forlorn sense that "America" has lost defining narratives of its past and...

Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form.
June 1, 1997... The multiple nations within "America," the uncertainty about how far "America" extends, the critical sense that "America" was invented through untenable exclusions, the forlorn sense that "America" has lost defining narratives of its past and...

Allegories of America: Narratives, Metaphysics, Politics.
June 1, 1997... The multiple nations within "America," the uncertainty about how far "America" extends, the critical sense that "America" was invented through untenable exclusions, the forlorn sense that "America" has lost defining narratives of its past and...

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
June 1, 1997... After two decades of attention to the topic, it has become almost unfashionable to trace the ways in which Victorians' resistance to sexual repression emerged and was articulated, often subversively, in literary discourses. Yet, these studies...

The Woman Reader: 1837-1914.
June 1, 1997... After two decades of attention to the topic, it has become almost unfashionable to trace the ways in which Victorians' resistance to sexual repression emerged and was articulated, often subversively, in literary discourses. Yet, these studies...

The Stone and the Scorpion: The Female Subject of Desire in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
June 1, 1997... After two decades of attention to the topic, it has become almost unfashionable to trace the ways in which Victorians' resistance to sexual repression emerged and was articulated, often subversively, in literary discourses. Yet, these studies...

Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford.
June 1, 1997... After two decades of attention to the topic, it has become almost unfashionable to trace the ways in which Victorians' resistance to sexual repression emerged and was articulated, often subversively, in literary discourses. Yet, these studies...

The tyranny of biography: Hemingway's readers and the fascination for Papa.
June 1, 1997... "The Hemingway you were taught about in high school is dead. Viva el nuevo Hemingway" (146). This is the claim, and its attendant celebratory clarion, made by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes in the final sentences of Hemingway's Genders. What...

Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions.
June 1, 1997... "The Hemingway you were taught about in high school is dead. Viva el nuevo Hemingway" (146). This is the claim, and its attendant celebratory clarion, made by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes in the final sentences of Hemingway's Genders. What...

Hemingway's Genders.
June 1, 1997... "The Hemingway you were taught about in high school is dead. Viva el nuevo Hemingway" (146). This is the claim, and its attendant celebratory clarion, made by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes in the final sentences of Hemingway's Genders. What...

Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.
June 1, 1997... "The Hemingway you were taught about in high school is dead. Viva el nuevo Hemingway" (146). This is the claim, and its attendant celebratory clarion, made by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes in the final sentences of Hemingway's Genders. What...

Re-creating Native American literary history: the past looks towards the future.
June 1, 1997... Native American Studies has yet to receive the attention or undergo the controversy that other "minority" literatures receive. Eva Kornfield highlights this lack of attention particularly from scholars working in poststructuralist and...

"Indi'n" Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America.
June 1, 1997... Native American Studies has yet to receive the attention or undergo the controversy that other "minority" literatures receive. Eva Kornfield highlights this lack of attention particularly from scholars working in poststructuralist and...

Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions.
June 1, 1997... Native American Studies has yet to receive the attention or undergo the controversy that other "minority" literatures receive. Eva Kornfield highlights this lack of attention particularly from scholars working in poststructuralist and...

Native American Antiquities and Linguistics.
June 1, 1997... Native American Studies has yet to receive the attention or undergo the controversy that other "minority" literatures receive. Eva Kornfield highlights this lack of attention particularly from scholars working in poststructuralist and...

Legacies of omission and unacknowledged bequests: recent Romantic criticism.
June 1, 1997... All three of these books share a (Romantic) concern with the invisible. Under this rubric, they can be arranged in a spectrum: from the most literal of vacancies, that left by the dead; through the middle ground of cultural exclusion, the fate of...

Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Queen Victoria.
June 1, 1997... All three of these books share a (Romantic) concern with the invisible. Under this rubric, they can be arranged in a spectrum: from the most literal of vacancies, that left by the dead; through the middle ground of cultural exclusion, the fate of...

Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837.
June 1, 1997... All three of these books share a (Romantic) concern with the invisible. Under this rubric, they can be arranged in a spectrum: from the most literal of vacancies, that left by the dead; through the middle ground of cultural exclusion, the fate of...

Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind.
June 1, 1997... All three of these books share a (Romantic) concern with the invisible. Under this rubric, they can be arranged in a spectrum: from the most literal of vacancies, that left by the dead; through the middle ground of cultural exclusion, the fate of...

Jewishness and race, gender and class in the English novel.
June 1, 1997... These three books, viewed as a whole, trace from the late-eighteenth century some significant issues that relate to what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, calls the "mantra" of race, gender, and class that now dominates American literary and...

Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity.
June 1, 1997... These three books, viewed as a whole, trace from the late-eighteenth century some significant issues that relate to what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, calls the "mantra" of race, gender, and class that now dominates American literary and...

Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945.
June 1, 1997... These three books, viewed as a whole, trace from the late-eighteenth century some significant issues that relate to what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, calls the "mantra" of race, gender, and class that now dominates American literary and...

Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture.
June 1, 1997... These three books, viewed as a whole, trace from the late-eighteenth century some significant issues that relate to what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, calls the "mantra" of race, gender, and class that now dominates American literary and...

Heroism & the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life.
June 1, 1997... In an embarrassing case of misplaced modification, Jerry Gafio Watts writes of Ralph Ellison that "He neither attempts to scare whites with images of brute Negroes, like Wright, nor does he champion an image of blacks as morally superior beings,...

Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age.
June 1, 1997... Alan Nadel's Containment Culture takes its place alongside Thomas Schaub's American Fiction in the Cold War (U of Wisconsin P, 1991) as a serious and sustained attempt to historicize cold war cultural narratives. But while Schaub focuses...

The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History.
June 1, 1997... In The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history, Susan Howe inspires readers to react and respond both to the texts about which she writes and to the text which she herself is writing in the same way she does -...

Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood.
June 1, 1997... Since all of us are "of woman born," many of us assume, quite mistakenly, that we know what it means to become a mother. Yet the word "mother" may be understood as a reference to both childbirth and child care, a conflation of quite different...

Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605-1776.
June 1, 1997... Katharine Ann Jensen gracefully weaves together cultural analysis, literary history, and textual exegesis in her recently published study of the letters and novels of the French women writers Catherine Desjardins (Lettres et billets galants,...

Defining Women: The Case of Cagney and Lacey.
June 1, 1997... . . . the tree is aware of its roots to a greater degree than it is able to see them . . . .If, however, the tree is in error as to this, how greatly it will be in error regarding all the rest of the forest around it! - Nietzsche The late...

Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction.
June 1, 1997... This book is a study of the following novels, published between 1961 and 1979: Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Sophie's Choice. The best thing about Insanity as Redemption is that it is lucidly...

Religious Imagination and Language in Emerson and Nietzsche.
June 1, 1997... The philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson continues to fascinate thinkers in many fields, and this brief but insightful study of the central ideas of Emerson and Nietzsche is an excellent example of the interesting scholarship that fascination can...

Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism.
June 1, 1997... At the heart of John Limon's intelligent, if occasionally dense study of American war fiction, is a double-edged premise, itself a model of postmodern paradox. "Why - if the history of literature began with war and has never forsworn it - do I...