College Literature articles from June 2005

College Literature archives from June 2005

Tricksters don't walk the dogma: Nkem Nwankwo's Danda.
June 22, 2005... Igbo village life is nostalgically evoked in Nkem Nwankwo's 1964 novel, Danda (1970), in which the trickster-like title character eludes the grasp of Western educational, economic, and religious forces. None of these elements serve to determine...

Fiery constellations: Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Benjamin's materialist historiography.
June 22, 2005... Near the end of Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry (1989), the image of a redeeming fire links two historical moments. In 1666, one of the novel's narrators, the mammoth dog-breeder Dog-Woman, disgusted by England's political corruption and...

Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and music: listening as a productive mode of social interaction.
June 22, 2005... On Christmas Eve 1940, just three months before her death, Virginia Woolf wrote to Dame Ethel Smyth, a good friend and then-contemporary composer of opera: "Yes, I will come one day soon. Because I must exchange ideas" (Nicolson 1980, 6:454)....

Fantasizing infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the murdering mother in early modern England.
June 22, 2005... Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires (William Blake) (1) Lady Macbeth's reference to motherhood and infanticide near the end of act one of Macbeth remains one of the more enigmatic moments in all of...

Coded discourse: romancing the (electronic) shadow in The Matrix (1).
June 22, 2005... Criticism on the Wachowski Brothers' science fiction film, The Matrix (1999), has generally followed along the lines of early criticism surrounding the cyberpunk fiction of the late 1980s. This isn't really surprising, since critics and fans of...

Rosemary's Baby, Gothic pregnancy, and fetal subjects.
June 22, 2005... The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self- fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture. Meanwhile, finding "positive" images and symbols of abortion...

Teaching World War I poetry--comparatively.
June 22, 2005... In his magisterial book, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, Samuel Hynes describes the challenge that World War I posed to art. "Reality had changed, in fundamental ways that called into question the assumptions on which...

Epistemologies of engagement (1).
June 22, 2005... If you get the IMF and the World Bank off our backs, we will get Plato and Descartes off yours. (Obioma Nnaemeka) A problem with theory "White" academic feminism in the United States has been criticized for at least the past...

The making of a new Virginia Woolf icon.(Virginia Woolf as Feminist)(Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the Public Sphere)(Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Black, Naomi. 2004. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. $47.50 hc. $19.95 sc. xiv + 247 pp. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2003. Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press....

Novel interventions: science, pseudo-science, and the law.(The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism & Narrative Doubt)(Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman)(The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Levine, Caroline. 2003. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism & Narrative Doubt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. $39.50 hc. 237 pp. Richardson, Angelique. 2003. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth...

Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Giroux, Henry A. 2003 Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. $17.95 sc. 204 pp. Henry Giroux's Public Spaces, Private Lives is both a continuation and a significant contribution to...

Reading the Family Dance. Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Knapp, John V. and Kenneth Womack, eds. 2003. Reading the Family Dance. Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study. Newark: University of Delaware Press. $55.00. 333 pp. This collection of thirteen essays, a follow-up to a group of articles...

Masculinity and Latin American Literature: Gender Shares Flesh.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Sifuentes-Jauregui, Ben. 2002. Transvestism, Masculinity and Latin American Literature: Gender Shares Flesh. New York: Palgrave. $75.00 hc. $23.95 sc. 256 pp. Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui begins with "a simple, working definition of...

Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Wells, Stanley and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds. 2003. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $24.95 sc. 744 pp. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide is aimed at the undergraduate Shakespeare classroom, probably in English rather...

Books received January 16, 2005 to April 15, 2005.(Bibliography)
June 22, 2005... Arthur, Paul. 2005. A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $59.95 hc. $19.95 sc. xvi + 216 pp. Balsamo, Gian. 2004. Joyce's Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the...