College Literature articles from March 1998

College Literature archives from March 1998

The heart of darkness in Joan Didion's 'Salvador.'
March 22, 1998... In an essay titled "On Morality," Joan Didion writes that meaningful morality for her has little to do with a concept of the "ideal good," that the "cautionary tales" told her in childhood about the behavior of people in particular, often...

Addicted to race: performativity, agency, and Cesaire's 'A Tempest.' (Aime Cesaire)
March 22, 1998... A Profound sense of spectacle pervades the dramatic writings of Aime Cesaire. Unabashedly political in their critique of simplistic, accepted readings of racial and national identity, these plays do not preach to the spectator, nor do they...

De-composing the canon: alter/native narratives from the borderlands.
March 22, 1998... Representation and resistance are very broad arenas within which much of the drama of colonialist relations and postcolonial examination and subversion of those relations has taken place. In both conquest and colonisation, texts and textuality...

"I'm black an' I'm proud": re-inventing Irishness in Roddy Doyle's 'The Commitments.'
March 22, 1998... In recent years Irish artistic productions in literature and popular culture have challenged contemporary revisionist readings of Irish history by engaging again with the issue of nationalism. Against today's prevailing climate in historical...

"The world's rarest work": modernism and masculinity in Fitzgerald's 'Tender is the Night.' (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
March 22, 1998... That particular trick is one that Ernest Hemingway and I worked out - probably from Conrad's preface to "The Nigger" - and it has been the greatest "credo" in my life, ever since I decided that I would rather be an artist than a careerist....

Pynchon's early labyrinths. (Thomas Pynchon, novelist)
March 22, 1998... From the maze of Minos to the knots that fascinated the Renaissance to Borges's metaphors for the interaction of text and reader, the labyrinth has captured the Western imagination.(1) Its architecture may be so complex that it defies analysis...

"Writing it Down So That It Would Be Real": narrative strategies in Dorothy Allison's 'Bastard Out of Carolina.'
March 22, 1998... Lesbian representation is not simply a matter of making lesbianism visible. . . . Women of the babyboom generation, the founders of women's music and culture, believed that they could construct a collective sense of what it meant to be a lesbian,...

"Listen to them being ghosts": Rosa's words of madness that Quentin can't hear. (states of mind of narrators of William Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!' and 'The Sound and The Fury')
March 22, 1998... In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), two of the story's narrators become tangled in their attempts to understand the past. Both Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield are described as ghosts, and both are eventually destroyed by their...

Ghostly presences: Edith Wharton's 'Sanctuary' and the issue of maternal sacrifice.
March 22, 1998... Too many Wharton scholars and their readers share an entrenched insistence that Sanctuary (1903) is a bad novella. Superficially quite different from much of Wharton's other fiction, this text has been systematically derided, ignored, and...

Children's literature within and without the profession.
March 22, 1998... Now almost 30 years after the Modern Language Association held its first meeting on children's literature, it is time to review the place and perception of children's literature studies. I was given the opportunity for such reflection when I...

Shakespeare and Gender: A History.
March 22, 1998... Barker, Deborah E., and Ivo Kamps, eds. 1995. New York: Verso. $19.95 sc. ix + 342 pp. Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean...

Performing NOSTALGIA: Shifting Shakespeare and the Commentary Past.
March 22, 1998... Bennett, Susan. 1996. London and New York: Routledge. $16.95 sc. viii + 199pp. Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean tragedy. Alas,...

"Scarce Truth Enough Alive": Shakespeare's Contemporary Search for Truth and Trust.
March 22, 1998... James, Max H. 1995. Pittsburgh: Dorrance. $20 hc. xiii + 208 pp. Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean tragedy. Alas, Liebler (like...

Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre.
March 22, 1998... Liebler, Naomi Conn. 1995. New York: Routledge. $65 hc. xii + 266 pp. Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean tragedy. Alas, Liebler...

Shakespeare from the Margins.
March 22, 1998... Parker, Patricia. 1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $52 hc. $19.95 sc. x + 392 pp. Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean...

Writing on Shakespeare.
March 22, 1998... Naomi Conn Liebler's book, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, has many good and useful things to say about Shakespearean tragedy. Alas, Liebler (like many recent writers on Shakespeare) is infected by the current rage...

The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood.
March 22, 1998... Baetzhold, Howard G., and Joseph B. McCullough, eds. 1995. Athens: University of Georgia Press. $29.95 hc. $14.00 sc. xxiv + 384 pp. In his influential study of Mark Twain's humor, James M. Cox proposes that critical discussion of Twain...

Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings.
March 22, 1998... Florence, Don. 1995. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. $34.95 hc. ix + 166 pp. In his influential study of Mark Twain's humor, James M. Cox proposes that critical discussion of Twain logically begins not with his first story or book but...

Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance.
March 22, 1998... Knoper, Randall. 1995. Berkeley: University of California Press. $35.00 hc. ix + 240 pp. In his influential study of Mark Twain's humor, James M. Cox proposes that critical discussion of Twain logically begins not with his first story or book...

Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self.
March 22, 1998... Michelson, Bruce. 1995. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $45.00 hc. $16.95 sc. ix + 269 pp. In his influential study of Mark Twain's humor, James M. Cox proposes that critical discussion of Twain logically begins not with his first...

Yours truly, Mark Twain: the signature in the works.
March 22, 1998... In his influential study of Mark Twain's humor, James M. Cox proposes that critical discussion of Twain logically begins not with his first story or book but rather with "the signature itself," the pseudonymous comic identity that Samuel Clemens...

The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.
March 22, 1998... Buell, Lawrence. 1995. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $35.09 hc. 586 pp. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" American literature...

Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings.
March 22, 1998... Martin, Terence. 1995. New York: Columbia University Press. $27.50 hc. xii+263 pp. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" American...

Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market.
March 22, 1998... Teichgraeber III, Richard F. 1995. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. $39.95 hc. xxiii+283 pp. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman, "Song of...

The barbaric yawp: the word as the world in American literature.
March 22, 1998... I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" American literature has always attracted and seemed to call for meta-thematic explanations for its many...

The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction.
March 22, 1998... Freeman, Barbara Claire. 1995. Berkeley: University of California Press. $35.00 hc. ix+202 pp. Most feminists would agree that identifying women's oppression and celebrating women's important and unique contribution to society were the goals...

Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850-1915.
March 22, 1998... Kahane, Claire. 1995. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $45 hc. $14.95 sc.196 pp. As women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century seized authorship of women's stories, they invariably found that conventional elements of...

The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition.
March 22, 1998... Walker, Nancy A. 1995. Austin: University of Texas Press. $30 hc. $13.95 sc. 205 pp. As women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century seized authorship of women's stories, they invariably found that conventional elements of...

Revising voice: women writers and the challenge to traditional narrative form.
March 22, 1998... As women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century seized authorship of women's stories, they invariably found that conventional elements of narrative structure could not adequately depict women's lives. Heightened awareness of...

Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel.
March 22, 1998... Eysturoy, Annie O. 1996. University of New Mexico Press. $27.50 hc. $15.95 sc. 172 pp. [W]e have grown up and survived along the edges, along the borders of so many languages, worlds, cultures and social systems that we constantly fix and...

Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature.
March 22, 1998... Herrera-Sobek, Maria, and Helena Mar'a Viramontes, eds. 1996. 2nd ed. University of New Mexico Press. 17.95 sc. 304 pp. [W]e have grown up and survived along the edges, along the borders of so many languages, worlds, cultures and social systems...

Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices.
March 22, 1998... Quintana, Alvina E. 1966. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. $44.95 hc. $16.95 sc. 165 pp. [W]e have grown up and survived along the edges, along the borders of so many languages, worlds, cultures and social systems that we constantly fix...

Toward Chicana critical theories: seeking equilibrium in the analysis of infinite complexities.
March 22, 1998... [W]e have grown up and survived along the edges, along the borders of so many languages, worlds, cultures and social systems that we constantly fix and focus on the spaces in between. Categories that try to define and limit this incredibly...

Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities.
March 22, 1998... Daly, Brenda O, and Maureen T. Reddy, eds. 1995. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. $ 44.00 hc. $19.50 sc. x+297 pp. Most feminists would agree that identifying women's oppression and celebrating women's important and unique contribution...

To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction.
March 22, 1998... Russ, Joanna. 1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. $27.95 hc. $12.95 sc. xiii+181 pp. Most feminists would agree that identifying women's oppression and celebrating women's important and unique contribution to society were the goals of...

The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction.
March 22, 1998... Freeman, Barbara Claire. 1995. Berkeley: University of California Press. $35 hc. 202 pp. As women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century seized authorship of women's stories, they invariably found that conventional elements of...

Feminism(s) past and present.
March 22, 1998... Most feminists would agree that identifying women's oppression and celebrating women's important and unique contribution to society were the goals of early feminism. They would also agree that over the last three decades, most feminists have...

Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth.
March 22, 1998... Giroux, Henry A. 1996. New York: Routledge. $16.95 sc. 247 pp. On a train in the summer, in India, I begin reading Henry Giroux's latest book I'm on my way to Ayodhya where Hindu fundamentalists had only a few years ago demolished a Muslim...

The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between.
March 22, 1998... Budick, Sanford, and Wolfgang Iser, eds. 1996. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $45.00 hc. $17.95 sc. xiv + 348 pp. This gathering of essays by scholar-critics from Israel, Germany, and the United States represents the third and concluding...

The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works from Antiquity to the Present.
March 22, 1998... Summers, Claude, ed. 1996. New York: Henry Holt. $45.00 hc; xiv + 786 pp. This is a wonderful book. It is a book that promises to be many things to many people, and it delivers on that promise. To those encountering gay and lesbian literature...

Women Writers and Fascism.
March 22, 1998... Gattens, Marie-Luise. 1995. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $39.95 hc. 185 pp. While offering perhaps more insight to historians and social scientists than to literary critics, Women Writers and Fascism by Marie-Luise Gattens should...

The Presence of Camoes: Influences on the Literature of England, America, and Southern Africa.
March 22, 1998... Monteiro, George. 1996. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. $21.95 hc. x + 189 pp. The opening epigraph from Fernando Pessoa could not have been better chosen to head this important new book by George Monteiro: "Valeu a pena? Tudo...