College Literature articles from March 2003

College Literature archives from March 2003

Assembling postmodernism: experience, meaning, and the space in-between.
March 22, 2003... Early in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, we encounter the heroine, Oedipa Maas, standing on a hillside overlooking the Southern California city of San Narciso. As she surveys the landscape below with its "vast sprawl of houses," ...

"It don't mean nothin'": Vietnam War fiction and postmodernism.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... One of the many ironies of the Vietnam War is that the one war America lost gave rise to more and better literature-collectively--than any of America's other twentieth century wars, the overwhelming majority of it written by the war's veterans,...

The anthology/corpus dynamic: a field theory of the canon.
March 22, 2003... Anthologies will always be with us. (1) But whatever the syllabi of foundational literary survey courses may tacitly proclaim, an anthology is not the same thing as "the canon." Like anthologies, the canon has inevitably to do with pedagogy...

Introduction: literature and the arts: a French perspective on visual poetics, language, and artistic representation.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... The fact that a spatial work of art doesn't speak can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, there is the idea of its absolute mutism, the idea that it is completely foreign or heterogeneous to words.... But on the other... we can always...

"A dream of stone": fame, vision, and the monument in nineteenth-century French literary culture.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Colosse de bronze ou d'albatre, Salue d'un peuple idolatre, Je surgirais sur la cite Comme un geant en sentinelle, Couvrant la ville de mon aile, Dans une attitude eternelle De genie et de majeste! (Victor...

Baudelaire and Delacroix on Tasso in prison: romantic reflections on a Renaissance Martyr.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Delacroix, lac de sang hante des mauvais anges, Ombrage par un bois de sapins toujours vert, Ou, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares etranges Passent, comme un soupir etouff'e de Weber; .. ("Les Phares") [Delacroix, lake of blood haunted by...

Gaspard de la Nuit: humor, the eau-forte, and the chiaroscuro vignette.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Precursors of literary genres are often snubbed by contemporary readers. Skimming over dedicatory prefaces, their unfamiliar names generally appear as a mortuary list of unknown influences on the renowned author with whose text we prefer to...

Ben Jelloun, Jean Genet, and cultural identity in The Street for Just One: Alberto Giacometti.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Contemporary Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and Jean Genet, the provocative postwar writer of France, have intertwined biographies, both in their personal lives and their work. Ben Jelloun, born in Morocco in 1944, went to France to pursue...

"L'art et les gens" (1): Jean-Luc Nancy's Genealogical Aesthetics.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... It is an ancient, immemorial scene, and it does not take place just once, but repeats itself indefinitely, with regularity, at every gathering of the hordes, who come to learn of their tribal origins, of their origins in brotherhoods, in...

Something queer is going on: sex and methodology in the Middle Ages.(Queering the Middle Ages)(Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage)(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Burger, Glenn, and Steven Kruger, eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $54.95hc. $19.95sc. 256 pp. Jacobs, Kathryn. 2001. Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage. Gainesville:...

Bowen, John. 2000. Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Oxford: Oxford University Press. $70 hc Academic fans of Dickens's early novels will be gratified by John Bowen's Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, a ringing defense of the novels Dickens wrote in the first half of his career. Bowen,...

Grasso, Linda M. 2002. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press. $49.95 hc $18.95 sc. xii + 249 pp. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies..." could well be the motto of Linda Grasso's Artistry of Anger. These celebrated...

Schwarze, Tracey Teets. 2002. Joyce and the Victorians.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $55.00 hc. xii + 246pp. Given its title, one might expect Tracey Schwarze's Joyce and the Victorians to delve into Joyce's anxiety of influence or examine his novels with those of Dickens, the...

Books received.
March 22, 2003... October 15, 2002 to January 15, 2003 Abbott, Megan E. 2003. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. New York: Palgrave. $59.95 hc. ix + 246 pp. Alcorn Jr., Marshall W. 2002. Changing the Subject in...