College Literature articles from October 1993

College Literature archives from October 1993

Antony and Alexander: imperial politics in Plutarch, Shakespeare, and some modern historical texts.
October 1, 1993... In "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," Jean E. Howard identified some (now familiar) assumptions of this approach to literary-historical studies: that history (and "human nature" itself) is a construct that is "produced, not...

Cross-dressing and forgetfulness of self in William Wells Brown's 'Clotel.'
October 1, 1993... "Extravagance in dress," wrote William Wells Brown in the 1880 My Southern Home, "is a great and growing evil with our people" (232). In one of several exempla that follow, Brown decries the behavior of an illiterate female cook who, despite...

Gendered space, racialized space: nativism, the immigrant woman and Stephen Crane's 'Maggie.' (novel 'Maggie: a Girl of the Streets')
October 1, 1993... The anxiety that attaches to the figure of woman is that of a difference that escapes the discourses of containment. (Solomon-Godeau 103) Women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public...

The pornographic mind and 'The White Hotel.' (novel by D.M. Thomas)
October 1, 1993... Over a decade after its initial publication in 1981, D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel continues to be controversial both inside and outside of the literature classroom. As an early reviewer of The White Hotel observed, "[w]hatever else may be...

The new ethnic novel and the American idea.
October 1, 1993... A renaissance of the ethnic novel now galvanizes the continuing ethnic reformation of America. Even as America in turn transforms ethnic cultures, the emergence during the past twenty years of a new ethnic novel compels a reconsideration of...

St. Michael and the sudarium: a Christian soldier and human sacrifice. (The Legacy of Columbian Encounters: Selected Perspectives)
October 1, 1993... Late in the seventeenth century, an unusual image of the archangel St. Michael was sculpted in relief as part of the retablo facade of the church of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad in Oaxaca (figure 1). Consistent with European images of St....

Aesthetics of colonial violence: the massacre of Acoma in Gaspar de Villagra's 'Historia de la Nueva Mexico.' (The Legacy of Columbian Encounters: Selected Perspectives)
October 1, 1993... They struggled with their feet for a little, not for very long. (Homer, Odyssey 22.472) Sacamos conclusiones de que lo importante era organizar al pueblo para que el pueblo no tuviera que sufrir lo mismo que nosotros, la pelicula...

Accounting for one's self: the business of alterity in fur trade narratives. (The Legacy of Columbian Encounters: Selected Perspectives)
October 1, 1993... Fur trade accounts from the latter half of the eighteenth century reflect the destabilization of the concept of society occurring in Britain at the time. Both the belief that the New World contains evidence of ideal social relations and the...

Canonizing revision: literary history and the post-modern Latin American writer. (The Legacy of Columbian Encounters: Selected Perspectives)
October 1, 1993... Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in follow- ing the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have...

Expanding hell. (lesson plan for teaching Dantes 'Inferno')
October 1, 1993... Teaching Dante's Inferno ranks among the most challenging and pleasurable of my annual tasks. Students confront this intricate text fiercely, eager to ponder the various episodes, characters, and themes. With so much juicy material at hand,...

Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World.
October 1, 1993... New Historicism, an approach that is practically synonymous with Stephen Greenblatt's name, is dedicated to the transgression of various boundaries. Many of the texts discussed in this short but intense book are what would normally be called...

The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique and Literary History.
October 1, 1993... Jose David Saldivar calls for a "critical cosmopolitanism" in literary studies of texts produced in the Americas, which would allow for the understanding of these texts as "orchestrations of multivocal cross-cultural exchanges occurring in a...

Novel frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture.
October 1, 1993... Joseph R. Urgo studies the modern novel as part of a broader theory of textuality and culture. Intelligent, critically creative, coherently argued, and persuasively written, Novel Frames proffers a theory of the novel as a decentered textual...

Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory.
October 1, 1993... During the 1980s, the rise of deconstruction in North American universities gripped the still overwhelmingly New Critical academy in the throes of something that could be likened to a kind of existential terror: if reality were challenged on a...

Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature.
October 1, 1993... Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature provides a critique of feminist criticism at the same time that it discusses Pre-Raphaelite art. Lynne Pearce argues that although representations of women and their experiences...

Strangers to Ourselves.
October 1, 1993... Julia Kristeva can be described as a French Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, semiotic theorist. She has been attacked for having betrayed her own radical potential (Stone 38) as well as for lacking a political, historical, or cultural...

Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America.
October 1, 1993... In Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America, Lee Quinby explores the complex interrelationships of power, discourse, and resistance. Freedom seeks an "aesthetics of liberty," defined here as "a tradition of ethics in America that presents...

Women Poets and the American Sublime.
October 1, 1993... Joanne Diehl has two primary goals: she intends to delineate a gender-identified poetics and to offer a textual analysis of poems by Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich. Diehl argues that these...

Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834.
October 1, 1993... Moira Ferguson's Subject to Others is a substantive account of the shifting positions that white British women writers take as they address slavery (and not coincidentally, feminism) between the aftermath of Britain's Civil War and the advent...

Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context.
October 1, 1993... Comparative literary studies have been with us for a long time, but extensive studies comparing the literatures of the Americas -- North, Central, and South -- are few indeed. Earl E. Fitz explores new ground in his book, not just in the...