College Literature articles from October 1995

College Literature archives from October 1995

Teaching to the contemporary crisis: notes on English 223 - prison, race and social justice.
October 1, 1995... The mass media, politicians, and the public at large recognize that the level of crime and violence in American is at crisis proportions. As public safety is threatened, from many quarters there emerges a clamor for increased police budgets,...

On becoming an ex-man: postmodern irony and the extinguishing of certainties in the autobiography of an ex-colored man.
October 1, 1995... James Weldon Johnson's anonymously published 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man explores the phenomenon of those who were legally defined as "colored" passing as whites in American society. The unnamed first person narrator, who...

Black Christ, red flag: Langston Hughes on Scottsboro.
October 1, 1995... In 1926, after some years of climbing, Langston Hughes paused to survey the topography of African-American literature in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In this essay, Hughes, first substantial statement on aesthetics, he brings to...

The veils of the law: race and sexuality in Nella Larsen's passing.
October 1, 1995... When Nella Larsen, then a prominent young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and final novel, Passing, in 1929, the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" interpretation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth...

From the far side of the urban frontier: the detective fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.
October 1, 1995... WESTERN FRONTIER AND URBAN FRONTIER They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don't care if there's no bread over on your side. They don't care if you die. And... when you try to come from behind...

Racial protest, identity, words and form in Maya Angelou's 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.' [Critical essay]
October 1, 1995... Maya Angelou has told in interviews how Robert Loomis, her eventual Random House editor, goaded her into writing autobiography, teasing her with the challenge of writing literary autobiography. Considering herself a poet and playwright, she had...

"Building up from fragments": the oral memory process in some recent African-American written narratives.
October 1, 1995... Although the precise way in which memory functions is still open to question, especially in these days of contentious debate over repressed/coerced memory, a useful distinction can be made between the differing perceptions of the memory process...

Subjection and prophecy in Phillis Wheatley's verse paraphrases of scripture.
October 1, 1995... The critical response to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (c.1754-1784) often registers disappointment or surprise. Some critics have complained that this African-American slave's verse is insecure (Collins 78), imitative (Richmond, Bid the...

Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892.
October 1, 1995... Identifying African-American women's writing as an integral component of U.S. literatures, Foster's and Tate's literary histories expand and revise such groundbreaking texts as Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women...

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century.
October 1, 1995... Identifying African-American women's writing as an integral component of U.S. literatures, Foster's and Tate's literary histories expand and revise such groundbreaking texts as Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women...

Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America.
October 1, 1995... In his preface to The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson writes that we cannot examine a text without considering the interpretive codes and conventions that construct any interpretation: "[W]e never really confront a text immediately, in...

Dead Fathers: The Logic of Transference in Modern Narrative.
October 1, 1995... In his preface to The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson writes that we cannot examine a text without considering the interpretive codes and conventions that construct any interpretation: "[W]e never really confront a text immediately, in...

Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern.
October 1, 1995... In what can unquestioningly be seen as one of the most influential theory texts published this decade, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble unleashed a destabilizing quake upon women's studies projects, the aftershocks of which are still felt. In one...

No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject.
October 1, 1995... In what can unquestioningly be seen as one of the most influential theory texts published this decade, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble unleashed a destabilizing quake upon women's studies projects, the aftershocks of which are still felt. In one...

A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South.
October 1, 1995... In what can unquestioningly be seen as one of the most influential theory texts published this decade, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble unleashed a destabilizing quake upon women's studies projects, the aftershocks of which are still felt. In one...

Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure.
October 1, 1995... In what can unquestioningly be seen as one of the most influential theory texts published this decade, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble unleashed a destabilizing quake upon women's studies projects, the aftershocks of which are still felt. In one...

Vietnam and the Southern Imagination.
October 1, 1995... The Museum of our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts recently housed an exhibition of items that have over the years been placed at the foot of the slabs of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. These items ranged from...

Receptions of War: Vietnam in American Culture.
October 1, 1995... The Museum of our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts recently housed an exhibition of items that have over the years been placed at the foot of the slabs of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. These items ranged from...

Vietnam, We've All Been There: Interviews with American Writers.
October 1, 1995... The Museum of our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts recently housed an exhibition of items that have over the years been placed at the foot of the slabs of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. These items ranged from...

Sexuality in Victorian Fiction.
October 1, 1995... These four books share a striking number of features beyond their common on nineteenth-century literature. All draw on Michel Foucault's work, albeit to varying degrees and for different purposes. Three attend not only to "high" culture, but...

Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism.
October 1, 1995... These four books share a striking number of features beyond their common on nineteenth-century literature. All draw on Michel Foucault's work, albeit to varying degrees and for different purposes. Three attend not only to "high" culture, but...

A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
October 1, 1995... These four books share a striking number of features beyond their common on nineteenth-century literature. All draw on Michel Foucault's work, albeit to varying degrees and for different purposes. Three attend not only to "high" culture, but...

Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Fiction.
October 1, 1995... These four books share a striking number of features beyond their common on nineteenth-century literature. All draw on Michel Foucault's work, albeit to varying degrees and for different purposes. Three attend not only to "high" culture, but...

The Colonial Rise of the Novel.
October 1, 1995... Recent literary scholarship has responded to contemporary theoretical pressures in a variety of ways. While most take issue with the interpretive conventions of the recent past, like Tolstoy's unhappy families they do so in their own ways. The...

The Imperial Archive.
October 1, 1995... Recent literary scholarship has responded to contemporary theoretical pressures in a variety of ways. While most take issue with the interpretive conventions of the recent past, like Tolstoy's unhappy families they do so in their own ways. The...

The English Novel in History.
October 1, 1995... Recent literary scholarship has responded to contemporary theoretical pressures in a variety of ways. While most take issue with the interpretive conventions of the recent past, like Tolstoy's unhappy families they do so in their own ways. The...

Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fiction and the Nineteenth Century Novel.
October 1, 1995... Fredric Jameson has observed that postmodern intellectual activity often implies the "new work... of rewriting all the familiar things in new terms and thus proposing modifications, new ideal perspectives, a reshuffling of canonical feelings...

The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction.
October 1, 1995... Fredric Jameson has observed that postmodern intellectual activity often implies the "new work... of rewriting all the familiar things in new terms and thus proposing modifications, new ideal perspectives, a reshuffling of canonical feelings...

"Doers of the Word": African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880.
October 1, 1995... On the first page of her latest book, Carla Peterson sets herself the task of investigating the "more literary aspects" of speeches and writings by African-American women who have belatedly been written into U. S. history by pioneering scholars...

Fiction, Crime and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism.
October 1, 1995... At first glance, Jon Thompson's Fiction, Crime, and Empire appears to be what the field of popular crime fiction needs: an analysis that chooses to remove the labels of "high" and "low" culture and instead elects to consider texts from a...