College Literature articles from October 1996

College Literature archives from October 1996

A monstrous reading of Mary Barton: fiction as "communitas."([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... 'As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read.' (Shelley 125) I When Frankenstein's monster relates is...

Postmodernism, readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Dictee.'([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... what breed sect gender denomination caste what stray ejection misplaced. Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other Tombe des nues de naturalized what transplant to dispel upon (Cha 20) While the critical discourses about and the forms of...

"What I have learned to feel": the pedagogical emotions of Holocaust education.([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... The phrase "Holocaust Education" is almost perverse in contradiction. "Holocaust" and "education" seem to pull in different directions, one pointing to the utter devastation of human values, the other insisting on their possibility. Yet there is...

The garden trampled: or the liquidation of African culture in V.S. Naipaul's 'A Bend in the River.'([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... "Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction. Proust recognized this. This procedure which today relegates every work of...

A strategy against marginalization: the "high" and "low" cultures in Kingston's 'China Men.' (Maxine Hong Kingston)([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... The Orient, Edward Said postulates, is a "European invention" of the "Middle East" as a "place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences" (1). Orientalism is a Eurocentric and hegemonic discourse that...

The Black voice and the language of the text: Toni Morrison's 'Sula.'([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... One of the most significant developments in the African-American tradition has been the formation of a class of intellectuals (scholars, critics, writers), a formation shot through and through with conflict both within and without. The conflict,...

Black on blonde: the Africanist presence in Dorothy Parker's "Big Blonde."([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... The story "Big Blonde" (1929) articulates some of the ambivalence with which Dorothy Parker's work approaches feminist inquiry.(1) There is a vicious style to Parker's compassionate portrait of a woman hopelessly trapped in social codes of...

Spitting out the seed: ownership of mother, child, breasts, milk and voice in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved.'([De]Colonizing Reading/[Dis]Covering the Other)
October 1, 1996... They lay him on my stomach, his head between my swollen, straining breasts. Umbilical cord throbs, snaking down my doughy abdomen, pulsing down between my legs, still attached to his sustaining placenta. Push. Push. The globulous force expells...

The life of the mind and the academic situation.(Forum: The Life of the Mind)
October 1, 1996... for my tenure-minded colleagues at ECU To be called an "academic" isn't usually a compliment. Ranging somewhere between an attribution of pedantry and an outright insult, it frequently takes a pejorative connotation, not without some warrant,...

The life of the mind, politics, and critical argument: a reply to Jeffrey Williams. (article in this issue, p. 128)(Froum: Life of the Mind)
October 1, 1996... Not surprisingly, I have many responses to Jeffrey Williams's essay. I am grateful to Williams for taking Beyond the Tenure Track seriously enough to engage with it so extensively. I am intrigued by his focusing on "the life of the mind" and...

Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O'Casey.
October 1, 1996... In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that modern Irish literature is in many ways a paradigm case of post-colonial (or, as I prefer, post-colonization) literature. It shares a range of political themes and literary devices with the...

Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness.
October 1, 1996... In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that modern Irish literature is in many ways a paradigm case of post-colonial (or, as I prefer, post-colonization) literature. It shares a range of political themes and literary devices with the...

Becoming Canonical in American Poetry.
October 1, 1996... Since the systematic study of literature was itself canonized by being granted the status of an academic discipline, academics have established "club status" to certain works and refused admission to others. In recent years the politics of...

Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong.
October 1, 1996... Since the systematic study of literature was itself canonized by being granted the status of an academic discipline, academics have established "club status" to certain works and refused admission to others. In recent years the politics of...

The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions.
October 1, 1996... Since the systematic study of literature was itself canonized by being granted the status of an academic discipline, academics have established "club status" to certain works and refused admission to others. In recent years the politics of...

Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture.
October 1, 1996... Terry Eagleton is a sharp and witty writer, and his literary analyses are engaging and insightful. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Eagleton is also an erudite writer, moving with ease through a mass of canonical and non-canonical literature,...

Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism.
October 1, 1996... Charles Bernheimer closes the "Preface" to this collection of essays with an appropriate, even if seemingly grand, claim for the success of the book after having outlined how quickly it was assembled: "The result is a volume that offers an...

Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire.
October 1, 1996... Lana Cable's Carnal Rhetoric begins by promising to revolutionize the way we read metaphor. Cable draws attention to what she calls "the semantic fallacy," which, she argues, governs much of our (mis)interpretation of metaphoric language. As...

The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'
October 1, 1996... The recently published collection of essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited by Mason I. Lowance, Jr., Ellen E. Westbrook, and R.C. De Prospo, is a welcome addition to Stowe scholarship, especially with the 1996 observation of...

The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny.
October 1, 1996... Castle writes that "the crucial essay" in this volume is not to be found in its table of contents. The essay that "haunts" her collection is Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny," a 1919 "meditation on the problem of the enlightenment" (3). Freud's...

Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction.
October 1, 1996... The conventions of writing about crime fiction are nearly as codified as those of the genre itself. One powerful convention of such criticism involves drawing ever-shifting boundaries between subgenres, with spy thrillers, hard-boiled detective...

The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton.
October 1, 1996... If desire is the underside of the law, as Lacan suggests, only a science of manners can tell us what we need to know about the violent thrills bound up in social custom. Indeed, according to Nancy Bentley, this explains the perverse fascination...

Tango and the Political Economy of Passion.
October 1, 1996... In her book Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, Marta Savigliano presents a comprehensive study of the tango dance form. Grounding her approach in the context of the "colonizing gaze," she examines the construction of the exoticism and...