College Literature articles from September 2003

College Literature archives from September 2003

Beyond the beats: an ethics of spontaneity in the poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... This article looks at how one West German poet, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, adapted the spontaneity found in American Beat writing as an ethical principle in his own work. Like many West German writers in the 1970s, Brinkmann wished to turn away...

Race, human empathy, and negative capability: the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa (1).(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... Whether they are reading about German history, Greek mythology, homosexuality, or parenthood, many readers still seek a convenient monolithic "African American perspective" from African American authors. Indeed, writers as imaginative and...

The paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... Melville's "Benito Cereno" is a problematic text that students of color, especially, can find troubling. However, when this story is studied alongside two other narratives of shipboard slave rebellions--Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and...

Louis Zukofsky in Kentucky in history.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... Louis Zukofsky's epic poem, A , is typically regarded as either a modernist collage poem or a postmodern poem that problematizes that view. This essay considers these interpretive paradigms as it elucidates the work's "Kentucky" theme. Zukofsky...

The curse of the "little phrase": Swann and the sorrows of the Sapphic sublime.(Proust and A la recherche du temps perdu)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... A body of Proustian scholarship attests to the ubiquity and efficacy of Freudian interpretations of A la recherche du temps perdu. By contrast, no critics to my knowledge have developed a Rankian psycho-critical reading of Proust. Yet, many of...

The hermeneutics of mourning: multiplicity and authority in Jewish law.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... Against a constellation of Western traditions which crave, as Hilary Putnam has written, access to the "God's-Eye View," the rabbinic tradition has consistently constituted itself through language. For the rabbis, although the clarity of...

Decolonizing the commonwealth: a postcolonial reading of Gloria Vando's Promesas Geography of the Impossible.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... In her Promesas: Geography of the Impossible (1993), the Nuyorican poet GloriaVando contests the dominant ideologies and national mythographies in Puerto Rico and the United States. Interlacing the lyrical and the confessional with the...

Ontological incoherence in Women in Love.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... The goal of classical ontology is to explain being or reality in terms of universally consistent first principles. But there are examples of subsequent ontologies whose first principles are not in harmony with each other, but instead are...

Irish Studies after the renaisance.(Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture)(Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker Irishness, and the Question of Blood)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Graham, Colin. 2001. Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. $67.00 hc. $26.00 sc. xiii + 189 pp. Valente, Joseph. 2002. Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker Irishness, and the Question of Blood....

Sielke, Sabine. 2002. Reading Rape: the Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Princeton: Princeton University Press. $55.00 hc. $19.95sc. 241 pp. In Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990, Sabine Sielke traces the rhetoric of rape in the United States through four...

Maltby, Paul. 2002. The Visionary Moment. A Postmodern Critique.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Albany: SUNY Press. $54.50 hc. xi + 176 pp. It has become rather difficult of late to make an impact with a book informed by postmodern theory and practice. The "horizon of expectations" for postmodern innovation has been significantly...

Haddad, Emily A. 2002. Orientalist Poetics: the Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... The Nineteenth Century Series. Aldershot: Ashgate. $69.95 hc. 220 pp. Emily A. Haddad's study of the influence of orientalism on European poetics is a timely reminder of the long-standing tendency of the West to stereo-type the Islamic...

Sirc, Geoffrey. 2002. English Composition as a Happening.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Logan: Utah State University Press. $26.95 hc. 328 pp. More than ten years ago, the late James Berlin--a leading advocate of a cultural studies approach to composition and an outspoken opponent of expressivism--remarked to me that what we...

Books received April 16, 2003 to July 15, 2003.
September 22, 2003... Agathocleous, Tanya, and Ann C. Dean, eds. 2003. Teaching Literature: A Companion. New York: Palgrave McMillan. $23.95 sc. xvi + 197 pp. Barry, Peter. 2003. English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies. London: Arnold Publishers....