College Literature articles from September 2007

College Literature archives from September 2007

"Determined to prove a villain": criticism, pedagogy, and Richard III.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Surprisingly little scholarly work has been done on how to teach William Shakespeare's Richard III at the college level, even though it presents specific textual and thematic problems for undergraduates. Aside from the play's reliance on a...

Overlapping and interlocking frames for humanities literary studies: Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria Anzaldua.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... This article addresses the need for more comparative perspectives among four cognate fields of study: postcolonial, feminist, ethnic, and francophone studies. (1) Francophone studies is the analysis of literature and culture produced in French...

What's the use? Writing poetry in wartime.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... In a "Statement of Conscience" in the anthology Poets Against the War, Morton Marcus, a Korean war veteran, offers this apology for the poem he submitted: "The pursuit of this war and our unilateral stance on a number of world issues have left...

"What story what story what sound": the nomadic poetics of Myung Mi Kim's Dura.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... In "Pollen Fossil Record," the last section of her fourth volume, Commons (2002), Myung Mi Kim raises a number of questions which underlie a language-centered nomadic poetics she has developed since her first book, Under Flag (1991). ...

Of cinema, food, and desire: Franz Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog".(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... I. Food, Film, and a Desire to Nothing but Literature 'Office life is a dog's life.' 'Yes, Kafka agreed, 'yet I don't... bark at anyone and I don't bite either. As you know-I'm a vegetarian. We only live on our own flesh." (1)...

The three Rs: reading, (w)riting, and romance in class mobility narratives by Yezierska, Smedley and Saxton.(Anzia Yezierska, Agnes Smedley, Alexander Saxton)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925), Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), and Alexander Saxton's The Great Midland (1948) each feature a strong-willed, independent, fiercely intelligent working-class female protagonist, and all three...

Order out of chaos: whiteness, white supremacy, and Thomas Dixon, Jr.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... After the American cataclysm of the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, Americans began to understand that a shift had taken place in the nation's racial and social being. This shift did not appear without anxieties and upheaval. With...

The power to undo sin: race, history and literary blackness in Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Historically, the Southwest has been a place where cultural tension exists between the extremes of assimilation and outright genocidal conquest. Such tension has proved to be fertile ground for both fiction writers and historians, who continue...

Academic film criticism, the rhetoric of crisis, and the current state of American horror cinema: thoughts on canonicity and academic anxiety.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Ask any fans, and they will tell you that American horror film is in a slump. Not that no more horror films are being made; on the contrary, as far as popularity and profitability go, the horror film seems near the top of its game as Hollywood...

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Shapiro, James. 2005. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95 hc. 394 pp. Perhaps the greatest biographer of Shakespeare has observed that the public nature of the facts known about the...

Multicultural Hybridity: Transforming American Literary Scholarship and Pedagogy.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Grobman, Laurie. Multicultural Hybridity: Transforming American Literary Scholarship and Pedagogy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 2007. $37.95 s.c. 207 pp. Multicultural Hybridity is readable, ambitious,...

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006. $59.95 h.c. $22.95 s.c. 198 pp. Over the last thirty years, literary criticism has brought the reader into the text with a...

Observations on Violence and Modernity.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. $24.95 s.c. 185 pp. In his new book, Seltzer continues unpacking the bloody "wound culture" that he investigated in his earlier work, Serial...

Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Scott, Jill. Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. $39.95 h.c. 224 pp. Certainly, to say that the myth of Oedipus is well-known in the Western world is an understatement: in fact, students in the...

Books received: April 16, 2007 to July 15, 2007.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2007... Ashley, Mike. 2007. Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines From 1970-1980. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. $27.50 sc. xix + 507 pp. Bar-Nadav, Hadara. 2007. A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight....