Digital Commons Network^™

Deviant Masculinity And Deleuzean Difference In Proust And Beckett, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.

The Repetition Of Violence And History: William Trevor's 'Lost Ground', Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

The William Trevor Collection offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated practitioners writing in the English language: the author of fifteen novels, three novellas and eleven volumes of short stories, as well as plays, radio and TV adaptations and film screenplays.

The City Is Full Of Bugs, Michael Stanley

Michael A Stanley

This essay explores the use of symbolism and metaphor in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, focusing on a particular scene inside Mary Rambo’s apartment in the middle of the novel. The use of symbolism in the novel is extensive, and many objects and characters serve as metaphors for social classes and groups, and often these representations also function as direct satire for various political groups, folkways, and the expectations or prejudices of the time period in which the novel is set. The objects and events that take place in Mary Rambo’s apartment go beyond symbolism to include a forecast of future …

Gender And Space In British Literature, 1660-1820, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Nodal Humor In Comic Narrative: A Semantic Analysis Of Two Stories By Twain And Wodehouse, Christopher Holcomb

Christopher Holcomb

This paper shows that a semantic theory of humor offers, despite assertions to the contrary, an adequate description of how particular instances of humor are linked to the narrative in which they appear. After Victor Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor is summarized, and adopted as the starting point of the analysis in this paper, the humor in two short stories is described in terms of their semantic properties. In this paper, humor is said to reside not simply in jokes but in joke-like constructions, for which the term "nodal points of humor" is used. These nodes can be identified …

Associate Editor, Brian Yothers

Brian Yothers

As of September 1, 2013, I will be associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (published by Johns Hopkins University Press).

Literature As Social Barometer In Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reading Contemprorary 'White Writing', Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

Contemporary South African literature shows a renewed concern with the close bonds between land, place and people in the New South Africa. In the post-apartheid period, this is literature that reflects a close awareness of the need for an art that retains both a sense of creative integrity and the ethical and political demands of the narrative of the new, postapartheid nation. Often history is invoked not as the deterministic frame that regulates each character’s lives typical of so much of the country’s literature, but as the accumulated mesh of individual experiences encompassed by the historical narrative. More to the …

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Pamela Benson

Pamela J Benson

Cavallo's provocative title suggests the essence of her argument: the Orlando Innamoratois a didactic poem in which the poet "presents a coherent moral vision of love as well as a program for a humanist use of literature" (10).

Chaucerian Polity, Pamela Benson

Pamela J Benson

In Chaucerian Polity David Wallace makes "visible, through an expansion of temporal and spatial parametersr, elations and developments that would otherwise remain obscured or unconnected"( xvii). Specifically, through examination of the political structures of fourteenth-century Florence and Milan, to which Chaucer was exposed on his travels, Wallace makes Chaucer's political thought visible.

Car Trouble And Other Stories, Adam Charpentier

Adam R. Charpentier

A collection of four short stories which examine the connection between awareness and emotional, psychological, and geographical identity. "Car Trouble" is a first person narrative of a hit & run accident and the events that follow. "Ten More Minutes" follows the recollections of a narrator detailing his admittance into and release from a mental hospital. The protagonist of "Islander" recounts his investigations of his lodgings on Tinian, an island far removed from his past life. "Little Black Dress" chronicles the impact the protagonist's lifestyle choices make on his marriage.

Idealization And Desire In The Hundred Acre Wood: A.A. Milne And Christopher (Robin), Laura Bright

Laura E Bright

Argues that A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner represent the conscious rejection, unconscious reproduction, and re-imaging of the author's traumatic Victorian childhood.

Folktales From Habi'ina, Katnantu District, Eastern Highlands Province, Terence Hays

Terence Hays

The people of Habi'ina village live on the northern slopes of Mount Piora in the Dogara Census Division of the Kainantu District, Eastern Highlands Province. Like other Papua New Guineans, they possess a rich oral literature and tell each other stories for a wide variety of reasons. All stories are called huri, but several different types can be distinguished.

Arbitrary Power, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics by William Keach is reviewed. The book is praised for its assessment of the language and style of Romantic poetry in light of history.

Shelley's Mont Blanc, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

"Mont Blanc" studies the relationship between the poet and the omnipotent. Spencer Hall questions the attribution of the supernatural to Shelley's thinking. Hall sees Shelley as creating a non-transcendental and hybrid confluence of emotions and ideas. Shelley concept of the sublime is not intuited by the poet, but rather constructed and projected by him. It is a process in which the imagination is primary.

Wordworth's "Lucy" Poems, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

This essay seeks to provide meaning and a context for interpretation of the Romantic "Lucy" poems by William Wordsworth. Hall argues against two critics' opposing interpretations by suggesting the meaning is humanistic which provides somewhat of a clarity into Wordsworth's poetic development. Hall suggests that his proposed context into these poems isn't merely one dimensional, but multi-faceted and draws upon other critics.

Refashioning A Wordsworthian Tradition, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

In this review of the critical approaches to Wordsworthian study, Spencer Hall discusses the contrast between theory and academic study of Wordsworthian poetry and their links to each other. Wordsworth is discussed in that of the "problematic Wordsworth" and that of the "programmatic Wordsworth." The two sides show how one thought was a product of imagination which was perpetuated in our time and the other from current academic theories. Hall brings to the forefront that by recognizing the interconnectedness of Wordsworthian studies and contemporary theorizing, the issues of literary studies and liberal education can be engaged with Wordsworth.

Beyond The Realms Of Dream, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

Mary Shelley's Alastor is analyzed in light of the relationship between Gothic and Romantic literature. The relationship between Gothicism and Romanticism is assessed in light of literature. Shelly's poem is held up as a representation of mature Gothic literature owing a debt to Romanticism.

The Ideal, The Rhetorical, And The Erotic, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

In this review of English Romanticism Spencer Hall examines two works in regards to the intense interest in P. B. Shelley's works. Hall uses many examples to demonstrate why Shelley has become so popular and why he will be in the years to come. With the ongoing critical reexamination of Shelley's works, and evidence of teachers use in their classrooms and in undergraduate studies, the passionate intensity that is undertaken affirms how "hot" Shelley really is.

Patients' Attitudes To General Practice Registrars: A Review Of The Literature, Andrew Bonney, Lyn Phillipson, Samantha Reis, Sandra Jones, Donald Iverson

Don C. Iverson

Introduction With the population ageing, it is imperative for training practices to provide GP registrars with sound experience in managing the health problems of older persons, especially chronic conditions. However, it is reported that a significant proportion of these patients will be resistant to consulting registrars, with concerns regarding disruption of continuity of care being a significant factor. The challenge for training practices is to identify approaches to engage registrars in the management of older patients whilst maintaining patient satisfaction. This paper presents a review of the literature on patient attitudes to general practice registrars to better understand the nature …

L'Objet X, Russell Potter

Russell A Potter

... white envy of black history, even though that history is written with whips and chains, extends to countless other visual and aural signifiers of black culture; in today's suburban enclaves it's hip-hop culture that brings the 'flava' to what many white kids apprehend as a flavorless cultural landscape.

Colonial Transformations, Zubeda Jalalzai

Zubeda Jalalzai

In Colonial Transformations Rebecca Ann Bach investigates the intriguing relationships between English dramatic literature of the early modern period, English colonial conquests in Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda, and the consequent literary, ideological, and material changes wrought at home and abroad. She traces these colonial transformations from England's expansion into Wales in 1536, which started a process that she says "redefined the territory and people the English encountered, but also importantly refigured the territory and people of the metropolitan center".

Aliens And Others, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

In the space of one week in the fall of 1994, Susan Smith went from small-town obscurity to national media icon, first as a suffering madonna pleading for the safe return of her two young children and then as a mad Medea who had admitted to their murders. At about the same time, a Rhode Island man, Richard Timothy Dunphy, was indicted for the murder of his two-year-old son, Eric. Dunphy-who allegedly beat Eric to death and then left the child's body in a closet for several days-did not make the national news.

Reading And Writing Race In Ireland, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

In following Henry's education in race matters -- one trajectory of the plot -- the novel foregrounds the many absurdities attending on the tragic history of racism in the U.S. Doyle's interest in race is not in fact new with this novel, which readers of the monthly Metro Eireann would know, as Doyle has been publishing stories centered on race issues in that venue since 2000. This essay examines the first five of those stories, particularily in their relation to emerging discources of race in Ireland.

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …

Foul And Fair Play, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

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 stories, and "cozies," for example, thought to occupy distinct cultural spaces and to attract different readers in search of dissimilar pleasures. Another is to argue either that there is no meaningful distinction between "art" literature and popular fiction, including crime fiction, or that, while there are indeed important differences between crime fiction and literature, some writers of crime fiction transcend the limits of their genre …

Postwar Serbian Nationalism And The Limits Of Invention, Nick Miller

Nick Miller

Serbs have rarely drawn the attention of theorists of nationalism. Nonetheless, even if they have not been christened this or that sort of nationalist by theorists, they have emerged from the 1990S with two sets of descriptors attached to them by journalists, scholars and politicians, and those descriptors conform to the general outlines of current theoretical discourse. Serbs are either the captives of 'ancient hatreds' or the manipulated victims of modern state-builders. By now most of us no doubt laugh at the notion that ancient hatreds were the catalyst of the wars in Yugoslaviain the 1990S and nod approvingly at …

Wordsworth's Later Style, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

The three "close readings" described in the March 1978 Editor's Column were introduced with this line from Marianne Moore: "we do not admire what we cannot understand." The proposition is, of course, as patently false to experience as is Keats's at the end of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." We often admire exceedingly what we do not understand, precisely because we do not understand it. This is as true of literary criticism as of religious revelation (the two activities having become strangely similar these days), and one of the three "close readings" referred to is a significant case in …

Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization: The Dialectics Of Love, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Presents a psychoanalysis of romantic idealization in Thomas Hardy's novel 'Far From the Madding Crowd.' Biography of Hardy; Effect of narcissistic conflicts and idealizations on Hardy's relationships with women in his life; Plot of the novel; Characters in the novel..

The Bonds Of Love And The Boundaries Of Self In Toni Morrison's "Beloved", Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Toni Morrison's Beloved penetrates, perhaps more deeply than any historical or psychological study could, the unconscious emotional and psychic consequences of slavery. The novel reveals how the condition of enslavement in the external world, particularly the denial of one's status as a human subject, has deep repercussions in the individual's internal world. These internal resonances are so profound that even if one is eventually freed from external bondage, the self will still be trapped in an inner world that prevents a genuine experience of freedom. As Sethe succinctly puts it, "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed …

Transitional States And Psychic Change: Thoughts On Reading D. H. Lawrence, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

One of my favorite scenes in literature occurs in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915). Tom Brangwen's Polish wife Lydia is upstairs in their home giving birth. Tom is downstairs with Anna, Lydia's four-year-old child by her first marriage. Anna is panic-stricken, screaming in terror for her mother, and Tom is responding to her with irritation and mounting anger. Like the child, he too is feeling shut out and abandoned by Lydia. Tom is made particularly furious by the "blind" and "mechanical" nature of Anna's crying.