Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Scene Transatlantiche: Eco Italiane Nella Beat Generation, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

Nella maldestra intervista con Fernanda Pivano trasmessa dalla RAI nel settembre del 1966, Jack Kerouac, interpellato riguardo le infuenze letterarie che avevano ispirato la sua produzione, rispose negando con forza l’impatto di autori italiani sulla sua poetica. Il rifuto di Kerouac – uno dei pochi esponenti della Beat Generation a poter vantare un radicamento nel territorio nordamericano da più di dieci generazioni (FamilySearch) – può essere letto come il tentativo di un autore aggrappatosi, nella parte fnale della sua vita, a un’ideologia conservatrice e nazionalista, di inscrivere la propria poetica all’interno di una tradizione letteraria puramente americana. Nella frase successiva …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

Debility And Disability In Edith Wharton's Novels, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Mabou Mines’ Dead End Kids And Performing Artists For Nuclear Disarmament, Hillary Miller

Publications and Research

Performance studies scholar and theater historian Hillary Miller offers a new study of the 1980 production of Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power by the New York-based avant-garde theater collective, Mabou Mines. Through a close reading of the play, Miller explores the relationship between this production and the little researched organization, Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament (PAND), revealing the correlations between collaboratively-generated theater practices and concurrent protest movements.

William W. French. Maryat Lee's Ecotheater: A Theater For The Twenty-First Century (Book Review), Carole K. Harris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Hard As Kerosene, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

This novel is set in West Africa during the 1980s and concerns one man's trip through Peace Corps, war and alcoholism.

Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity And The Liberation Of The American Housewife, Megan Behrent

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

“My Books Will Be Read By Millions Of People!”: The Laguardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Project On Wikipedia.”, Ximena Gallardo C., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

[This book chapter (“My Books Will Be Read By Millions of People!”: The LaGuardia Community College Octavia E. Butler Wikipedia Project.”) originally appeared in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Tarshia Stanley, published by the Modern Language Association of America." Pages 45-51. ISBN: 9781603294157]

In this essay, we examine the innovative community college classroom project that resulted in the first installment of Wikipedia Project Octavia E. Butler: the crafting of thorough, rigorously researched, well-written Wikipedia entries for Butler’s works by teams of undergraduate students.

The first part of the essay focuses on our design of a …

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

“I’Ll Come Back And Break Your Spell”: Narrative Freedom And Genre In The Haunting Of Hill House, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

In The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson interplays repression and fear inside a “normal” world, reshaping the modern Gothic novel. In this article, I trace key moments in the text where the perceptions of her complicated protagonist, Eleanor Vance, appear without the mediation of the narrator, via verb tenses, punctuation/formatting choices, and quotation. Many of these moments, I argue, occur in narrative spaces that are more quotidian than Gothic (some not even chilling at all). With the periodic narrative freedom, which I call bare thoughts, this recalibrates the division between imaginary and reality while opening up possibilities for …

A Refuge For Jae-In Doe: Fugues In The Key Of English Major, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major"

Author(s):

Seo-Young Chu (see profile)

Date:

2017

Subject(s):

Feminism, Creative nonfiction, Asian American literature, Sonnets, Social justice, Trauma

Item Type:

Essay

Tag(s):

#MeToo, Stanford, women in academia, early american

Permanent URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cp82-8f39

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.

Arnold Whitridge: Scholar And Veteran Of Two Armies And Two Wars, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This is an invited blog post written for Roads to the Great War, a site dedicated to the study of the First World War edited by historian Mike Hanlon. The article discusses the life and career of Arnold Whitridge, a soldier, scholar and grandson of British poet Matthew Arnold.

This is the url:

http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2017/01/arnold-whitridge-scholar-and-veteran-of.html

The Noble Art Of Lying, James E. Mahon

Publications and Research

In this chapter I examine the writings of Mark Twain on lying, especially his essays "On the decay of the Art of Lying" and "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It." I show that Twain held that there were two kinds of lies: the spoken lie and the silent lie. The silent lie is the lie of not saying what one is thinking, and is far more common than the spoken lie. The greatest silent lies, according to Twain, were the national silent lies that there was nothing wrong with slavery (the U.S.), that there was nothing …

Lyric X-Marks: Genre And Self-Determination In The Harp Poems Of John Rollin Ridge, R. Arvo Carr

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Shaping The Body Of Grief: Converging The Personal, Academic, And Visual In Memoir To Create A Broader Way Of Mourning, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

I have been writing a memoir of my mother’s death since before she died. It began with a piece I started after she moved to hospice care, on the cusp of 2013. I began at my grief’s beginning: writing about the spring of her diagnosis the previous year. I currently have over 100,000 words that trace her life, her illness, her death, my grief, and my (ongoing) healing; the first chapter begins with that first piece, which I will excerpt later on. As I edit, I’m shaping the body of the text, as though it’s a person, as though it’s …

The Invisible Hand Of The Lyric: Emily Dickinson’S Hypermediated Manuscripts And The Debate Over Genre, Dominique Zino

Publications and Research

Between the mid-1990s and the present, a poetics of digitization emerged around Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, performed primarily by the members of the Emily Dickinson Editorial Collective. Translating Dickinson’s work across archival sources, scanned images, typographic transcripts, and coding languages has offered Dickinson’s editors an escape from the determinism that accompanied the age of print and an opportunity to highlight the continuum along which the poet composed her body of work. Through multimodal, interactive exhibits, electronic editors of the Dickinson corpus often seek to demonstrate that no one medium is sufficient to represent the range of meaning implied in Dickinson’s body …

The Self Is A Moving Target: The Neuroscience Of Siri Hustvedt's Artists, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

Touching Brains, Jason Tougaw

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Why George Has To Die: Gloria Naylor’S Mama Day And The Myth Of The Goddess, Thomas R. Frosch

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Doubling And Multiplying The Self/Story In Catherynne M. Valente's The Ice Puzzle: Readers, Writers, And The Best Of All Girls, Veronica Schanoes

Publications and Research

Is there a difference between the doubled self and the multiplied self? Using Kelly Link’s “The Girl Detective,” a revision of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” and Catherynne M. Valente’s online novel The Ice Puzzle, a revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” I suggest that the joy taken in the multiplied self in these texts reflects the nontraditional approaches to publishing and their readers that these authors have taken.

Middle Eastern-American Literature: A Contemporary Turn In Emerson Studies, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Collecting To The Core: American Crime Fiction, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Overview of key secondary works analyzing American crime fiction: general works, works dealing with specific periods, works dealing with crime fiction by women and African Americans.

Feminism, The Left, And Postwar Literary Culture By Kathlene Mcdonald (Review), Danica Savonick

Publications and Research

Reviews the book Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture by Kathlene McDonald,University of Mississippi Press, 2012.

Italian-American Literature And Working-Class Culture, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.