Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Apartheid, Brian Macaskill

Brian Macaskill

No abstract provided.

Vladislavic, Ivan, Brian Macaskill

Brian Macaskill

No abstract provided.

J.M. Coetzee, Brian Macaskill

Brian Macaskill

No abstract provided.

To Live Like Fighting Cocks: 'Fight Club' And The Ethics Of Masculinity, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club has prompted many academics to write about this film and has captivated many of their students. As Warren Rosenberg, chair of English at the all-male Wabash College has said, "This seems to be a movie that they all adore so we'll see if we can deconstruct it, and hopefully get them to like it less" (Students, A10). While we may take this flippant comment from a 2001 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education as just that and dismiss it as quickly as it passes, Rosenberg's sentiment reflects a widespread …

Remake As Erasure In 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was remade as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) by Marcus Nispel. The remake erases the progressive critique of gender and family life in the United States that Hooper’s film screened and replaces that critique with a reactionary vision of sex, gender and family in the United States of the early twenty-first century.

On Mutilation: The Sublime Body Of Chuck Palahniuk's Fiction, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Much of Chuck Palahniuk's writing centers on the mutilation of bodies. Bodies are broken from the outside. They are beaten unrecognizable and destroyed beyond recuperation. Bodies are transformed from one sex to another, one gender to another. In Palahniuk's writing, the human body is the site for the inscription of a search for modes of authentic living in a world where the difference between the fake and the genuine has ceased to function. Not just the rules that had regulated behavior and prospects for a good life, but the rules that determine desire, pleasure, gender identity, and family role are …

Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, And The Postmodern Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Samuel Beckett's texts are populated with characters who have been so deprived of their humanity that humanity appears as essentially absent from his texts. The characters' presence in the diegesis is marked by unmistakable absences-absence of vision, of mobility, of sense, of name. Beckett's characters are often without: without hair, without teeth, without foreseeable future. The human character is at the limit of humanity and runs the risk of passing over into the grey zone of the inhuman. They lose track of their place, of their time, of their names. They frequently belong to no time and no place. When …

The Usual: Pub Phenomenology In The Works Of James Joyce, Thomas Keegan

Tom Keegan

"The Usual: Pub Phenomenology in the Works of James Joyce" attempts to wrest the pub from critical dismissal as a token symbol of paternalistic Irish drunkenness and return it to the center of Joyce's work as the site for his development of a philosophy of being. Read this way, the pub illustrates ways humans come to understand their place in the world through objects, practices, and later, as part of a public entity. The pub also tells the story of modernism's impact on Irish society. Few spaces so deftly render the complexities of the modern Irish position: at the edge …

For All The Mias Of This World, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

Over the past few years there has been a lot of attention given to the amount of women, or lack thereof, in the publishing world. Statistics provided by the 2013 Vida Count show that not only should those numbers be much stronger, but so should the representations of women and their variations of sexuality in published works. Roxane Gay writes in the introduction to her 2014 book, Bad Feminist: Essays, “Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are the sidekicks, the …

This I Believe: The Do-Over, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

I believe in second chances. Even thirds. There’s nothing like the power of a sincere do-over.

As a junior and senior high student, school was never my forte. It wasn’t for lack of effort on my parents’ part—my mother had been a fourth grade teacher and my father, a doctor, worked hard to keep me in one of the best districts in our area. Still, I bucked most school activities. Study groups? No way. Extra-curriculars? Not unless my friends were doing it. Math club? Please!

My junior year I fell into an anxious depression so severe, I required hospitalization. All …

Rebellion In The Metropolis: George Gissing's New Woman Musician, Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

In his depiction of Alma Frothingham, the female protagonist of The Whirlpool, George Gissing intersects two cultural debates of the fin de siècle: the New Woman and female musical genius. Setting his novel against the backdrop of the specular economy of late-nineteenth-century London, Gissing’s engagement with these debates sheds light on the vexed question of his feminism. His New Woman’s increased autonomy and sexual freedom is evident in her pursuit of a professional music career. Alma believes she has control over her own sexuality and the sexual response her performances elicit in others. However, she does not recognize that by …

Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary, Scott Abbott, Zarko Radakovic

Scott Abbott

As a follow-up to their first collaboration Repetitions (published in Belgrade in 1994, and in English by punctum books in 2013), in 2008 the authors published, also in Belgrade, Vampiri & Razumni recnik, published now by punctum as Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary. Vampires is Radaković’s fictionalized account of a Serb living in Cologne, Germany while his former country disintegrates. He travels in the American West, ostensibly looking for the vampires causing chaos in his own country, and then returns to Europe, having found no vampires. It is a dark text, a story of destruction told in a narrative that …

Capote, Cortázar, Fuentes Y Wolff: Casas Tomadas, Tinieblas Góticas Y Temores Burgueses, Cesar Valverde

Cesar Valverde

No abstract provided.

Nature In A Box: Ecocriticism, Goethe’S Ironic Werther, And Unbalanced Nature, Heather Sullivan

Heather I Sullivan

No abstract provided.

Ecocriticism, The Elements, And The Ascent/Descent Into Weather In Goethe’S Faust, Heather Sullivan

Heather I Sullivan

No abstract provided.

Material Ecocriticism: Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, And Other Matter, Dana Phillips, Heather Sullivan

Heather I Sullivan

No abstract provided.

Faust’S Mountains: An Ecocritical Reading Of Goethe’S Tragedy And Science, Heather Sullivan

Heather I Sullivan

No abstract provided.

La Pratique Ironique De L’Appel À L’Autorité Dans Les Péritextes Du Théâtre De Corneille, Nina Ekstein

Nina C Ekstein

Corneille a lié un grand nombre de péritextes à son œuvre théâtrale, dont les Préfaces, les avis « Au lecteur », les Arguments, les Épîtres, les Examens de 1660 et les Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique de la même année. Ce sont tous des textes polémiques du fait qu’ils représentent des prises de position dans les débats théâtraux de l’époque. Ce sont aussi des défenses souvent très spécifiques de ses œuvres. Les péritextes constituent un terrain particulièrement riche car c’est là qu’un auteur fait connaître ses intentions au lecteur.

The Theatrical Lieu De Culture Within Molière’S Theater, Nina Ekstein

Nina C Ekstein

Molière’s theater is itself, by definition, a lieu de culture. The performance of one of his plays transforms the space in which it occurs into a lieu de culture by virtue of the presence of two crucial features. First, the performance belongs to a cultural domain, in this case specifically the theater. By ‘culture’ I mean simply that which is tied to the arts, letters, manners, and scholarly pursuits. Second there must be an audience present for that performance. The same basic situation obviously holds true for any playwright whose plays are performed. What makes Molière interesting is the degree …

Sex In Rotrou’S Theater: Performance And Disorder, Nina Ekstein

Nina C Ekstein

Sexual desire is ubiquitous in all theater. It follows that virtually all theatrical traditions struggle with the issue of the representation of that desire onstage. The French stage of the 1630s and Jean Rotrou's theater of that period in particular constitute an unusual moment of relative freedom before the imposition of the bienséances banished sexual activity from the stage. What I propose is a theatrical reading of sex in Rotrou's plays, a tripartite examination of dramatic strategy: how Rotrou foregrounds the scandalous by direct depiction of sexuality onstage; how at other moments he moves to attenuate its prurient force by …

Irony In Emmanuel Carrère’S La Moustache, Nina Ekstein

Nina C Ekstein

The term "irony" is often applied to film, but in varied and often imprecise ways. Sometimes this slippery term is used to denote an inter-textual (or more precisely interfilmic) reference with the potential for parody; at other times it may mark a discordance between different channels (for example, between the film music and what is shown onscreen).1 I will focus on a particular type of irony, tied to undecidability, in which two alternatives are held in suspension, both present, both undeniable, and yet perfectly incompatible. A concrete example is the drawing that from one perspective seems to be of a …

Rotrou’S Bélisaire: Hierarchy And Meaning, Nina Ekstein

Nina C Ekstein

No abstract provided.

Anti-Haitian Rhetoric And The Monumentalizing Of Violence In Joaquin Balaguer's Guía Emocional De La Ciudad Romántica, Medar Serrata

Medar Serrata

This essay compares four editions of the book Guía emocional de la ciudad romántica, by the Dominican author and politician Joaquin Balaguer. The book, a celebration of Santo Domingo’s monumental architecture, evokes the topos of the romantic poet who strolls down the streets of an ancient city admiring the remnants of the past. A closer examination, however, reveals a text deeply invested in the monumentalizing of violence—a text that portrays the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo as the savior of the nation. Moreover, the metaphorical stroll that the reader is invited to take reenacts the movement of history in order to …

Bi- And Multilingual Aspects In The Literary Writing Of Translingual Authors In Sweden, Peter Leonard

Peter Leonard

The experience of transnational migration often occasions an increased awareness of the coupling of language and identity, as migrants must represent themselves in unfamiliar tongues no less than unfamiliar spaces. Since the 1980s, a body of literature in Swedish has emerged that is focused on this struggle to understand and present the self in a new language. Increased attention to these kinds of ‘post-ethnic identity’ in Scandinavia at the turn of the millennium has focused critical energy on these literary figurations of language change. A central theme in the authorships of Swedish writers such as Theodore Kallifatides is the need …

Course Syllabus: Harry Potter And International Politics - Identity, Violence And Social Control, Emma Norman

Emma R. Norman

The themes we draw from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are used to illuminate parallels in contemporary world politics and to apprehend in detail some of the key problems that revolve around the three core themes of the course (identity, violence, and social control). How, for instance, does life in Hogwarts help to illuminate the multiple, crosscutting identities produced by globalization? How does the divide between wizards and muggles, or Hermione’s obsession with elvish welfare, serve to illuminate continued discrimination in current liberal democracies and do these narratives help to widen our options when it comes to minimizing it? What …

North American Pollinator Partnership Conference: Making A Difference One Pollinator At A Time, Tammy Horn

Tammy Horn

The North American Pollinator Protection Campaign 10th Anniversary conference, held in Washington DC 2010, is the last place I saw myself being invited to a couple of years ago. Unemployed and changing careers, I withdrew from conventional academe to work bees on surface mine sites in Kentucky, which are not conventional places to define new careers.

The Language Of Horses, Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley

Advance Praise for The Language of Horses "These living, breathing poems woo us...and we happily succumb to their charms."

-Dorothy Sutton, author of Backing into Mountains and Startling Art: Darwin and Matisse

"Here, among mountains and cornfields, stables and laboratories, are compelling human tongues: mother, father, daughters, lovers. The Language of Horses, in Hensley's fertile imagination and deft hands, is indeed 'the language of life rising.'"

-Libby Falk Jones, author of Above the Eastern Hilltops, Blue

"Like the scents of haymows and meadows, these poems of longing carry the reader back to an idyllic childhood in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, …

Beeconomy: What Women And Bees Can Teach Us About Local Trade And The Global Market, Tammy Horn

Tammy Horn

Queen bee. Worker bees. Busy as a bee. These phrases have shaped perceptions of women for centuries, but how did these stereotypes begin? Who are the women who keep bees and what can we learn from them? Beeconomy examines the fascinating evolution of the relationship between women and bees around the world. From Africa to Australia to Asia, women have participated in the pragmatic aspects of honey hunting and in the more advanced skills associated with beekeeping as hive technology has advanced through the centuries.

Synthesizing the various aspects of hive-related products, such as beewax and cosmetics, as well as …

Book Review: The Gloria Anzaldual Reader, And: The Feminist Theory Reader Local And Global Perspectives, And: Feminism Redux An Anthology Of Literary Theory And Criticism, Xiumei Pu

Xiumei Pu

No abstract provided.

Expecting, Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley

Cora As soon as your brother-in-law gives you word, you begin making the room ready. One of the upstairs bedrooms. The one with the east facing window. The room that was never filled.

You paint the walls a pale lilac. Elden and one of the farmhands drag an old iron bed in from the storage room in the barn. You sand off the rust and paint it white. You hang sheer curtains and spread a bright quilt—one of dozens your grandmother made over the years—across the bed. As a final touch, you add an antique vanity—a splurge purchase—with flowering vines …