Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …