Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What Does That Mean?, Carolyn Rhodes

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cover Girl Run For Cover, Rénee Olander

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pai Dos Burros, Luisa A. Igloria

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Excerpts From "Death Journal", Nancy Olthoff

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Decision, Edith White

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Shell Seekers And Working Women Readers’ Search For Serenity, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

For the last decade feminist literary critics have convincingly argued that bestselling novels from Gone with the Wind (1936) and Forever Amber (1944) to The Valley of the Dolls (1966) and The Flame and the Flower (1972) reveal the psychic needs of twentieth-century middle-class American women, and that these needs have as much to do with desire for the emotional sustenance they once received from their mothers as with desire for heterosexual romance. However, as more and more women have moved from the private to the public workplace, their psychic needs have changed somewhat. Based on the American popularity of …

Androgyny Or Catastrophe: Doris Lessing's Vision In The Early 1970s, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Doris Lessing's novels of the early 1970s offer readers a rare kind of wisdom one which has been nourished by Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, which she admires. Unlike Lessing's earlier fiction which was simply influenced by the ideas of Sufism, three of her novels-Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)-are literally Sufi fables-that is, symbolic stories, each of which "illuminates truth" (qtd. in Shah, The Sufis 14). The Sufi truth illuminated by these novels is that "life is One," and that because we have …

Cinderella, Marie Antoinette, And Sara: Roles And Role Models In A Little Princess, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Role-model criticism, the easiest and often most logical form of criticism for children’s literature, has fallen out of favor in our more theoretically sophisticated times. Toril Moi, surveying the state of feminist criticism in 1985, devoted a chapter to “Images of Women” criticism, finding it overly prescriptive and frequently self-contradictory in its calls for a “realistic” or accurate depiction of women’s lives simultaneously with the desire for “strong, impressive female characters” (47). Since many real women (and men!) are neither strong nor impressive, the effort is doomed from the start. And the specific call for “role models” is problematic in …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

Reflections And Projections On American Feminism And Culture: An Interview With Gloria Steinem, Melissa Friedling, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

This interview was conducted in September 1995 when Gloria Steinem visited Iowa City during her book tour for the second edition of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Republished in 1995, initially published in 1983, and consisting of essays first released as early as 1963, Outrageous Acts provides an occasion for us to think between decades of American feminist political, cultural, and academic endeavor. As academic feminists of the third wave, we took this opportunity to engage Gloria Steinem as a public intellectual whose cultural work calls us to interrogate both contemporary culture’s “friendly” incorporations and recent “feminist” hostile repudiations of …

Southern Africa And The Themes Of Madness: Novels By Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, And Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

However different their lives, Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, and Nadine Gordimer share the common heritage of having grown up in southern Africa. All three were profoundly affected by that experience. Their responses to the colonialist, racist, and sexist attitudes that permeated their lives have determined, to a major extent. the nature of their fiction. Their novels reflect the grotesque situations and bizarre human relationships created by prejudice, injustice, and the desire to dominate. These three authors focus on the mad nature of this social and political situation in southern Africa. In their works, dystopian and utopian visions of the future …

Feminists Face The Job Market: Q & A (Questions & Anecdotes), Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

When I began work on this paper I designed a questionnaire to be filled out by women who had recently been on the job market. It asked for fairly detailed information: titles of accepted articles, writing samples, and dissertation, number of MLA interviews, other interviews, campus visits, kinds of questions asked, etc. I had hoped, I think, to develop a magic formula—twelve writing sample requests divided by three interviews multiplied by two publications equals an 87% chance of getting a job, for example. But I had trouble developing the formula; no common patterns emerged. The first thing I did learn …

Seeking Polly, Pretty Polly, Poor Polly, Or The Granddaughter Seeks To Remember What The Grandfathers Sought To Forget, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

My great-great-great-grandmother is so special to me because I found her despite the fact that she was deliberately written out of my his-tory. And this is the story of our meeting.

Postmortem Diagnoses Of Virginia Woolf's 'Madness': The Precarious Quest For Truth, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

The reputation of British writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now well established. Her brilliance as a writer is seldom contested, and her place in the literary canon is assured. Whether interested in literary traditions, textual studies, applied feminism, or postmodern theory, most scholars and critics admire what she had to say and how she said it. The variety, volume, and quality of her writings are impressive; her skill as a writer is seen not only in her eight novels but also in her essays, diaries, letters, short stories, biographies and nonfictional works A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas …

Women And Revolution In Dystopian Fiction: Nadine Gordimer's July's People And Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) are both dystopias, nightmare visions of the future. Both of the worlds depicted come into being because of revolutionary coups. However, in both cases, the revolutions were in progress long before the actual takeovers, and there were opportunities for citizens to have prevented these dystopian situations from coming to pass. Yet, because changing the direction of political events requires energy, solidarity, bravery or at least some self-sacrifice, most citizens are reluctant to become involved. Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Atwood understand this attitude because they have felt that way …

Marge Piercy's Small Changes: Welcome To The Sexual Revolution, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes is encyclopedic in its incredibly detailed, all-encompassing feminist analysis of female and male behavior in the late 60's and early 70's. The behavior of the younger generation is compared and contrasted with that of their parents. The overall impression given by the novel is that, despite the very different life-styles of the two generations, very little change has, in fact, occurred. At the end of the novel, sexism prevails and no significant threat to male control of the power structure has developed. From examination of the title, Piercy seems to place her emphasis not upon …

Feminist Criticism Of Classical Rhetoric Texts: A Case Study Of Gorgias' Helen, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

Despite the diversity of claims feminist scholars of antiquity advance, they share at least one preoccupation: the critique of patriarchy. That is, they challenge "the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women" (Lerner 239) enacted in primary and secondary texts. The particular methods by which they make their critiques of women's subjugation vary as much as their claims, but most can be classified into one of two categories according to their broad interests in woman as a reader or as a writer of classical texts. Using Elaine Showalter's classifications, for example, we can group most of this scholarship under …

Teaching Literature In The 1990'S: Meeting The Challenge, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

English teachers are currently beset by a variety of political forces vying for their attention. Education has become big news again for the first time since October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union inaugurated the Space Age by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. In 1957, astonished at the Russians' success, Americans panicked and decided that their math science, and foreign language training was inadequate. Recent survey~ showing the superiority of Japanese and European students over American students have provoked serious concern about the quality of education going on in American public schools and in our colleges and universities. The …

The Spherical Vision, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

Virginia Woolf's experiences as a manic-depressive influenced her vision of reality and, in tum, her aesthetics. Manic-depression is a "cyclic" illness-cyclic in the sense that the manic-depressive moves alternately between two extreme psychological states. Hence, he experiences reality in terms of two opposite perspectives. Psychotic depression involves what Jung describes as the experience of the "shadow." That is, looking into the unconscious, the individual sees his own reflection. He takes a risk in looking, for as Jung says, "The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because …

The Evolution Of Doris Lessing's Art From A Mystical Moment To Space Fiction, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

After publishing ten major novels, Doris Lessing has begun writing what she calls '·space fiction'· for her new series entitled Canopus in Argos: Archives. In a review of the first two novels published in this series, namely, Shikasta ( 1979) and the Marriages Between Zones Three. Four, and Five (1980)¹. Jean Pickering stresses that many of Doris Lessing's most avid readers were initially attracted to her because of her insights about the female experience and because of her allegiance to nineteenth-century realism." Pickering suggests that Lessing's growing interest in space fiction and Sufism (Islamic mysticism) has …

Zora Neale Hurston, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Some new information is occasionally being ferreted out that may help to cast additional light on some of these issues, but quite clearly Zora Neale Hurston will remain something of an enigma - too complex a figure to reach any easy conclusions about, except perhaps that she defies simple characterization. People responded to her (and still do) very emotionally: her detractors despise her bitterly; her defenders love her passionately. All agree that she was eccentric, colorful, entertaining, humorous, and unforgettable.

Perhaps the most crucial question to pose about her is why one of the most important figures in the Harlem …

Black Eve Or Madonna? A Study Of The Antithetical Views Of The Mother In Black American Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Within these two extreme views of woman - the mother who brings death and destruction versus the mother who brings life and salvation - where does the Black American mother stand? It seems to me that it would not be inappropriate to look at the literature, not as mere fiction, but rather as an interpretation and compilation of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and a host of other areas. Thus the true literary artist reveals life more accurately and with more insight than any historical facts and statistical details, because he deals with the truth of the human heart, with the …