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Articles 1 - 30 of 52
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Ted Cohen On Sharing The World, Michael Fischer
Ted Cohen On Sharing The World, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
"Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own": The Graphic Turn And The Future Of Holocaust Representation, Victoria Aarons
"Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own": The Graphic Turn And The Future Of Holocaust Representation, Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of …
Rolle Reassembled: Booklet Production, Single-Author Anthologies, And The Making Of Bodley 861, Andrew B. Kraebel
Rolle Reassembled: Booklet Production, Single-Author Anthologies, And The Making Of Bodley 861, Andrew B. Kraebel
English Faculty Research
The assignment of value to manuscripts on the basis of their antiquity—that is, the notion that books written at a greater distance from the present were therefore more deserving of attention—reflects a sensibility more commonly associated with early modern collectors than with medieval scribes. Malcolm Parkes, for example, though describing many instances of archaizing hands in medieval manuscripts, tends to see these as pragmatic efforts driven by “the need to copy replacement leaves,” a more practical aim than the Tudor valuing of medieval scripts, which “came to be perceived as emblematic of the past.”1 Within this framework, though generally …
Reading Roth/Reading Ourselves: Looking Back, Victoria Aarons
Reading Roth/Reading Ourselves: Looking Back, Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
Roth thus presents his characters as figures bearing the very seductive possibility of a "multitude of realities." Disenchanted with a worn-out, dampened, banal, and diminished life, one can slip into another, "an exchange of existences," as the wily Zuckerman says. But, in changing those distasteful and objectionable aspects of one's existence, one would do well to caution against the intemperate, impulsive desire, the head-long rush to "change everything," as Zuckerman chastises his brother Henry (Counterlife 156; italics in original). In other words, one would do well to show some restraint, as Roth's characters more often than not humorously …
Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, And Literary Authority, Claudia Stokes
Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, And Literary Authority, Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, commonplacing was a habitual practice of middle-class US households, undertaken by children and adults alike to record notable quotations and to cultivate their literary taste. Though it declined in popularity with the rise of the scrapbook in the midcentury, commonplacing was for centuries a standard feature of both educational curricula and domestic literacy, with generations of students instructed in the intellectual and moral benefits of selecting and copying passages culled from reading. Commonplace books offer a wealth of vital information about US literary culture, for they not only illuminate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading …
American Jewish Writing In The Twenty-First Century: New Global Directions, Victoria Aarons
American Jewish Writing In The Twenty-First Century: New Global Directions, Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
"Sinful Creature, Full Of Weakness": The Theology Of Disability In Cummins's The Lamplighter [Review], Claudia Stokes
"Sinful Creature, Full Of Weakness": The Theology Of Disability In Cummins's The Lamplighter [Review], Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
After several decades of scholarship that discerned general patterns in literary representations of disability, recent years have seen a turn toward the specific and the particular, with a focused concentration on the ways in which individual texts and literary moments limn bodily difference. In a recent essay about disability in the early American novel, Sari Altschuler made a compelling case for this transition by showing that some of the standard claims about literary representations of disability simply failed to apply to the specific nature of early American fiction, and she consequently called for more particularized, historically grounded analyses of literary …
Saul Bellow As A Novelist Of Ideas: Introduction To The Forum, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales
Saul Bellow As A Novelist Of Ideas: Introduction To The Forum, Victoria Aarons, Gustavo Sánchez-Canales
English Faculty Research
On the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Saul Bellow asked, “What is at the center now?” (2015a: 299). This question gets at the heart of a lifetime of literary attempts to find “the center,” to expose the core of what it means to be human in the volatile, unstable, and explosive twentieth century. In defense of what, for Bellow, was the singular preoccupation of his lengthy and distinguished literary career, he insists that “[o]ut of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more …
Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons
Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has, as its frontispiece, two epigraphs that frame and set the stage for the fraught condition of its protagonist, Asa Leventhal, as he navigates a tortuous course through the physical and psychic landscape that threatens to be his undoing. The novel’s first epigraph narrates the brief but portentous “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a lone merchant, traveling on business and oppressed by the heat, takes shelter beneath a tree. There he breaks fast, relieving his weariness and his hunger with bread and dates. …
The Future Of Joyce's A Portrait: The Künstlerroman And Hope, David Rando
The Future Of Joyce's A Portrait: The Künstlerroman And Hope, David Rando
English Faculty Research
This essay aims to capture some of the future effects that result from A Portrait's manipulation the artist novel genre. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's distinctions between the detective and the artist novel genres, this essay views A Portrait as a hybrid of both genres, at once obsessed with detective fiction's 'darkness at the beginning' (as emblematized by Stephen's anxiety surrounding the Foetus inscription) and the artist novel's 'not-yet' (as emblematized by the wish image of Stephen's green rose). A Portrait's status as an artist novel is complicated by Stephen's reprisal in Ulysses, but this essay argues that, …
“The Knots Within”: Translations, Tapestries, And The Art Of Reading Backwards, Kathryn Vomero Santos
“The Knots Within”: Translations, Tapestries, And The Art Of Reading Backwards, Kathryn Vomero Santos
English Faculty Research
This article presents a new approach to reading the famous tapestry metaphor that has circulated in discourses on translation for centuries. Popularized by Miguel de Cervantes in the second part of Don Quixote (1615), the image of the tapestry’s two sides—the smooth front side and the messy reverse side—has long been assumed to illustrate the uneven relationship between an original and its translation. Following the lead of seventeenth-century English translator Leonard Digges, who urges readers to remember “the knots within” that make the tapestry possible, the article advocates for a method of reading backwards toward a history of translation …
Grace Paley’S Urban Jewish Voice: Identity, History, And "The Tune Of The Language", Victoria Aarons
Grace Paley’S Urban Jewish Voice: Identity, History, And "The Tune Of The Language", Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
Dans ses nouvelles minimalistes et expérimentales, Grace Paley construit un monde urbain d’après-guerre typiquement juif américain. C’est avant tout par le dialogue qu’elle donne vie à ses personnages qui sont toujours décrits dans des lieux de convivialité et de rencontre (perrons, cours d’école, rues ou squares du quartier) et dont la place dans l’histoire est définie par le langage. L’intrigue pour Paley est purement secondaire : c’est par le langage et la transmission des histoires qui les définissent que les personnages déterminent leur rapport à eux-mêmes et au monde. Diverse, compacte, nuancée et éloquente dans sa simplicité même, la langue …
The Poetics Of Unoriginality: The Case Of Lucretia Davidson, Claudia Stokes
The Poetics Of Unoriginality: The Case Of Lucretia Davidson, Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
Literary conventionality and unoriginality have long been presumed to be markers of lesser literary quality. Scholars of women’s literature have argued that this assumption enabled the denigration of nineteenth-century American women writers, many of whose works markedly adhered to literary convention and evaded innovation. Following the work of such critics as Eliza Richards and Virginia Jackson in unearthing the contemporary literary contexts that framed female literary conventionality, this essay argues that the writings of Lucretia Davidson, an enormously popular poet, provides an important data point in our understandings of the social uses of literary unoriginality. Specifically, Davidson’s work suggests that …
Defending Compromise, Michael Fischer
Defending Compromise, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
The article focuses on the opinion of James Wagner, president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, about the role of compromise in founding and sustaining the American political system. The reaction of the public to the article he published in the Winter 2013 issue of the "Emory Magazine" entitled "As American as...Compromise" is discussed. The view of professor Avishai Margalit about the idea of rotten compromises outlined in the article is also noted.
The Religious Novel, Claudia Stokes
Like The Odyssey, Only Different: Olympian Omnipotence Versus Karmic Adjustment In Pynchon's Vineland, David Rando
Like The Odyssey, Only Different: Olympian Omnipotence Versus Karmic Adjustment In Pynchon's Vineland, David Rando
English Faculty Research
In Vineland, Pynchon recalls the Odyssey in order to foreground crucial differences from its Western model of comprehending narrative outcomes as acts of Olympian or divine omnipotence. Instead, Vineland does something innovative with narrative power, establishing specific karmic character relationships that potentially ameliorate personal and national grievances and suffering and broadening our understanding of narrative power and outcomes beyond the heavy hand of judgment in order to register gentle karmic nudges.
Hosting Language: Immigration And Translation In The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Kathryn Vomero Santos
Hosting Language: Immigration And Translation In The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Kathryn Vomero Santos
English Faculty Research
I will argue that Shakespeare uses the dialogic form of drama to stage such encounters between the languages of guest and host and to demonstrate that hosting the stranger in the English language causes the play’s English characters, along with its audiences and readers, to become “sensitive to the strangeness of [their] own language” and yet resistant to the idea that the immigrant can ever be fully “Englished” (Ricoeur 2006: 29).7
Expelled Once Again: The Fantasy Of Living The Counterlife In Roth’S Nemesis, Victoria Aarons
Expelled Once Again: The Fantasy Of Living The Counterlife In Roth’S Nemesis, Victoria Aarons
English Faculty Research
In Nemesis (2010) the misguided attempts to create and to live an anxiously figured counterlife turn catasttophic as Roth's Bucky Cantor, the Jewish warrior of the Weequahic playgrounds, attempts to step out of his life and reinvent himself Here the art of impersonation is shown to be an impossible failure. For the deluded Bucky Cantor is inevitably stticken, not only with polio, but with the illusion that he can walk out of^ one life—the life bequeathed to him—and inhabit the lives of others. Roth shows the desire to live out the counterlife to be the ultimate self-delusion, exposing instead, as …
The Religious Revival: Narratives Of Religious Origin In Us Culture [Review], Claudia Stokes
The Religious Revival: Narratives Of Religious Origin In Us Culture [Review], Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
The administration of George W. Bush ushered in a new era of public religious discourse. Before the 2000 election, a politician’s religion generally remained in the shadowy recesses of private life, politely referenced only as metonymic evidence attesting to his or her strong moral foundation and character. The presidential campaigns of George W. Bush moved religious rhetoric from the political margins to the center, by speaking openly about the effects of his midlife conversion to Christianity and by using coded religious language to mobilize conservative Christian voters. This explicit inclusion of religious rhetoric has dramatically changed the texture of American …
David Foster Wallace And Lovelessness, David Rando
David Foster Wallace And Lovelessness, David Rando
English Faculty Research
The article focuses on the American writer David Foster Wallace and his way of expressing emotions in his works. Topics discussed include Wallace using irony in his fictions to express genuine emotions, critics of his work reproducing Wallace's own thoughts to criticize him, and his books "Oblivion," and "Infinite Jest," and the unfinished novel "The Pale King." It also refers to the book "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf in comparison to deaths in Wallace's works.
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
Imagine a community where constructive dialogue across political, class, and other differences is rare. Threatened by disagreement, individuals cluster together with like-minded believers, often egging one another on into taking even more extreme positions, usually against their ideological opponents. Sources of information are selected to ratify existing views instead of challenging them. Shielded from external perspectives, individuals stay stuck in anger, opposition, and resentment, recycling grievances against their enemies and spinning out fantasies of revenge.
George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando
George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando
English Faculty Research
George Saunders peoples his stories with the losers of American history—the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history’s winners have walked all over on their paths to glory, fame, or terrific wealth. Among other forms of marginalization, Saunders’s subject is above all the American working class. In the last twenty or more years, however, for reasons that include the fall of the Soviet Union, the impact of poststructuralist theory, conceptualizations of identity that more and more take race and gender into consideration alongside class, and the general cultural turn in class analysis, it has become increasingly difficult to write …
My Kingdom: Sentimentalism And The Refinement Of Hymnody, Claudia Stokes
My Kingdom: Sentimentalism And The Refinement Of Hymnody, Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
Few features of mid-nineteenth-century American women’s literature seem as foreign and outdated today as the omnipresence of hymns. In countless literary works, hymns are quoted, sung, discussed, and contemplated. Hymns in these texts are rivaled in influence only by the Bible and are potent catalysts of religious experience, sparking conversion in the unbeliever and offering reassurance to the faithful during times of trouble. In the literary world of the American mid-century, the singing of a hymn can bring tears to the eyes of even the most hardened unbeliever. Such scenes pervade fiction of the period. During Ellen Montgomery’s sorrowful trip …
Bodies Of Reform: The Rhetoric Of Character In Gilded Age America [Review], Claudia Stokes
Bodies Of Reform: The Rhetoric Of Character In Gilded Age America [Review], Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
What is the nature of human character? Is it innate or the product of socialization? Is it fixed or fungible, whether for good or for ill? The multiple theories regarding the origins of character that percolated throughout the 1800s have become a mainstay of nineteenth-century U.S. studies over the last twenty years, receiving particular attention in analyses of late-century responses to the anxiety sparked by immigration, labor agitation, and unstable financial markets as well as by the Race Question and the Woman Question. Societal reform during this time was actively fueled by debates about the nature and origin of character, …
These Days Of Large Things: The Culture Of Size In America, 1865-1930 [Review], Claudia Stokes
These Days Of Large Things: The Culture Of Size In America, 1865-1930 [Review], Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
In These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865–1930, Michael Tavel Clarke examines the Progressive Era preoccupation with size. As Clarke argues with considerable evidence, largeness was widely interpreted in this period (and, indeed, in our own) to denote progress and advancement while smallness in turn signified degeneracy and unwholesomeness. This pervasive and enduring schema, Clarke shows, had its roots in American expansionism and imperialism, enterprises underwritten by the interlocking beliefs that bigger is better and that superiority must be physically manifest.
Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities [Review], Michael Fischer
Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha Nussbaum joins many observers in arguing that the arts and humanities are under siege, threatened by budget cuts and a growing emphasis on professional training. When budget cuts do not eliminate university programs in the arts and humanities, they swell class size to the point that the traditional hallmarks of a humanistic education—class discussion, essay examinations, research assignments demanding critical thinking—become untenable. Instead, PowerPoint lecturing and multiple-choice exercises dominate, reinforcing the rote learning that standardized testing has already made the norm in K–12 education. A recent Wall Street Journal article, …
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms [Review], David Rando
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms [Review], David Rando
English Faculty Research
It appears that the moderns are catching up to the Victorians at last. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier’s edited volume, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940, represents the most forceful statement to date about the possibilities and opportunities for print culture studies in the modernist period. While the study of print culture has flourished in Victorian studies for decades, particularly through the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and its journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, modernist studies has been slower to embrace print culture studies. There are many historical and theoretical reasons for this, but even field nomenclature may make a difference. “Victorian studies” …
The Perverse In Historical Perception: Anne Frank And Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, David Rando
The Perverse In Historical Perception: Anne Frank And Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, David Rando
English Faculty Research
The cover art for Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane over the Sea reproduces a turn-of-the-century postcard that depicts bathers in an ocean. In the foreground, the figure of a woman leans propped against a railing. For the album, her head has been replaced with a well-worn drumhead. She and the nearest bather have an arm raised. From behind the woman, another raised arm of an otherwise subtended bather appears. Two figures farther in the distance are in the water up to their heads. The blithe face of the nearest bather looks up toward the woman, whose own face has …
The Cat's Meow: Ulysses, Animals, And The Veterinary Gaze, David Rando
The Cat's Meow: Ulysses, Animals, And The Veterinary Gaze, David Rando
English Faculty Research
This essay argues that Joyce's representational techniques seek to intervene in the rationalized mode of apprehending animal bodies—here called the veterinary gaze—in order to deconstruct its authority and the barriers it maintains between humans and animals. Joyce's intervention, however, is necessarily a modest one. This is because the extraordinary language acts by which Ulysses would redefine the representation of humans and animals simultaneously reinforce the linguistic basis that maintains the barriers. At the same time, Ulysses evokes a sadness that to some extent redraws the human/animal divide, but this sadness is less an effect of language than it is of …
The Death Of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy Of His Last Days [Review], Michael Fischer
The Death Of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy Of His Last Days [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
Sigmund Freud has been on Mark Edmundson’s mind at least since his 1990 book, Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud. In that book, Edmundson uncovers a tension between two sides of Freud: the normative Freud committed to a rigid understanding of human behavior, and the romantic Freud whose restlessness with all given conventions inspired endless self-reinvention in his own writing. This side of Freud shows his kinship to Wordsworth, Emerson, and other writers and provides grounds of resistance to what is most stultifying in his own work. In Edmundson’s view, we need the imaginative …