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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
[Review Of The Book Pollock's Modernism, By M. Schreyach], Eileen Costello
[Review Of The Book Pollock's Modernism, By M. Schreyach], Eileen Costello
Art and Art History Faculty Research
In 1950, on one of the few occasions that Jackson Pollock publicly discussed his approach to painting, he remarked that 'technique is just a means of arriving at a statement'. Given Pollock's revolutionary method and unprecedented formal achievements, this declaration has generated an enormous amount of critical attention over the past sixty-five years. The book under review is the most recent contribution, yet it stands apart from earlier studies.
God, Space, & City In The Roman Imagination [Review], Timothy M. O'Sullivan
God, Space, & City In The Roman Imagination [Review], Timothy M. O'Sullivan
Classical Studies Faculty Research
This ambitious book aims to convey what ancient Romans saw, thought, and felt as they experienced their city. Jenkyns focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on literary sources in his attempt to reconstruct how the Roman worldview of the late Republic and early Principate was shaped by the city of Rome itself, and vice versa. The built environment and public space are the principal points of emphasis, but the volume ranges widely over many other topics as well, including religious devotion, attitudes to the countryside, and Roman tourism.
Racializing Queerness, Queering Nationalism, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz
Racializing Queerness, Queering Nationalism, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Book review of Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire by Sandra K. Soto, part of the Chicana Matters Series.
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, …
Some Homeric Hymns [Review], Corinne Ondine Pache
Some Homeric Hymns [Review], Corinne Ondine Pache
Classical Studies Faculty Research
R. offers a new edition of Hymns 3, 4 and 5. The volume follows the typical Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics format and includes a broad discussion of the Homeric Hymns, individual introductions for each hymn discussed, a section on the Homeric Hymns and Hellenistic poetry, a chapter on the transmission of the text, and three maps. R.’s text is based on previous editions, and he uses Càssola’s apparatus criticus as his ‘base’ (p. 33). In his general introduction, R. elegantly deals with questions of dating, authorship, the order of the poems and their function as preludes. The individual …
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” …
Writing And Empire In Tacitus [Review], Timothy M. O'Sullivan
Writing And Empire In Tacitus [Review], Timothy M. O'Sullivan
Classical Studies Faculty Research
Over the past decade, scholars such as Ash, O’Gorman, and Haynes have taken up a cause long championed by Woodman, insisting that we must treat Tacitus’ works as literary productions before we can use them as historical documents. By remaining attentive to issues of voice, allusion, and narrative presentation, these scholars have shown how Tacitus is worthy of the kinds of intense readings we might perform on any ancient author writing in poetry or prose; in many ways they do for Tacitus what Miles, Jaeger, and Feldherr did for Livy in the 1990s. Dylan Sailor’s Writing and Empire in Tacitus …
Critical Moments In Classical Literature [Review], Lawrence Kim
Critical Moments In Classical Literature [Review], Lawrence Kim
Classical Studies Faculty Research
Critical Moments in Classical Literature is a curious book; deeply learned, elegantly written, and filled with subtle observations on a vast array of texts, but also somewhat diffuse, elusive, and in the end frustrating. On the face of it, the subtitle, Studies in the Ancient View of Literature and its Uses, is a good description of the book’s six chapters, each focused on a text constituting a ‘critical moment’ in ancient literary criticism: (1) Aristophanes’ Frogs, (2) Euripides’ Cyclops, (4) Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation, (5) Longinus’ On the Sublime, and (6) Plutarch’s How the …
A Referential Commentary And Lexicon To Homer, Iliad Viii [Review], Erwin F. Cook
A Referential Commentary And Lexicon To Homer, Iliad Viii [Review], Erwin F. Cook
Classical Studies Faculty Research
A 14,305 page Iliad commentary? That is what we get if we multiply the pages Adrian Kelly lavishes on Book 8 with the poem’s dimensions. And, Book 8? This is never really explained, though I suspect the long scholarly tradition that the book strays from Homer’s typical compositional practices and standards is one reason. For Adrian Kelly’s stated objective is to recreate at least part of the rich network of associations available to the early auditors of epic, with the result that Book 8 is shown to be as traditional as any other.
Review Of Adele Reinhartz, Jesus Of Hollywood [Review Of The Book Jesus Of Hollywood, By A. Reinhartz], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Review Of Adele Reinhartz, Jesus Of Hollywood [Review Of The Book Jesus Of Hollywood, By A. Reinhartz], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
Since the advent of the modern film in the late nineteenth century over one hundred films on Jesus have been made. They tend to come in spurts. About a half-dozen major silent films were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, the most famous of which is Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). After over three decades in which no Jesus film appeared—thanks in part to the Production Code adopted by Hollywood and promoted by the Catholic Legion of Decency—several rmajor films on Jesus were released in the 1960s, and several more in the 1970s, including two musicals. The …
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 …
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 [Review], David Rando
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 [Review], David Rando
English Faculty Research
Like Stranger Shores (2000), Inner Workings collects J. M. Coetzee’s recent literary essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books or as introductions. Bound together, they accrue a taste and texture that readers might not have suspected if they encountered these essays in their original publications. Coetzee engages a compelling cluster of twentieth-century writers, including, among others, Italo Svevo, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, V. S. Naipaul, and, likely of special interest to this journal’s readers, Philip Roth. Walt Whitman is the lonely denizen …
Review Of Jonathan L. Reed, The Harpercollins Visual Guide To The New Testament [Review Of The Book The Harpercollins Visual Guide To The New Testament: What Archaeology Reveals About The First Christians, By J. L. Reed], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
Jonathan Reed begins the first chapter of The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament with the assertion that "archaeology is imperative for the study of the New Testament." This much most students of the New Testament and early Christian literature would grant. But how and to what degree is archaeology important to biblical studies is less clear and can be at times a contentious issue. The expectation that archaeology should provide proof of the historical reliability of the New Testament has for decades sent many a would-be Indiana Jones off in search of this or that biblical site with …
Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando
Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando
English Faculty Research
Books about Finnegans Wake announce their forms with unusual regularity: skeleton keys, plot summaries, reader’s guides, first-draft versions, lexicons, gazetteers, censuses, genetic guides, annotations, and more. Every form offers a particular route through the Wake, and we hope our collective efforts add up to a cartography of possibilities. But until now we have never been issued an “invitation” to the Wake. Many readers of this journal will realize that they must have invited themselves uncouthly to the Wake long ago, and some will imagine that it is too late for invitations when one has already been at the party …
Paul The Reluctant Witness: Power And Weakness In Luke's Portrayal [Review Of The Book Paul The Reluctant Witness: Power And Weakness In Luke's Portrayal By B. Shipp], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Paul The Reluctant Witness: Power And Weakness In Luke's Portrayal [Review Of The Book Paul The Reluctant Witness: Power And Weakness In Luke's Portrayal By B. Shipp], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
That the Acts of the Apostles includes three slightly different accounts of Paul's Damascus road encounter with Jesus has long presented a challenge to interpreters. In this book Blake Shipp seeks to understand the function of the three accounts in Acts 9, 22, and 26 within the larger narrative sweep of Acts by means of a rhetorical analysis. Critical of what he calls the chaotic state of current rhetorical criticism, Shipp also proposes guidelines for the application of rhetorical analysis of the New Testament, something he terms a "literary-rhetorical" method. The bulk of Shipp's analysis of Acts consists of the …
Review Of Santiago Guijarro Oporto, Jesús Y Sus Primeros Discípulos [Review Of The Book Jesús Y Sus Primeros Discípulos, By S. Guijarro Oporto], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Review Of Santiago Guijarro Oporto, Jesús Y Sus Primeros Discípulos [Review Of The Book Jesús Y Sus Primeros Discípulos, By S. Guijarro Oporto], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
This book collects nine studies by the author, each of which addresses slightly different aspects of the study of earliest Christianity in Palestine. All but one of the essays have been previously published between the years 2000 and 2006. As such, the book does not systematically work toward a single argument; nonetheless, the various chapters display a remarkable unity by virtue of addressing aspects of the study of the Synoptic Gospels and by means of a largely consistent methodological approach that can be described as a combination of typical New Testament methods and approaches, such as form and redaction criticism, …
Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity – By Jennifer Wright Knust [Review Of The Book Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity By J. W. Knust], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity – By Jennifer Wright Knust [Review Of The Book Abandoned To Lust: Sexual Slander And Ancient Christianity By J. W. Knust], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
The author argues that accusations of sexual depravity in early Christian literature, whatever their historical value, must be placed in the broader context of Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions in which charges of sexual deviance were stock elements of rhetorical slander. The first chapter, “Sexual Slander and Ancient Invective,” shows the degree to which the discourses of status and gender were intertwined in the Greco-Roman world. In this context, accusations of sexual deviance served the construction and maintenance of an elite identity understood as a male who is able to control his passions and avoid excess. In four subsequent chapters she tracks …
Memory, Tradition And Text: Uses Of The Past In Early Christianity - Edited By Alan Kirk And Tom Thatcher [Review Of The Book Memory, Tradition And Text: Uses Of The Past In Early Christianity, By A. Kirk & T. Thatcher, Ed.], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
The aim of this collection of essays is, at least in part, to remedy the lack of attention that studies of early Christianity have paid to recent developments, in the fields of sociology and anthropology, in the study of memory. An excellent introductory survey by Alan Kirk of recent developments in memory studies is followed by eleven essays applying some aspect of the approach to various texts or problems in the study of early Christianity, and then by responses by Werner Kelber and Barry Schwartz. While the various contributions interact in different ways with the relevant theories and models, all …
Kingship In The Mycenaean World And Its Reflections In The Oral Tradition [Review], Erwin F. Cook
Kingship In The Mycenaean World And Its Reflections In The Oral Tradition [Review], Erwin F. Cook
Classical Studies Faculty Research
Shear undertakes a detailed comparison of archaeological evidence from Mycenaean Greece, the surviving Linear B tablets, and the Homeric epics with the aim of showing that, contrary to the reigning scholarly consensus, Homer preserves a detailed and accurate portrait of the age he purports to describe. Indeed, Shear believes that both epics and much of Greek myth took shape during this period and reflect actual historical events (hence the reference to "oral tradition" rather than "Homer" in the title). Thus, because Pelops is the eponym of the Pcloponnesos, "he should logically belong to the early tradition that evolved soon after …
The Sex Lives Of Saints: An Erotics Of Ancient Hagiography – By Virginia Burrus [Review Of The Book The Sex Lives Of Saints: An Erotics Of Ancient Hagiography By V. Burrus], Rubén R. Dupertuis
The Sex Lives Of Saints: An Erotics Of Ancient Hagiography – By Virginia Burrus [Review Of The Book The Sex Lives Of Saints: An Erotics Of Ancient Hagiography By V. Burrus], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
In the difficult yet rewarding book Burrus offers “countererotic” readings of fourth- and fifth-century CE hagiographies in which she challenges understandings that take ascetic lives of saints as sublimating sexual desire; rather, Burrus reads these texts as the site of an “exuberant eroticism” that constantly relocates and displaces erotic desire. After an introductory chapter, Burrus first focuses on Jerome’s “queer” Lives of Paul, Malchus, and Hilarion. A second chapter treats the eroticized lives of three women: Jerome’s friend Paula, Gregory of Nyssa’s sister Macrina, and Augustine’s mother, Monica. A third chapter focuses on several treatments of Martin of Tours in …
An Ecstasy Of Folly: Prophecy And Authority In Early Christianity – By Laura Nasrallah [Review Of The Book An Ecstasy Of Folly: Prophecy And Authority In Early Christianity By L. Nasrallah], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
Nasrallah’s book is a valuable contribution to the study of prophecy and ecstatic manifestations in early Christianity, for its reading of representative Christian texts within the larger context of debates about such phenomena in the Greco-Roman world, and for viewing the materials through the lens of rhetorical criticism. Nasrallah focuses on three texts or authors: Paul’s discussion of the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians, Tertullian’s defense of prophecy in De anima and related texts, and the Anti-Phrygian source, Nasrallah’s name for the late second—early-third-century source probably embedded in Epiphanius’ Panarion. Nasrallah argues that taxonomies of forms of …
[Review Of The Book The Reception Of Luke And Acts In The Period Before Irenaeus: Looking For Luke In The Second Century, By A. Gregory], Rubén R. Dupertuis
[Review Of The Book The Reception Of Luke And Acts In The Period Before Irenaeus: Looking For Luke In The Second Century, By A. Gregory], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
In this book, a revision of the author's 2001 Oxford dissertation, Andrew Gregory has set for himself the daunting task of determining when we can definitively say that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are being used by later Christian authors. The greatest contribution of this book is that it treats in one study a broad range of texts and scholarly discussion on this question–according to the author, the first time this has been done.
Lost Christianities: The Battles For Scripture And The Faiths We Never Knew [Review Of The Book Lost Christianities: The Battles For Scripture And The Faiths We Never Knew By B. D. Ehrman], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
This book is an introduction to the basic content of non-canonical early Christian texts, exploring them both as evidence for the diversity of early Christianity and for what they can say about the formation of the New Testament canon. It is divided into three sections. The first uses the concept of forgery to introduce a number of important extra-canonical texts (including Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, and the Secret Gospel of Mark). The second section takes a closer look at some of the different forms of Christianity …
The Raft Of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination Of Homer's Odyssey [Review], Erwin F. Cook
The Raft Of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination Of Homer's Odyssey [Review], Erwin F. Cook
Classical Studies Faculty Research
In The Raft of Odysseus, Carol Dougherty wishes to read several major episodes of the Odyssey as ways of imagining colonial experience, and as informed by the discourse of colonial foundation. Odysseus can be compared to an ethnographer, who gains self-knowledge through a process of “decoding” a foreign culture and “recoding” it for one’s own, so that “the strange becomes familiar and the familiar strange” (p. 10). At the same time, he is also a colonist, whose experiences among the Phaeacians and Cyclopes offer complementary images of colonial encounters, and a traveling poet, who trades his stories for commercial …
"Everybody’S Alamo": Revolution In The Revolution, Texas Style, Linda K. Salvucci
"Everybody’S Alamo": Revolution In The Revolution, Texas Style, Linda K. Salvucci
History Faculty Research
In the fall of 2000, I did what once seemed unthinkable: I willingly began to teach a first-year seminar, "Remembering the Alamo: Myth, Memory and History." Few veteran instructors of the U.S. history survey might question my desire to take a break from that always challenging responsibility. But why would a female "Yankee" whose research involves Atlantic trades and empires settle upon such an unlikely topic? To some extent, the answer is personal, and represents my slow coming to terms with the universal symbol of the city I have called home since 1985. Yet my intensified commitment to remembering the …
[Review Of The Book Introduction To The New Testament, Vol. 2: History And Literature Of Early Christianity, By H. Koester], Rubén R. Dupertuis
[Review Of The Book Introduction To The New Testament, Vol. 2: History And Literature Of Early Christianity, By H. Koester], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
The publication of this book completes the second edition of Helmut Koester’s important two-volume introduction to early Christian literature and history, published originally in 1982. Like the second edition of the first volume, which appeared in 1995, this edition seeks to make current the now classic and well-known introductory volume, while maintaining its structure and organization. After covering the formation of the canon, text critical issues and an all too brief introduction to methods—only source, form, tradition, narrative and rhetorical criticism are discussed, the latter two being new to this edition—texts are discussed in chronological and geographical sequence, beginning with …
Cuatro Viajes En La Literatura Del Antiguo Egypto [Review Of The Book Cuatro Viajes En La Literatura Del Antiguo Egipto, By J. M. Galán], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Cuatro Viajes En La Literatura Del Antiguo Egypto [Review Of The Book Cuatro Viajes En La Literatura Del Antiguo Egipto, By J. M. Galán], Rubén R. Dupertuis
Religion Faculty Research
In Cuatro Viajes en la Literatura del Antigua Egypto José M. Galán brings together four stories from Egyptian literature united by the motif of the journey into unknown or enemy land. The stories grouped in this volume are "The Shipwrecked Sailor," "The Tale of Sinuhe," "The Doomed Prince" and "Report of Wenamun."
The Returns Of Odysseus: Colonization And Ethnicity [Review], Erwin F. Cook
The Returns Of Odysseus: Colonization And Ethnicity [Review], Erwin F. Cook
Classical Studies Faculty Research
The Returns of Odysseus will be essential reading for specialists in Homer, early Greek history, and ancient ethnology. They and others willing to expend the time and energy necessary to read this densely argued and worded book will win a perspective on Greek (pre)colonization and its mythology unavailable from any other source. I myself required a full week for a careful reading, after which I noted to my surprise that I had taken over 50 pages of notes, many of which now belong to my permanent files. If, in what follows, I concentrate on some illustrative problems with Malkin's (M.) …