Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics Of Genius In The United States, 1840-1890 By Gustavus Stadler, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Though the title suggests it is, this book is not a cultural history of genius in the 19th-century US. Working in a high cultural-studies mode, Stadler (Haverford College) addresses questions like those addressed in a special issue of American Literature, "Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies" (ed. by Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, v. 76, no. 3, September 2004). He uses an oddly assorted group of figures to map out a grand narrative of how the genius works to accommodate ordinary individuals to "the troubling, potentially shattering phenomena associated with modernity." In the first three chapters Stadler focuses …

Review Of Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, And The Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, Henry Turner argues that English stage practice emerged out of practical geometry and related mechanical arts. The book is part of a new critical attention to the interconnections between literature and science, one that depends on the recognition that art involved the creation not just of aesthetic objects but also of knowledge itself. Stage practice drew from geometry to develop the concepts of plat-plot and to define its use of scenes as both spatial divisions and dramatic structures. Drama also provided audiences with forms of practical knowledge …

Futurist Fiction & Fantasy: The Racial Establishment, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Futurist fiction and fantasy encompasses a variety of subgenres: hard science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, sword-and-sorcerer fantasy, and cyberpunk. Unfortunately, even though nearly a century has expired since the advent of futurist fiction and fantasy, Richard Pryor’s observation and a call for action is still viable. Despite the growing number of Black futurist fiction and fantasy writers, the proportion of Black futurist fiction and fantasy authors to White futurist fiction and fantasy authors is dismal. This disproportion means that Black futurist fiction and fantasy authors have a limited presence in the industry. Thus, although Black futurist fiction and fantasy authors …

Review Of Imagining The Primitive In Naturalist And Modernist Literature By Gina M. Rossetti, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Rossetti (St. Xavier Univ.) argues that representations of characters as “primitives” in late 19th and early-20th century literary texts served to “limn the boundaries of American Identity.” Much like Walker Been Michaels in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (CH, Mar’ 96, 33-3775), she focuses primarily on ways that literary representations seek to constitute the national family as white in the face of increasing numbers of ethnic and racial others. Rossetti brings an interesting set of nonliterary texts to this conversation, namely writings by late-19th- and early 20th-centruy sociologists and other cultural analysts, and the juxtapositions these provide allow interesting …

Reading With Your Ears: The Uses Of Opera In Literature, James E. Ford

Music and Literature Archive

In both the East and the West the relationship between opera and literature is ancient and profound. As the Disciples of the Pear Garden would know, many of the most popular works of the Beijing Opera are based on famous Chinese historical novels. And when a group of late Sixteenth-Century Italians created Western opera they were trying to revive Greek tragedy. (They knew that Greek tragedy was sung in some fashion and the speaking-to-music we know as recitiative was their attempt to reproduce that ancient practice.) Of course, many, many Western operas have been based on plays, novels, and short …

Major Literary Award Winners In The Medium-Sized Academic Library, Todd Spires

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This article addresses the role of major literary award-winning books and authors in the medium-sized academic library. It details a study performed at Bradley University’s Cullom-Davis Library in early 2006. The project surveyed award-winning books held by the library at the time of the study. The purpose of the survey was to evaluate past selection performance of these materials, to provide data on items that the library needs to acquire and to encourage library faculty to watch for and make use of literary and other prize winning materials. The article describes the thought-process involved, the actual workflow and the …

This Is My Idaho, Cynthia L. Struloeff

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This Is My Idaho is a collection of short stories set in or around the fictional town of Eagle City, Idaho, in southeast Idaho near the borders with Montana and Wyoming. There is a wildness in this part of the world, circled by high, unforgiving mountains, that resonates within the people there. The characters of this collection must hammer out their lives against this landscape. Some, like Mary in “What the Good Is,” and Ginny in “The Sugar Shell,” feel the mountains as a kind of barrier between them and the rest of the world and yearn to escape. Others, …

Identity And Authenticity: Explorations In Native American And Irish Literature And Culture, Drucilla M. Wall

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This collection explores of some of the many ways in which Native American, Irish, and immigrant Irish-American cultures negotiate the complexities of how they are represented as "other," and how they represent themselves, through the literary and cultural practices and productions that define identity and construct meaning. The core issue that each chapter examines is one of authenticity and the means through which this often contested and vexed notion is performed. The Irish and American Indian points of view which I explore are certainly not the only ones that shed light on this issue, but these are the ones I …

Allusive Mechanics In Modern And Postmodern Fiction As Suggested By James Joyce In His Novel Dubliners, Kynan D. Connor

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

James Joyce in his novel Dubliners conducts a series of narrative experiments with allusion, and in doing so suggests a new literary criticism based upon the allusive process. This new criticism of allusive mechanics considers the text in terms of its allusive potential for character—that is, the character is treated as capable of signification. Because Joyce can mimic the process of signification, it repositions the author to the act of writing and the reader to the act of reading. Character is greatly expanded through allusive mechanics because narrative elements like allusion in a text are treated as having a character-oriented …

Review Of Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature By American Women, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This volume of essays joins a small but growing body of work attempting to recuperate "benevolence" as an important concept for nineteenth century American literary history. As Susan Ryan observes in The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race 8 the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence, although sentimentality and benevolence are interrelated, the recent critical focus on sentimentality has tended to obscure the importance of benevolence as a nineteenth-century cultural category. While Ryan focuses on gender in addition to race, most of her primary literary figures are, nevertheless, male. The essays in this volume thus usefully supplement Ryan's volume, bringing another (and …

Review Of The Salt Roads By Nalo Hopkinson, Gregory E. Rutledge

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Although Samuel R. Delany, Jr. has been publishing sci-fi /fantasy since the 1960s and Octavia E. Butler since the 1970s, and both were included in and thus canonized by the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1999), still only a handful of Black novelists work the field. Not withstanding their canonization, their studied interpolation of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation into their novels, and the potential the genre has for shaping our hypertext, Internet-driven world, this state of affairs still obtains. Nevertheless these are heady times, as the other Black sci-fi novelists such as Jewell Gomez, Stephen Barnes, and …

“Plain Broad Narratives Of Substantial Facts”: Credibility, Narrative, And Hakluyt’S Principall Navigations, Julia Schleck

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article compares voyage narratives printed in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 Principall Navigations to contemporaneous travel histories in an effort to contextualize the epistemological status of each group of texts and debunk the former’s reputation for greater factuality. It critiques the use commonly made of Hakluyt’s narratives in literary studies, arguing that the privileging of these texts over other sources results in postcolonial studies that ironically valorize a type of writing which promoted the colonial mindset these studies seek to expose.

Liberation Theology And Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing The Dialogue, Shari J. Stenberg

Department of English: Faculty Publications

recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, Stanley Fish describes a phone call he received after the death of Jacques Derrida from a reporter who was curious as to what would succeed high theory as the "center of energy in the academy." "I answered like a shot," Fish writes, "religion" (1). For many, Fish's prophecy might create a feeling of uneasiness; after all, in academic culture, religious ideologies are often considered hindrances to-not vehicles for-critical thought. This feeling may be especially true in regard to Christianity, which is often conflated with conservative politics and fundamentalism both in and outside of the …