Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.

"Terror As Theater": Unraveling Spectacle In Post 9/11 Literatures, Elise Christine Silva

Faculty Publications

For the purposes of this paper, I will discuss two post 9/11 novels—both of which utilize the terror-as-theatre metaphor in order to work through the 9/11 spectacle. Both Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) explore avenues of communication and meaning making in the face of an event that many critics suggested defied language, description, and expression. Through their thematic use of performance, these texts reject a closed and inert polarized interpretation of 9/11 and invite a pastiche of interpretations and interactions. Through this communicative connection, authors, texts, and readers convene to …

Children's Film As Social Practice, Joseph L. Zornado

Faculty Publications

In his paper "Children's Film as Social Practice," J. Zornado argues that the animated feature is a genre distinct in its own right, and, although overlooked by film criticism up to now, deserves rigorous, scholarly attention. Zornado employs the term "iconology" to develop a foundation for a critical methodology indebted to Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan as well as contemporary film criticism. Iconology of the animated feature film is the study of the meaning systems of the dominant culture and the ways in which such systems are inscribed into all kinds of social practice geared, specifically, to seduce and inform the …

The City, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Autobiography, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

This three-volume reference (which complements the three-volume American history through literature, 1820-1870) presents lengthy essays on works and themes in literature that contextualize them within their historical milieu. Many essays feature an individual work for the subject, describing the work's critical reception and interpretation while focusing on the events or themes it depicts, such as racism, class, or philosophical or religious belief. Thematic essays, including those on adolescence, city dwellers, humor, or social Darwinism, explore the meaning and impact of the concept during the era, with many specific literary examples. Each essay concludes with cross referencing and lists of bibliography. …

Biography, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

This three-volume reference (which complements the three-volume American history through literature, 1820-1870) presents lengthy essays on works and themes in literature that contextualize them within their historical milieu. Many essays feature an individual work for the subject, describing the work's critical reception and interpretation while focusing on the events or themes it depicts, such as racism, class, or philosophical or religious belief. Thematic essays, including those on adolescence, city dwellers, humor, or social Darwinism, explore the meaning and impact of the concept during the era, with many specific literary examples. Each essay concludes with cross referencing and lists of bibliography. …

Whitman’S Philadelphia And Whitman’S Camden: Retrospect And Prospect, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

James Russell Lowell, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

A-Z entries detail the lives, works, and critical reception of more than 70 American writers of the 19th century.

The American literary canon has undergone revision and expansion in recent years, and our notions of the 19th-century renaissance have been reevaluated. Mainstream anthologies have been revised to reflect the expanding literary canon, yet resources for readers have remained widely scattered. This book expands earlier definitions of the 19th-century American Renaissance as represented by canonical writers such as Emerson and Poe, covering writers who published popular fiction and dominated the literary marketplace of the day. Included is generous coverage of women …

Psychoanalysis And The Problem Of Evil, Barbara A. Schapiro

Faculty Publications

Since "evil" has become a term much in vogue in our current political climate, it seems ever more important to explore its psychic meanings and origins. What, first of all, do analysts and therapists mean by the word "evil"? The grandiosity of the term, as well as its traditionally religious connotations, perhaps make it unsuited to the therapeutic context. As Ruth Stein (2002) has commented, "Evil' may sound too allegorical or too concrete, too essentialist or too objective for psychoanalytic ways of thinking that are oriented towards the study of individual subjectivity" (394).

Walt Whitman' And 'Ralph Waldo Emerson', William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

This anthology brings together under one cover the most important abolitionist and--unique to this volume--proslavery documents written in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It makes accessible to students, scholars, and general readers the breadth of the slavery debate. Including many previously inaccessible documents,A House Dividedis a critical and welcome contribution to a literature that includes only a few volumes of antislavery writings and no volumes of proslavery documents in print. Mason Lowance's introduction is an excellent overview of the antebellum slavery debate and its key issues and participants. Lowance also introduces each selection, locating …

Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization, Barbara A. Schapiro

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Edward Carpenter, Walt Whitman, And Working-Class ‘Comradeship.’, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

The contributors to this volume interpret various facets of masculinity, including many forms of sexuality and eroticism, institutional structures such as boys' public schools, and class formations and divisions. The authors demonstrate how the various constructions of same-sex desire in nineteenth-century Britain function with ambivalence and antagonism. Illustrated.

Transitional States And Psychic Change, Barbara A. Schapiro

Faculty Publications

One of my favorite scenes in literature occurs in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915). Tom Brangwen's Polish wife Lydia is upstairs in their home giving birth. Tom is downstairs with Anna, Lydia's four-year-old child by her first marriage. Anna is panic-stricken, screaming in terror for her mother, and Tom is responding to her with irritation and mounting anger. Like the child, he too is feeling shut out and abandoned by Lydia. Tom is made particularly furious by the "blind" and "mechanical" nature of Anna's crying.

A Becoming Habit, Joseph L. Zornado

Faculty Publications

Much of Flannery O'Connor's fiction undermines the notion that her texts, or any text for that matter, offers the reader a chance at fixed comprehensibility In fact, O'Connor's fiction often clears itself away as a meaning-bearing icon in order to introduce the reader to something other, to the mystery latent and invisible in the manners. O'Connor remains remarkable as an avowed Catholic and as a writer because she resisted spelling out that mystery though her Catholic faith offered much in the way of dogma that might have sufficed. Even so, there is an indissoluble link between the writer and the …

A Poetics Of History: Karen Cushman's Medieval World, Joseph L. Zornado

Faculty Publications

Historical fiction occupies an uncertain space in the field of children's literature. Offer a teacher or scholar a work of historical fiction in any genre, from picture book to novel, and you are sure to get a varied, contentious response about what makes historical fiction work. Why? Because historical fiction has ambitious, ambiguous aims. For instance, should historical fiction be good history, even if this means the story might be, say, a little dull? Or, on the other hand, should the author take liberties with setting, dialogue, and character in order to provide the audience with "a good read?" What …

A Question Of "Character": Visual Images And The Nineteenth-Century Construction Of Edgar Allan Poe, William A. Pannapacker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

L'Objet X, Russell A. Potter

Faculty Publications

... white envy of black history, even though that history is written with whips and chains, extends to countless other visual and aural signifiers of black culture; in today's suburban enclaves it's hip-hop culture that brings the 'flava' to what many white kids apprehend as a flavorless cultural landscape.

Interrogating Identity, Daniel M. Scott

Faculty Publications

Discusses the structures of identity and the role writing plays in the reconfiguration of the self in Charles Johnson's novel `Middle Passage.' Fundamental assumptions about human and literary identity; Allusion and appropriation of textual authority; Novel's debt to preceding Western writing; Complications of Afro-American experience; Johnson's reconfiguration of writing..

Nodal Humor In Comic Narrative: A Semantic Analysis Of Two Stories By Twain And Wodehouse, Christopher Holcomb

Faculty Publications

This paper shows that a semantic theory of humor offers, despite assertions to the contrary, an adequate description of how particular instances of humor are linked to the narrative in which they appear. After Victor Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor is summarized, and adopted as the starting point of the analysis in this paper, the humor in two short stories is described in terms of their semantic properties. In this paper, humor is said to reside not simply in jokes but in joke-like constructions, for which the term "nodal points of humor" is used. These nodes can be identified …

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy

Faculty Publications

Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …

Trauma And Sadomasochistic Narrative, Barbara A. Schapiro

Faculty Publications

This essay applies trauma theory and relational psychoanalysis to a close reading of Mary Gaitskill's short story "The Dentist." It argues that the sadomasochistic relationship central to this story, and to much of Gaitskill's fiction, is rooted in trauma and can be illuminated by an understanding of the post-traumatic condition.

Power And The Poet, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

In this examination of the English Romantic poet P. B. Shelley, Spencer Hall takes a new direction into the critical review of this work. Whereas traditional thought expresses a metaphysical belief or revelation in regards to Shelley's Power myth, Hall provides a new perspective of deep-seated skepticism. By focusing on the function of the poem rather than a symbolic meaning, Hall seeks to show that the myth is a subjective attribute of human experience rather than supernatural and should be taken as a metaphor used in a variety of ways.

Wordsworth's Later Style, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

The three "close readings" described in the March 1978 Editor's Column were introduced with this line from Marianne Moore: "we do not admire what we cannot understand." The proposition is, of course, as patently false to experience as is Keats's at the end of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." We often admire exceedingly what we do not understand, precisely because we do not understand it. This is as true of literary criticism as of religious revelation (the two activities having become strangely similar these days), and one of the three "close readings" referred to is a significant case in …

Shelley's Mont Blanc, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

"Mont Blanc" studies the relationship between the poet and the omnipotent. Spencer Hall questions the attribution of the supernatural to Shelley's thinking. Hall sees Shelley as creating a non-transcendental and hybrid confluence of emotions and ideas. Shelley concept of the sublime is not intuited by the poet, but rather constructed and projected by him. It is a process in which the imagination is primary.

Wordworth's "Lucy" Poems, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

This essay seeks to provide meaning and a context for interpretation of the Romantic "Lucy" poems by William Wordsworth. Hall argues against two critics' opposing interpretations by suggesting the meaning is humanistic which provides somewhat of a clarity into Wordsworth's poetic development. Hall suggests that his proposed context into these poems isn't merely one dimensional, but multi-faceted and draws upon other critics.