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Articles 1 - 29 of 29
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
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
"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 …
The Partisan And His Doppelganger: The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein
The Partisan And His Doppelganger: The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein
Faculty Publications
Published in 1982, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi's first novel proper. Perhaps Primo Levi is regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages, and had his partisan brigade not been captured, perhaps Levi's underground fighting might have continued until the end of the war. If Not Now, When? thus might reflect Levi's need to explore that sought-after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity. Did Live write If Not Now, When? as a …
Into The Imagined Forest: A 2000-Year Retrospective Of The German Woods, Richard Hacken
Into The Imagined Forest: A 2000-Year Retrospective Of The German Woods, Richard Hacken
Faculty Publications
In a "House of Learning" lecture in the Harold B. Lee Library in October, 2008, Richard Hacken gave this presentation, a combination of text and images. Coming from the history of ideas, this retrospective of the German woods looked at historical, linguistic, artistic, philosophical, political, literary, cultural, and of course botanical aspects of the German forest. In summary, five major forest themes arise from Germans imagining their own German woods: (1) taming the external and internal wilderness; (2) establishing social justice; (3) advocating national unity; (4) maintaining a sense of the sacred; and (5) encouraging ecological awareness.
Children's Film As Social Practice, Joseph L. Zornado
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 …
Cinema/History/Feminism, Joan C. Dagle
Cinema/History/Feminism, Joan C. Dagle
Faculty Publications
Margarethe von Trotta's 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg offers a cinematic portrait of a historically significant female revolutionary, one of the central figures of 20th century socialism. The film attempts to reclaim this figure as historical subject, as feminist subject, and as a cinematic subject for contemporary audiences for whom socialist and feminist history has been lost or suppressed and for whom cinema is articulated within mainstream conventions.
Psychoanalysis And The Problem Of Evil, Barbara A. Schapiro
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).
Primo Levi, Ilona Klein
Primo Levi, Ilona Klein
Faculty Publications
Born in Turin, 31 July 1919, to Cesare Levi, engineer, and wife Ester (née Luzzati). Studied at Liceo-Ginnasio D'Azeglio from 1934; University of Turn, degree in chemistry, 1941. Joined partisans in Valle D'Aosta to fight German invaders, 1943; arrested and sent to Carpi-Fossoli internment camp near Modena. Deported to Auschwitz, February 1944; worked as slave laborer at rubber factory of Buns-Monowitz (I.G. Farben, Auschwitz III). Liberated by Soviet army, 1945; after long journey through central and easter Europe, reunited with family in Turin, October 1945. Married Lucia Morpurgo, teacher, 1947; two children. Worked as industrial chemist for SIVA (paints, enamels, …
Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization, Barbara A. Schapiro
Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization, Barbara A. Schapiro
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The Sabbath In The First Creation Accounts, Jiri Moskala
The Sabbath In The First Creation Accounts, Jiri Moskala
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Trading French And Postcolonial Feminisms, Zubeda Jalalzai
Trading French And Postcolonial Feminisms, Zubeda Jalalzai
Faculty Publications
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in articulating feminist and postcolonial politics, raises issues of importance for both first world and third world feminists as well as enacting some of the very dangers which accompany those tenuous relationships. Spivak's essays, "French Feminism in an International Frame" (1981) and "French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics" (1992), provide a rich arena in which she presents powerful cautions regarding international solidarities and explores the complicated dynamics of ethical relationships on multiple levels, including that between mother and daughter, bourgeois postcolonial feminist and the woman of the "ground," as well as between metropolitan and postcolonial feminists.
Transitional States And Psychic Change, Barbara A. Schapiro
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.
Art, Design And Gestalt Theory, Roy R. Behrens
Art, Design And Gestalt Theory, Roy R. Behrens
Faculty Publications
Gestalt psychology was founded in 1910 by three German psychologists, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler. The author discusses gestalt theory's influence on modern art and design, describes its resemblance to Japanese-inspired theories of aesthetics and finds evidence of a mutual, if limited, interest between the gestalt psychologists and certain artists.
Primo Levi And Bruno Piazza: Auschwitz In Italian Literature, Ilona Klein
Primo Levi And Bruno Piazza: Auschwitz In Italian Literature, Ilona Klein
Faculty Publications
To focus on the literature of the Shoah more than 50 years later and 7,000 miles away inevitably creates some sense of dissociation due to both historical and geographic distance. While on the one hand, an analysis of the literature of the genocide might grant further insights through a retrospective look, on the other, however, this distance of time and space risks leading to an oversimplification of the Shoah, in the sense that the plight of the Jews, their individual stories and the overwhelming sense of emptiness caused by the depletion of the intellectual Jewish cultural communities in Europe might …
A Becoming Habit, Joseph L. Zornado
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
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 …
Primo Levi, Ilona Klein
Primo Levi, Ilona Klein
Faculty Publications
Chemistry and literature, viewed by most people as widely different subjects, come together in the works of Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was both a professional chemist and a professional writer. Levi said that he wanted to fill the gap between the imaginative world of literature and the analytical world of science. Believing such a gap absurd, he was never daunted by the purported incompatibility between the two fields of knowledge. Levi's literary work is also marked by his experience in Auschwitz's concentration camp, where he was interned from February 1944 to January 1945. Through his characteristically clear and …
L'Objet X, Russell A. Potter
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
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
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 …
Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein
Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein
Faculty Publications
Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Even though his first book Se questo è un uomo–published in English as Survival in Auschwitz–did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it was accepted unanimously in Italy as a literary masterpiece and a great witness to history when Einaudi republished the volume in 1956. From that moment on, Italian readers and critics have acknowledged the literary beauty and importance of Levi's writings. He …
"Official Science Often Lacks Humility": Humor, Science, And Technology In Levi's Storie Naturali, Ilona Klein
"Official Science Often Lacks Humility": Humor, Science, And Technology In Levi's Storie Naturali, Ilona Klein
Faculty Publications
Primo Levi's third book, written under the pseudonym of "Damiano Malabaila," was published for the first time in the fall of 1966 by Einaudi. Storie naturali is a collection of fifteen short stories which represent the beginning of a new Cours in the author's narrative. After the autobiographical Survival in Auschwitz of 1947 and his second book of 1963 The Reawakening–both dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath–Storie Naturali ("Natural Stories," not yet published in English) represented such a break in the literary patter established by Levi up to that point, that the author decided to use a …
The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy
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
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.
Folktales From Habi'ina, Katnantu District, Eastern Highlands Province, Terence E. Hays
Folktales From Habi'ina, Katnantu District, Eastern Highlands Province, Terence E. Hays
Faculty Publications
The people of Habi'ina village live on the northern slopes of Mount Piora in the Dogara Census Division of the Kainantu District, Eastern Highlands Province. Like other Papua New Guineans, they possess a rich oral literature and tell each other stories for a wide variety of reasons. All stories are called huri, but several different types can be distinguished.
Power And The Poet, Spencer Hall
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
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
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
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.