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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
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
David P. Rando
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.
George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando
George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando
David P. Rando
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 …
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
David P. Rando
The cover art for Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane over the Seareproduces 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 become …
David Foster Wallace And Lovelessness, David Rando
David Foster Wallace And Lovelessness, David Rando
David P. Rando
No abstract provided.
The Cat's Meow: Ulysses, Animals, And The Veterinary Gaze, David Rando
The Cat's Meow: Ulysses, Animals, And The Veterinary Gaze, David Rando
David P. Rando
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 …
Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando
Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando
David P. Rando
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 …
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 [Review], David Rando
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 [Review], David Rando
David P. Rando
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 …
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms [Review], David Rando
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms [Review], David Rando
David P. Rando
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” …