English Language and Literature Commons^™

Book Review: Beckett At 100: Revolving It All, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Rhizome National Identity: "Scatlin's Psychic Defense' In Trainspotting, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Beyond Irony: The Unnamable's Appropriation Of Its Critics In A Humorous Reading Of The Text, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

In traditional Beckett criticism, the most conventional interpretation of the narrator's activity in The Unnamable posits that the narrative is attempting to establish "his" own self-identity, but "[h]is search for self-knowledge has failed because it has produced only fiction" (Solomon 83). Another variety of this interpretation poses the Unnamable's dilemma in Existential language: "Existence affirms merely that something is; essence denotes what it is ... By the time we reach The Unnamable, the collapse of essence is virtually complete; the voice is a mere existence crying out that it exists" (Levy 104). As Dennis A. Foster argues in his Lacanian …

Trends In The Contemporary Irish Novel: Sex, Lies, And Gender, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

The 1990s Irish novel presents its own brand of uniqueness and sophistication to the contemporary Anglophone novel. In this article I divide the development of the 1990s Irish novel into three groups. The first type of novel that emerges in the 1990s concerns the presentation of a different image of Ireland, one that magnifies gender construction and sexual preference. The second group of novels concerns the act of reading itself and the difficulty in determining truth from lies. These novels impair the reader's ability to read in an effort to show that everything is a form of interpretation: memories, history, …

"Reclamation Of 'Injurious Terms' In Emma Donoghue's Fiction, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

Featuring new essays by international literary scholars, the two-volume Companion to Irish Literature encompasses the full breadth of Ireland's literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. * Covers an unprecedented historical range of Irish literature * Arranged in two volumes covering Irish literature from the medieval period to 1900, and its development through the twentieth century to the present day * Presents a re-visioning of twentieth-century Irish literature and a collection of the most up-to-date scholarship in the field as a whole * Includes a substantial number of women writers from the eighteenth century to the present …

The Balance Between Mechanical And Creative Writing In David Copperfield, Ralph Matthews

Ralph Frame Matthews

This thesis argues that Charles Dickens's novel, David Copperfield, represents writing as an art whose success depends on a dynamic relationship between the mechanical and the creative. The representations of writing in the novel comment on David's and Dickens's work as novelists. In the last section of my thesis, I argue that the novel extends this idea of balance to the ethical dimension of writing. This study is valuable and relevant insofar as it extends recent scholarly insights about the complex work of authorship to moments in the novel that have been neglected.

Book Review: Saying I No More: Subjectivity And Consciousness In The Prose Of Samuel Beckett, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Performance Review: "Women Don't Have Prostates': Woman Impersonating A Man Impersonating Krapp', Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

"What's It Like Being Irish?" The Return Of The Repressed In Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

This is a distinctive book that examines the diversity and energy of writing in a period marked by the unparalleled global prominence of Irish culture.This collection provides a wide-ranging survey of fiction, poetry and drama over the last two decades, considering both well-established figures and also emerging writers who have received relatively little critical attention. Contributors explore the central developments within Irish culture and society that have transformed the writing and reading of identity, sexuality, history and gender. The book examines the impact of Mary Robinson's Presidency; growing cultural confidence 'back home'; legislative reform on sexual and moral issues; the …

"A Slot Without An Occupant": Krapps Rhizome Identity, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

Introduction / Jennifer M. Jeffers

1 Whispers Out of Time / Helen Regueiro Elam

17 "Speak no more": The Hermeneutical Function of Narrative in Samuel Beckett's Endgame / Jonathan Boulter

39 "A place without an occupant": Krapp's Rhizome Identity / Jennifer M. Jeffers

63 Voices out of the Air: Freedom, Death, and Constraint in All That Fall / Stephen Dilks

81 Vain Reasonings: Not I / Derval Tubridy

111 Performing Vision(s): Perspectives on Spectatorship in Beckett's Theatre / Anna McMullan

133 "Sadism Demands a Story": Looking at Gender and Pain in Samuel Beckett's Plays / Karen Laughlin

159 Bodily Functions: …

Deviant Masculinity And Deleuzean Difference In Proust And Beckett, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.

The Repetition Of Violence And History: William Trevor's 'Lost Ground', Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

The William Trevor Collection offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated practitioners writing in the English language: the author of fifteen novels, three novellas and eleven volumes of short stories, as well as plays, radio and TV adaptations and film screenplays.

Book Review: Janespotting And Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions Since The Mid-1990s, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

The Silent Protagonist, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Women And Ireland As Beckett's Lost Others, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

The White Bed Of Desire In A.S. Byatt's Possession, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

The British novelist A. S. Byatt frequently writes about art and color theory in her fiction. In Still Life (1985) Byatt intentionally saturates her text with musings on art and color; bordering on the didactic, she devotes long passages to Van Gogh's chromatics and individual characters' theories on art. With The Matisse Stories (1996) her discussion moves into the theory of complementary colors in the story “Art Work,” through the painter Robin Dennison. Painting for Robin is “a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and color, you know” (70). In the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession: A Romance, …

Timon Of Athens: The Iconography Of False Friendship, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

The realization that iconographic tableaux appear at central points in the drama of Shakespeare no longer seems to involve a radical critical perspective. Thus a recent study is able to show convincingly that the playwright presented audiences with a Hamlet who upon his first appearance on stage illustrated what the Renaissance would certainly have recognized as the melancholic contemplative personality. As I have noted in a previous article, the hero of Macbeth when he sees the bloody dagger before him is in fact perceiving the image which most clearly denotes tragedy itself; in the emblem books, the dagger is indeed …

Staging The York Creation, And Fall Of Lucifer, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

The Creation, and Fall of Lucifer by the York Realist was intended to provide a spectacular opening for the Corpus Christi cycle, of which the city of York felt very proud in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the York Realist appears to have been particularly sensitive to the conditions of production, this opening play provides a useful focus for attention to the staging used in the York cycle. The internal evidence of the Realist's Creation, and Fall of Lucifer demonstrates that he was not writing a mere literary exercise, but kept in mind the specifics of stage production.

The Early Drama, Art, And Music Project: Publications 1977-2002, Timothy Christiansen, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

A bibliography of publications of the Early Drama, Art, and Music project at Western Michigan University, originally compiled by Timothy Christiansen and updated in 2002 by Clifford Davidson. This digital reprint was created in 2014 for ScholarWorks at WMU, with an addendum, an update, and a few corrections to the formatting of the 2002 publication.

Hocus Pocus And The Croxton Play Of The Sacrament, Cameron Mcnabb

Cameron Hunt McNabb

This article addresses how heresy and parody intersect in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament through its religiously and verbally dissenting characters. The play’s highly theatrical depiction of a host miracle both enforces and undermines its emphatic endorsement of the real presence. The play ameliorates this tension by the privileging of words over deeds, aligning the transformative power of the consecratory words with the transformative power of believers’ confessions at conversion wherein both words and actions enact a transubstantiation, thus manifesting the real presence of Christ. The play’s language becomes a moral marker and the vehicle for the heretics’ dissent …

Sweet As Muscatel, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Although my grandfather had made his fortune in trade, I had been educated as a gentleman and at first I expected Flora society to accept me as such. After a youth spent in Paris and Vienna, I was anyone's equal in deportment. My attire, always elegant without flashiness, had elsewhere disarmed the stuffiest arbiters. So when with a lover's shyness I followed the Lady Celia into the Contessa di Filipini's salon at Flora, I was not expecting difficulties from the threadbare remnants of aristocracy which infested that small city. I took no special notice of Prospero until the night he …

The Fountain And The Black Fish, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

It was late afternoon when Oscar Verplank and his mother arrived at his Aunt Penny's apartment. The boards of the porch creaked as they crossed to the heavy oak door. "The house is more than a hundred years old,"murmured his mother as she rang the bell. A buzz sounded and Oscar quickly opened the door. "They had to update the place to make it livable, Mother," he noted. As they climbed the creaky stairs, the door to the upstairs apartment was thrown open. "Louise! It's been too long!" cried the woman who rushed out. As the sisters embraced each other, …

Foreground And Background: Three Literary Treatments Of The Bubonic Plague, Gwenyth Hood

Gwenyth Hood

Though many diseases bring suffering and death, plagues strike the imagination with special awe because they threaten death to whole cities and nations. So it is not surprising that novelists have treated of plagues now and then. A visitation of bubonic plague is the central event in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’s The Plague. In Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, it is the culminating event, through which all the plot lines are finally resolved. Though much separates these writers, including language, culture, century. and philosophical outlook. each presents the plague accurately according to the scientific knowledge …

Attending To The Act Of Reading: Critical Reading, Contemplative Reading, And Active Reading, Paul Corrigan

Paul T. Corrigan

How students read influences how they learn. In particular, in order for students to learn to read more deeply or on a /oig/oer level, they need to learn to read actively. While many scholars and teachers appear to take active reading for granted, possibly assuming students will come into such “study skills” on their own, I propose that we should make concerted efforts to help students understand and adopt such habits as underlining, writing comments in the margins, asking questions, rereading, and so forth. In this essay, I survey recent work on critical reading, contemplative reading, and active reading and …

Moving At The Speed Of Love: Alex Caldiero's Some Love, Scott Abbott

Scott Abbott

Poet Alex Caldiero's SOME LOVE is tangled in the poetic complexities of love, and yet, as the reviewer discovers, the poems here can be every bit as fleshy and uncomplicated as the real thing.

Woolf Online, Pamela Caughie, Nicholas Hayward, Mark Hussey, Peter Shillingsburg, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

The site is intended to serve as a resource for research and study of Woolf's modernist classic. On this site you will find images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), the typescripts, the proofs, and various early editions of the novel, including the first British and American editions and their variants. Also included is a wealth of contextual materials, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of the novel, selected essays Woolf wrote during the two- year period during which she …

The Usual: Pub Phenomenology In The Works Of James Joyce, Thomas Keegan

Tom Keegan

"The Usual: Pub Phenomenology in the Works of James Joyce" attempts to wrest the pub from critical dismissal as a token symbol of paternalistic Irish drunkenness and return it to the center of Joyce's work as the site for his development of a philosophy of being. Read this way, the pub illustrates ways humans come to understand their place in the world through objects, practices, and later, as part of a public entity. The pub also tells the story of modernism's impact on Irish society. Few spaces so deftly render the complexities of the modern Irish position: at the edge …

Dancing In The Diaspora: Remembering The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

Introduction:

In Canada, the classical dance bharatanatyam is both greater and less than an art form, greater because, unlike more common forms such as ballet or jazz dance, it offers its practitioners and its spectators something more than an opportunity to experience art or to be the vehicle for its expression, and less because what it offers along with its art is ethnicity. And in our multicultural society anything tagged as ethnic is caught in an intricate web of exaltation and denigration: by the very act of its celebration, which is frequently state-sponsored and state-endorsed, ethnicity is cast outside and …

The Language Of Science, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

With more and more scientific language being applied -and misapplied- in our daily lives, this title from the Intertext series explores the use of scientific terms through hot topics from the MMR vaccine to AIDS and biological weapons.

Living On The Border: Ethotic Conflict And The Satiric Impulse, Carol Reeves

Carol Reeves

No abstract provided.