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.

Beckett's Masculinity: New Interpretations Of Beckett In 21st C, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

From Murphy to Rockaby to Worstward Ho, Beckett’s Masculinity illustrates how Samuel Beckett’s work functions as a testament to the site of memory for the historically erased twentieth-century Protestant, Anglo-Irish community. Jennifer Jeffers ably shows how Beckett converted his own personal traumatic loss of a masculine, patriarchal national identity into a sustained group of obsessive images in his texts. As Beckett’s work matured, he utilized the strategies of emasculation and gender distortion to dismantle Western masculinity. Beckett’s Masculinity shows that Western hegemonic masculinity was a source of private trauma and anxiety for Beckett; yet, he eventually transformed the twentieth-century …

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

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Britain Colonized: Hollywood's Appropriation Of British Literature, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

Britain Colonized analyzes how and why filmmakers use clichéd Hollywood formulas and American cultural standards when adapting British literature. The films discussed in this book are evidence of the way one nation remakes another, often in the image of itself or what it needs the Other to be (as the British Empire once did). Reterritorialization on the part of Hollywood manifests American cultural and capitalist hegemony over the English speaking world. Britain Colonized identifies the phenomena portending the future of British and Anglophone literary and cultural studies as a group of citations appropriated for American ends.

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

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David Brown, Chris Palmer

David C. Brown

A Sublime Event: Gordon Craig's Uber-Marionette In Samuel Beckett's Late Drama, 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.

Samuel Beckett: A Casebook On Modern Dramatists, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

Garland reference library of the humanities - Casebooks on modern dramatists ; vol. 25

The Silent Protagonist, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

The Irish Novel At The End Of The Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, And Power, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

This text interprets a wide range of Irish novels of the 1990s, focusing on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body. It looks at how identities do, or don't, conform to familiar notions of sexuality, gender and culture and goes on to say that Irish identity is a matter of economics.

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

Jennifer M. Jeffers

No abstract provided.

Address, Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis

Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees--beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage …

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, …

Use Of Wikis In Second/Foreign Language Classes: A Literature Review, Mimi Li

Mimi Li

Wikis, as emerging Web 2.0 tools, have been increasingly implemented in language classrooms. To explore the current state of research and inform future studies, this article reviews the past research on the use of wikis in second/foreign language classes. Using Google Scholar and the ERIC database, the researcher examines twenty-one empirical studies published in fourteen peer-reviewed journals from 2008 to 2011. Specifically, the researcher takes a holistic review of this body of literature, including theoretical frameworks, research goals, contexts and participants, tasks and wiki applications, and research methods and instruments. The researcher identifies four main research themes investigated in the …

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.

Recovering Melville’S Hand: An Inaugural Report On Digital Discovery And Analysis At Melville’S Marginalia Online, Steven Olsen-Smith

Steven Olsen-Smith

This installment of “Melville’s Hand,” a department of Leviathan originally conceived by Founding Editor John Bryant, is the first to appear in the journal since staff at Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO) printed newly documented marginalia in issue 10.3 of 2008. Through the vision of Bryant’s successor as Editor Samuel Otter and of Associate Editor Brian Yothers, the present installment also constitutes the inaugural printing of what we hope will remain an annual contribution by the online project to Leviathan (appearing in every June issue) for years to come. What gives us confidence that MMO will generate significant material …

Culinary Jane Austen, Christopher D. Wilkes

Christopher D Wilkes

In the world of domestic intimacy that Jane Austen fashions for us, food, its production, preparation and consumption, appears almost nowhere, at least in the novels themselves. But there is a complex moral economy that surrounds food, and its analysis tells us much of the broader social and economic hierarchies that swirled around the Austen families, as they engaged in a struggle for social recognition and social maintenance. When we take the Austen films into account, this analysis gains sharpness, and makes what is often inferred very clear indeed. This paper examines the social meaning of these culinary habits, first …

Zombies, Sea-Monsters And Vampires: Jane Austen Flirts With The Horror Genre, Christopher Wilkes

Christopher D Wilkes

Notes for a panel at Pacific University.