Modern Literature Commons^™

Between Presence And Absence: Spatial Disjunction And Innovation In Detective Stories, Riccardo Pelizzo

riccardo pelizzo

No abstract provided.

Ecocriticism, The Elements, And The Ascent/Descent Into Weather In Goethe’S Faust, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

The ostensibly religious and ethical significance of Faust's final ascension after his death tends to distract, if not blind, readers to other possible implications of that upwards movement and to the idea that he may continue and return "back to earth." The assumption that heavenly powers reward Faust leads to the claim that Goethe's tragedy validates the quest of "land developers" or those who would strive regardless of the consequences. I propose, in contrast, that we read Faust's "final" ascension alongside Goethe's weather essay, "Witterungslehre 1825," and thereby note that this upward motion is not necessarily "final" at all but …

Horizons, Volume 26, 2010, Sacred Heart University

Vistas (Horizons)

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] Mother Tongues And Nations: The Invention Of The Native Speaker, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Bookshelf

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, …

Apuleius: Metamorphoses: An Intermediate Latin Reader (Review), Max Nelson

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Publications

No abstract provided.

Gina Bonakdar Nahai: Fantasies Of Escape And Inclusion, Mojgan Behmand

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Caspian Rain are the enticing titles of Gina Bonakdar Nahai’s Iran-focused novels, published in 1991, 1999, and 2008 respectively. And the titles hold true: the narratives reflect the pain, melancholy and dream-like beauty conveyed in the titles as they divulge characters who strive to escape the restrictions of their community, religion, government, and gender. In the meantime, as the author depicts these fantasies of escape and attempts at flight –and frequently harshly punishes them–, the characters achieve a hitherto unknown feat, namely the depiction of Jewish Iranian main characters …

Taking Refuge In “How:” Dissecting The Motives Behind Cholly’S Rape In The Bluest Eye, Rebecca Andrews

Undergraduate Review

Most parents see parts of themselves in their children. They see their own familiar eyes, their sense of humor, and their long legs. Parents desire to nurture their child’s every hope and dream, and also want to raise their children in a safe and secure environment. However, what if a father saw in his daughter everything that he hated in himself? What if this same father never learned to love in a nurturing way from his own parents? The effects would be devastating. Toni Morrison examines such a scenario in her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye through the rape Pecola …

Venezuelan Avant-Garde: María Calcaño's Erotic Poetry, Giovanna Montenegro

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Abstract: This essay treats the Venezuelan avant-garde and its historical development through the poet María Calcaño (1906-1956). An analysis of Calcaño’s work reveals how her erotic avant-gardism was excluded from male-dominated avant-garde literary circles in Venezuela in the 1920s and the 1930s. Rather than analyzing the Latin- American avant-garde as a product of European vanguardisms, I show how Calcaño’s poetry draws upon women’s physical and erotic experience to generate a new female- authored avant-garde poetic corpus. Calcaño therefore produces work that illustrates the poetic expression of women’s identity in Venezuela. She is the first poet who breaks with poetic forms …

Photograph: Poet On Dust Jacket, Richmond, Virginia 1996, Alexander Long

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Rotrou’S Bélisaire: Hierarchy And Meaning, Nina Ekstein

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Bélisaire (1643) differs significantly from the bulk of Rotrou’s theater, perhaps above all in its array of profoundly disparate features. The notion of hierarchy offers a means of organizing the dissimilar elements and understanding the play as a whole. Like so many of Rotrou’s plays, the subject is not original. Its source is Mira de Amescua’s El ejemplo mayor de la Desdicha.

Pathos, Winter 2010, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editors: Joel Eisenhower and Richard Hernandez

Issue 11

Beyond "Infinite Jest": Post-Postmodern Solidarity In 9/11 Narratives, Najwa Heather Al-Tabaa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis interrogates the postmodern view of popular culture as being banal and questions Theodore Adorno's view of postmodern consumer culture as ultimately anti- human(istic). My re-reading of postmodern popular culture finds that there is potential for meaningful human interaction through popular culture. My re-reading asserts that popular culture is capable of being a vehicle for solidarity. In my analysis I locate a postmodern paradigm shift in which human solidarity becomes a necessary consideration and focus of postmodern narratives and art forms. I term this shift "post-postmodernism" which is marked by a focus on solidarity.1 While the shift to the …

U.S. Latinos’ Use Of Written Spanish: Realities And Aspirations, Laura Callahan

Modern Languages & Literature

This paper reports on an investigation of writing in Spanish in the lives of U.S. Latinos. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with informants recruited from among students and former students of high school and college Spanish courses. The interviews were transcribed and coded for concepts and emergent themes (Rubin & Rubin, 2005; Bogdan & Biklen, 1992). Some themes that emerged relate to what U.S. Latinos do with written Spanish and what they would like to be able to do; other themes include classroom experiences, extra-academic avenues of acquisition, the social position of varieties of Spanish, language maintenance, and intergenerational loss. …

Southern Encounters In The City: Reconfiguring The South From The Liminal Space, Eveljn Ferraro

Modern Languages & Literature

In Il pensiero meridiano, sociologist Franco Cassano claims that the cultural autonomy of the South hinges upon a radical redefinition of the relationship between South and North. Dominant representations of the South as a “not-yet North”1 (Cassano viii), always imperfectly mimicking a more advanced North, found themselves on the idea of a linear transition from backwardness to development where the differences are often reduced to a matter of time. If Gramsci, in The Southern Question, deconstructed the Italian North/South binarism by suggesting potential alliances among non-dominant groups (namely, Northern workers and Southern peasants), Cassano proposes a spatial rethinking of the …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Esperança Bielsa. The Latin American Urban Crónica: Between Literature and Mass Culture by Miguel González-Abellás

Gene H. Bell-Villada, ed. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook by Miguel González-Abellás

Albert Memmi. Decolonization and the Decolonized. Trans. Robert Bononno by Christa Jones

Erin Graff Zivin. The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary by Naomi Lindstrom

Dawn Fulton. Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Crticism by Jane E. Evans

Anne Lambright. Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space and the Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas by Arturio Arias

Andrew Sobanet. Jail …

Ionesco’S Rhinocéros And The Menippean Tradition, Preston Fambrough

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mikhail Bakhtin argues that Menippean satire, one of the two serio-comic genres of classical antiquity from which the carnivalesque strain in Western literature derives, continues its development in modern times in the “fantastic story” and the “philosophical fairy tale.” This modern form of the menippea is characterized by the presence of the grotesque, the use of the fantastic for philosophical purposes, the crowning of a (wise) fool or jester as carnival king, and “a sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Rabelais 11) which informs all carnivalized literature. A genre of “ultimate questions of worldview,” it …

Writers, Rebels, And Cannibals: Léonora Miano’S Rendering Of Africa In L’Intérieur De La Nuit, Magali Compan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Léonora Miano’s first novel L’Intérieur de la nuit received a laudatory critical reception when it was published by the French publishing house Plon in 2005. The novel’s depiction of an act of cannibalism in a village of a fictional African nation provides the turning point and central event of the narrative. The novel’s cannibalism has also been central to its critical reception in the west. While many Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel in unique ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing.

This article considers the interviews …

The Mother Tongues Of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation, Roland K. Végső

Faculty Publications -- Department of English

The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particularistic discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument. Two examples of this transnationalism are explored side by side: Ezra Pound’s and Anzia Yezierska’s definitions of the aesthetic act in terms of translation. The readings show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism. The essay concludes that we now need to interpret the cultures …

Bees In America: How The Honey Bee Shaped A Nation, Tammy Horn

Tammy Horn

" Honey bees--and the qualities associated with them--have quietly influenced American values for four centuries. During every major period in the country's history, bees and beekeepers have represented order and stability in a country without a national religion, political party, or language. Bees in America is an enlightening cultural history of bees and beekeeping in the United States. Tammy Horn, herself a beekeeper, offers a varied social and technological history from the colonial period, when the British first introduced bees to the New World, to the present, when bees are being used by the American military to detect bombs. Early …

Viable (A Letter Confessing My Own Lack Of Faith To My Newborn Son), Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley

Last January, in the minute and a half it took the ultrasound technician to pronounce that word, hours after I stood up from the sofa and felt the blood rush warm out of me, I thought about the moments when knowledge of your life was mine alone, when I had sat, heart-pounding, holding the confirmation of your presence inside me, frozen, unable or unwilling, to rise and begin the inevitable process of sharing you.