Modern Literature Commons^™

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

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student 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 …

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.

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 …

[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, …

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 …

Kurt Vonnegut, Authorship And The Purpose Of Literature: A Study Of Kilgore Trout, Danielle M. Benesh

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The works of Kurt Vonnegut demonstrate the author's lifelong interest in the purpose of literature and the role of the author in a postmodern society. Through the use of his most frequently recurring character, the science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut questions the ways in which an author's works influence readers and ponders the relationship between society and art. These themes are explored in detail in the four novels which feature Kilgore Trout most prominently: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions and Timequake. A study of these novels reveals a progressive personification of the Trout figure, as …

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.