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Articles 1 - 30 of 31
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall
Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.
Priscilla Layne. White Rebels In Black: German Appropriation Of Black Popular Culture. U Of Michigan P, 2018., Mona Eikel-Pohen
Priscilla Layne. White Rebels In Black: German Appropriation Of Black Popular Culture. U Of Michigan P, 2018., Mona Eikel-Pohen
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Priscilla Layne. White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture. U of Michigan P, 2018. ix + 259 pp.
Walt Hunter. Forms Of A World: Contemporary Poetry And The Making Of Globalization. Fordham Up, 2019., Jeremy Glazier
Walt Hunter. Forms Of A World: Contemporary Poetry And The Making Of Globalization. Fordham Up, 2019., Jeremy Glazier
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Walt Hunter Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization. Fordham UP, 2019. 190 pp.
Elizabeth S. Anker And Rita Felski, Eds. Critique And Postcritique. Duke Up, 2017., Maïté Marciano
Elizabeth S. Anker And Rita Felski, Eds. Critique And Postcritique. Duke Up, 2017., Maïté Marciano
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, eds. Critique and Postcritique. Duke UP, 2017.329 pp.
Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure
Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.
Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite
Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In the second decade of the 21st century, academic comics studies is well established as a serious intellectual subject, but for many non-specialists, including university administrators, a sense of frivolity still attaches to comics. This brief essay braids together personal history and intellectual analysis: 1) it compares the cultural position of comics today to the position of novels in the 19th century; 2) it analyzes the complementary nature of the verbal and visual channels; 3) it argues that neither words nor pictures should be considered primary in a narratology of comics; and 4) that comics are eminently well …
Jean Braithwaite, Ed. Chris Ware: Conversations. Jackson: The Up Of Mississippi, 2017., Lindsay Harper Cannon
Jean Braithwaite, Ed. Chris Ware: Conversations. Jackson: The Up Of Mississippi, 2017., Lindsay Harper Cannon
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Jean Braithwaite, ed. Chris Ware: Conversations. Jackson: The UP of Mississippi, 2017.
Michael A Chaney. Reading Lessons In Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, And Mazes In The Autobiographical Graphic Novel. Jackson: Up Of Mississippi, 2016., Jennifer Caroccio
Michael A Chaney. Reading Lessons In Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, And Mazes In The Autobiographical Graphic Novel. Jackson: Up Of Mississippi, 2016., Jennifer Caroccio
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Michael A. Chaney. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016.
Michelle Ann Abate And Gwen Athene Tarbox. Graphic Novels For Children And Young Adults. Up Of Mississippi, 2017., Carlos G. Kelly
Michelle Ann Abate And Gwen Athene Tarbox. Graphic Novels For Children And Young Adults. Up Of Mississippi, 2017., Carlos G. Kelly
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox. Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults. UP of Mississippi, 2017.
Christopher Pizzino. Arresting Development: Comics At The Boundaries Of Literature. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Katlin M. Sweeney
Christopher Pizzino. Arresting Development: Comics At The Boundaries Of Literature. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Katlin M. Sweeney
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Christopher Pizzino. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.
Eugene Onegin The Cold War Monument: How Edmund Wilson Quarreled With Vladimir Nabokov, Tim Conley
Eugene Onegin The Cold War Monument: How Edmund Wilson Quarreled With Vladimir Nabokov, Tim Conley
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The tale of how Edmund Wilson quarreled with Vladimir Nabokov over the latter’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin can be instructively read as a politically charged event, specifically a “high culture” allegory of the Cold War. Dissemination of anti-Communist ideals (often in liberal and literary guises) was the mandate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose funding and editorial initiatives included the publication of both pre-Revolution Russian literature and, more notoriously, the journal Encounter (1953-1990), where Nabokov’s fiery “Reply” to Wilson appeared. This essay outlines the propaganda value of the Onegin debate within and to Cold War mythology.
The Craft Of Emotion In Isabel Allende's Paula , Susan Carvalho
The Craft Of Emotion In Isabel Allende's Paula , Susan Carvalho
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Isabel Allende's narrative, from her first novel The House of the Spirits (1982) through the most recent works, has often been branded as "sentimental..."
"Playing A Game Of Worlds": Postmodern Time And The Search For Individual Autonomy In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire , Jill Leroy-Frazier
"Playing A Game Of Worlds": Postmodern Time And The Search For Individual Autonomy In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire , Jill Leroy-Frazier
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article enters the ongoing critical debate surrounding Pale Fire, as to whether the apparent structure of the novel can be taken at face value. Do the central characters, John Shade and Charles Kinbote, constitute separate voices within the novel, as poet and commentator respectively, or is one in fact the fictional creation of the other? Arguing that the dispute arises out of a set of critical assumptions that negate at least some of the possible implications of Nabokov's own views of art's purpose and function, the essay asserts that Nabokov's disbelief in objective reality renders the entire Shade/Kinbote …
The "Incongruous Stranger" As Structural Element In The Novels Of Elsa Triolet, Lorene M. Birden
The "Incongruous Stranger" As Structural Element In The Novels Of Elsa Triolet, Lorene M. Birden
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Language in Literature, Roman Jakobson underlines the presence of a certain device, which he calls he superfluous passerby, in Russian realist literature. This element has traveled into French literature with a Russian-born expatriate novelist. Several works by Eisa Triolet present this type of character, and extend the device structurally. In this device a character can provoke a new development in plot or character relations. Such a character has no direct relationship to the characters or events portrayed. Therefore, as opposed to classic novelistic perspective, this incongruous and unknown character shifts and blurs characterial hierarchy. The superfluous passerby displaces …
(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt
(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Masks serve as particularly effective props in contemporary Mexican and Chicano performance art because of a number of deeply rooted traditions in Mexican culture. This essay explores the mask as code of honor in Mexican culture, and foregrounds the manner in which a number of contemporary Mexican and Chicano artists and performers strategically employ wrestling masks to (ef)face the mask-like image of Mexican or U.S. nationalism. I apply the label "performance artist" broadly, to include musicians and political figures that integrate an exaggerated sense of theatricality into their performances. Following the early work of Roland Barthes, I read performances as …
Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield
Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Fontes's novel begins with a corrido announcing typical themes of murder and revenge. But the novel has from the outset been interimplicated in a history of the persecution of the Yoeme (Yaquis) at the turn into the twentieth century. Its three main protagonists become mavericks on the border, as they cross ultimately not only into safety in Arizona but into solidarity with the oppressed. Such crossings are existential, resulting in new identities that eschew racial or ethnic purity but instead embrace mixed ethnicity, or mestizaje (to borrow key concepts from Anzaldúa). Such crossings are lateral, non-hierarchic. But Fontes does not …
Introduction , Charles Tatum
Introduction , Charles Tatum
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Contemporary cultural critics have theorized the multiple aspects of "location" in many different ways…
Crossing The Great Divide: Rewritings Of The U.S.-Mexican Encounter In Walter Abish And Richard Rodríguez , Maarten Van Delden
Crossing The Great Divide: Rewritings Of The U.S.-Mexican Encounter In Walter Abish And Richard Rodríguez , Maarten Van Delden
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In a 1978 essay on the relationship between Mexico and the United States, Octavio Paz suggested that the two countries were separated by a "perhaps insuperable" divide. Yet two recent works—Richard Rodríguez's collection of essays Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992) and Walter Abish's novel Eclipse Fever (1993)—offer evidence of a changing outlook on the U.S.-Mexican encounter. Abish and Rodríguez build upon the storehouse of images of the irreconcilable differences between the two nations. However, insofar as they play with and question these images, they draw attention to the unstable, fluctuating nature of the U.S.-Mexican encounter …
To Arrive Is To Begin: Benjamin Sáenz's Carry Me Like Water And The Pilgrimage Of Origin In The Borderlands , Alberto López Pulido
To Arrive Is To Begin: Benjamin Sáenz's Carry Me Like Water And The Pilgrimage Of Origin In The Borderlands , Alberto López Pulido
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay examines the "pilgrimage of origin" as presented in Benjamin Sáenz's novel Carry Me Like Water. As is the case with other ethnic literature, Carry Me Like Water teaches us that we must first go back before we can move forward and transform our lives. By pilgrimage of origin I make reference to a journey where participants are required to return to the past and the familiar. Unlike the more commonly described linear pilgrimage experience where participants are required to travel beyond the range of their familiar space, the pilgrimage of origin obligates participants to return to their …
Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú
Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …
John Rechy: Bodies And Souls And The Homoeroticization Of The Urban Quest, David William Foster
John Rechy: Bodies And Souls And The Homoeroticization Of The Urban Quest, David William Foster
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
It has been difficult for John Rechy to become established in the canon of Chicano literature, in large part because of the homophobia that held sway during the formative period of Chicano literary criticism. However, now recognized as a founding figure of U.S. homoerotic writing, Rechy is also widely recognized as important to the Chicano literary tradition. This study focuses on the importance of Rechy less as a gay writer than to explore the ways in which his great Los Angeles novel, Bodies and Souls (1983), explores the conflicts between sexuality and the emotionally and physically deadening effects of modern …
Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken
Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú focuses centrally on the tensions of borders that are eroding yet firmly in place. Cantú's border pivots on the geographic space in which Mexico and the United States physically intersect, yet she probes at the same time several of the other tenuous cultural borders that postmodernity has brought into focus. Transcending distinctions between genres, languages, and cultures, Cantú undertakes innovative genre hybridity, visual-verbal hybridity, and the recombination of distinct cultural codes. Whether writing cultural criticism, autobioethnography, creative fiction, or poetry, Cantú locates herself at the intersection of the geographical and epistemological …
Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos
Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …
Playing Nabokov: Performances By Himself And Others , Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Playing Nabokov: Performances By Himself And Others , Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In 1918, in the Crimea, the adolescent Vladimir Nabokov devised a new pastime: "parodizing a biographic approach" by narrating his own actions aloud. In this self-conscious "game," he orchestrated changes in grammatical person, gender, and tense in order to transform his present experiences into a third-person past, as remembered by a female friend in an imaginary future. Staging his own biography in this fashion allowed Nabokov to resolve the inherent conflict between his life and his art. Indeed, he went on to play the game of narrating his own biography throughout his memoir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, and …
Illness As Metaphor? The Role Of Linguistic Categories In The History Of Medicine , Ulrike Kistner
Illness As Metaphor? The Role Of Linguistic Categories In The History Of Medicine , Ulrike Kistner
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Susan Soniag's studies on "Illness and Metaphor" raise a host of questions, based on the twin suppositions running through her project: the ubiquity and pervasiveness of metaphoric constructions of illness on the one hand, and the vision of a liberation from metaphors of illness on the other hand. This paper sets itself the task to explain and resolve this paradox. To this end, concepts of metaphor have to be linguistically defined and differentiated, both structurally and within an archaeology of (medical) knowledge; for it is only on the basis of such a differentiation that we can show how metaphorical language …
Father Knows Best, Judith Roof
Father Knows Best, Judith Roof
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In his essay, "Althusser's Mirror," Carsten Strathausen reveals the paternal politics inherent to any gesture of appropriation. Molding Lacan to an Althusserian mirror, Strathausen demonstrates parallels between Lacan's mirror stage and Althusser's interpellated subject. The resemblance, created through what Strathausen suggests is Althusser's mis-reading of Lacan, reveals their mutual influence. The question of influence, however, becomes an issue of tradition Althusser links to a politics of legitimacy and right he associates with a figure of paternity. While the process of filiation would seem to extend from Lacan to Althusser in the logic of the mirror employed by Strathausen to renew …
From Exile To Affirmation: The Poetry Of Joseph Brodsky, David Patterson
From Exile To Affirmation: The Poetry Of Joseph Brodsky, David Patterson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article examines the relation between the exile of the poet from his homeland and the "exile of the word." The notion of the exile of the word pertains to the poet's problem of re-introducing meaning to the word—an excess of meaning that conveys more than the word can normally convey—through his poetry. Showing how the poet in exile becomes a poet of exile, the article examines what poetry has to do with a larger difficulty of exile and homelessness in human life. Brodsky's poetry, the article argues, addresses this very difficulty. The article concludes that the human capacity to …
Introduction, Lynn A. Higgins
Introduction, Lynn A. Higgins
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
From an issue of the Magazine Litteraire featuring the work of Fernand Braudel to an article by Hayden White on the "Absurdist moment" in criticism, it is clear that the disciplines of history and literary studies are converging. Historians like White and Dominick La Capra in the United States, and Michel de Certeau and the members of the Annales School in France are investigating the rhetorical modes of their craft and exploring implications of the fact that it is historians themselves who "make history." At the same time, literary scholars, emerging from Structuralism and the New Criticism, are seeking with …
Brancusi And His Poets, Joshua S. Mostow
Brancusi And His Poets, Joshua S. Mostow
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article examines four poems on the work of the modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi, written between 1922 and 1966 by four different poets: Carl Sandburg, Mina Loy, Jean (Hans) Arp, and Jiri Kolar. The purpose of the article is to explore how the varying poetics of these writers—the modernism of the Chicago Renaissance, Futurism, Dadaism, and Concrete poetry—influenced the poets' reception and interpretation of the sculptor and his work. This study approaches the relations between visual and verbal art through a semiotic methodology, and while the discussion of the poems takes the form of comparative literature, the main concern of …
On Reading Poems: Visual & Verbal Icons In William Carlos Williams' «Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus», Irene R. Fairley
On Reading Poems: Visual & Verbal Icons In William Carlos Williams' «Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus», Irene R. Fairley
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Williams' admiration for Brueghel's landscape is coded in structural and stylistic correspondences between the poem and the painting. Structures in the poem have effects analogous to the use of devices of color, line, foregrounding in the painting. The poem, like the painting, presents a «neutral» scene but subtly insures the reader's involvement. Further, Williams draws a visual statement so that graphic features suggest a global image isomorphic with the motif of descent. Features of the poem, such as line and clause length, syntactic construction, semantic coherence, are discussed as factors that contribute to rapid glancing and increase readability. A study …