Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Professing American Literature: A Report From Brazil, Arnold Gordenstein

New England Journal of Public Policy

This American professor discovered that although his Brazilian students appeared to be entirely receptive to American literature, they were often culturally blocked from the concepts the books contained. He also found that some key American ideas don't translate well into Brazilian culture and that it is nearly impossible for a professor abroad to present literature in a politically and culturally neutral way.

Representative Men, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

"Representativeness" is the theme of Shaun O'Connell's essay, "Representative Men." Reviewing six books, one about an actual man and five about fictional men, O'Connell sees them as attempts to define "representative men" of the 1980s, "an era," he observes, "when the worst were full of passionate intensities, particularly among men." Each antiheroic man in these books, he concludes, was "selfish, domineering, dangerous to women, and deceitful, yet each man was also committed to a system of values and ideas that made him an interesting case history — values which, in some instances, redeemed his failings."

As usual, O'Connell, in his …