Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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.

“Since When Is Steve Urkel White?” – Vocal Blackface In The German Dubbing Landscape, Patrick Ploschnitzki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dubbed (i.e., lip-synchronized audiovisual translation of) movies and television are ubiquitous in German-speaking countries and often consumed without active reflection of their production. Due to this inattention, the domestication / replacement of cultural references in US media translated into German often goes unnoticed. Translational decision-making becomes highly problematic, however, when entire cultures are replaced or disregarded as a result. In 2004, applied linguist Robin Queen demonstrated that Black actors were dubbed by white voice actors with German dialects and sociolects traditionally read as “blue collar.” There has not been any follow-up research to her crucial contribution that remains topical: the …

Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The impulse toward multilingual writing has arisen as a prominent trend in contemporary women’s writing. Criticism and notions of the literary have to respond to, among other things, the fact that "we live in a world where a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi or multilingual" (Camboni 34). To be responsive to the "increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts" (Eagleton and Friedman 3). This paper considers the ways multilingual writing creates, “small scale modes of listening” (Maguire xix) that tune the reader to languages, identities, and cultures under erasure. …

Heredia, Juanita. Mapping South American Latina/O Literature In The United States: Interviews With Contemporary Writers, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019., Manuela Borzone

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Juanita Heredia. Mapping South American Latina/o Literature in the United States: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. vii + 238 pp.

Twenty-First-Century African And Asian Migration To Europe And The Rise Of The Ethno-Topographic Narrative, Nelson González Ortega, Olga Michael

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a rise in the publication of narratives concerning contemporary African and Asian migration to Europe, written individually or collectively, by Asian, African and/or European authors. While scholarly attention has increasingly turned to these texts, our purpose is to further investigate them from a pan-European perspective and to propose a model for their analysis as a distinct literary genre. We therefore introduce the "ethno-topographic narrative" to define, classify and systematically analyze twenty-first-century migration narratives published in Europe in relation to theory, method, corpus, generic type, individual or collective authorship, border and …

Monolingualism Of Us Poetry: Language Barriers For Poetry In Spanish, Benito Del Pliego

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The growing acceptance of US Latino voices in the US literary canon is also bringing to the attention of the critics the limitations of this inclusiveness. US Latino or Hispanic literatures are a far more complex phenomenon than commonly portrayed. This complexity is interlaced with the even wider frame of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual literary realities of the US, a country where languages other than English have been historically relegated to a secondary role by concerted policies of cultural domination. In such context, it is relevant to explores the social origins and the implications of the systematical bias against the literary …

Jonathan K. Gosnell. Franco-America In The Making: The Creole Nation Within. U Of Nebraska P, 2018., Anna V. Keefe

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jonathan K. Gosnell. Franco-America in the Making: The Creole Nation Within. U of Nebraska P, 2018. 347 pp.

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.

A Branch Of Magic, Or The Possibility Of Myth In Esther Kinsky’S Am Fluß, Ben Pestell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article demonstrates how literary walks can evoke myth in a meaningful way for contemporary life. In particular, through a close reading of Esther Kinsky’s Am Fluß [River], I argue that the landscape experienced on foot can articulate and give access to the transcendent component of myth. I begin with a survey of how magic and transcendent experience is configured in related literary forms (namely new nature writing, the post-secular, new materialism, and the literature of re-enchantment) but remains bound by material reality. I then define the meaning and function of myth in relation to contemporary literature. These …

Wombs, Wizards, And Wisdom: Bilbo's Journey From Childhood In The Hobbit, Rory W. Collins

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

In The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien constructs middle-aged Bilbo Baggins as a sheltered and emotionally immature ‘child’ during the opening chapters before tracing his development into an autonomous, self-aware adult as the tale progresses. This article examines Tolkien’s novel qua bildungsroman through both a literary lens—considering setting, dialogue, and symbolism, among other techniques—and via a psychological framework, emphasizing an Eriksonian conception of development. Additionally, Peter Jackson’s three-part film adaptation of The Hobbit is discussed throughout with ways that Jackson succeeds and fails at portraying Bilbo’s childlike attributes noted. I argue that Tolkien presents a sophisticated account of Bilbo’s …

Arthur Rose. Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee. Bloomsbury, 2017., Peter Faziani

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Arthur Rose. Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee. Bloomsbury, 2017. 190 pp.

The “Anarchy” Of King Arthur’S Beginnings: The Politics That Created The Arthurian Tradition, Andrew D. Pringle

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

“The ‘Anarchy’ of King Arthur’s Beginnings: The Politics that Created the Arthurian Tradition” examines Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae in a political and historical context to illuminate the 12^th-century politics that started the Arthurian tradition and show how those politics influenced later works about the legendary king. Based on literary and historical research, this paper covers the transmission of politics in the Historia in three sections: a summary of the politics during the time Geoffrey wrote the Historia, an examination of the way those politics were integrated into the Historia, and finally a consideration of …

Ilai Rowner. The Event: Literature And Theory. U Of Nebraska P, 2015., Dane Stalcup

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Ilai Rowner. The Event: Literature and Theory. U of Nebraska P, 2015. xv + 311 pp.

Meera Atkinson. The Poetics Of Transgenerational Trauma. Bloomsbury, 2017., Katie Lally

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Meera Atkinson. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Joy Of Ugly Feelings: Korean “Bad Taste” Webtoons As A Case Study, Hyesu Park

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cognitive narratology has contributed significantly to our understanding of reading fiction, namely, what happens when we read and why we read at all. According to scholars such as Lisa Zunshine, Alan Palmer, and George Butte, we have an evolved craving to read the minds of others, and reading fiction ultimately is a busy act of reading and misreading minds of characters in the storyworld. My paper questions this cognitivist belief by using Korean “bad taste” webtoons (online comics using violent verbal and visual for amusement) as a case study. I discuss ways in which the absence of readable minds and …

Perineum: Erika Lopez, Debra A. Castillo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Erika Lopez is the author of five lavishly illustrated, fictionalized memoirs as well as a postcard book and a performance piece, “Nothing Left but the Smell.” All of her books are road tales of sorts, texts that grapple with the inchoate and often illegible need to assert herself as bi: bi-racial, bi-sexual, bi-cultural, bi-coastal, but also more and different than merely bi (“I contain multitudes,” said Walt Whitman), disrespectful of boundaries, genders, and genres, and unwilling to settle down with one person or one story even when the constant movement and empting out exhausts her. Even worse, in some ways; …

Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the second decade of the 21^st 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 19^th 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 …

An Unexpected Life Through Comics: An Interview With Ben Katchor, Frederick Luis Aldama

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This interview conducted with Ben Katchor takes readers on a journey through his life, work, and different eras of comic strip and comic book creation. Katchor shares with Frederick Luis Aldama his origins as a word and drawing storyteller as well as his trials, tribulations, and successes throughout the latter 20th century.

Frederick Luis Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey By Interview. San Diego: ¡Hyperbole Books!, 2017., Jessica Rutherford

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Frederick Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview. San Diego: ¡Hyperbole Books!, 2017.

Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics And Post-War Constructions Of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven Up, 2015., Kristof Van Gansen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Mel Gibson. Remembered Reading. Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2015.

Frederick Luis Aldama And Christopher M. González, Eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, And Future. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Noel R. Zavala

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher M. González, eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.

Mark Heimermann And Brittany Tullis, Eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth In Transnational Comics. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2017., Cristina R. Rivera

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, eds. Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017.

Andrew J. Kunka. Autobiographical Comics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017., Nicole Dib

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Andrew J. Kunka. Autobiographical Comics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Canadians In The Manichean Universe Of War: The Novels Of Ralph Connor, Anna Branach-Kallas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The purpose of my article is an analysis of two war novels by Canadian best-selling author Charles W. Gordon, known to his readers under the pseudonym of Ralph Connor (1830-1937): The Major (1917) and The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919). At the age of fifty-four, Connor was sent to the front as a preacher; only a fourth of his battalion survived, which made his determined to support the cause of the Empire in North America. His sentimental romances were written to support the war effort (The Major) or consolidate the myth of Canada’s valorous sacrifice in …

The Journey To Death: Elemental Imagery In The Works Of George Macdonald, Kaitlin M. Downing

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Abstract

Child death is a common topic in Victorian literature, with many writers focusing on the pain that comes with the loss of a child. George MacDonald also includes child death in his writing, but in a very different way; MacDonald’s works tend to portray death in a much more positive manner, straying away from the sadness surrounding a death and instead focusing on journeys of purification for the characters, with death simply as a transition into the next stage of life. MacDonald combines his religious beliefs with his interest in chemistry and alchemy to create these purifying journeys, each …

Dirk Van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind And Creative Undoing From Darwin To Beckett And Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Xiii + 271 Pp., Anna E. Hiller

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Dirk van Hulle. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xiii + 271 pp.

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 …

Homosexuality As (Anti)Illness: Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere , Edward S. Brinkley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article treats Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as culturally antagonistic but also as culturally conservative: Dorian's liminal position as a male who knows—who has experienced sexual contact with other males—is linked in the text both to a position of cultural/epistemological superiority (the "Greek" sexual act constructed as index of canonical mastery, back to Greek texts and artwork) and to a position of disease and dis-figurement. The latter association, read by other commentators particularly in the final pages as punishment for narcissism, hedonism, or homosexual activity, is here glossed as an accusation against Victorian injunctions against same …

Men In (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, And Psychoanalysis In Rebecca West's The Return Of The Soldier , Misha Kavka

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the "shell shock" of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and "a newer kind of doctor," West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along …

Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chinua Achebe is recognized as one of Africa's most important and influential writers, and his novels have focused on the ways in which the European tradition of the novel and African modes of expression relate to each other in both complementary and contesting ways. Achebe's novels are informed by an important theory of writing which tries to mediate the politics of the novel as a form of commentary on the emergence and transformation of nationalism which constitutes the African writer's epistemological context. Achebe's esthetic has been overdetermined by the changing discourse on representation and national identity in colonial and post-colonial …