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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“Boys Will Be Boys”: Antithetical Boyhood In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Madilyn Abbe
“Boys Will Be Boys”: Antithetical Boyhood In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Madilyn Abbe
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
This paper explores Claudia Rankine’s work Citizen: An American Lyric and how the text applies boyhood and manhood differently to white and black males. The text subverts these terms’ straightforward relationship with actual age, instead recognizing them as reverse age categorizations. While these contradictory applications minimize black men through infantilization and expedite the maturation of black children, these same converse categorizations excuse the violence of white men. Through this distinction, Citizen exposes childhood as a subjective categorization to benefit white power. To address the resulting self-fragmentation for African American males, I maintain that the text proffers storytelling as symbolic mothering …
The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear Of The Unknown In The Things They Carried, Mckay Hansen
The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear Of The Unknown In The Things They Carried, Mckay Hansen
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In this paper I discuss the nature of the fear that worked upon many of the soldiers of the Vietnam War, concentrating on a fear of the unknown. Drawing upon Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as its central focus text, my analysis suggests that the fear of the unknown is a product of communities’ efforts to distance themselves from a cultural Other. As such, I posit that those in positions of societal influence employ fear to reinforce racial stereotypes and maintain domestic unity. Perceiving ethnic and linguistic misunderstandings as forces that cultural leaders often evoke deliberately, I claim that …