Poetry Commons^™

To Live Like Fighting Cocks: 'Fight Club' And The Ethics Of Masculinity, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club has prompted many academics to write about this film and has captivated many of their students. As Warren Rosenberg, chair of English at the all-male Wabash College has said, "This seems to be a movie that they all adore so we'll see if we can deconstruct it, and hopefully get them to like it less" (Students, A10). While we may take this flippant comment from a 2001 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education as just that and dismiss it as quickly as it passes, Rosenberg's sentiment reflects a widespread …

Violence And Beauty: Jacques Lacan's 'Antigone', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

If Jean-Luc Nancy was able to write in "The Sublime Offering," in 1993, that the sublime was fashionable (25), then academic and theoretical tastes have changed, and beauty has come back in style. Throughout the late 1990s, cultural critics and theorists undertook a return to beauty against the fashion for the sublime that returned in twentieth-century theory and philosophy of art in works by Jean-François Lyotard and Theodor Adorno, among others. The interest in the sublime has been grounded in violent historical experience. Not that violence was new, or that the kinds of violence that the twentieth century bequeathed us …

Remake As Erasure In 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was remade as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) by Marcus Nispel. The remake erases the progressive critique of gender and family life in the United States that Hooper’s film screened and replaces that critique with a reactionary vision of sex, gender and family in the United States of the early twenty-first century.

Differend, Sexual Difference, And The Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

The aim of this chapter is to articulate how two key feminist writers, Marguerite Duras and Luce lrigaray, engage and rewrite Lyotard's interest in the sublime as a feminist aesthetic category. Jean-François Lyotard was at the vanguard of a retrieval of the category of the sublime in contemporary aesthetic theory. A trenchantly polymorphous philosopher, he wrote of the sublime in a range of styles that rivals the old masters of aesthetics, who not only mastered the thought, but were themselves sublime in their works. Whereas the tradition of aesthetics almost unequivocally aligns the sublime with the masculine and the feminine …

Invisible Monsters And Palahniuk's Perverse Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Invisible Monsters is a novel about the search for identities — sexual, family, gender, social — that is never at ease with the search. The characters in the novel wish to put an end to the need to search for an identity and to draw to a close the need and urge to represent themselves to others. These are characters who wish to be what and who they are without apology or argument but are ill-equipped to do so. They cannot find the means by and through which to put the seeking to an end. It may be tempting to …

Mixing Mourning And Desire: Alfonso Cuarón's 'Y Tu Mamá También', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También was one of a series of hit movies from Mexico in the early years of the millennium. From the beginning, the movie generated shock and scandal for its representations of graphic sex, but more than that for its representation of queer desire between the emerging young stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal. As the two established their careers, they continued to answer questions about Julio and Tenoch, the two adolescent, urban cowboys they played in Y Tu Mamá También. The road movie as coming-of-age story on its own would not produce any disconcerting …

Hiroshima, 'Mon Amour,' Trauma, And The Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Trauma ruptures the world of our daily experiences. It is an intrusion that threatens the body and psyche and affects us in symptomatic ways. That something happened is certain; what that is, however, resists comprehension and understanding. The impetus of much contemporary trauma research in the humanities derives from the coincidence of survivors' insistence on the truth of their experiences and life in a global culture that multiplies traumatic circumstances. These circumstances pose a radical threat to the fecundity of human life, to be sure, and also to the very possibility of brute survival. My aim in this essay is …

On Mutilation: The Sublime Body Of Chuck Palahniuk's Fiction, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Much of Chuck Palahniuk's writing centers on the mutilation of bodies. Bodies are broken from the outside. They are beaten unrecognizable and destroyed beyond recuperation. Bodies are transformed from one sex to another, one gender to another. In Palahniuk's writing, the human body is the site for the inscription of a search for modes of authentic living in a world where the difference between the fake and the genuine has ceased to function. Not just the rules that had regulated behavior and prospects for a good life, but the rules that determine desire, pleasure, gender identity, and family role are …

Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, And The Postmodern Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Samuel Beckett's texts are populated with characters who have been so deprived of their humanity that humanity appears as essentially absent from his texts. The characters' presence in the diegesis is marked by unmistakable absences-absence of vision, of mobility, of sense, of name. Beckett's characters are often without: without hair, without teeth, without foreseeable future. The human character is at the limit of humanity and runs the risk of passing over into the grey zone of the inhuman. They lose track of their place, of their time, of their names. They frequently belong to no time and no place. When …

The Vanishing Mexicana/O: (Dis)Locating The Native In Ruiz De Burton’S 'Who Would Have Thought It?' And 'The Squatter And The Don', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political reform. American Indians’ presence in the novels, however marginal, and Ruiz de Burton’s rendering of them as savage, powerless, and justly shut out from the social and political life of the nation, are critical to the author’s aims. Accounting for the absence and strategic appearance of American …

Scientific Racism And Masculine Recuperation: Charles Lummis And The Search For 'Home', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

Like many of his peers who came of age during the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles Lummis (1859-1928) chafed against the constraints of what he and other antimodernists viewed as the overly civilized Eastern United States. However, in Lummis’ own estimation, one of the many qualities that distinguished him from his peers was his willingness to take the necessary action to combat the devitalizing impact of city life by heading west to experience unfamiliar lands and cultures. As he states in the opening pages of his 1892 travel narrative, A Tramp Across the Continent, “I am an American …

Weaving Transnational Identity: Travel And Diaspora In Sandra Cisneros’S 'Caramelo', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento: A Novel (2002) dramatizes the functions of travel and tourism for members of the Mexican and Chicana/o diaspora, particularly for second-generation Chicana protagonist and narrator, Lala Reyes. Caramelo showcases travel's critical role in cultural identity formation, maintenance, and contestation for diasporic peoples, while also demonstrating the variability and mutability of diasporic cultural identity as mediated through travel. My explication of the novel's representations of cultural identity formation through travel contributes to critical conversations regarding the relationship between diaspora and tourism, argues for elastic understandings of diaspora itself, and brings needed attention to the particularities …

'The Injin Is Civilized And Aint Extinct No More Than A Rabbit': Transformation And Transnationalism In Alexander Posey’S 'Fus Fixico Letters, Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

In this article I first introduce my critical approach to Posey’s life and work in conjunction with an overview of the Fus Fixico Letters, as situated in their historical and cultural context. I position my argument in relation to the ideological framework outlined by Creek/Cherokee writer and theorist Craig Womack (one of the most significant Posey scholars), and throughout the article draw upon the groundbreaking historical and archival research of Daniel Littlefield. Following an introduction to the letters and an outline of my central arguments, I analyze Posey’s conception of transformation, as it manifests in the Fus Fixico Letters, as …

The Possibilities And Pitfalls In Teaching Sherman Alexie’S 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian', Tereza M. Szeghi

Tereza M. Szeghi

About the book: This book provides original essays that suggest ways to engage students in the classroom with the cultural factors of American literature. Some of the essays focus on individual authors’ works, others view American literature more broadly, and still others focus on the application of culturally based methods for reading. All suggest a closer look at how ethnicity, culture and pedagogy interact in the classroom to help students better understand the complexity of works by African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and several other sometimes overlooked American cultural groups. Abstract for Tereza M. Szeghi's essay: In March …

What The Fuck Is This?: Aesthetic Nature Of Being Or Ontology In The Poetry Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alexis Stephenson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“What the Fuck is This?” examines the intersection of phenomenology and poetry arguing for an aesthetic nature of Being and focuses on how we know or experience the world instead of Cartesian absolutes. This subjective knowledge does not compete against objective knowledge but simply recognizes the use that poetic language has for communicating the subjective knowledge from experience of being as it unfolds for us. The major movements of the thesis focus on aesthetic objects, aesthetic intersubjectivity, and the aesthetic self. These are labeled “aesthetic” because a phenomenological methodology reveals a dialectic between that which is unfolding and that which …

Inverting The Haiku Moment: Alienation, Objectification, And Mobility In Richard Wright’S ‘Haiku: This Other World’, Thomas Lewis Morgan

Thomas Morgan

Richard Wright’s haiku — both the 4,000 he wrote at the end of his life and the 817 he selected for inclusion in Haiku: This Other World (1998) — remain something of an enigma in his larger oeuvre; critics variously position them as a continuation of his earlier thematic concerns in a different literary form, an aesthetic departure from the racialized limitations imposed upon his earlier work, or one of several positions in between. Such arguments debate the formal construction as well as the strategic reinvention of Wright’s haiku. The present essay engages both sides of this conversation, arguing that …

The City As Refuge: Constructing Urban Blackness In Paul Laurence Dunbar’S 'The Sport Of The Gods' And James Weldon Johnson’S 'Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man.', Thomas Lewis Morgan

Thomas Morgan

This essay analyzes the narrative strategies that Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson used to represent black characters in The Sport of the Gods and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a means of examining the authors' construction of the city as an alternative space for depicting African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, the majority of African American images in popular fiction were confined to Southern-based pastoral depictions that restricted black identity to stereotypically limited and historically regressive ideas, exemplified in such characters as Zip Coon, Sambo, Uncle Tom, Jim Crow, and Mammy Jane. The …

Bridging The Works Of Horace, Catullus, Ovid, And Haydock, George Bishop Haydock

Honors Theses

I wrote this thesis to explore the metrical poetry of Horace, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as my own poetry and short fiction. I parsed the Latin poems, word-by-word, and provided literal translations, as well as idiomatic translations of selected poems by Horace and Ovid. In order to link these translations to my short story, Into the Last Good Fight, I wrote three metrical poems that synthesize the themes, concepts, and structures of my story with the themes, concepts, and structures of the Latin poems. To provide an even stronger link between the Latin portion of my thesis and the …

Lost In Translation? Found In Translation? Neither? Both?, Esther Allen, Mary Ann Caws, Peter Constantine, Edith Grossman, Nancy Kline, Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Karen Van Dyck, Alyson Waters, Roger Celestin, Charles Lebel

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Translation specialists Esther Allen, Mary Ann Caws, Peter Constantine, Edith Grossman, Nancy Kline, Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Karen Van Dyck and Alyson Waters respond to the TQC question:

“Lost in translation”; “Found in translation”: Are these just useless commonplaces or are they indicative of something relevant to your own practice?

“Amidst The Chime Of The Razor Wire”: Narrating Poetic Justice In Guantanamo Bay, Kristina H. Reardon

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

The quest of poetic justice carries Marc Falkoff’s 2007 anthology Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak into the court of public (literary) opinion. While the Pentagon asserts that poetry poses special security risks, and related translation issues may obscure the artistry or message of some of the 17 poets’ verse, Falkoff’s volume nevertheless gives prisoners’ voices a forum in which they might be heard. At the nexus of legal and literary scholarship, poetic voice and its expression become a site of deconstructing identity. The Guantanamo poets invite readers to explore the ways that aesthetics form perceptions of their identity as …

Intertextuality And Ideology: Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' And James Fordyce's 'Sermons To Young Women', Laura Vorachek

Laura Vorachek

In Jane Austen’s Art of Memory and other works, Jocelyn Harris has demonstrated the importance of Austen’s literary contexts for understanding and appreciating Austen’s art. One context for understanding Pride and Prejudice is the conduct book it mentions by name, James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women. Mr. Collins chooses it to read aloud to the Bennet girls, and when Lydia interrupts him, he responds: “I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit.” I would argue that reading Pride and Prejudice next to Fordyce’s Sermons reveals that …

Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, 1800, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Prelude:

IN the dense tracts of woodland that stretch south from Esthwaite Water, a young boy pauses amidst a copse of hazel. His chest heaves; his heart races. Brake, bramble, and thorn. Exhaustion and expectation gather in each breath, course through his body and deeper still into his soul. He eyes the trees, fingers the milk-white flowers that hang in clusters, and knows joy. His breathing slows. Leaves murmur in the breeze. His heart fills with kindness. Taking up the crook that lies in the long grass, he swings it wide. Petals fill the air, swirl around him like …

Unexpected Zeus, Adam Lambert

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.