English Language and Literature Commons^™

Flowers In The Dessert: Susana Reisz And Rocío Silva Santisteban, Bethsabe Huaman Andia

International Languages & Literature Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the critical work of two distinguished Peruvian intellectuals: Susana Reisz and Rocío Silva Santisteban. Specifically, I analyze those texts that approach the relation between women and literature from theoretical perspectives, with particular emphasis given to texts about poetry that define feminine writing and women’s literature. In the case of Susana Reisz I start with the book Teoría Literaria. Una propuesta (1986) and finish with the article “¿El premio será otra carrera? (El lugar de la mujer escritora en el hispanismo del futuro)” from 2010. In the case of Rocío Silva Santisteban I begin with El combate de …

Rural Space As Queer Space: A Queer-Ecology Reading Of Fun Home, Debra J. Rosenthal, Lydia Munnell

2018 Faculty Bibliography

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has quickly joined the ranks of celebrated literary graphic novels. Set in part at a family-run funeral home, the book explores Alison's complicated relationship with her father, a closeted gay man. Amid the tensions of her home life, Alison discovers her own lesbian sexuality and her talent for drawing. The coming-of-age story and graphic format appeal to students. However, the book's nonlinear structure; intertextuality with modernist novels, Greek myths, and other works; and frank representations of sexuality and death present challenges in the classroom.

This volume offers strategies for teaching Fun Home in …

Linda Grace Hoyer Updike: Woman, Author, And Mother, Leslie Hoffman

Library Summer Fellows

Linda Grace Hoyer was a brilliant individual. She graduated from Ursinus College at the age of nineteen, received a master's from Cornell University, and after many years of diligent work, published two novels and a myriad of short stories. She lived an unusual life: reflective, feminine in her thought processes, but nevertheless somewhat stubborn in a time when women were meant to fill a subordinate role. I have found through my research that Hoyer's brilliance did not lie in her intellect and writing alone. In fact, as demonstrated by her literature's autobiographical nature, her brilliance as a writer seemed to …

Anne Hutchinson And The Economics Of Antinomian Selfhood In Colonial New England, Michelle Burnham

English

If American literary histories so often begin with the New England Puritans, it is because histories with such a starting point are able to tell an appealing national story of coherent community and religious freedom. So, at any rate, suggests T. H. Breen when he notes that beginning the national narrative instead with John Smith and the Virginia colony would require telling a far less pleasing tale of American greed, domination, and exploitation. Philip Gura has likewise wondered how Sacvan Bercovitch's model of an "American self," formulated from exclusively Puritan New England materials, might be complicated by John Smith's mercantilism. …

Disseminating Heterotopia, Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Publications and Research

Focuses on the motion picture The Passion of Remembrance by Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood, and the book Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany. Highlights of the motion picture and the book; Author's argument that the tendency to ossify myths only leads to further confusion; Understanding of the mythic process.

Loopholes Of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative And The Critique Of Agency In Foucault, Michelle Burnham

English

Located in the exact center of Harriet Jacobs' i86r slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Shve Girl, is a chapter entitled "The Loophole of Retreat. " The chapter's title refers to the tiny crawlspace above her grandmother's shed, where Jacobs hides for seven years in an effort to escape her master's persecution and the "peculiar institution" of slavery which authorizes that persecution. This chapter's central location, whether the result of accident or design, would seem to suggest its structural significance within Jacobs' narrative. Yet its central location is by no means obvious, for "The Loophole of Retreat" goes …

Persona Criticism And The Death Of The Author, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

The difficulty with doing biographical criticism today is that the figure of the author has increasingly come under attack, almost as if the author's portrait, which at one time routinely accompanied critical works, were being atomized, dissolved in an acid bath of scorn and distrust. Though "death of the author" critics have made a number of important points about the rigidity and naiveté of certain earlier forms of biographical criticism, I find that in my own practice I am loath to give up all vestiges of the author. The strategy I have chosen is what I would call persona criticism, …

Feminist Literary Criticism And The Author, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In the course of this essay I wish to reopen the (never fully closed) question of whether it is advisable to speak of the author, or of what Foucault calls "the author function," when querying a text, and I wish to reopen it precisely at the site where feminist criticism and post-structuralism are presently engaged in dialogue. Here in particular we might expect that reasons for rejecting author erasure would appear. However, theoretically informed feminist critics have recently found themselves tempted to agree with Barthes, Foucault, and the Edward Said of Beginnings that the authorial presence is best set aside …