English Language and Literature Commons^™

Deviant Masculinity And Deleuzean Difference In Proust And Beckett, Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.

The Repetition Of Violence And History: William Trevor's 'Lost Ground', Jennifer Jeffers

Jennifer M. Jeffers

The William Trevor Collection offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated practitioners writing in the English language: the author of fifteen novels, three novellas and eleven volumes of short stories, as well as plays, radio and TV adaptations and film screenplays.

Gender And Space In British Literature, 1660-1820, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Nodal Humor In Comic Narrative: A Semantic Analysis Of Two Stories By Twain And Wodehouse, Christopher Holcomb

Christopher Holcomb

This paper shows that a semantic theory of humor offers, despite assertions to the contrary, an adequate description of how particular instances of humor are linked to the narrative in which they appear. After Victor Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor is summarized, and adopted as the starting point of the analysis in this paper, the humor in two short stories is described in terms of their semantic properties. In this paper, humor is said to reside not simply in jokes but in joke-like constructions, for which the term "nodal points of humor" is used. These nodes can be identified …

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Pamela Benson

Pamela J Benson

Cavallo's provocative title suggests the essence of her argument: the Orlando Innamoratois a didactic poem in which the poet "presents a coherent moral vision of love as well as a program for a humanist use of literature" (10).

Chaucerian Polity, Pamela Benson

Pamela J Benson

In Chaucerian Polity David Wallace makes "visible, through an expansion of temporal and spatial parametersr, elations and developments that would otherwise remain obscured or unconnected"( xvii). Specifically, through examination of the political structures of fourteenth-century Florence and Milan, to which Chaucer was exposed on his travels, Wallace makes Chaucer's political thought visible.

Idealization And Desire In The Hundred Acre Wood: A.A. Milne And Christopher (Robin), Laura Bright

Laura E Bright

Argues that A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner represent the conscious rejection, unconscious reproduction, and re-imaging of the author's traumatic Victorian childhood.

Arbitrary Power, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics by William Keach is reviewed. The book is praised for its assessment of the language and style of Romantic poetry in light of history.

Shelley's Mont Blanc, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

"Mont Blanc" studies the relationship between the poet and the omnipotent. Spencer Hall questions the attribution of the supernatural to Shelley's thinking. Hall sees Shelley as creating a non-transcendental and hybrid confluence of emotions and ideas. Shelley concept of the sublime is not intuited by the poet, but rather constructed and projected by him. It is a process in which the imagination is primary.

Wordworth's "Lucy" Poems, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

This essay seeks to provide meaning and a context for interpretation of the Romantic "Lucy" poems by William Wordsworth. Hall argues against two critics' opposing interpretations by suggesting the meaning is humanistic which provides somewhat of a clarity into Wordsworth's poetic development. Hall suggests that his proposed context into these poems isn't merely one dimensional, but multi-faceted and draws upon other critics.

Refashioning A Wordsworthian Tradition, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

In this review of the critical approaches to Wordsworthian study, Spencer Hall discusses the contrast between theory and academic study of Wordsworthian poetry and their links to each other. Wordsworth is discussed in that of the "problematic Wordsworth" and that of the "programmatic Wordsworth." The two sides show how one thought was a product of imagination which was perpetuated in our time and the other from current academic theories. Hall brings to the forefront that by recognizing the interconnectedness of Wordsworthian studies and contemporary theorizing, the issues of literary studies and liberal education can be engaged with Wordsworth.

Beyond The Realms Of Dream, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

Mary Shelley's Alastor is analyzed in light of the relationship between Gothic and Romantic literature. The relationship between Gothicism and Romanticism is assessed in light of literature. Shelly's poem is held up as a representation of mature Gothic literature owing a debt to Romanticism.

The Ideal, The Rhetorical, And The Erotic, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

In this review of English Romanticism Spencer Hall examines two works in regards to the intense interest in P. B. Shelley's works. Hall uses many examples to demonstrate why Shelley has become so popular and why he will be in the years to come. With the ongoing critical reexamination of Shelley's works, and evidence of teachers use in their classrooms and in undergraduate studies, the passionate intensity that is undertaken affirms how "hot" Shelley really is.

L'Objet X, Russell Potter

Russell A Potter

... white envy of black history, even though that history is written with whips and chains, extends to countless other visual and aural signifiers of black culture; in today's suburban enclaves it's hip-hop culture that brings the 'flava' to what many white kids apprehend as a flavorless cultural landscape.

Reading And Writing Race In Ireland, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

In following Henry's education in race matters -- one trajectory of the plot -- the novel foregrounds the many absurdities attending on the tragic history of racism in the U.S. Doyle's interest in race is not in fact new with this novel, which readers of the monthly Metro Eireann would know, as Doyle has been publishing stories centered on race issues in that venue since 2000. This essay examines the first five of those stories, particularily in their relation to emerging discources of race in Ireland.

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …

Foul And Fair Play, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

The conventions of writing about crime fiction are nearly as codified as those of the genre itself. One powerful convention of such criticism involves drawing ever shifting boundaries between subgenres, with spy thrillers, hard-boiled detective stories, and "cozies," for example, thought to occupy distinct cultural spaces and to attract different readers in search of dissimilar pleasures. Another is to argue either that there is no meaningful distinction between "art" literature and popular fiction, including crime fiction, or that, while there are indeed important differences between crime fiction and literature, some writers of crime fiction transcend the limits of their genre …

Wordsworth's Later Style, Spencer Hall

Spencer Hall

The three "close readings" described in the March 1978 Editor's Column were introduced with this line from Marianne Moore: "we do not admire what we cannot understand." The proposition is, of course, as patently false to experience as is Keats's at the end of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." We often admire exceedingly what we do not understand, precisely because we do not understand it. This is as true of literary criticism as of religious revelation (the two activities having become strangely similar these days), and one of the three "close readings" referred to is a significant case in …

Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization: The Dialectics Of Love, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Presents a psychoanalysis of romantic idealization in Thomas Hardy's novel 'Far From the Madding Crowd.' Biography of Hardy; Effect of narcissistic conflicts and idealizations on Hardy's relationships with women in his life; Plot of the novel; Characters in the novel..

The Bonds Of Love And The Boundaries Of Self In Toni Morrison's "Beloved", Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Toni Morrison's Beloved penetrates, perhaps more deeply than any historical or psychological study could, the unconscious emotional and psychic consequences of slavery. The novel reveals how the condition of enslavement in the external world, particularly the denial of one's status as a human subject, has deep repercussions in the individual's internal world. These internal resonances are so profound that even if one is eventually freed from external bondage, the self will still be trapped in an inner world that prevents a genuine experience of freedom. As Sethe succinctly puts it, "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed …

Transitional States And Psychic Change: Thoughts On Reading D. H. Lawrence, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

One of my favorite scenes in literature occurs in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915). Tom Brangwen's Polish wife Lydia is upstairs in their home giving birth. Tom is downstairs with Anna, Lydia's four-year-old child by her first marriage. Anna is panic-stricken, screaming in terror for her mother, and Tom is responding to her with irritation and mounting anger. Like the child, he too is feeling shut out and abandoned by Lydia. Tom is made particularly furious by the "blind" and "mechanical" nature of Anna's crying.

Psychoanalysis And Romantic Idealization, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

No abstract provided.

The Death-Ego And The Vital Self: Romances Of Desire In Literature / Book Review, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Psychoanalysis and literary romance share much in common: both are concerned with desire, with elusive objects of desire, and with the dark, hidden, and fantastic dimensions of the human imagination. Gavriel Reisner’s The Death-Ego and the Vital Self explores the interrelationship of psychoanalysis and literary romance with original and often illuminating results.

Trauma And Sadomasochistic Narrative, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

This essay applies trauma theory and relational psychoanalysis to a close reading of Mary Gaitskill's short story "The Dentist." It argues that the sadomasochistic relationship central to this story, and to much of Gaitskill's fiction, is rooted in trauma and can be illuminated by an understanding of the post-traumatic condition.

The Death-Ego And The Vital Self, Barbara Schapiro

Barbara A Schapiro

Reviews the book "The Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis," by Gavriel Reisner.

A Poetics Of History: Karen Cushman's Medieval World, Joseph Zornado

Joseph L Zornado

Historical fiction occupies an uncertain space in the field of children's literature. Offer a teacher or scholar a work of historical fiction in any genre, from picture book to novel, and you are sure to get a varied, contentious response about what makes historical fiction work. Why? Because historical fiction has ambitious, ambiguous aims. For instance, should historical fiction be good history, even if this means the story might be, say, a little dull? Or, on the other hand, should the author take liberties with setting, dialogue, and character in order to provide the audience with "a good read?" What …

A Becoming Habit, Joseph Zornado

Joseph L Zornado

Much of Flannery O'Connor's fiction undermines the notion that her texts, or any text for that matter, offers the reader a chance at fixed comprehensibility In fact, O'Connor's fiction often clears itself away as a meaning-bearing icon in order to introduce the reader to something other, to the mystery latent and invisible in the manners. O'Connor remains remarkable as an avowed Catholic and as a writer because she resisted spelling out that mystery though her Catholic faith offered much in the way of dogma that might have sufficed. Even so, there is an indissoluble link between the writer and the …

Blasted’S Hysteria: Rape, Realism, And The Thresholds Of The Visible, Kim Solga

Kim Solga

A curious blind spot remains in the critical response to Sarah Kane’s Blasted: the rape of Cate by Ian. In a play famous for its onstage violence, why is this rape, one of its pivotal moments of brutality, left unstaged? This article investigates this gap by exploring the theoretical and historical dimensions of the ‘‘missing’’ in Kane’s play. I argue that Kane’s representation of Cate’s rape as missing signals both her engagement with the history of rape’s representation – an elusive, evasive history rather than an outrageous, in-yer-face one – as well as a deft understanding of how the ‘‘missing’’ …

Small Group Multitasking In Literature Classes, Bradley Baurain

Bradley Baurain

Faced with the challenge of teaching American literature to large, multilevel classes in Vietnam, the writer developed a flexible small group framework called ‘multitasking’. ‘Multitasking’ sets up stable task categories which rotate among small groups from lesson to lesson. This framework enabled students to work cooperatively in a variety of formats and the teacher to generate a wide range of materials and activities efficiently. It also spurred students to develop more independent learning skills and the teacher to experiment more freely with new techniques. In a narrative and reflective format, in terms both of what he expected and what he …

Rape’S Metatheatrical Return: Rehearsing Sexual Violence Among The Early Moderns, Kim Solga

Kim Solga

What happens when theatre crosses the line, risks danger in the real? This paper explores the pernicious theatricalization of sexual violence in early modern England, its trouble-making uptake in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and Julie Taymor's contemporary response in her 1999 film version of the play. Along the way the article probes a handful of questions about theatre's social efficacy: what are the consequences of understanding theatre as a potentially malevolent form of public art and expression? How do we account for those moments when theatre poses genuine risk? And, more importantly, how do we build a response to, an ethics …