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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Order And Orderlessness In Gravity's Rainbow: A Dialectic, Richard A. House '94
Order And Orderlessness In Gravity's Rainbow: A Dialectic, Richard A. House '94
Honors Projects
Gravity's Rainbow is a notoriously unreliable text. The perspectives of the strange narrator and various characters give an account of the novel's events that is clearly problematic in terms of the degree of "reality" that can be ascribed to various episodes: fantasies, hallucinations, and paranoid delusions are often indistinguishable from the events which may cause them or to which they may refer. To an unusual degree, then, the fundamental plot-question-"What happens?"-becomes a point of depa.rt"u!e for a sort of textual metaphysics. Often, arguments about the significance of passages may be upstaged by arguments about the plot itself: what "really" happens …
Reading Between The Texts: Benjamin Thomas's 'Abraham Lincoln' And Stephen Oates's 'With Malice Toward None', Robert Bray
Reading Between The Texts: Benjamin Thomas's 'Abraham Lincoln' And Stephen Oates's 'With Malice Toward None', Robert Bray
Scholarship
This essay, previously published in the 'Journal of Information Ethics' (1994) is the one that ignited the Stephen B. Oates plagiarism scandal; that story is fully told in the companion book, 'Dishonest Abe Scholarship.' 'Reading between the Texts' is an analysis of parallels between the two Lincoln biographies of the title, arguing that Oates's book was in parts written out of Thomas's, without acknowledgement of the former's work.
Demythifying Melville: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage And The Nightmare Of Slavery, Rachel Palencia '94
Demythifying Melville: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage And The Nightmare Of Slavery, Rachel Palencia '94
Honors Projects
When I first picked up Middle Passage, I was struck by an odd sense of familiarity, for having read "Benito Cereno" that same year, I immediately noted a connection to Melville. I became curious to determine not only the nature of that connection but also how an analysis of it might enhance an understanding of Johnson's text. I asked myself: "Why does Johnson deliberately choose to retell Melville?" A few reasons immediately suggested themselves: because Melville represents the canon of classic American literature and because he is an American writer who has adopted the 'European perspective of the empire. Moreover, …