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Rhode Island College

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Articles 61 - 69 of 69

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

A Poetics Of History: Karen Cushman's Medieval World, Joseph L. Zornado Apr 1997

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

Faculty Publications

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 …

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L'Objet X, Russell A. Potter Oct 1995

L'Objet X, Russell A. Potter

Faculty Publications

... 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.

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Interrogating Identity, Daniel M. Scott Jan 1995

Interrogating Identity, Daniel M. Scott

Faculty Publications

Discusses the structures of identity and the role writing plays in the reconfiguration of the self in Charles Johnson's novel `Middle Passage.' Fundamental assumptions about human and literary identity; Allusion and appropriation of textual authority; Novel's debt to preceding Western writing; Complications of Afro-American experience; Johnson's reconfiguration of writing..

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The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy Apr 1988

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen T. Reddy

Faculty Publications

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 …

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Trauma And Sadomasochistic Narrative, Barbara A. Schapiro Jul 1987

Trauma And Sadomasochistic Narrative, Barbara A. Schapiro

Faculty Publications

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.

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Power And The Poet, Spencer Hall Jan 1983

Power And The Poet, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

In this examination of the English Romantic poet P. B. Shelley, Spencer Hall takes a new direction into the critical review of this work. Whereas traditional thought expresses a metaphysical belief or revelation in regards to Shelley's Power myth, Hall provides a new perspective of deep-seated skepticism. By focusing on the function of the poem rather than a symbolic meaning, Hall seeks to show that the myth is a subjective attribute of human experience rather than supernatural and should be taken as a metaphor used in a variety of ways.

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Wordsworth's Later Style, Spencer Hall Jan 1979

Wordsworth's Later Style, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

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 …

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Shelley's Mont Blanc, Spencer Hall Apr 1973

Shelley's Mont Blanc, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

"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.

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Wordworth's "Lucy" Poems, Spencer Hall Jan 1971

Wordworth's "Lucy" Poems, Spencer Hall

Faculty Publications

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.

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