Modern Literature Commons^™

Is Chaos Theory Postmodern Science?, J. Linn Mackey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Based on a comparison between the theories of N. Katherine Hayles (Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science) and Vladimir Tasic (Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought), J. Linn Mackey asks the question Is Chaos Theory Postmodern Science and looks at parallels between the literature dubbed as postmodern and the scientific branch more properly termed complex dynamics. His conclusions are surprising: both Hayles and Tasic miss important connective elements of both the science and the practice of postmodernism. Postmodern science does, in fact, exist, and literature just may be it.

Rewriting, Rereading Récidive, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

Author of some dozen works of homoerotic fiction, two polemical essays, and recipient of the 1973 Prix Médicis¹, Tony Duvert published his first novel Récidive in 1967. Seven years later he rewrote it, ultimately publishing a much shorter version in 1976 - which for reviewer A. Thiher resembles what the prose of Jean Genet might have become were it to have been rewritten by Alain Robbe-Grillet. This disturbing work by one of France's most aggressively homosexual writers, a self-proclaimed "pédhomophile" (L'Enfant 21), has largely escaped critical attention. In the only study to focus on Récidive to date, …

Native Speakers' Attitudes Toward The Use Of Spanish By Non-Native Speakers: From George W. To J. Lo, Laura Callahan

Modern Languages & Literature

This investigation of native speakers' attitudes toward the use of Spanish by non-native speakers considers the following questions: Do native speakers consider the public use of Spanish by non-native speakers to be inappropriate? Do Latino non-native speakers provoke a more favorable response? Do native speakers believe Latinos have an obligation to know Spanish? What factors correlate with native and heritage speakers' attitudes toward ethnicity and language choice? Data were collected via a questionnaire distributed to students at post-secondary institutions in ten states. The findings provide insights into the attitudes of native and heritage speakers, a rapidly growing population in the …

Returning To The Originary Enmity Of Philosophy And Literature: Juan Benet's Del Pozo Y Del Numa (Un Ensayo Y Una Leyenda), Stephen D. Gingerich

World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The article discusses the book "Del pozo y del numa (un ensayo y una leyenda)," by Spanish author Juan Benet. The book is a critical analysis of the work of German novelist Thomas Mann. The article explores the similarities between the two writers, and while Benet was disappointed in Mann's opus "Joseph and His Brothers," both writers were accustomed to include philosophical digressions in their works. The article also mentions Benet's love-hate relationship with literary criticism.

Au-Delà De Leurs Doléances, Au Nom De L’In-Nocence: Renaud Camus And The Political, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

No abstract provided.

Cinco Destinos De Ensueño, Kevin Fagan

World Languages and Cultures

Todo cambia y evoluciona en la vida, y con los viajes pasa lo mismo. Un día, un destino está de moda, y al siguiente cae en el olvido. ¿Se acuerda alguien de las cataratas del Niágara? Aquí les presentamos los cinco destinos más "calientes" de los próximos años.

Horizons, Volume 21, 2004, Sacred Heart University

Vistas (Horizons)

Sacred Heart University student literary magazine, Horizons.

The Teenage Dissent Of Newman And Unamuno: Conscience As A Safeguard Against Coercive Manipulation, Kevin T. Fagan

World Languages and Cultures

Teenagers seem easy targets for despotic groups, such as cults. Moral conscience, however, may be a dike against a sea of despotism. John Henry Newman and Miguel de Unamuno were giant defenders of conscience in their respective cultures. Their philosophies and phenomenologies of conscience depict conscience as supreme in the mind of the ordinary person, though subject to pressures, even death. This notion becomes alive in the deep religious crisis and conversion of their adolescence, marked by a sense of personal divine experience, confidence in final predestination or holy trust, and an ethical commitment. Both men, however, dissent from their …

The Late Modernism Of Cormac Mccarthy (Review), Peter Lurie, Mark A. Eaton

English Faculty Publications

David Holloway's titular phrasing "late modernism" has an effective ring. It captures the theoretical underpinnings of his recent book, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, evoking Fredric Jameson's work, on which Holloway heavily relies, while also situating McCarthy precisely where he wants him to be, historically and culturally. According to Holloway, McCarthy's fiction constitutes an important redoubt against the diminishing of modernism's once-valorous stance by forging a productive opposition to what he sees as a final stage in capitalist expansion. At the heart of Holloway's project is his concern to restore an oppositional vitality to literary production, or what …

In The Space Behind His Eyes : Donald R. Stuart : A Biography, Sally Clarke

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The major part of this thesis, In the Space Behind His Eyes, is a biography of Western Australian author, Donald Robert Stuart (1913-1983), a colourful life story woven around accepted and persistent myths found in the Australian psyche. In his childhood, Donald Stuart listened to stories about his Scottish immigrant grandfather finding gold on the Victorian fields and his father's part in the 1891 Queensland Shearers strike. His poverty-stricken, but peaceful, upbringing in suburban Perth, Western Australia, was overtaken by the 1930s Depression and, as a rebellious fourteen-year old, he left home and took to the road. In the next …

Rhétorique De La Réception Des Oeuvres Francophones Dans Présence Africaine, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article analyses the Reception discourse towards African and Caribbean Literatures in French. We will analyse some articles published in Présence africaine to show how this journal played a leading part in the promotion of African and Caribbean Literatures in French since its beginning in 1947 to now.

Discours Préfaciels Et Réception En Littérature Africaine De Langue Française, Sélom Komlan Gbanou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Decisive instance between the text and its reader, the preface plays an important role in the reception of the literary work, as Gerard Genette emphasizes in his essay Seuils (1987). The present analysis proposes a reading of the stategies used in the prefaces of francophone African Literature from colonial times to the present. Who introduces whom? Why and how? These are a few of the questions this article deals with.

Outstanding Southeastern Author Awards Nomination Form

The Southeastern Librarian

Calls for nominations for the Outstanding Southeastern Author Awards for 2003.

Trends. Psychology Of The Alienated And Political Violence, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses alienation and the psychology of the alienated in literature (Camus and Dostoevsky) and society.

Freedom Of Conscience In John H. Newman And Miguel De Unamuno, Kevin T. Fagan

World Languages and Cultures

Deals with the issue of freedom of conscience in two of its principal advocates in the modem English and Spanish-speaking worlds, John Henry Newman and Miguel de Unamuno. Seemingly strange bedfellows, in their respective linguistic communities Newman is considered an intellectual defender of institutional Christianity, while Unamuno is oft characterized as its greatest heretic. This dissertation is a comparative study of both writers from a historical-critical perspective. Our aim is to suggest that the heroic defenses of conscience by both Newman and Unamuno towards the end of their lives are a logical corollary to a succession of actions and writings …

Revisiting Mercier's L'An 2440. [Review Of Riikka Forsström's Possible Worlds: The Idea Of Happiness In The Utopian Vision Of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden, 2002], Arthur B. Evans

Global Language Studies Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

John Mcgahern: From The Local To The Universal, Eamon Maher

Books/Chapters

John McGahern has distinguished himself as one of Ireland's finest living novelists and short story writers with such works as The Pornographer, The Barracks, Amongst Women, and the controversial The Dark, which was banned in Ireland. His latest novel, By the Lake, earned him much critical acclaim, and he was one of only four recipients of a 2003 Lannan Literary Award. In this comprehensive guide to the fiction of John McGahern, Eamon Maher argues that in his themes, scenes, scenarios, and characters, which on the surface seem to originate from a limited source--the local--we can …

Chronological Bibliography Of The Works Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, Allison J. Roepsch, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This two-part bibliography has been built by consulting the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and the bibliographies compiled by Sister Mary Michael Welsh ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up to 1860," Ph.D. diss., Catholic Universiry of America, 1937) and Richard Banus Gidez ("A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State Universiry, 1958); library cataloging records; and the personal records of Lucinda Damon-Bach and Melissa J. Homestead. In most cases, entries have been confirmed through books, periodicals, photocopies, or microfilm received through interlibrary loan. We were not able …

Horizons, Volume 20, 2003, Sacred Heart University

Vistas (Horizons)

No abstract provided.

Crossing Borders In Anne Tyler's Fiction, Susan Norton

Articles

No abstract provided.

Good Intentions Aren't Enough: Intellectuals And Violence In Luis Goytisolo's Mzungo, Terri Carney

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the 1990s Luis Goytisolo explores the possibilities of popular fiction, adapting various genres (travel, mystery, erotic, historical) to accomodate his long-term project of unpacking Western Values. Indeed, Goytisolo’s flirtation with the best-selling genre fiction constitutes a postmodern gesture of “complicitous critique.”For example, in Escalera hacia el cielo (1999) Goytisolo exploits the erotic genre to challenge the traditional paradigm of the dominant male gaze and the objectified female body and to offer instead expressions of mutuality. In Mzungo (1996), Goytisolo engages the travel novel to undermine the culturally dominant position of the white European male who “discovers” an unknown culture/geography …

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The idea that women in past centuries withheld their names because they experienced their own authorship as shameful or scandalous has achieved the character of received wisdom. Ask a typical lower-level undergraduate what she knows about women's authorship in the United States during the years of Sedgwick's greatest productivity (the 1820s through the 1840s), and she will tell you: "It wasn't considered respectable for women to write back then, so they didn't give their names, or they took male pseudonyms." I argue instead that Sedgwick's anonymity was a market strategy for constructing an authorial persona rather than an absence of …

Motherlands Of The Mind: A Study Of The Women Characters Of Attia Hosain's Sunlight On A Broken Column And Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Umme Sadat Nazmun Nahar Al-Wazedi

Masters Theses

In my thesis I examine the portrayal of women characters by two post-colonial Indian writers, Attia Hosain and Salman Rushdie, respectively in Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Midnight's Children (1980). I show how Hosain's and Rushdie's ideas of identity, nation and nationality influence their depiction of these women characters.

In the section analyzing Sunlight on a Broken Column, I argue that there is a spatial veil separating the feudal world of "Ashiana" from the outside world with its political disturbances, the life of a woman as an individual from the life of a woman as a part …

Image And Identity: Effects Of The Gaze In Colette's The Vagabond And Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Janet A. Puzey

Masters Theses

Image and Identity: Effects of the Gaze in Colette's The Vagabond and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight explains the development of identity, within private and public spaces, of the novels' female protagonists, Renee Nere and Sasha Jensen. Understanding the history of Paris, used as setting in both novels as well as serving as home for both authors, and its historical relationship to the gaze is important.

Using John Berger's and Charles Baudelaire's observations of female presence and the gaze, the thesis analyzes the ways in which Renee and Sasha struggle to form their identities, not only while braving the critical …

Mother What Art Thou? : A Study Of The Depiction Of Mother Figures In Recent Australian And New Zealand Fiction For Teenagers, Jane Siddall

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis is a study of the representations of mothers and mother figures as found in five contemporary (published between 1984 and 1999) novels for teenagers. The focus is on western constructions of motherhood, as both normalising and universalising discourses. Utilising a variety of critical approaches this thesis examines the socio-cultural issues present in the novels in conjunction with western models of maternity. This study argues the category of mother is interdependent upon the category of child. As children's literature often focuses on the development of the child, the mother figures are often read as the “unconscious” of the texts. …

The Carnival King, Ian Kilroy

Books/Book Chapters

A play in two acts. A macabre farce about murder and the search for justice during carnival time.

Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life By Bruce King (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are my rooms now." The journey that Walcott makes from "houseboy" to master/ruler/owner of the house of literature (the Nobel Laureate is frequently acclaimed the greatest poet writing in the English language) is painstakingly detailed in Bruce King's tome Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.

Robertson Davies: Narrative Structure And The Search For A Canadian Identity, Angela M. Busboom

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Truth And Consequences: Renaud Camus And The Personal, Brian G. Kennelly

World Languages and Cultures

A year before his untimely death in 1980, in the days before the internet, before even the minitel bleu or rose, Roland Barthes compared the personals – at that time still print-based – of two popular French dailies. On the one hand, the advertisements in Le Nouvel Observateur belied artifice, he noted. The information their writers shared publicly with potential mates revealed a certain banal artificiality. Despite the obvious effort the creators of the ads had put into catching the eye of possible matches, in spite of the care with which they had weighed the words before ultimately selecting …

Searching For The Irish Soul, Eamon Maher

Articles

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