Category: College Literature

Abjection and degeneration in Thomas Hardy’s “Barbara of the House of Grebe” Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts Thomas Hardy’s Gothic tale, “Barbara of the House of Grebe” (1891), dramatizes the horrid consequences of belief in the Victorian myth of degeneration. Only months after writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy creates another tragedy in the less well-known “Barbara”; […]

Resentful Little Women: Gender and Class Feeling in Louisa May Alcott Foote, Stephanie In one of the most dramatic and emotionally charged scenes in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women, Amy retaliates against her sister Jo for a perceived slight. Jo refuses to let Amy accompany her on a rare outing to the theater, […]

Stirrings Still; Or, The Impossibility of Mourning the Deaths of Edward Said Marrouchi, Mustapha “[T]hy worldly task hast done . . . / . . . [R]enowed be thy grave.” (Cymbeline, IV, ii, 282) So much to write about, and I do not have the heart for it; so much to say about what has […]

Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, The Chandarlapaty, Raj Lardas, John. 2001. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $39.95 hc. 316 pp. John Lardas’s analysis of the Beat Generation-Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs-in The Bop Apocalypse, doesn’t cover a […]

Derrida and Siva: An Abhinavaguptan look at the transcendental signified Heidinger, Kurt As is well known, Jacques Derrida repudiates any “transcendental signified” or “center,” and this repudiation co-determines his postulations concerning “differance.” Differance, which putatively disallows the process of using literal language to fix meaning, provides, in turn, the grounding rationale for the interpretive methodology, […]

Learning Lessons from the Trojan War: Briseis and the Theme of Force Dué, Casey How is it that we still today find so much power in an ancient epic poem? It seems that every generation reads the Iliad with fresh eyes. I have argued in a recent book that the significance of the Trojan War […]

“Raising the Stigma”: Black Womanhood and the Marked Body in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces Putzi, Jennifer In the Preface to her novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Pauline Hopkins claims that she writes in order to “raise the stigma of degradation from [her] race” (1988, 13). The use […]

Structural Coherence of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, The McLuckie, Craig In An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Bennett and Royle open by posing a number of questions about beginnings: When will we have begun? Where-or when-does a literary text begin? . . . Does a text begin as the author puts […]

To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille Itzkowitz, Kenneth The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the […]

“More deadly than the male”: Classifying female witnesses in trial advocacy handbooks Goodwin, Jill Tomasson “You will always approach [the female witness] as if she were a wild animal ready to tear you if she could get near enough.” Richard Harris 1879. “A woman witness is off times death to the cross-examiner.” Asher Cornelius 1929. […]