‘Watt’: logic, insanity, aphasia Michael Beausang The shadow of Holderlin hangs over Samuel Beckett’s Watt: the speech of a madman, focus on the Oedipus myth, and direct allusions to the poet. Among the poetry fragments quoted in German in the novel, we find, “von Klippe zu Klippe geworfen/ Endlos in . . . hinab.” This […]
Sethe’s choice: ‘Beloved’ and the ethics of reading James Phelan Morrison’s Unusual Guidance Now, too late, [Stamp Paid] understood [Baby Suggs]. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. (180) “Sethe’s rough choice,” […]
Guy Aston, ed. Learning with Corpora – Book Review David L. Gugin Houston: Athelstan, 2001. 276 pp. $24.95 paper. The relationship between academic research and actual classroom teaching, between what Graeme Kennedy has called the “scientifically interesting” and the “pedagogically useful” (qtd. in Aston 1), can be problematic. In Learning with Corpora, Guy Aston and […]
Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson’s Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody – Critical Essay John N. Duvall History is unquestionably one of the most contentious areas of debate among those concerned with postmodernism. I would like to take up Fredric Jameson’s and Linda Hutcheon’s competing accounts of the relation between postmodernism and history not […]
Disembodied voices and narrating bodies in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ – Issues in English and American Literatures Barbara Hochman Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Steig, Michael. Stories of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Trilling, Lionel. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Liberal Imagination. New York: Doubleday, 1953. Turnbull, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New […]
Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel Susan L. Ferguson The presentation of dialect in novels often appears to be startlingly inconsistent. Even when the narrator calls attention to the dialect speech of a character, the actual presentation of that speech in the dialogue may differ from what the reader is led […]
“Measure for Measure”: chiasmus, justice, and mercy Ira Clark 1. Chiasmus, Antimetabole, Commutatio, Permutatio, Counterchange Ye haue a figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse, and by making them to chaunge and shift one into others place they do very pretily exchange and shift the sence. (Puttenham 208) ’tis […]
Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine – Review David Herman Katharine Young. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. xiii + 199. $27.75 cloth. The opening paragraph of this inventive, stylishly written book outlines the core problem studied by the author: Medicine inscribes the body into a discourse of objectivity. The body is materialized even […]
The New Historicism Reader. – book reviews Gustavo Guerra In the collection The New Historicism Reader, H. Aram Veeser offers a sequel to his The New Historicism (1989). Different from the previous, theoretically oriented volume on the subject, The New Historicism Reader presents a selection of New Historicist essays engaged in practice. We do not […]
The “moreness” or “lessness” of “natural” narratology: Samuel Beckett’s “Lessness” reconsidered – Critical Essay Jan Alber In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). Monika Fludemik reconstitutes narativity on the basis of experientiality, i.e., humanity’s embodiedness in the world, and claims that incomprehensible texts can be made more readable if one attempts to narrativize them. Since Samuel […]