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Science, Michel Serres, and the Topological Poetics of A. R. Ammons College Literature Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Bernhard H. Kuhn
Abstract: This essay interprets the poetry of A. R. Ammons through the mathematics of topology as theorized by Michel Serres. Focused on the bending, stretching and twisting of geometric forms to reveal new, unexpected shapes and areas of equivalence, topology provides Serres a conception of culture that challenges the static, Euclidian mindset that for him predominates Western thought. Viewed topologically
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Literature and Professional Society: Modernism, Aesthetics, and Ian McEwan's Saturday College Literature Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Regina Martin
Abstract: Ian McEwan’s novels are well-known for their ongoing conversation with turn-of-the-twentieth-century modernism. This essay argues that McEwan’s novel Saturday engages with two modernist problematics—modernist interrogation of aesthetics and the emergence of the professional classes during the modernist era. Reading McEwan’s novel through and against its modernist antecedents, Mrs. Dalloway
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Academic and Conversational Genre: Revisionist Visions of Anti-Racist Rhetoric in Claudia Rankine's Just Us College Literature Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Liliana M. Naydan
Abstract: This article explores the rhetorical effects of academic writing and conversation in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. It argues that Rankine’s multimodal and multi-genre text functions as a metacognitive commentary on the problems and possibilities of structure in textual and social senses of the term. Through her revisions of textual genre conventions such as academic annotations and through her
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The Twentieth-Century Adaptation of the Captivity Narrative and the Act of Looking in Elmore Leonard's Western Stories College Literature Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Melanie A. Marotta
Abstract: In Leonard’s two versions of the western captivity narrative, “The Colonel’s Lady” and “The Tonto Woman,” the female characters are briefly empowered through the one-sided gaze to resist the men who gaze and reject their restrictive societal rules. In this moment, the women refuse to accept oppressive actions, thereby using the gaze to their advantage. It is notable that in each of the stories
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Hanif Kureishi's Passages of Queerness: Diasporic Sensualities and the Creation of Selves College Literature Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Julin Everett
Abstract: This paper proposes queer diasporic sensualities as an alternative to perpetual states of postcoloniality. Opting out of prescribed immigrant identities and embracing the transgressive nature of queer potentiality allows for uncategorizable, ungovernable selves. I explore these possibilities through readings of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, and My Beautiful Laundrette
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"Visions Again Came To Me of My African Ancestors Bound and Dragged onto Slave Ships": From Political Autobiography to Burton's Post-Black Power Neo-Abolitionist Memoir College Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Patrick Elliot Alexander
Abstract: This article builds upon African American literary theorist Margo Perkins's conception of political autobiography from her award-winning book Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties, and the work of critical prison studies scholars Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodríguez. It reads Susan Burton's 2017 narrative, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight
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"Narrativity and Cognition: Early Mind-Driven Plots in Henry James's Notebook Synopses" College Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-09 José A. Álvarez-Amorós
Abstract: Inspired by a blend of narrativity studies and cognitive narrative theory, and based on an updated conception of the epistemic plot, this paper sets out to investigate how fictional cognition propels narrative progression from the earliest compositional stages of Henry James's tales as documented in his notebook synopses. Placed in a wider context, moreover, and given James's conviction of
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"A Gratifying Divergence": Immigrant Settlement and the National Narrative in Willa Cather's My Ántonia College Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Peter Kvidera
Abstract: This essay examines Cather's 1923 essay "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle" and her 1918 novel My Ántonia to analyze her representation of the immigrant figure that simultaneously defines the region (Nebraska) and enriches the story of America. The essay contextualizes Cather's writing within the statutes of nineteenth-century homesteading legislation, which allowed Nebraska to be settled
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Dark Poetry and the Anti-Elegiac: Approaching the Unspeakable College Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Alyson Miller, Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington
Abstract: Dark Tourism is a term associated with pilgrimages to places associated with the famous dead. "Dark Poetry" attempts to imagine, explore, or reanimate a dark event. Using Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust poetry and Mariko Nagai's collection, Irradiated Cities (2017) as examples, we discuss dark poetry's use of an anti-elegiac mode, which focuses on historical particularities in refashioning
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Cosmetics as Tools of Resistance and Survival in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four College Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-09 George Sadaka
Abstract: Wearing makeup may not be merely a perfunctory beauty ritual in The Sheltering Sky and Nineteen Eighty-Four. This essay reads it as an act of defiance and emancipation that begins with the woman's face, using the very objects that putatively contribute to the objectification of women. In these novels—written by western white men in 1949—the restorative properties of makeup enunciate Kit and
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Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed (review) College Literature Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Andrew M. Pisano
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed Andrew M. Pisano Peter P. Reed, 2022. Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theater. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. hc $99.99 Peter
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"The Proprioceptive Probe": Amiri Baraka's New Ark in Tales and Tales of the Out and the Gone College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Özge Özbek Akiman
Abstract: Amiri Baraka reimagines his hometown, Newark, as a mythical New Ark in his fiction, Tales (1967) and the Tales of the Out and the Gone (2007), as a symbolic source wherefrom Black people reinvent themselves. At the basis of the poet’s spatial vision lies a culturally specific proprioceptive impulse, an attention to the real-time and site-specific innerworkings of the body. This essay analyzes
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Engraved Legacies: Bringing Phillis Wheatley's Idle Pose to the Classroom College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Jordan L. Von Cannon
Abstract: This essay considers Scipio Moorhead’s 1773 portrait of Phillis Wheatley, Wheatley’s poem “To S.M. A Young African Painter” and the mutual legacy of these two artists. Focusing on the idle pose, I argue that Wheatley explores the relationship between the critic and poet in connection with literary reputation. I draw on theories of idleness (as affect, suspended action) as well as gender,
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"Racial Greatness" Reconsidered: Race Theory, Masking, and Pragmatism in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 M. Clay Hooper
Abstract: This essay situates Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) as a pragmatic intervention in Jim Crow-era discourses around Black Nationalism. Highlighting Griggs’s instrumentalist relationship to race theory in both Imperium and Guide to Racial Greatness (1923), this essay argues that his works are fertile sites for examining a distinctly African American tradition of philosophical pragmatism
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"There Were Some Things That Did Not Change": Postcolonial Reckonings with Gender in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Laura Major
Abstract: Though seemingly romanticized, Alexander McCall Smith’s popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series reckons with the gendered realities of postcolonial Botswana by creating a paradox that resists a simple reading of gender and feminism in the locale it inhabits. The series’ heroine, though traditional, defies gender roles, practicing a situated and culturally specific version of women’s
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The Otherness of Communication: Systems Theory and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Kazutaka Sugiyama
Abstract: This essay investigates the radical reconceptualization of communication demonstrated in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). In the novel, Ishiguro depicts communication not as a means to establish mutual understanding, but as an autonomous phenomenon independent from the participants, which I call dislocated communication. I articulate this notion of communication following from Niklas
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Global Milton and Visual Art ed. by Mario Murgia and Angelica Duran (review) College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Matthew Dolloff
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Global Milton and Visual Art ed. by Mario Murgia and Angelica Duran Matthew Dolloff Murgia, Mario, and Angelica Duran, eds. 2021. Global Milton and Visual Art. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. $96.65 hc. 432 pp. Two of the significant challenges facing literary studies are how to maintain the relevance and vitality of canonical
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Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona's Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright (review) College Literature Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Alexander Lalama
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright Alexander Lalama Flores-Silva, Dolores, and Keith Cartwright. 2022. Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices. New York: Anthem Press. $24.95 sc. 90 pp. Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright’s
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Robert Lowell's Still Lifes and the Market Economy of the Poetic Profession College Literature Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Grzegorz Kosc
In the 1970s, Robert Lowell began to feel financially constrained or insecure. He therefore occasionally meditated on poetic art that would cater to consumerist cravings in the fashion of Dutch seventeenth-century still-life artists and French painters of food such as Chardin and Manet. In his descriptions of dishes and laid tables, Lowell toyed with poetry's ability to construct images of pleasure
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The Space Between: Proper Names and Other Disturbances in Jack Spicer's Poetry College Literature Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Jim Goar
Proper names in Jack Spicer's poems mark areas of uncertainty, spreading. This uncertainty stems not only from the divide between the names (sometimes the same name), but also by their use as "disturbances," exacerbating this already disorderly space above the real. This article, in search of the real Spicer spoke of, turns to this unstable gulf itself, and through the disturbances that mark it, explores
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Hawthorne and the Problem of Immigrant Fiction in Jhumpa Lahiri's Hema and Kaushik College Literature Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Liliana M. Naydan
This article considers Jhumpa Lahiri's exploration of the tensions that manifest within the category of immigrant fiction through a reading of Hema and Kaushik, a short story cycle that functions as a hybrid parody of the form and content of two of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works: The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. It argues that Lahiri challenges reductive conceptualizations of immigrant identity
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Tracing the Figure of Roland Barthes in The Argonauts: A "many-gendered mother" of Maggie Nelson's Heart College Literature Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Alexandra Pugh
Roland Barthes is among the thinkers and artists whom Maggie Nelson claims as her "many-gendered mothers" in The Argonauts (2015). This essay foregrounds Nelson's mode of engagement with Barthes's work, proposing that she replicates the active, writerly reading that Barthes himself advocates in S/Z (1970) and elsewhere. Where Nelson expresses deep affinity with Barthes, she also brings herself to his
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Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory (review) College Literature Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Alejandro Cathey-Cevallos
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Alejandro Cathey-Cevallos Guillory, John. 2022. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. $105.00 hc. $29.00 sc. 456 pp. As with Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary
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Genres of Empire: An Introduction College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Alyssa A. Hunziker, Mitch R. Murray
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Genres of Empire:An Introduction Alyssa A. Hunziker (bio) and Mitch R. Murray (bio) It is now a cliché to note that contemporary literature and criticism have undergone a "genre turn" (Martin 2017; Leypoldt 2018; Tally 2017). Well-established authors of what critics deem distinctly literary fiction have taken up previously maligned popular
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How to Write a Novel in the Present-Indefinite: Charles Yu, Mohsin Hamid, and Science Fiction as Critique College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Mitch R. Murray
Abstract: As we are no doubt tired of being told, ours is a homogenous future-canceling present. Against this brand of doomism, in which the possibility of just and sustainable futures is steamrolled by the linear temporal progression of imperial and capitalist domination, this essay argues for the minor utopian function of the novel. It reads Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional
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Semiperipherality and the Taiwanese American Novel College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Christopher T. Fan
Abstract: While Asian American authors have certainly produced narratives of return to their or their predecessors' countries of origin, these narratives have, until recently, predominantly appeared in memoir and autobiography. Since the turn of the millennium there's been a significant uptick in the fictional portrayal of return. In stark contrast to the spiritual and filial returns in memoir, these
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(Mis)Reading in the Age of Terror: Promoting Racial Literacy through Counter-Colonial Narrative Resistance in the Post-9/11 Muslim Novel College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Roberta Wolfson
Abstract: In the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001, a surge of literary works by Muslim and Arab authors emerged on the US literary scene, seeking to challenge Islamophobic rhetoric that misrepresents Muslim and Arab communities. This essay examines two such novels, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both
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"The Eager Arab Astronaut": Fantasies of (Superheroic) Flight in the Lebanese Diasporic Imagination College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Vincent Haddad
Abstract: This essay puts into conversation two texts that negotiate the fantasy of space, flight, and Arab identity, specifically focused on the Lebanese diaspora: A. Naji Bakhti's debut novel Between Beirut and the Moon (2020) and superhero comics about the Lebanese American Green Lantern Simon Baz (2012–2021). Drawing on a history of how aerial surveys and perspectives inflicted the modernizing
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"One foot on the other side": Towards a Periodization of West African Spiritual Surrealism College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Kate Harlin
Abstract: For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern
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Citational Gothic: Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Archive College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Abstract: Mexican Canadian writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia's meteoric rise after the publication of Mexican Gothic (2020) has placed her at the center of contemporary genre fiction. This essay discusses the ways in which her approach to genre, and particularly to the Gothic, is informed by a citational dynamic in relation to what the article calls her "Mexican Archive"—that is, the rich network of references
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Empire, Infrastructural Violence, and the Speculative Turn College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Jessica Hurley
Abstract: This essay analyzes the function of speculative fiction in the ecosystem of literary attempts to understand the imbrication of infrastructure with racial and colonial violence. While the task of making infrastructural violence apprehensible may seem more suited to realism (the literary mode designed to make legible "what is"), I trace a largely unrecognized strand in Johan Galtung's original
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Human Rights and the Novel After UNDRIP: On Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Susan Hegeman
Abstract: This essay extends Joseph Slaughter's argument that the genre of the novel and human rights discourse are "mutually enabling fictions," by examining three novels by the celebrated Native American author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) created in the wake of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP presented a significant innovation
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The Temporal Imagination of Indigenous Futurisms College Literature Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Mathias Nilges
Abstract: If the very act of speaking back against colonial tropes has itself become an aspect of mainstream SF that cynically distorts the force and significance of the concept of decolonization while simultaneously serving as a way to avoid engaging with SF's own historical connection to colonialism, then how may we answer the crucial question that, as insists, artists and scholars must continue
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Editorial Remarks: Fifty Years of College Literature College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Megan Corbin
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editorial Remarks:Fifty Years of College Literature Megan Corbin As I step into the role of Editor of College Literature, the timing feels especially strange as it is the journal's fiftieth anniversary year. Learning about a journal with such a long history and simultaneously participating in planning meetings for how to best celebrate
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"I wish i were my / self – mexican": Tom Raworth and Mexico College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Daniel Eltringham
Abstract: This article is the first analysis of the importance of Mexico for the postwar neo-avant-garde British poet Tom Raworth (1938–2017). Focusing on his poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it traces the centrality of Mexico, Latin America, and Spanish to Raworth's work, beginning with connections forged in the internationalist intellectual milieu at the University of Essex in 1967 and concluding
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Middlebrow Affective Mapping: Reading Modern Motherhood in Louis Bromfield's Mrs. Parkington (1942) College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Tine Sommer
Abstract: While New Modernist Studies is growing as it aims at a more inclusive literary modernism, critical interest in middlebrow literature is declining. This article argues that middlebrow literary scholarship is crucially important for understanding nuances in middle-class American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Engaging with affect theory, this article claims that "affective
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"A Man of Two Faces and Two Minds": Just Memory and Metatextuality in The Sympathizer's Rewriting of the Vietnam War College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Roberta Wolfson
Abstract: Vietnam War narratives typically adopt a limited perspective that Viet Thanh Nguyen, in his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), terms "unjust memory," which recalls the past from a self-serving position that remembers the self as human and other as inhuman. In contrast, Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer (2015) represents the war from a more inclusive perspective that
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Meet the New Boss: Dave Eggers's The Circle and the New Digital Totalitarianism College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Peter J. McKenna III
Abstract: Dave Eggers's 2013 novel, The Circle, is a digital age dystopia, illustrating a shift from traditional dystopian fears about totalitarian governments toward fears of media monopolies. Despite the modern polish, the Circle social media company illustrates the Althusserian concept of interpellation, where citizen identities are "hailed" by the social media they use. Indeed, "citizenship" itself
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Margaret Fuller's Illegibilities: Afterlives of an Unreadable, Unrecoverable Manuscript College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Mollie Barnes
Abstract: What can we learn about a manuscript that was probably lost at sea? How can such an elusive text help us to historicize transatlantic reading practices? In this paper, I trace the reception of a book we famously cannot read or recover: Margaret Fuller's history of the Italian Revolution. In July 1850, Fuller drowned with her husband and son when the Elizabeth wrecked within sight of Fire
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Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review) College Literature Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Madeline Zehnder
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Madeline Zehnder Stokes, Claudia. 2021. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Philadelphia: University
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Living without Insects in Jane Austen's Emma: A Horizontal Reading College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
Abstract: What happens when we read an Austen novel "horizontally"—that is, in opposition to the vertical framing established by the author? This essay answers this question by examining the case of absent insects in Austen's Emma. After a review of how a traditional, humanistic reading of the novel unfolds, the essay proposes an alternative view to explore how the novel has omitted vital biological
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"My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls": Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, "Black" Hair, and the Revenge of Postcolonial Education College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Eric L. De Barros
Abstract: This essay offers a cross-historical, politically responsive reading of one line from Titus Andronicus: "My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls" (2.3. 34). No critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed this description as anything more than an obvious representation of its speaker's, Aaron's, racial difference; film, for its part, has either cut it from the script or kept it as an unperformed
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The Unspeakable Whiteness in Whitman's Democracy: Empire and the Limits of American Literature College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Jesse A. Goldberg
Abstract: In this article I use Toni Morrison's literary criticism in "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" and "Playing in the Dark" as models for readings of Walt Whitman's "Democratic Vistas," "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," and "Reconciliation." These readings are done in service of a reflection on American literature as a field of study at our current historical moment in the context of the Black Lives
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Kant, the Canon, and Pleasure's Transcendental Sociability College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 James Phillips
Abstract: For much of the late twentieth century pleasure was marginalized as an object of study in literary criticism. Recent attempts (Timothy Aubry, Robert S. Lehman et al.) at redressing this have often appealed to Kant's aesthetics with its open avowal of pleasure as the basis of judgement. Kant's universalism, however, has been largely held at arm's length out of a worry that it underwrote hegemonic
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William Gaddis, the Us Army, and the Unwriting of an American War Novel College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Jason Arthur
Abstract: This essay examines, for the first time, William Gaddis's stint as a scriptwriter for the US Army's Signal Corps Pictorial Services (APS). Through comparative analysis of a battle-documentary script that Gaddis wrote for the APS and his writing of the novel
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"My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls": Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, "Black" Hair, and the Revenge of Postcolonial Education College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Eric L. De Barros
Abstract: This essay offers a cross-historical, politically responsive reading of one line from Titus Andronicus: "My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls" (2.3. 34). No critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed this description as anything more than an obvious representation of its speaker's, Aaron's, racial difference; film, for its part, has either cut it from the script or kept it as an unperformed
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Living without Insects in Jane Austen's Emma: A Horizontal Reading College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
Abstract: What happens when we read an Austen novel "horizontally"—that is, in opposition to the vertical framing established by the author? This essay answers this question by examining the case of absent insects in Austen's Emma. After a review of how a traditional, humanistic reading of the novel unfolds, the essay proposes an alternative view to explore how the novel has omitted vital biological
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The Unspeakable Whiteness in Whitman's Democracy: Empire and the Limits of American Literature College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Jesse A. Goldberg
Abstract: In this article I use Toni Morrison's literary criticism in "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" and "Playing in the Dark" as models for readings of Walt Whitman's "Democratic Vistas," "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," and "Reconciliation." These readings are done in service of a reflection on American literature as a field of study at our current historical moment in the context of the Black Lives
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Kant, the Canon, and Pleasure's Transcendental Sociability College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 James Phillips
Abstract: For much of the late twentieth century pleasure was marginalized as an object of study in literary criticism. Recent attempts (Timothy Aubry, Robert S. Lehman et al.) at redressing this have often appealed to Kant's aesthetics with its open avowal of pleasure as the basis of judgement. Kant's universalism, however, has been largely held at arm's length out of a worry that it underwrote hegemonic
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William Gaddis, the Us Army, and the Unwriting of an American War Novel College Literature Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Jason Arthur
Abstract: This essay examines, for the first time, William Gaddis's stint as a scriptwriter for the US Army's Signal Corps Pictorial Services (APS). Through comparative analysis of a battle-documentary script that Gaddis wrote for the APS and his writing of the novel
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Children, Too, Sing America: Ending Apartheid in and of Children's Literature College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Ellen Butler Donovan, Laura Dubek
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Children, Too, Sing America:Ending Apartheid in and of Children's Literature Ellen Butler Donovan (bio) and Laura Dubek (bio) On March 2, 2021, National Read Across America Day, the estate of Theodor Geisel, known to millions as Dr. Seuss, announced that it would no longer publish six of the best-selling author's books, each of which "portray[s]
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Joy or Vexation: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen's Passing College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Seohyun Kim
Abstract: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) illustrates that Irene's experience and perception of joy and pleasure are intertwined with her understanding of Black motherhood and childhood. During the early twentieth century, racial uplift leaders urged Black girls and women to embody the ideals of respectable motherhood as a means of both combating the infantilization of Black people and reclaiming the
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Isis as Little Red Riding Hood: Illuminating Zora Neale Hurston's "Drenched in Light" College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Holly Blackford Humes
Abstract: This essay argues that Zora Neale Hurston's early short story "Drenched in Light" (1924) deploys the intertext of "Little Red Riding Hood" to frame the story of Isis. Casting the dilemma of the Black female artist and her desire to cross boundaries in the framework of Little Red, Hurston amalgamates European and African American folklore traditions, shifting the tale of Red Riding Hood to
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"Mature Themes": Childhood in the African American Literary Scene of Encounter College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Maude Hines
Abstract: This essay introduces "Encounter," a literary device that juxtaposes the themes we tend to call "mature"—such as addiction, poverty, and police brutality—with maturity's apparent antithesis: childhood. As both a literary device and a methodology, Encounter is an aesthetic form that uses childhood to make ideology visible. Its hallmark attributes—didacticism, gothic echoes, paradoxical innocence
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In Search of Faith Ringgold's Picture Books College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Ewa Klęczaj-Siara
Abstract: Faith Ringgold exemplifies Black female creative expression. Drawing upon her own experience as a Black woman artist in America as well as the quiltmaking tradition, marked with resistance and protest, she produced picture books which are counterstories to the existing narratives of Black life. The article demonstrates how Ring-gold's stories foster resistance and resilience by featuring
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A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks's Homemade Love College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 E. Gale Greenlee
Abstract: This article analyzes Homemade Love, a children's picture book by Black feminist writer, theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks. I specifically examine how hooks renders her child protagonist in relation to space. By linking girlhood with the domestic bliss of an intimate Black home, hooks aligns Black childhood with notions of innocence and respatializes Black girlhood, lifting it from
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Jason Reynolds's Stamped: A Young Adult Adaptation for All Ages College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Kaavonia Hinton
Abstract: Jason Reynolds's Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (2020) joins a centuries-long tradition of adapting adult books for children. This paper argues that Stamped is an antiracist text that raises important, interconnected questions about adaptation, purpose, and audience. Like many history texts about Black experiences in the US such as Julius Lester's To Be a Slave (1968) and James Baldwin's
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Dream Keepers College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Ellen Donovan, Laura Dubek
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Dream Keepers Ellen Donovan and Laura Dubek When Langston Hughes made his literary debut in the pages of The Brownies Book and The Crisis in 1921, the nineteen-year-old could not have imagined the incredible impact he would have on generations of writers. This section contains profiles of artists of that next generation and their work
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Afterword: Writing Black Children, Writing "Black Aliveness" College Literature Pub Date : 2022-07-06 Nicole King
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Afterword:Writing Black Children, Writing "Black Aliveness" Nicole King (bio) Given how frequently I reach for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature in my university teaching, it is shocking and a bit embarrassing to learn that it includes "not one author or illustrator who produced work exclusively for young readers" as
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Merrill Moore's Sonnetorium: Reading Writing and the Scale of Poetic Technique College Literature Pub Date : 2022-04-13 Matthew Kilbane
Abstract: The US poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore (1903–1957) wrote upwards of 100,000 sonnets in his lifetime. For literary scholars, the super prolific Moore is perhaps “interesting chiefly as a subject for statistics,” in an early reviewer’s phrase, but recourse to computational methods may actually obscure what is most instructive about Moore’s example for literary studies today. This articles