COLLEGE LITERATURE最新文献

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 only one woman has been included, thereby calling attention to the inequality that exists in American Western society. For a brief time, each female protagonist controls her destiny. Since these stories rely on captivity narratives as source material, however, eventually these women must return to white society: two-sided staring allows for the accumulation of knowledge, which assists in their return.

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. Though these works chronicle racial, gendered, and sexual double unbelonging, they also indicate a fear of permanent classification. The constant movement of queer, Brown male protagonists through the physical spaces of the metropole subvert normative, colonial visions of race, gender, and sexuality. I argue that landscapes of queer diasporic sensualities allow individuals to escape postcoloniality and position themselves at the center of their own lives. Finally, the essay observes the traditionally gendered nature of diaspora, notes the inertia of Kureishi’s South-Asian, female characters, but also finds openings for freeform identities within a new breed of Brown Englishwomen.

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 attention to rhetorical, textual, and social conventions such as interruptions and questions, Rankine critiques the sociocultural invisibility of whiteness and structural racism and puts a premium on revision as re-seeing, ultimately inviting her readers to re-envision and engage in antiracism in contemporary US life.

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 and Howards End, provides a means of understanding how, in modernist novels, a discourse of literary and aesthetic value exists as a function of the tension between leisure-class and professional-class ideologies. The triangulation of modernism, Saturday, and discourses of professionalism in the essay provides a theoretical framework for historicizing the perennial conflicts between theoretically informed literary criticism and “new aestheticism,” “new formalism,” and most recently, “postcritique” within the context of professional class hegemony.

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, Ammons’s poems, with their rapidly changing, seemingly incongruous, subject matter, meter, and diction, create surprising structural analogies or points of contact between discourses often regarded as separate, such as the literary and scientific. I trace the relations between science and poetry in two of Ammons’s more ambitious works that span his mature period: the “Essay on Poetics” (1970) and the book-length Garbage (1993), examining the innovative strategies Ammons develops to locate the hidden passageways between disciplines that modern culture obscures.

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 Julia's desire to restore their own existential image in a world that oppresses and dehumanizes women. Employing Lacan's gaze theory as its primary methodology, this study sheds light on how cosmetics are portrayed as front-line defenses of feminine identity—especially needed in hard times and dystopian contexts.

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 for Incarcerated Women, as reflecting an untheorized subgenre of African American confinement literature: the post-Black Power neo-abolitionist memoir. In the memoir, Burton alludes to slavery and anti-slavery activism to contextualize historically the post-Black Power-era prison-industrial complex and galvanize opposition to it.

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 the storyness of the representation of consciousness, this paper also invites debate on his role as a remote harbinger of the narrativity of the mind, so characteristic of contemporary cognitive approaches to the fictional genre.

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 and problematizing dark events while employing numerous gaps and fragmentations. This poetry, often written by second-generation and non-survivor poets, approaches notions of the ineffable while providing an important bridge between incomprehensible events and the human imagination, and challenging language's capacity to comprehend the "unspeakable."