Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association最新文献

{"title":"Thomas Pynchon's \"Classic\" Presentation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics","authors":"Thomas R. Lyons, A. D. Franklin","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0024","url":null,"abstract":"There has been little interest shown in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49 since its publication more than six years ago. The book was initially acknowledged in a series of reviews more noteworthy for their clever displays of vocabulary than for their insights.1 And there has been little of a critical nature to fill the gap.2 The book and its author deserve better of us than this. For, beneath the veneer of flashy, sometimes sophomoric, verbal humor, Mr. Pynchon presents us with a new and quite serious dimension of an age-old literary theme, a uniquely twentieth century definition of the element of fate. The Crying Of Lot 49 takes its place in a series of classic statements of the theme which begins in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden, and encompasses the efforts of such figures as Oedipus, Hamlet, and Faust who are all bedeviled by the inevitable nexus of knowledge and evil. Pynchon grounds his literary themes in certain laws, theories, and speculations in the physical sciences—in particular, those of thermodynamics, entropy, and information theory. These topics reputedly were of more than passing","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123933399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From String Stories to Satellites: Portrayal of the Native Alaskan in Literature and Folklore","authors":"C. J. Keim, Jack Bernet","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Mrs. Hana Kangas earned her B.Ed. degree at the University of Alaska in 1940, her M.Ed. in 1967. In the twenty-seven-year interim this half-Eskimo woman raised a family and taught school. She vividly recalls sitting on the floor of the family barabara in the Arctic and watching the Eskimo string storytellers. Weaving a loop of sinew or cord on their hands into various figures reminiscent of the cat's cradle familiar to American folkways, they told the traditional beliefs, practices, and tales of the Eskimo people as they made the string figures. Even today, other Eskimo students relate similar experiences of communication enhanced by figures drawn into the earth during the telling with story knives. Some of these knives are intricately carved ivory instruments several inches long, which have been passed down from one generation to the next. Other instruments are simply table knives or nails that will scratch a fairly legible illustration into the earth to help more fully communicate the narrator's story. At the same time they employ these ancient means of communication among a people whose language only now is being developed into written form, native Alaskan storytellers today practice their art and reach larger audiences than ever by means of satellite communication. Through the auspices of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Library, the studios of the Lfniversity of Alaska's KUAC-FM radio station and the ATS-I satellite each week broadcast tales contributed by native storytellers to villages virtually throughout the 586,400-square-mile state. Such activity, coupled with an accelerating movement to publish native folklore, gives solid assurance that this important twenty-five percent segment of Alaska's population will at last receive its proper literary due, which, in rum, will lead to further political and social recognition. More important these efforts enable natives to carry their heritage across the multi-cultural bridges to understanding. The native Alaskan deserves a new, more accurate \"image\" than that generally projected in the past, particularly from the Gold Rush era of 1898 to about the mid-1920s, by Anglo-American authors who did have a written language and printing processes at their disposal. The traditional stereotypes which usually emerge in the works of the known poets, short story writers, and novelists follow to a great degree the precedent set in the anonymously composed, widely published \"Kobuk Maiden,\" which portrays the Eskimo","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125521907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"National Consciousness in Italian Literature","authors":"Joseph S. Rossi","doi":"10.1353/rmr.1973.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rmr.1973.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Prince Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire and the stoutest champion of the status quo in Restoration Europe, dismissed the national aspirations of the Italians by defining Italy as a \"geographical expression.\" Thus he implied that Italy was no more to be considered a single political entity, even in a potential state, than the other large European peninsulas, like the Iberian, the Balkan, or the Scandinavian, which included more than one independent state. At a later time the Italian poet Carducci quipped that Mettemich had been wrong in his definition, because Italy really was not a geographical expression but a literary expression; by this he obviously meant that Italy had been a perennial literary theme, though often enough a vacuous one, throughout the centuries when it did not have a political existence. To some extent both definitions are true, and their truth explains on the one hand why Italy attained its unification so late in its history and on the other why it was eventually able to achieve it at all. Metternich was justified in calling Italy a geographical expression for that is all it had been since the fall of the Roman Empire. For something like fourteen centuries, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution, Italy had housed many states, served many masters, with a great variety of political forms co-existing at the same time, which resembled each other in only one respect-their instability. Many masters tried to control the entire peninsula; none ever succeeded. The Byzantines, the Lombards, the Swabians, the Angevines from Naples, the Viscontis from Milan, and later the Spaniards and the Austrians, all came more or less close to the final goal without achieving it. The only ruler who could have unified Italy was Napoleon, and he did not want to do it. But by that time the Italians were ready for unification, and they successfully enticed Napoleon's nephew to help them. This state of affairs is not surprising when one considers the geographical and historical peculiarities of Italy. Its geography seems designed specifically for the purpose of precluding the formation of a single state. The mainland of Italy is a strip of land running in a southeasterly direction, a little over 700 miles long and, on the average, about 100 miles wide. One chain of lofty mountains, the Alps, separates it from the rest of Europe, and another chain of mountains of respectable height, the Apennines, splits it lengthwise. Someone compared Italy to a veal chop, with the Alps and the Apennines representing the bones on the sides, and the rich Po Valley the tasty but","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129888390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"War and Lechery\": Thematic Unity of Troilus and Cressida","authors":"E. Hart","doi":"10.1353/rmr.1973.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rmr.1973.0019","url":null,"abstract":"\"And war and lechery confound all!\" said Thersites, thereby stating the theme of Troilus and Cressida. It would seem inevitable that a dramatic genius with as fertile an imagination as Shakespeare's, experimenting with forms and ideas, would sooner or later ask himself the question: What would happen if one should write a play in which all values are reversed, a play in which the mirror held up to life reflects not a positive but a negative image? Regardless of whether Shakespeare ever asked himself such a question, Troilus and Cressida is such a play as the question would have invited. It is a play in which everything that was white in his other plays is confounded into black; everything that was black has become white. This does not mean that Shakespeare's values have changed; it means merely that the negative must be developed by exposure to the reversing light of irony to produce the correct and positive print. Love, in all Shakespeare's writings, reaches its highest fulfillment in marriage and procreation, with biological reproduction coming to symbolize all forms of creativity and productivity. As others have pointed out, the heavy curse of the uncreative life is projected symbolically in the childlessness of Macbeth and the sterility called by Lear upon his daughters. Shakespeare rejects both extremes of love, both celibacy and promiscuousness. The first line of the first sonnet puts aside as foolish the ideals of courtly or romantic love: \"From fairest creatures we desire increase\"; a later sonnet ( 129) rejects the way of the philanderer just as vehemently: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action.\" The Aristotelian golden mean is, for Shakespeare, marriage: marriage of two people equal in their love and without those impediments which would prevent their achievement of a happy union producing healthy children. It goes without saying that a life of sexual abstention would produce no offspring, that it would provide no means by which, through the power of an all-absorbing love, the female fertilized the imagination of the man as he released in her the power to reproduce. That a life of sexual excess would likewise preclude this land of inter-impregnation is demonstrated by Troilus and Cressida. Because the idea is a negative one, the thwarting of the creative powers of love and life, the image is thrown negatively upon the screen. In the two principal female characters of Troilus, Cressida and Helen, Shakespeare illustrates the violation of the golden mean of love on the side of promiscuousness. The two women are parallel in that the vice of each is to destroy love by reducing it to sex. Love, frustrated from becoming creative","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133440921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Terminal Sanctity or Benign Banality: The Critical Controversy Surrounding Hermann Hesse","authors":"R. Koester","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Although more than a decade has elapsed since Hermann Hesse's death, no generally accepted critical concensus on the man or his art has yet emerged. In fact, most current estimates of the author appear irreconcilably polarized between extravagant adulation and excessive detraction. Admittedly, this dichotomy is not the only difficulty plaguing Hesse criticism; yet its elimination would go a long way toward curing his ailing literary reputation. The contemporary Hesse debate, which resembles a tug-of-war between literary hagiographers and iconoclasts, has demonstrable historical antecedents, going back to World War I and its aftermath. With the publication of his wartime essays, especially the first, \"O Freunde, nicht diese Tonel\" (1914), Hesse became, almost overnight, the enfant terrible of German letters. His pacifistic appeals to nonviolent humanism stirred up a jingoistic hornet's nest and touched off a campaign of vilification in the chauvinistic press, which resulted in a partial boycott of his works by book dealers and readers. Then, while shrill wartime invectives were still ringing in his ears, he found himself abruptly elevated to unprecedented esteem after the 1919 publication of Demian. Germany's postwar youth greeted this novel with such enthusiasm that its author was swiftly adopted as a spokesman for the new generation and, to some extent, as its spiritual guide. It should be noted, however, that Hesse's meteoric rise to popularity was based chiefly on the sociological and political climate of the time. Among the young, who were bewildered and distressed by the topsy-turvy world inherited from their elders, was widespread disenchantment with the older generation, with prevailing authority, and with traditional standards of value, all of which were blamed for the chaos in the country. Consequently, they turned to Hesse, in whose writings-or perhaps I should say-into whose writings they read affinitive sentiments with which they could identify. The principal object of their concern was not his art per se, but whatever personally meaningful data they could extract from his work. In other words, his admirers ignored the central question of aesthetic merit no less than his adversaries. It is this World War I dispute which established an unwholesome pattern of appraisal that, mutatis mutandis, has haunted Hesse ever since. The issue of the poet's talent or lack of it becomes peripheral and his work is gauged","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121166637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Strether Sees: The Ending of The Ambassadors","authors":"R. Merrill","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131382139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"La Question de l'Influence de Bergson sur Proust","authors":"Joyce N. Megay","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Dcpuis 1913, date de la parution du premier volume de A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, certains critiques litt6rafres ne cessent de rapprocher l'oeuvre de Proust de celle du philosophe Henri Bergson. Or nous nous proposons, dans notre expose, de souligner les ciff6rences fondamentales qui s6parent les deux oeuvres. Notre analyse portera sur les conceptions diff6rentes de Bergson et de Proust en ce qui conceme le Temps, la M6moire et le RMel. II existe bien quelques passages dans l'oeuvre de Proust qui distinguent, comme l'a fait Bergson, le temps mesurable-celui de l'horloge, et le temps psychologique-la dur6e. Le premier est le temps de la vie sociale, de la science; le second est color6 par nos tats d'&me et nos i'mpressions. Dans les Chroniques, nous trouvons le passage suivant, qui sera en partie repris dans Du C6tW de chez Swann:","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133861796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aristarchus Redux: The Satirists vs. the Scholars in the Early Eighteenth Century","authors":"M. E. Green","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115573813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thoreau's Synthesizing Metaphor: Two Fishes With One Hook","authors":"James A. Hamby","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Although some studies have been done concerning Henry David Thoreau's craftsmanship, emphasis is not generally placed on the relationship between Waiden s art and Waiden s philosophy. Despite its practical application to such diverse contemporary phenomena as nonviolent resistance and communal organization, Waiden speaks to us not merely because it affirms the ultimate in man-and-tiie-land relationships but because its artistic unity also demonstrates how we truly can transcend lives of quiet desperation. This transcendence develops through Walden's internal organizing structure of metaphor, and is extended to the point that metaphor becomes philosophic system. Thus Thoreau doubly demonstrates that we can, within ourselves, overcome the perpetual struggle between self and society, that we can emerge from the particular and die finite to the universal and the infinite. Despite the apparently rambling nature of Thoreau's prose, Walden's introductory chapter, \"Economy,\" demonstrates economy of expression. Thoreau's first statement concerning his mode of life refutes the criticism tiiat he is impertinent and states radier tiiat his life-style is \"very natural and pertinent.\" His uniting the words natural and pertinent has far-reaching implications. Natural suggests the innate, the instinctively moral, the free, the uninhibited, while pertinent suggests the logical, the suitable, the reasonable. It seems to be a rather ambitious comment for one to claim that his life is both logical or reasonable and, at the same time, natural or free. Thoreau's fusion of two such generally antithetic terms anticipates the sweeping scope of his","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132470764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A \"Living\" Baroque Exemplum of Dying","authors":"W. Scherer","doi":"10.1353/RMR.1973.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/RMR.1973.0006","url":null,"abstract":"\"Dieu seul est grand!\" were the irrefutable first words of Jean Baptiste Massillon's funeral oration for the \"Roi Soleil,\" Louis XIV. At the feet of his court chaplain, his French subjects, and before all of Europe, the once great \"Sun King\" lay in death. It was 1715. Only a few years before in another part of Europe, the splendid Habsburg Imperial residence-city of Vienna throbbed with the violent tenor and enthusiasm of the European Baroquea phenomenon which in the preceding century had flourished with enormous extravagance at both the court of Louis XIV and that of his rival Viennese cousin, Leopold I. But by 1705, Leopold lay flat and secure in the \"Kapuzinergruft\" (the Capuchin Imperial Vault) with the rest of the Habsburg royalty, encased in a massive sarcophagus adorned with fitting emblems of an obsessive Baroque weltanschauung that emphasized the transient nature of things, human equality in mortality, and the vanity of earthly glory. In life Leopold's pompous son, Charles VI, was heir to the Baroque flamboyance of his father: Charles' corpse followed the Baroque monarch's (and that of his brother, Joseph I) in another lead sarcophagus upon which were mounted four regally crowned skull's heads. The crown of one sunken-eyed skull was a replica of the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, thus symbolizing that death reigns supremely over all men. Leopold himself had erected the monumental plague-pillar in Vienna, edifying death's supremacy: a sculptural memento mori for his 70,000 fellowmen who succumbed to the devastating plague in 1679. \"Leute sterben heute, die noch nie vorher gestorben sind!\" is a typically sardonic Viennese saying,' emphasizing paradoxically the exclusiveness of each man's experience of dying and the uncanny \"democracy\" of death: all men must die. Despite the universality of this experience, Jacob Boehme, the \"Einige reisset die Pest also augenblicklich hinweg, wie ich anno 1679 selbst","PeriodicalId":344945,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128783880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}