COLLEGE LITERATURE最新文献

{"title":"\"A Gratifying Divergence\": Immigrant Settlement and the National Narrative in Willa Cather's My Ántonia","authors":"Peter Kvidera","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a924343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a924343","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay examines Cather's 1923 essay \"Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle\" and her 1918 novel <i>My Ántonia</i> 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 and the nation to expand westward. It first considers opportunities and challenges afforded by homesteading, and then discusses Cather's use of immigrant settlement and the cycles of storytelling it produces to revise monolithic interpretations of the national narrative.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140576789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Otherness of Communication: Systems Theory and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go","authors":"Kazutaka Sugiyama","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917866","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay investigates the radical reconceptualization of communication demonstrated in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>Never Let Me Go</i> (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 Luhmann’s systems theory. In deploying this framework, I argue that Ishiguro positions dislocated communication as the reality of communication, in turn obliging readers to experience the otherness of clones as epistemologically inaccessible since the readers, too, participate in communication with the novel’s protagonist narrator, Kathy H.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"The Proprioceptive Probe\": Amiri Baraka's New Ark in Tales and Tales of the Out and the Gone","authors":"Özge Özbek Akiman","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917862","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Amiri Baraka reimagines his hometown, Newark, as a mythical New Ark in his fiction, <i>Tales</i> (1967) and the <i>Tales of the Out and the Gone</i> (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 the development of the sketchy characters and settings in the early stories into the New Ark’s “out and gone” in later stories within the framework of the proprioceptive loop that constantly internalizes and acts on the external.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139516024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Racial Greatness\" Reconsidered: Race Theory, Masking, and Pragmatism in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio","authors":"M. Clay Hooper","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917864","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay situates Sutton Griggs’s <i>Imperium in Imperio</i> (1899) as a pragmatic intervention in Jim Crow-era discourses around Black Nationalism. Highlighting Griggs’s instrumentalist relationship to race theory in both <i>Imperium</i> and <i>Guide to Racial Greatness</i> (1923), this essay argues that his works are fertile sites for examining a distinctly African American tradition of philosophical pragmatism that sought to conceptualize racial solidarity in nonessentialist ways. It further suggests that Griggs’s pragmatism, responding to the unique pressures of the Jim Crow period, emphasized the need for emancipatory efforts to be masked and embedded within the very structures they sought to dismantle.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Global Milton and Visual Art ed. by Mario Murgia and Angelica Duran (review)","authors":"Matthew Dolloff","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917867","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Global Milton and Visual Art&lt;/em&gt; ed. by Mario Murgia and Angelica Duran &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Matthew Dolloff &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Murgia, Mario, and Angelica Duran, eds. 2021. &lt;em&gt;Global Milton and Visual Art&lt;/em&gt;. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. $96.65 hc. 432 pp. &lt;p&gt;Two of the significant challenges facing literary studies are how to maintain the relevance and vitality of canonical authors such as John Milton in an increasingly diverse classroom and how to generate new and innovative research on authors who have been studied for centuries. &lt;em&gt;Global Milton and Visual Art&lt;/em&gt; provides at least partial answers to both by showing us how visual art can facilitate “engaging new admirers” in “expanded editorial contexts” (Murgia and Duran 2021, 233) via research from both veteran and budding scholars. It is an encyclopedic study of Milton’s poetry through “paratextual narratives” (2021, 201) ranging from book sculptures and paintings to stained glass, music videos, and even “culinary portraits” (141). Some 103 illustrations grace the pages of this fifteen-chapter, 432-page study of the “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “nobrow” (148) with an additional sixty-four supplemental web-based images. It is a wonder that Milton, who in his early career was such an iconoclast and who later went blind before composing &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, should be the source of so much visual representation. As Duran and Murgia point out (15), the Book III invocation asking “celestial Light” to “Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers/Irradiate, there plant eyes” is a fitting introduction to their project.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The book is divided into four parts containing multiple chapters, the first titled “Panoramas.” In Chapter 1, Murgia and Duran state &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 130]&lt;/strong&gt; their thesis, “advancing the appreciation of the presence, aesthetic appropriation, and reinterpretation of the works and legends” of John Milton (2021, 4), before giving us a preview of the essays to come. In Chapter 2, Joseph Wittreich argues that in the Romantic period, global translations of Milton’s poetry and the “feverish illustration of it” coincided with a “revitalization and secularization of Milton’s mythologies” (22) that expanded William Blake’s seminal eroticizing of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;. His examples include two relatively unfamiliar artists from Italy and France, Francesco Zucchi and Anne-Marie Du Bocage, one of the few women treated in the volume. These and other Romantic recastings produce “new Miltons” (57) in the modern literary economy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Part II, “Cameos,” features three essays that, in quite different ways, pertain to perhaps the most famous illustrator of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, Gustave Doré. The first chapter is Hiroko Sano’s study of the influence of Japan’s great artist of the &lt;em&gt;ukiyo-e&lt;/em&gt; genre, Katsushika Hok","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona's Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright (review)","authors":"Alexander Lalama","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917868","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices&lt;/em&gt; by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Alexander Lalama &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Flores-Silva, Dolores, and Keith Cartwright. 2022. &lt;em&gt;Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Anthem Press. $24.95 sc. 90 pp. &lt;p&gt;Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright’s &lt;em&gt;Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices&lt;/em&gt; adds a critical layer to the growing field of Gothic studies, and in particular contributes another voice to the growing questioning of how we define the gothic in terms of national and colonial literatures. Commonly viewed as beginning in eighteenth century Britain with the publishing of Horace Walpole’s &lt;em&gt;Castle of Otranto&lt;/em&gt; in 1764, gothic literature is associated with a constellation of tropes, anxieties, and themes. Flores-Silva and Cartwright build on the decolonizing trajectory that has erupted in the past decade in regards to gothic literary studies, alongside recent work by Maisha Wester, Leila Taylor, and Xavier Aldana-Reyes. &lt;em&gt;Gulf Gothic&lt;/em&gt; argues the Gulf of Mexico—specifically the Mexican and US gulf coast region—has always been a gothic realm, one whose gothic nature is exacerbated by the legacies of colonization, plantation slavery, as well as capitalist extractivism, not to mention the environmental catastrophes that reveal the underlying social and racial hierarchies that often remain submerged in dominant narratives of the region. Even more critical, though, is Flores-Silva and Cartwright’s excavation of the gothic that existed in the Gulf long before the arrival of Columbus and Cortés, far earlier than Walpole’s novel, what they call a “Gulf gothic performance” (2022, 7). &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 134]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;La Llorona becomes the central image and figure of the Gulf gothic, a figure, folktale, and monstrous specter that represents the transnational nature of the Gulf gothic. Flores-Silva and Cartwright call into question the dominant narrative of La Llorona as beginning with Doña Maria, also known as Malinche, the Indigenous woman who served as Hernan Cortés’s translator and lover during the Spanish arrival, the often-repudiated and misogynistic image of Mexico’s conquest. As a cautionary tale of the deceitfulness and duplicitous ways of the wronged woman, &lt;em&gt;Gulf Gothic&lt;/em&gt; locates images and narratives of other La Llorona-like figures extant in Veracruz’s Gulf shore long before the arrival of Spaniards to the region. What arises is a genealogy of La Llorona that extends back to texts like the &lt;em&gt;Popol Vuh&lt;/em&gt;, in Aztec figures such as Tlazoltéotl, and in clay figures of women who died in childbirth (&lt;em&gt;Cihuateteo&lt;/em&gt;) in a death shrine at the pre-colonial ruins of El Zapotal. All of these weeping","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Engraved Legacies: Bringing Phillis Wheatley's Idle Pose to the Classroom","authors":"Jordan L. Von Cannon","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917863","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay considers Scipio Moorhead’s 1773 portrait of Phillis Wheatley, Wheatley’s poem “To S.M. A Young <i>African</i> 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, labor, and race in order to argue that Wheatley’s writing reveals her active role in image-making by paradoxically capturing an idle moment, allowing students to contextualize her intellectual labor within the legacy of her authorship.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"There Were Some Things That Did Not Change\": Postcolonial Reckonings with Gender in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series","authors":"Laura Major","doi":"10.1353/lit.2024.a917865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917865","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Though seemingly romanticized, Alexander McCall Smith’s popular <i>No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency</i> 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 empowerment. Indeed, when discussing gender in postcolonial Africa, we should not apply Western notions of feminism. Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, which recognizes locality, fluidity, and mutual influence in the construction of postcolonial identity, is a useful lens through which to understand the series’ paradoxes.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tracing the Figure of Roland Barthes in The Argonauts : A \"many-gendered mother\" of Maggie Nelson's Heart","authors":"Alexandra Pugh","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a908887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a908887","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: 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 work and pushes against and beyond it. In my analysis, there are four axes to this active engagement with Barthes in The Argonauts : firstly, Nelson establishes Barthes as a foundational figure in her intertextual, queer literary lineage. Secondly, Nelson experiments with Barthes's formal and stylistic innovations. Thirdly, Barthes provides a foil for Nelson's recuperation of maternal subjectivity. Finally, Nelson builds on Barthes's writings on love to attest to the joy and viability of queer kinship. In foregrounding Nelson's (re)readings of Barthes, I elucidate her work and its citational politics, while inviting new perspectives on his. As a reader of The Argonauts , moreover, I find I must comb the text's layers to find meaning, bringing myself to its (typographical) gaps. Nelson's work, like that of Barthes, invites a mode of reading that makes space for dialogue, intimacy, and intellectual innovation.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135687096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hawthorne and the Problem of Immigrant Fiction in Jhumpa Lahiri's Hema and Kaushik","authors":"Liliana M. Naydan","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a908886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a908886","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: 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 while spotlighting key differences between Hawthorne's fictionalized Anglo-Saxon immigrants and her fictionalized South Asian ones. She tacitly comments on Hawthorne's politics and on the politics of art and literature as lenses into the South Asian immigrant experience in what Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù characterize as Anglo-nostalgic times. Ultimately, Lahiri mourns her fictionalized immigrants' disempowerment while inviting her readers to persevere where her protagonists fail: through furthering conversations about the politics of immigrant identity, hybridity in its different forms, and Anglo-nostalgic impulses that threaten to subvert the agency of hybrid and marginalized individuals in and beyond the United States.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135687097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}