Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 53, Number 1
Spring 1999
CONTENTS
From the Editors
Articles | Forum | Translation | Reviews
Articles
Message in a Bottle:
Tricks of Time in Las batallas en el desierto,
by José Emilio Pacheco
Florence Moorhead-Rosenberg
Boise State University
Las batallas en el desierto (1981), by José Emilio Pacheco, couples the device of the epic hero with the process of remembrance in order to
defamiliarize and then bring a greater clarity to social issues and characteristics of post-WWII and contemporary Mexico. The adult narrator
Carlos, in the act of remembering his "infatuation" with Mariana, undertakes a journey into his past, though he actually travels no further than
the reaches of his mind. His courage in confronting an extremely uncomfortable episode at the age of nine and then reconstructing it as a
forty-something adult affords us a glimpse of one of the few forms of "heroic" behavior left to the modern world: the undertaking and
simultaneous narration of a confrontation with a bleak and better forgotten past in order to understand the nature of one's position in the
present. The discursive structure of Las batallas incorporates at least three of Gérard Genette's temporal perspectives (as outlined in Narrative
Discourse: An Essay in Method), a strategy which stimulates the reader to construct a more totalizing view of the events narrated and the
present from which they are recounted. The entire journey, in fact, constitutes an elaborate rite of passage, one which leads Carlos to a more
profound understanding of not only his society, but his place within that society.
Immediate Memories:
(Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate) Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro
Carl Whithaus
Queens College, CUNY
As a New York poet writing at the end of the twentieth century, David Shapiro's works have often been read as a continuation of poetic
projects begun by earlier New York School poets (e.g., Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch) or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (e.g.,
Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and Ron Sillman). Shapiro's writing can been seen in relationship to these poetic projects -- his writing
traces over and over the surface of words, while the "depth" of narrative or confession is exposed as illusion; yet, Shapiro's poems insist on
their attempts to connect with the past. Shapiro's writing (heroically) acknowledges that the past -- at least in poetry -- is always "grasped" (and
lost) in the present by a reader and not the poet.
Can the Female Muse Speak?
Chacel and Poniatowska Read Against the Grain
Sebastiaan Faber
University of California, Davis
Rosa Chacel's Teresa (1941) and Elena Poniatowska's Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (1978) are two fictionalized (auto)biographical texts
about Teresa Mancha, the famous lover of Spanish Romantic poet José de Espronceda, and Angelina Beloff, who shared her life for ten years
with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Both texts subvert the patriarchal ideology of their sources. In addition to revising the historical image of
their protagonists, the authors also attempt to correct the views of women prevailing in their own cultural milieu.
Memory Tricks: Re-Calling and Testimony
in the Poetry of Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Susana Chávez Silverman
Pomona College
In Alicia Gaspar de Alba's second collection of poetry, Gardenias for El Gran Gurú and Other Poems, the act of remembering is central. The
function of memory -- at once elegiac and regenerative -- is explored in the work of Gaspar de Alba, principally in her recent poetry but also
involving important intertextualities with earlier pieces, such as the poem "Domingo Means Scrubbing" and the story "Malinche's Rights." The
notion of "re-calling," deployed bisemically, refers to the act of remembering in the conventional sense and also, more importantly perhaps,
connotes a more active sense of re-naming, re-assembling the past, both personal and collective. Motifs of death, loss, absence, pain, ritual, and
lesbian eroticism (which recur with regularity in Gaspar de Alba's oeuvre) are traceable in a number of emblematic texts. In this most recent work,
it is the inscription of the father's death that allows the poet's voice to come into being, to testify, to write and re-member his dangerous
presence, and to embrace what his passing means to her: "When my father dies / the stories I waited for will blossom."
Forum
The Education of the Soul:
The Forsaken Ideal of Literary Study
Michael Richard Bonin
Gonzaga University
Our discipline's present-day professional detachment from literature's personal, moral claim upon the reader undermines literary study's
traditional place in a liberal arts or humanistic education. Many great books overtly intend the reader's metanoia: spiritual conversion or
awakening accomplished by means of verbal power. Nowadays, though, it is fashionable to treat literary works as only artifacts, mere products
of an age, or as no more than tools of "hegemonic" cultural forces. But don't we fail as readers, teachers and critics when we refuse to engage
The Divine Comedy or Walden, for example, on the authors' own stated terms?
Translation
House of Geishas by Ana María Shua
[originally published as
Casa de geishas
(Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, 1992)]
Selections translated by David William Foster
Arizona State University
Reviews
Teaching a Foreign Language with Some Technological Help
CD-ROMs and Web Sites
Reviewer: Sonja G. Hokanson
Untangling the Web: St. Martin's Guide to Language and Culture on the Internet, by Carl S. Blyth
Reviewer: Joseph Collentine
Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom
Reviewer: Donna R. Cheney
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, by Helen Vendler
Reviewer: Mary L. Hjelm
At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England, by Rose A. Zimbardo
Reviewer: Paulette Scott
Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America, by William J. Scheick
Reviewer: Angela Athy
Gothic Feminism, by Diane Long Hoeveler
Reviewer: Jeanette Roberts Shumaker
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition
and Documentary Casebook, ed. Julie Bates Dock
Reviewer: Neila C. Seshachari
Rucksacks in the Classroom: Teaching Jack Kerouac in the Twenty-First Century
Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, by Ellis Amburn
The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac, by Jim Christy
Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait, by Barry Miles
Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. Compact Disk.
Kerouac -- kicks joy darkness. Compact Disk.
A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus. CD-ROM.
Reviewer: Kurt Hemmer
What Is It Then Between Us?: Traditions of love in American Poetry, by Eric Murphy Selinger
Reviewer: Eric P. Elshtain
Signature: Contemporary Southern Writers
Videos
Reviewer: Jeannette E. Riley
"The Studio System" and "Film Noir." American Cinema
Videos
Reviewer: Walter Metz
Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
Reviewer: Susan Hendricks Swetnam
What's Happened to the Humanities?, ed. Alvin Kernan
Reviewer: AnaLouise Keating
Universities and their Leadership, ed. William G. Bowen and Harold T. Shapiro
Reviewer: Joyce Kinkead
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