Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 54, Number 1
Spring 2000
CONTENTS
From the Editors
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Neologism as Oppositional Language
in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone
Diane C. LeBlanc
University of Wyoming
Fae Myenne Ng's Bone offers a new paradigm of spiritual quest that challenges
the notion of a unified self achieved through the realization of one term in its other.
Self is momentarily realized through the invention of new language promised in the last word
of the novel, "backdaire." This Chinese-English neologism is a powerful utterance signifying
the main character Leila's unwillingness to privilege either her Asian or American identity.
At the same time, it creates a paradox central to her quest. Although Leila no longer is
fragmented by the composite of ever-changing differences that constitute a postmodern
subject, Ng's creation of language that rejects the dominant discourse while threatening to
impede Leila's access to power through that discourse acknowledges the material reality of
living with difference.
Thomas Pynchon, Wit, and the Work of the Supernatural
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds
University of Northern Colorado
Thomas Pynchon offers, in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and other novels [Gravity's
Rainbow (1973), Mason and Dixon (1997)], the pun as an energy-generating
alternative to entropy in its ability to multiply meanings, to proliferate "output" from a
single source, a word, or an image. In Pynchon's usage, the pun, even more than Maxwell's Demon,
defies the second law of thermodynamics: it actually creates energy, causing a word to do
the work of several with minimal effort. A look into Pynchon's Puritan past sounds the
historical possibilities of Lot 49, suggesting that Pynchon's puns reinscribe
the sacred into the secular world, visiting a supernatural effect upon the world of physical
laws to defy those laws and to create life out of the void.
"Windows" and/or "Mirrors" in the Creation of
Sexual/Personal Identity
through Multicultural Women's Poetry
Annette Bennington McElhiney
Metropolitan State College of Denver
Borrowing from Emily Style's metaphor of curriculum as either "windows" or "mirrors," we can see how poetry
written by women from African American, Asian American, Chicana, European American, and Native American
backgrounds can function in one of two ways: as "windows" into the worldviews of someone from another culture or as
"mirrors" that reflect our own cultures. Included are looks at racial/ethnic traditions, conventions, worldviews, historical events, and
sociological conditions affecting the respective women's poetry, as well as readers' responses to the poetry. The poems of
Marian Yee, Esmeralda Bernal, Kathleen Fraser, Carol P. Snow, and Lucile Clifton are illustrative of how women from
different racial/cultural backgrounds claim their own sexual/personal identities while not ignoring the worldviews of their
native cultures.
The Poetics of Camp in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock
MJ Robinson
New York University
Alfred Hitchcock has often been accused of inserting queer subtexts into his films. This examination seeks first to posit
camp as a humor system that is subversive by nature. Hitchcock's use of a hidden poetics of camp is then considered as the
way in which his queerness is expressed. The main focus is Hitchcock's camp exploitation of the "star persona," the use of
which widens the subversive nature of camp to allow for more than just the categorizing of queer desires along the axes of
homosexual and heterosexual and complicates the already contentious relationship between star, actor, star persona, and
audience.
Birth and Development of the Moroccan Short Story
Abdellatif Akbib
Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Morocco
The development of the Moroccan short story written in Arabic from its birth in the early 1940s to its recent state in the late
1990s is charted out. For a comprehensive survey, attention is given both to the socio-cultural background in which the
genre first saw the light and developed as well as to the major narrative techniques this literary category has experimented
with in the last fifty years.
Forum
Why Contemporary Poetry is Not Taught in the Academy
Michael McIrvin
University of Wyoming
Contemporary poetry is increasingly not taught in college classrooms. At best, students in non-genre-specific survey
courses are offered canned responses to the staid standbys from literature survey textbooks. Although there are valid
reasons for the academy's inherent perception of poetry's irrelevance, including the mainstream tendency to solipsistic
banality and to the art as careerist vehicle to tenure, the role that poetry has traditionally played as a means to explore the
deeper self and the depths of human reality has not been usurped by anything else. Consequently, it is incumbent upon the
teachers of contemporary literature to search the moribund corpus for the few excellent examples of the genre still being
written, the work of the few poets and their publishers struggling to revivify the art.
Reviews
Recent Collections of Latin American Historical Documents
Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, ed. Kenneth Mills and William B. Taylor
Women through Women's Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts,
ed. June E. Hahner
The Human Tradition in Modern Latin America, ed. William H. Beezley and Judith Ewell
Reviewer: John E. Kicza
The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary
Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, et al.
Reviewer: Elizabeth Holtze
Building Resemblance: Analogical Imagery in the Early French Renaissance, by Michael Randall
Reviewer: Margaret Harp
Approaches to Teaching Stendhal's The Red and the Black, ed. Dean de la Motte and Stirling Haig
Reviewer: Aleksandra Gruzinska
Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism, by David Farrell Krell
Reviewer: Hans Gabriel
The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses,
by George Monteiro
Reviewer: David Callahan
After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora, by Amy K. Kaminsky
Reviewer: Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez
Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love, and Life in the Films of Woody Allen, by Mary P. Nichols
Reviewer: Douglas W. Reitinger
The Western Tradition. Videotape series.
Reviewer: Peter Utgaard
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Joanne M. Braxton
Reviewer: Kathryn Rummell
Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong
Reviewer: Wenxin Li
Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology, ed. Alison Hawthorne Deming
Reviewer: Carl Whithaus
The Fence and the River, by Claire F. Fox
Reviewer: Francisco Manzo-Robledo
Latinos Unidos: From Cultural Diversity to the Politics of Solidarity, by Enrique T. Trueba
Reviewer: Glenn A. Martínez
The Mirror of Ideas, by Michel Tournier
Reviewer: Jann Purdy
Sustainable Poetry: Four Ecopoets, by Leonard Scigaj
Reviewer: Anthony Flinn
Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality in Education, ed. Leslie G. Roman and Linda Eyre
Reviewer: Maureen Shannon Salzer
The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education, by John James Axtell
Reviewer: John E. Loftis
The Wired Professor: a guide to incorporating the World Wide Web in college
instruction, by Anne B. Keating with Joseph Hargitai
Reviewer: Victoria Defferding
La Novela lúdica experimental de Julio Cortázar,
by María D. Blanco Arnejo
Reviewer: Sandra García Angeles
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