Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 54, Number 2
Fall 2000
CONTENTS
From the Executive Director
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Nationalism, Commerce, and Imperial Anxiety
in Defoe’s Later Works
Christopher Flynn
University of California
Daniel Defoe’s later works -- fictional and journalistic -- make a case for English
imperial control over the Americas in the early 18th century. Robinson Crusoe, Moll
Flanders, and the lesser known but more polemically explicit Atlas Maritimus &
Commercialis, show much of the world as promising for English commerce but anxiously
fix on the Americas as necessary to the economic health of the nation. These works were
aimed at various audiences; the novels sought to influence merchants, while the Atlas,
a massive and expensive book, was geared towards the ruling class. Defoe is anxious to make
it clear that Providence seems to have decreed that "all North-America would be English."
Much of Defoe’s body of work can be seen as a heterogeneous speech act that sought to do
what Edward Said’s Orientalism claims the French and British in the next century would do
concerning the East: represent the Other in terms that rendered it familiar yet inferior,
and as such colonizable and possessable. Print culture leads directly to imperial and
economic expansion.
Middlemarch, Obligation, and Dorothea’s Duplicity
Clifford J. Marks
University of Wyoming
Utilizing her unorthodox approach to spirituality and her wide readings in the field of
ethics, George Eliot, in Middlemarch, portrays forms of ethical behavior that offer
innovative depictions of community and human interaction. A translator of Spinoza,
Eliot constructs a world where obligation is a necessity in rapidly changing times.
By highlighting the importance of obligation, Eliot demonstrates how the power of human
relationships must be understood ethically. Middlemarch offers a compelling critique of
the status quo. This critique, though, provides a somewhat radical solution to entrenched
social problems. Furthermore, this sense of obligation, as seen in the relationship between
Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, must be tied to a spirituality that would confirm the
importance of human action and, simultaneously, demonstrate how that grounded action
suggests, paradoxically, the trace of a transcendent state.
Popular Accounts of the Greenwich Bombing
and Conrad's The Secret Agent
David Mulry
Odessa College
Some of the contemporary sources of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent are here
examined, adding to the work of Norman Sherry with analyses of newspaper accounts and
various anarchist accounts, including a more extensive look at an alternative novel
version of the bombing which predates Conrad’s, A Girl Among the Anarchists by Isabel
Meredith -- a pseudonym for Helen and Olive Rossetti. The Rosetti/Meredith novel suggests
a likely point of access to contemporary anarchist versions of the incident.
More importantly, carefully delineated and documented here is the broader historical
mind-set out of which the novel emerged.
Working Politics: Juan Domingo Perón's Creation
of Positive Social Identity
Deborah L. Berhó
George Fox University
Charismatic leaders create social change through their discourse. Juan Domingo Perón,
Argentina’s president from 1946 to 1955, was a skilled communicator who extended a positive
social identity to thousands of workers. This comparative study examines Perón’s political
discourse through metaphor theory, focusing specifically on Lakoff and Johnson’s claim in
Metaphors We Live By that "Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of
new metaphorical concepts" (145). Also included are a socio-political background, a
literature review, and a detailed description of Perón’s one highly significant new metaphor,
"politics is work."
Pax Femina: Women in William Stafford's West
Sally Bishop Shigley
Weber State University
William Stafford was often viewed by critics and colleagues as a soft, perhaps minor, poetic
voice. This sense is compounded by his pacifism, environmentalism, and other traditionally
"feminine" archetypes that he embraces. Yet Stafford's creation of women characters and
voices is still troubling. The women who populate Stafford’s poems are very limited,
one-dimensional figures. Stafford’s personae use the female figure to cathect or catalyze
the anger of the male speaker or to illustrate the kindness and virtue of the speaker to the
less fortunate woman. Stafford’s defensive insistence on the existence of the wild "wolf" in
his poetry is a symbol of how his so-called feminine sensibilities about nature and culture
are embedded with a personal ambivalence about women. Stafford's speakers insist on man’s
peaceful coexistence with his fellow men and with nature but cannot seem to make peace with
the women around them.
Forum
Distance Education in Foreign Languages
Sonja G. Hokanson
Washington State University
There are solid advantages to a distance education approach to foreign language acquisition.
Practical aspects are important, but even more important is the improvement in the communicative
environment available in a distance format as compared to a face-to-face classroom. Advantages
beyond the pragmatic include increased student-centeredness, relevance for the fulfillment of
the National Foreign Language Standards, and extension of the understanding of processes of
Second Language Acquisition. Disadvantages spring from some of the same sources as the
advantages, but they can be handled skillfully so that positive features are maximized.
Reviews
Homer's Traditional Art, by John Miles Foley
Reviewer: Carol Poster
Sybils!, CD-ROM
Reviewer: Maureen Jane Smith
Shakespeare's Promises, by William Kerrigan
Reviewer: Mary L. Hjelm
Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture, by Catherine Belsey
Reviewer: Dorothea Kehler
Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing, by James Olney
Reviewer: Holli G. Levitsky
English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World, An Inkle
and Yarico Reader, ed. Frank Felsenstein
Reviewer: Peter L. Bayers
Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, by Andrew Elfenbein
Reviewer: Petra Dierkes-Thrun
Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt
Reviewer: Martha Ninneman
Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish
Press, by Lou Charnon-Deutsch
Reviewer: Margaret Van Epp Salazar
Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of
Greatness" in Germany, by Wolfgang G. Natter
Reviewer: Judy Suh
Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir, by Jans B. Wager
Reviewer: Heide Witthöft
American Domesticity: From How-to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama, by Kathleen Anne McHugh
Reviewer: Jill Bergman
The Great Gatsby, CD-ROM
Reviewer: Matthew Colley
Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time, ed. Frederick Voss
Reviewer: Valerio Ferme
A Companion to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, ed. Stephen D. Dowden
Reviewer: Susan V. Scaff
Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, by Jeffrey Herf
Reviewer: Michael R. Hayse
Barbara Frischmuth in Contemporary Context, ed. Renate S. Posthofen
Reviewer: Jacqueline Vansant
José Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway, by Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez
Reviewer: Victoria Ramirez
The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject, by Juliet Flower MacCannell
Reviewer: Carolyn Tilghman Bitzenhofer
Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward
Reviewer: Jeannette E. Riley
Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson
Reviewer: Julie Barak
Dis/locating Cultures/Identitites, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, by Uma Narayan
Reviewer: Azfar Hussain
New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity, by Ellen McCracken
Reviewer: María Alicia Garza
Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, by Philip Gambone
Reviewer: Steven F. Butterman
The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values, by James Engell
Reviewer: Cezar M. Ornatowski
Rhetorical Narratology, by Michael Kearns
Reviewer: Eleni Anastasiou
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