Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 55, Number 1
Spring 2001
CONTENTS
From the Editors
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
(Anti-)Semitism 1890s/1990s:
Octave Mirbeau and E.M. Cioran
Aleksandra Gruzinska
Arizona State University
Mirbeau's voice thundered in Les Grimaces (1883-1884)
against the Jewish segment of the French population. During
the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, he became nonetheless an ardent
Dreyfusard who reversed his sympathies. To those who doubted his
credibility as a journalist, Mirbeau responded with recantations
or "Palinodies" (1898). A century later, E.M. Cioran's death in
1995 led French papers to reveal the nature of his writings of
the 1930s. His "youthful extremism" did not augur well for the
Jews, or his own glory. Having tasted exile, he became later in
life an uncompromising skeptic. Exile taught Cioran to understand
the Jews better. In "Un Peuple de solitaires" he replaced his
youthful anti-Jewish stance with a penetrating essay on the
Jewish nation. This article explores how two fin de
siècle writers courageously tamed their anti-Semitism
and reversed their sympathies in favor of the Jews.
Oedipus as Reader in
Georges Rodenbach’s La Vocation
Robert Ziegler
Montana Tech
Taking as its focus Georges Rodenbach’s 1895 novel, La
Vocation, this article examines both the Decadents’
redefinition of relationships in the traditional Oedipal
triangle and their resituation of the hero’s role in enlightened
male readers. Rodenbach’s narrative may restage a familiar drama
in which the child’s parricidal fantasies are magically fulfilled,
an absent father introjected as ego ideal becomes a god who
punishes the son for coveting the mother, and religion instills
the guilt incurred by violating the incest taboo. But while
adopting the Oedipus story, Rodenbach shifts the focus away from
the child’s indulgence in forbidden desires and onto the mother’s
choreographing her son’s enactment of impulses that chain him to
the world and prevent him from escaping into religion. More
importantly, Rodenbach’s text constitutes its reader as the true
hero whose lucidity enables him to gaze into the mirror of the
novel and apprehend a truth to which the protagonist is blind.
La(s) representación(es) de la subjetividad
femenina a través
del palimpsesto en "La sunamita" y "Estío" de
Inés Arredondo
María Alicia Garza
Boise State University
The late Mexican writer Inés Arredondo presents in "La sunamita," and
"Estío" two examples of how the palimpsest can be used as a discursive strategy
in order to subvert patriarchal texts such as Greek mythology and the Bible. In
"La sunamita," the author reconstructs the story of King David's companion Abishag.
In the biblical version, this woman is voiceless, whereas in Arredondo's revision,
Luisa the protagonist criticizes the manner in which religion favors male domination
over women. "Estío" is a transformed version of Euripides' tragedy
Hippolytus. The misogynist element that is apparent in Euripides' play is absent
in Arredondo's story since it is a female protagonist who controls the narration. The
misguided Phedra is replaced by a woman character who avoids an incestuous relationship
with her son at all costs. Although Arredondo has been quoted that she did not want to
be considered a feminist writer, in these two stories she has provided two concrete
examples of how a feminist subjectivity can used to subvert masculine discourse.
Brave New Girls: Female
Archetypes, Border Crashing, and Utopia
in Kate Braverman's
Palm Latitudes
ShaunAnne Tangney
Minot State University
In Sexual Anarchy Elaine Showalter argues that there were
several problematic female archetypes constructed by culture and in
literature at the close of the nineteenth century. The archetypes,
Showalter argues, were constructed in order to keep women "in
their place," an action that the fear and uncertainty of a fin
de siècle often produces. This article reads Kate
Braverman’s contemporary novel, Palm Latitudes, in terms
of Showalter’s archetypal constructions but argues that at the
close of the twentieth century, Braverman is able to use
archetypes to crash borders, rather than to maintain them.
This notion of border crashing leads to an argument about
utopia: that utopia is a place, both textual and geopolitical,
that can be made by erasing rather than enforcing linguistic,
cultural, gender, sexual, and textual borders. The discussion
ends on a note of hope that in the national and cultural
borderlands of the U.S. we might indeed make and inhabit
that utopia.
The Uses of the Fantastic
and the Deferment of Closure
in American Literature on the Vietnam War
Steffen H. Hantke
Regis University
Increasingly, Vietnam writers must confront criticism about the
historical relevance of their topic. In response, they problematize
closure, continuously projecting it into a utopian future. Three
fantastic texts -- Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, Bruce
McAllister's Dream Baby, and Lucius Shepard's "Shades" --
explore, dramatize, and reify this trope of perpetually deferred
closure. Respectively, they challenge the common assertion that
repeated articulation leads to therapeutic self-recognition.
They enable the reader to perceive dominant narrative conventions
as aesthetically rather than mimetically grounded and to recognize
their implicit ideological agenda.
Forum
On the Crisis of Self-Definition
in English Studies
Jeffrey Cain
Washington State University
The final decades of the twentieth century witnessed a
profusion of books, journal articles, and conferences earnest
and frequently dogmatic in their attempts to map, interpret,
and define the ever untidy topography of English studies.
Many such attempts imply that literary studies is in an
uncharacteristic crisis of self-definition. Far from being
uncharacteristic, the present crisis is typical of the nature
of literary studies and reflects an ongoing concern over the
value and purpose of literary education. Discord, contention,
and crisis not only characterize the history of literary
studies: when they are grounded in genuine academic freedom,
they will ensure its viability. Complacency, rather than
strife, is the bane of literary studies.
Reviews
Life in Tudor Times, CD-ROM
Reviewer: Mary L. Hjelm
Approaches to Teaching Shorter
Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott
Reviewer: Audrey Becker
Shakespeare on Love and Lust,
by Maurice Charney
Reviewer: Dowling G. Campbell
Misogynous Economies: The
Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain,
by Laura Mandell
Reviewer: Marvin D.L. Lansverk
Romanticism at the End of
History, by Jerome Christensen
Reviewer: Kandi Tayebi
Hortense Allart: The Woman and the
Novelist, by Helynne Hollstein Hansen
Reviewer: Ruth B. Antosh
The Letters of George Henry Lewes,
Vol. III, with New George Eliot Letters, ed. William Baker
Reviewer: Carol A. Martin
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two
Cities, CD-ROM
Reviewer: Michael Kramp
A Historical Guide to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson
Reviewer: Cynthia A. Cavanaugh
Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and
Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, by Mary Louise Kete
Reviewer: Elizabeth Dill
Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard
Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson, by James G.
Nelson
Reviewer: Linda White
Staking Her Claim: The Life of
Belinda Mulrooney, Klondike and Alaska Entrepreneur, by
Melanie J. Mayer and Robert N. DeArmand
Reviewer: Allene M. Parker
Willa Cather and the Politics of
Criticism, by Joan Acocella
Reviewer: Paulette Scott
Birthing a Nation: Gender,
Creativity, and the West in American Literature, by Susan J.
Rosowski
Reviewer: Laura Hamblin
West of the Border: The
Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers, by
Noreen Groover Lape
Reviewer: Peter L. Bayers
Coyote Kills John Wayne:
Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural
Frontier, by Carlton Smith
Reviewer: Jennifer Lemberg
American Fiction, American Myth,
by Philip Young
Reviewer: Danielle A. Jones
Creatures of Darkness: Raymond
Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir, by Gene D. Phillips
Reviewer: A. Mary Murphy
Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the
African American Experience, ed. Manning Marable
Reviewer: Julie Barak
Disidentifications: Queers of Color
and the Performance of Politics, by José Esteban
Muñoz
Reviewer: Curtis Wasson
Wanderlust: A History of Walking,
by Rebecca Solnit
Reviewer: Susan M. Lucas
Critical Condition: Feminism at the
Turn of the Century, by Susan Gubar
Reviewer: Gwendolyn James
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