Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 56, Number 2
Fall 2002
CONTENTS
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Multifaceted Metaphor:
Gogol's Portrayal of
St. Petersburg in Dead Souls
Danielle Jones
SUNY-Albany
A close reading of Dead Souls in light of letters and biographical information
highlights how Gogol purposefully subverted the glamorous representation of St.
Petersburg typical of his day. Through repetition and association, the capital
comes to represent what is false, foreign, and deceitful about fashion, culture,
the Enlightenment, and the upper class. This portrayal, however, is not overt
but rather cloaked in the depiction of the village of N. Although Gogol's
methods are subtle, a pairing of the locales entails a critique of the capital
both directly by comparison and indirectly by contrast. The multiple nuances and the
humor of Dead Souls cannot be fully appreciated without an awareness of Gogol's
methods. Further, this angle is essential in understanding Gogol's professed intentions
of showing the moral and spiritual deficiencies he saw in sophisticated society.
Finally, the culminating effect of Gogol's portrayal of St. Petersburg becomes an
extended and complex metaphor.
Building the Chicana Body
in Sandra Cisneros' My Wicked Wicked Ways
Adriana Estill
University of New Mexico
The article analyzes the corporeal subjectivity developed in
My Wicked Wicked Ways, from the early poems' focus on the
young girl's difficult struggle to negotiate her Chicago barrio's
economic, spatial, and physical violence against the bodies and
sexuality of women and children to the final poems' portrayal of
an adult woman and her body's extensive ontological and
epistomological rootedness in global affairs. This is the first
article to provide a comprehensive critique of My Wicked Wicked
Ways that argues for the existence of a singular poetic voice
that both makes the collection coherent and allows for the
recognition of the work as the description of one Chicana
subject's chronological and spatial journey.
Stirring up the Dust: The Healing History
of a Curandera
in La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora
Elisabeth Guerrero
Bucknell University
Brianda Domecq's La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora (The
Astonishing Story of the Saint of Cabora, 1990) revisits the tale of Teresa Urrea, or Saint
Teresa of Cabora (1873-1906), a Sonoran mystic and anti-Porfirian activist whose life
ended in exile in the United States. This study posits that just as the character
Teresa is a curandera, or healer, the text also serves as what activist historian
Aurora Levins Morales has called history as curandera, a healing history. La
insólita historia carries out a number of Levins Morales' suggestions for creating
remedies through stories, such as telling untold or undertold tales, centering women to
change the landscape, identifying and contradicting strategic pieces of misinformation,
showing agency rather than passive victimization, and embracing complexity and ambiguity.
The novel thus offers a healing contribution to Mexican letters.
Ethos, Morality, and Narrative Structure:
Theory and Response
Michael Kearns
University of Southern Indiana
Theorists such as Wayne Booth suggest that ethos (of narrating voice or implied author),
complexity of narrative structure, and moral response will be fairly closely linked.
Readers will tend to prefer the "better company" offered by a writer who pays more
attention to craft and will benefit, ethically, from "traveling with" that writer.
Theorists of moral development suggest that individuals progress from a more
simplistic, dualistic level to a level at which they can value and respond
to complex situations; thus a link between narrative complexity and moral
complexity seems plausible. However, analyzing a sample of reviews posted
by readers on Amazon.com of The Archivist (by Martha Cooley) and The Reader
(by Bernard Schlink), one sees that no simple connection exists: readers
may tend to value a narrative with a complex perspective but may also tend
to react more strongly to morally objectionable situations.
Forum
Birthing the Lesbian
Teacher Within:
Towards an Understanding of Identity and
Self-Actualization
Catherine Fox
Iowa State University
This discussion is an outgrowth of two semesters of teaching; in
the first semester I was closeted, in the next semester I came out
to my entire class. An interaction with a student marks the onset
of many more "contractions" which led to the "birthing" of my
lesbian-teacher identity. I use my teaching experiences as a
launching point from which to explore the complex issues involved
in teacher self-disclosure of lesbian or gay identities and to
show how the choice to come out can produce overwhelmingly
positive effects on our teaching and pedagogy.
Reviews
Vision, the Gaze, and the Function of the Senses
in Celestina, by James F. Burke
Reviewer: Kevin Larsen
Shakespeare's Noise, by Kenneth Gross
Reviewer: Michael Pringle
Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840,
by Jonathan Lamb
Reviewer: Greg Grewell
Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out,
Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out, by Paul Elledge
Reviewer: L. Adam Mekler
She Left Nothing in Particular:
The Autobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women's Diaries,
by Amy L. Wink
Reviewer: Stephen J. Rippon
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, by Rüdiger Safranski
Reviewer: Sean Ireton
Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism:
From the Revolution to World War II, by John Carlos Rowe
Reviewer: Darryl Hattenhauer
The War Poets, Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Reviewer: Collin Hughes
A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway,
ed. Linda Wagner-Martin
Reviewer: Mimi R. Gladstein
Native American Representations:
First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations,
ed. Gretchen M. Bataille
Reviewer: Peter L. Bayers
Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest
in Historical Fiction and Film, by J. Douglas Canfield
Reviewer: Melissa Hussain
American Indian Literature, Environmental
Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place, by Joni Adamson
Reviewer: Ryan Simmons
American Indian Literature, Environmental
Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place, by Joni Adamson
Reviewer: Michael Lundblad
Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation
and the Peasant "Other" in Modern Chinese Literature, by Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker
Reviewer: Christopher Lupke
Truth and Consequences: Intentions,
Conventions, and the New Thematics, by Reed Way Dasenbrock
Reviewer: Daniel Smitherman
Practicing New Historicism,
by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt
Reviewer: Catherine Kunce
Getting It Published:
A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, by William Germano
Reviewer: Joseph S. Eng
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