Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 58, Number 1
Spring 2004
CONTENTS
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Poets as Modern Art Critics: Stating
the "Redemptive Power" of the Abstracted Image
Mary Dezember
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
By the early nineteenth century, artists began replacing the concrete,
traditional religious images of faith with abstracted images that
emphasized their compositional elements, specifically color and shape.
Soon, art was becoming a quasi-religion composed of these secular symbols
of color and shape, and poet-art critics as the modern "priests"
to decipher these symbolic codes for the public emerged. Baudelaire,
Apollinaire, Rilke, Kandinsky, and Stein wrote critiques in lyrical,
though prose, renderings that capture and transmit the redemptive effect
of the emphasis of compositional elements in painting and that promote
compositional elements as important in their own right.
Requiems: Liudmila Petrushevskaia's
World of Death
Tatyana Novikov
University of Nebraska--Omaha
Negating old conventions about dying as heroic transcendence, post-Communist Rusian fiction
transforms Soviet fictional "noble and beautiful death" into modern "insignificant and sordid
death." Death is represented as central in writings by many contemporary Russian authors
whose works reflect a time of intensifying crisis. Saturated by images of death, Petrushevskaia's
fiction associates the demise of its characters with the national decay. This article focuses on
Petrushevskaia's imaginative strategies of representing mortal closure in her collection of
stories Requiems and links the new image of death to living in an age of cataclysms.
Arbitrary, absurd, violent, and unjustified, death has the last word in every story and is
presented as a dynamic agent, consciously manipulating the characters. By showing death's immense
power, the author establishes in Requiems a potent symbol of a death-stricken culture.
Abla Farhoud et la fragilité du bonheur
Lucie Lequin
L'Université Concordia
Au cœur de cet article se trouve l'idée de filiation, soit la transmission
et le passage du savoir d'une génération à l'autre, dans
l'écriture d'Abla Farhoud, une écrivaine québécoise.
Dans ses œuvres sont représentés des personnages féminins
en rupture de filiation. Chacune de ces femmes a l'impression forte de vivre à
côté d'elle-même et de la vie, souvent à la merci du pouvoir
politique ou patriarcal. Pour mettre en lumière ces fêlures, ces fractures
du soi, j'examinerai d'abord l'univers castrant des œuvres farhoudiennes, ensuite
seront analysées les multiples formes de transmission rompue et enfin les
stratégies créatrices adoptées par quelques personnages pour
renouer avec le soi et avec le monde. Il sera alors question de l'acte d'écrire
ou de parler, du comment dire et de ses effets sur la filiation.
[This article originated with the idea of transmission and passage of knowledge from one
generation to the next presented by the philosophers Abel and Collin. Abla Farhoud's
work features female characters in rupture of filiation. Each of these women experiences
the intense feeling of living outside of themselves and life, vulnerable to the
political and patriarchal power. The purpose here is to study in Farhoud's work
this universe created by the rupture of the generational link, as well as the fracture
itself and the path chosen by some of these women to regain nevertheless a voice, the
only means to resume the interrupted conversation, this essential exchange necessary to
guide oneself and find one's place in the world.]
Forum
A Perfume Advertisement as a Teaching Tool
Michael Delahoyde
Washington State University
A 30-second television advertisement from the mid-1980s is available for viewing here
in the Rocky Mountain E-Review. The ad was part of a perfume campaign titled
Jane Seymour in Le Jardin de Max Factor and serves as a useful teaching tool
in any number of classes including Mythology, Introduction to Literature, The Bible as
Literature, in writing classes for the promotion of careful observation and critical
thinking skills, and in classes emphasizing critical theory. Described is the typical
class session in which students are encouraged, or tricked maybe, into constructing an
archetypal reading of the ad.
Reviews
The Poetics of Empire in the Indies:
Prophecy and Imitation in La Araucana and Os Lusíadas,
by James Nicolopulos
Reviewer: Azfar Hussain
Dreams of the Burning Child:
Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness, by David Lee Miller
Reviewer: Joanne Craig
The Shakespeare Enigma,
Films for the Humanities & Sciences
Reviewer: Michael Delahoyde
Milton Studies XLI,
ed. Albert C. Labriola
Reviewer: Kirk G. Rasmussen
Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina, ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker
Reviewer: Katherine V. Moskver
The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations
in the Victorian Era, by David Finkelstein
Reviewer: Alan R. Blackstock
The Word Rides Again: Rereading the Frontier in
American Fiction, by J. David Stevens
Reviewer: Jeffrey W. Miller
Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, by
Kim Fortuny
Reviewer: Victoria Ramirez
Reading Godot, by Lois Gordon
Reviewer: Deborah Weagel
Letters to J.D. Salinger,
ed. Chris Kubica and Will Hochman
Reviewer: Catherine Kunce
Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell,
Ammons, Merrill, and Rich, by Nick Halpern
Reviewer: Daniel Gustav Anderson
The Speckled People, by Hugo Hamilton
Reviewer: Joanne Craig
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature,
ed. Jay Parini
Reviewer: Norman Weinstein
On the Battlefields of the Cold War: A Soviet Ambassador's
Confession, by Victor Israelyan
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva
A Geopolitics of Academic Writing,
by A. Suresh Canagarajah
Reviewer: Melissa Hussain
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