Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 59, Number 2
Fall 2005
CONTENTS
From the Editors
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Gnosis in Aemilia Lanyer's
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Wendy Miller Roberts
Northwestern University
Working from Aemilia Lanyer's Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in "Eves Apologie"
to her articulation of the entirety of salvific history throughout Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum, this article offers a new understanding of Lanyer's position in literary
history by placing her within the Gnostic tradition.
People in Threes Going Up in Smoke
and Other Triplicities
in Russian Literature and Culture
Lee B. Croft
Arizona State University
Triplicity is particularly pervasive and profound in Russian culture and in Russian
literature, as is shown by this tracing of "things in threes" from Russian preliterary
narrative forms through Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gippius, Blok,
Pasternak, and Pelevin, as well as in the works of criticism that treat them.
Literary Evidence of Continuities
from Zhou Shuren to Lu Xun
Eva Shan Chou
City University of New York, Baruch College
Zhou Shuren adopted the pen name Lu Xun in 1918 when he began to write for the new
vanguard magazines. The results were the fiction and essays that soon made Lu Xun the
preeminent name in modern Chinese literature. The background of this astonishing
efflorescence at age thirty-seven is little understood, for sources on the preceeding
years are scarce and provide few insights. This article presents new evidence showing
connections between Zhou Shuren and the modern writer that he became. It identifies
continuities between a classical-language essay by Zhou, "An Account of Excursions in
the Year 1911," published in 1912, and two of Lu Xun's best-known vernacular-language
short stories: "Hometown" (1921) and "New Year's Sacrifice" (1924). The connections
show an obscure essay to be significant, they shed light on key moments in two
much-analyzed stories, and they increase our understanding of a major figure.
Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europa
as the Elusive "Object of Longing"
Daniel C. Villanueva
University of Nevada - Las Vegas
Pan-Europa (1922) is a Weimar-era defense of democratic, multicultural "European"
political institutions and cultural ties binding both Eastern and Western Europe.
Uncannily presaging actual developments within the European Community after 1945, it
retains importance as a cosmopolitan blueprint for a more inclusive definition of what
"Europe" should geographically encompass and how deeply European nations should integrate.
It likewise outlines the dangers in an exclusive focus on the imagined benefits of
exclusively Western European traditions.
Cioran ou le délire de lire
Aurélien Demars
Université Jean Moulin
Cet article se propose d'interroger l'herméneutique à l'oeuvre chez
Cioran à travers la réinterprétation de ses concepts d'admiration, de portrait
et de lecture. Parce que le sens ne fait pas sens impunément, c'est le procès
du sens du sens qui est intenté ici. Le pessimisme heuristique de Cioran ne se
réduit pourtant pas à un nihilisme gnoséologique. Il s'agit donc d'examiner
comment Cioran lit-il, comment nous apprend-il à le lire et même à lire
philosophiquement : brisé en deux avec d'un côté une herméneutique
mystique des larmes et de l'autre une herméneutique délirante de la lucidité,
le sens se mire dans la moire insensée qu'est le non-sens. Plus qu'un miroir
déformant de soi-même, le sens est un prisme qui concentre en la conscience un
sens caché, secret.
[This article questions the hermeneutics present in Cioran's work through the reinterpretation
of his concepts of admiration, portrait, and reading. Because meaning does not convey itself
blamelessly, the meaning of meaning is here on trial. The heuristic pessimism of Cioran is not
simply reduced to a gnoseologic nihilism. There is, therefore, a need to examine how Cioran
reads, how he teaches us to read him and how to read philosophically: broken in two with on
one side a mystic hermeneutics of tears and on the other a delirious hermeneutics of
lucidity, meaning is reflected in the senseless iridescence of non-sense. More than a
distorting mirror of itself, meaning is a prism which concentrates in our consciousness
a hidden, secret sense.]
Forum
Some Notes on Failure
in Researching Sport and Coaching Writing
Linda Kittell
Washington State University
This article is based on a talk given by the author, a Senior Instructor of English at
Washington State University, to the Honors College in April 2005 as part of the Invited
Lecture Series. The title comes from a discussion she overheard between two students.
One student was trying to convince her boyfriend to go to Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka's
poetry reading. She kept repeating, "But Travis, he won the Noble Prize."
This got the author thinking about "noble" prizes, that although they may be more
readily available than Nobel Prizes, they are not less important. There's a lot about basketball
here, a little about baseball, some about teaching writing, and a couple of peafowl tossed in.
Reviews
Charlemagne, by Matthias Becher, trans. David S. Bachrach
Reviewer: Jolyon Timothy Hughes
The Preaching Fox: Festive Subversion in the Plays of the Wakefield
Master, by Warren Edminster
Reviewer: Rick McDonald
Milton Studies 44 (2004), ed. Albert C. Labriola
Reviewer: Joanne Craig
Approaches to Teaching Austen's Emma,
ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom
Reviewer: Kandi Tayebi
German Orientalisms, by Todd Kontje
Reviewer: Hans-Georg Erney
The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the
Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by Michael Gross
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva
Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century
Louisiana, by Norman R. Shapiro
Reviewer: Cécile Accilien
The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation
in J.K. Huysmans, by Robert Ziegler
Reviewer: Aleksandra Gruzinska
Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater
and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India, by Nandi Bhatia
Reviewer: Alan Johnson
Approaches to Teaching Proust's Fiction and Criticism,
ed. Elyane Dezon-Jones and Inge Crosman Wimmers
Reviewer: Helynne Hollstein Hansen
Why Women Protest: Women's Movements in Chile,
by Lisa Baldez
Reviewer: Victor P. Unda
Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World
Writing, Writing the Real World,
ed. Janis P. Stout
Reviewer: Catharine Randall
As Ever Yours: The Letters of Max Perkins and Elizabeth Lemmon,
ed. Rodger L. Tarr
Reviewer: Craig Monk
The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire / Le Style Apollinaire,
by Louis Zukofsky
Reviewer: Cecile Hanania
Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust,
ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandis
Reviewer: Joanne Craig
Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the
North American West,
ed. Kathleen A. Boardman and Gioia Woods
Reviewer: Jennie A. Camp
An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature,
ed. Danny L. Miller, Sharon Hatfield, and Gurney Norman
Reviewer: Michael Pringle
Bringing The Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age,
by Herman Lebovics
Reviewer: Lorie Sauble-Otto
Afro-Cuban Tales, by Lydia Cabrera, trans.
Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes and Lauren Yoder
Reviewer: Norman Weinstein
Family Life in the Twentieth Century,
ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli
Reviewer: Anne Bliss
On James Tate,
ed. Brian Henry
Reviewer: Cliff Toliver
The Postmodern Poetic Narrative of Cuban Writer
Reinaldo Arenas, by Ileana C. Zéndegui
Reviewer: Patricia Catoira
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of
Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco,
by Gastón R. Gordillo
Reviewer: Graham Lyons
Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions,
by Paulina Palmer
Reviewer: Mary P. Anderson
Distant Reading: Performance, Readership,
and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry,
by Peter Middleton
Reviewer: Hannah Lavery
France at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: Trends
and Transformations, ed. Marie-Christine Koop
Reviewer: Kathryn Eberle Wildgen
Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy,
by Marjorie Perloff
Reviewer: Claudia A. Becker
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism,
2nd edition by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman
Reviewer: Michael Kramp
Topics in Language and Cultures for Teachers,
by Steven Brown and Jodi Eisterhold
Reviewer: Vilma Concha-Chiaraviglio
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