Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 60, Number 1
SPRING 2006
CONTENTS
Articles | Reviews
Articles
Swallowing Mosquitoes, Wine,
and Supplement with Quevedo
John Gardner
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
In Quevedo's sonnet #531 the mosquito functions as a supplement, disrupting the perfection
of the wine and the formal order of the poem, transgressing the strict thematic divisions
in the work. Through metaphor, vocabulary, and neologism, the mosquito is portrayed as one
link in a potentially infinite chain of supplementation. But the term "mosquito" also serves
to create a play between links in the chain, which is dissolved altogether as the wine is
ingested. This consumption, by both mosquito and persona, reveals the wine as a pharmakon.
Related works are also explored.
Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire
in Nella Larsen's Passing
H. Jordan Landry
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
This essay explores Nella Larsen's revision of images of mulatto women in Harlem Renaissance
novels. Larsen reveals her female characters' imprisonment by a false belief that whites
and men are innocent and women of mixed ethnicity always culpable. Larsen traces this blame
of women back to Harlem Renaissance novels. In response, she revises the traditional erotic
triangle. For Larsen, women of mixed ethnicity see each other outside of a culture of blame
only when men play a diminished role within the triangle. Then, they recognize their own
worth through fetishization of each other's body, particularly its blackness, within the
triangle.
The Comedy of Language in Borges' "La busca de Averroes"
E. Joseph Sharkey
University of Washington
It is true that Jorge Luis Borges liked to scorn the medium of his own form of art for its
limitations. But the critical consensus about the failures of language in Borges' stories
takes him too much at his word; it is too negative and too simplistic, even with regard to
those cases in which Borges himself affirms or seems to affirm it. "La busca de Averroes"
("Averroes' Search"), for example, he describes as "a story of failure." And yet the single
failure portrayed sits atop a heap of successes that reveal language as conqueror of history,
culture, and subjectivity.
The Reclaiming of Saxony and its Dialect
in Post-Wall East German Literature
Gabriele Eckart
Southeast Missouri State University
The dispersion of identity in East Germany as a result of German reunification and
globalization has brought about the need to find one's regional identity. While this
is true for people of all East German regions, it is articulated most conspicuously in
texts of writers from Saxony. This study will show that two generations of writers from
the former GDR reclaim their Saxon identity by exploring local life in its entirety,
which includes the Saxon dialect, and by attempting to acquire a specific Saxon perspective
in looking at the world.
"What happens to country" in Blood Meridian
Jay Ellis
University of Colorado
Open spaces shift into constraints of place in Cormac McCarthy's novels. Between Blood
Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, horrific violence across an antinomian range
shifts into easier disturbances. What happens to country that narrows possibilities, even
as it proscribes violence? Previous scholarship answers in mythic or political terms. But
close reading Blood Meridian's Epilogue toward historical references suggests the
advent of barbed-wire fencing, the coterminous near extinction of the American Bison and
near eradication of American Indians, and a belated Western realization of the Land Act of
1865, deepen such answers.
Reviews
Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany,
by Chris Wickham
Reviewer: Ameer Sohrawardy
The Practical Shakespeare:
The Plays in Practice and on the Page, by Colin Butler
Reviewer: Michael Pringle
Shakespeare's Sonnets,
by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
Reviewer: Elizabeth Holtze
Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale,
by María Antonia Garcés
Reviewer: Kevin S. Larsen
Milton Studies 45 (2005), ed. Albert C. Labriola
Reviewer: Joanne Craig
Picking Wedlock: Women and the Courtship Novel in Spain,
by Shifra Armon
Reviewer: Kelly J. Cockburn
Approaches to Teaching Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,
ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher
Reviewer: Nina Chordas
Hound, Bay Horse, and Turtle-Dove: Obscurity and Authority
in Thoreau's Walden, by Henrik Otterberg
Reviewer: Jeanne I. Lakatos
In Mortal Combat: The Conflict of Life
and Death in Zola's Rougon-Macquart,
by Kristof H. Haavik
Reviewer: Kathryn Eberle Wildgen
Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence
Literature by American Women, ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi
Reviewer: Bernadette H. Hyner
Approaches to Teaching Henry James's Daisy Miller and
The Turn of the Screw, ed. Kimberly C. Reed and Peter G. Beidler
Reviewer: Robert M. Hogge
Love and Good Reasons: Postliberal
Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature,
by Fritz Oehlschlaeger
Reviewer: Alan Blackstock
Mary Austin's Southwest:
An Anthology of Her Literary Criticism, ed. Chelsea Blackbird and Barney Nelson
Reviewer: Gwen Sullivan
Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State (1922-1939),
by Philip O'Leary
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal
Polish Memories,
by Witold Gombrowicz
Reviewer: Aleksandra Gruzinska
A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes,
by Witold Gombrowicz
Reviewer: Aleksandra Gruzinska
Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture
of the World Wars, by Janis P. Stout
Reviewer: Teresa Knudsen
Modernity and Progress:
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell, by Ronald Berman
Reviewer: Erin Clair
Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater,
by Milly S. Barranger
Reviewer: Lesley Broder
A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary
American Poetry, by Susan M. Schultz
Reviewer: Claudia A. Becker
Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations,
ed. Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles
Reviewer: Joanne Craig
Origins of Language: Constraints on Hypotheses,
by Sverker Johansson
Reviewer: Claudia A. Becker
Fundamentos de fonología y fonética española
para hablantes de inglés: Manual práctico de español como lengua
extranjera, by Eva Núñez Méndez
Reviewer: Scott M. Rex
Échos: Cultural Discussions for Students of French,
by Kimberlee Campbell
Reviewer: Lorie Sauble-Otto
This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film,
by Abigail Child
Reviewer: Scott M. Tomberlin
Dissonance (if you are interested),
by Rosmarie Waldrop
Reviewer: Daniel Gustav Anderson
Modern Social Imaginaries,
by Charles Taylor
Reviewer: John Rothfork
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