Rocky Mountain Review
Volume 62, Number 2
FALL 2008
CONTENTS
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Martin Montanus
as Entertainer and Social Critic
Albrecht Classen
University of Arizona
Contrary to common assumptions, sixteenth-century German literature contains numerous
collections of Schwänke: that is, hilarious, entertaining, didactic, but
ultimately epistemological short stories. The laughter that the authors evoke
intends to teach, but also to illuminate and to help the audience to grasp
fundamental aspects of their lives. This finds strong confirmation in the humorous
tales by Martin Montanus who obviously cared little about theological issues that
seemingly dominated that century; instead he offered delightful, skillfully
developed Schwänke in which he exposed people's weakness, foolishness, failures,
and foibles. Because of the strategic employment of laughter, however, the recipient
is invited to join the learning process and to recognize basic elements of human life.
Upanishadic Perceptions
in T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Drama
P.S. Sri
Royal Military College of Canada
The Upanishadic leitmotif of the twin selves of a human being -- one active and
worldly and the other contemplative and spiritual -- haunts the works of T.S.
Eliot. By juxtaposing his insights with those of the Upanishads, we may
gauge their deep influence on Eliot's Weltanschauung and grasp his vision
of the human condition.
Dialectics of Representation
in Xosé Neira Vilas'
Memorias dun neno labrego
Ana Carballal
University of Nebraska-Omaha
Xosé Neira Vilas' Memorias dun neno labrego (1961) serves as the
ideal example of the arguments sustained by Fredric Jameson in his work The
Political Unconscious. Written in 1981, one of the objectives of Jameson's
work was to dismantle the inscrutable imaginaries that all types of ideologies
fall into, what Jameson himself considers "utopian elements." Neira Vilas' novel
is depleted of such representations. The book, set in Galicia, the northwest
region of Spain, in the 1950s, is an autobiography of Balbino, a five-year-old
child who relates the oppression and the hopelessness of living with his family
and always being at the mercy of a ruthless and tyrannical boss. Through Jameson's
work, Galicia may be seen in this novel as an institutionalized text in which
only the upper classes have a decision in its organization. Nevertheless,
it is within this text that Balbino starts a revolution that will challenge
that fixed representation, trying to create a balance among all the social
groups and its interests.
Anne Fontaine and Contemporary
Women's Cinema in France
Rachel Ritterbusch
Shepherd University
Contemporary French filmmaker Anne Fontaine rejects the label "woman's film"
that critics frequently apply to her work. However, if the concept of "women's
cinema" is defined according to specific textual and enunciative processes
rather than the gender of the filmmaker, it becomes apparent that Fontaine's
dramas are indeed "women's films." In particular, her Nettoyage à
sec (1997) exhibits a uniquely feminine aesthetic that breaks with dominant
ideology both in terms of content -- through the presentation of a self-confident,
sexually uninhibited heroine -- and in terms of form -- through the foregrounding
of the act of spectatorship.
Forum
An Interdisciplinary Examination of U.S. Racism
from The Mismeasure of Man to Invisible Man
Carol Anelli and Richard Law
Washington State University
U.S. racism is deeply rooted in the sciences, as the late Stephen Jay Gould
detailed in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Mismeasure of Man (1996).
To bridge the "Two Cultures" gap between the sciences and the humanities, we
paired Gould's book with Ralph Ellison's classic work, Invisible Man,
and report here our approaches and our students' response to them.
Reviews
Chaucer and Langland:
The Antagonistic Tradition, by John M. Bowers
Reviewer: Pamela Luff Troyer
Books Under Suspicion:
Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late
Medieval England, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
Reviewer: Cindy Carlson
Gutenberg and
the Impact of Printing, by Stephan Füssel
Reviewer: Cliff Toliver
Print and Power in France and
England: 1500-1800, ed. David Adams and Adrian Armstrong
Reviewer: Liberty Stanavage
Travel Narratives from
the Age of Discovery: An Anthology, ed. Peter C. Mancall
Reviewer: McKenna Rose
Profiling Shakespeare,
by Marjorie Garber
Reviewer: Andrew D. McCarthy
Shakesfear and How to Cure It:
A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare, by Ralph Alan Cohen
Reviewer: Kirk G. Rasmussen
Milton Studies 47 (2007),
ed. Albert C. Labriola
Reviewer: Caitlin Holmes
Robert Southey:
Entire Man of Letters, by W.A. Speck
Reviewer: Brian C. Cooney
New Frontiers in Early American Studies
Feminist Interventions
in Early American Studies, ed. Mary C. Carruth
The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals
and Book Culture in Early New England, by Matthew P. Brown
Reviewer: Doreen Alvarez Saar
Language and Revolution in Burke,
Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin, by Jane Hodson
Reviewer: Mariam M. Radhwi
James Fenimore Cooper:
The Early Years, by Wayne Franklin
Reviewer: Michael Pringle
Reading Melville's Pierre;
or, The Ambiguities, by Brian Higgins and Herschel Parker
Reviewer: Sura P. Rath
Mark Twain and the Spiritual
Crisis of His Age, by Harold K. Bush, Jr.
Reviewer: Jeffrey W. Miller
Working Fictions: A Genealogy
of the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Lesjak
Reviewer: Jessica Webb
Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson:
Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body, by Oliver S. Buckton
Reviewer: Jack W. Shear
Modernist Aesthetics
and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde,
by Paul Fortunato
Reviewer: Catherine R. Mintler
Twilight: A Drama in Five Acts,
by Elsa Bernstein
Reviewer: Edith Borchardt
Rudyard Kipling:
The Books I Leave Behind, by David Alan Richards
Reviewer: Robert Sargent Fay
The Nothing Machine:
The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau, by Robert Ziegler
Reviewer: Barbara Petrosky
Cupboards of Curiosity:
Women, Recollection and Film History, by Amelie Hastie
Reviewer: Pamela T. Washington
Lovers & Beloveds: Sexual
Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961, by Gary Richards
Reviewer: Erin Clair
Don DeLillo:
The Possibility of Fiction, by Peter Boxall
Reviewer: Randy Laist
Writing the Southwest,
ed. David King Dunaway and Sara Spurgeon
Reviewer: Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Hot Coffee and Cold Truth:
Living and Writing in the West, ed. W.C. Jameson
Reviewer: Marja Mogk
Chicana Creativity and Criticism:
New Frontiers in American Literature, ed. Maria Herrera-Sobek
and Helena Maria Viramontes
Reviewer: Liana M. Silva
Frauenkrimi/polar féminin.
Generic Expectations and the Reception of Recent French and German
Crime Novels by Women, by Nicola Barfoot
Reviewer: Cornelius Partsch
Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson
Reviewer: Kara Jacobi
The Politics of Life Itself:
Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century,
by Nikolas Rose
Reviewer: Troy Urquhart
Everything You Need to Know
About Creative Writing (but knowing isn't everything...),
by Heather Leach and Robert Graham
Reviewer: Helynne H. Hansen
Mexican Americans
and the Politics of Diversity, by Lisa Magaña
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal
Teaching French Grammar in Context,
by Stacey L. Katz and Carl S. Blyth
Reviewer: Jocelyne Le Ber
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