Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 63, Number 1
SPRING 2009
CONTENTS
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Violence, Violation,
and the Limits of Ethics in Robinson Jeffers' "Hurt Hawks"
Jordan L. Green
State University of New York at Buffalo
This close reading of "Hurt Hawks" focuses on the poem's rhetorical
and thematic violence and violation that challenge the primary
ontological status of the human in relation to the nonhuman. In a
meditation on an unforgiving natural world that abruptly transitions
to his speaker's defiant ethical stance toward humanity, Jeffers'
assault on the human upsets the historical anthropocentric
classification of value that regards the nonhuman as unworthy of
serious ethical consideration. This article also suggests that
Jeffers should be read as more than a nature poet as his work
reveals a modernist sensitivity to the possibilities of poetic
language in addition to offering an important reconsideration
of the sublime and the limits of common ethics.
The "Lukács Effect"
in Twentieth-Century Hungarian Literature and Film
Agnes Vashegyi MacDonald
University of British Columbia
This article explores ideas about nostalgia and hope in Hungarian culture
by tracing György Lukács' literary and philosophical concepts
that attempted to form a coherent theoretical movement. Lukács'
denunciation of the outdated social forms in Hungary and his rejection
of bourgeois capitalism left him at a psychological impasse and in a
theoretical paradox. The article proposes to problematize Lukács'
theoretical developments as a question of the Hungarian worldview and
argues that twentieth-century Hungarian culture is a testament and
legacy of the Lukácsian situation of paradox, hence the
"Lukács effect." In order to promote its specific value for the
dramatization and critique of literature and film Imre Kertész'
novel Fateless and István Szabó's film Father
are discussed.
Playing Secret Agent in Hans
Christoph Buch's The Wartburg Warden. A German Story
Cornelius Partsch
Western Washington University
To date, research on Stasi literature has focused on the manifold reactions
of (former) East Germans to the information that came to light in the early
1990s about the secret police's extensive role in East German society. Once
the Stasi Documents Law provided for access to the files the Stasi had
archived, many victims of the state's surveillance measures were forced
to undertake a reappraisal of their biographies. On the side of the
perpetrators, Manfred Stolpe's evasive maneuvers drew widespread public
attention. Situated in the context of these vexing issues and debates
about the past, guilt, secrecy, and the status of the files, this article
offers a reading of one of the few Stasi books contributed by a West German,
Hans Christoph Buch's picaresque novel The Wartburg Warden. A German
Story (1994). In this conspicuously playful text, an immortal narrator
serves a number of oppressive institutions as informer. He is charged with
controlling three iconic figures during periods of national upheaval and
division (Luther, Goethe, Brecht) and finally manages to ease through the
revolution of 1989 under the codename "Sekretär." Buch's heteroglossic
novel offers a reflection on the responsibility of intellectuals and on
historical representation in the face of the Stasi revelations, increasing
right-wing violence, and a re-evaluation of postmodernist poetics in unified
Germany.
The Impact of Mass Media
Representations of Body Image
on Personal Identity in Lise Tremblay's
La Danse juive
Kelly-Anne Maddox
Thompson Rivers University
Governor General's award laureate La Danse juive tells the story of
an anonymous female narrator living in Montreal who contemplates her
obesity vis-à-vis numerous image conscious characters and media figures.
Tremblay's novel provides a pertinent reflection on individual identity within
the context of contemporary popular culture and mass media paradigms as the
narrator delves into an exploration of the origins of her obesity and tries
to establish a connection between her body, her father, and the media-oriented
consumer society in which she lives. Drawing principally on Jean Baudrillard's
work, The Consumer Society, this article examines the portrayal of
identity in La Danse juive through a discussion of mass media and
popular culture, body image and self, and the consequences arising from
mass media representations of body image standards.
Davis Award Winners
To encourage the engagement of graduate students in scholarly production,
the Rocky Mountain Review is recognizing excellence among our graduate
student membership by publishing two papers, first presented at the RMMLA
conference, that won the Davis Award. Both papers are presented in their
original versions: not subjected to peer-review but simply edited for
publication. We hope that this feature will inspire graduate students
in the humanities to pursue their scholarly efforts and to submit their
work at our annual conference.
Life, Writing, and Problems of Genre
in Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész
Michael Bachmann
Mainz University
From Elie Wiesel's famous dictum that "a novel about Treblinka is either
not a novel or not about Treblinka" to Art Spiegelman's request that the
New York Times Book Review categorize his Maus-comix as
"non-fiction/mice," many works of Holocaust literature have challenged
generic classification, including the work of Nobel Prize laureate Imre
Kertész, a survivor from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Although his
first book Sorstalanság [Fatelessness] (1975) is
based on the author's experience in these camps, he labels it a novel
(regény). This might not be surprising, given the recurrent
use of terms such as "autobiographical novel" to account for the tensions
between "experience" and "writing." Kertész, however, rejects such
hybrid classifications, or so we are led to believe when reading his
latest work, K. Dosszié [Dossier K.] (2006). In
what seems to be a comprehensive interview, the author states that "such
a genre does not exist. Either it is an autobiography or a novel." K.
Dosszié connects this binary opposition to a divide between
writing and oral testimony. K. Dosszié, however, is both.
Through writing, the author wants to escape from talking about his
experience; and thus from the experience itself. The interviewer, on
the other hand, attempts to link scenes from Sorstalanság
to Kertész, thereby reinscribing them into an "oral sphere." By
"forcing" him to speak, the interviewer tries to retrace this movement
and in effect establish an oral scene of witnessing. However, in a
destabilizing move, Kertész claims in his preface that he
basically invented the interview, classifying it as "downright
autobiography" and "novel." Thus, he himself is both interviewer
and interviewee, and at the same time, neither one of them. Reading
K. Dosszié against the background of its uncertain
generic status, the article attempts to trace the movements between
testimony (orality) and fiction (writing).
The Geographical Imagination
in Toni Morrison's Paradise
Lindsay M. Christopher
University of Denver
Oklahoma was once an empty space on the margins of a Euro-American map,
ready to be filled by a land-hungry, brand new nation with fantasies of
earthly paradise and fears of savage tribes. In her novel Paradise
(1997), Toni Morrison unearths the Native populations, emancipated
Africans, and violent land speculators who all worked to carve out
homes in these blank, unincorporated margins. By centering the patriarchal,
all-black town of Ruby inside rural Oklahoma and placing the racially
ambiguous, all-female Convent on its wild outskirts, Morrison explores
how conflicting ideas of land and property not only reflect on geography
as a tool of domination, but how differing geographical imaginations can
lead to loss of direction, to misunderstanding, intolerance, and even
death. Morrison charts her characters' movements through this landscape
to show how using the stories and experiential maps of those who came
before can define the territory and ultimately resist colonization.
Forum
A Monstrous Pedagogy
Jacob Hughes
Washington State University
Incorporating monsters into the freshman composition classroom may seem
like a strange idea, but unpacking the deep layers of psycho-cultural
issues and concerns serves as excellent critical thinking exercises for
first-time college writers. Utilizing monstrous content from a variety
of mediums, the author's writing sequence has allowed him to avoid
cliché angles on common paper topics and more importantly to
expand student experience and understanding beyond the familiar
boundaries of popular culture. Requiring students to branch out into
unfamiliar inquiries assists them in developing the skills necessary
to adapt to a variety of different research environments. The writing
sequence described here exercises student development in key intellectual
faculties possessed by experienced writers: rhetorical awareness,
research acumen, sensitivity to multiple perspectives, and investment
into a series of ideas in a body of work over the course of a semester
and beyond.
Reviews
Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral
Tradition of Northern Europe, by Thomas A. DuBois
Reviewer: Joshua K. Johnson
New Interpretations in the History of
French Literature: From Marie de France to Beckett and Cioran,
ed. Aleksandra Gruzinska
Reviewer: Catherine Marachi
The French Fetish from Chaucer
to Shakespeare, by Deanne Williams
Reviewer: Cindy Carlson
Piccolomini en Iberia: Influencias italianas
en el génesis de la literatura sentimental española,
by Jaime Leaños
Reviewer: Paul E. Larson
Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden
Age Sonnets by Iberian Women, by Gwyn Fox
Reviewer: George Antony Thomas
William Camden: A Life in Context,
by Wyman H. Herendeen
Reviewer: Heather C. Easterling
Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise
of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940, by Laura Doyle
Reviewer: Sarah Gleeson-White
The Great Age of the English Essay:
An Anthology, ed. Denise Gigante
Reviewer: Renee Bryzik
Realist Vision, by Peter Brooks
Reviewer: Paul Kerschen
Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews,
ed. Gary Scharnhorst
Reviewer: Jeffrey W. Miller
Five Fictions in Search of Truth,
by Myra Jehlan
Reviewer: Sravani Biswas
Una rosa para Ernestina. Ensayos
en conmemoración del centenario de Ernestina de Champourcin,
ed. Joy Landeira
Reviewer: Frieda H. Blackwell
The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography of
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, by Jackson J. Benson
Reviewer: Debbie Cutshaw
Approaches to Teaching Lolita,
ed. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Gayla Diment
and
Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works, ed. Thomas H. Schaub
Reviewer: Sura P. Rath
Literary Spaces: Introduction
to Comparative Black Literature, by Christel N. Temple
Reviewer: Randy Jasmine
Womanism, Literature and the Black
Community, 1965-1980, by Kalenda C. Eaton
Reviewer: Sarah Smorol
Approaches to Teaching Puig's Kiss
of the Spider Woman, ed. Daniel Balderston and Francine Masiello
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal
Goth: Undead Subculture,
ed. Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby
Reviewer: Susan Nyikos
The Outside Child In and Out
of the Book, by Christine Wilkie-Stibbs
Reviewer: Susan J. Konantz
The Case for Literature, by Gao
Xingjian
Reviewer: Helga Lénárt-Cheng
On Eloquence, by Denis Donoghue
Reviewer: Ingo R. Stoehr
Aesthetics and Literature,
by David Davies
Reviewer: Tom Hertweck
Humanism, by Tony Davies
Reviewer: Helga Lénárt-Cheng
Elements of German:
Phonology and Morphology, by Elmer H. Antonsen
Reviewer: Louise E. Stoehr
Swedish: An Essential Grammar,
by Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe
Reviewer: Lily M. Konantz
MLA Style Manual and Guide to
Scholarly Publishing, 3rd ed.
Reviewer: Joy Landeira
© 2004 ROCKY MOUNTAIN MODERN LANGUAGE
ASSOCIATION |