Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 63, Number 2
FALL 2009
CONTENTS
Articles | Forum | Reviews
Articles
Reading Angeles Mastretta's
Arráncame la vida
Through the Lens of Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema
Cynthia Duncan
University of Washington Tacoma
Angeles Mastretta's 1985 novel, Arráncame la vida [Tear
This Heart Out] is important in terms of how it reconfigures Mexican
national identity for women in the postrevolutionary era (1930s-'40s). The
novel plays against the filmic traditions of Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema,
deconstructing stereotypes and undermining the power of male discourse to
shape feminine identity. Although some critics have dismissed Mastretta's
work as "light literature," it successfully plots a space for women to
insert themselves into nationalist narratives without glorifying the
ideology of machismo.
Derrida on Kafka's "Before the Law"
Raphael Foshay
Athabasca University
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot gives a classic
delineation of that central New Critical doctrine of the sovereignty
of the text. Though deconstruction is ordinarily understood to be in
direct opposition to such textual formalism, a close reading of
Derrida's essay on Kafka's "Before the Law" reveals a subtle
correspondence between a preoccupation with aesthetic form and
a deconstructive response to it. While Derrida is impressed by
the degree of reflexivity inherent in Kafka's parable, I argue
that the parable itself thematizes a degree of self-awareness
that can be argued to outdistance the reverse formalism of
Derrida's reading.
Serial Killers, Literary Critics,
and Süskind's Das Parfum
Damon O. Rarick
University of Rhode Island
Das Parfum provides a beguiling foil for several forays
into problems of genre, intertextuality, historiography, and
narrativization, yet elicits a surprisingly limited number of
responses to the commensurability of art and murder and the
displaced logic of representing murder as art. This article
examines the various critical responses in an attempt to make
sense of why such a troubling and troubled novel became such a
popular and critical phenomenon and to begin to locate and explore
the ways in which murder, art, and public spectacle serve a societal
function that the modern imagination both relies upon and turns from.
Davis Award Winners
Image-Texts in The Woman in White
Darcy Irvin
University of California at Davis
The serial publication of The Woman in White (1859-1860) did
not include the type of illustrations we associate with the major
mid-Victorian novels. Collins' novel adhered to the text-only format
of Dickens' family magazine All the Year Round. Collins did,
however, experiment with the text typographically; he included stylized,
pseudo-facsimile copies of Laura Fairlie's death certificate and tombstone
inscription that function both as images and texts. These reproductions
provide evidence beyond what the written word is capable of producing
-- it is the representation of the copies, as much as the content, that
will persuade the legal court and the reader of their legitimacy. The
novel treats these "narratives" as images, rather than transcriptions,
the inclusion of which affected the Victorian conception of the
image-text and produced readers that actively engaged in narrative
construction.
Innocence and the Child of Sex Tourism
in Filipino/American Literature and Culture
Gladys Nubla
University of California, Berkeley
Examination of the trope of childhood "innocence" in Maria Rosa Henson's
memoir, Comfort Woman (1999), and Han Ong's novel, The Disinherited
(2004), reveals and interrogates the simultaneous infantilization and
sexualization of Filipinas/os that enable the sex tourism industry in the
Philippines. Henson and Ong, as representatives of Filipina/o human rights
and diasporic literary movements, respectively, deploy the trope of childhood
innocence in largely dissimilar ways: the rhetorical power of Henson's text
revolves around stolen sexual innocence and sexual violation, whereas Ong's
text features the tension between pre-modern (sexual) innocence and
precocious worldly knowledge. A non-postcolonial perspective comes in
the form of the blog posts of a retired white American man living in the
Philippines with his much younger Filipina girlfriend. Ironically,
his depictions of an ideal childlike innocence and some Filipinas'
betrayal of his ideal resemble those depictions found in Henson and
Ong's texts.
Forum
In Support of a Visual
Approach for Teaching My Ántonia
Cynthia Cavanaugh
Kean University
The visual approach involves using illustrations, photographs, videos,
Internet sites, and other media to capture the interest and the intellectual
attention of university students who are accustomed to a multimedia world of
stimulation. I explain this visual approach using my experience of teaching
Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia to a general education, world
literature class. Visuals that supplement discussions or visuals that
supplement presentations concerning the characters, the historical time
period, or the setting of the novel draw many students toward a deeper
understanding of the attitudes and actions of the characters within the
culture represented by the literary text.
Reviews
Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy:
Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary
Theory, by Simon Swift
Reviewer: David Tagnani
Romantic Readers: The Evidence
of Marginalia, by H.J. Jackson
Reviewer: John Schwiebert
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert:
A Selection, ed. Paul Auster
Reviewer: John Schwiebert
The Female Complaint: The Unfinished
Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, by Lauren Berlant
Reviewer: Heather D.S. Anderson
Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives
of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Elizabeth
Dill and Sheri Weinstein
Reviewer: Erin Clair
The Fin de Siècle Poem:
English Literary Culture in the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow
Reviewer: Anthony Flinn
The Return of Christian Humanism:
Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History, by Lee Oser
Reviewer: Alan Blackstock
Theorists of Modernist Poetry:
T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, by Rebecca Beasley
Reviewer: Craig Monk
Worldly Acts and Sentient Things:
The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo, by Robert Chodat
Reviewer: Geoffrey A. Wright
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor,
by Brad Gooch
Reviewer: Marshall Bruce Gentry
Approaches to Teaching Grass's
The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva
Our Caribbean: A Gathering
of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, ed. Thomas Glave
Reviewer: Débora Maldonado-DeOliveira
Jameson on Jameson: Conversations
on Cultural Marxism, ed. Ian Buchanan
Reviewer: Daniel Gustav Anderson
Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography,
by David Huddart
Reviewer: Ana Isabel Carballal
Mano en vuelo,
by Alicia Kozameh
Reviewer: Janis Breckenridge
The Last Word - The English Language:
Opinions and Prejudices, by Laurence Urdang
Reviewer: Felice Coles
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