Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature

Volume 59, Number 2
Fall 2005

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