Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature
Volume 63, Number 1
SPRING 2009
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 Lukács' denunciation of the outdated social forms in Hungary and his rejection of bourgeois capitalism left him at a psychological impasse and in a theoretical paradox.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.
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
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