Rocky Mountain Review

73-1-2019 | Spring 2019

CONTENTS

Guidelines for Submission for Articles and Book Reviews

Articles

Articles are published in alphabetical order according to the name of the author. 

Ian Green, Eastern Washington University

Combustible Man: Consumption, Cannibalism, and Commodity Horror in Redburn

This research reimagines Herman Melville’s Redburn as an urgent critique of Atlantic capitalism and an important development in American horror literature. The novel contains a baffling outburst of spontaneous combustion, which links its ruminations on capital to its investment in horror fiction. Here, Melville participates in the Gothic horror genre. He also reimagines it for an American audience by investing it with his own suspicions of transcendentalism, labor, eroticism, religion, and capital in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the cunningly bland prose transforms the uncanny into the commonplace and reveals the horror lurking within the flat language of capitalism and the romantic style of melodrama. Redburn bridges social critique and Gothic or Cosmic horror and still offers a potent critique of capital that has achieved omnipresence in our own time.

 

Lori A. Davis Perry, United States Air Force Academy

Satirizing the Blood Libel: Ritual Cannibalism, Infant Sacrifice, and Bloodied Knives in “A Modest Proposal”

In his mock-pamphlet “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift both actualizes and parodies cultural tensions surrounding racial stereotypes concerning Jews, and censures the ruling classes through pointed references to anti-Semitic Blood, Conspiracy, and Economic libels. He thus touches squarely upon two old anxieties among his readers, the belief that Jews could exist only as the antithesis of English cultural identity, and the growing concern that differences between Jews and Christians had become alarmingly unfixed. Swift’s Projector ultimately satirizes the anxiety of conversion among Anglo-Christians by proposing that Christians “turn Jewish” through ritual child murder and cannibalism.

 

Jean-Blaise Samou, Ripon College

Oralité et historiographie à l’ère du multimédia : dynamiques trans-scripturelles dans les récits de Sarraounia

Dans les années 80, Abdoulaye Mamani et Med Hondo se sont inspirés des récits oraux pour transformer Sarraounia Mangou, figure historique, en un mythe littéraire et cinématographique. Depuis lors, plusieurs autres types de média – chanson populaire, bande dessinée, peinture architecturale, sculpture joaillière, réseaux sociaux – reprennent à leur manière et réinscrivent dans l’imaginaire négro-africain l’épopée anti-impériale de cette monarque nigériènne. Face à cette prolifération des modes de narration, quel serait le rapport de l’oralité à l’historiographie quand le récit navigue entre plusieurs supports médiatiques, en l’occurrence scripturels, sonores, visuels, numériques? Quel rôle est assigné au griot dans ce contexte? Le présent article affirme que loin d’être de simples transcriptions de la parole du griot, les divers récits de Sarraounia s’appuient sur l’oralité non seulement comme instance achéologique de l’historiographie, mais surtout comme indice sémiologique d’interférence, d’hybridation et de différenciation.

 

Kasey J. Waite, University at Albany, SUNY 

The Spark of Kindness: The Rhetoric of Abolitionist Action in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Famously known for its specific audience of northern white women, traditional readings of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girlhave long focused on Jacobs’s use of sympathy or pity. However, a different reading is possible that analyzes how Jacobs rejects both sympathy and pity as a foundation for positive abolitionist action and, instead, relies on kindness as the only emotion that invokes real material change on behalf of the slave woman.

Reviews

Reviews are published in alphabetical order according to the name of the author reviewed. 

Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl, by Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee, eds.  

Reviewer: Jeffery Moser

Wunderbare Jahre: Als wir noch die Welt bereisten, by Sibylle Berg.

Reviewer: Louise E. Stoehr

Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, byKevin Binfield and William J. Christmas, eds.

Reviewer: Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Shifting Subjectivities in Contemporary Fiction and Film from Spain, by Jennifer Brady and Meredith L. Jeffers.

Reviewer:Eduardo A. Caro Meléndez

Political Vocabularies: Word Change and the Nature of Politics, by Conal Condren.  

Reviewer: Doreen Alvarez Saar

El segundo Quijote (1615) nuevas interpretaciones, nuevas reflexiones cuatro siglos después (2015), byConxita Domènech and Andrés Lema-Hincapié, eds.

Reviewer: Elia Hatfield

NU-ENGLISH: A Simpler English Language for the Future, by Bill Dommett.

Reviewer: Alyssa Young

Experimental Research Methods in Sociolinguistics, byKatie Drager.

Reviewer: Juan García-Cardona

Teaching Hemingway and Race, by Gary Edward Holcomb, ed.

Reviewer: Alyssa Young

Reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: Glossary and Commentary, by Robert W. Lewis and Michael Kim Roos.

Reviewer: Ricardo Landeira

El intelectual y la cultura de masas. Argumentos latinoamericanos en torno a Ángel Rama y José María Arguedas, by Javier García Liendo.

Reviewer: Renee Fritzen

Hemingway in the Digital Age: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding, by Laura Godfrey, ed.

Reviewer: Wayne Catan

Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture, byWendy Larson.

Reviewer: Naji R Obaid

Gender from Latin to Romance, byMichele Loporcaro.

Reviewer: John M. Ryan

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, byValeria Luiselli.

Reviewer: Marcus Embry

Kalila and Dinna, trans. from the Persian by Wheeler Thackston, by Nasrullah Munshi. 

Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Viejo Verde, byGustavo Pérez Firmat.

Reviewer: Joy Landeira

The Book of Dust. Volume one: La Belle Sauvage, byPhilip Pullman.

Reviewer: Peter Fields

Fay Weldon, Feminism, and British Culture, by Mara E. Reisman.

Reviewer: Jeffery Moser

The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano, byTerence Scully.

Reviewer: Doreen Alvarez Saar

This Language, A River: A History of English, byK. Aaron Smith and Susan M. Kim.

Reviewer: Peter Fields

The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, by Warren Treadgold.
Reviewer: John Herda

Click here to access a pdf of all reviews.

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