Is William Faulkner’s fiction built on a fundamental dichotomy of outcast individual versus the healthy agrarian community? The New Critics of the 1930s advanced this view, and it has shaped much Faulkner criticism. However, in Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, John Duvall posits the existence of another possibility, alternative communities formed by “deviant” couples. These couples, who violate “normal” gender roles and behaviors, challenge the either/or view of Faulkner’s world.
The study treats in detail the novels Light in August, The Wild Palms, Sanctuary, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom!, as well as several of Faulkner’s short stories. In discussing each work, Duvall challenges the traditional view that Faulkner created active men who follow a code of honor and passive women who are close to nature. Instead, he charts the many instances of men who are nurturing and passive and women who are strong and sexually active. These alternative couples undermine a common view of Faulkner as an upholder of Southern patriarchal values, thus countering the argument that Faulkner’s fiction is essentially misogynist.
This new approach, drawing on semiotics, feminism, and Marxism, makes Faulkner more accessible to readers interested in ideological analysis. It also stresses the intertextual connections between Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and non-Yoknapatawpha fiction. Perhaps most importantly, it uncovers what the New Criticism concealed, namely, that Faulkner’s fiction traces the full androgynous spectrum of the human condition.
The Victorian era was characterized by great scientific curiosity—as exemplified by the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man—as well as by new questions regarding the place of women in society. Patricia Murphy now explores the tenuous interplay of gender and science to show how the era’s literature both challenged and reinforced a constrictive role for Victorian women. Focusing on a specific body of literature involving women intensely associated with scientific pursuits, and examining selected noncanonical writings—both fictional and nonfictional representations of scientific women—Murphy demonstrates how these works informed the “Woman Question” by reinforcing or rejecting presumed truths about gender and science.
Often, the process of modern state formation is founded on the marginalization of certain groups, and Latin America is no exception. In The Language of the In-Between, Erika Almenara contends that literary production replicates this same process. Looking at marginalized communities in Chile and Peru, particularly writers who are travesti, trans, cuir/queer, and Indigenous, the author shows how these writers stake a claim for the liminal space that is neither one thing nor the other. This allows a freedom to expose oppression and to critique a national identity based on erasure. By employing a language of nonnormative gender and sexuality to dispute the state projects of modernity and modernization, the voice of the poor and racialized travesti evolves from powerlessness to become an agent of social transformation.
"Objectivist" writers, conjoined through a variety of personal, ideological, and literary-historical links, have, from the late 1920s to the present, attracted emulation and suspicion. Representing a nonsymbolist, postimagist poetics and characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological worldview, Objectivists have retained their outsider status. Despite such status, however, the formal, intellectual, ideological, and ethical concerns of the Objectivist nexus have increasingly influenced poetry and poetics in the United States.
Thus, argue editors Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, the time has come for an anthology that unites essential works on Objectivist practices and presents Objectivist writing as an enlargement of the possibilities of poetry rather than as a determinable and definable literary movement. The authors' collective aim is to bring attention to this group of poets and to exemplify and specify cultural readings for poetic texts--readings alert to the material world, politics, society, and history, and readings concerned with the production, dissemination, and reception of poetic texts.
The contributors consider Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky within both their historical milieu and our own. The essays insist on poetry as a mode of thought; analyze and evaluate Objectivist politics; focus on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised by certain Objectivist affiliations with Judaism; and explore the dissemination of poetic texts and the vagaries of Objectivist reception. Running throughout the book are two related threads: Objectivist writing as generally a practice aware of its own historical and social contingency and Objectivist writing as a site of complexity, contestation, interrogation, and disagreement.
An unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged.
Each of these writers guided their readers through a constantly changing cityscape and advised them on matters of cultural taste, using their ties to journalism and their participation in urban practice to share accessible wisdom and establish their role as intellectual arbiters. The intimate ties they developed with their audience fostered a permeable concept of literature that would pave the way for overtly politically engaged chroniclers of the 1960s and 1970s. Providing comparative analysis as well as reflection on the evolution of this important genre, Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America is the first systematic study of the Latin American writers who forged a new reading public in the early twentieth century.
In texts from the mid-Heian to the early Kamakura periods, certain figures appear to be “marginal” or removed from “centers” of power. But why do we see these figures in this way?
This study first seeks to answer this question by examining the details of the marginalizing discourse found in these texts. Who is portraying whom as marginal? For what reason? Is the discourse consistent? The author next considers these texts in terms of the predilection of modern scholarship, both Japanese and Western, to label certain figures “marginal.” She then poses the question: Is this predilection a helpful tool or does it inscribe modern biases and misconceptions onto these texts?
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press