Volume 2 | Spring 2004

Author Dead. Full Report at Eleven:
The Questioning of the Author Function in City of Glass and The Lizard's Tail

Donald E. Backman
San Francisco State University

"Writing unfolds like a game [...] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits" (Foucault 102). It is interesting that Michel Foucault, in his essay "What is an Author?" should refer to writing as a game. A game implies a set of rules that keep participation fair on both sides. Full Article>
 

Unsettling Fixity and Fantasy:
Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and The Weary Blues

Katy Chiles
Northwestern University

This essay begins by making a bold statement: we, even as 21st-century scholars, remain haunted by the "meaning" of the Harlem Renaissance. Please allow me to point to and quote at length an endnote buried in small print at the back of Houston Baker's Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Full Article>

(Dis)Integrating Canadian Nationalism:
Bearing Witness to Trauma in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach & Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field

Amber Dean
Simon Fraser University

Sometimes we live the wars between nations as personal events. Sometimes a private drama appears like a war or natural catastrophe. Sometimes the two wars, the personal and the national, coincide.
- Hélène Cixous
  Full Article>

Melancholic Longing in The Shadow Lines

Gregory Esplin
Utah State University

Reading Theodor Adorno against the grain, I suggest that the melancholic sensibility he identifies resonates with recent struggles to articulate emergent configurations of subjectivity in post-colonial studies. Such a sense of yearning fuels continued attempts to locate new forms of collective identification that seek to transcend the exclusivity of nationalism, while nevertheless enabling a sense of social solidarity. Full Article>
 

Translation of Boris Slutsky's "Key"

Rebecca Gould
City University of New York

Key
I had a room with a private entrance.
I was a bachelor and lived alone.
My friends entered at every whim. Full Article>
 

Translation of Jaime Gil de Biedma's "El juego de hacer versos"

Yolanda Morata

El juego de hacer versos -que no es un juego- es algo parecido en principio al placer solitario.

The line-writing game -which is not a game- is something similar at first to solitary pleasure. Full Article>
 

"Now There's Two Heroines in One Kitchen":
Lesbianism and Me(h)tafilmic Discourse in Deepa Mehta's Fire

Irina Negrea
Lehigh University

Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta released Fire in 1996. The reception in India was divided between enthusiasm and violent criticism, turning Fire into a highly controversial film. In the making of Fire, Mehta uses "traditional" filmic narrative in order to convey her views on the institution of marriage to as many members of the audience as possible. The plot revolves around two Indian women living in a joint family. Full Article>
 

Christopher Romans
University of Alabama

The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich wrote her Revelations of Divine Love or The Book of Shewings in order to understand a series of fifteen visions she received in May 1371. Her text explores the ways in which the spirit is revealed (and hidden) by the flesh as well as the relationship and unification of the body and soul. Full Article>
 

The Mother's Burial, the Daughter's Burden:
Disintegrated and Dismembered Bodies in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Wright's Native Son

Cristina Stanciu
University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign

The female body has been eulogized, idealized, and sanctified throughout history, while being preserved in a state of comfortable muteness, bearing the stigma of materiality. The roles commonly attributed to women, as Luce Irigaray has argued, have been those of "virgin, mother, and prostitute" (186). Full Article>
 

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