Recently added articles from Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies:
Introduction: poetries
Apr 01, 2006; ... In calling this issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies "poetries," we aim to expose a series of hoaxes: among them, the idea that poetry is dead (it's not), the belief that it belongs to the academy (it doesn't), and the suspicion that it takes one or another singular shape (it is many, ...
Enigma Variations: Poetry and Modern Nightlife
Apr 01, 2006; ... Pitch Taverns and nightclubs are places where casual social interaction, business, and even crime, coexist in a place governed ostensibly by pleasure. They are also sites where the illicit and often subversive habits (or "trades") of the demimonde become intelligible-and available-to ...
Only Death Can Part Us: Messages on Wartime Cards
Apr 01, 2006; ... One of the major challenges for a historically-based cultural studies is the absence from our archives of any substantial record of how ordinary people in earlier periods interacted with various discursive regimes. One may, for example, gauge the role literature played in the lives of those who ...
"Writing Another Kind of Poetry": James Norman Hall as "Fern Gravel" in Oh Millersville!
Apr 01, 2006; ... I am writing another kind of poetry, And some of my poems are beautiful to me. I hope, someday, people will travel To see the home of the poetess, Fern Gravel, Like they go to Longfellow's home, and Whittier's, And then I'll remember the day I wrote this ...
Sylvia Plath and Electracy
Apr 01, 2006; ... I. The Impossible Archive Sylvia Plath's short story "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams," written in 1958, reads like an archival fantasy. Its narrator, a secretary in a mental hospital, spends each day "facing the door of the office and [typing] up other people's dreams" (17). In ...
Def Poetry's Public: Spoken Word Poetry and the Racial Politics of Going Mainstream
Apr 01, 2006; ... It's imperative that these spoken word artists be catapulted to the mainstream and be recognized. Finally the marriage between hip-hop and spoken word can begin the arduous task of reconciliation. -Bruce George, former Executive Producer of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Rap ...
Poetries, Micropoetries, Micropoetics
Apr 01, 2006; ... I liked absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, colored prints, old-fashioned literature, Church Latin, erotic books badly spelled, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly refrains, naive ...
Reading Lines Forum
Apr 01, 2006; ... Paula Bernat Bennett Of the various texts that led to my adopting a cultural studies approach to my field-nineteenth-century American women's poetry-the two that affected me the most were The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, and The West as America: ...
Introduction: The Religious and the Secular
Oct 01, 2005; ... As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in the mid-nineties, I visited one of my advisors during office hours. As I accepted the proffered chair and my marked-up paper, she gave me a gentle but unambiguous message: "Everett, if you really want to go to graduate school in English, you've got to stop ...
On Secularization, Rationalization, and Other Mystical Things: The Unfinished Work of Marx's Religious Criticism
Oct 01, 2005; ... The field of cultural studies has emerged over the last few decades to become a primary locus of interdisciplinary ferment in today's university. As its modes of inquiry circulate across disciplines, there is one circuit that to this day remains notably blocked: namely, that linking cultural and ...
Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth
Oct 01, 2005; ... Is spiritual experience the best way to account for the host of newer religious sensibilities that are cropping up, in enabling the crossing of borders between older religious systems that scatter the cultural landscape as the newer intolerances that have taken their place? In order to offer a ...
Religious Scriptors of Human Possibilities and Cultural Transformations
Oct 01, 2005; ... What is good, is something that comes through innovation. The good does not exist, like that, in an atemporal sky, with people who would be like the Astrologers of the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable nature of the stars. The good is defined by us, it is practised, it is ...
The Haunting: Cultural Studies, Religion and Alternative Therapies
Oct 01, 2005; ... In his introduction to the 1988 collection Not Necessarily the New Age, Robert Basil claimed that although millions of people had experimented with non-traditional spirituality and with alternative therapies, and although hundreds of books had been written on New Age thinking, there was not one ...
When a Woman Thinks Alone: Rethinking Mexican History through Women and Faith
Oct 01, 2005; ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours! [. . .] And Seneca says in his Tragedies: A woman either loves or hates; ...
Review Essay: Jacques Derrida: Acts of Religion
Oct 01, 2005; ... Review Essay: Jacques Derrida: Acts of Religion Christopher D. Kilgore Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002). This collection of Derrida's essays is entitled Acts of Religion, not "thoughts," "essays," or "writings" on religion. It is an ...
Review Essay: Graham Ward: True Religion
Oct 01, 2005; ... Review Essay: Graham Ward: True Religion Ioana Patuleanu Graham Ward, True Religion, Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Secularism is about to implode, Graham Ward warns the reader; one can see the signs of a return of the religious in the cultural arena and in the consumer market. The book is ...
Review Essay: Talal Asad: Genealogies of Religion, and Formations of the Secular
Oct 01, 2005; ... Review Essay: Talal Asad: Genealogies of Religion, and Formations of the Secular Kevin Seidel Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Talal Asad, Formations of ...
Review Essay: Slavoj Zizek: On Belief, and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
Oct 01, 2005; ... Review Essay: Slavoj Zizek: On Belief, and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity David Jasper In his books On Belief (2001) and The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), the philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek poses the radical question of the ...
Review Essay: Rene Girard: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
Oct 01, 2005; ... Review Essay: Rene Girard: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning David Lyle Jeffrey Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated, with a foreword, by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis; Ottawa: Novalis; Leominster (UK): Gracewing, 2001.193 pp., ...
Review Essay: Nicholas McDowell: The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660
Oct 01, 2005; ... Review Essay: Nicholas McDowell: The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 Angela Balla Nicholas McDowell. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. 192. ISBN ...