Recently added articles from Notes on Contemporary Literature:
James Salter's "Am Strande von Tanger".(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... The title of James Salter's first story, "Am Strande von Tanger" (On the Beach at Tangier), alludes to a landscape by the Bohemian artist Wenzel Hollar (1607-77). It first appeared in the Paris Review (Fall 1968) and, twenty years later, opened his collection Dusk (1988). The tale, written ...
Through the looking glass: the role of memory in The Glass Menagerie.(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... Laura Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie (1944) hardly qualifies as a romantic superwoman, a majestic ego eager to transcend the "mereness" of mundane human existence. In his narration of the drama at the same time as he plays a part in it, together with his final, self-centered leavetaking ...
Some unheard melodies in a Clockwork Orange.(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange swarms with allusions to classical music. The favorite composers of Alex, the novel's protagonist, are Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, none of whom Burgess transforms into Alex's nasdat (teen talk) jargon. There are, however, other composers and musical ...
Saul Bellow's favorite thought on Herzog? The evidence of an unpublished Bellow letter.(Moses Herzog)(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... Despite the decade-long effort of Saul Bellow's biographer, James Atlas, to collect the letters Bellow sent to "wives, friends, lovers, enemies, writers he admired and writers he detested, teachers, students, disciples, [and] fans," the job will likely never be complete ("The Last Time I ...
Hemingway, Gongora and the concept of nada.(Ernest Hemingway, Luis de Gongora)(Critical essay)
May 01, 2008; ... Hemingway owned three works by the poet and satirist of the Spanish Golden Age, Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645). He mentions Quevedo three times in For Whom the Bell Tolls. An old man's dialect was "like reading Quevedo"; Pilar's story-telling is "better than Quevedo"; and Robert Jordan ...
Ideological State Apparatuses in Vilas': memorias dun neno labrego.(Xose Neira Vilas)(Critical essay)
May 01, 2008; ... Xose Neira Vilas (Gres, Pontevedra 1928) is one of the most recognized and widely read Galician authors of the twentieth century (Galicia is the northwest region of Spain associated with the Celtic culture and regional nationalism). An emigrant during the first part of his life, his trips ...
Clowning around in James Purdy's: The Paradise Circus.(Critical essay)
May 01, 2008; ... In anticipation of the (delayed, but) forthcoming edition of four plays by James Purdy (Selected Plays. Brice, The Paradise Circus, Where Quentin Goes, and Ruthanna Elder [Evanston: Northwestern UP, forthcoming 2007]), I will examine the previously unpublished play The Paradise Circus. In ...
Art of darkness: Nina Sadur's Gothic fictions.(Critical essay)
May 01, 2008; ... Readers of Hoffmann, Poe, and Melville will recognize close affinities with the master of the Russian Gothic tale and a major figure of contemporary Russian prose, Nina Sadur, whose fiction in the Gothic mode is now coming to the forefront of the Russian Gothic canon that includes Pushkin, ...
Joyce and Herrick.(James Joyce, Robert Herrick)(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Contemporary critics of Joyce's Chamber Music (1907) saw in these early poems "something of the spirit of Waller and Herrick," "a courtliness that reminds one of Herrick and Lovelace" and "the lucid sensibility of Jonson and Herrick." Ezra Pound observed, "the wording is Elizabethan, the ...
Philip Roth's quarrel with realism in American Pastoral.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Philip Roth's American Pastoral (London: Vintage, 1997) is not so much about the 'life' of Seymour Levov, the Swede, an assimilationist Jewish-American entrepreneur who battles to preserve his family and the capitalistic enterprises he owns in Newark from the social turbulence of the ...
On chapter XLV of Derek Walcott's Omeros.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Ever since its publication in 1990, Walcott's Omeros has been a celebrated text, helping to earn the poet the Nobel Prize in 1992. The concentration on postcolonial literature in literary studies during the past two decades has spurred interest in Walcott's poem which presents a Caribbean ...
The united snakes: Peter Redgrove's vision of America.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... The first time I came across Peter Redgrove's representation of America I was rather puzzled. It was in his 1979 collection of poems The Weddings at Nether Powers. "Meeting America at Wistman's Manor", came as something of a surprise as it appeared seemingly out of nowhere towards the end ...
Blank books in Gerald Vizenor's "Almost Browne".(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... In his short story "Almost Brown" Gerald Vizenor lulls the reader into accepting the "blank books" as symbolic of a challenge inviting one to gauge the purpose, a mirror reflecting the reader, or a joke debunking human insistence upon meaning. The stress placed on them in the last couple ...
William Jay Smith's "The World below the Window".(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2008; ... <Pre> William Jay Smith's "The World below the Window" The geraniums I left last night on the windowsill,To the best of my knowledge now, are out there still,And will be there as long as I think they will. And will be there as long as I think that ICan throw the ...
The sense of horror: Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber".(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2008; ... In "The Bloody Chamber" Angela Carter creates horror not by appealing to the reader's intellect but rather by stimulating bodily sensations in terms of colour, temperature and haptic (sense of touch) conditions. The first configurations of colour, texture and temperature are: ...
A soldier's flaw, in Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2008; ... In A Soldier's Play (NY, Hill and Wang, 1982), by Charles Fuller, a black drillmaster, Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, has been murdered on an army base in Louisiana during World War II, and a black lawyer, Captain Richard Davenport--the first black commissioned officer ever to be seen in this ...
Audre Lorde's "Afterimages": history, scripture, myth, and nightmare.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Audre Lorde's "Afterimages" (The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde [NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000]: 339) is a complex, multi-layered poem that voices the continuing trauma of one of the most brutal events in the Civil Rights struggle--the murder of Emmett Till. This 14-year old black boy ...
Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and the essentializing of Africa: a critical double standard?(Critical essay)
Nov 01, 2007; ... There are at least two practices and beliefs that Barbara Kingsolver inscribes in her novel, The Poisonwood Bible (NY: HarperFlamingo, 1998), onto the cultures of the Congo region, which in fact are probably borrowed from other parts of the African continent. Specifically, these are ...
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and the Florida cigar industry.(Critical essay)
Nov 01, 2007; ... At first sight the "roller of big cigars" in the opening line of Wallace Stevens' favorite poem seems to represent an enjoyable luxury for the living, like ice cream, as opposed to the grim presence of death in the next stanza. But Stevens suggests that the roller is both the man who ...
Implications of the The Incredible Shrinking Man allusion in Don DeLillo's Americana.(Critical essay)
Nov 01, 2007; ... David Bell, the 28-year-old protagonist of Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), jokes that he has spent "28 years in the movies" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971: 224). He has not been involved in the cinematic industry as such, but his actual existence has been so saturated with ...