Survey Of Criticism Research Articles

Legal Criticism and Unsettled Precedent: A Survey of Judicial and Scholarly Criticism of Roe v. Wade Since 1973 (1st ed. Jan. 2022)

Legal Criticism and Unsettled Precedent: A Survey of Judicial and Scholarly Criticism of Roe v. Wade Since 1973 (1st ed. Jan. 2022)

Corley's Aspirations and Gumley's Dreams in "Eumaeus"

Aspirations and Gumley's Dreams in 'Eumaeus' examines the narrative function and semiotic implications of John Corley's presence in Ulysses. Synthesizing a wide survey of criticism on Eumaeus, the essay grounds its analysis in Corley's location in Dublin and in his Homeric parallel with Melanthius, the goatherd disloyal to Odysseus. As he enters the novel situated between Dublin's red-light district and the cabman's shelter, Corley's raison d'etre becomes illuminated by several major themes in the episode established by previous criticism: deceptive signification, alienated labor, empty monetary value, and homoeroticism. Through this framework, I argue that may be working as a male prostitute or at least posing as one. The Dublin Castle scandal and Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 provide historical context for male prostitution in the era, and analysis of Joyce's story Two Gallants links to the Ascendancy in the Castle and highlights the significance of his name. The essay uses Michael Riffaterre's theories of literary production to cast Corley as an emblematic name that assists in generating the plot of the episode, and analysis of linguistic and metaphorical aspects of Corley's name further inform his role in the novel. Understanding Corley's aspirations in this light also elucidates Gumley's narrative function and the bond between Bloom and Stephen.

Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz by Jason Borge

Reviewed by: Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz by Jason Borge Carlos E. Peña Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz. By Jason Borge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. [ix, 266 p. ISBN 9780822369875 (hardcover), $99.95; ISBN 9780822369905 (paperback), $26.95; ISBN 9780822372332 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Reaching a wide audience almost always comes at a price, and the cost of bringing complex art forms to the mainstream can threaten the integrity of the work and its creators. Jazz music is a powerful example. Various historiographies have enabled jazz to penetrate classrooms and collective consciousness in its country of origin. Too often, though, these sources, including standard textbooks—and especially Ken Burns's Jazz documentary—perform a disservice to the music by simplifying or even eschewing vital aspects of its history and identities. Such omissions carry strong sociopolitical implications. This is where we find the impetus for Jason Borge's Tropical Riffs. A persistent shortcoming of many jazz histories is the lack of acknowledgment of Latin American influences on jazz. Much has been written to call out the ignorance of Latin America among US jazz writers and documentarians, and Borge provides examples of such criticism at the outset of his book. But instead of asking "what Latin America meant to the US jazz establishment," Borge subsequently found himself more concerned with the question of "what jazz meant to Latin America" (p. vii). Among the current bibliography of writings on jazz in various parts of the world, Borge's work fills a surprisingly gaping lacuna, especially when one considers that Latin American music and musicians have indelibly contributed to the shape of jazz for practically an entire century of its evolution. [End Page 94] The introduction outlines the astute and compelling premises of Borge's project, setting the stage for the five lengthy chapters that follow. Even in its earliest forms, jazz penetrated the cultural imaginaries of Latin American nations, which, due to relatively close economic and geopolitical ties with the United States, were uniquely positioned to consume, imitate, and integrate jazz. The paradoxes embodied by jazz—being modern and sophisticated but widely perceived as primal, a source of national pride created by poor, disenfranchised people—are in some ways analogous to Latin American forms like samba, tango, and son. But the Latin American nations, wildly diverse in terms of political regimes and their relationships to issues of race, class, culture, and economics, nevertheless shared the circumstance of being far enough removed from US cultural discourse to ensure that their audiences, critics, and artists could forge their own relationships to jazz. From these premises emerge Borge's central questions of how and why jazz resonated with Latin American audiences and his need for a survey of jazz criticism that accounts for the entirety of the Western hemisphere. Chapter 1 describes how awareness of jazz in Latin America, beginning in the 1920s, sprouted from sporadic exposure to US media, resulting in rather warped conceptions of what jazz was and how it sounded. Local musicians were quick to adapt styles they called jazz into their repertoires, and audiences were subjected to controversies in the media and in politics about the morality (or lack thereof) of the music. Plenty of discourse surrounding jazz carried racist overtones. Still, jazz enjoyed an undeniable popularity that was initially concentrated among the more privileged classes of Latin Americans. Borge takes an in-depth look at the reception of Josephine Baker, who toured extensively in Latin America, noting how it is ironic that Baker's popularity in the region foregrounded the prominence of Parisian culture—not that of the US jazz epicenters—in South America and Mexico early in the jazz age. Borge uses journalism of the period to examine Baker's differing reception among Latin American nations, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The three chapters that follow take closer looks, respectively, at Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba. A patent strength of Borge's work is his reliance on early periodical literature, including specialized jazz magazines, as a foundation. Some of these writings have been anthologized while others have not, but their inclusion gives weight...

Les Écoles de pensée du xiie siècle et la littérature romane (oc et oïl). Études réunies par Valérie Fasseur et Jean-René Valette.

There are clearly many potential benefits to studying literary history alongside intellectual history, and attempts to persuade researchers from these different fields to cross disciplinary boundaries to engage in dialogue are to be welcomed, for all the difficulties in doing so. This collection comes out of an interdisciplinary conference that had the aim of exploring the relationship between the explosion of literary production in the vernacular in France and the ‘schools of thought’ that characterize intellectual histories of the twelfth century, most famously the Neoplatonic thought of the schools of Saint-Victor and Chartres. Valérie Fasseur and Jean-René Valette’s brief Introduction acknowledges the difficulties of their interdisciplinary approach, noting that many of the contributions do not so much answer the question at stake as interrogate the terms of reference: What is a ‘school of thought’? How can its influence be shown? Some of the collection’s essays give useful overviews to broader questions, charting the foothills of the issue if not quite scaling the peaks, such as Fasseur’s interesting discussion of Occitan literature’s possible intellectual debts to twelfth-century schools of thought or Valette’s survey of criticism about Grail literature. Dominique Boutet catalogues instances where twelfth- and thirteenth-century French literature discusses the creation of the world and suggests a potential link to Chartrian Neoplatonism. Strangely, several essays are included that, as they openly acknowledge, do not engage with the volume’s problematic, such as Jacques Verger’s chapter on Bernard of Clairvaux and secular audiences, Jean-Yves Tilliette’s interesting discussion of Victorine literary style, Jean-Marie Fritz’s comparison of clerical literary production at the court of Marie de Champagne, or Dominique Poirel’s presentation of secular values in Hugh of Saint-Victor’s writing. Articles on allegorical poetry in the final third of the volume are somewhat disappointing. Damien Boquet usefully suggests a link between Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose and Aelred of Rievaux’s De spirituali amicitia but does not explain how this might affect interpretation of the poem. Marie-Pascale Halary picks up Guillaume de Lorris’s games with mystical traditions in his part of the Rose but strangely neglects the poet’s ludic irony to offer an unproven hypothesis, namely that Guillaume is influenced by Cistercian thought. It is difficult to know what to do with Armand Strubel’s article on vernacular allegory, which does not engage with twelfth-century thought and which has only six references to secondary literature. Ultimately, this collection provokes a serious and valuable question: how should medieval texts be studied in an interdisciplinary way? The approach here, tending towards inclusivity and choosing to juxtapose articles that stay within their own disciplines, cannot be said to be an unqualified success and one can only wish that much of the good work in the volume had been brought together in a more focused way to answer the interesting questions raised.

Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens: “Ideas of Remoteness”

Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens“Ideas of Remoteness” Thomas Gould Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens “Ideas of Remoteness” Dean Rader’s essay on Stevens’s various hauntings of contemporary American poetry features some new remarks by the poet Terrance Hayes, which will furnish me with the main theme of this survey of recent Stevens criticism: “I don’t believe he thought black folk could write poems, comprehend poems, care for poems. But that’s not what both scares and influences me most about Stevens. It’s the remoteness his brand of imagination engenders. He champions the kind of imagination that makes all else secondary.” Throughout this review, I want to consider such an idea of “remoteness.” The unfavorable perception of Stevens as a “remote” poet is not new, nor are the efforts of Stevensians to dispel or disprove it, to collapse the distance it implies. A reputation for remoteness is self-fulfilling, likely to ensure that a poet remains distant from readers. In this sense, collapsing remoteness, surely, has to be one of the primary tasks of contemporary literary criticism. It is such a task that Helen Vendler seems to be motivated by in the opening pages of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, when she writes of her attempt “to present the Stevens I know to the public eye, which still too often finds Stevens remote and distant from the common life” (3). Presumably, Vendler is referring to the usual—whether misconceived or not—complaints that Stevens presents a poetics of privilege, that he isolates himself in a showily obscure and rarefied vocabulary, that his poetic extemporizations are willfully, inaccessibly cerebral and abstract. [End Page 299] But to be remote is, nevertheless, to be in relation. Remoteness is, as it were, a mode of intentionality and, if we look to the poems themselves, we often find attempts to measure the distance from something, a measuring that always implies an activity of reconciliation. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens asks, “Not to be part of the sun? To stand // Remote and call it merciful?” (CPP 138); here, in a way that clearly resonates with Hayes’s ambivalence, the intentionality of Stevens’s remoteness is more concerned with an aesthetic remoteness from things or “things as they are” than it is with a social or political remoteness from people, or from a “common life.” My aim is to show how this past year’s essays tackle this problem by demonstrating how remoteness and its various spatializations are an immanent concern of the poems themselves, and how remoteness might thereby be critically recuperated. I want to set Brian Brodhead Glaser’s essay “Wallace Stevens and Racial Melancholy” in the context of Hayes’s comments on the implied interlinkage between Stevens’s private prejudices and his supposedly remote “brand of imagination.” Hayes is one of what Lisa Steinman calls Stevens’s “unanticipated readers” in her contribution to the critical anthology Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, published this year by Bloomsbury and reviewed in this journal’s Spring 2017 issue. Theorizing the legacy and influence of Stevens on African American poets, Steinman writes that “Stevens’ poems . . . self-consciously look forward to ‘unanticipated’ readers” (225). Glaser’s argument instead offers something like the exact temporal opposite of this idea, suggesting that Stevens’s poems (or at least “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”) self-consciously look back, and look back to a loss they are incapable of fully comprehending and representing. Glaser’s argument has two central points. First, he borrows Anne Anlin Cheng’s notion of racial melancholy to contend that Stevens’s “coldness” was a means of affecting and reflexively incorporating “his inability to mourn a figure, the Africanist victim of violence, who was always already lost to him” (388). Melancholy names the affective process of situating the intentionality of an experience of remoteness. Eschewing a redemptive account (and, to be clear, he does not pull any punches), Glaser suggests that the poem is haunted by a pervasive and oblique awareness, rather than an absolute ignorance, of its own remoteness, the kind that Hayes would decades later ambivalently ascribe to Stevens...

CONFESSIONS OF A LATE‐BLOOMING, “MISEDUCATED” PHILOSOPHER OF SCIENCE

AbstractThis article provides a survey of Walker Percy's criticism of what Pope Benedict XVI calls “scientificity,” which entails a constriction of the dynamic interaction of faith and reason. The process can result in the diminishment of ethical considerations raised by science's impact on public policy. Beginning in the 1950s, Percy begins speculating about the negative influence of scientificity. The threat of a political regime using weapons of mass destruction is only one of several menacing developments. The desacrilization of human life from cradle to grave leads Percy to assert that modern science's impact is often radically incoherent. In The Moviegoer, Percy finds his existential and theistic voice that would enable him to advance his critique of science.

Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction

This brief survey of criticism about biofiction clarifies how scholars have struggled to define the aesthetic form in relation to the historical novel and to biography. By citing some prominent authors of biofiction, it provides a preliminary framework for and definition of biofiction as an introduction to this cluster, which consists of process pieces and scholarly essays about biofiction.

Victorian Melodrama

AbstractThis article offers a survey of criticism on Victorian melodrama since the rise of cultural studies in the 1960s. It will consider various approaches to melodrama, from formalist and materialist accounts to revisionist studies which investigate the historiography of Victorian popular theatre. The field of melodrama studies is now so large that it is impossible to provide a comprehensive survey within this space. As such, there are some omissions: this article focusses almost exclusively on studies which take British (primarily London) melodrama as their focus, and it only includes scholarship dealing with melodrama on the stage and in the novel. The first part of this essay summarises foundational work in the field, and the second section details how melodrama has been seen as influencing other cultural forms. The third section turns to scholarship which places melodrama within its historical context, whilst the fourth section considers revisionist accounts which question the interpretative and discursive methods used to conceptualise the Victorian theatre. To conclude, this essay will address the subject of emotion and melodrama, and suggest a possible new framework through which to view and expand upon current understandings of ‘affect’ and the melodramatic theatre.

A Philosophy of Suffering:

AbstractThe major unresolved critical question regarding Nathanael West's dark modernist novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, is whether or not it offers a scintilla of hope for the future of American culture. Otherwise expressed, is redemption possible, or is the work best read as primarily accusatory, part of the negative school of modernism? This article argues that although a wholly redemptive reading is impossible, the work still possesses extrinsic redemptive value: through the very ferocity of its portrayal of dehumanization and suffering, it prompts the reader to ethical reflection, and oftentimes empathy. This thesis is demonstrated through a close reading of the text and a survey of West criticism up to today, including recent studies linking the author's use of the grotesque with compassion. Finally, in order to better understand Miss Lonelyhearts's redemptive implications, the later theory of Richard Rorty is explored, in particular the epistemological and philosophical claims made in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Of greatest relevance to this study is Rorty's claim that only a common understanding of suffering can form the basis for human solidarity, as well as his belief that the unique imaginative quality of literature allows it to communicate philosophical principles better than philosophy itself.

A Survey of Twentieth-century Literary Theory and Criticism in Chinese

In their article "A Survey of Twentieth-century Literary Theory and Criticism in Chinese" Xiaoming Chen and Anfeng Sheng survey Chinese-language scholarship that for the reason of the East-West divide is less known in the West. Although heavily influenced by both Western and Soviet Marxist thought, twentieth-century Chinese literary theorization and criticism produced much incisive scholarship based on the vast knowledge existing in Chinese culture and literary scholarship. Chen and Sheng survey pioneering works by numerous Chinese literary theorists and critics who have been influential in their own time and exerted persistent modeling influences until today and the article is meant to adjust the anonymous position of Chinese literary theorization in the West and thus to contribute to the diversity of literary studies.

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

<i>British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology</i> (review)

Reviewed by: British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology Rebecca Shapiro British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2009. Pp. 906. $80; $40 (paper). Acknowledging a debt to anthologies edited by Germaine Greer, Roger Lonsdale, Joyce Fullard, and Paula R. Feldman, Ms. Backscheider and Ms. Ingrassia assert that their text of 368 poems by eighty women is the first comprehensive collection of eighteenth-century British women’s poetry in roughly twenty years. The editors address “a persistent need to document the history of women’s poetic expression” in the period and to rewrite literary history, “from which women have been largely excluded or, in effect, ghettoized.” So, rather than “ghettoize” women’s poetry yet again, Ms. Backscheider and Ms. Ingrassia wish to use their anthology to challenge the traditional, gendered ways of reading that previously hindered women writers from being accepted as objectively “good.” By choosing only women writers in their anthology, the editors aim to show that women are important to literary scholars for representing “biographical, historical, and social evidence” organically as authors just as men have been, and not merely as women. The editors do that by ensuring that they include a range of authors who employ various poetic genres and who represent diverse political, class, educational, and religious values. Not only were women poets active during this period—often publicly so—but they were also writing in styles and venues that have come to be considered the purview of men. The editors have excerpted poems from letters and plays as well as from collections by single authors, miscellanies, periodicals, and manuscripts. The organization is thematic and generic, and the editors rightly mention that some readers will be unhappy with their choice of an atemporal structure. This arrangement is reminiscent of how the thematic Longman Anthology of British Literature became a serious rival to the chronological Norton Anthology. For that reason, this text would work very well in course design, as eighteenth-century courses are already temporized. Its three main parts—”Poetic Kinds and Genres,” “Poetry as Life Writing,” and “Writing on Writing”—are divided into thirty-two subsections, such as “The Sonnet,” “Satire,” “Pastoral Poetry,” “Friendship [End Page 64] Poems,” “Love Poems,” “Poems on Nature,” “The Muses,” “The Experience of Writing,” “The Nightingale in Poetry.” Some subsections consist of only a few poems. While it is useful to see how women wrote very different poems on similar themes, it is not always easy to understand how political or social movements affected women’s writing during the 170 years covered by the editors. And while it is important to recognize that women had a variety of literary interests and wrote in several genres, it is also helpful to see what individual women wrote by using the alternate table of contents at the back. The variety of categories provides a fascinating view into the current public interests as well as the private concerns of the women poets. For example, Ms. Backscheider and Ms. Ingrassia create subtle variations in the section on love poems: Jane Cave Winscom’s “Written About a Month after the Birth of My Son” and Charlotte Smith’s “Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants” are among the poems on children. “Poems on Marriage” is not included in the section on love poems, while same-sex poems are; and the editors differentiate “Poems on Nature” (Jane West’s “Spring: An Ode” and Ann Thomas’s “On Birds, Butterflies, a Deer, &c.”) from “Poems on Ecology” (Behn’s “On a Juniper-Tree” and “To a Cricket”). Many poems could easily work in more than one section. While the editors provide an alternative table of contents by author, others by chronology and genre also would have been useful. For each section, the editors’ introduction to each type of poetry provides a framework for the poems and poets included, and a brief survey of current criticism; these introductions could have been longer than their average two pages, and should have provided more historical context. Their brevity suggests the editors are directing the anthology toward knowledgeable readers, and it is true that this...

Late Modernism, 1928–1945: Criticism and Theory

AbstractIn contrast to the well‐established body of criticism on early modernism in 20th‐century literature, late modernism has only belatedly appeared in the critical discourse. This article presents a survey of criticism on thirties writing and writing between the World Wars in order to suggest that the early success of Auden Generation criticism narrowed the scope of the critical field. Since the late 1990s, a critical reassessment of writing between the late twenties and late forties has facilitated the emergence of late modernism. Combining cultural and historical assessment with attention to the period’s plurality of aesthetics, these contributions are vital to the theorization of late modernism beyond the dyadic model of the Auden Generation and to an analysis of late modernism that examines the conceptual work these texts perform in relation to modernist and postmodernist modalities. Drawing together the approaches of recent theorists of late modernism, this article concludes by offering an alternative framework for mapping a plurality of late modernist writers, one that examines late modernist poetics in relation to historical contexts.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale : A Bibliographic Essay

Abstract: This bibliographic essay on Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale serves as a broad survey of Maus criticism based on ten thematic categories such as trauma, postmemory, generational transmission, and the use of English. As much as this essay examines the wide range of scholarly interests surrounding Maus , it also highlights the problem of repetitive concentration on certain themes that dominates and restricts discussion on the text. This overview of Maus criticism thus not only provides a useful summary of the studies currently available, but also serves as a suggestive guide for future scholars in their attempts to broaden and enrich the field with an eye on expanding the critical discourse.

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Amanda Carella, Corey J. Dahl, Adam Lownik, and Ted Weiers [The current bibliography aspires to include all serious contributions to Hemingway scholarship. Given the substantial quantity of significant critical work appearing on Hemingway's life and writings annually, inconsequential items from the popular press have been omitted to facilitate the distinction of important developments and trends in the field. Annotations for articles appearing in The Hemingway Review have been omitted due to the immediate availability of abstracts introducing each issue. Kelli Larson welcomes your assistance in keeping this feature current. Please send reprints, clippings, and photocopies of articles, as well as notices of new books, directly to Larson at the University of St. Thomas, 333 JRC, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105-1096. E-Mail: Kalarson1@stthomas.edu.] Books Brasch, James D. That Other Hemingway: The Master Inventor. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2010. [On EH's life in Cuba. Brasch provides a context for his 1981 Hemingway's Library: A Composite Record, a catalogue of EH's immense library at the Finca Vigía (now available on line from the John F. Kennedy Library). Surveys those volumes devoted to poetry and art (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Lord Byron, Paul Cézanne and others) to reveal the breadth of Hemingway's intellectual curiosity and suggests that "knowledge, not experience, was the source of invention." Interviews with EH's personal physician and friend Dr. José Luis Herrera Sotolongo describe EH's activities during the Spanish Civil War and sympathy for the Cuban Revolution. Examines EH's correspondence with Malcom Cowley and Bernard Berenson, reconstructing his complicated relationship with each man and revealing the depths of his loneliness while living in Cuba. Concludes with logs of their correspondence and an inventory of books [End Page 129] by and about EH in Berenson's personal library. Relies on previously published material.] Bryfonski, Dedria, ed. Male and Female Roles in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Detroit: Greenhaven P, 2010. [Collection of reprinted excerpts ranging from 1952 through 2007 on gender issues by such well-known Hemingway scholars as Carlos Baker, Debra A. Moddelmog, Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes. Geared to young adult readers.] Earle, David M. All Man! Hemingway, 1950s Men's Magazines, and the Masculine Persona. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2009. [Introduction to 1950s pulp men's magazines focusing specifically on the popular image of EH in relation to the development of postwar hypermasculinity and misogyny. Earle's study "is not about Hemingway's fiction but Hemingway himself as a fiction, as a popular representation, and as an innately visual image that grows out of twentieth-century mass media and the dynamics of midcentury gender." Discusses EH's celebrity, both its rise and fall, beginning with the author's earliest pulp fragments housed at the John F. Kennedy Library. Loaded with visually stunning full color illustrations.] Eisler, Rudolf. Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New Delhi, India: Centrum Press, 2009. [Not seen.] Federspiel, Michael R. Picturing Hemingway's Michigan. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010. [Explores EH's early summers spent in the Little Traverse Bay area of Northern Michigan and the profound influence of the region on his later work. Provides an historical context, tracing the region's dramatic evolution from rural lumbering tract to vacation hotspot in the early 1900s. Combines over 250 black-and-white photographs, maps, illustrations, and postcards along with commentaries and excerpts from EH's stories, letters, and journals to create a picture of the people and places of Northern Michigan that serve as backdrop for so many of his writings.] Hasan, Rabiul. Rediscovering Hemingway in Bangladesh and India, 1971-2006. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2010. [Surveys the teaching, reception, and influence of EH's works in Bangladesh and India from 1971 to 2006, revealing the growing interest in EH studies in the Indian sub-continent. Opens with a brief overview of American and British criticism before moving into a survey of Indian and Bangladeshi criticism on EH's short stories and novels and the challenges specific to teaching American literature in Bangladesh and India. Closes with an assessment of EH's reputation and continued relevance among academics...

Comics Studies’ Identity Crisis: A Meta-Theoretical Survey

This article reflects on comics studies’ tendency for self-apology and a latent inferiority complex. It offers a survey of contemporary comics criticism and textbooks as well as a critique of a tendency towards an assimilation of comics studies by literary studies. It highlights the ways in which interdisciplinary approaches and a critical engagement with the foundational texts of comics studies, as well as recent scholarly endeavors to provide a theoretical grounding to comics studies apart from literary studies, can help the discipline. In particular, it advances the hope that comics can come to be recognized as an image-based medium with a need for its own critical vocabulary

Practical Magic: Empathy and Alienation in Harlem Duet

In the Renaissance, drama's salutary effects were sometimes articulated in terms of the ability to trigger empathic responses. As Thomas Heywood reports in Apology for Actors (1612), the performanc...

Teen Shakespeare Films: An Annotated Survey of Criticism

This article attempts to provide a comprehensive reference guide to the Shakespeare film adaptations specifically targeted at a teenage audience. The bibliography includes a section of general studies on the subject and classifies all the teen films under the title of one of Shakespeare's works. Although this survey seeks to be as comprehensive as possible, certain works of minimal value to the subject have been discarded in the interest of efficiency. Interviews and reviews are only included if they specifically deal with one or more Shakespeare films or make reference to the Shakespearean playtext and, for reasons of space, the bibliography is limited to English-language items. Except where the subject is self-evident, entries are annotated with further information about their content.

Neue Wege in der psychiatrischen Diagnostik?

There is an increasing criticism of the current operational diagnostic approach of ICD-10 and DSM-IV in psychiatry. It has not been possible to validate the respective diagnostic categories with neurobiological findings or to detect sharp boundaries between the diagnostic categories with respect to psychopathological symptoms. Therefore, dimensional diagnostic models are suggested in order to supplement the categorical diagnostic approach. Based on a historical review and a survey of the current criticism of the diagnostic approach of ICD-10 and DSM-IV proposals are made in order to solve the current problems. In conclusion, a multiaxial diagnostic model is suggested that comprises the axes "syndromes", "course types" and "etiology" and that may provide a bridge between the traditional categorical diagnostic approach and dimensional models.

Tradition and subversion in Renaissance literature: studies in Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne

Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement. This title includes chapters that explore Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Faerie Queene, Volpone, and Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose - which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus. The tension between tradition and subversion, both linguistic and cultural, then, can be seen to produce not aporia in any negative sense, but a positive complexity of response from the audience, animating and profoundly enriching each work. In Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare merges the previously despised figure of the merchant with a Christ-like figure, brilliantly reasserting the Christian condemnation of profiteering while simultaneously advocating its seeming opposite, a validation of the burgeoning mercantile activity of the Renaissance. Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature is a thoughtful study, rich in both historical scholarship and in its survey of modern criticism. Even those who are quite familiar with the texts discussed here will find Roston's focus on the tension between maintaining the expectations of the culture and pulling toward new ideas an illuminating way to freshly consider these literary works.