Rocky Mountain E-Review
of Language and Literature

Volume 60, Number 1
SPRING 2006

Articles

Swallowing Mosquitoes, Wine,
and Supplement with Quevedo

John Gardner
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

In Quevedo's sonnet #531 the mosquito functions as a supplement, disrupting the perfection of the wine and the formal order of the poem, transgressing the strict thematic divisions in the work. Through metaphor, vocabulary, and neologism, the mosquito is portrayed as one link in a potentially infinite chain of supplementation. But the term "mosquito" also serves to create a play between links in the chain, which is dissolved altogether as the wine is ingested. This consumption, by both mosquito and persona, reveals the wine as a pharmakon. Related works are also explored.

Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire
in Nella Larsen's Passing

H. Jordan Landry
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

This essay explores Nella Larsen's revision of images of mulatto women in Harlem Renaissance novels. Larsen reveals her female characters' imprisonment by a false belief that whites and men are innocent and women of mixed ethnicity always culpable. Larsen traces this blame of women back to Harlem Renaissance novels. In response, she revises the traditional erotic triangle. For Larsen, women of mixed ethnicity see each other outside of a culture of blame only when men play a diminished role within the triangle. Then, they recognize their own worth through fetishization of each other's body, particularly its blackness, within the triangle.

The Comedy of Language in Borges' "La busca de Averroes"

E. Joseph Sharkey
University of Washington

It is true that Jorge Luis Borges liked to scorn the medium of his own form of art for its limitations. But the critical consensus about the failures of language in Borges' stories takes him too much at his word; it is too negative and too simplistic, even with regard to those cases in which Borges himself affirms or seems to affirm it. "La busca de Averroes" ("Averroes' Search"), for example, he describes as "a story of failure." And yet the single failure portrayed sits atop a heap of successes that reveal language as conqueror of history, culture, and subjectivity.

The Reclaiming of Saxony and its Dialect
in Post-Wall East German Literature

Gabriele Eckart
Southeast Missouri State University

The dispersion of identity in East Germany as a result of German reunification and globalization has brought about the need to find one's regional identity. While this is true for people of all East German regions, it is articulated most conspicuously in texts of writers from Saxony. This study will show that two generations of writers from the former GDR reclaim their Saxon identity by exploring local life in its entirety, which includes the Saxon dialect, and by attempting to acquire a specific Saxon perspective in looking at the world.

"What happens to country" in Blood Meridian

Jay Ellis
University of Colorado

Open spaces shift into constraints of place in Cormac McCarthy's novels. Between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, horrific violence across an antinomian range shifts into easier disturbances. What happens to country that narrows possibilities, even as it proscribes violence? Previous scholarship answers in mythic or political terms. But close reading Blood Meridian's Epilogue toward historical references suggests the advent of barbed-wire fencing, the coterminous near extinction of the American Bison and near eradication of American Indians, and a belated Western realization of the Land Act of 1865, deepen such answers.

Reviews

Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany, by Chris Wickham
Reviewer: Ameer Sohrawardy

The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page, by Colin Butler
Reviewer: Michael Pringle

Shakespeare's Sonnets, by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
Reviewer: Elizabeth Holtze

Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale, by María Antonia Garcés
Reviewer: Kevin S. Larsen

Milton Studies 45 (2005), ed. Albert C. Labriola
Reviewer: Joanne Craig

Picking Wedlock: Women and the Courtship Novel in Spain, by Shifra Armon
Reviewer: Kelly J. Cockburn

Approaches to Teaching Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher
Reviewer: Nina Chordas

Hound, Bay Horse, and Turtle-Dove: Obscurity and Authority in Thoreau's Walden, by Henrik Otterberg
Reviewer: Jeanne I. Lakatos

In Mortal Combat: The Conflict of Life and Death in Zola's Rougon-Macquart, by Kristof H. Haavik
Reviewer: Kathryn Eberle Wildgen

Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women, ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi
Reviewer: Bernadette H. Hyner

Approaches to Teaching Henry James's Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, ed. Kimberly C. Reed and Peter G. Beidler
Reviewer: Robert M. Hogge