Rocky Mountain Review 
of Language and Literature

Volume 64, Number 1
Spring 2010


Articles

Reflections on holocaust and Holocaust

David Caldwell 
University of Northern Colorado

Guest Editor for this issue of the Rocky Mountain Review, David Caldwell introduces the following four articles and offers an overview of works emerging from and related to the Holocaust.


"Life Is Beautiful, Or Is It?" Asked Jakob the Liar

Ilona Klein 
Brigham Young University

This article compares and analyzes two films, Life Is Beautiful (1998) and Jakob the Liar (1999), both of which treat the topic of anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution during World War II. The study seeks to identify some of the reasons why the first film turned into an international cinematographic commercial success while the latter flopped at US box offices. The discourse is framed by a discussion on the definition of humor used within the context of artistic reinterpretations of the Shoah [Holocaust].


Audacious Rhetorical Devices in Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" 
and Nelly Sachs' "O die Schornsteine"

Sandra I. Dillon 
Idaho State University

This article shows how Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge" ["Deathfugue"] and Nelly Sachs' poem "O die Schornsteine" ["O the chimneys"] present the paradoxical nature of the Holocaust through the use of the "audacious metaphors" as defined by Harald Weinrich in his article "Semantik der kühnen Metapher." The discussion extends Weinrich's theory to include rhetorical devices such as ellipsis, apostrophes, and synecdoches. Through these rhetorical devices Celan and Sachs redefine terms such as "milk," "habitations," "chimneys," "grave," and "body," emphasizing the difficulties of using a language that has been corrupted to represent an unrepresentable event.


Poetry from the Theresienstadt Transit Camp, 1941-1945

Sandra Alfers 

Western Washington University

Peter Kien (1919-1944) represents one of over 60 prisoners in the Theresienstadt transit camp, who wrote poetry in German during their imprisonment between 1941 and 1945. This essay analyses Kien's poem "Ein Psalm, aus Babylon zu klagen" and places it within the broader discourse of German language Holocaust poetry. Exploring the function and uses of poetry for prisoners as well as its particular status in Theresienstadt, this essay illustrates the importance of including poetry written in the camps in German discussions of Holocaust poetry.


Memory and Identity in Autobiographical Texts 
by Günter Grass and Dieter Wellershoff

Katja Fullard 
Goethe-Institut Chicago

This study addresses the question of memory culture as a social framework of remembering and how this memory culture affects the reconstruction of identity. A comparison of two autobiographical texts reveals how similar memories are interpreted differently to offer an acceptable German identity. A combination of renegotiating German identity after reunification and the willingness of the generation of the children to re-engage in dialogue with the generation of the perpetrators was necessary to lead to the confessions presented in these texts.


Reviews

Approaches to Teaching Teresa of Ávila and the Spanish Mystics, ed. Alison Weber 
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainebleau, by Virginia Scott and Sara Sturm-Maddox 
Reviewer: Catherine Marachi

Literary and Cultural Intersections During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Marianna D'Ezio 
Reviewer: Teresa Coronado

Writing the Past, Writing the Future: Time and Narrative in Gothic and Sensation Fiction, by Richard S. Albright 
Reviewer: Marilyn Antenucci

Approaches to Teaching Duras's Ourika, ed. Mary Ellen Birkett and Christopher Rivers 
Reviewer: Véronique Machelidon

Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House, ed. John O. Jordan and Gordon Bigelow 
Reviewer: M. Adam Carroll

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Philip E. Smith II 
Reviewer: Colin Carman

Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale 
Reviewer: Ann Ciasullo

Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction From Japan, 1913-1938, ed. William J. Tyler 
Reviewer: Nikki Floyd

The Ogre's Progress: Images of The Ogre in Modern and Contemporary French Fiction, by Jonathan F. Krell 
Reviewer: Helga Lénárt-Cheng

Dreaming Across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands, ed. Louise Marlow 
Reviewer: Christa Jones

Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler, by Abigail Gillman 
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva

Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature, by James Currey 
Reviewer: Monty Vierra

How What You Eat Defines Who You Are: The Food Theme in Four American Women Writers, by Irenna Ya-Hui Chang 
Reviewer: Meredith E. Abarca

A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, ed. Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Malay 
Reviewer: Julie Steward

Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope, by Karen Marguerite Moloney Chang 
Reviewer: Ingo R. Stoehr

Teaching North American Environmental Literature, ed. Laird Christensen, Mark C. Long, and Fred Waage 
Reviewer: Sandra Hill

An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 4th ed. by William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott 
Reviewer: Melissa Sue Whitney

A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, by Christopher Douglas 
Reviewer: Joy Landeira

The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang, by Tom Dalzell 
Reviewer: Michael Pringle

Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom, ed. Robert E. Cummings and Matt Barton 
Reviewer: Jacob Hughes

Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative, by Paul John Eakin 
Reviewer: Janis Breckenridge

Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice, by Laura Alba-Juez 
Reviewer: Louise E. Stoehr