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
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