Rocky Mountain Review 
of Language and Literature

Special Issue: "Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21st Century"

Introduction by Guest Editor Theda Wrede 
Dixie State University

Volume 69, Number 1 
Spring 2015


Articles

Heba M. Sharobeem 
Alexandria University, Egypt

The study discusses space as reflective of cultural conflict and the interrelation between gender, race, place, space, and power in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck. The focus is on three stories that depict women residing in different spaces: domestic, hybrid, border, and marginal. Space, and the role it plays in Adichie’s stories, is analyzed as a social product based on the theories of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space and of Michel Foucault in “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Cross reference will also be made to similar stories from Arabic literature.


C. Christina Lam 
Queensborough Community College

Trauma, by its very nature, resists articulation. While the effects of trauma silence and banish the offending experience from consciousness, bodily evidence remains. Consequently the event, never processed by the survivor because of its overwhelming magnitude and intensity, reveals itself in a bodily acting out. This article explores how Loida Maritza Pérez narrates the inherent violence of poverty and racism experienced by a dislocated Dominican family in New York City in her novel of family trauma,Geographies of Home (1999). 
Drawing upon the insights of trauma and gender studies, this article focuses on the body, to show how its representation in Pérez’s novel addresses silence, trauma’s hallmark, to give voice to previously unclaimed experiences. The bleeding, mutilated and oppressed female body becomes a figure that disrupts the silencing effects of trauma and gives witness to the political violence that is devastating the nation (the body politic) in its personal connection to the material effects experienced by the body at home. Geographies of Home, therefore, performs the dialectic of trauma and testimony by configuring the personal as inseparable from the public terrain of national traumas. The personal turns political in this text in ways that not only intersect these two categories, but also collapse them in dramatic fashion. Pérez’s work thus testifies to experienced realities—working class and immigrant experiences—that would otherwise be erased, and it shows the creativity and resilience of those women who resist silencing.

Pamela J. Rader 
Georgian Court University

The concept of Zwischenraum, or in between spaces, acts as a site for productive silences in Erdrich’s novel The Painted Drum. These productive silences can be read as intervals of transitions and as sites of potential where Erdrich’s narrating characters underscore the importance of writing, storytelling, and literary production. Drawing on Cheryl Glenn’s ideas of rhetorical silences, this essay explores the use of silence as a chosen, productive rhetorical strategy for creating, connecting, and continuing narratives; silence is not nothingness. Faye Travers, one of The Painted Drum’s central narrating characters, appropriates the importance of Zwischenraum as a world view and as an imagined site for her narrative creation. Silence as a metaphorical in between space, or as an imagined space of potential, enables the writer-character of Faye Travers to connect her story with those of her co-narrators, Bernard Shaawano and Fleur Pillager. I propose that a closer reading of Zwischenraum as a metaphor for narrative creation offers insights into Faye’s social silence and her perceived withdrawal from the world; upon finding the eponymous drum, the one-quarter Ojibwe Faye Travers redefines Zwischenraum. In redefining Zwischenraum as a site for belonging, Faye the silent listener and writer understands that the pairing of narrative and silence (and not silence alone) connects her to people.


Marie Lovrod 
University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Using Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Doris Pilkington/Nuri Garimara’s Rabbit Proof Fence, and Uwem Akpan’s Fattening for Gabon, this paper charts the resistant resilience of three young protagonists who negotiate recurring forms of neo/colonial violence in disparate contexts. Each navigates brutal conditions through intuitive, rebellious, transformative acts that disrupt dominant temporal and spatial scales to reframe subaltern histories. Distinct but related struggles for wider horizons of possibility reveal cumulative ruptures in intergenerational care across chronic, if scattered, hegemonies. All call into question assumptions informing mainstream coming-of-age novels through narrow but instructive escapes from over-determined sites of gendered, sexualized and racialized subordination.


Reviews

Reviews are published in alphabetical order according to the name of the author reviewed.

Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets, by Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch, eds.
Reviewer: Marshall Lewis Johnson

Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, by Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, eds.
Reviewer: Thomas P. Fair

Nineteenth-Century British Literature Then and Now: Reading with Hindsight, by Simon Dentith.
Reviewer: Daniel M.R. Abitz

Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, by Jennifer Doyle.
Reviewer: Sarah E. Cornish

Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature, by Jonathan Hsy.
Reviewer: Pamela Troyer

The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds.
Reviewer: Peter Fields

Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, by Wendy Lesser.
Reviewer: Michelle Villanueva

Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, by Elizabeth Losh, Jonathan Alexander, Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon. 
Reviewer: Christa Albrecht-Crane

East of Eden: New and Recent Essays, by Michael J. Meyer and Henry Veggian, eds.
Reviewer: Eric W. Riddle

Immigrant Voices: 21st Century Stories, by Achy Obejas and Megan Byles, eds.
Reviewer: Soran Kurdi

The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, by Lucy Pearson.
Reviewer: Jacqueline H. Harris

Gaining a Face: The Romanticism of C.S. Lewis, by James Prothero and Donald T. Williams.
Reviewer: Gary Lindeburg

Wordsworth and Welsh Romanticism, by James Prothero.
Reviewer: Kelly J. Hunnings

Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin, by Walter L. Reed.
Reviewer: Angie Kelson-Packer

Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature, by Robert D. Richardson.
Reviewer: John Schwiebert

Archipelago: A Novel, by Monique Roffey.
Reviewer: Christopher B. Field

Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son, by Gary Scharnhorst.
Reviewer: Joshua Leavitt

Bridges of Paris, by Michael Saint James.
Reviewer: Ricardo Landeira

Rebozos, Carmen Tafolla.
Reviewer: Dorsía Smith Silva

Mediating Culture in the Seventeenth-Century German Novel: Eberhard Werner Happel, 1647-1690, by Gerhild Scholz Williams.
Reviewer: Albrecht Classen

Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration, by Keri Yousif.
Reviewer: Mary Anne Garnett

Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners: Poems, by Gwendolyn Zepeda.
Reviewer: Joshua Leavitt and Ayendy Bonifacio