Rocky Mountain Review

75-1 Spring 2021

CONTENTS

Guidelines for Submission for Articles and Book Reviews

Articles

Articles are in alphabetical order according to the name of the author.

 

Jim Coby, Indiana University, Kokomo

Diffused Feeling: Threat Environments and Affective Labor in William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]

This essay examines the tumultuous circumstances and key moments of shared affect (or emotional content) between two characters in William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]: Tall Convict and Harry Wilbourne. Ultimately, by connecting these two geographically and temporally distant characters through affect, Faulkner subversively argues against notions of regional exceptionalism.

 

Precious McKenzie, Rocky Mountain College

Picture Books That Pop: Building Emergent Literacy through Alliteration, Onomatopoeia, Rhyme, and Meter

Grounded in the germinal work in the field of emergent literacy done by Marie Clay, this article begins by contextualizing research on emergent literacy and examines how poetic picture books assist young children with developing literacy and language acquisition skills. It includes textual analysis of the poetic techniques of alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme and meter in Sandra Boynton’s Moo Baa La La La and Barnyard Dance, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham; Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault’s Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama Mad at Mama.

 

Min Yang, Bowling Green State University

The Symptoms of Perpetrator Trauma: Rethinking the Portrayal of Red Guards in Scar Literature

This article studies the psychology of the Red Guards portrayed as protagonists in Scar Literature. I argue that a psychological paradox of confrontation and denial of the committed violence experienced by some Red Guards derives from the interplay between trauma and ideology. Further mapping the representation of the Red Guards in the broader sociopolitical context in China, this interplay indicates an ongoing dynamic process in which traumatic symptoms have been consistently forming, reforming, and transforming in their vacillations between personal libido and society, between conscious and unconscious, and between compulsively revisiting traumatic memory and denying this repetition.

 Sterling Keynote 2019

The full text of Christopher Lupke’s Sterling Keynote Address given at RMMLA’s 2019 convention at the University of Texas El Paso is included in this issue.

Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta

Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Sōseki’s Excursion into the Split Subject and Translation’s Rescue of the Humanities

This essay takes the current crisis in the humanities as its starting point, shifting away from the popular view that the humanities are imperiled by hostile elements from outside academia and a general suspicion of their worth to a deeper and more lasting problem. This larger crisis is that if the humanities are allowed to continue to languish, the North American academy eventually will be left with a knowledge gap. Future generations will be unable to develop humanities-based skills. Although the author has no solution to this problem, he emphasizes one aspect of the humanities: the value of reading world literature in translation. Arguing that important insights can be gleaned from reading outside one’s own field, he draws on Natsume Sōseki’s modern classic Kokoro. Kokoro unveils for the reader many things about Japanese culture in the transition to modernity, including a tension between two subjective tendencies: individualism versus relationality based on filial obeisance. That such insights can be gained from reading in translation is a strong argument for the humanities as well as general education.

Reviews

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

Unnatural Narratology: Extension, Revisions, and Challenges, by Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, editors.

Reviewer: Nozomi Irei

 

Women Mobilizing Memory, by Ayse Gul Altinay, María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon, editors.

Reviewer: Helen Makhdoumian

 

We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction, by Natalya Bekhta.

Reviewer: Marshall Lewis Johnson

 

Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative, by Matthew Clark and James Phelan.

Reviewer: Marshall Lewis Johnson

 

Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain, by Paula Derdiger.

Reviewer: Ryan Karpovage

 

Encuentros y desencuentros con la frontera imperial: La iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús de Quito y la misión en el Amazonas (siglo XVII), by Carmen Fernández-Salvador.

Reviewer: Alexander M. Cárdenas

 

How Dead Languages Work, byCoulter H. George.

Reviewer: John M. Ryan

 

La pasión esclava: Alianzas masoquistas en La Regenta, by Nuria Godón.

Reviewer: Julia H. Chang

 

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, by Adam Grener.  

Reviewer: Krista Rascoe

 

Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, by Erin James and Eric Morel, editors.

Reviewer: Pamela J. Rader

 

Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek, editors.

Reviewer: Fredrick Douglass Dixon

 

Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women, by E. Nicole Meyer and Joyce Johnston, editors.

Reviewer: Noëlle Brown

 

The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. 

Reviewer: Pamela J. Rader

 

EthicsAfter Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader, by Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston, editors.

Reviewer: Lucien Darjeun Meadows

 

Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology, by John Pier, editor.

Reviewer: E. Nicole Meyer

 

Affaires globales: S’engager dans la vie professionnelle en français, niveau avancé, by Deborah S. Reisinger, Mary Beth Raycraft, and Nathalie Dieu-Porter.

Reviewers: Marie-Line Brunet and Bénédicte Sohier

 

Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, byJohn Savarese.

Reviewer: Sasha Tamar Strelitz

 

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, by Lewis Turco.

Reviewer: Joy Landeira

 

The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh.   

Reviewer: Helen Makhdoumian

 

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner.

Reviewer:Matthew VanWinkle

 

Run Me to Earth, by Paul Yoon.

Reviewer: Erin Roberts

 

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