Scholarly Works, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures
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- Performing culture(s): Extras and extra-texts in Sabina Berman's 'eXtras'Bixler, Jacqueline E. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004-10)For almost thirty years, Mexican dramatist Sabina Berman has been writing and producing plays that question and often ridicule notions of gender, political credibility, historical authority, and cultural identity. Her latest play, eXtras (2003), is not a Berman original, but rather a translation and adaptation of Marie Jones's highly acclaimed Stones in His Pockets. The bold, capital "X" and multiple connotations of the title are but the external wrapping of a complicated text / translation / performance that extends from Ireland to Mexico, from actor to audience, and finally from Hollywood to the rest of global culture. Theories of performance and cultural resistance shed light on the complexity and playfulness with which Berman translates, adapts, stages, and ultimately subverts Hollywood's hold on cultural representation and, by extension, the hold of US culture on those parts of the world where dire economic conditions and free-trade capitalism force local culture to sell out to global (i.e., first world) culture. In this intercultural performance of texts and extra-texts, Berman and her own hired "extras" underscore what it means to be an extra in the full sense of the word and in today's global(ized) society.
- Toutes passions mises en arriere. .. The Emotions in Legal Perspective: Montaigne and the Palace Academy at BloisFarquhar, Sue W. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005-01)Although profound distrust of the passions underpinned Montaigne's philosophy of disengagement, it was precisely his interest in the emotion of anger that engaged the Essais (1580) most provocatively in the contemporary debate on sovereignty. Similarly, a subtext on royal power informed the Palace Academy (1576-79) lectures on anger. Whereas the Academy institutionalized a discourse on kingship, Montaigne opened the way for an emergent grammar of rights defining a subject citizen.
- Rhythm in a Sinuous Stanza: The Anatomy and Acoustic Contour of the Latin AlcaicBecker, Andrew S. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)This essay explores the metrical as well as rhythmical aspects of the acoustic contour of the Latin Alcaic, focusing on patterns of natural, audible, performed word accents in coincidence and syncopation with the fixed pattern of the meter, in both the ancient and modern scansions of the stanza. The meter was measured in antiquity with a learned, latent expectation or undercurrent of regular verse beats to scan aloud, to measure for the ear, the pattern of long and short syllables. Within the fixed framework of the meter, variable patterns of accent provide a rhythm, and that rhythm is the focus of this essay. Very little attention falls on sound and sense: the coda argues that sound need not be subordinate to meaning, need not be sound effect, nor explicitly rhetorical, to be worth our attention.
- A Year in Rewind, and Five Centuries of Continuity: El ano del desierto's Dialectical ImageZimmer, Z. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
- Fiction, incarnation et singularité: entretien avec Alexander DickowJourde, Pierre (French Review, 2015-05)
- Consumption, Domesticity and the Female Body in Emile Zola’s Fiction [Book review]Johnson, Sharon P. (University of Nebraska, 2016-04-02)A book review of Hennessy, Susan S. Consumption, Domesticity and the Female Body in Emile Zola’s Fiction. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2015. Pp. 185. ISBN-13: 978-4955-0361-0
- Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France [Book review]Johnson, Sharon P. (2016-10-01)A book review of Andrea Goulet, Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. viii + 295 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-8122-4779-4.
- The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern ParisWatson, J. (2017)Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres challenge the binary logic of Western philosophy very differently, Derrida through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a philosophy of things. Serres has begun to draw more international readers thanks to a recent shift in critical emphasis from words to things. The difference between deconstruction’s word-orientated acosmism and the newer versions of thing-oriented cosmism can be fruitfully explored by comparing Derrida to Serres on the basis of their readings of Plato’s cosmogony, focused on the figure of chora in Timaeus.
- From The Marshal AbsoluteJourde, Pierre (2017)
- The Song of the Unrequited LoverGuillaume Apollinaire (2017-05-01)
- "The Screamer" and "Departure"Max Jacob (2017-06-08)
- Air of Solitude followed by RequiemGustave Roud (Seagull Books, 2017-09-03)
- DifferenceGustave Roud (2018)
- La (De)construcción De La Santidad Criolla Enaprendiendo a MorirAndrango-Walker, Catalina (2018-07)
- Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair [Book review]Johnson, Sharon P. (Oxford University Press, 2019-04-19)A book review of Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in fin-de-siècle France: The Flamidien Affair. By Timothy Verhoeven. (Palgrave Pivot.) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 122 pp.
- AfterwordJohnson, Sharon P. (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-12-18)
- From Kerry to Chiconcuac: Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets and Sabina Berman’s eXtrasBixler, Jacqueline E. (2020-05)This article focuses on the Mexican play, eXtras, Sabina Berman's translation and adaptation of the Irish hit play Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones. Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and other contributors to adaptation studies shed light on the process used by Berman to tradapt and glocalize Stones in His Pockets for the Mexican stage, where the combined forces of Hollywood and globalization have likewise ravaged the local economy and where Jones's tragicomic story of exploitation and anonymization played every bit as well as it did in Ireland.
- Le Roi fou: Gustave Kahn’s Speculative Symbolist FictionShryock, Richard L. (2021)
- Le Code en toutes lettres: Écritures et réécritures du Code Civil au XIXe siècle [Book review]Johnson, Sharon P. (American Association of Teachers of French, 2021)A book review of MAS, MARION et FRANÇOIS KERLOUÉGAN, éd. Le Code en toutes lettres: Écritures et réécritures du Code Civil au XIXe siècle. Classiques Garnier, 2020. ISBN 978-2-406-10046-1. Pp. 309.
- Countering Anthropos with Trans-Corporeal Assemblages in Rita Indiana’s TentacleSierra, Sarah (Il Sileno Edizione, 2021)Rita Indiana’s 2015 novel La Mucama de Omicunlé, translated in English as Tentacle in 2018, portrays an attempt to intercede in the events leading to an ecological disaster in the year 2024 by appealing to the agent of the Anthropocene, Anthropos, to restrain from world-destroying behaviors. Characterized by an exceedingly autonomous and individualistic nature, Anthropos is compelled by an incessant and singular focus to fulfill personal desires. Seemingly isolated from the environing world, Anthropos – as an embodiment of human exceptionalism – fails to comprehend that every subject lives entangled with diverse agents at any given moment. The character of Anthropos emerges, then, as a destructive force that interprets the powerless human and more-than-human entities as expendable objects reserved for the improvement of its privileged position in the world. In contradistinction to the self-perceived exceptionalism of Anthropos, Indiana’s novel also generates trans-corporeal assemblages. Successful aversion of the apocalyptic ecological event depends upon these assemblages created by the dispersed consciousness of a prophesied savior, Olokun. This figure’s power emerges from the ability to exist simultaneously in distinct moments of time, what Walter Mignolo characterizes as ‘pluriversal’ that counters the Western hegemonic idea of unilineal temporality and hierarchical classification of subjectivity. However, avoiding the catastrophe that decimates all oceanic life will depend upon a decisive moment when Olokun is forced to choose between his individualistic pleasures to live in the present or to sacrifice himself and his avatars by altering the timeline that would prevent his emergence. In spite of Olokun’s doomed human struggle between self-preservation and the collective good, he engenders multi-temporal and intersubjective assemblages capable of altering the disembodied perspective that guides the Anthropos. These diverse entities that he creates - or actants to use Jane Bennet’s terminology - unite and display the dynamic and productive experience of converging with the richly populated disenfranchised human and more-than-human inhabitants of the planet. The constellation of actants generates potent connections across temporal and spatial boundaries and produces an alternative ontology that resists conceiving of humanity as removed or above a vibrant and diversely inhabited world.