Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged literary criticism

Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction

When the term “anarchy” is heard, most people think of the “circle-A” graffiti on crumbling buildings and the T-shirts of punk rock kids, or else imagine a state of complete lawlessness and the breakdown of society. Popular culture does nothing to dispel these collective thoughts. In theory and philosophy, anarchy refers to the absence of a state or rulers and a society in which there is no vertical hierarchy of class, but instead a horizontal equality of societal participants.

Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

In Activist Sentiments, P. Gabrielle Foreman examines reading practices and literacies—formal and social/vernacular—among African American women from 1859 to the 1890s.

Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature

Anna Marie Sandoval has written a very personal book: Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature. Can a book about such a scholarly topic be personal? In the preface and afterword (eighteen pages), Sandoval explains how. To summarize would be to remove the reader’s pleasure for those who will venture into her story.

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

Feeling Backward is a brilliant book that attempts the “impossible” and succeeds. Using Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick as theoretical touchstones, and incorporating Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” Heather Love “feels backward” to reimagine and connect with aspects of a queer past that had been rendered invisible.

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history.

The Non-Believer’s Bible

The Non-Believers Bible was passed along to me for review by a colleague who found the writing style to be painful, thereby foreclosing the possibility of her writing a deliberate review. Rather than headache-inducing, I found the text to be perplexing. Both while in the midst of reading it and after finishing it, one question continuously echoed in my mind: How to read this text?

Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels

Romance is a huge market, the most popular kind of fiction—and one of the most maligned.

Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation

In the introduction to Ultra-Talk, David Kirby writes, “What I offer in these pages is a way to read, see, and savor, a post-theoretical world view that everybody can share.” That is a strong assertion, and though this collection of essays covers diverse and interesting ground, Kirby doesn’t quite live up to his goal. Elsewhere in the introduction, the author defines a set of criteria for what is “good”: that which “must not only appeal to both the elite an

Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka

This novel re-imagines The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning as a bug. Samsa’s point of view is crucial to The Metamorphosis, but Lance Olsen focuses on those who witness the inexplicable, unsettling transformation: his sister, his parents, the chief clerk, the servant girl, the cook, the charwoman, and three lodgers. Anxious Pleasures expands the story to these peripheral characters and ones who never even met the new Samsa: a cashier who he casually dated, his sister’s suitor, and the neighbor downstairs.