Copyright (c) 2009 Texas State University All rights reserved. http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp Recent documents in Faculty Publications-English en-us Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:25:42 PST 3600 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/22 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/22 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:14:14 PST Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its persistent belief in an American exceptionalism that prevents it from recognizing the postnational force of Melville's novels. Robert T. Tally http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/21 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/21 Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:26:18 PST Literature abounds with the description and exploration of spaces. The writer maps the world, combining a representation of real places with the imaginary space of fiction. In some cases, what I have elsewhere called literary cartography serves to map a well known space (e.g., Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg or Twain's Mississippi River); in others, the places mapped may be wholly imaginary (More's Utopia or Tolkien's Middle Earth). Most often, the two combine, as the literary representation of a seemingly real place is never the purely mimetic image of that space. In a sense, all writing partakes in a form of cartography, since even the most realistic map does not truly depict the space, but, like literature, figures it forth in a complex skein of imaginary relations. In "La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace," Bertrand Westphal provides a theory and a method for analyzing this interplay of spatial practices in literary texts. Robert T. Tally http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/20 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/20 Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:49:42 PDT The moral of Vonnegut's third novel, stated in its opening pages, is "We are what we pretend to be." Vonnegut's most directly existentialist novel, _Mother Night_ introduces the related themes of alienation, identity, and authenticity in order to carefully analyze the delusions and self-delusions of a man who believes himself to be good while involved in the most hideous of crimes. Vonnegut's critique of identity thus undergirds his exploration of morality. In this essay, Tally reads Vonnegut's novel in relation to its dramatization of existential angst and the crisis of authenticity. Robert T. Tally http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/19 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/19 Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:29:13 PST Leonard N. Wright http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/18 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/18 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:28:12 PST Commencement Speeches 1978-1979 Southwest Texas State University Ralph H. Houston http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/17 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/17 Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:43:47 PST Ralph H. Houston http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/16 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/16 Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:20:39 PST A tentative endeavor to assist first-semester students in Freshman Composition to attain more easily there putative proficiency-level in the subject, by supplying them with such supplemental materials as they need at this stage--material the average composition text does not supply. Gates Thomas http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/15 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/15 Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:05:55 PST Robert T. Tally http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/14 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/14 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:52:00 PST "I take SPACE to be the central fact to man in America." At the beginning of Call me Ishmael, Charles Olson categorically established space as a key concept for American Studies. Yet, for the most part, this concept has not been central to studies of nineteenth-century American literature. Space has made a timely reemergence in literary and cultural studies in recent years, as the discourse of postmodernism has especially emphasized its importance, and excellent work on cartography and literature is being done in early modern studies, especially in the history of colonization and conquest of the Americas. Right in the center of these two moments of modernity, the early and the post, the mid-nineteenth-century United States faced critical changes to its imaginary and real social spaces, typified by industrialization and urbanization, the emergence of a world market, the breakdown of traditional communities, westward expansion, and a looming national catastrophe. As in the baroque and postmodern eras, these crises called for new ways of seeing the world and of representing oneself in it: new narratives, new maps. The texts of so-called "classic" American literature are such literary maps. I argue that geocriticism - a critical framework that focuses on the spatial representations within the texts, specifically looking at the overlapping territories of actual, physical geography and an author's or character's mental mapping in the literary text - makes possible a productive reading of classic American literature in light of the spatial peculiarities of the age. Robert T. Tally http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/13 http://ecommons.txstate.edu/englfacp/13 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:48:36 PDT Robert T. Tally