Category Archives: Article

Readings no longer active

Readings is no longer active. You can still access the archive of published articles.

Readings has been a peer-reviewed literary studies journal intended to be read by both scholars and the general public founded by Alexandra Berlina. Like other journals, it looked for academic quality and originality. Unlike most, it also cared for high readability and the potential interest of literature-loving non-scholars. The journal is open-access.

It had been edited by Alexandra Berlina and later Sam Wiseman. The editorial board included Robert Alter, Angelika Bammer, Hans Bertens, Brian Boyd, Theo Hermans, Andrew Kahn, Susan S. Lanser and Ansgar Nünning. We thank our editors, reviewers, authors and readers for the time together!

The Hybrid Turn: What the Figure of the Vampire Hunter Tells Us about the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

by Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore, Savannah State University and Appalachian State University

Our essay grounds the epistemological task of the vampire hunter in Stoker’s Dracula and then explores the changing representations of these figures and their task in later media including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, Blade, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Breaking Dawn. Traversing the realms of logic as well as representation and faith, we trace components of the epistemological task of the vampire hunter that demand a challenge to deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality and the horizon of what is possible and impossible. We close with the exciting provocation such a critique offers a (post) humanities.

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‘my little Aussie snob’: The Role of Class in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask

by Emma Woodward

The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter interweaves poetry in the form of a detective novel that further explores the themes of gender, class, and the myths of Australian society in its structure, characters, plot, and storyline. This article discusses the theme of class that while not directly evident is reoccurring throughout the book. The author begins the article by posing the question of whether or not Porter is bringing to light deeper ideas of the Australian community. Further determining, “Australia is a land for the working class hero, yet if terms gain meaning through opposition in a binary, then Australia cannot be imagined as a classless society when the working class needs a foil in order to gain meaning.”

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Ordinary Paranoia: The Frightening Similarity of John Cheever’s Wapshot Novels

by Steven Wandler, University of Minnesota

In this essay, I argue that traditional readings of John Cheever’s two Wapshot novels as radically different misses their underlying similarity. Seeing underlying similarity between the two novels provides new ways of thinking not only about Cheever’s novels but also about the paranoia that suffused the early postmodernist period of the 1960s and Cheever’s moral resistance to its attractions.

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Puzo’s Spy and Compensatory Justice

by Nancy Ciccone, University of Colorado Denver

Mario Puzo’s little known spy thriller, Six Graves to Munich, wrestles with themes he later develops in his best seller, The Godfather.  Among them is the exploration of commensurate and compensatory justice. Set in post-WWII, the novel dramatizes a spy’s revenge against former enemies, whom the US Government now considers friendly. Focusing on issues of identity, the genre furthermore provides subtle pathways for Puzo to incorporate his Italian American heritage. Whatever its literary merits, Six Graves provides an apt framework for Puzo to interrogate justice in relation to criminality.

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Bee Line: How the Honey Bee Defined the American Frontier

by Rob Hardy, Carleton College

Before the 1630s, the domestic honey bee was unknown on the North American continent. The honey bee was one of the many invasive species brought to North America by the early European settlers, along with such commonplace species as dandelions and earthworms. Two hundred years later, honey bees had spread across the continent. To Native Americans, the honey bee became a harbinger of the arrival of the white man. To the settlers, bees became a marker of the frontier. Along the way, bees left their small mark on the literature of the American west—especially in the period between 1840 and 1860, when settlers were spreading across the flowering prairies of the Midwest.

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The Inwardness of James Joyce’s Story, “The Dead”

by Keith Oatley, University of Toronto; Maja Djikic, University of Toronto; Raymond Mar, York University, Toronto

James Joyce’s most famous short story, ”The Dead,” works in layers. In one of these we identify with the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, so that we ourselves become metaphorical: we remain ourselves but also become Gabriel. In another layer Joyce offers an extended metaphor in which we are prompted to wonder whether understandings of others whom we might meet at a party have a relation to being intimate with a spouse. Although our emotions are empathetically related to Gabriel’s they are our own, as we take on his concerns and plans in the circumstances he enters. Continue reading The Inwardness of James Joyce’s Story, “The Dead”

The Failed Revolts of Stephen Dedalus: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nietzschean Self-Overcoming

by James McAdams, Lehigh University

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce portrays Stephen Dedalus as an ambitious, rebellious, and cultural critic hostile to his native Ireland’s naïve convictions in religion, language and family.  In these ways, Stephen, at least superficially, endorses and aims to follow Nietzsche’s model of der Ubermensch, or philosopher of the future, who will escape nihilism by creating his own identity and his own meaning through art.  During the time Portrait was composed, Nietzsche was incredibly popular among the youthful artists of Dublin, and Joyce, as has been demonstrated in many passages in The Dubliners, was foremost among them in his admiration of Nietzsche.  Continue reading The Failed Revolts of Stephen Dedalus: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nietzschean Self-Overcoming

Murmuring Seas, Broken Ground: the Liminal Landscape of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”

by Sam Wiseman, University of Potsdam

In the fiction of M.R. James, landscape functions as a device to represent and explore the world of the imagination. This is particularly true of his most famous story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, in which the setting—a stretch of East Anglian shingle beach, caught between land and sea—functions as a liminal realm, which does not belong fully to one world or another. The region’s elemental instability allows James to emphasize the inadvertent exploration of other thresholds by his protagonist, Parkins: between fiction/imagination and “reality”, the sublime and the comprehensible, the oceanic and the cultural, and the animistic and scientific. In the story’s most uncanny and frightening scene, Parkins finds himself trapped in a liminal psychological state—neither dreaming nor waking—in which the region’s landscape and weather both play a key metaphorical and atmospheric role in establishing a feeling of destabilization. It is this sense of suspension between realms, I argue, that creates the story’s distinctive power: it is typically Jamesian in its ultimate cautionary moral, one which warns of the dangers of investigating/eroding boundaries between categories, and which uses its haunting coastal landscape as a corresponding image to this message.

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Scripts for Life: How Plays, Novels, and Conduct Manuals Created Women in Eighteenth-Century Britain

by Tabitha Kenlon, American University in Dubai

Long before Helen Gurley Brown and Oprah, women learned how to live their lives through literature—plays, novels, and conduct manuals provided instructions on what women needed to do in order to be women. In eighteenth-century England, ideas about marriage were changing and women were writing books and appearing on stage; these (and other) shifts made female behavior a popular topic. This essay examines sample works by playwright Hannah Cowley, Jane Austen, and conduct manual writers to reveal the ways authors conveyed mixed messages about acceptable activities for women as they explored subtle new roles while respecting the rules.

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