Review of Eighth Habitation: New Poems by Adam Aitken

Review of Eighth Habitation: New Poems by Adam Aitke

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Catherian Cathedral: Gothic Cathedral Iconography in Willa Cather\u27s Fiction\u3c/i\u3e by Christine E. Kephart

Christine Kephart\u27s book is published in a series dedicated to the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, one of the leading Cather scholars. It honors Skaggs\u27s memory with an original, sprightly, and captivating illumination of the motif of the cathedral throughout Cather\u27s writing. We all know about Death Comes to the Archbishop and, to a lesser extent, Shadows on the Rock with their overt engagement of New World Catholicism and the presence within them of churches, cathedrals, and bishops. But Kephart looks for the cathedral motif throughout Cather\u27s oeuvre, beginning with her failed first novel, Alexander\u27s Bridge, where Kephart sees the gothic, curvilinear aspects of the bridge (built, after all, in Quebec) as presaging the architectural aspects of the cathedral. In other words, transmuting the bridge into the cathedral is a correlate for Cather\u27s artistic maturation

Tribute to Geoff Davis

A tribute to Geoff Davis

The Inner Consistency of Reality : Intermediacy in \u3ci\u3eThe Hobbit\u3c/i\u3e

Especially concerned with Bilbo’s characterization, unusual in children’s literature, as middle-aged, but also addresses other issues of world-building and story structure that reinforce this motif of “starting in the middle”: maps, the sense of the past, racial characteristics and relations. Birns draws interesting contrasts with the Alice in Wonderland and Oz books

Eotenas and Hobbits: Finn and Hengest, and Tolkien’s Speculation About Origins

This essay examines Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest, particularly concentrating on Tolkien’s interpretation of the word eotenas as meaning Jutes rather than ‘monsters’. As opposed to “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics,” where Tolkien emphasizes supernatural elements at the expense of history, Tolkien’s lecture on the Finnsburg episode in Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment seems to present Hengest as an English national hero, despite the bloodiness and vengeance of his reprisals against Hnaef and the Frisian court. The use of the word \u27eotenas,\u27 which can be constructed as either \u27monsters\u27 or \u27Jutes,\u27 is at the nub of the conflict here, I argue that Alan Bliss, who edited and provided commentary on Tolkien’s Hengest work, actually performs a revisionary move on Tolkien by suggesting Hengest was an Anglian, not a Jute. This is significant as it creates further distance between the English and the continental Goths—often said to be connections of the Geats, who, as Michael Drout pointed out, Tolkien at times wished to identify with the Jutes. The essay concludes by looking at the origin-stories of the Hobbits and the Rohirrim in Tolkien’s legendarium and examining what light Tolkien’s work on the Hengest material sheds on the relation of these two origin stories

A Registering of Transformations: Alex Miller’s The Passage Of Love

This essay discusses Alex Miller’s most recent novel, The passage of Love, (2017) in the light of the conspectus on Miller’s work offered by Robert Dixon’s 2014 study of Miller, The Ruin of Time. Despite Miller and Dixon having relatively different intellectual stances, Dixon has brought to bear both theoretical platforms and a deep immersion in Australian literary and cultural history to analyze Miller's work. This essay tries to continue in that tradition, analyzing Miller’s practice of the originally French genre of autofiction and the way this practice is tied in with a set of ethical dilemmas related to the registering of post-Holocaust and post-Mabo trauma as well as his own experience and those of his friends and lovers. In discussing how Miller’s surrogate, Robert Crofts, tries as a migrant from Britain to make a life for himself on an Australian continent with its own tragic history, the essay analyzes how Miller's practice of autofiction speaks to the particular circumstances of Australian literature within world literary space.

“What were you wearing?”: Victimization of Sexual Assault Victims at Cal Poly

This paper will argue that Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo place greater blame and responsibility on women victims of sexual assault than their perpetrators. Sexual assault and sexual assault prevention methods in local media will be examined, as will three recent Title IX cases of Cal Poly students. Placing abundant blame and responsibility on the victims of sexual assault creates a culture of victimization, which discourages victims from reporting their sexual assaults. Although this paper does not offer up suggestions of how we can better Cal Poly’s approach to sexual assault, it hopes to spark a conversation about improving current methods and procedures for the sake of the mental and emotional well being of sexual assault victims