Units - Humanities and Letters

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The convoluted logic of creolization the New Orleans way
(University of North Carolina Press, 2000) Komins, B. J.
1. In an earlier essay ("Succulent Tomatoes"), I discuss the derisive cultural, racial, and historical definitions of New Orleans' "original" settlers, from the political contests of the late nineteenth century to the parodic sensibilities of today. Like other phenomena on this "inland island," the meanings of Creole have developed in ways that respond to conflict and isolation. 2. I would like to thank Professor Michael Picone of the University of Alabama for his valuable comments and suggestions, particularly concerning New Orleans' meandering classifications and labels. 3. Professor Roach's book elegantly describes the various products and consequences of Creole "reciprocal acculturation" from the city's burial code through the political events and fanfare of carnival. Through both conversations and his text, Roach's provocative New Orleans work informs many of my ideas in this essay. 4. "Arrival at New Orleans. Forest of ships. Mississippi three-hundred feet deep. External appearance of the city. Beautiful houses. Huts. Muddy streets without pavements. Spanish architecture: flat roofs; English: bricks, small doors; French: massive portes cocheres. Population also mixed. Faces with every nuance of color. Language French, English, Spanish, Creole. General French look, however posters and commercial announcements mostly in English" (Translation mine). 5. "The evening at the theater . . . Strange sight presented in the auditorium: first loge, white; second, gray. Women of color, very pretty . . . Third loge black" (Translation mine). 6. For examples of these "ethnic works," see Vujnovich, Shofner and Ellsworth, and Reinecke. 7. I received Mrs. Stern's unpublished account of the German experience in New Orleans from Professor Richard Beavers of the University of New Orleans. 8. 8 This report is cited in John Duffy's Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853. 9. Alan Lomax's Mister Jelly Roll consists of oral history, interviews, and second-hand reporting; the comments that I cite come from Jelly Roll's initial interview with Lomax at the Library of Congress. 10. There are several recorded versions of "Hyena Stomp" now available on compact disk, from early jazz anthologies to Jelly Roll Morton collections. My comments follow the 1992 redigitized recording referenced in the Works Cited.
Open Access
Godaffiliation: Lucy Snowe's Thwarted development in Charlotte Brontë's Villette
(Routledge, 2000) Komins, B. J.
Charlotte Brontë's character Lucy Snowe, the protagonist of Villette (1853), ostensibly belongs to the canon of Bildungsroman heroes. She narrates her own saga of apprenticeship which includes the tests of poverty, alienation and loneliness, finally finding fulfillment in marriage and professional life. But Villette does not always conform to the Bildungsroman formula; Lucy's story contains many gaps and frustrating deferrals. From beginning to end, genre “violations” occur. Brontë's novel asks its readers to consider several important questions: Where does Lucy begin? Where does she end? And, on a formal level, how does Villette ‐ Lucy Snowe's self‐narrated story ‐ violate reader's expectations of the Bildungsroman genre? In this essay I discuss Villette's genre “flaws”, especially its extraordinary use of ambiguities and cultural cliches; I contend that Brontë's novel may be read as both Lucy Snowe's saga and a Victorian guide to misreading.
Open Access
Sightseeing in Paris with Baudelaire and Breton
(Purdue University Press, 2000) Komins, B. J.
n his article "Sightseeing in Paris with Baudelaire and Breton," Benton Jay Komins discusses the tensions between Charles Baudelaire's acts of modern appropriation and André Breton's imaginative seizing of the démodé. While Breton roams the Parisian cityscape with the same aspect of creative gazing as Charles Baudelaire's nineteenth-century dandy, the objects and experiences that he privileges are different from the dandy's fashionable marvels. In texts such as Nadja passé artifacts captivate Breton. Between Baudelaire's revelling in the elegant modern possibilities of dandysme and Breton's imaginative seizing of démodé objects, something significant has occurred: Twentieth-century urbanites like Breton no longer celebrate the experience of the new; rather, they privilege the obsolete, injecting it with inspirational possibilities. Against the cultural frame of Baudelaire's dandy and the social phenomenon of the fetishized commodity, Breton's twentieth-century descriptions of ruined Parisian landmarks, decrepit neighbourhoods, and exhausted everyday objects indeed become political.
Open Access
Comparative spaces and seeing seduction and horror in bataille
(Purdue University Press, 2000) Komins, B. J.
In his article, "Comparative Spaces and Seeing Seduction and Horror in Bataille," Benton Jay Komins explores Bataille's preoccupation with "seeing": The eye holds a preeminently ambiguous position in Georges Bataille's universe of enucleated priests and scatological window scenes. Komins' comparative examination presents several aspects of Bataille's eyes: Existing between fascination and revulsion, this most Bataillean organ moves between subjective vision and objective blindness. The eye both captures and is captured in episodes of seductive horror. Through the denigration of vision, Bataille's dethroned eye exceeds the confines of visuality. Bataille develops an extraordinary notion of ocularity -- as a metaphor, action, and traumatic fixation - in his novels, autobiographical notes, and critical writing. His compelling eyes surface between written genres and lived experience, that is to say, in the comparative space between the phantasmatic and the social, inviting psychological and historical analysis.
Open Access
Eccentric New Orleans: a synergy of culture and geography
(Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association, 2000) Komins, B. J.
Open Access
Developing a humanities core curriculum program in Turkey
(Modern Language Association, 2000) Komins, B. T.; Nicholls, D. G.
Open Access
Claroscuros: el Mestizaje Cromático, Telúrico, y Racial en " Chambacú: Corral de Negros "
(Vanderbilt University, 2001) Porto, L. E.
Open Access
What Glaucon said: the significance of Apollon at republic
(Global Scholarly Publications, 2002) Bowe, Geoff S.; Uptown-Ward, J.
Open Access
Antigone in (post-modern) Palestine
(Hecate Press, 2003) Festic, F.
Open Access
Spinoza and the politics of the Matrix, on Matrix, machine philosophique
(Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2003) Chesney, D.
Open Access
Sanctifying the robe: punitive violence and the English press, 1650-1700
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Rosenberg, P.
[No abstract available]
Open Access
Sanctifying the robe: Punitive violence and the English press, 1650–1700
(Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2004) Rosenberg, Philippe; Devereaux, S.; Griffiths, P.
It has become almost commonplace to treat punishment as a self-contained sociological phenomenon to be interpreted in terms of sentences or patterns of prosecution. Unfortunately, this widespread approach tends to overlook how punitive power itself has been understood. Much like its ancient and medieval predecessors, modern punishment is supported by a set of rituals, rationales and explanations that serve to legitimize it. This symbolic apparatus not only underwrites punishment, but also marks it off as something distinct from ‘mere’ violence. Rationales are therefore every bit as crucial to the sociology of punishment as are the severity of sanctions, the frequency of punitive action, or the legal machinery that surround its application.
Open Access
Proust and cinema, or Luchino Visconti's search
(Post Script, Inc., 2004) Chesney, D.
Discusses the film adaptation of Marcel Proust's novel "Ã€ la recherche du temps perdu". Brief history and overview of the novel; Luchino Visconti's Proust project; Cast for the film; Modes of adaptation; Role of aristocracy in the novel; Visconti's treatment of the film; Misinterpretation of Proust.
Open Access
Thomas Tryon and the seventeeth-century dimensions of antislavery
(Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2004) Rosenberg, P.
Open Access
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
(University of Illinois, 2004) Komins, B. J.
Open Access
The Jester and the Sage: Twain and Nietzsche
(University of California Press, 2005) Brahm, G. N.; Robinson, F. G.
Though Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche were aware of each other, they never met and there is no evidence of influence in either direction. Yet the similarities in their thought are strikingly numerous and close. They were both penetrating psychologists who shared Sigmund Freud's interest in the unconscious and his misgiving about the future of civilization. Both regarded Christianity as a leading symptom of the world's madness, manifest in a slavish morality of good and evil and in a widespread subjection to irrational guilt. They were at one in lamenting the pervasive human surrender to varieties of evasion, disavowel, deceit, and self-deception. Other, lesser similarities abound in thought, style, and patterns of literary production. © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California.
Open Access
Aristocracy and modernism: signs of aristocracy in Marcel Proust's-À la Recherche du temps perdu
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) Chesney, D. M.
Open Access
Cameades
(Ashgate Publishing, 2005) Bowe, Geoff S.; O'Grady, P. F.
Open Access
Corinth
(Ashgate Publishing, 2005) Bowe, Geoff S.; O'Grady, P. F.
Open Access
Dissimulation and deception in Madeleine de Scudéry's promenade de versailles
(Routledge, 2006) Barry, L.