The Sentimental Politics of Language: Ralph Waldo Emerson's and José María Sánchez's Texan Stories
In 1828, Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria assigned General Manuel de Mier y Terán to survey the Texan boundary between Mexico and the United States and to assess the situation of Anglo-American settlers in the territory. Traveling with Terán was Lieutenant José María Sánchez, whose diary of the expedition has long been recognized as an important source document for histories of the period and region. This article asserts the literary value of Sánchez’s diary for a hemispheric study of American Romanticism. In his description of landscape as spiritual experience and his emphasis on language as creative political force, Sánchez enacts the core tenets of an Emersonian Transcendental subject, an artistic sensibility at variance with the Byronic Romantic hero of Mexican and Latin American literature of the period. This article investigates the Mexican political tensions such a Romantic position evokes while exploring the inter-American potential of a hemispheric Romanticism.
the cambridge companion
Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare’s works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare’s multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences continue to matter now and in the future.
The Dumb Waiter: Pinter's Play with the Audience
Published commentary on The Dumb Waiter is for the most part rather unsatisfactory. Instead of analyzing the playas Pinter wrote it, most commentators rely on distortions and fabrications -or, at best, conclusions based on guesswork -to concoct a new play of their own making. The discrepancy is most apparent in the commentators' accounts of how the play ends. In the playas Pinter wrote it, after Gus has gone out the door on the left to get a glass of water, he says -Ben hears through the speaking tube that the victim they have been waiting for “has arrived and will be coming in straight way. The normal method to be employed. ” Ben calls Gus, gets ready while the toilet flushes off left, calls Gus again, and then the play closes with the following stage direction: