Current Issue

Subscription Information

Submission Information

Archives

Editorial Staff

Advisory Board

Back Issue Order Form

English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

David Gorman
"Second Supplement to a Checklist of English Translations of M. M. Bakhtin and His Circle"/ 551

William Nelles
"Michael Riffarterre: A Checklist of Writings through 1996"/ 554

Phillipe Carrard
"Part of the Way with Verbal Play: The Ludic MOde in Scholarly Titling" / 566

William Baker and Kenneth Womack
"Recent Work in Critical Theory" / 584

David Gorman, "Second Supplement to a Checklist of English Translations of M. M. Bakhtin and His Circle"/ 551
Updates, corrects, and completes the Russian-to-English bibliographies published in Style 27 (1993) and Style 28 (1994).
back to top

William Nelles, "Michael Riffarterre: A Checklist of Writings through 1996"/ 554
A complete listing of all Michael Riffarterre's published books and articles from 1953 through 1996, including reprintings, revised versions, and translations.
back to top

Phillipe Carrard, "Part of the Way with Verbal Play: The Ludic MOde in Scholarly Titling" / 566
Although style manuals advise scholars to use titles that are simple and descriptive, a survey of the titles now employed in literary and cultural criticism reveals a taste for verbal play. Specifically, academics today like to rely on figures of sound (Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Culture); on intertextuality (Judith A. Walkowitz, The City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London); and on puns (Alan Dinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement). As these examples demonstrate, however, scholars who play with their titles do so up to a certain degree; they usually add a subtitle, which clarifies the title by removing most of its allusiveness or ambiguity. Such a coupling points to both commercial prudence and epistemological uncertainties. On the commercial side, it possibly attracts attention to the book while still informing about its content. As for epistemology, it shows that while academics now seem to take for granted that it is impossible to achieve totalizing descriptions, to follow consistently logical lines of argument, and to make use of denotative language exclusively, they are ready neither to abandon procedures of discovery and argumentation with which they are comfortable, nor to write up their data in a language that would draw systematically on the poetics function. The texts they are producing are thus bricolages, through which they seek to resolve their conflicts by mixing heterogeneous materials. As for their titles, they already announce such a hybridity; that is, they tell not just about the topic of their studies, but also about those studies' rhetorical mode and epistemological status.
back to top

William Baker and Kenneth Womack, "Recent Work in Critical Theory" / 584
Four hundred twenty-three recently published monographs treat critical theory: specifically seiotics, narratology, rhetoric, and language systems; postmodernist criticism and deconstruction; reader-response and phenomenological criticism; feminist and gender studies; psychoanalytic criticism; and cultural and historical criticism.
back to top