College English - Volume 66, Issue 4, 2004

This essay explores how photographic images of atrocity work to undo some of our assumptions about how historical narratives work, and disturb the cultural memory that allows us to write ourselves into history. It suggests a way of reading these photographic images that yields something that might be called “forgetful memory,” aspects of the event at the center of the photo that cannot be integrated into the narrative we build to contain it.

This essay suggests that Harrison’s representation of father–daughter incest in The Kiss draws on literary elements of two seemingly distinct genres, memoir and fairy tale, to tell a story of violence and violation in the white middle–class family. Through memoir, it argues, Harrison revises the moral and behavioral edicts that cultural narratives, especially traditional fairy tales dealing with father–daughter incest, seek to impose.

The authors argue for a structural revolution in English studies that builds on the epistemological ground shared by those in composition and literature. Their confederative “English studies” model integrates work in literature, discourse, language studies, and the larger culture with rhetoric and writing instruction horizontally, not hierarchically.

Reviewed are: Teaching Literature. Elaine Showalter; Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, by Gerald Graff; and Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century, by Kurt Spellmeyer.