Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 8, 2002

Volume 30, Number 21

In her book "Sex Drives," Laura Frost uses examples from modern literature to explore how politics enters into sexual fantasy.

Yale Books in Brief

The following is a list of books published recently by members of the Yale community. Descriptions are based on material provided by the publishers.

To submit information about books for this column, send e-mail to opa@yale.edu.

Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism
Laura Frost, Assistant Professor of English
(Cornell University Press, 2002)

How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature and for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics? Laura Frost advances a reading of works by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms and domination. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy.

Calling from Diffusion: Hermeneutics of the Promenade
Thomas M. Greene, the Frederick Clifford Ford Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2002)

Based on four Nielson Lectures delivered at Smith College, the volume examines a series of "promenade poems," lyrics that follow a poetic speaker moving through a landscape and responding to it. Greene invites the reader to consider a wide range of poets, beginning with Amy Clampitt and A.R. Ammons, and continuing with Petrarch, Ronsard, Saint-Amant, Milton, Vaughan, Marvell and Whitman.

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Alumna is new director of Yale Center for British Art

Writer Salman Rushdie ponders the effect of fear . . .

Former U.N. official calls for international effort . . .

Professor Kazdin will head Yale Child Study Center

Funding renewed for program to attract students to sciences

In Focus: Project Assert

Psychologist examines the making of 'memories'

D.C. mayor heralds dawning of the 'century of the city'

International meeting will assess status of women in physics

Women's Health Research wins grant for community outreach

Commemorating the Birth of a Nation

Benjamin Clark Jr., former manager in Yale's Dining Halls, dies in Texas

Yale Books in Brief

Campus Notes