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Isabella Baranyk’s essay, “Femininity, Ghosts, and Feminine Ghosts in The Woman Warrior” was written for her Perspectives on the Humanities class, “Embodied Language,” in the spring of 2016. The assignment called for a close examination of select passages from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Students were asked to formulate argument-driven narratives that move beyond simple observation and achieve deep critical analysis.

Isabella presents a strong example of this kind of analysis. Her paper reveals how ghosts and women in the novel are both diminished by unequal relations of power, in overt and understated ways. Living people can be disregarded as “ghosts” and women are cast off, challenged, and policed, particularly for the ways in which they express their femininity. Over the course of the paper, Isabella calls attention to the strange and specific ways in which characterizations of ghosts and women intersect in Kingston’s work, alternately, to both unfortunate and empowering ends.

—Eun Joo Kim, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Faculty Introduction for “Cardboard Cutouts: The Paradox of Female Power”

Read “Cardboard Cutouts: The Paradox of Female Power”.

A significant hurdle students face in writing courses is, simply, the essay prompt. Writing faculty lace them with important writing objectives. Unfortunately, students don’t always realize they’re not fully engaging the prompt—what it’s asking, why it’s asking what it does, and what it hopes to accomplish. In “Cardboard Cutouts: The Paradox of Female Power,” Josie Gidman zeroes in unerringly on her essay prompt, which, intending to cultivate students’ interpretive skills through close analysis, asked her to pinpoint a key quotation that she considered fit uniquely, like a puzzle piece, into her text’s whole in such a way as to illuminate its complex, rich meaning. Firmly rooted in the specifics of her astutely chosen quotation (two other key prompt intents), Josie’s essay delivers a striking, nuanced interpretation of the “love arts” of the sacred harlot-priestess Shamhat—initiator of Enkidu into manhood and the world of humans—adroitly constituting and navigating between dissonant poles of real and artificial female power that she exposes in the nearly 3500-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh.

—Amy Goldman, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Letter from the Editors | Vol. 1

Letter from the Editors, Vol. 1 No.1

We are thrilled to present to you the inaugural issue of The Hundred River Review! The essays in this journal were all submitted for core courses taught in the Writing Program during the 2015-2016 academic year and were selected for showcase because they are notable examples of the kind of work undertaken by students in their first and second years at NYU Shanghai.

Here on the ninth floor, we are busy with celebration: As NYU Shanghai’s first graduating class prepares for commencement, this journal makes its way to print. We drew its name from the Chinese idiom 海纳百川 (Hǎi nà bǎi chuān) or “the sea accepts one hundred rivers.” This phrase is sometimes paired with 有容乃大 (Yǒu róng nǎi dà), which can be translated into English as “a great person should be inclusive.” Taken together the two idioms suggest that inclusivity is a mark of excellence, that institutions who strive towards excellence are not only vast like the sea but also take in inspiration from multiple sources. With this title, we want to acknowledge Shanghai’s historically eclectic and receptive culture and the ways in which it has informed the many-cultured spirit we have built here at NYU Shanghai.

From an analysis of the presence of ghosts in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior to an application of Luce Irigaray’s concept of philotes to The Epic of Gilgamesh, the topics explored in this first issue are varied and thought-provoking. You will find essays about the politics of cross-cultural exchange, about procrastination in Hamlet, and about the function of formal apologies after a genocide. At times our authors pour over the meaning and significance of a single sentence; other times they elegantly orchestrate a sustained mode of questioning across multiple texts.

While there are clear differences in strategy, style, and shape, each essay successfully implements the writing skills and techniques taught by faculty in the Writing Program. In all of the essays, the authors have carefully worked to navigate between their sources efficiently and effectively, to evidence all claims adequately and eloquently, and to develop a sound and arguable claim.

In order to create these coherent arguments, students must be willing to work at the difficult practice of shaping their ideas into words. The Hundred River Review is a celebration of our writers’ hard work, both the efforts they put into their initial submission and efforts they put into revising their papers with writing fellows and faculty after acceptance.

We believe there is value in reading the writing of those with whom we share our classrooms and our halls. We hope that you’ll enjoy reading these essays as much as we did.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Tomscha and Emma Lumeij

The Hundred River Review Editorial Board

Acknowledgements | Vol. 1

Acknowledgement, Vol. 1 No.1

The Editors would like to thank the faculty and staff who contributed to the making of this journal. Thank you also to Amy Becker for your direction and support, Richard Larson for your guidance, and Chang Zhao for your translations. Without your collective efforts, this journal would not have been possible.