For literature criticism it is often best to start with our literature databases instead of the Palomino Search. This page is just a starting point.
When accessing a database (article, e-book, film) off campus, you will get a screen where you will have to fill in your ACES ID and your BANNER NUMBER to show you are a PAC student, staff or faculty member.
If you have any issues contact the Ozuna Library Reference Desk via Chat or send an email to pac-ref@alamo.edu.
All our resource links are safe. In most cases you can resolve this issue by either using another browser or clearing your current browser's cache. Below are instructions on clearing the cache.
Problem: When clicking on the green button that is supposed to take you to the ebook, video, or article, you get to a page with an error message.
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Possible solution: Click on the title of ebook, video, article (in Palomino Search) scroll to Access Online (see image on left). In many cases the same item is available from another source/vendor. Try and see if any of the other "View full text" links work. If that doesn't work: Click on "Report a broken link" (yellow highlight) and fill in the form. The E-resource librarian will respond to the email generated. She can almost always find you a copy of the article. And we can work on getting the broken link fixed.
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Streaming video can be helpful to understand a work, author, or literary period better. Most of our videos come with a transcript and citation aid and can be used in papers. These are just a few examples.
Turn the World Upside Down by
In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday "folk." Turn the World Upside Down explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly--that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive--from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince--Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter.
Incremental Realism by
In Incremental Realism, Mary Esteve offers a bold, revisionist literary and cultural history of efforts undertaken by literary realists, public intellectuals, and policy activists to advance the value of public institutions and the claims of socioeconomic justice. Esteve specifically focuses on era-defining authors of realist fiction, including Philip Roth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Patricia Highsmith, Paula Fox, Peter Taylor, and Mary McCarthy, who mobilized the trope of happiness to reinforce the crucial value of public institutions, such as the public library, and the importance of pursuing socioeconomic justice, as envisioned by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and welfare-state liberals.
Hidden in Plain Sight by
Hidden in Plain Sight examines signal nineteenth-century works by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Joel Chandler Harris to show how writers portrayed a nation founded on the unseen seen of slavery's capitalism.
The Origin of Others by
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines.
The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948 by
In The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948, José F. Aranda Jr. describes the first one hundred years of Mexican American literature. Letters, folklore, print culture, and literary production demonstrate how a new Anglo-American political imaginary revised and realigned centuries-old discourses on race, gender, class, religion, citizenship, power, and sovereignty. For Mexican Americans, modernity is less about any particular angst over global imperial designs or cultures of capitalism and more about becoming the subordinates of a nation-building project that ushers the United States into the twentieth century.
Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing by
In the decades after U.S. independence, American novelists carried on an argument that pitted direct democracy against the representative liberalism they attributed to their British counterparts. The result was an American novel distinguished by its use of narrative tropes that generated a social system resembling today's distributed network.