Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 69
Culture of Contagion
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cannot, it might seem, easily be constructed as foreigners, yet if you conceive
them as having essential qualities at variance somehow with your notion of America,
and then express that essence as propagating like a disease, you have accomplished
the same thing. It is by such metaphors that we conceive of the point where, in poet
Louise Gluck’s phrase, self ends and “the blur of the world begins” (80). Conta
gion is the modern Trojan horse, the ultimate twentieth-century symbol of the
foreigner within our walls.
State University of West Georgia
David Raney
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