{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0249609984399376, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0046801872074883, 'mean_word_length': 5.413333333333333, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script by Cristina Herrera (review)

that is enabled by collage techniques. Later, she describes the “hallucinatory, multifarious, patchworked metropolis of 1960s New York City” as intensely influential in Bob Dylan’s music (187). Such a claim seems inherently tied to ecocritical understandings of urban space, a theoretical framework that is conspicuously absent in the project, but one which would allow Cran’s claim that “collage is a chiefly urban art form” to take on a more prominent role in her argument (30). Her connection between collage and the struggle of representation versus embodiment is apt, but it becomes less prominent beyond the book’s introduction, and some of the book’s close readings would benefit from the insights of the ecocritical sentiments coded in the opening discussion. Despite the potential critique of dodging its ecocritical connections, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture demonstrates compelling readings of the figures in the study. The book’s greatest strength is its nuanced discussion of Bob Dylan, a figure that connects what might be seen as the high art of the other figures in the study to American popular culture. Cran outlines Dylan’s specific collage techniques and his self-perceived roots in visual art in order to demonstrate how his music attempts to capture lived experience. In identifying how Dylan “builds his songs less from the imagination than from collated snapshots of real life,” Cran gestures back to her important recognition that collage techniques can bring on embodied experiences of material space. By following her discussion of Dylan with a conclusion that addresses John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg, Cran exposes her roots in literary studies but also identifies the prevalence of collage techniques across twentieth-century artistic, literary, and cultural expression.