scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question

Showing papers in "College Literature in 2016"


Journal Article
TL;DR: Achebe as discussed by the authors argued that the failure of the protagonist in Things Fall Apart is not due to weaknesses in character or departed African glories but rather a function of heroism in the cultural belief systems of the Igbos.
Abstract: Although Things Fall Apart remains the most widely read African novel, the failure of its hero continues to generate haunting questions in the minds of some of its readers, especially among those who seem to identify with the hero's tragedy Central to this discomfort is the question: why did Achebe choose as his hero an aspiring but brutal young man who ultimately took his own life? The author himself acknowledges that he has "been asked this question in one form or another by a certain kind of reader for thirty years" (Lindfors 1991, 22).2 According to Achebe, these readers wanted to know why he allowed a just cause to stumble and fall? Why did he let Okonkwo (the hero of the novel) fail? Several commentators have argued that Okonkwo's failure is due to his individual character weaknesses. Many blame it on the fragmentation of the Umuofia society and the destruction of its cultural values by the colonial powers. Yet others stress both.3 There is no doubt that these things played a role in the suffering mind of the hero, but to argue that they are the reason for his failure is, in my opinion, too limited. Hence, I want to argue, contrary to popular views, that Okonkwo's downfall is not necessarily due to weaknesses in character or departed African glories but rather is a function of heroism in the cultural belief systems of the Igbos. As Okhamafe aptly noted, perhaps "things begin to fall apart in this nine-village Umuofia clan long before a European colonialist missionary culture inserts itself there" (Okhamafe 1995, 134). Things Fall Apart is not a novel without a cultural context. It is a text rooted in the social customs, traditions, and cultural milieu of a people. The characters and their actions are better understood when they are examined in that light. To do otherwise not only denies the novel a full measure of appreciation, it also renders vague and imprecise the significance of certain events, actions, and actors in the story. What we have in this novel is a vivid picture of the Igbo society at the end of the nineteenth century. Achebe described for the world the positive as well as the negative aspects of the Igbo people. He discussed the Igbos' social customs, their political structures, religions, even seasonal festivals and ceremonies. He provided the picture without any attempt to romanticize or sentimentalize it. As he said in another occasion, "the characters are normal people and their events are real human events" (Lindfors 1991, 21).4 Achebe told the story as it is. The fact of his account is that the Igbo clan (of which I am a member) is a group of African people with a complex, vigorous, and self-sufficient way of life. Prior to the invasion of their land and the eclipse of their culture by foreign powers, they were undisturbed by the present, and they had no nostalgia for the past. In the novel, Achebe portrayed a people who are now caught between two conflicting cultures. On the one hand, there is the traditional way of life pulling on the Umuofia people and one man's struggle to maintain that cultural integrity against an overwhelming force of the colonial imperialism. On the other hand, we have the European style which, as presented, seems to represent the future, a new community of the so-called "civilized world." It now appears this African man, Okonkwo, and the entire society of Umuofia must make a choice between the old and the new-if they have the power. The desire to become a member of European-style society has its attraction. For one, it is conveyed to the Umuofia people, including Okonkwo, as a means of enjoying the spoils of twentieth-century civilization. But Okonkwo refined to endorse the appeal. He recognized that accepting the invitation is done at the expense of the things that comprised his identity and defined his values. So when some members of the Umuofia community unwittingly accepted the invitation and endorsed "a strange faith," things fell apart for the Igbo people in Achebe's novel. …

19 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For the Union Dead as discussed by the authors depicts a nation ironically unified in its servility to commercial interests and its indifference toward historical sacrifice and resistance to racial equality, and thus elegiac commemoration becomes impossible.
Abstract: In Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” the banality of Civil War memory underwrites apathy toward civil rights struggle. Lowell depicts a nation ironically unified in its servility to commercial interests and its indifference toward historical sacrifice and resistance to racial equality. Under such conditions, elegiac commemoration becomes impossible, and Lowell’s poem functions as a meta-elegy: a lament for a failure of memory. These conditions persist and confront Lowell’s successors, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young, who carry forward the legacy of “For the Union Dead” as they confront contemporary versions of the banality of memory and the perpetuation of racial violence.

11 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The 2012 James Bond film Skyfall as mentioned in this paper argues that Skyfall attempts a significant cultural intervention into perceptions of the contemporary secret state, offering a staunch defense of Western intelligence services while contesting the skeptical visions that have come to dominate recent spy narratives.
Abstract: When examining the process of the banalization of warfare, the history of the modern state intelligence apparatus provides one of the most significant examples of such a transition. This article, through analysis of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, looks at how the world’s most successful spy franchise has adapted to this contemporary paradigm of intelligence and cyber-terrorism. Through examining how Skyfall engages with issues such as the threats posed by the ubiquity of the internet, the accountability of intelligence services in the wake of the War on Terror, and the continued ability of fictional works to depict conflict and the intelligence apparatus in the modern world, this essay argues that Skyfall attempts a significant cultural intervention into perceptions of the contemporary secret state, offering a staunch defense of Western intelligence services while contesting the skeptical visions that have come to dominate recent spy narratives.

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A wide-ranging survey of the uneven and plural militarization of US war culture and everyday life during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan can be found in this article, which argues that the cultural authority and representational confidence of recent war culture draws on the "consolidated vision" of empire, but paradoxically its power is based not on grand narratives but rests on much more partial, fragmented, and incoherent representations of wartime.
Abstract: This essay offers a wide-ranging survey of the uneven and plural militarization of US war culture and everyday life during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It argues that the cultural authority and representational confidence of recent war culture draws on the “consolidated vision” of empire, but that paradoxically its power is based not on grand narratives but rests on much more partial, fragmented, and incoherent representations of wartime. It explores the unstable “homeland” imaginary constituted around the militarization and racialization of urban policing and surveillance since the Cold War recently contested by Black Lives Matter; the distancing, dominant representations of wars abroad through high tech warfare and hypermasculine paramilitary special forces; the emergent normalization of torture and trauma; and the sacralization of the veteran. The essay explores work by Phil Klay, Brian Turner, Sinan Antoon, and the film, Zero Dark Thirty , and offers extended discussions of Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and the TV drama The Wire .

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI

7 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative (1984) as discussed by the authors examines the relationship between the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism and the literary genre of metafiction and argues that these psychological associations, while likely inevitable, are here, however, irrelevant in that it is the narrative text, and not the author, that is being described as narcissistic.
Abstract: Introduction At a minimal level, all psychoanalytic definitions of narcissism refer to the turning back of the self upon itself. This defining quality of narcissism clearly resonates with the self-reflexive turn of metafictional literature and has paved the way for a rather loose and often pejorative invocation of the term "narcissistic" to characterize metafiction as a genre. These "narcissistic narratives," to use Hutcheon's phrase, are denigrated by some for their excessive enchantment with the textual web of tiresome antics that comprises their solipsistic self-absorption. John Barth, probably the pre-eminent American metafictionist of the contemporary period, is clearly aware that his metafictional work will alienate some readers when he quips only half ironically "Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness" (1968, 110). In contrast, a critical study such as Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative (1984) valorizes the epistemological and ontological implications that arise from the relentless scrutiny of narrative codes and literary conventions in metafiction. While Hutcheon's groundbreaking study displays a clear awareness of both the pejorative connotations and the psychoanalytic implications of the term "narcissism," Narcissistic Narrative declines to examine with any rigor the potential relationship between the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism and the literary genre of metafiction. Instead, Hutcheon argues that "These psychological associations [of narcissism], while likely inevitable, are here, however, irrelevant in that it is the narrative text, and not the author, that is being described as narcissistic" (1984,1). Hutcheon appears unable to conceive of how narcissism can be anything other than a means of diagnosing the authorial psyche; by refusing this easy gambit, Hutcheon neatly avoids the theoretical pitfalls that accompany such authorial psycho-pathologizing. But her refusal also reveals a certain limitation in theoretical scope: an unwillingness to stretch the parameters of the possible relationship between psychoanalytic inquiry and literature. In the following discussion, I propose to take up where Hutcheon leaves off by examining how various psychoanalytic models of narcissism can productively illuminate some of the features of metafictional literature. At the basis of this discussion lies the assertion that the libidinal economies of narcissistic personalities provide models for the consideration of metafictional texts. By developing these models in conjunction with some tools of narratology, and by exploring the implications that arise when these models are placed in conjunction with a handful contemporary American metafictional works, this discussion will not only examine the textual economies of metafictional texts in the light of psychoanalytical theories, but it will also refract some of the thematic concerns of metafiction through that same psychoanalytical and narratological lens. In so doing, "narcissism" is developed from a pejorative epithet into a new tool for the examination and understanding of metafictional texts. The implications of this approach have direct bearing on how we can read and understand the implications of metafiction. The predominantly Formalist approach to metafiction tends to marginalize what Fredric Jameson would identify as "the political" dimension of metafictional novels. When these Formalist analyses approach the political dimension of metafictional textuality, they do so almost exclusively through the lens of Russian Formalism and, in particular, through the concept of defamiliarization. For example, Waugh notes how the exposure of literary codes and conventions in metafiction leads to a quasi-Marxist process of demystification. She asserts that the narrative innovations of metafiction self-consciously examine their own construction, and in so doing, "explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text" (1984, 2). Because metafiction offers "extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems" (9)- point that is echoed by others (see Hutcheon 1984, 24; Imhof 1986, 98; Boyd 1983, 26)-readers of metafiction are invited, though not compelled, to question how their own worlds are similar textually Textuality is ubiquitous because "reading and writing belong to the processes of 'life' as much as they do to those of 'art'" (Hutcheon 1984, 5). …

6 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: The authors argue that the students' implicit assumption of cultural superiority remains unchallenged, and their experience of multiculturalism becomes a confirmation of what they believe they already know because they do not see those values as truly "core" but as overlays on a substratum of essential humanity.
Abstract: 1 Although I am committed, through personal experience and conviction, to diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom, I have become increasingly concerned with how these concepts get translated into practice, particularly in the pedagogy of writing classes. I fear that postcolonial texts are frequently being used as litde more than a kind of multiculturalist mass tourism, what Stanley Fish has termed "boutique multiculturalism" (Fish 1997, 378).2 The student is taken on tours of other cultures-one class on a Chinese story, another on an Ugandan-tours which, like the network evening news, tame otherness and difference. And this taming dominates multicultural readers, where experience is interpreted in universalist terms, thus making us all, underneath, the same, except for some exotic surface differences.3 Exposed only to fragments of other cultures, the students' unconscious assumption of cultural superiority remains unchallenged, and their experience of multiculturalism becomes a confirmation of what they believe they already know. Like tourists on a twelve-day tour of ten countries, they may recognize quaint tourist sites, but they will have little sense of how life is lived in those "other" places, because we do not allow the central belief systems of these "other" cultures to confront our own. As Julie Drew has written: "Despite the good intentions of those who produce them, multicultural readers ... often promote a kind of `cultural tourism' that constructs students as free to travel, to observe, to remain removed from and unaffected" (1997, 298) by what they read of these other cultures. The stance toward other cultures encoded in multiculturalist readers, she continues, "does not compel students to negotiate or dialogue" (301) nor does it "require students to think through their own positions because theirs [is] . . 'natural' . . . [and] invisible" (301-02). These readers assume that "our" experience is the template against which all other cultures are measured, and another of the central governing assumptions of these textbooks is toleration-that all cultural differences must be tolerated because difference is merely a feature of the surface of things. These books, in Stanley Fish's terms, share the assumptions of a boutique multiculturalist who does not and cannot take seriously the core values of the cultures he tolerates. The reason that he cannot is that he does not see those values as truly "core" but as overlays on a substratum of essential humanity ... We may dress differently, speak differently, woo differently, worship or not worship differently, but underneath (so the argument goes) there is something we all share (or that shares us) and that something constitutes the core of our identities. (Fish 1997, 379) What I will try to argue for in this essay is a pedagogy that asks students to 11 take seriously the core values" of other cultures by using culturally resistant texts to make students confront their own Enlightenment assumptions about how experience can be universally construed. In critiquing this kind of boutique multiculturalism in writing courses, I am speaking in part from personal experience-from having lived for extended periods in Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Poland-and I bring that experience to our current debates over multiculturalism. My working hypothesis is that unless students are unsettled, that unless they begin to examine fundamental cultural issues, then multiculturalism, as a project, will fail, for as Thomas West has argued, we need a multicritical pedagogy, one "that realizes the transformative potential of the otherness of the other, of that which is neither always understandable or assimilable." (1998, 87). I realize that translating this agenda into pedagogy is quite challenging, especially because it relies on finding texts that are culturally resistant, ones which cannot be easily read in terms of the students' pre-existing cultural or aesthetic categories. …

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors locates the question of the banalization of war in relation to the suppression of the link between violence and civility in modernity, and identifies banality and spectacle as two axes of a shared political condition of appearance.
Abstract: This introductory essay locates the question of the banalization of war in relation to the suppression of the link between violence and civility in modernity. It thereby identifies banality and spectacle as two axes of a shared political condition of appearance. This condition of appearance is explored through Hannah Arendt’s account of action as the space of appearance and its basis in plurality in The Human Condition (1958). The essay argues that Arendt’s more historically engaged philosophical work—including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and her interviews about the Eichmann trial—rearticulates this abstract account through a historically informed conception of “social texture” which requires care for “what the world looks like,” for the Mitsein of Dasein . This care for what the world looks like is identified in the poetry of Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail, and is shown to provide a critical framework for addressing contemporary war culture through Arendt’s concepts of “banality” and “functioning.”

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the writings of Union soldiers who participated in the Civil War campaigns of Sherman's March to the Sea and his Carolinas campaigns and argues that amidst the more mundane descriptions of the daily routines of military life, some soldiers also took a keen pleasure in viewing Georgia and the Carolinas as a tourist destination.
Abstract: This article examines the writings of Union soldiers who participated in the Civil War campaigns of Sherman’s March to the Sea and his Carolinas campaigns. I argue that amidst the more mundane descriptions of the daily routines of military life—miles marched, the conditions of the food and the weather—some soldiers also took a keen pleasure in viewing Georgia and the Carolinas as a tourist destination. The soldiers’ use of touristic rhetoric reflects the significant cultural influence that nineteenth-century tourism had in the United States; more importantly, touristic rhetoric creates opportunities for praising a Southern landscape and culture from which slavery has been largely excised. These rhetorical strategies allow Sherman’s soldiers to downplay the destructiveness of their actions and pave the way toward reconciliation with the South after the war’s end.

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a speculative reading of the Blood Meridian is proposed, which moves this problem to the center of the text, and examines the text's attempts to resolve it, which is problematic because it appears to assert both the utter contingency of human existence and the absolute self-determination of human will.
Abstract: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) resists or problematizes many of the literary categories that frequently organize our reading: modern or postmodern, Western novel or Southern novel, national allegory or historical metafiction or apocalyptic thriller. I propose an alternative to such categories of genre, movement, or literary genealogy—reading the novel as a self-conscious, narrative working-through of a literary-philosophical problem. The concept that Blood Meridian continually circles without fully resolving, I suggest, is a problematic ontology of violence, problematic because it appears to assert both the utter contingency of human existence and the absolute self-determination of human will. Historicist, aesthetic, or political readings of the novel that fail to address this problem will always be unsatisfactory. I offer what I call a speculative reading which moves this problem to the center of the text, and examines the text’s attempts to resolve it.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the paratextual structure of G.V. Desani's All About Hatterr and found that it encourages the reader to ignore and belittle questions of politics and history that pervaded the primary narrative.
Abstract: While critics have begun to consider G.V. Desani’s Anglo-Indian novel All About H. Hatterr, few have considered the novel’s paratextual structure—composed of a series of fictional prefaces, a primary narrative, and an appendix—in any considerable depth. More often, critics view the novel in terms of its supposed apoliticism and ahistoricism. My essay argues that an investigation of its form can re-invigorate discussions of historical critique in Desani’s text. I read the novel’s experimental structure as a means to critique Western complicity toward colonial oppression in India, in that the paratexts repeatedly urge the reader to ignore and belittle questions of politics and history that pervade the primary narrative. As such, I reveal how the paratexts that frame the narrative engender misreading and misinterpretation. I thus link the novel’s form with questions of colonialism, and I examine how Desani’s text, in encouraging readers to misinterpret it, provides a critical investigation into questions of colonial authority.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored the Orientalist implications of the Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, an early modern text widely praised as pre-Orientalist, and pointed out the political denial of Saidian and other personally inflected forms of historicist criticism.
Abstract: Over the past couple decades, countless critics have disputed the applicability of Edward Said’s Orientalism to Western representations of the early modern East. Such representations, they argue, are characterized by non-authoritarian, cross-cultural negotiations, not the later Western colonial dominance central to Said’s analysis. The problem, however, is that this otherwise useful re-orientation depends on simplifying distortions of Said’s theoretical premise and interpretive methodology. Rather than recognize Said’s Palestinian identity position as legitimately defining his postcolonial historicism, these critics dismiss his conclusions as anachronistic: simply stated, as “bad” historicism. Characterized by what I term the gatekeeping politics of “good” historicism, such dismissals, I argue, represent the political denial of Saidian and other personally inflected forms of historicist criticism as a condition of professional entry and socio-political legitimacy. Rejecting this condition, I conclude by exploring the Orientalist implications of “The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam,” an early modern text widely praised as pre-Orientalist.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the publishing history surrounding Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) by examining two key paratextual elements: the introduction to the 1989 reprint edition, supplied by Hunter S. Thompson, and the illustrated cockroaches inserted throughout the narrative by Straight Arrow Books designer Jon Goodchild.
Abstract: This essay explores the publishing history surrounding Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) by examining two key paratextual elements: the introduction to the 1989 reprint edition, supplied by Hunter S. Thompson, and the illustrated cockroaches inserted throughout the narrative by Straight Arrow Books designer Jon Goodchild. It examines Acosta’s tandem efforts to employ and destabilize the singular identity at the heart of Chicano nationalism through the figure of the cockroach, and it suggests that such strategic essentialism is also at the heart of the publishing process. This essay argues that Acosta combatively collaborates with his friends and publishers in order to ensure literary survival.

Journal Article
TL;DR: Wickham as mentioned in this paper argues that women did not perform in the English mystery plays because their voices were not as powerful as those of men, and that they would not have been audible in the open streets which formed the performance arena for the drama.
Abstract: If women appeared rarely in the medieval theatre this was not because it was thought shameful: rather was this so because of factors that were particular to the theatre of the Middle Ages. In the first place, responsibility for the organization of the Corpus Christi drama rested with bishops, canons, and city fathers: this exclusively male hierarchy then delegated executive responsibility to guilds, religious and commercial, that were open to men. Liturgical music drama, moreover, having relied for generations on choir-boys and junior clergy to take treble roles-provided an example to be imitated in the Corpus Christi drama. The quality of these voices suggests another and more practical reason for continuing to employ them rather than to recruit women-audibility in an open-air auditorium. (Wickham 1987, 93-94) I quote at length from Glynne Wickham's The Medieval Theatre because it raises some interesting problems that are encountered when trying to formulate a feminist approach to the English mystery plays. In this article I would like to examine the challenges that are encountered when teaching feminist approaches to the mystery plays and offer some suggestions as to how classroom activities can provide a fruitful exploration of these issues. If women's activity is to be given a voice within the classroom, then it is essential that pedagogical methods take steps in order to nullify the crippling affect of Wickham's opening statement. One of the first problems that must be overcome when teaching a feminist approach to the mystery plays is the lack of appropriate resources. Wickham is, in fact, one of the few authors of a standard college textbook to include references to women. The majority of course books in print, which an undergraduate might encounter when studying medieval drama, omit anything but a cursory reference to women. Even the Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, which contains an excellent bibliography, fails to offer anything other than a passing reference to women.' Recent scholarship has produced a handful of articles that explore the role of women within the plays, although these are not necessarily easily accessible for an undergraduate.When teaching medieval drama from a feminist perspective the first hurdle that must be overcome is the lack of appropriate resources. Many of the challenges that must be faced when developing a feminist pedagogical approach are identified in Wickham's opening comments. He suggests three major reasons as to why women were excluded from the medieval stage. He first argues that the lack of female performance in the mystery plays was brought about by the production methods of the plays.The church, civic, and guild authorities responsible for bringing forth the dramas were male institutions. Wickham implies that this patriarchal control in effect excluded women from involvement with the dramas. Second, Wickham postulates that the model of performance established through the tradition of liturgical drama influenced the mystery plays. Church music drama was predominately performed by men, and it was thought that medieval theatre developed from this model of performance.2 Finally, Wickham hypothesises that women did not perform in the English mystery plays because their voices were not as powerful as those of men, and that they would not have been audible in the open streets which formed the performance arena for the dramas. Wickham's observations highlight some of the important methodological issues which shape teaching and research practices within the field of medieval drama. The majority of standard textbooks are still influenced by approaches inherited from the 1903 writings of EX Chambers. Chambers's thesis views medieval drama as part of an evolutionary development from Latinate Church drama towards Renaissance theatre (1967, 126). However, the validity of this viewpoint has been questioned; Chambers's views are based on a Darwinian notion of evolution and progression. …

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors identifies the banal temporality of endless war in both the affective disposition signaled by the POW/MIA flag and the conditions of apperception of the war planners who orchestrated the US war in Southeast Asia.
Abstract: This essay identifies the banal temporality of endless war in both the affective disposition signaled by the POW/MIA flag and the conditions of apperception of the war planners who orchestrated the US war in Southeast Asia. To explore this banal time, the essay turns to Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir Memento (), a film that explores the interplay of memory, subjectivity, and violence. Memento ’s ostensible opposition between memory as the return of origin and absolute temporal dispersal in fact gives way to a quite different conception of subjectivity’s temporal connectivity, based in routine repetition, habit, and conditioning—the “banal time” that Hannah Arendt sees as underpinning the banality of evil. In a reading of Homi Bhabha’s account of freedom as being based “in the indeterminate,” the banal time of Memento is shown to destabilize the opposition of grand narrative and temporal dispersal upon which contemporary theory has staked its political orientation. At the same time, the essay counters interpretations of Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil that reduce it to a dismissal of the perpetrator’s character or humanity. Rather, Arendt’s conception is shown to focus on the temporal conditions of possibility of responsibility, and to prioritize modes of connectivity that would overcome banal time.

Journal Article
TL;DR: Huck's reticence to speak is not simple courtesy, nor, certainly, a test of Jim, who has already proven himself a morally admirable figure as mentioned in this paper, but rather, it reveals an alternate moral code that has, in fact, driven him through the novel: a code based on the maintenance of relationships, not on an abstract hierarchy of values.
Abstract: The American literary tradition has often been defined by its moments of radical autonomy-Thoreau at his pond, Ishmael offering his apostrophe to "landlessness," Huck "light[ing] out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (Twain 1995,265). In fact, Twain's novel is often taught as the text that epitomizes this tradition, with Huck held up as its exemplar: a boy courageous enough to stand against the moral conventions of his society, to risk Hell itself rather than conform to the "sivilizing" process of communities he rejects.1 Yet such a focus belies an alternate strand in the tradition: moments of radical connection that call into question not just the value but even the possibility of autonomy. The passage from which my title is drawn illustrates this point. At the very moment Jim's freedom seems most in crisis, when Tom's injury puts the escape on hold while Huck goes for the doctor, the two characters speak as one through Jim's voice. Knowing Jim will say what they both think, Huck asks Jim to say it: "`No, sah-I doan' budge a step out'n dis place, `dout a doctor, not if it's forty year!"' (1995, 251).While the moment certainly contains troubling elements, we must acknowledge the profound, almost telepathic connection between characters in this encounter.2 That the connection involves a moral choice is particularly appropriate in this novel that hinges on such moments. This particular decision reveals the two major threads of morality examined in the novel. Emerging from a set of assumptions most readers (and teachers) of the novel probably expect, Jim's argument prevails: he claims that the risk to Tom's life trumps his own need for freedom, that the doctor must be fetched even if it means Jim stays where he is-a slave-for "forty year." This proposed timeframe brings Jim to the moment of Twain's composition, representing Jim's willingness to extend his slavery not just past an historical end Jim cannot foresee but quite possibly for the remainder of his life. In his mouth, the words become a willing sacrifice--one Huck cannot offer on his behalf. Yet Huck's reticence to speak isn't simple courtesy, nor, certainly, a test of Jim, who has already proven himself a morally admirable figure. Huck's silence reveals an alternate moral code that has, in fact, driven him through the novel: a code based on the maintenance of relationships, not on an abstract hierarchy of values. Huck never moves into the realm of "abstract" morality; he never asserts a conviction that when two moral principles come into conflict, one will have priority because of the nature of the moral principle itself. Instead, he acts strictly through his sense of commitment to his friends-and in the moment when Tom is shot, Huck finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. Both friends have powerful and immediate claims upon him.Yet Huck has no recourse to abstract assumptions to establish that preserving Tom's life is the highest moral obligation at that moment-or even the reverse, that Jim's need for freedom takes priority over the arguably small risk to Tom's life (or perhaps only to limb, as he's been shot in the leg rather than in a more vital region). My point is not that one value or another should have priority but rather that Huck's decisions are not based on abstract moral reasoning. His loyalty to both friends means that, in the face of their conflicting needs, Huck is paralyzed. Huck needs Jim to say what must be done because if Huck says it himself, the demand for a doctor betrays Jim's need for freedom-and so betrays Huck's relationship with Jim. Only after Jim insists on the doctor can Huck act: "[S]o it was all right, now, and I told Tom I was a'going for a doctor" (1995, 251).The key is "now": only after Jim has said "it," acknowledging the demand Tom's injury places on them, does the moral hierarchy become "all right," releasing Huck to respond accordingly. The hierarchy of values Jim describes-that liberty must give way when a life is at stake-doesn't free Huck to act. …

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors compare the depiction of Havanese slavery in two nineteenth-century US novels, Mary Peabody Mann's Juanita and Martin R. Delany's Blake, and conclude that the meaningful division is not that between nations but rather a transnational conflict between US and Caribbean white elites and the black slaves they exploit.
Abstract: This essay compares the depiction of Havanese slavery in two nineteenth-century US novels, Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita and Martin R. Delany’s Blake. I contextualize these depictions of Havana in terms of contemporaneous discourses regarding the incompatibility of urbanity and slavery. Juanita’s representation of a chaotic Havana, I contend, underpins Mann’s nationalist argument that the absence of problems endemic to Cuban slaveholding entails the superiority of US liberal democracy. Various moments in the text, though, compromise this nationalist logic by revealing similarities between US Southern and Cuban slaveholding. In Blake, Delany seizes on this tension, suggesting that the meaningful division is not that between nations but rather a transnational conflict between US and Caribbean white elites and the black slaves they exploit. For Delany’s protagonist Blake, Havana offers opportunity, as its large, heterogeneous black population makes possible successful slave revolt. In conclusion, this contrast in attitudes towards urban slavery focalizes meaningful differences between Mann's white paternalist and Delany's black nationalist approaches to abolition.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper used a tourist gaze to frame parts of her journey, a strategy also employed by Australians in earlier conflicts, revealing aspects of wartime leisure while providing an alternative model for reconciling traumatic experiences.
Abstract: International volunteers in the Spanish Civil War negotiated fraught aspects of modernity, including links between technology and violence, the ethics of transnational engagement, and the interconnection between national identity and changing roles for women. To understand their experiences they drew on existing knowledge of Spain and a range of interpretive frameworks available to understand their life in war. Agnes Hodgson was an Australian nurse who volunteered for the Republicans. Her experiences, recorded in her diary, reflect neither the politically committed volunteer’s disillusionment nor the romance of war as confirmation of masculinity present in other narratives. Hodgson uses a tourist gaze to frame parts of her journey, a strategy also employed by Australians in earlier conflicts. Tourism in war reveals aspects of wartime leisure while providing an alternative model for reconciling traumatic experiences. The fusion of the genre of war testimony, which fundamentally relates change, with the genre of travel narrative, which traditionally projects stasis, disrupts the prevailing tropes of both genres.

Journal Article
TL;DR: For example, the authors pointed out that Hrotsvit of Gandersheim is one of the earliest women playwrights to be included in the canon of medieval drama and pointed out the role of the first woman playwright in the history of drama.
Abstract: For most of us who teach college literature, anthologies are a fact of life; they are convenient, compact, and often less expensive for students than purchasing separate texts. As part of my participation in the 1997 NEH Summer Institute on the Literary Traditions of Medieval Women, I had the opportunity to look at a number of anthologies of works by medieval women in which the works, particularly the plays, of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim are represented. If inclusion in anthologies can be seen as an indicator of a writer's place in an accepted canon, then Hrotsvit has surely arrived, at least in terms of the study of women writers. But if one looks at other kinds of anthologies, particularly those that focus on drama, Hrotsvit is strangely absent, which, on the face of it, seems odd since she is one of the earliest medieval dramatists and one of the few from the period whose name we know. I have looked at numerous anthologies put out by major publishers for use in introduction to drama courses, and I have yet to find one that includes a play by Hrotsvit, or even one that mentions her in the critical apparatus. Hrotsvit is also absent from David Bevington's Medieval Drama (1975), the standard text in most university courses on medieval drama. If, as Glen Johnson has argued, anthologies "ratify] whatever consensus exists about the canon" and "perpetuat[e] that consensus in the act of presenting it and preserv[e] the consensus through assuring that the works are accessible" (1991, 113), then Hrotsvit's absence from drama anthologies, both medieval and general, must indicate something about her status in the drama canon as a whole. For some reason, Hrotsvit is not seen as an integral part of discussions of drama, even medieval drama. The question is, why not? One easy way of explaining Hrotsvit's absence from the drama canon is to blame it on her sex. Sue-Ellen Case, for example, argues that "the seemingly dramatic standards which select the playwrights in the canon are actually the same patriarchal biases which organize the economy and social organization of the culture at large. In the case of Hrotsvit, this patriarchal bias suppresses the importance of the role of the first woman playwright" (1983, 534). Case goes on to argue that the problem with Hrotsvit, from the point of view of patriarchal bias, is that "[h]er project was to change the roles of women on the stage from negative ones to positive ones" (535) by overturning the problematic depiction of women in the works of Terence, on whom Hrotsvit claims to draw as a dramatic source. While I believe that Case has a point in her gender-based explanation for Hrotsvit's exclusion from the canon of drama, I think there is more involved than simply the sex of the writer or the strength of her female characters. In Lost Saints, her study of the process by which Victorian women writers gained and were denied literary canonization,Tricia Lootens observes that as much as she would have liked to blame the lack of attention to women writers squarely on gender, what she actually discovered was that "the process of decanonization was much more complex and ambiguous" (1996, 1-2). Lootens links the canonization and decanonization of Victorian women writers to what she calls "the power of legend" (3). In Lootens' study, the "legends" in question are Victorian ideas about womanhood and paradigms for saintly canonization, among others. In the case of Hrotsvit, the primary "legend" which I believe excludes her from the canon of medieval drama is the largely discredited, but still powerful, notion of the evolutionary development of drama. In his landmark 1965 book Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, O.B. Hardison examines the influence of two early twentieth century scholars, E.K. Chambers and Karl Young, on the study of medieval drama. Hardison acknowledges that Chambers' The Medieval Stage, published in 1903, and Young's The Drama of the Medieval Church, published in 1933, have formed the basis of much of the critical work on medieval drama that has come since, but he also notes several serious problems with the two texts. …


Journal Article
TL;DR: The first mature poems about paintings were motivated, as so frequently was the case with Plath, by the possibility of publication and payment for publication as discussed by the authors, and they were published in the early 1960s.
Abstract: Introduction Sylvia Plath's letters and journals document her knowledge of and interest in painting - especially modernist paintings. In the letters and journals she mentions De Chirico, Gauguin, Goya, Gris, Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, van Gogh and others. Prior to 1956, Plath was already incorporating references to art works in her poetry. In "Midsummer Mobile"-a rather shallow poem of instructions to a would-be painter, she refers to "a sky of Dufy blue," to "Seurat: fleck[ed] schooner," "the mellow palette of Matisse," and "a rare Calder mobile" (Hughes 1981, 324). Furthermore, not only does the title of her "To Eva Descending the Stair" echo that of Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," but so does the poem's theme: that stasis is impossible and that "stillness is a lie," because "The wheels revolve" and "the universe keeps moving" (303). Her first mature poems about paintings were motivated, as so frequently was the case with Plath, by the possibility of publication and payment for publication.1 In January, 1958, Art News wrote her offering her "from $50 to $75 for a poem on a work of art" (Plath 1975, 336). On the day she received the letter, she immediately thought of Gauguin. On January 26, referring to "the red-caped medicine man, the naked girl lying with the strange fox, [and] Jacob wrestling with his angel" she writes, "I shall sit and stare at Gauguin in the library, limit my field and try to rest, then write it." Two weeks later she writes," I'm hoping to go to the Art Museum and meditate on Gauguin and Rousseau" (1975, 336). On March 5, she writes that she plans "to have my art poems-one to three (Gauguin, Klee and Rousseau)-completed by the end of March," and exclaims, "I feel my mind, my imagination, nudging, sprouting, prying and peering" (Hughes 1982, 202). By March 20, 1958, she has "narrowed down poem subjects to Klee (five paintings and etchings) and Rousseau (two paintings)" (208).2 Two days later, after getting "piles of wonderful books from the Art Library," she feels she is "overflowing with ideas and inspirations, as if I've been bottling up a geyser for a year" (Plath 1975, 336), and she writes to her mother, "These [`Virgin,"Perseus,"Battle-Scene,' and `Departure of the Ghost'] are easily the best poems I've written and open up new material and a new voice. I've discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art" (336). Then on March 28, she records in her journal, "I wrote eight poems in the last eight days, long poems, lyrical poems, and thunderous poems: poems breaking open my real experience of life in the last five years: life which has been shut up, untouchable ... not to be touched. I feel these are the best poems I have ever done" (Hughes 1982, 210). She says that she speaks with "a broad wide voice (that] thunders and sings of joy, sorrow and the deep visions of queer and terrible and exotic worlds" (211). Plath has utilized specific paintings as sources for over a dozen poems. In some she acknowledges the painting that inspired it. In others she provides enough details to identify the work but does not name it. She usually transforms paintings into poems in one of three ways. Sometimes she simply describes the picture, merely replicating the picture in words; sometimes she brings a merely visual, two-dimensional picture to life by giving it plot, emotional resonance, and theme; or, finally, she completely transforms the painting into a poem whose subject and theme differ considerably from the painting which inspired it. In such transformations she may utilize only a few details of the picture and, sometimes, little more its title.3 When she does this, she usually aims to emphasize the limited roles she felt existed for women of her generation, to complain about how her mother and father have ruined her life, or to express her own anxieties. Replications In "The Seafarer" and "Yadwigha," two of Plath's poems based on modernist paintings, she does little more than replicate the painting in words. …

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors analyzes Erian's fiction in relation to two entangled sets of wars: the 1980s US feminist Sex Wars, and pre-and post-9/11 US-Iraq Wars.
Abstract: This article analyzes Alicia Erian’s fiction in relation to two entangled sets of wars: the 1980s US feminist Sex Wars, and pre– and post–9/11 US-Iraq Wars. While Erian’s early fiction dramatizes the affective experience of growing

Journal Article
TL;DR: Hogan et al. as discussed by the authors proposed and developed a post-structuralist approach to post-colonial studies, which they describe as being heretofore dominated by "poststructuralism" and other "postmodern," identity-based political agendas.
Abstract: Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2000. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Albany: State University of NewYork Press. $62.50 hc. $20.95 sc. xix + 353 pp. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $57.95 hc. $19.95 sc. xiii + 294 pp. Much as other politically motivated cultural movements that have struggled to define a just relation between the inchvidual subject and society, postcolonial studies has debated and fought over the relative value of particularities (the "local") and universals (the "global") since the field opened in the late 1970s and early 80s. Frantz Fanon-- a postcolonial forerunner, psychoanalyst, and political activist-opens the second chapter of the prescient Black Skin, White Masks on this point, Man is motion toward the world and toward his like .... Every consciousness seems to have the capacity to demonstrate these two components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making superstructure on my whole vision of the world. (1968,41) The several positions that have developed to define this relationship between subject and society are indicative of two emerging factions competing to represent postcolonial studies. During the first two decades of postcolonial studies this competition appeared to pit modernists versus "postmodernists," who have argued (with some success) that modernism's veneration of "universalism" is politically conservative and predisposed to "eurocentrism."Yet both of these perspectives, despite disagreements over ideology and interpretation, have tended to focus on the role of cultural identity in the postcolonial situation. In the last five years however, economic theories of the postcolonial scene have coalesced and are earnestly competing with theories of identity for methodological and ideological dominance of the field in the twenty-first century. Like other fields dedicated to studying the politics of marginalized texts and cultures, postcolonial studies has rapidly developed its own canon that says a good deal about what it means to describe something-be it a period, a culture, a subject or text, a politics, etc.-as "postcolonial." Because this canon includes scholarship from sociologists and anthropologists, literary and cultural critics, political activists and analysts, and psychoanalysts (among others), the field has rapidly developed an interdisciplinary character. Questions about what "postcoloniality" means should be answered by an analysis of how a "postcolonial canon" has come to be formed and who belongs to this twenty-odd year old field. Put another way, who are the theorists who represent the multivalent field of"postcolonial studies" and how have these figures come to be recognized as such (and by whom)? Recent books by Patrick Colm Hogan and Neil Lazarus propose and develop Marxian approaches to postcolonial studies, which they describe as being heretofore dominated by "poststructuralism" and other "postmodern," identity-based political agendas. As Hogan and Lazarus see it postcolonial studies is vexed by political contradictions that have troubled the field from its very inception, rendering it ineffective. Their books are intended to revise and refocus postcolonial theory and praxis on nationalism rather than the transnational, on universal otherness over identity or race, and on economics instead of mimicry because of what Lazarus notes to be "the conspicuous absence, until very recently, of any credible or legitimated Marxist position within the field of postcolonial studies" (1999, 12). The opening paragraph on Lazarus's intentions for the book could also be used to describe Hogan's project: "It is intended as a self-consciously Marxist contribution to the academic field of postcolonial studies-one capable of suggesting a credible historical materialist alternative to the idealist and dehistoricizing scholarship currently predominant in that field" (1999, 1). …


Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: While several readers of Jorge Luis Borges’s aphoristic text “The Ethnographer” (1969) have attempted its interpretation, we argue that they have done so with little if any attention to its intercultural hermeneutic circularity. Using Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as the main framework, we re-examine the story-poem as an allegory of intercultural desire to understand what Spivak, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), terms the quite other . Borges’s ethnographic allegory of intercultural thinking as hermeneutic circle enacts intercultural understanding as a paradoxical, contradictory, even conflictive ethical performance. Literary (and intercultural) understanding in this view are not accomplished in complete comprehension of the very other but in respectful attention to her. In its intimation of a dialogue with a quite other to whom we must respond, Borges’s story-poem ironically cautions the reader toward the dangers of encoded knowledge and abstraction that may outplace ethical relations with persons.