Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2017"

Sedimenting stories: Italo Calvino and the extraordinary strata of the Anthropocene

Abstract: In this essay, I suggest to read the sedimenting phases of the Anthropocene by using the oeuvre of Italo Calvino as an imaginative companion to geological processes. Exploring his early writings, I try to show how literature captured the environmental processes preparing the Anthropocene, thus providing—like a sort of “narrative stratigrapher”—a gradual disclosure of this new post-geological epoch. At the same time, I also invite one to see how Italy was the material text in which the Anthropocene was being inscribed. If apocalypse means revelation, this literature will be therefore apocalyptic in the real sense, co-emerging with the Italian as well as global landscape of the “Great Acceleration” and evolving with the ecological parable of the Anthropocene, from its “Golden Spike” to what we see in and around us today.

Associations and verbal consciousness: an analysis based on four English and one Hungarian translation of Bulgakov’s novel: The Master and Margarita

Abstract: The typical linguocultural background of Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, together with its culture-specific vocabulary (lacunas) leaning back to the Soviet times of the 1920s and 1930s, challenges both the readers and even the best translators. In this paper, we examine the verbal consciousness on both the individual and the national level, comparing the Russian original text of the First Chapter with its four English and one Hungarian translation. Leaning on the association method applied both in the Western academic discourse and by the Moscow School of Ethnopsycholinguistics, we demonstrate how the author’s (and the translators’) individual verbal consciousness presumably influenced the creation (and the translation) of the text.

GIS and telescopic reading: between spatial and digital humanities

Abstract: This paper begins with the so-called spatial turn and goes on to examine one of its most recent offshoots: the cartographic turn. After analysing the implications that this turn, particularly its digital aspect, may have on a possible mappability of literature and on the definition of an emerging field like spatial humanities, the paper will discuss the broad disciplinary spectrum of digital humanities and its possible convergences with this cartographic and spatialising trend through the changes experienced by the contemporary textual condition (from the large-scale digitation of texts to the spread of multimedia). The paper also explores the split between an eminently quantitative approach and a qualitative one, within both digital and spatial humanities, when tackling the study of texts, whether they be literary or otherwise. This duality leads to the current debate between defenders and detractors of what Franco Moretti dubbed distant reading, a critical practice that opposes the traditional method of close reading. As the paper attempts to argue, that distant perspective is closely linked to the cartographic turn and does not necessarily involve using exclusively quantitative tools and giving up close reading as a means of accessing texts. In this sense, through the underlying concept of some literary GIS and of the emerging notion of deep or thick mapping, the paper argues for the possibility of a telescopic reading which, as part of the approaches and interests of spatial and digital humanities, combines quantitative and qualitative methods and makes a distant focus (that is, cartographic) compatible with a close reading of texts.

Can the oriental know justice? Can the subaltern tell stories?

Abstract: In response to the contemporary American philosopher Michael J. Sandel’s tremendous popularity and ongoing engagements with Chinese philosophy, which are often offered as evidence of a deep resonance between his work and contemporary Chinese interests in justice, I argue that his conception of justice as a product of the storyteller’s narrative quest encounters two potential problems when considered from a Chinese perspective. The first is whether “Chinese” justice—which can be viewed substantially as a collective if not individual attempt to overcome subalternity as the Oriental subject—can be achieved through the foreign forms of moral reasoning that are perhaps guilty of consigning Chinese to their status as Orientals in the first place. The second questions whether the Western culture of storytelling, of the heroic subject who conquers the other (so often the Oriental in modern times), is not already a product and producer of injustice, and in its contemporary forms, a fantasy and fetish of capitalist society that is not only incapable of individual justice, but also complicit in injustices towards others. These points are raised in tandem with discussions of ongoing generational shifts in China largely attributable to the rapid expansion of a market economy and the growing normalization of Western-style heroic, justice seeking storyteller, which might in turn legitimize Sandel’s approach to justice. However, from a Marxist perspective, I argue that such developments might be Trojan horses for new forms of subjugation, alienation, and inauthentic being—in short, contra Western Orientalist universalism, the very injustices that China’s modernity project has aimed to overcome and with which it risks assimilation.

Radiation ecologies in Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi

Abstract: This article examines atomic explosion and radiation ecologies in the trans-Pacific, trans-Indigenous context using the Hiroshima A-bombing as an entry point. Drawing on Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s critical model of radiation ecologies, I investigate contemporary representation and reflections on the first A-bomb to re-visit the history from the present eco-scholarship on nuclear radiation. Taking renowned Native American writer Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 as an anchor text, I venture a nuclear criticism that recognizes the violent history of the radioactive Pacific, connecting Indigenous subjects in the trans-Pacific context. My study concludes with Indigenous significance and environmental justice, probing into the ways in which Indigenous peoples bear testimony to radiation ecologies in the Pacific by invoking Indigenous narratives, cultural practices, and forms of resistance against radioactive imperialisms.

Material ecocriticism, genes, and the phobia/philia spectrum

Abstract: Some materials may have more agency than we might imagine or wish. This was the radical proposal of E.O. Wilson more than three decades ago in Biophilia (1984). Evolutionary biologists have long speculated about the genetic roots of both our affinity with and our acrimony to nature, and ecocritics have been quick to fix on biophilia as a tenet of environmental salvation. The obverse side has won less favor. But the cheerful picture of a world run by biophilic impulses is as fanciful and inaccurate as utopic visions of a world without anger or evil. Irrational fears of snakes and darkness, for starters, are evolution-based ecophobia at play. I will review in this article what sorts of attempts ecocritics have made to reconcile our material animality and genetic inheritance with the production of literature. Such work has been described by Judith Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians as “both futile and ideologically dangerous,” and sometimes with good reason (which I will get into in detail in the article). One of the things that quickly becomes apparent is that without verifiable data, virtually every ecocritical reading or theory we do amounts to little more than what Richard Lewontin calls “an exercise in plausible story telling rather than a science of testable hypotheses.” One of the ways to avoid this without becoming a mouthpiece for the sciences is to recognize that behavioral traits, though often shared, are contextual and individual, meaning that any kind of empirical or systemic analysis must also be case-by-case and not reducible to the kind of templates that are, perhaps, more pleasing to literary critics. Maybe we can plop deconstruction or new historicism down on any old text, but material ecocriticism of the sort I am proposing here is a much more painstaking endeavor. With a keen eye trained on the dangers of “literary Darwinism” (and all that it both entails and promises), I will argue that studying the genetic roots of ecophobia offers to explain (consonant with evolutionary psychology) how adaptive behaviors to a material world in which we no longer live function. This work is crucial if we are to understand how we got into our current environmental crisis, why we seem unable to get out of it, and why biophilic theorizing alone hasn’t answered and never will answer these questions.

NO LOGO!: Visual sovereignty and the Washington Redsk*ns debate

Abstract: The paper draws upon the controversy over the use of indigenous-related sports emblems that has recently sparked a series of protests across the United States against the Washington Redsk*ns name and imagery. It focuses on the visual aspect of the debate, tracing the white-supremacist foundations of the Washington team’s insignia to the institutional construction of Native identity through popular Indian head pennies, gold coins, and buffalo nickels in the period between 1859 and 1938. Pointing at the seemingly paradoxical discrepancy between the minted messages and the systematic political, legal, and military invasion on American Indian sovereignty in that period, it proceeds to deconstruct the paradox by exposing the numismatic pictorial language as a manifestation of the same ideological project and the configurations of power that have remained unchanged to this day. The continued circulation of indigenous-based iconography in the contemporary American context shows that the same cultural imagination continues to serve not only as a powerful rationale for European America’s historical, national, and political narrative but also as a form of “anti-conquest” that both obscures and enacts the established formulas of colonial domination and control. Observing the alterations of the Washington Redsk*ns logo design across some of the key socio-historical moments of the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the analysis explores how various forms of national anxiety transcend into identity through the politics of representation. In that light, it regards recent activism against mass-mediated symbolization of indigenous identity as an important arena in which centuries-old hegemonic discourses are contested against new venues of self-determination and internal decolonization.

Nature’s narrative agencies as compound individuals

Abstract: The changing meanings of nature and its constituents (organic and inorganic matter, and organisms) have largely emerged from the new materialist interpretations of the naturalcultural reality as one of complex entanglements of the human and the nonhuman realms made visible in the porosity of bodily natures, trans-corporeality, and the interdependence of material and discursive practices. The new materialist accounts of physicochemical processes in terms of their agentic capacities and generative powers have also fundamentally changed our understanding of the concept of agency. Taking the new ideas in the framework of material ecocriticism, this essay will focus on the expressive dimension of material agencies as “narrative agencies,” which are comprised of compound individuals, a concept developed by the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne much before the emergence of the new materialist paradigm, to explain the creativity, imagination, and experience found in nature’s individuals such as atoms, molecules, cells, and nonhuman species. Some are “low-grade” individuals, others, like animals, are “high-grade” individuals; but all have internal experience and are involved in a meaningful process of interpreting their environment and making an effect on surrounding entities, processes and flows of materialities. The argument presented here is that in the “storied world” of living nature, which material ecocriticism interprets as a site of narrativity, there is not only a capacity of agency but also an expressive function, nature’s narrative ability.

Introduction: contexts and paradigms for ecological engagement

Abstract: In The future of environmental criticism, Buell (2005) proffers a cognitive mapping of the future of ecocriticism in terms of the two-wave palimpsestic ‘‘trend-lines’’ of environmental criticism. To follow up on Buell’s observations of environmental twists and turns, Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson go a step further to welcome more inclusive wave theories of ecocriticism at the present time by ushering in ‘‘a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries,’’ an attempt that ‘‘explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint’’ (Adamson and Slovic 2009, pp. 6–7). In their adumbration, Adamson and Slovic feature those global concepts of place melding with neo-bioregionalism, such as eco-cosmopolitanism, translocality, post-national and post-ethnic comparative studies of ecocriticism, material ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and polymorphous activism, as a means to debunk the nature–culture binary. For both ecocritics, ‘‘material’’ ecofeminism stands as one component of the third wave of ecocriticism.

Material feminism and ecocriticism: Nu Wa, White Snake, and Mazu

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss two popular Eastern deities, Nu Wa and Mazu, and the mythical White Snake, critically reading them as age old “material feminist” and “material ecocritical” models of living and being in the world. The terms in quotations refer to contemporary Western-based theory and criticism—namely, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s edited entitled Material feminisms (2008) and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s edited Material ecocriticism (2014). As I will argue, the claims in those studies are useful for understanding the marginalized material and feminist bases of deity worship in the East. As part of that argument, I also refer to a key concept for poststructuralist scholars, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “body without organs,” for it complements the work of material feminists and ecocritics. Reading Mazu and Nu Wa through the interstices of that work, I argue that Mazu and Nu Wa embody a radical Deleuzian subjectivity that lies outside of “the body” as it (“the body”) speaks for obsolete policings and constructions of subjectivity and individuality, yet inside “the body” as it points to material feminist and ecocritical arguments that express that humans are always and already a composition of embodied nonhuman and human matter inclusive of inorganic and organic matter, human-made and nonhuman-made material, and natural and cultural “matter.”

Edith Wharton’s vision of continuity in wartime France

Abstract: Reading Wharton’s two nonfiction texts about France together provides the possibility of comparing a pre-war travelogue to a war report on French culture. Wharton’s precise descriptions and sound method of visual interpretation of moral value in A motor-flight (1908) become problematized in descriptions of war damage in Fighting France (1915). A motor-flight provides several examples of continuity in French material culture offering the chance of a meaningful use of the past. In Fighting France, visits to the war zone show the damage done to civilized landscapes, historical monuments, houses, cathedrals that are destroyed or ruined, offering only chances to think of the scope of the losses in cultural terms, meditations on the lost sense of the past. Images of destruction are linked to this loss of historical continuity. Visits to the trenches show the war as a menace difficult to visualize for the traveller. Here the main effect of the war seems to be the continual threat to secure reflexes and habits of the old reality that is being replaced by war. Also, there are no reports on human wounds but descriptions of the damage to the material environment become humanized. In general, however great the material damage shown and the cultural ruin indicated, Wharton finds traces of continuity in the devastated French countryside of the abandoned war zone: new life begins in the ordered lines of the gardens, in the new uses of the churches, in the reorganization of everyday life among the ruins. From the perspective of the language of war, this means that Wharton’s war reports do not use the disillusioned tone necessary for the language of Anglo-Saxon male combat gnosticism. The standard reason for this can be that she was never in combat. Another likely reason, however, can be her Francophilia. In a gesture that may be identified as a reliance on the outmoded British high rhetoric of war, Wharton adopts the French attitude to historical continuity she describes, which eventually cannot and would not accept the material and cultural devastation the war brings. Although a non-combatant who is rarely close to the lines, Wharton does not report on the home front and her new roles there. She struggles to comprehend and represent her experience of the war zone as an eyewitness, and the method she uses for this is the architectural vision of her former travelogue in order to communicate the extent of the material loss to her noncombatant American audience.

Digital Literatures circulation: testing post-Bourdieu theories

Abstract: The launching of Google Books and Google Earth in 2004 could be seen as a symbolic landmark in the configuration of memories and localization in space. Should we be getting ready for a change in literary reading and writing? It is time we asked whether interrelations on a global scale in digital environments have altered the patterns of production and distribution of writing, circulation and consumption of reading, and if so, in what way. We consider that Digital Literatures are a very useful workbench not only to explore the consequences of global digital circulation as a factual process, but also as an imaginary storytelling. Literatures that were born digital can show how rituals of readings, formulas of production and narratives are being modified in the twenty-first century. In this paper, we work on a very large and diverse domain: Digital Literatures circulating in Spanish all over the world, not only those created in Hispanophone countries. Our starting point is our own repertory: Ciberia, but also other digital collections such as LiteLab, IlovePoetry, Hermeneia, ELMCIP and ELO. We will try to answer the following question: Can we use a post-Bourdieu methodology, conceived for nineteenth century French literature, to study circulating Digital Literatures in Spanish as a changing field? We will provide a complete analysis of the emergence of this dynamic field.

“Translator Studies”: Wu Mi’s discourse on translation

Abstract: Wu Mi (1894–1978) was one of the most important scholars in China in the early twentieth century. Taking habitus of the translator into consideration, this paper investigates Wu’s discourse on translation within a research framework on translators, and discusses Wu’s discourse on the definition and purpose of translation, the criteria of translation, the selection of materials for translation, the method of translation, etc. The study indicates that Wu’s direct discourse on translation is greatly influenced by his indirect discourse on translation, and his discourse on translation is also influenced by his habitus as a “Babbittian.” Wu was confident about traditional Chinese culture and language as well as the Chinese means of punctuation and did not think translation should be used as a tool to reform the native Chinese language. He was against the foreignized translation method and preferred using natural native Chinese language. We can say that the essence of Wu’s translation principle is “to put new materials in old rules.” Wu’s discourse on translation is indeed a true reflection of his habitus and his stance on New Culture Movement and is inseparable from the cultural and historical background.

“Slowness” in the Anthropocene: ecological medicine in Refuge and God’s Hotel

Abstract: How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene, or what is being called the new “Age of the Human,” with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? These are the questions that Stacy Alaimo poses in Bodily Natures (2010). Six years later, literary critics, doctors, and environmentalists are still considering the powerful and pervasive material forces of toxins and pollution and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. This topic was first introduced by Joni Adamson in a monograph that signaled a turn in ecocriticism to environmental justice that considered toxins and pollution in the places we live, work, and play (2001). Alaimo (2010), Linda Nash (2006) and others took up that new direction to reinforce the argument that the history of the environment is intertwined with the notion of disease and with the issues of social class, gender, and race. Drawing on the perspectives of elemental/material ecocriticism in relation to disease, the environment, and bodies, this essay explores Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) to analyze how nuclear detonation, underground, was constitutive of the history of what she terms the “clan of the one-breasted women.” After emphasizing the possible (environmental) causes and risks of cancer or other chronic diseases in the age of the Anthropocene, the essay then focuses on attempts to uncover the “underground” or alternative epistemologies of cancer and other diseases and their associated therapies based on a reading of Victoria Sweet’s book God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (2012). Sweet’s professional experience acquired over twenty years of practice as a doctor at Laguna Honda, a chronic care hospital, resonates with the perspectives of other authors who are also interested in alternative and ecological health care and in notions of “slow medicine,” “ecological medicine,” the art of gardening, and mind–body interactions. In the framework of elemental ecocriticism, this essay argues that in picturing an era of anthropogenic culture and confronting invisible xenobiotic chemicals, Sweet’s elemental ecocritical thinking of medicine, bodies, and environment is not obsolete but perhaps an “antidote” to the suicidal tendency of modern society.

An animal studies and ecocritical reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract: In this ecocritical and animal studies reading of the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375–1400), I focus on what the poem divulges about medieval attitudes toward hunting animals for sport. Studies that focus on the blurring of conceptual, cognitive, and ethical distinctions between animals and humans in medieval literature invite consideration of that blurring as it is found in the triple hunt scenes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. My argument is that the triple hunt scenes confront the problem of truth (trawþe) in the context of animal sports as well as in the context of the games in which Bertilak invites Gawain and the court of Camelot to participate. In elaborating on the given content, I also note the thematic and conceptual overlaps among Bertilak, Gawain, and the fox, a tripling that scholars have overlooked in their focus on the parallels between Gawain and the deer, boar, and fox. I rely on scholarly studies by such key figures in animal studies and medieval studies as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Susan Crane and such key figures in ecocriticism and medieval studies as Gillian Rudd and Corinne J. Saunders in my focus on animal hunting in medieval Britain. In addition, I refer to several modern translations of the poem: two recent translations by W. S. Merwin and Simon Armitage and three older and canonical translations by J. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, Marie Borroff, and Brian Stone.

Gambling as a literary subject in Frank Hardy’s work

Abstract: The article explores the representation and critique of gambling in Frank Hardy’s writing. It analyses the prominence of, and changes in the concept of gambling in some of Hardy’s texts. Despite the frequency and persistence of gambling as a literary subject in Hardy’s work, his engagement with this popular activity has received only scant scholarly attention. This is particularly curious, given that gambling is a considerable and still contemporary cultural phenomenon in Australia and beyond. The study offers some possible explanations for this low analytical interest.

Fact versus fiction in Rudy Wiebe’s “Where is the Voice Coming from”

Abstract: Rudy Wiebe’s collection of short stories Where Is the Voice Coming From was first published in 1974. The mere fact that this collection has seen numerous new editions at the turn of the 21st century reflects its credibility in depicting contemporary indigenous phenomena. Apart from exploring the complex relationship of document, history, and fiction, the well-known title story depicts two contrasted views on experiencing reality—the one that perceives it as a mysterious, almost mystical experience and is generally related to the oral traditions of the indigenous peoples and the other one that rests on the allegedly objective factual evidence of the white settlers. In his exploration of the conflict between the ‘Almighty Voice’ and the NorthWest Mounted police, which has been the subject of various conflicting accounts, Wiebe examines the process of turning events into stories and expresses his doubts about their historical accuracy. In that, he comes close to the view of various postcolonial literary critics who generally oppose the trend of falsifying reality by relying on the objectivity of historical reports as the only way of experiencing and decoding the past.

Postdigital synchronicity and syntopy: the manipulation of universal codes, and the fully automated avantgarde

Abstract: In recent years, the use of new (both linguistic and non-linguistic) literary codes has accelerated due to the global technological intermediations between writers, scientists and artists, and to the increase and diversification of human–machine interactions. The new codes emerging from this new set of global interactions are often re-interpretations of literary and artistic methods and devices developed by modern and postmodern avangardist movements; however, they present some new interesting features when expanding through postdigital environments, where a novel universe of data/symbols are manipulated by a variety of human–machine assemblages with different modes of implication in performance-driven collaborative arrangements. This article critically reviews and reflects on literary works entering and exploring this postdigital space by using innovative art/writing codes.

The over-consumption of Native American imagery and the ongoing results for contemporary reality

Abstract: This paper originally served as a complement to the 123 slides of contemporary Native American images, shown as a looping slideshow at the Contemporary Indigenous Realities conference held at the University of Montenegro in the summer of 2015. These popular images have patterns that include primitivism, savagery, sex objectification, buffoons, anachronisms, and stereotypes. The prevalence of these images can be found in commercialism, sports, movies and television, literature and magazines, toys, the military, and endless entertainment celebrities dressed as Native Americans for fun (not roles). This paper examines the “cause and effect” of this phenomenon that is ubiquitous worldwide. The misinformation, lies, stereotypes, and myths about Native Americans have resulted in an image, held by both Natives and non-Natives, that is archaic at best and psychologically harmful at worst. This (mis)perception of indigenous peoples has become American schema due to pervasive and myth borne legacy. Numerous scholars over the last century have measured the effects of related oppressive societal qualities, always with the results harming the psyche of those so poorly portrayed.

Writing–reading devices: intermediations

Abstract: Exploring the widening of literary practices, and demystifying boundaries in genres, sensory modalities, reading/writing processes and devices, this paper analyses two types of crossovers and intermediations: distributed authorship in the writing of digital generative literature, and the feedback loops between the screen and the book in contemporary experimental works. Nick Montfort and Marc Saporta’s works are analysed as enactive systems that emerge from the intersections between different modes of production and perception, highlighting the ways in which writing and reading strategies are reconfigured in contemporary experiences with literary forms and theoretical frameworks.

Unknown Hungarian first fruits of the Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav

Abstract: The Slovak (as well as non-national) history of literature, dedicated to heuristic research and gradual archival and interpretive disclosure of both well-known and unknown texts of the Slovak poet P. O. Hviezdoslav, followed up in its early stages the interest of the Czech literary historian, Albert Pražak, who in his biographical memoir publication S Hviezdoslavom (With Hviezdoslav) offered a portrait of that poet on the basis of the authentic manuscript material and recollections. The discovery of P. O. Hviezdoslav’s early Hungarian poetic composition of approximately 500 verses entitled Tompakő comes from that part of the Slovacica estate from Albert Pražak that was not passed over in the 1950s to the editors of the poet’s works in Slovakia, followed by the archival processing and keeping in the Literary Archives of the Matica slovenska national foundation. In the volume of poems Tompakő, originating in the first half of the 1860s, the poet presented some of the Orava region themes, which reflected his close links with the nature. In this paper, we will focus on the interpretation of a literary historical and comparative grasp of Hviezdoslav’s newly discovered manuscripts of Hungarian poems. Of course, we are aware that this unexpected discovery of the Hungarian first fruits of Hviezdoslav will not principally alter the picture of the poet’s early work, but in addition to its very heuristic-biographical value, it will expand the view of both Slovak and Hungarian literary history on the thematic and genre variability of Hviezdoslav’s early work.

From social rebellion to ambiguous conformism: a study of reform and history in The Scarlet Letter

Abstract: One of the central questions Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) endeavors to address in his major novels is how social reform can be informed by historical consciousness. In view of this consistent subject in Hawthorne’s works, this essay attempts to explore the inextricable relationship between Hawthorne’s reformist impulse and his strong awareness of the past in his major novel, The Scarlet Letter. By focusing on both the necessity of reform and the exigency of the historical sense in Hawthorne’s works, this essay argues that the significance of his contribution to American literature is better understood if special emphasis is placed on how his political and historical concerns interact in his major novel. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s return signifies a transformation from social rebel to conformist, which is designed to illustrate a revised and democratic relationship between self and community, although it fails to lead to full reconciliation between the two. I argue that the dialectical connection between Hawthorne’s reformist impulses and historical consciousness resolves the acute conflicts between self and society in this novel.

California Forgets. Luna Remembers: Sensing contemporary Native American realities in James Luna’s performance Native Stories: For Fun, Profit & Guilt

Abstract: James Luna’s multimedia performances are largely rooted in his culture and daily experience as a Pooyukitchchum (Luiseno) Indian living on La Jolla reservation north of San Diego, in Southern California. Informed by a polyphonic style, they interweave, converse and collide with various personal, collective, fictional, and non-fictional stories and discourses. This fluid and yet fractured approach incorporating visual, aural, written, and body language directly engages contemporary viewers through the resonances and dissonances of present and past, the physical presence of the artist’s acting body, and through the immersive environment they are invited to share with the artist in the here-and-now of the performance site. This article is based on the performance Native Stories: For Fun, Profit & Guilt that James Luna presented in October 2014 in San Francisco during the Litquake festival featuring Sheila Tishmil Skinner and followed by a spoken-word monologue by Guillermo Gomez-Pena. It aims to highlight how Luna senses today’s native people’s experiences and how he mediates California’s present and historical past. The play with metamorphosis, distortion, and dissonances, the slippages in various personae, along with the combination of technology-mediated devices, are some of the strategies he uses to trace the complexities of contemporary indigenous people’s realities.

Ethnic identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water

Abstract: The paper analyzes the elements that constitute Native American identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993). In the novel, King juxtaposes two ethnic identities, white Christian American, representing the majority in the American society, and Native American, representing a minority. King portrays the struggle of Native Americans in the US and Canada to define their identity given the historically long rift between their native heritage and the white culture. Stigmatized for their ethnicity and race, Native Americans were exposed to marginalization and prejudice and forced to somehow overcome this position. The struggle has been made more difficult by the efforts of the dominant society to assimilate them and at the same time prevent them from claiming full citizenship. King carefully weaves the stories of his characters, who constantly go back and forth between the reservation lands and the outside world, having to find their position in both and usually not belonging to either. By focusing on the world of the reservation, Native American spirituality, tribal tradition of storytelling, and creation myths, King examines different aspects of Native American ethnic identity and, through juxtaposition of the Native American ethnic identity with that of the dominant society, reevaluates the marginalized position of the Native Americans.

The authoring software tool in digital literature as a vector of the global imaginary

Abstract: Digital writing necessarily requires tools, software or technology. With its constant development, the technology must be “intuitive” and easy to use, with no need for a manual. This intuitive use of the software authoring tool as a kind of universal language places it squarely in the globalization process. A question then arises: while allowing some degree of fair competition, does globalization not also entail a uniform way of producing, doing or thinking? Since the tools used by many digital authors were first developed for commercial purposes, we can ask whether this fact affects their imaginary when they write. Keeping in mind the globalized environment, I will illustrate the closed relationship in which the tools themselves make certain proposals and then anticipate certain specific practices, i.e., how globalization can structure the discourse and influence how authors think about creating their works. There is a globalized imaginary in which communications technology is becoming increasingly interconnected, and in which our imagination inevitably becomes globalized, reflecting beliefs and economic/socio-cultural structures that challenge national boundaries and shift the balance of power. Lev Manovich talks about “cultural software” (2010), while Edgar Morin recognizes the existence of a global civilization that includes standard shared values. In this perspective, I will also examine the role of free software to see whether it can give rise to new communities and modify one production model of digital writing.

What matters for women: discovering Irish women through Maeve Binchy’s “All That Matters”

Abstract: Irish women have long been marginalized, but sexual politics in Ireland has undergone many changes since the 1970s. This paper focuses on Maeve Binchy’s short story “All That Matters” in the hope of exploring the image of Irish women as presented in the story. The short story is collected in New Dubliners (2004), a collection of eleven stories by distinguished contemporary Irish writers presenting modern-day Irish scenarios in honor of James Joyce’s writings about Dubliners around a century ago. The study argues that although the phantom of patriarchy still haunts women’s lives in different forms, women in contemporary Ireland are more eager to challenge social taboos and work for their self-actualization.

Back to the city: urban agriculture and the reimagining of agrarianism in Novella Carpenter’s Farm City

Abstract: In this essay, I examine how Novella Carpenter, while paying dutiful homage to the American agrarian ideal, diverges from dominant agrarian discourse’s rural-centricity when she (trans)plants both the practice and the art of cultivation to an inner-city abandoned lot. In her memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (2009), Carpenter’s story of small family farming, indeed, evokes what Eric T. Freyfogle describes as an agrarian mode of life in which humans, as members of the land community, are “just as dependent as other life on the land’s fertility and just as shaped by its mysteries and possibilities” (Freyfogle, in: Freyfogle (ed) The new agrarianism: land, culture, and the community of life, Island Press, Washington, DC, 2001, p. xiii). Carpenter’s return to the city, however, marks a critical break from traditional understandings of agrarianism, challenging the city-country binary that has long been employed in the imagining of agrarianism. Farming in the city, like traditional agrarians she is attentive to the agencies of nonhuman entities and matters; unlike them, she moves beyond their rurality to reconfigure cities as agential bodies constantly in dynamic processes of becoming. In Farm City, her return from the land shifts the emphasis from the countryside to the city, evoking a “new agrarianism” that foregrounds both environmental stewardship and community-citizenship. The urban strain of Carpenter’s farming experience, I argue, not only brings to the fore the agronomic and spiritual potentialities of inner cities but forges a new ethical relation embracing humanity and history as active agents of the agrarian community.

Affective frames and intra-relational finites in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change

Abstract: This article brings into conversation a Badiouian ethics and Karen Barad’s post-phenomenological relationality of “intra-actions” among the human and nonhuman so as to situate the environmentally and politically engaged poetry included in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change. Criticism has avoided exploring the interplay between stylistic choices and political dimensions in her poetry, which includes engagements with pressing environmental issues today (global warming, rising seas, and chaotic weather), preemptive wars, and questions of plausible poetic agency itself. Foregrounding a material dimension while still maintaining a sense of responsibility, this essay highlights Alain Badiou’s use of poetic configurations as “subjects” engaging in ethical world-recognitions that help situate an important underlying posthuman ethos evident in Graham’s poetry. Barad, in a discourse with roots in quantum physics, argues that we must rethink representation from an entirely different phenomenology of intra-actions, beginning with relations, not objects or Cartesian selves. Thus both Badiou and Barad, in radically different but complementary ways, situate ontological finites—poems and sites of intra-action—as means of overcoming Derridean differance, which remains one formal cornerstone of postmodern displacement evident in American mass media’s post-truth equalization of all positions without situating possibilities of coherent analysis or engagement. In conversation with the work of Judith Butler as well as Badiou and Barad, this essay intends to make a small contribution to feminist posthumanism and politics, and expand our sense of ethical and affective engagement in New Materialist criticism.

The rights of trees: on a Hungarian short story from 1900

Abstract: This paper analyses a short story written in 1900 by Kalman Mikszath (1847–1910), a major Hungarian author. The plot narrates the genesis and the consequences of a strange last will, which bequeaths a substantial amount of money to two trees. The plot is partly funny, partly uncanny, and evolves rather slowly, in accordance with the long and rather inactive life cycles of trees. It is not so much the plot, however, that is interesting, but rather the ethical discourse of the personae in how to deal with the trees. Due to the exceptional legal situation, various people start regarding the trees as persons and have difficulties in making decisions about them. While it would be an overstatement to say that Mikszath wrote a prototext of environmental justice, he definitely challenged some ideas of his times and asked important questions about possible ethical approaches to nature. Legal issues are ubiquitous in world literature, but the world of law is usually limited to human affairs. As soon as trees are treated as legal subjects, they seem to become persons. Usually the development is the reverse in legal reasoning: if one is a person, one has rights. Therefore the short story is a sort of thought-experiment: what if we regard the non-human world as having rights? And the result is a paradigm shift we can nowadays make use of, accepting that justice is not or should not be limited to just the human sphere.

To Ojibwe country and back: Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

Abstract: This paper proposes a close analysis of Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), considered as a piece of travel writing. The book is first looked at through the lenses of recent developments in travel writing critical theory. However, this theory, being developed on the theoretical tools of postcolonialism, i.e. on problematizing the intentional perception of the Western travelling subject and on questioning this subject’s almost innate adoption of hierarchical superiority in relation to the travelling object, cannot vitally apply to another “conceptual reality” in which these relations are nonexistent. After consideration of feminist reading of contemporary travel writing, the paper concludes that its, often militant, stand does not comply with a culture that knows child bringer and language teacher as a woman. To pay due respect to the text in question, the analysis turns to some of Native American authored discussions on the difference of meaning of land in contrast to mapping territory, of understanding of circularity of time in contrast to linearity of history. The paper concludes that this Erdrich’s book of travel defies Theory and develops into a potent response to the dehumanizing semiotics of the Native subject and humanity in general.