Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2004"

Writing the Post-Colonial Space: Ben Okri's Magical City and the Subversion of Imperialism

Abstract: With an assertion by Foucault the master of genealogy and historical location that \"the present epoch will be above all else the epoch of space\" (1986: 22) it may appear that growth in spatial studies has been exponential and has infiltrated all theoretical approaches. Yet such a development of the spatial as a factor for critical consideration must not be taken for granted. For while Kant may have privileged space in his Transcendental Aesthetic (1787) by discussing it in equal measure with time, and Gotthold Lessing (1766) may have explored the idea of a \"poetic picture\" (1962: 74) and the relationship between the arts, time, and space (77-91) as early as 1766, the period between Kant's work and the mid twentieth-century can be seen as one in which space has frequently been subsumed by the importance of time and its correlative: a linear, narrative chronology that \"sees space as merely the particularity which specifies and fragments history\" (Grossberg 179). In the social sciences, space in this period had been overshadowed by the importance of time, geography overshadowed by history: \"putting phenomena in a temporal sequence . . . somehow came to be seen as more significant and critically revealing than putting them beside or next to each other in a spatial configuration\" (Soja 1996: 168). Thus Foucault asks the question: \"Did it start with Bergson or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic\" (1980: 70). Therefore, what there has been in relation to the spatial may be deemed a resurgence; a resurgence wider than in Foucault's view: a

Familiarizing the Colonized in Ben Jonson's Masques

Abstract: In The Masque of Blackness (1605) and its plot sequel The Masque of Beauty (1608), Ben Jonson represents the transformation of African people to Europeans when they travel to England from Africa. However, in the Blackness masque, an important counter voice momentarily interrupts the transformative activities of the play's travel agenda. Niger objects to the project of cultural absorption played before the English court audience. His argument celebrating African identity laments his daughters' relocation to Albion (England) from Africa (Aethiopia). Niger's speech of sixty-nine lines censures European literary efforts to negate African identity. In its entirety, the Blackness masque enlists spatial metaphor to demonstrate a transformation of colonial culture to that of the colonizer but also reveals the threat to colonial identity. The play's startlingly early racial consciousness and awareness of intercultural issues in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods relies primarily upon geographical travel as emblematic of cultural and psychological change. I suggest that Jonson constructs an intercultural discourse wherein the African figures are fashioned as familiar, commensurate with a seventeenth-century European self-conception an effect that reduces the threat from alien identities and supports England's nascent quest for global markets. Of the characters of the masque, Niger alone retains his outward and inward blackness, and he is banished from the white realm of Albion. He becomes a necessary, but comfortably distant, other. A necessary other, because, as Homi Bhabha observes, \"[t]he colonialist exercise of authority requires the production of differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices can map out subject populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power\" (1994: 111). Jonson's play offers a double

Turning Back: Retracing Twentieth-Century Trauma in Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, and W. G. Sebald

Abstract: The literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to its contemporary upheavals; so does that of the late twentieth century. If we perceive the later upheavals as less psychologically, morally, and artistically digestible, and read backward to an era that now seems comparatively innocent, do we blame that era for failing to deploy literary strategies that might have anticipated and forestalled coming catastrophes? By a more vigorous experimentalism, a more insistent disordering, might early-twentieth century artists and intellectuals have helped avert the monstrous rage for order that would result in the murder of millions? Reading backward is always problematic. After 1918, there was no predicting that a world now divided between Before and After the Great War could come to be divided into Before and After the Atomic Bomb, Before and After death camps. The horrors of World War I were previously unimaginable (and, as Paul Fussell has shown, initially and for some time indescribable); but even after the world had lost that innocence, it still could not foresee the explosions or ovens of mid-century. Eventually literature would have to adapt itself to human acts that the worst horror fictions of Revelations or Dante never imagined. As Omer Bartov writes in Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation,

After the Fall: Nostalgia and the Treatment of Authority in the Works of Kafka and Agnon, Two Habsburgian Writers

Abstract: And yet I dozed off and slept. How do I know that I slept? Because of the dream I dreamt. What did I dream? I dreamt that a great war had come to the world, and that I was called to it. I vowed to God that if I returned safely from the war, whoever came out of my house to greet me on my return from the war would be sacrificed. I returned home, and there I was myself, coming out to greet me. S. Y. Agnon 1968: 76

On Being Too Deeply Loved

Abstract: This essay considers the competing claims of the ideology of erotic merging on the one hand and the ideal of developing a clearly bounded self on the other. I argue that a \"moral negotiation\" with a work of literature (Othello) can create a fruitful confrontation with this familiar tension. The rewards for such criticism are both moral and literary: moral, since literature facilitates modes of moral reflection that cannot be activated by employing non-literary moral reflection; literary, because a moral dialogue with literary texts is not only possible but also aesthetically enriching. On the theoretical front, this essay thus continues what has been called \"the literary turn\" in moral philosophy, which supplements the work of other philosophers of literature by highlighting the capacity of the literary work to form a critique of an embedded ideology (in my reading, a prevalent erotic ideology). Finally, I relate ethical criticism to the current debate over cultural studies and the anxieties associated with the disappearance of the literary. I argue that taking an \"ethical turn\" enables literary criticism to claim an important distinctiveness in contrast to other modalities of cultural critique.

From Essentialism to Constructivism?: The Gender of Peace and War—Gilman, Woolf, Freud

Abstract: Is there a \"natural\" fit between gender and the pacifist or military impulse? History seems to offer an answer to this question, even though general historiography of pacifism ignores it. ' Only in recent histories of women in the peace movements has the discourse on this subject been initiated. Despite its antecedents in nineteenth-century Europe, this discourse gained momentum on both sides of the Atlantic around the two World Wars, persisted in the protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, and reached theoretical maturity in the post-gender heyday of the 1980s and 90s.2 This continuity notwithstanding, thinking on this issue has noticeably changed throughout the last century. Moreover, a close look at the early stages of the European peace movements reveals a complex

A Woman's Space Is in the Home: Architecture, Privacy, and Melodrama in Pamela and Gaslight

Abstract: Imagine a Georgian terrace house (Figure 1). Standing at a height of no more than four stories, joined by party walls to replicated versions of itself, constructed primarily of the red brick indigenous to Georgian London, with sash-windows made of crown glass1 in recessed frames of varying sizes from largest on the bottom floor to smallest on the top, a parapet-roof tiled with English slate, a rather unembellished door of English oak surrounded by an arching porch of double columns marking the entranceway, and black wrought iron fence enclosing its external space to signify where its boundaries end and its neighbor's begin, the Georgian terrace house defines the outward appearance of London's domestic space.2 Following the Great Fire of 1666 and the adoption of the Act for the Rebuilding of the City, the design and construction of eighteenth-century London housing complied with laws which in effect standardized building height, structural thickness, size of timber for floors and roofs, and the positioning of the ground floor

The Islands of Poetry; the Poetry of Islands

Abstract: An island, let it be, say, three or four hundred to a thousand miles or so from the nearest habitations of humanity and well out of the usual sea trade routes, preferably uncharted, fairly commodious, say thirteen miles by four, of a climate whose extremes are not of a pitiless severity, an island which nature's bounty has endowed with shade, fresh water, shelter and food fit for human consumption. And there our recluse. Every seaman, every wanderer on the deep, has hearkened to the decoy of that ideal island. (de la Mare 16)

"Locked in a Room of One's Own?": Querying the Quest for Keys to Woolf's "Madness"

Abstract: Virginia Woolf has been represented as the origin of the feminist author and scholar \"the mother of us all,\"1 and as \"the real-life epitome of that feminine archetype, the mad wife\" (Showalter 1977: 276). If \"the mother of us all\" is also an archetypal \"mad wife,\" we have problems. These are especially deep-rooted if, as Sue Roe suggests, \"[s]he has been so readily and so ubiquitously appropriated to the feminist literary Cause that it sometimes seems as though every feminist insight has its origin somewhere in the work of Virginia Woolf (1990: 3). To address these problems, our feminist roots in \"madness,\" I believe that we need to disentangle some of the strings wound around Woolf studies. In so doing, it is my aim to foreground the complex web of gendered, pathologizing discursive practices that have produced, no doubt unwittingly, a seemingly unending and often unreflexive quest a kind of binding Gordian knot in Woolf studies attempts to diagnose

The Jewish Other in Old English Narrative Poetry

Abstract: Jews settled in England only after the Norman conquest. In earlier periods, Anglo-Saxon missionaries, travelers, and traders may have encountered individual Jews or Jewish communities on the continent, and Jewish traders, given their widespread presence in the Carolingian Empire and Mediterranean world, may, perhaps, have visited England. Records of Jews living in Anglo-Saxon England do not exist. Nevertheless, narrative poetry in Old English is frequently based upon Old Testament material, and Jews figure in narratives that use material from Christian legend and history as well. When the poetry dramatizes Jewish speakers and characterizes Judaism as a system of belief, its representations are dependent on textual traditions. The Anglo-Saxon encounter with Judaism is a textual encounter.

Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (review)

Abstract: Rather than the volume of literary criticism one might have expected, Geoffrey Hartman's most recent book offers an \"intervention\" (a term Hartman employs following Adorno's usage, 229) in the fuss surrounding the rise of cultural studies to curricular dominance. The book's thirteen essays address the possibility of authenticity in a world flooded by simulacra and develop the analysis of this question into a counterstatement on the institutional hegemony of what Hartman describes as \"aggressively pragmatic\" cultural studies (213). The \"norm of inclusiveness\" (197) and \"ethos of cultural retrieval\" (198) in this discipline, the argument goes, fail to temper an ineradicable reality hunger and thus counterproductively provoke a purgative political nostalgia for an allegedly more real past. Against this, Hartman's plea for an aesthetic education stakes the authority of the whole of his oeuvre: the theoretical statements on textuality, making up the book's third and best part, rework the conclusions of the readings dominating Hartman's works till, roughly, Saving the Text, his 1981 engagement with Derrida, while the overall analysis derives its grave \"cultural and political urgency\" (viii) from the investment in Holocaust remembrance that has accompanied his increasingly ethical criticism since then. The problematic of survivor testimonies occupies the whole second part of the book and, for two interrelated reasons, constitutes the most dramatic application of Hartman's cultural analysis. First, our postmodernity confronts an increasing derealization of the world due to the overkill of simulacra. The corollary of this is an unsatisfiable reality hunger exemplified most distressingly by a \"memory envy\" aimed at Holocaust survivors, because of the second and third generations' \"lack of something more collectively defining\" (79). Second, this derealization is crucially brought on by the \"mediaturn,\" that is, by the media's claim to being \"a medium rather than a mediation\" (68), while it is on these media that the survival of the testimonies

Language and Landscape: Conflict in Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah

Abstract: This paper will discuss Anthills of the Savannah, which, incidentally, has the most pictorial title of all Chinua Achebe's novels, focusing on the relationship between language and the environment staged in this narrative and, in particular, on the very English concept of picturesque landscapes.1 I shall attempt to trace the trajectory of the picturesque and landscape painting within the English language and address the problems that arise as a result of its subsequent export to the British colonies. Two basic questions underlie the argument. If Achebe believes that the English language can be a useful tool for the African writer to reclaim his ancestral heritage, does he also believe that it can lose enough of its cultural past to be made suitable for the African environment? And does Anthills of the Savannah, his most recent novel and one in which many themes from his other works converge, convey a successful mastery and subjugation of the English language? The English-language postcolonial writers seem to have inherited a certain pictorial rhetoric from their past. One of the main reasons for this is the imperial fascination with landscape. W. J. T. Mitchell has noted that landscape conceptualization first flourished in China at the height of its imperial power; England's fascination with it likewise began when it experienced imperial success (Mitchell 1994: 9). But, the start of Western landscape awareness has always been attributed to the Dutch, whose mid-seventeenth-century transformation from a rebellious colony to a maritime empire happened to coincide with its export of landscape painting. In the eighteenth century the idea, meaning,

The Organization of Space in Alexander Blok's Retribution

Abstract: Alexander Blok's poem Retribution amounts to what may be called his spiritual testament Blok (1880-1921) worked on this poem for over eleven years, from 1910 to 1921 Almost up to his last day he was still trying to arrange the materials left in the draft or outline form the fragments written in June 1921 were the last verses that Blok ever wrote He was tormented by the sense of his poem's elusiveness, inexplicability, by its ineluctable incompleteness Whatever external reasons may have caused Retribution to remain unfinished, one of the main internal reasons lay with the organization of space The poem's plot covers a long period of Russian and world history, from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century Blok pedantically collected historical details about the rule of Alexander III and about the 1877-1878 Russian-Turkish war As he conceptualized his poem, these events, along with other realia of the period, were supposed to provide an epic background for the destiny of three generations of one family: a father, a son, and the son's son In the Introduction, Blok describes the idea of Retribution as follows: "A family that has suffered the retribution of history, of the environment, of the epoch, begins, in its turn, to administer retribution; the last of the first-born is already able to snarl and roar like a lion; he is ready to seize, with his little human hand, the wheel of history And he may, indeed, have seized it Through catastrophes and setbacks my 'Rougon-Macquarts' free themselves gradually from the A©ducation sentimentale of Russian nobility, 'coal turns into a diamond,' and Russia into a New America, a New not the Old America" (Blok 1960-1965, III: 298) The idea of Retribution is, in effect, connected both with the WesternEuropean novel (Emile Zola's naturalistic chronicle) and with the notion

Vladimir Pecherin's Apologia pro vita mea (Mémoires d'outre-tombe) : A Strategy of Defense

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov disputed the idea that literature imitates life and proposed the reverse: life imitates literature. Yet the connection between life and literature is an oscillating process, further complicated when a memoir, a would-be mimetic representation of a life, is an imitation of other literary texts, literature imitating literature. The case of Vladimir Pecherin is an example of the play of the manifold links between literature, life, and life-writing. In 1836, Vladimir Sergeevich Pecherin (1807-1885), a young professor of Greek at Moscow University, a gifted poet and translator, loved by his students and colleagues, suddenly abandoned a promising career and fled Russia, never to return. He had spent two years studying philosophy in Berlin, as one of a small group of students from St. Petersburg University sent by the Russian government to prepare for their academic careers. Each student owed twelve years of service as a professor in exchange for the funding; Pecherin left the country after teaching just one semester. At that time, he was twenty nine; the remaining forty nine years of his life were spent abroad, first in France, then in England, and finally, in Ireland. During the first four years after his departure, Pecherin wandered through Western Europe, where he mingled with various revolutionary circles. Then, in 1840, he unexpectedly converted to Catholicism. Shortly afterwards he took a tonsure and entered the Redemptorist Order as a monk. His bond with

Nabokov at Cornell (review)

Abstract: The occasion for this volume was the Cornell Nabokov Centenary Festival, held in Ithaca, New York, on September 10-12, 1998, \"to mark the jubilee of Nabokov's advent at Cornell and his then approaching centenary\" (Shapiro: xi). The last decade has seen a veritable Sturm und Drang in Nabokov studies, reviewed in Stephen Jan Parker's \"Nabokov Studies: The State of the Art Revisited,\" the penultimate article of the volume. As the co-editor (with George Gibian) of The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, which presented the materials from the first Nabokov Festival held at Cornell in 1983, Parker can assert that now \"Nabokov criticism has burgeoned into a vigorous growth industry, not only in terms of books, but also in hundreds and hundreds of articles, chapters, essays, notes, and reviews in various languages not to mention the new electronic dimension of inquiry and shared information on the Internet\" (269). Apparently, this hermeneutic proliferation is also a form of interpretative response to Nabokov as a complex cultural phenomenon. Accordingly, Nabokov at Cornell attempts to reflect \"the great diversity of the interests of Nabokov perhaps the last Renaissance man\" (Shapiro xii). It is divided into five parts \"The Russian Years,\" \"The American Years,\" \"The Miraculous Amphora,\" \"The Glorious Output,\" and \"The Thrill of Science and the Pleasure of Art,\" dealing, respectively, with Russian and American novels, the Cornell lectures on Russian and world literature, and the place of science and painting in Nabokov's oeuvre. In \"The Fourth Dimension of Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark,\" Vladimir E. Alexandrov suggests, with some reservations, a possible influence of the Russian occultist P. D. Uspenskii's ideas about \"Fourth Dimension\" on Nabokov. With reference to his previous comments on this issue,1 Alexandrov points to an episode from Laughter in the Dark that suggests a connection with Uspenskii's treatise Tertium Organum. Though the article ends by cautiously raising the possibility that Uspenskii \"was more of a mediating than a direct influence on Nabokov\" (9), it seems that since writers of formative significance for Nabokov's

A Companion to Chaucer (review)

Abstract: of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry. New Haven: Yale University Press. ----. 1964. Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale University Press. ----. 1975. The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ----. 1981. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ----. 1985. Easy Pieces. New York: Columbia University Press.

Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (review)

Abstract: possibly be presented to us on the page or in the picture. What the artists of antimorphosis demonstrate (in quite various ways) is how to reconcile, on the one hand, our urgent need for the evidentiary photograph and, on the other, our equally urgent need to comprehend the limitations of its value\" (100). Just as loss is a personal experience, so is the experience of each of the poets Gubar discusses in relation to the losses of others. So, too, is the experience of the reader reading these poems and reading Gubar's splendid book. Though Gubar focuses on poetry, she also discusses painting and poetic prose (such as Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces). Still and all, it is as a critique of poetry or, more precisely perhaps, of the poetic imagination that the reader shares with the poet that Gubar's book triumphs over the forces that hideously exterminated human lives and that threaten to continue to the present day to annihilate just that capacity for personal empathy and response that might have prevented a Holocaust to begin with. There is an ethical stake in being a good reader of poetry. And Gubar is a superb reader.