Showing papers in "Partial Answers in 2005"

Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (review)

Abstract: letter's language in the poem. Embedded in a text that is both the signal act of a poet claiming full authority and \"range\" and the voicing of romantic yearning cycled directly from letters to Boldereff, Olson's Maximus hovers in what can be read as the poem's trans-subjective borderland. \"Flashing more than a wing, / than any romantic thing, than memory, than place,\" Olson's poetic text blurs the boundaries between the private and the public acknowledgment, the mythic and the ordinary self a shift that, if not carried forward in the life, has clear consequences for the art:

Conrad, Freud, and Derrida on Pompeii: A Paradigm of Disappearance

Abstract: In the year 79 CE., a fierce eruption of Mount Vesuvius resulted in the complete burial of one of the most opulent cultural centers of the Roman Empire. Effaced by mounds of ash and lava, Pompeii was transformed into a symbol of severance and destruction a significance that it has retained in collective thought to this day. At present, the excavated city stands as a historical and cultural monument to a temporal arrest that occurred almost three thousand years ago. Prey to a chronological anomaly, Pompeii constitutes a paradoxical fusion: it is a virtual actuality, a present-day past. Encapsulating the incommensurate forces of disappearance and recovery, the geographical space of Pompeii doubles as a psychological, philosophical, and literary locale, a metaphor that inspires and informs the works of several great Western writers. In this paper, I will trace the manner in which this interdisciplinary juncture hosts a meeting between Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. Despite the disparity of their interpretative frameworks the three writers identify in the Pompeiian image a locus of desire that is engendered by the tantalizing absence of that which was buried or lost. By testing the writers' various approaches to this apparent lack approaches that encompass the fluctuating temporalities of absence and presence, loss and recuperation, closure and deferral this paper examines not only the motif of Pompeii but also the principles that underlie the works of those who interpret it. The texts studied here, namely, Conrad's The Arrow of Gold, Freud's \"Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva,\" and Derrida's Archive Fever, differ in their treatment of the Pompeiian motif. Freud uses the motif in a strictly interpretative manner, commenting on its significance within a fourth text, Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeiian Phantasy

The Scandal of the Jew: Reflexive Transgressiveness in Du Maurier's Trilby

Abstract: When he first appeared in George Du Maurier's enormously popular fin de sià ̈cle novel Trilby (1894), Svengali, the demonic villain, did not seize the readers' popular and critical imagination to the extent that he obsessed the characters and the narrator of the novel. Initially, readers of the novel, \"the first modern best seller in American publishing\" (Showalter ix), focused on the eponymous heroine, Trilby.1 Her antagonist Svengali was only grudgingly acknowledged by a contemporary reader as a necessary evil in the novel: without him \"there would be no novel of Trilby . . . nevertheless, he is the sole blot upon it\" (Gilder and Gilder 27). Yet with the passage of time, it was Svengali, the sinister hypnotist who exerts control over Trilby, who would linger in the popular imagination. Indeed, Svengali is now so much more famous than the novel itself, so detached from the text that engendered him that his origins are not commonly remembered.2

Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature

Abstract: One of the dominant traits of the old Soviet regime was its unwillingness to confront the serious moral shortcomings of the Soviet past. Until the perestroà ̄ka years of the late 1980s, when President Mikhail Gorbachev challenged Soviet citizens to \"fill in the blank pages\" of Soviet history, it was a regime with a singularly bad conscience.1 The bad conscience extended beyond the mass murder committed by the Bolsheviks and later by Stalin to the genocide committed by the Nazis on Soviet soil, beyond the massacres of the Civil War period (1918-1921), collectivization (1929-1932), and the Great Terror (1936-1938) to the blank pages concerning the Nazi Holocaust on Soviet soil. As is well known, until perestroà ̄ka, the Soviet political and ideological leadership did as little as possible to acknowledge the historical facts of the crimes against the Jews committed on Soviet territory. The enforced silence immediately leads one to suspect some sort of complicity after the fact, and this impression is reinforced by the defensive tone of the scant official or officially sanctioned commentary that appeared in the press. In the Soviet press, indeed, the Holocaust was treated as someone else's problem particularly the problem of the \"capitalist\" countries. The specifically anti-Jewish focus of the Holocaust and the virulent racism impelling Nazi actions were systematically downplayed. The memory of those atrocities was largely suppressed, much as were the

On Terrorism and Morals: Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract: Critics have long read Λ Tale of Two Cities as a particularly egregious symptom of Dickens's vexed relationship to his own historical commitments.1 Although the French Revolution encompasses the action of the novel and affects all of its characters, to many Dickens has appeared to think that revolutions sometimes needed to be endured so that families might have a proper appreciation for the joys of domesticity.2 György Lukács, writing about Λ Tale in The Historical Novel, mentions the novel only to object that "the weaknesses of Dickens's petty bourgeois humanism and idealism are more obvious and obtrusive" in this novel than in those that Lukács admires and categorizes as the "truly social

Race, Culture, and Openness: An Early Modern Precedent

Abstract: A group of poems praising blackness as an aesthetic and moral quality in human identity remains a startlingly early expression of racial and cultural inclusiveness in early modern English literature. Their author, Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, is remembered today, not without justification, as the founder of English deism. Recent critics have largely ignored the racial and intercultural implications of the poems, preferring instead to study them as liberal prescriptions for institutional religion, or as extended metaphors for Cherbury's epistemological undertakings, wherein blackness becomes a privileged metaphor for the invisibility of universal truth.' I will argue that Cherbury's \"blackness poems\" are not limited in meaning to doctrinal and rhetorical notions. Rather, they express a rare early modern openness, a dialogic stance, towards the cultural other, which Cherbury emblematizes in the colors black and brown. Paralleling his pluralistic theology, these poems effect an important expansion of European identity, and anticipate, by hundreds of years, the relation of intercultural contact to notions of

The Trisected Society: Social Welfare in Early Victorian Fiction

Abstract: Social policy researchers have recently been taking an interest in culture and cultural studies (see, e.g., Clarke 2004). This article arguably opens up a new dialogue in its attempt to elucidate the role that popular culture has played in the evolution of British social policy. Histories of popular culture (e.g. Rose 2001) usually make only passing reference to social policies, while histories of the latter tend not to use popular culture as a source of influential historical documents (e.g. Fraser 2003). The premise of this project is that we achieve only a partial understanding of popular culture and social policy unless we are prepared to relate the two more closely. As a first stage, the following article focuses upon some seminal novels of the 1840s and 1850s, by Dickens, Gaskell, Disraeli, and Kingsley, in their relation to developments in society and welfare policy of the early Victorian period those most commonly seen by critics as significant in relation to \"social problems.\" These novels have been of interest to literary critics since the 1950s but their socialpolicy aspects have often been eclipsed by other disciplinary approaches (cf. Berry 1999). The aim of the article is to examine the novels in this light, as involving implicit sociological and welfare-related discourse that challenged some but not all aspects of classical political economics. In what follows I shall infer from these novels a particular view of industrial society and an accompanying set of precepts for its ethical recoordination.

The Myth of the Salamander in the Work of Ka-Tzetnik

Abstract: In 1945, while recovering from the ordeal of Nazi concentration camps in an Italian hospital and awaiting his passage to Palestine, a survivor who called himself Karl Tzetinski and would become famous under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik, composed, in Yiddish, a novel based on his experience. Its title was Salamandra (\"Salamander\"), and this was also the title of the poem that he composed at the same period. In English the novel appeared under the title Sunrise over Hell (1977). Salamandra was also used by Ka-Tzetnik as the general title of his series of six novels about the Holocaust \"Salamandra: Chronicle of a Jewish Family in the Twentieth-Century.\"1

Faith and Narrative: A Reading of The Franklin's Tale

Abstract: This paper has a twofold objective: to outline a philosophy of narrative1 and to show how it applies to Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale. Central to both will be an elucidation of the concept of faith which is essential to that story. The aim is to show that troth, Chaucer's "trouthe," is ethically prior to truth in the epistemological sense.

Early Ramifications of Theatrical Iconoclasm: The Conversion of Catholic Biblical Plays into Protestant Drama

Abstract: The agenda of the Protestant Reformation included a transformation of the way in which people worshipped by deflecting it away from public spectacle into a more private form that entailed individual prayer and introspection. Residual traces of traditional forms of worship that might jeopardize this complicated task were suspect in view of the magnitude of the change. English iconoclasts therefore considered the removal of sacred images an essential measure for the advancement of the Protestant Reformation. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, supported the iconoclastic campaign; on February 20,1547, during the coronation ceremony, he called on Edward VI \"to see idolatry destroyed . . . and images removed\" (Aston 247). The twenty-eighth injunction issued under King Edward VI in 1547 explicitly directed the clergy to \"take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines, pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition; so that there remain no memory of the same\" (Duffy 480). Interestingly enough, the images of the same revered figures that were being \"pulled down and white-limed\" (Nichols 54) from churches and chapels persisted in theatrical performances. One would have expected the same intolerance shown towards the use of sacred images to apply to the representation of similar figures on stage. However, during the 1550s Protestant playwrights continued to present sacred images on stage. I shall here examine the treatment of sacred imagery which allowed it to appear on stage without explicitly calling to mind Catholic worship. The texts to be analyzed as examples are two Biblical

Recognition and Autobiography

Abstract: In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two year old Australian Rules league footballer and Victorian state cricketer, was involved in a car accident that left him quadriplegic for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The tragedy received extensive press coverage and struck a chord with many in and beyond the Melbourne sporting community. Robert was a brilliant all-round athlete with an impeccable sporting pedigree. He was the latest of the celebrated Rose family of the Collingwood Football Club the most famous sporting club in Australia; a bastion of working class pride located close to the center of Melbourne. Robert's father, Bob, had been one of the greatest ever players for the club and had gone on to coach it. Four of Bob's brothers had also played for the Collingwood 'Magpies'. Later in his career, Bob coached Footscray, another Melbourne working class club. At the time of the accident, Robert too had joined Footscray, was playing state cricket, and might have gone on to bat for Australia. His best-remembered cricketing feat was to put Dennis Lillee, perhaps the finest of all Australian fast bowlers, to the sword at Melbourne's coliseum of sport, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Robert's younger brother, Peter, witnessed the assault on the great fast bowler. Sitting in the top tier of the Northern Stand reading Norman Mailer's autobiography, Peter's attention is drawn to the \"microscopic drama\" (21) unfolding below. Proud as always of his brother's sporting prowess, he forgets about Mailer and becomes part of the rapturous crowd.

Dialectic and Impersonality in T. S. Eliot

Abstract: Critics have long pointed out that the work of T. S. Eliot presents such striking polarities that he seems to be two different persons. This perception, firmly in place by the late 1920s, is based, first, on the discontinuity between his elegant prose and his jagged poetry and, second, on the about-face associated with his mid-life religious conversion. The suspicion of schizophrenia was strengthened by the \"new style\" of his post-conversion poetry and by his venture into social and religious criticism. In the 1930s, following the publication of The Use of Poetry and After Strange Gods, Paul Elmer More expressed frustration with the \"cleft Eliot,\" and Henry Hazlitt claimed that there were at least three Eliots a poet, a critic, and a philosopher and that it was inconceivable that these could be the same person (More 1932; Hazlitt 1932). In the 1940s, W. H. Auden playfully made the same point in a piece for the New Yorker called \"Port and Nuts with the Eliots,\" his plural referring to the notion that \"T. S. Eliot is not a single figure, but a household\" (Auden 1949). There are many versions of

Dickens and the scene of recognition

Abstract: This essay grew out of a lecture I gave at the Dickens Universe hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the summer of 2004.1 would like to thank Helena Michie and John Jordan for inviting me and the participants in the Universe, especially in the faculty seminar, for their remarks and questions. I would also like to thank Lorri Nandrea who read this essay at various stages and whose comments and suggestions were, as always, extremely helpful. 1 Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (New York, 2002), p. 414. All further references to Cave's book will be given in parentheses within the text. I am deeply indebted to Cave's book, which was, in many ways, the inspiration for this essay, and I rely heavily on his insights for the description of the plot of recognition, though my emphasis is often different from his. His argument about the link between recognition, on the one hand, and irreducible particularity and contingency, on the other hand, and his claim that it is precisely as such that recognition can be taken as the figure for fiction, lead him to advocate (even if only in passing and implicitly) a practice of reading marked by a resistance to generalization. \"Anagnorisis [which, he argues, is 'the signature of or synecdoche for fiction'] . . . is the twist that undoes generalization, the twist that brings one back again and again to the recognition of the particular and the accidental\" (255). I myself have argued for such a practice of reading in my book Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Traditional Novel (Stanford, 1996). Insisting on the irreducible specificity of every literary text obviously does not mean claiming for it an irreducible originality; rather, it means insisting on the way a literary text repeats with a difference, in a way that makes a difference. This is what my analysis of the scene of recognition in several Dickens novels will attempt to show.

The Metaphor of Talion

Abstract: Literary theories have accustomed us to welcome the opaqueness of the sign. Poetic discourse, which for modern sensibility has become the focal point of the very question of language, emblematically maintains the \"absolutely pure\" ambiguity of its symbols and the autonomy of its signifying forms (Barthes 1987:71). Essentially untranslatable, the poetic text resists1 the menace of interpretation that attempts to track it down like quarry. It eludes our nets, to re-emerge as an untiring enigma. The Bible in the Jewish tradition is, conversely, a source of religious legislation, a code that governs human existence in all its details. It therefore calls for a univocal reading in order to guarantee uniform conduct. In this sense, it is thought to partake in the values of signification that semiotics has taught us to assign to the domain of prose and everyday language: readability, trans-parence, referentiality. This \"transitive language is the one which seeks to transform reality immediately, not to double it: 'practical' utterances linked to acts, to techniques, to behavior, invocatory utterances linked to rites, since rites too are presumed to open nature\" (Barthes 1972: 268; emphasis added). At the same time, the Bible is also a Text, a sacred and prophetic utterance. As such, it assumes the parameters of a literary work, thus operating in an evasive, sibylline, and infinitely plural way. This ambivalence justifies one's wondering about the status of the Bible in traditional Jewish exegesis, a unique source of inspiration, now praxis now Revelation, divided between the literality of daily life and poetic literariness.2

Russian Literature of 1868: In Search of a "Positively Beautiful Person"

Abstract: In Russian literature of the 1860s, the first attempt to create a character of an ideal human being was made by Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) in his novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). Chemyshevsky's \"unusual man\" (1961: 221), Rakhmetov, was conceived as, in every respect, a harmonious person, and one who is supposed to have achieved this integrity the hard way, as a result of numerous self-inflicted trials. After Chernyshevsky, writers who presented their own versions of an excellent human being tended to follow this hagiographical pattern and connect their heroes' idealized spirituality with a certain deficiency of the flesh, that is, with the suppression of a powerful sexual drive characteristic of ordinary people.1 Rakhmetov's behavior, his way of life, his habits, the advice that he gives Vera Pavlovna regarding her family drama are all determined by the feat which he believes he is preparing to accomplish. Like the Christian martyrs of the first centuries, Rakhmetov deliberately incurs physical and moral ordeals. The author does not explain what his feat might be, but the context of the novel makes it clear that it is revolution. The moral and especially physical hardships for which Rakhmetov trains himself are those which he expects revolutionaries to face. Rakhmetov's character attracted more attention than the novel's

Reading the Body in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

Abstract: At first glance, the title of Juliet McMaster's new book seems to proclaim allegiance to a vast and growing field of contemporary scholarship. In the last decades, numerous researchers and critics have attempted to \"read\" the human body that is, to seek meaning in the myriad ways it has been understood, theorized, experienced and imagined over history. Eighteenth-century studies, their literary branch included, have shared this fascination; the result has been an impressive series of books, articles and dissertations devoted to the question of the body. The richness of this ongoing debate is perhaps best reflected in collections such as Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von MÃ1⁄4cke's Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century (1994) or in the articles on the eighteenth century included in Angela Keane and Avril Horner's Body Matters (2000). The body's place in the writing of particular authors has also been studied in depth for example, in Carol Houlihan Flynn's The Body in Swift and Defoe (1990) and in Tristanne J. Connolly's William Blake and the Body (2002). All of these works can be said to share the goal of \"reading\" the eighteenth-century body, although they vary in their methodological approach to it and examine it in a wide range of contexts.

The Protoliterary: Steps toward an Anthropology of Culture (review)

Abstract: K. Ludwig Pfeiffer's study is a strong response to hasty indictments of literary analysis frequently heard at what appears to be the end of the era of deconstruction; it directs practitioners (as well as the general reader) towards a viable alternative setting for both literature and the humanities in general. By linking the development of the novel, theory, performative discourse, and multiple media with anthropological models of the novel and the world of sport, he has located a number of blind spots in contemporary literary studies. While the actual materials used in the text are not new in the

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (review)

Abstract: A bibliographical search under the rubric \"Shakespeare Biography,\" excluding the more esoteric and narrowly focused works, yields a modest ninety-three items. There is a massive disproportion between this outpouring of scholarship, spanning the last four centuries, and what is actually known of Shakespeare's life. Nevertheless, as Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges, \"assiduous, sometimes obsessive archival research and speculation of many generations of scholars and writers\" (391 ) have produced a proliferation of biographical studies, translating every scant detail into insightful observation. While some of the biographies tend towards the novelistic and fanciful, such as Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun, most reflect an evolving tradition of archival documentation, the best known later examples of which are S. Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (later telescoped into A Compact Documentary Life), and Park Honan's 1998 Shakespeare: A Life. More recently the scarce details of the bard's life have gone on film in the BBC's 2003 documentary Shakespeare, written and presented by Michael Wood, who published a book to complement the series. All of these acknowledge their debt (as does Greenblatt) to the work of E. K. Chambers as well as to the early eighteenth-century biographer Nicholas Rowe and the nineteenth-century Biographical Essays by Thomas De Quincey. The obvious question then seems to be \"why write another one?\" In his Preface, Greenblatt explains that his book \"aims to tread the shadowy paths that lead from the life [Shakespeare] lived, into the literature he created\" (12). In this he draws upon his New Historicist method, reading the plays in terms of early modern cultural realities. In fact, the shadowy paths in the book are two-way: they use aspects of the life in an attempt to account for the work, and they delve into the work in an attempt to fill in the \"huge gaps in knowledge that make any biographical study of Shakespeare an exercise in speculation\" (18). Will in the World is \"exercise in speculation\" that is both entertaining and scholarly. Having avowed this at the start, Greenblatt is free to mine the archives, the biographies, and above all the plays and poems in his attempt to create a coherent and vital picture of the poet. Beginning,