Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 1987"

Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage

Abstract: R ECENT LITERARY historians have pointed out that the English Renaissance theater was an important site of cultural transformation-a place where cultural change was not simply reflected but also rehearsed and enacted (Greenblatt; Moretti; Montrose). Thus it is instructive to examine theatrical representations of gender during that period, for the theater provided an arena where changing gender definitions could be displayed, deplored, or enforced and where anxieties about them could be expressed by playwrights and incited or repressed among their audiences. The English Renaissance stage is an especially interesting subject for gender studies because women's parts were played by boys. As the term gender roles indicates, there is an important sense in which gender is a kind of act for all women, not only for actresses and not only for boys pretending to be women. Sandra Gilbert, for instance, points out that among modern writers, the women, in contrast to the men, perceive the fundamental sexual self as a kind of costume rather than as the naked bedrock reality it seems to their male contemporaries. On a stage where female characters were always played by male actors, feminine gender was inevitably a matter of costume; and in plays where the heroines dressed as boys, gender became doubly problematic, the unstable product of roleplaying and costume, not only in the theatrical representation but also within the fiction presented on stage.1 For a Renaissance audience, the sexual ambiguity of the boy heroine in masculine attire was likely to invoke a widespread and ambivalent mythological tradition centering on the figure of the androgyne (Slights; Hayles, "Ambivalent"). The androgyne could be an image of transcendence-of surpassing the bounds that limit the human condition in a fallen world, of breaking through the constraints that material existence imposes on spiritual aspiration or the personal restrictions that define our roles in society. But the androgyne could also be an object of ridicule or an image of monstrous deformity, of social and physical abnormality. Both these images of the androgyne appear in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, expressing radically different conceptions of human life and society and of dramatic imitation as well. The idealized image of the androgyne supported by Neoplatonic, alchemical, and biblical traditions-appeared frequently in the literature of the sixteenth century (Keach 191). Increasingly, however, the high Renaissance image of the androgyne as a symbol of prelapsarian or mystical perfection was replaced by the satirical portrait of the hermaphrodite, a medical monstrosity or social misfit, an image of perversion or abnormality.2 The spiritualized conception of the supernatural androgyne gave way to a more limited vision, confined within the social and natural worlds of ordinary life, which produced the image of the unnatural hermaphrodite. At the same time, literary theory increasingly subordinated art to nature: nature became the object of artistic imitation and the standard by which art was to be judged.3

Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation

Abstract: The name Oscar Wilde has become one of the best-known indexes of late nineteenth-century male homoerotic desire. To situate Wilde's emergence as “a homosexual” in late nineteenth-century literary contexts and thereby explore the ways that sex-gender ideologies shape specific literary works, I focus first on Teleny, a novel widely attributed to Wilde and one of the earliest examples of male homoerotic pornography. Then, by analyzing the more celebrated and yet manifestly “straight” text The Picture of Dorian Gray, I illustrate that, even in the absence of explicit homosexual terminology or activity, a text can subvert the normative standards for male same-sex behavior. In considering how these works challenge the hegemonic representations of male homoerotic experience in late Victorian Britain, I suggest that textual depictions of male same-sex experience both reproduce and resist the dominant (hetero)sexual ideologies and practices.

The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama

Abstract: A SPECTER IS haunting criticism-the specter of a new historicism. As Jean Howard tells us in a recent Shakespeare Quarterly, "Suddenly indifference to history has been replaced by avid interest. Renaissance journals are full of essays placing the works of Milton, Donne, and Spenser in historical context." And not just Renaissance journals: the trend evident there is "part of a much larger critical movement in the post-structuralist period to rehistoricize literary studies" (236). This movement stems from the perception that poststructuralist criticism in its earlier textualist or deconstructive phase was essentially a continuation of formalism. However interesting at the peripheries, it retained the central impulse of formalism to focus on the text in isolation from human will and desire and from the particular social formation within which will and desire are produced, directed, controlled, satisfied, frustrated. The new historical criticism aims at putting the text back into the context from which it was generated. This emphasis on the cultural production of texts extends to their reception as well. Audiences themselves have will and desire, which also develop in connection with social or cultural authority. Hence the new historicization of literary studies is equally a new politicization, with interpretation judged as an expression of the political interests of the audience-sometimes the contemporary audience, sometimes the modern one, sometimes both. And here again the phenomenon is by no means unique to Renaissance studies. David Simpson points out that in 1983 at least five books focused on "the politics of Romanticism" (81). Moreover, the major theoretical journals have taken a similar course, publishing special issues with titles like The Politics of Interpretation and Nuclear Criticism.' One final example: when Wayne Booth tells us recently in the pages of Critical Inquiry that he is trading in his reliable and efficient "implied reader" for a powerful new vehicle called the "real reader," we may be sure we have turned a corner. But do we know where we are going? And are we sure we want to get there? Putting the text back into history sounds like something we might all want to do, but we should be certain we know what history means and what the practical consequences of such a program are. It also sounds like a good idea to acknowledge the political needs of real audiences, instead of mystifying those needs with some formalist, neo-Kantian Myth of an Audience-as long as we can be persuaded that the real audience is not itself just another myth, another hypothetical construct, and that the politics of literature are not, rather, as Gerald Graff suggests, pseudopolitics. In considering these matters, I focus first on recent commentaries about Renaissance drama, but only as examples; I quickly juxtapose the Renaissance critics with other sorts of writers-such as Althusser, Foucault, and Jameson-who can define new-historicist assumptions in the most general way and who can provide the clearest framework for the questions I want to ask: How do new-historicist critics characterize the text? What do they mean by history? How do they typically understand the relation between the two? Claiming to describe a general or typical new historicism is presumptuous; simply to write about the new historicism is to construct a fiction, a critical fabrication, like the Elizabethan World Picture or the Medieval Mind. Many different and even contradictory critical practices are currently represented as new historicism. Nonetheless, as I understand the project, it is at its core-or, better, at its cutting edge-a kind of "Marxist criticism." The label does not eliminate the problem of typicality or generality; it merely relocates it. By centering the new historicism in Marxist criticism, do I mean classical Marxism or some of the different, "softer" revisions prefaced by neo or post? The answer is that I mean all of them, to the extent that they all view history and contemporary political life as determined, wholly or in essence, by struggle, contestation, power relations, libido dominandi. This assumption, which I find the most problematic aspect of the new historicism, brings me to the last and by far the most important question I want to

Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base

Abstract: A S BEFITS A celebration of reading, I begin by reading a passage. I read it in the context of our situation here and now, in December of 1986, gathered in New York City, bound together by our shared profession as readers of literature, writers about literature, and teachers of literature and of the good writing that only good reading makes possible. It comes from "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan," a section of In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams's great book about America. In the American Grain is a major work of what is these days called "cultural critique." The passage describes Montezuma's capital, one of the high points of world civilization, destroyed by Cortez almost overnight, in the name of European values:

Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English

Abstract: As new literatures in English emerge all over the world, literature in English is increasingly multicultural, but the criticism of these literatures has not fully come to terms with this multiculturalism. Specifically, a work read across cultures is likely to be at least partially unintelligible to some of its readers, and critics have seen this as a factor necessarily limiting the readership of these works. But intelligibility and meaningfulness are not synonymous. This essay analyzes moments of difficulty in four such multicultural texts, by Narayan, Kingston, Anaya, and Ihimaera, showing on Gricean lines that meaning can be created precisely by the struggle to make sense of the unintelligible. The work done in that process can lead to a deeper understanding of the text, and the reader who must do that work is therefore not excluded from a full understanding.

Hisperic Style in the Old English "Rhyming Poem"

Abstract: Les traditions poetiques diverses (vieil-irlandais, vieux norrois, litterature latine carolingienne) et le style lexical du vieil-anglais " R. P. " issu du " Exeter Book "

The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras

Abstract: Marguerite Duras "malady of death," to use Marguerite Duras's term, constitutes our most hidden inner recesses. If the passion for death governs the military and economic domains as well as social and political bonds, this passion now even appears to govern the once noble realm of the mind. Indeed, a monumental crisis in thought and word, a crisis in representation, has occurred. Its analogues can be found in previous centuries (the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, the devastating periods of plague or war during the Middle Ages), and its causes can be sought in the collapse of economic, political, and legal structures. Moreover, the power of destructive forces, both outside and within the individual and society, has never appeared as incontestable and irrevocable as it does today. The destruction of nature, of life and economic resources, is coupled with an outbreak, or simply a more patent manifestation, of the disorders that psychiatry has subtly diagnosed: psychosis, depression, mania, borderline disorders, false personalities, and so on. As horrible as the political and military cataclysms have been, and as much as they defy comprehension by their monstrous violenceconcentration camps or the atomic bomb-the violently intense deflagration of psychic identity remains equally difficult to grasp. Valery was already

Alison's Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath's Tale

Abstract: Chaucer's Wife of Bath longs to counter the assertion of antifeminist satire that women's authority over men is noxious and undeserved. At first it seems that for her tale she chooses romance as the genre that can imagine a worthy sovereignty of secular women, yet she undermines romantic elevation by frequently returning to satiric stances. The generic mixing in her tale signals that romance is inadequate to her argument and indeed that no conventional discourse sustains women's sovereignty. Alison attempts to reach beyond the discourses available to her by destabilizing gender, genre, and gentillesse in her narration, intimating that these categories are flexible and open to new meanings.

Castration, speech acts, and the realist difference: S/Z versus sarrasine

Abstract: N O CONTEMPORARY work has more persuasively challenged traditional views of realist fiction than Roland Barthes's S/Z. Barthes demonstrates that Balzac's Sarrasine systematically undermines every epistemological precondition for the referential specificity normally invoked to define the genre to which texts like Sarrasine belong. The purpose of this article is to interrogate Barthes's dispersal of realist reference by reading Sarrasine through the categories developed by another important challenge to dominant concepts of referentiality, J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts. An example can help specify those aspects of Austin's work relevant to the realist problematic. Imagine a courtroom where a sensational, televised trial is taking place. At a certain moment, the appropriate official comes to the front of the room and says, "Court is now in session." Immediately afterward, a television reporter at the rear of the room announces in a microphone, "Court is now in session." In Austin's terminology, those two utterances of the same locution have radically different illocutionary force. The first is a performative utterance that does not state but acts. If it is not said, court is not in session. The reporter's repetition is in contrast a constative utterance, one that describes a situation independent of its description. Court is in session whether the reporter says so or not. Whereas we can legitimately inquire into the truth value of the reporter's constative words, it makes no sense to ask whether performative utterance of the same words is true or false. Assuming the necessary extraverbal conditions are met, there is no way a performative can fail to be true. Austin's most important insight for contemporary literary theory was of course that the constative-and with it the truth it expresses-is a subcategory of the performative. Performative language succeeds because of the conventions accepted by the sociolinguistic community in which it performs. The same conventions are responsible for language's constative function as a vehicle of truth or falsehood. The officer's "Court is now in session" is an example of words that do things by virtue of those words' position in the system of collective agreements that create the institution of a court and determine when its sessions are official. The reporter's "Court is now in session" is an example of words that say things by virtue of those words' position in the system of collective agreements that constitute the semantic structure of the English language. The conventions that establish a court are qualitatively identical to those that define the word court; the agreements that determine when a session counts are qualitatively identical to those that determine what the word session means. Regardless of whether we want to determine the accuracy or the authority of "Court is now in session," we can make the determination only by examining the historically specific conventions the sentence invokes. Austin's insistence that constative and performative speech depend equally on social conventions is emphatic and repetitive in the final lectures of How to Do Things with Words. "We must notice that the illocutionary act is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a convention" (105). In so noticing, we must also recognize that stating a fact cannot be distinguished from any other form of illocution: "stating is only one among very numerous speech acts of the illocutionary class" (147). In order to tell the truth, constative utterances must conform to the sorts of collectively enforced protocols that authorize such overtly formalized speech act as pronouncements. "Surely to state is every bit as much to perform an illocutionary act as, say, to warn or to pronounce" (134). To his question "What then finally is left of the distinction of the performative and constative utterance?" (145), Austin's implicit answer is "Nothing worth fretting over." Statements of truth, like every other verbal performance, derive validity from the conventions accepted by the community in which they are made. How to Do Things with Words begins by separating performative from constative speech. It ends by collapsing its inaugural distinction. The rich discussions of speech-act theory that followed Austin's lectures have given sustained attention to this dissolution of a founding discrimination. Deconstruc-

Nobel Lecture 1986: This Past Must Address Its Present

Abstract: A rather curious scene, unscripted, once took place in the wings of a London theater at the same time as the scheduled performance was being presented on the actual stage, before an audience. What happened was this: an actor refused to come on stage for his allocated role. Action was suspended. A fellow actor tried to persuade him to emerge, but he stubbornly shook his head. Then a struggle ensued. The second actor had hoped that, suddenly exposed to the audience in full glare of the spotlight, the reluctant actor would have no choice but to rejoin the cast. And so he tried to take the delinquent actor by surprise, pulling him suddenly toward the stage. He did not fully succeed, so a brief but untidy struggle began. The unwilling actor was completely taken aback and deeply embarrassed—some of that tussle was quite visible to a part of the audience.

Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon's Yeoman's Tale

Abstract: Dissonances within texts may result from contradictions within ideology or the contradiction between ideology and history. The disjunctions between the two parts of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, between both parts and the ending, and the gaps within each of the parts can be explained as arising with the contradiction between Chaucer's ideological project in the tale—an attack on the emergence of productive capital—and the literary means for the attack. The result is a confession told without moral content and then a fabliau made to serve Christian morality. Productive capital, which is virtually unrepresented elsewhere in the Chaucerian canon, is both invisible and glaring in the tale; and it competed in Chaucer's London with commercial capital, which reinforced the feudal aristocracy as well as depended on it.

Dickinson and Patriarchal Meter: A Theory of Metrical Codes

Abstract: An analysis of Emily Dickinson's metrics suggests that her meters—even in individual lines of poetry—can be read as signs for the connotations they have acquired and for the cultural contexts that have empowered them. Iambic pentameter, the dominant meter in Dickinson's poetic lineage and culture, although rare in her work, plays a significant role in some of her most famous poems. Dickinson's iambic pentameters usually occur in a dynamic with her ordinary meter, the hymn stanza, a relation that reflects her ambivalence toward the male-identified poetic authority represented by iambic pentameter. Reading key poems for their semantic-metrical connections—the ways in which the semantic and metrical levels comment on each other—illuminates Dickinson's association of canonical poetic strength with patriarchal structures such as Christianity, with social conventions of fame and power, and with both triumph and failure.

Women’s Speech and Silence in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec

Abstract: The speech behavior of Erec and his wife, Enite, in Hartmann's late twelfth-century Arthurian epic seems to support the view that women in strongly patriarchal societies are expected to speak with ...

Never-Ending Story: Carmen Martín Gaite’s The Back Room

Abstract: It would be deceptively easy for a critic defining the central conflict of The Back Room, Carmen Martin Gaite's first post-Franco novel, to sort out a series of polar forces-chaos and order, memory...

"When You Call Me That... ": Tall Talk and Male Hegemony in the Virginian

Abstract: Owen Wister's The Virginian, considered the prototypical cowboy western, only vaguely satisfies formula expectations. Encounters consist more of wordplay than gunplay, and physical conflicts rarely...

Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's “Clay”

Abstract: Traditional allegorical readings of Joyce's Dubliners story “Clay” have tended to collude with the story's rhetorical aim of aggrandizing the figure of Maria. The estimation of the “old maid” is indeed the story's crux, and the exigencies of desire compel the manipulative textual strategies that render the story ambiguous and produce conflicting interpretations. The story thereby achieves a fine dramatization of the precarious ontology of the old maid, a dramatization in which the fragmented reader (whose ear and eye are in conflict) participates as a principal actor.

Garcilaso's Poetics of Subversion and the Orpheus Tapestry

Abstract: O RPHEUS LOST Eurydice to the underworld. Given the chance to restore his wife to the world of light and life, Orpheus disobeyed the injunction not to look back and lost her forever. Then, as he had earlier left spirits spellbound in Hades, the poet and lover enchanted beasts, trees, and stones with his piercing lament in the living world. This poignant tale of the mysterious lyrist was appropriated by poets of the Spanish Golden Age, including Garcilaso de la Vega (1501[?]-36), whose imitation in his third eclogue engages his models in an intertextual dialogue. The Renaissance imitation of models is clearly a form of intertextuality, the act of writing by which a text emerges as a product of prior texts.I Terence Cave speaks of this interplay of texts within the framework of sixteenth-century theories of imitation:

William Bradford's American Sublime

Abstract: But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same. Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went before), they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour. It is recorded in Scripture as a mercy to the Apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they met with them (as after will appear) were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men-and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world. If it be said they had a ship to succour them, it is true; but what heard they daily from the master and company? But that with speed they should look out a place (with their shallop) where they would be, at some near distance; for the season was such as he would not stir from thence till a safe harbor was discovered by them, where they would be, and he might go without danger; and that victuals consumed apace but he must and would keep sufficient for themselves and their return. Yea, it was muttered by some that if they got not a place in time, they would turn them and their goods ashore and leave them. Let it also be considered what weak hopes of supply and succour they left behind them, that might bear up their minds in this sad condition and trials they were under; and they could not but be very small. It is true, indeed, the affections and love of their brethren at Leyden was cordial and entire towards them, but they had little power to help them or themselves; and how the case stood before them and the merchants at their coming away hath already been declared. What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: "Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity," etc. "Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies endure forever." "Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His lovingkindness and His wonderful works before the sons of men." (61-63)

Defining the “Colonial Reader”: El Periquillo Sarniento

Abstract: El Periquillo Sarniento, the first Spanish American novel, by Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi, was published in Nueva Espana in 1816. The book's reception at that moment, when Mexico was fighting for independence, cries out for a reader-response interpretation sensitive to the social realities of production and consumption. In the title of this essay the “colonial reader” emphasizes the political nature of the reading process for this particular work, but the quotation marks suggest general applicability. Lizardi's sense of his readers' varying orientations to a book—from a rigidly European literary taste to an American desire for plain expression—dictated the design of this indigenous work. Lizardi, like the writers of the “new Spanish American novel” later, understood the need for a radically different literary language, one that would urge readers to question inherited forms and to revalue existing speech.