Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 2002"
TL;DR: In the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility as mentioned in this paper, and references to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound.
Abstract: At the turn of the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility. References to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. In this heady environment, new technologies promise ever-increasing powers of transformation and transport—applied to information, business, and self—and the benefits of surveillance and tracking. More and more in this context, the concept of a person or of human beings appears to depend on the attenuated possibilities of cyberspace. If the heavy, even immovable, facts of embodied existence can be ameliorated or discharged through the creation of new identities on the Internet, for example, or through new collective personas or communities, then what or who counts as a person becomes transformed. (CK)
57 citations
TL;DR: There is a passage in David Lodge's 1988 novel nice work in which the heroine, a marxist-feminist critic who teaches English literature, looks out the window of an airplane and sees the division of labor as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: There is a passage in David Lodge's 1988 Novel nice work in which the heroine, a marxist-feminist critic who teaches English literature, looks out the window of an airplane and sees the division of labor. Factories, shops, offices, schools, beginning the working day. People crammed into rush-hour buses and trains, or sitting at the wheels of their cars in traffic jams, or washing up breakfast things in the kitchens of pebble-dashed semis. All inhabiting their own little worlds, oblivious of how they fitted into the total picture. The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea, gave no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action possible: the building and maintenance of the power station that produced the electricity, the mining of coal or pumping of oil to fuel the generators, the laying of miles of cable to carry the current to her house, the digging and smelting and milling of ore or bauxite into sheets of steel or aluminum, the cutting and pressing and welding of the metal into the kettle's shell, spout and handle, the assembling of these parts with scores of other components—coils, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, rivets, wires, springs, rubber insulation, plastic trimmings; then the packaging of the kettle, the advertising of the kettle, the marketing of the kettle, to wholesale and retail outlets, the transportation of the kettle to warehouses and shops, the calculation of its price, and the distribution of its added value between all the myriad people and agencies concerned in its production and circulation. The housewife gave no thought to all this as she switched on her kettle.
51 citations
TL;DR: The border is the state's most undemocratic condition, its discretionary exemption from democracy as discussed by the authors, and to democratize the border, one must democratize this nondemocratic aspect of democratic sovereignty, a task that would be juridically difficult but would be an act of political realism none the less.
Abstract: The work of the distinguished French political theorist and philosopher Etienne Balibar has emerged as profoundly significant in shaping post-1968 debates around class, race, national sovereignty, citizenship, and international human rights. The following essay is particularly relevant to this issue of PMLA insofar as the essay signals the importance of the border as a limit case for globalization and reflects on what the philosophical bases of citizenship would be in a postnational order of Europe.
Borders, Balibar suggests, are products of the state's attributing to itself a right to property, which becomes, in turn, a limit case of institutions (their means of self-stabilization) that allows them to control subjects rather than be subject to their control. The police power of border control is the state's most undemocratic condition, its discretionary exemption from democracy. To democratize the border, he maintains, one must democratize this nondemocratic aspect of democratic sovereignty, a task that would be juridically difficult but that would be an act of political realism none the less, since borders inevitably shift whether nations want them to or not, redefined by socially trans bordered, culturally transnational, and economically global spaces.
49 citations
TL;DR: The price of eternal vigilance is indifference as mentioned in this paper, which is the price for eternal vigilance, and yet, nothing is being done to prevent a genocide in Bosnian Muslims in full view of the world's television cameras.
Abstract: The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (30)
Here in Sarajevo, hundreds of TV crews parade before our very eyes; dozens of foreign journalists, reporters, and writers. Everything is known here, right down to minutest details, and yet, nothing …
—Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger (qtd. in Dizdarevic 39) With these epigraphs I aim to abbreviate a frequently cited “lesson of bosnia”——That a country was destroyed and a genocide happened, in the heart of Europe, on television, and what is known as the world or the West simply looked on and did nothing. Bosnians, said one to the American journalist David Rieff, “felt as you would feel if you were mugged in full view of a policeman and he did nothing to rescue you” (140). Or, as Rieff says with slightly more precision, 200,000 Bosnian Muslims died, in full view of the world's television cameras, and more than two million other people were forcibly displaced. A state formally recognized by the European Community and the United States […] and the United Nations […] was allowed to be destroyed. While it was being destroyed, UN military forces and officials looked on, offering “humanitarian” assistance and protesting […] that there was no will in the international community to do anything more. (23)
34 citations
TL;DR: A linguist, psychoanalyst, critical theorist, and novelist, Julia Kristeva as mentioned in this paper was the first to publish a novel, La revolution du langage poetique (Revolution in Poetic Language).
Abstract: JULIA KRISTEVA is a linguist, psychoanalyst, critical theorist, and novelist. She moved to Paris from her native Bulgaria in 1966 and began her prolific career with contributions to literary reviews, notably Tel quel, before the 1974 publication of her monumental doctoral thesis, La revolution du langage poetique (Revolution in Poetic Language). Kristeva teaches at the Universite de Paris VII, where she directs the doctoral program in textual studies and the newly founded Institut Roland Barthes.
31 citations
TL;DR: Many Romantic poets were fascinated by the idea that a special historical sense could hear the cultural difference of remote epochs in the sound of the sea or of the wind as discussed by the authors, and they attempted to imagine a new kind of secular afterlife that fused nature and history, thereby combining the permanence of a natural process with the consoling collectivity of social existence.
Abstract: Many Romantic poets were fascinated by the idea that a special historical sense could hear the cultural difference of remote epochs in the sound of the sea or of the wind. This essay traces that fascination back to late-eighteenth-century attempts to imagine a new kind of secular afterlife that fused nature and history, thereby combining the permanence of a natural process with the consoling collectivity of social existence. The most influential parts of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems were the ostensibly archaic ghosts who literalized Enlightenment fantasies about this form of historical immortality. In poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Felicia Hemans, historical sensations function as intimations of immortality and as signs of culture’s primacy over other forms of class distinction. The essay closes by suggesting that late-twentieth-century film and literary criticism continue to promise their audiences a similar kind of earthly immortality. (TU)
26 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto" and his personal poetry are explored. But the authors argue that O’Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry, but instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience.
Abstract: This essay explores the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” and his personal poetry. Though these works have recently been celebrated for their candid expression of homosexual desire during a cultural moment set on silencing queer voices, I argue the inverse. Focusing on O’Hara’s ambivalent relation to a calcified poetics of impersonality promoted by New Critics and confessional poets, I suggest that O’Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry. He instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a fantastic space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience. Apparent in poems such as “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) and “Personal Poem,” this project enables the poet to fashion an intimately imagined queer community that facilitates impersonal identifications. Through personism, that is, O’Hara fabricates an alternative public sphere in which public individuals paradoxically become visibly invisi...
25 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that decadence represented a sterile and ultimately failed attempt to defy social and cultural norms and, second, that the movement was antithetical to the scientific culture of the nineteenth century, and that the failures of the subject were the logical consequence of a scientific spirit that, by the end of the century, increasingly ignored the demands of utilitarianism and fixated on the pursuit of experimental knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences.
Abstract: This essay challenges two established critical assumptions about late Victorian literary decadence: first, that decadence represented a sterile and ultimately failed attempt to defy social and cultural norms and, second, that the movement was antithetical to the scientific culture of the nineteenth century. Decadence is instead shown to be the logical consequence of a scientific spirit that, by the end of the century, increasingly ignored the demands of utilitarianism and fixated on the pursuit of experimental knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the “failures” of the subject that so frequently mark the end of accounts of decadence such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Collins’s Heart and Science, and Machen’s The Great God Pan represent the triumph of a historically specific experimental ethos that valued the transcendence of conventional epistemology over the discovery of useful knowledge. (CF)
25 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the psychoanalytic theory is less a vehicle to be abandoned or replaced and more something organic and renewable, an evolving body of ideas that provides techniques for reading.
Abstract: But look more carefully […]. [T]here is something other, some strewn matter, that does not absorb […]. —Adam Thorpe, Ulverton Declaring Psychoanalysis “Finally Dead and buried” is “one of the seasonal rituals of our intellectual life” (Žižek 7). In the latest salvo of this battle, Lee Patterson rehearses the argument that debunking the scientific base of Freudianism renders the theory useless to the humanities, and he objects particularly to the application of psychoanalytic models to medieval texts—an exercise, for him, in anachronistic reasoning. Patterson's claim recalls earlier rounds led by Stephen Greenblatt and, a decade before that, in a more totalizing vein, by Frederick Crews. My title indicates my interest in the dispute: where Patterson calls psychoanalysis an “ambulance” or “hearse” (656), I argue that the theory is less a vehicle to be abandoned or replaced and more something organic and renewable—an evolving body of ideas that provides techniques for reading. However, in this short essay I will not construct an apologia for psychoanalytic theory generally but take on the more limited task of characterizing recent uses of the theory in critical engagements with early modern texts. Salient qualities of this work have been overlooked by those who demonize psychoanalysis (a habit suggested by Žižek's image) or are allergic to anything linked to Freud.
24 citations
TL;DR: Montaigne's most famous essay, "Of Cannibals" emerges as a radical response to this question when examined in the context of his time's religious polemic, a context from which the essay borrows much of its imagery as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: What might the Mass resemble among a people who never experienced the Fall? Montaigne's most famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” emerges as a radical response to this question when examined in the context of his time's religious polemic, a context from which the essay borrows much of its imagery. Unlike Protestant controversialists who disparaged Catholic eucharistic rites as barbarous, Montaigne suggests such religious prejudices prove little better than the cultural ones under which New World natives labored. He elects to pursue a line of religious inquiry opened up by Renaissance speculation that Amerindians might constitute a non-Adamite race in order to conduct a personal exploration of alternative practices of faith. This two-mindedness with regard to religion suggests that characterizations of Montaigne need to step beyond the categories of believer and unbeliever. Abandoning tendencies toward denominationalism and, more generally, toward affixing labels to heterodoxy allows for an investigation of the fully idiosyncratic experience of early modern belief.
23 citations
TL;DR: Keats's Lamia emerges here as the consummate Romantic monster, a vision of life conceived beyond the material fact of organization as discussed by the authors, which is a brilliant if tragic response to the question of what it means to "[d]ie into life".
Abstract: The aesthetic definition of monstrosity underwent a change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from a concept of deformity to a notion of monstrosity as too much life. Scientific discourse between 1780 and 1830 was preoccupied with the idea of a living principle that could distinguish living matter from nonliving, and the physiologist John Hunter posited an even more speculative “principle of monstrosity” as an extension of the formative capacity. Such monstrosity did not remain on the level of theory but became the motivating force for a new kind of monster in the literature of the Romantic period. Keats’s Lamia emerges here as the consummate Romantic monster—a vision of life conceived beyond the material fact of organization. Viewed in this light, Lamia, no mere narrative swerve from Keats’s epic ambitions, is a brilliant if tragic response to the question of what it means to “[d]ie into life.” (DG)
TL;DR: Milton's "Lycidas" as discussed by the authors deploys a variety of matrimonial references within an elegiac context that simultaneously manifests anxiety over feminine sexuality, and the result is a poem whose erotic investments, coexisting as they do with a general preference for masculine over feminine companionship, tend to settle into patterns of same-sex attachment.
Abstract: Milton’s “Lycidas” deploys a variety of matrimonial references—classical and Christian—within an elegiac context that simultaneously manifests anxiety over feminine sexuality. The result is a poem whose erotic investments, coexisting as they do with a general preference for masculine over feminine companionship, tend to settle into patterns of same-sex attachment. These culminate in the “unexpressive nuptial song” of the poem’s conclusion, which figures spiritual consummation in matrimonial terms while implicitly positioning Lycidas in the role of bride. (BB)
TL;DR: Ash, Timothy Garton as discussed by the authors, Timothy G. "True Confessions." New York Re'O5~ view of Books 17 July 1997: 33-34, 36-37.
Abstract: ~O ~ Ash, Timothy Garton. "True Confessions." New York Re'O5~ view of Books 17 July 1997: 33-34, 36-37. 'O Friedman, Roger. "Widows to Testify at Hearings." Cape Times 15 Apr. 1996. Independent Online. 16 Apr. 1996 . E "Killing of Amy Biehl." Pt. 1. Amnesty Hearings and Deci'0nV ~ sions. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 13 Nov. 2001 . ,^, ~ Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New ^Of: ~ York: Random, 1998. Ita ~ Long Night's Journey into Day. Dir. Frances Reid and DebIt*v ~ orah Hoffman. California Newsreel, 2000. Minow, Martha. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon, 1998.
TL;DR: The Complaint of the Virgin this paper explores a woman's exemplary transition from subversive investment in private connection and private suffering to self-abnegation and participation in public power, and provides a model for Hoccleve's own movements between marginalized interiority and public rhetoric.
Abstract: What is the relation between Marian lament and the distinctively modern, autobiographical complaints of Thomas Hoccleve? What, moreover, is the relation between Hoccleve's performances of private misery and his ability to offer advice and counsel to princes? This article argues that Hoccleve's “Complaint of the Virgin” can teach us to recognize the complex interweaving of gender, genre, ideality, and excess that informs Hocclevean complaints more generally. “The Complaint of the Virgin” explores a woman's exemplary transition from subversive investment in private connection and private suffering to self-abnegation and participation in public power. In doing so, the poem provides a model for Hoccleve's own movements between marginalized interiority and public rhetoric—and for his meditation between Lancastrian subjects and their sovereign. The Virgin offers a lesson in the 1364 Abstracts [PMLA pleasures and power of complaint, the disciplining of interiority, and the production of social relations through spectacle and sacrifice.
TL;DR: The authors argue that as economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns.
Abstract: Paradoxical as it may appear, isn't it through the rights of man that transpires today—at a planetary level—the worst discriminations?
—Jean Baudrillard, Les mots de passe Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.
TL;DR: Gomez-Pena as discussed by the authors traces recent developments in the work of Mexican American performance artists, whose earlier interests in immigration, transnationalism, and border-crossing art have increasingly led him to reflect on the promises and dangers cyberspace poses for racially minoritized groups.
Abstract: In the study of postmodern technocultures, including computer-mediated communication and popular narratives about cyberspace, the status of embodiment has emerged as a key question, especially in the context of popular rhetorics that imagine the Internet as a site of freedom from embodied particularity. But while analyses of gender bending and sexual performance on the Internet abound, the future of race in cyberspace has been relatively neglected. This essay traces recent developments in the work of the Mexican American performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, whose earlier interests in immigration, transnationalism, and border-crossing art have increasingly led him to reflect on the promises and dangers cyberspace poses for racially minoritized groups, to the extent that people who use or study the Internet fantasize cyberspace as a site of subjective border crossing and identity play. The essay looks at the theme of virtual reality in specific performances and at Gomez-Pena's incorporation of new technologies into his work.
TL;DR: The authors explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity, and the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated.
Abstract: This article explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity. In the modern uncoupling of identities from fixed homelands, the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated. In an emerging configuration that interrogates the subject-centered perspective of occidental humanism, we are invited to consider the transit of language, whether in literary expression, television realism, or musical rhythm, as the site of an ongoing elaboration that is irreducible to a single point of view or to the transparency desired by a unilateral politics. Where no culture, history, or identity remains immune to the interruptions and interrogations of a multiple modernity that no longer merely mirrors the First World, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship need to be reconsidered radically. (IC)
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a more comprehensive view of globalization than they do when read separately, and they explore the shape that emerges from their interactions, highlighting the ways in which they challenge and complement one another.
Abstract: Globalization is such a large concept that it forces us all into the position of the blind men examining an elephant—able to articulate the part we touch but not able to grasp the whole. So it is with the provocative papers in this issue by Mark Poster, Bruce Robbins, and Thomas Keenan, along with Emily Apter's introduction. Each makes excellent points but also mounts a different argument. As a group they present a more comprehensive view of globalization than they do when read separately, and I want to explore the shape that emerges from their interactions. I see my task less as weaving them into a seamless tapestry than as highlighting the ways in which they challenge and complement one another. By pointing out the incompleteness as well as the accomplishment of each, I want to show that together they suggest new interactions between the local and the global and, through these interactions, new possibilities for political awareness and action.
TL;DR: In Memoriam as mentioned in this paper, Tennyson's In Memoriam suggests that poetic knowledge may precede and shape scientific knowledge, from widespread anxiety regarding the death of the sun through religious invocations of the conservation of energy.
Abstract: Tennyson's In Memoriam suggests that poetic knowledge may precede and shape scientific knowledge. Struggling with the implications and possibilities of Victorian energy physics even as that science came into being, Tennyson anticipates not only the laws of thermodynamics but also many of the ways these ideas suffuse Victorian thought, from widespread anxieties regarding the death of the sun through religious invocations of the conservation of energy. In Memoriam at once evokes the roots of physical theory in Romantic elegy and suggests the elegiac structure and function of Victorian physical discourse; like In Memoriam, the laws of thermodynamics effect a reconciliation between the dissipation we observe and the conservation we crave. Moreover, as Tennyson reconceives waste as transformation in the natural world, In Memoriam also reveals a surprising relation between energy physics and another emergent science, evolutionary biology.
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TL;DR: A gifted undergraduate came to me with some urgent questions: Should he major in literature? And if he did, what practical benefits might he realize? I asked one question: “Are you in love?” By this I meant, "Are they in love with literature?" And then I inquired, “Does your heart skip a beat when you encounter your love? Do they ache when the two of you are separated? Do you resent anything that intrudes on you and your love?"
Abstract: Recently, a gifted undergraduate came to me with some urgent questions: Should he major in literature? And if he did, what practical benefits might he realize? I asked one question: “Are you in love?” By this I meant, “Are you in love with literature?” Then I inquired, “Does your heart skip a beat when you encounter your love? Do you ache when the two of you are separated? Do you resent anything that intrudes on you and your love?”
TL;DR: One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall recently to explain how happy she was to have reached a moment in her academic career when she no longer had to teach literature.
Abstract: One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall recently to explain how happy she was to have reached a moment in her academic career when she no longer had to teach literature. Another colleague buttonholed me at about the same time to tell me he could no longer imagine teaching literature in any context other than cultural studies-that is, in a setting in which the literary text was at most an illustration of an ideological, historical, or theoretical theme, no different from any other cultural manifestation. No wonder undergraduates demonstrate dwindling interest in taking a major in literature. For a host of reasons, they come to the university less interested in studying literature than previous generations of students were, only to encounter on their arrival professors who are more than occasionally apathetic toward or suspicious of literary texts. Student disenchantment can only grow in such circumstances.
TL;DR: This paper investigated the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997), by analyzing two related motifs, the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse.
Abstract: This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic, My Brother also overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.
TL;DR: Waters as mentioned in this paper argued that the overproduction of monographs required of tenure candidates "conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past thirty years [...]" (B7).
Abstract: Education complements his "Modest Proposal [. . .]" in PMLA. The longer Chronicle piece insistently deploys the concept of crisis that presided over a 1997 conference of humanities scholars, librarians, and editors, The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis (Case). According to Waters, the overproduction of monographs required of tenure candidates "conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past thirty years [...]" (B7). "Above all," he avers, "the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership" that implicates the university: "the problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the problem of the university [.. .]," an institution "increasingly committed to business values" (B8). In this university in which "the humanities have grown to be beside the point," Waters submits, the increased stress on the tenure monograph during the eighties and nineties is the most evident symptom of an ill-conceived professionalization of the humanities. Although I would dispense with the rhetoric of crisis, I concur with much of Waters's diagnosis and welcome his proposal in PMLA to shift the tenure standard from the monograph to essays in scholarly journals. He is right in asserting that too many mediocre, largely superfluous books are published and right in worrying that the proliferation of verbiage young scholars encounter-for example, at the MLA Annual Convention book exhibit-impels them to organize their professional commitments irrationally. It does so not merely by monopolizing their time but often, as Waters notes, by disallowing a trajectory that would carry a substantial, exacting project of research and writing through to full maturation. The numerous and familiar reservations occasioned by this structuring of the professorial career around the monograph required for tenure clearly warrant the kind of proposal Waters has advanced. My question, from the administrator's standpoint, is whether trying to implement it without a more comprehensive scheme for reform would make much more sense than simply allowing market and technological forces to run their course.
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the articulation of transgressive desires in Reinaldo Arenas's "El Cometa Halley", a parodic continuation of Federico Garcia Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba.
Abstract: This essay analyzes the articulation of transgressive desires in Reinaldo Arenas’s “El Cometa Halley,” a parodic continuation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba. I argue that by moving the Alba sisters from Spain to Cuba and liberating their repressed sexualities, Arenas pursues his fantasies of sexual freedom. Linking his rewriting of Garcia Lorca to the historically significant arrival of Halley’s comet in 1910, Arenas relies on the comet’s phallic tail to set the story in motion. More specifically, “El Cometa Halley” sketches a preoedipal fantasy of mother-son incest that recurs in Arenas’s life and work. (JO)
TL;DR: The authors argue that the value of studying literature is precisely that it poses value as a question, not an answer, and that faculty members implicitly answer this question all the time, in the courses they teach, especially in introductory, or "gateway" courses.
Abstract: IF THE VALUE OF THE STUDY OF LITERAture were self-evident, there would be no need to pose this question. That such is not the case is clear from the virulence of the debates about higher education in the humanities that have roiled the profession and areas beyond. Professors of literature have had a lot to say to one another about this question but not, perhaps, as much to say to their students. Yet faculty members implicitly answer this question all the time, in the courses they teach, especially in introductory, or "gateway," courses. I will address the question, then, as concretely as possible, by way of the introductory course for the English major my colleagues and I have designed together and discussed repeatedly over the past two decades at Wesleyan University. In so doing, I will argue that the value of studying literature is precisely that it poses value as a question, not an answer. The broadest rubric for English 201, The Study of Literature, is "word, work, world"; we're willing to suffer the alliteration for the conceptual good it does. We introduce students to the complexities of language as made evident in metaphors and other tropes (at the level of the word); we demonstrate how literary texts elaborate arguments through figurative language and the structuring processes of narrative (the level of the work); and we teach students that all of literature, from word through work, is a worldly phenomenon with a history and a part to play in human affairs.
TL;DR: In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established in 1995 to facilitate national reconciliation by creating a public record of human rights violations as mentioned in this paper, which was used by the TRC to facilitate the creation of a new national narrative.
Abstract: CAN THE SOCIAL SPHERE EVER BE A SPHERE of forgiveness? This possibility is being tested in South Africa in the operations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). During the past seven years, writing, guilt, and forgiveness have converged in powerful and controversial ways as the TRC process facilitates the public production of a discourse of forgiveness. In many instances, the unforgivable has been forgiven in the construction of a new national narrative. As part of the negotiations leading to the adoption of a democratic constitution, the TRC was established in 1995 to facilitate national reconciliation by creating a public record of human rights violations. In a series of public hearings, two thousand victims testified about their experiences of abuse. Perpetrators appeared in a second set of hearings in an attempt to gain amnesty, which was given only if the applicant fully disclosed the abuses committed and demonstrated a political motivation for doing so. By November 2000 the TRC had refused 5,392 applications and granted 849 amnesties (“Summary”). Some opposed the amnesty provisions, contending that governments have a legal duty to prosecute human rights violators, but others argued that the only way to achieve a peaceful reconciliation in South Africa was through a complete public accounting, unlikely to occur in legal prosecutions. Some observers may consider the amnesty provision a form of forgiveness, but the Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow notes that the TRC grants perpetrators legal immunity, not forgiveness, in a public process that insists on standards of justice, in contrast with blanket amnesties such as those issued in Chile, which encouraged social amnesia about past abuses. In South Africa, individuals must specifically request amnesty, openly acknowledge that they committed abuses, and live with this social identification. Yet they are not required to indicate remorse or ask for forgiveness. In the language of speech-act theory, perpetrators’ statements are required to be constative (conveying information) but not illocutionary (performing an act). Minow explains, “The healing sought by the TRC does not require apologies or forgiveness. On behalf of bystanders and perpetrators, as well as victims, it seeks to reestablish a baseline of right and wrong” (78). By encouraging the formerly voiceless to speak and perpetrators to reveal their secrets, the TRC hopes to construct a historical record that will create a new climate of respect for civil rights. Many South African church leaders were involved in the design of the TRC, and its religious roots are unmistakable. This is apparent in the choice of the charismatic Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu as the commission chair, in the opening and closing of each session with prayer, and in the rituals of hymn singing and candle lighting that punctuated the hearings. Our work was “profoundly spiritual,” Tutu says (No Future 80). At the first meeting of theTRC, on 16 December 1995, Tutu overtly established the narrative framework of the commission in Christian terms: “We will be engaging in what should be a corporate nationwide process of healing through contrition, confession and forgiveness” (“Address”). As the title of his book on the TRC process reflects, Tutu repeatedly argued that South Africa had “no future without forgiveness” and urged South Africans to move toward reconciliation. The language used by commissioners and victims alike was often the language of forgiveness. “I Want to Say: / Forgive Me”: South African Discourse and Forgiveness
TL;DR: Renato Rosaldo as mentioned in this paper interviewed a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery in the Ilongots, asking if it ever happened that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse.
Abstract: One of my favorite anthropological anecdotes is one Renato Rosaldo tells from his fieldwork among the Ilongots in the highland Philippines in the late 1960s. He was interviewing a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery. Did it ever happen, he wondered, that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse? The woman, uneasy and embarrassed, acknowledged that she did recall a few occasions when this had happened among the Ilongots: At one point she stopped short in mid-tale and asked, “Does this kind of thing happen in your country?” I laughed. Hoping to reassure her, I said that Americans committed adultery much more often than Ilongots. […] A look of shock spread over her face as she asked, “You mean it's spread?” (101)
TL;DR: Soyinka as discussed by the authors asserted that the United States is one of the most insular, mono-linguistic communities [he has] ever encountered in his life, along with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of The Monolingualism of the Other, and Bei Ling, a dissident Chinese poet, translator, and editor, Soyinka is on the executive board of Irvine's new center, an initiative funded by a large endowment from Glenn Schaeffer, a successful Las Vegas casino executive.
Abstract: Common though it may be in most of the United States today, monolingualism is an aberration in most of the world. In western Europe, for example, primary schools teach foreign languages to young children; in urban areas of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, switching between local, vernacular languages and national tongues is a common daily occurrence among all citizens, even those who may not be literate in the traditional Western sense. In a speech for the formal inauguration of the University of California, Irvine's new International Center for Writing and Translation on 5 April 2002, the 1986 Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka, asserted that the United States is “one of the most insular, mono-linguistic communities [he has] ever encountered in [his] life.” Along with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of The Monolingualism of the Other, and Bei Ling, a dissident Chinese poet, translator, and editor, Soyinka is on the executive board of Irvine's new center, an initiative funded by a large endowment from Glenn Schaeffer, a successful Las Vegas casino executive (Johnson E1, E3).
TL;DR: In a later essay by Chow, the authors, such specificity is dissolved in an affirmation of the mutual implication of cultural studies and poststructuralist theory ("Theory") for Japanese literature.
Abstract: 2 For more on the postwar United States reception of Japanese literature, see Field 232-41. 3 On the dynamic of literature as ornament and as information in area studies, see Chow, "Politics." This essay, a valuable critique of area studies generally, is especially fine on the teaching of literature as resistance to such instrumentalization (132). In a later essay by Chow, such specificity is dissolved in an affirmation of the mutual implication of cultural studies and poststructuralist theory ("Theory").