Showing papers in "South Central Review in 1995"

Aging and gender in literature : studies in creativity

Abstract: By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age. The editors have brought together original work by a range of scholars, including Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, the two most influential theorists of ageing; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, the historian at work on a major life-span study of the Percys of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana; and a number of literary scholars from classics, English and modern languages. The contributors note that a culturally constructed "decline narrative" has dominated literary theory for some time. Yet their research indicates several different patterns of late-life writing, most of which challenge these negative assumptions. Utilising the insights of social psychologists, who have demonstrated that creativity depends upon a fruitful interaction between individual talent and the larger literary world, the contributors show that writers' reactions to ageing are determined partly by cultural attitudes toward gender. This book combines ageing theory with literary analysis. It demonstrates that literature plays an important role in the construction of gerontological theory and that ageing is as important a category in literary analysis as gender, race, class and sexual orientation. "Ageing and Gender in Literature" bridges the long-standing gap between literature and social science and demonstrates how enriching such an integration can be. Scholars of literature, feminism, gerontology and anyone curious about the development of creativity over the life course, should find this book of interest.

The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture@@@Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women

Abstract: In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

Michel Foucault the Orientalist: On Revolutionary Iran and the "Spirit of Islam"

Abstract: Uta Liebmann Schaub has observed that a meeting of East and West occurs in the writings of Michel Foucault where, she asserts, a strong undercurrent of Buddhist thought is detectable. Although he never explicitly acknowledged its influence, Foucault appears to have been seduced by a radical otherness in Eastern philosophy, consistently drawing upon its premises in his historical critique of modern Western subjectivity. Surprisingly, in her analysis of Foucault's "oriental subtext," Schaub makes no mention of a cluster of writings published between September 1978 and May 1979 in which Foucault encountered what is arguably Western civilization's most enduring and menacing Oriental other: the world of Islam. Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchat's Iran: La Revolution au nom de Dieu (1979) includes one such text, an interview with Foucault entitled "L'Esprit d'un monde sans esprit"'3 in which he commented extensively upon the politico-religious fervor that erupted in opposition to the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s. In this interview and numerous other writings on the subject, Foucault extolled the virtues of Iran's revolutionary "spirit," remaining, I shall argue, singularly uncritical in his appraisal of the emancipatory potential and of the new subjectivity it was to bestow upon the Iranian people.4 Given Foucault's intellectual preoccupation with questions of power and moralizing discourses of corporal constraint, the largely unqualified enthusiasm he expressed for the Islamic revolution in Iran is perplexing indeed. His ardor is even more baffling when one considers that much of the repressive machinery set in motion immediately following the Shah's departure in February 1979 was directly applied-much like the disciplinary regimen he reproves in Surveiller et punir (1975)-to the body and soul of the Iranian populace, introducing levels of coercion unfathomable even under the Shah's ruthless reign. Judging from statements made in that interview and in his numerous articles published in the fall of 1978 and the spring of 1979 in both the French press and the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera,5 when he cast his Western intellectual gaze upon what for many progressive observers was a dumbfounding event in the history of modem national liberation movements, Foucault produced an Orientalist discourse-albeit one of decidedly Leftist inflection-that

Bakhtin and Phenomenology: A Reply to Gary Saul Morson

Abstract: Gary Saul Morson's recent attempts to unify Bakhtin's oeuvre under the single term "prosaics" seem at first glance a welcome change from the Bakhtin industry's prevailing modus operandi. Rather than trying to understand Bakhtin's thinking as unitary from start to finish-treating terms like "answerability"' or "dialogics"2 as embryonic instances of the entirety of the Russian thinker's work-Morson sees Bakhtin's work as anti-theoretical and growing in stages. Morson's primary, though by no means exclusive, target in his more recent work is historical criticism, and in particular, historical materialist or Marxist theory.3 For several reasons-not the least of which is what Morson calls Bakhtin's antipathy toward Soviet Marxism-he suggests that materialist claims on Bakhtin's work are wrong-headed at best, because the scholars don't know Bakhtin's biographical history, or cynical at worst, because they do know the history but ignore the untidy details. Moreover, it is because of this antipathy toward Marxism and its attendant theory, dialectics, that the works so frequently attributed to Bakhtin but which carry the names of his comrades and fellow-members of a philosophical "circle," Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev, cannot possibly be Bakhtin's own, since the invectives launched against dialectics and sociological criticism in works like Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and the essays published in The Dialogic Imagination run exactly counter to the materialist rhetoric found in the first few chapters of the co(or pseudo-) authored Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and The Formal Method of Literary Scholarship.4 Having taken apart the materialist argument for a Marxist Bakhtin, Morson might then persuade us to accept his more loosely organized version of the Russian philosopher of language. And, to be honest, his assessment of "the prosaic Bakhtin" has given me an opportunity to rethink my own reading of the "Marxist texts." Morson's most significant contribution to Bakhtin scholarship, however-and this is my point of departure for this essay-is his acknowledgment of the neo-Kantian phenomenological underpinnings

After Perestroika: The Era of Rasstroika

Abstract: Russian is not the quickest of languages to master, but one feature that enables students of Russian to amuse themselves as they attempt to absorb a large and often forbidding vocabulary is the readiness with which the language allows the formation of different words through the addition of prefixes and suffixes. Thus it is possible to take a slang verb in English, either translate or transliterate the root into Russian, and start adding various prefixes to create a plethora of non-existent yet "meaningful" words. I recall a class in which one student took the English word "to fudge," used the productive suffix for creating new verbs to arrive at fudzhirovat', and then started in with prefixes: zafudzhirovat' (to begin to fudge), perefudzhirovat' (to fudge again), nafudzhirovat'sia (to have one's fill of fudging), etc. Some verbs in Russian are (or were) naturally more productive in this regard than others. The verb "to build" (stroit ) in Russian is among those from which many other verbs are derived by the addition of various prefixes. Perestroit' has the basic meaning of"reconstruct" but can also mean to re-design, re-shape, re-form (in the military sense), and to re-tune; the noun formed from this verb, the by-now familiar perestroika, a word that no longer needs to be italicized in English, potentially has all these meanings in Russian, but during the Gorbachev era came to be used most often to mean something like the reconstruction or reform of political, social, and economic institutions. Solzhenitsyn, in making a 1990 pronouncement about the direction in which he felt Russia should go, chose a somewhat different verb, the unusual obustroit', which contains the same root and two prefixes, oband u-.' Now Solzhenitsyn has been a student of the Russian language himself, going so far as to put out a dictionary of "linguistic expansion" (Russkii slovar' iazykovogo rasshireniia) containing little-used or forgotten words which he thought should come back into the language in order to enrich it.2 Obustroit' is not easy to find in dictionaries of the literary language, but the native speakers with whom I have checked seemed familiar with the word. In the past it has most often been used about a living space; the verb takes the basic meanings of ustroit' (to construct, but also to establish, to fix up) and, apparently, enlarges them with the sense of "around" that can be expressed by the prefix ob-. The basic meaning then is something along the lines of to fix up one's surroundings or to make a place livable; Solzhenitsyn's usage seems unusual because he applies the word to a locale as vast as an entire

Faust, Germany, and Unification

Abstract: "Deutschland ist Hamlet," as the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath had it in a classicalage of dividedness, the decades of romantic Angst prior to the outbreak of the revolution in March of 1848: neither a state nor a nation, Germany seemed unable to come to grips with the crimes of the past, haunted by medieval ghosts, while cultivating a precious inaction, and surrendering sovereignty to others. A trenchant image indeed, surely capturing the troubled incapacity of the early nineteenth century, the obsessive side of the sleeping-capped deutscher Michel (Germany's representative caricature, the corollary to Uncle Sam), although, for all of its critical intentions, the image is still embedded in the same provincialism and interiority against which it protests. For it identifies Germany as the site of an excessive reflection that hinders political decision. In contrast to Hamlet who acts too little, Faust acts too much: it is Faust, from the sixteenth-century chapbook to Mann's Faustus after the Second World War who traces the vicissitudes of action --"Im Anfang war die Tat" ("In the beginning was the Act") [1237]'--and it is he who is more commonly taken as the allegory of the nation. But which Faust and where? Is it the scholar despairing at the limits of knowledge, opting for the deed through the pact with the devil, or is it the beatific promise of grace as the culmination of the encyclopedic collection of culture: or if Faust, as Germany, is divided from the start-"Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in meiner Brust" ("Two souls, alas! reside within my breast") [1112]-how does unification transpire? Divided Faust, divided Germany? If no figure is more German than Faust, no trope is more German than division, and no border more replete with literary significance than the one between the two parts of the tragedy: the young Faust and the old, die kleine Welt and die grosse Welt, the narrowness of old Germany and the epic sweep of the classical world. How are the two linked? The formal welding of the two disparate parts of the representative national epic may tell us something about the culture of German unification. Consider that moment closely: while the dramatic

Structural, Thematic, and Symbolic Mirrors in "El cuarto de atras" and "Nubosidad Variable" of Martin Gaite

Abstract: The many sizes, shapes, and materials utilized for mirrors in the course of history produce a multiplicity of forms in literary representation and help to explain the polysemic significances of the image and its frequent transmutations. As early as the Ovidian version of the Narcissus myth-if not before-a variant of the mirror image, water, appears as a reflector motif. The mirroring or reflecting function of water, whether fountain, river, lake, or spring, often associated with vanity, occurs early in written literature, and its presence can be postulated in the oral tradition. Since the first recorded evidence, at least, the reflection has been associated with vanitas.'