Showing papers on "Fable published in 2003"

"Culture and Corruption": Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract: "Culture and corruption," murmured Dorian, "I have known something of both." --Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question. --Thomas Wainewright, quoted by Wilde in "Pen, Pencil, and Poison" Recent genre theory reminds us of just how often our disagreements about the meaning or interpretation of a text are actually debates about how the text should be read, or, more precisely, what kind of text it should be read as. If we are persuaded that a text is indeed an urban eclogue, a Bildungsroman, a Horatian ode, a parody of pastoral, or an example of postmodern female Gothic, we are more likely also to be persuaded of the critic's interpretation of that text's meaning. Thus a critic who interprets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a modern secular morality play is not so much claiming to have found the meaning of the text as he or she is trying to persuade us to read the text as a particular kind of play. What a text means is inseparable from how it is read, and since we must always read a text as something, genre often asserts itself as a set of instructions, implicit or explicit, on how to read a text. The debate over the genre, and thereby the meaning, of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray exemplifies this protocol of reading. Dorian Gray (1) has always provoked contradictory interpretations, but underlying the disagreements about the work's meaning there has persisted a more fundamental debate about what kind of novel it should be read as. This debate is discernible in the early reviews, though somewhat obscured by the hysteria over the novel's alleged immorality. Reading the novel as an English imitation of a decadent French text, for example, the reviewer for the Daily Chronicle denounced it as "a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents, a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction" (NCE 342-43). The St. James Gazette repeated this attack: "The writer airs his cheap research among the garbage of the French Decadents like any drivelling pedant" (NCE 333). But while the popular secular press was denouncing Wilde's novel for its "spiritual putrefaction," Christian publications, such as the Christian Leader, the Christian World, and Light, which interpreted it as an ethical parable or moral fable, praised it as "a work of high moral import" (qtd. in Pearce 169). In America, Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel Hawthorne) was undecided whether Dorian Gray was "a novel or romance (it partakes of both)." But he finally settled on "parable" and pronounced the novel "a salutary departure from the ordinary English novel" (NCE 348-349). Clearly, the judgment of early reviewers depended, at least to some extent, on the genre in which they placed the novel. Modern critics are as divided about the novel's meaning as the original reviewers were obsessed with its morality. But what has not changed is the role the perceived genre of the novel plays in interpretation. (2) While some critics read the novel as belonging to a single genre and assume that the conventions of that genre provide the key to unlock the text's meaning, others see it as a kind of heteroglossia combining two or more genres. In "The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable of the Fall," for example, Joyce Carol Oates finds the novel to be "a curious hybrid. Certainly it possesses a 'supernatural' dimension, and its central image is Gothic; yet in other respects it is Restoration comedy" (427). For her, the novel's generic anomalies make its message at once transparently clear and enigmatically opaque: While in one sense The Picture of Dorian Gray is as transparent as a medieval allegory, and its structure as workman-like as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, to which it bears an obvious family resemblance, in another sense it remains a puzzle: knotted, convoluted, brilliantly enigmatic. …

Science, animal sympathy, and Anna Barbauld's the mouse's petition

Abstract: There is a fascinating scene from the Life of Aesop, as recounted in Julien Macho's late fifteenth-century Esope, in which King Xantus of Babylon requests that his servant Aesop go to the market and buy the best meat procurable for that evening's meal, which Xantus is hosting for a group of scholars visiting for a few days. Aesop returns soon thereafter with a basket of pork tongues. Upon seeing the tongues, the king insults Aesop, and he and the scholars angrily question the slave as to why he bought tongues when ordered to purchase the best meat. Justifying his choice of meats, Aesop replies:1[Q]uelle viande est milleure que la langue? [C] ar certainement tout art et toute doctrine et philozophie sont notifiees par la langue. Item, donner et prendre, sauluer et marchander et faire cites, toutes ces choses sont par la langue; car par la langue les hommes sont louez, car la vie des hommes mortelz, la plus grant partie, est en la langue, et ainsi n'est meilleur que la bonne langue ne chose plus doulce ne sauoreuse ne plus prouffitable es hommes mortelz.The next day King Xantus again sends Aesop to the butcher, but this time, perhaps testing the servant, he requests that Aesop buy the worst (pire), most fetid (puante) meat. Again the slave returns with the tongues, and when Xantus and die scholars, indignant, demand to know why the fool has bought tongues again, Aesop explains:[C]ar quelle chose est ce qui est pire ne plus puante que la mauluaise langue? Pour la langue les hommes sont perilz. Par la langue viennent en pourriture. Par la langue les cites sont destruictes, et de la mauluaise langue viennent tous maulx.This account depicting the contrastive, versatile power of the tongue serves as an ideal epigraph for an examination of the fable in the context of vernacular translation, particularly in a study of the fables of William Caxton, who, more than any other medieval fabulist, found himself at the center of a dynamic multhingual, multicultural ethos in late fifteenth-century London after spending most of his career in the polyglot commercial center of Bruges, in Flanders. His decision to translate and print a book of Aesop's fables was informed by a number of considerations. The fable was an extremely popular literary form in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the popular and traditional status of Aesopic fables during the fifteenth century made the genre a natural choice for printers. Caxton's reasons for compiling and printing the fables, then, certainly had more to do with this popularity than with artistic concerns. But a "commercial" versus "poetic" dichotomy in characterizing the writer and his work, particularly in the dynamic, complex socio-political milieu at the end of the fifteenth century, which in England temporally marks the divide between the medieval and early modern periods, is overly simplistic. Caxton's role in the literary and commercial nexus of this liminal period is rather a complex, multi-faceted one shaped by not only the political climate in late fifteenth-century England but also by its linguistic and associated emergent nationalistic environment.As a commercial printer Caxton was obligated to emphasize productivity and efficiency over poetic merit. Yet his translations, rather than being mere transparent, "faithful" copies of the original, reflect a mindful awareness of the cultural environment in which he was working. Not an "invisible" translator whose only concern is fidelity to his sources, Caxton instead exhibits a tension and an anxiety about his authorial self-representation through his rewriting, an identity more complicated, multi-dimensional, and elusive than that of earlier vernacular fabulists. My argument in this essay is that despite the criticisms leveled at Caxton suggesting his adaptations are facile and overly-simplistic, he worked as a translator, printer, publisher, and bookseller in a decidedly complex and rapidly-changing linguistic, literary, economic, and political era and carried out a translation program that reflected, and indeed helped shape, this contemporary atmosphere. …

Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990

Abstract: Readers of the contemporary novel in France are witnessing the most astonishing reinvigoration of narrative prose since the New Novel of the 1950s. In the last few years, bold, innovative, and richly compelling novels have been written by a variety of young writers. These texts question traditional strategies of character, plot, theme, and message; and they demand new strategies of reading, too. Choosing ten novels published during the 1990s as examples of that trend, Warren Motte traces the resurgence of the novel in France. He argues that each of the novels under consideration here, quite apart from what other stories it tells, presents a fable of the novel that deals with the genre's possibilities, limitations, and future as a cultural form.

Inventory and documentation of the Graeco-Latin fable

Abstract: This third volume of the History of the Graeco-Latin Fable offers a complete inventory and documentation of the Classical fable tradition in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The original Spanish edition (1987) has been considerably enlarged with numerous supplementary references and less than 350 new fables. The present edition uniquely refers to fables in more than 20 different languages, not only in Greek and Latin, but also in other Oriental and Western languages such as Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sanskrit, Egyptian, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Circassian, Slavonian, Albanian, Spanish, Italian, English, French, German, and Dutch, thus paving the way for studies of comparative literature. The book is conveniently concluded with elaborate indexes of fable characters, passages included, and numeration systems of other contributions in the field.

The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning

Abstract: The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning. By Eli Yassif. Translated by Jaqueline S. Teitelbaum. Foreword by Dan Ben-Amos. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 561, acknowledgements, notes, index, $59.95 cloth.) The Hebrew Folktale is the magnum opus of Eli Yassif, Professor of Hebrew Literature and Jewish Folklore at Tel Aviv University. In it, Yassif attempts to outline the course of the folktale in Hebrew culture through the ages. he traces the folktale as a part of Hebrew literature, but he is especially concerned with its reflections and refractions of Jewish life in particular historical epochs: biblical, second Temple, rabbinic, medieval, and contemporary. The use of the term folktale in the title is somewhat misleading. What Yassif intends is a survey of Hebrew folk narrative-myth, legend, fable, fairytale, novella, comic anecdote, exemplum-only some of which are to be found in Aarne and Thompson's Types of the Folktale. Indeed, the great emphasis on legends of various kinds and the de-emphasis of wonder tales, jokes, and anecdotes suggest that the English title of this work was chosen with perhaps more aesthetic than descriptive considerations in mind. In the biblical period Yassif discusses the remnants of myth in Genesis, the legendary aspects of the story of Job, the fable of Jotham ( judg. 9:6-20), the novella-like aspects of the stories of Joseph and the scroll of Esther, and the story cycles of the Patriarchs. Folk narratives reside beneath the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings of the second Temple period-e.g., Maccabees, jubilees, Tobit, juidth, Ahikar. This period-marked by the return to Zion, Hellenization, and the Hasmonean revolt-gave rise to the retelling of biblical tales, tales of the wise courtier, martyrological tales, and fairytales. Thematically there is a focus on the confrontation of the Jewish community with foreign domination, community survival, and miraculous rescue. The chapters on the rabbinic and medieval periods are the biggest in the book. The former is the period of the talmudic and midrashic compendia that emerged following the destruction of the second temple. Expanded biblical tales (usually tied to a biblical verse), tales of magic and demonology, exempla and parables, and legends about individual rabbis abound. Only comic tales would seem to be a truly novel form in this literature. The Jewish Middle Ages begin with the Islamic expansion at the end of the seventh century. No new genres emerge, and there is considerable repetition, extension, and elaboration of stories, styles, and structures from the previous period, although there are a large number of narratives translated into Hebrew from other languages. Legends predominate, with an emphasis on saints, the exorcism of demons, and the intervention of God in the protection and salvation of Jewish communities assailed and assaulted by antisemitic rulers, clergy, and neighbors. The narratives of the "contemporary period" (post-medieval) are represented only by Hasidic tales of the zaddik (righteous man, Hasidic leader, collections of which begin to be published in the early nineteenth century), and legends of saints and "return to the faith" stories told in Israel today. Although these stories are rooted in the realities of modern society, their thematic structures are old. They are employed aggressively today in mass rallies to promote the return of the secular community to orthodox belief and practice. The Hebrew Folktale is a work of staggering scope and scholarship, and there is much to be learned from it. But it is also daunting, especially for those with modest knowledge of Hebrew sources. While Yassif tries to explain much, much is left to the reader to unravel. As the work is translated from Hebrew, it might be assumed that readers of the original work would have a greater familiarity with terminology, textual chronology, and the nature of talmudic, midrashic, and other texts. …

La pervivencia de la fábula greco-latina en la literatura española e hispanoamericana

Abstract: In this paper the author analyzes the survival of the fable in Spanish and Southamerican Literature.

The Spirit of Pygmalion

Abstract: By looking closely at a brief description of Pygmalion in Vasari's Lives and comparing it to Ovid's version of the myth, this essay suggests that Vasari's allusion is a subtle transformation of a classical poetic fable of artistic creation into a spiritual allegory grounded in Genesis.

Ted Hughes's Crow: An Alternative Theological Paradigm

Abstract: This essay argues that Ted Hughes's Crow presents an alternative theological paradigm that rescues certain elements of Being—in particular the feminine and the demonic—often repressed within the Christian tradition. Through the resurrection of an Earth Goddess, Hughes's paradigm restores divinity to the natural world, and supplements the one-sidedness of Trinitarian doctrine. Crow, as a character, dramatises humanity's estrangement from the Goddess, and thus from the unconscious life that created it. By lending expression to what otherwise remains dangerously repressed in the uncon scious, Crow participates in the healthy psychological process Jung calls individuation. The violent and grotesque nature of Ted Hughes's Crow has left critics the delicate task of determining whether or not the volume has redeeming value. Those opposed to Crow find it lacking in hope and human perspective: Geoffrey Thurley calls Crow a 'somewhat inhuman, even brutal book',1 while Calvin Bedient concludes that Crow is 'the croak of nihilism itself'.2 Hughes's defenders find in Crow not only a human perspective but a kind of psycho logical healing power. Contrasting Hughes to the Movement poets, Annie Schofield praises his direct dealing with post-atomic psychological crises.3 Keith Sagar compares Hughes to a shaman, his function being to 'make the dangerous journey, on behalf of his society, into the spirit world ... into his own unconscious'.4 But Crow's value extends beyond a nebulous and mys tical probing of the psyche: Crow redeems itself by presenting an alternative theological paradigm that rescues certain elements of Being and expression often repressed within the Christian tradition. It is typical of critics to enter their discussions of Crow with some notion of an imaginative 'world' with definable characteristics. Leonard Scigaj, for instance, finds in Crow a 'magical world of fable and primitive trickster narrative ... with a set of motifs that evaluate modem Western culture'.5 Similarly, Egbert Faas discusses a 'supratemporal world of global religious Literature & Theology 17/1 © Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.64 on Tue, 19 Apr 2016 04:33:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms i8 TED HUGHES'S CROW dimensions in which Western myths figure side by side with the Tibetan Buddhist Womb Door or an Eskimo Genesis'.6 It may be added to these that the world of Crow, and to some extent the world of Hughes's poetry in general,7 inverts the hierarchy of Being established in Genesis, where an external male God gives man dominion 'over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth'. In Crow the divine source of creation is nature herself, symbolically represented as an earth goddess; the external Christian God is an invention of man who usurps her throne. Consciousness marks the 'fall' of humanity from its true parent, who looms angrily over her temporary oppressors. In emphasising the holiness of the natural world, and imbuing its landscape with characteristics of the feminine and the demonic, Crow bites back at a strand of more orthodox thought present in the theological writings of C.S. Lewis. In God in the Dock, published one year before Crow, Lewis defends a theological system largely dismissive of these same elements of Being. He delineates instead an all-masculine, all-benevolent God, wholly independent of his creation. Whereas Hughes locates divinity within the regenerative processes of nature, the natural world remains for Lewis a mere imitation of an abstract though masculine ideal: 'The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of supernatural reality; the dying, and coming again, descending, and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature because it was first there in God Himself' Gender and morality are likewise subjected in Lewis's paradigm to a rigid hierarchical construct. Reluctant to award the demonic an integral place within the forces of life, he complains that dualism 'gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good', whereas a 'sound theory ... demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion'.10 Elsewhere, declaring that 'we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him',11 Lewis upholds masculinity as an ideal principle, therefore sustaining the old Platonic binaries and their skewed emphases. While Lewis's theology concerns itself with separation and subordination, Hughes's alternative aims toward reintegration. In this way Crow participates within Jung's vision of psycho-spiritual maturation. John Dourley defines Jung's work as a revision to Trinitarian symbol and doctrine, in which a 'goddess' representative of the collective unconscious is fitted into the equation.12 Like Hughes's poetry, Jung's psychology is committed to the reconciliation of severed levels of Being; by giving conscious life to what is otherwise repressed within the unconscious, it labours toward a reintegrated psychic whole. Jung uses the term individuation to describe the process by which one becomes 'a psychological "in-dividual", that is, a separate, indivisible unity or "whole" \13 That process first involves a plunge downward into the This content downloaded from 207.46.13.64 on Tue, 19 Apr 2016 04:33:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Atalanta's Apples: Postcolonial Theory as a Barrier to the "Balance of Stories"

Abstract: he ancient Greek myth of "Atalanta's Apples" is a story in which Atalanta, who had no wish to marry, challenges her suitors to a race, slows them down with well-placed golden apples, and ends up frustrating their desire. I came across this variation on the better-known African fable of "The Tortoise and the Hare" came while I was reading Francis Bacon's "Plan for The Great Instauration" (25). Bacon was not just any old citizen of the Western European nation that colonized my native land, Ghana, but, rather, one of the fi rst advocates of inductive, experimen- tal modern Western science. The chief and only end of science, according to him, was to create "fruits and works," that is, material results and creature comforts. In other words, Science must justify itself as "Technology," yet one that serves the glory of God in that these fruits and works of science are also "Works of Light." This comes right out of the Christian Bible, especially the exhortation to "Let your light so shine before men, that they many see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 5:16). Meet it is, then, that the Cross goes into the wild, unknown world armed with the Sword, leaving it to others or future generations to beat either of these into Ploughshares, if they choose. One of the fi rst 'fruits and works' of modern science was, of course, the charting of the skies (by Copernicus and Galileo, for instance), which aided navigation and so facilitated the intrusion of the Europeans into other parts of the world, Africa included. The Europeans, denizens of what the called "the known world," landed in these other, unknown worlds, armed with notions of their cultural superiority and manifest destiny, as endowed by both religion and science, and settled down to the systematic colonization and devastation of these lands, Africa included, using technology. Surely, an essay, written by an African, advising wariness with all borrowed terms and theories could do better than craft its title from an ancient Greek myth, and moreover one acquired by way of an Englishman? Surely, native-indigenous myths and parables could provide more worthy titles, such as "Ananse's Web," "Eshu's Foot-tracks," or even "The Worm's Dance" (Ananse and Eshu being tricksters in Akan folktales and Yoruba mythology, respectively, while the third alternative title alludes to the Yoruba/Igbo saying "You may think the worm is dancing but that is only the way it walks")? Indeed, why not craft a title out of the West African folktale of "The Tortoise and the Hare," whose moral is that the race (for knowledge and for power) is not for the swift but for the steady and the wise? The Hare's speediness lulls it into complacency,

Marie de France

Abstract: In the 1160s, an author who identifies herself as 'Marie' dedicated a collection of Breton stories or lais to a 'noble reis', most likely Henry II Plantagenet. Some time later, a 'Marie' who announces that she is 'de France' penned the Fables , which she says she translates from King Alfred's English translation of Aesopic tales; these she dedicated to 'le cunte Willame'. Finally, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz , an account of an Irish knight's voyage to the underworld, was translated from a religious text of monastic origin into the vernacular for the benefit of a lay audience by one 'Marie', probably around 1190. During the course of her career, 'Marie de France' thus produced works in three different genres - Breton tale, animal fable, spiritual voyage - each of which blends literary traditions and linguistic registers and whose topics progress from a tapestry of marvellous love stories, to a shrewd observation of animal and human social behaviour, and finally, to a vision of sin and redemption.

Bernard Shaw's The Black Girl in Search of God: The Story behind the Story

Abstract: Leon Hugo's study is a groundbreaking account of the "story behind the story" of Shaw's allegory The Black Girl in Search of God, a short fable written by Shaw in a remote coastal village in South Africa. Illustrated by John Farleigh, the book was published in 1932 and became a best-seller. The story is a fable of a "black girl," converted by Christian missionaries, who tries to find the answer to the question "Where is God?" by making a journey of the soul. Along the way she meets with a number of representations of God, from the New and Old Testaments of the Bible and from the Koran, who disgust and appall her with their hopelessly outdated embodiments of deity. The reaction from critics and readers of the day ranged from cries of blasphemy to allegations that Shaw was moving to madness. The volume was banned in public libraries and in Ireland. Several tracts and books sought to repudiate, ridicule, or develop Shaw's religious argument, and there were adaptations for stage performances and for radio broadcasts. This literary event is recounted, examined, and assessed by Leon Hugo. He surveys the close kinship between Shaw and Voltaire - a dominant presence in a tale that itself echoes Candide. The final chapter considers the "black girl" as a Shavian champion of religious freedom, feminist rights, and political emancipation. Illustrations revive a selection of Farleigh's captivating artwork, and Hugo includes representative illustrations from the rebutting tracts and books that followed Black Girl as well.