The Banter and the Bond: A Tapestry of Tender Tales in Din about Chins by Santosh Bakaya

In the spring of 1832, Balzac received a letter from the Polish countess Éveline Hańska that would alter the course both of his life and of his literary production. Signed simply ‘L’Étrangère’, Mme Hańska’s letter triggered a sixteen-year correspondence between her and Balzac, and the start of a love affair that would culminate in the couple’s marriage in March 1850, less than six months before the novelist’s death. However, as Ewa Szypula points out in her Introduction to this fascinating study, the Lettres à Madame Hanska have failed to garner the sustained attention of scholars, who have used them primarily as a tool for verifying specific details of Balzac’s biography. By contrast, Szypula treats the letters as texts in their own right, arguing persuasively that they can be analysed in much the same way as we might read and interpret Balzac’s fiction. Far from existing independently of the rest of the novelist’s work, she claims, the correspondence functions as a creative, experimental space in which Balzac initiates many of the themes, images, and plotlines that he develops in his fictional writings. In the first chapter of this volume, Szypula explores the palimpsestic nature of the correspondence, and the manner in which Balzac used his letters to Mme Hańska to overwrite his earlier relationships and life experiences. Starting with Éveline’s curious habit of leaving blank pages in her letters, Szypula reflects on the way in which this ‘blankness’ allowed Balzac to construct an image of her as his ideal woman while simultaneously re-imagining his earlier romantic attachment to Mme de Berny, whom he also referred to as Ève. Chapter 2 turns to questions of performance and play, focusing in particular on the ways in which Balzac shaped letters into ‘mini-performances’ whose ultimate aim was to seduce Mme Hańska. Most interestingly, Szypula explains how Balzac adopted different roles in his letters in order to provide Éveline with the means of justifying their adulterous relationship to herself. Often, for example, he casts himself as a child, and stresses the pure, maternal nature of their love — an idea that would filter into his 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet, in which Balzac describes the love between the eponymous heroine and her cousin Charles as childish in its innocence. Szypula’s final chapter considers the relationship between collecting, rereading, and storytelling in the correspondence. In particular, she examines Balzac’s repeated requests for objects from Éveline — such as a piece of black cloth from her dress — and his use of these objects as fuel for both his rereading of her letters and his own writing. As Szypula argues compellingly, the themes of writing and rereading assume special importance in the 1844 novel Modeste Mignon, in which Balzac can be seen to reflect on the limitations of rereading, particularly when a letter-writer is insincere. The study concludes with an Afterword that examines Mme Hańska’s attempts at revising Balzac’s letters following his death, a process that shows — as Szypula does so refreshingly in this volume — that this correspondence has never truly closed, but instead remains intriguingly open to rereading and re-interpretation.

Madame de Genlis was a French writer and minor aristocrat, who was known for her educational writings and children’s books (and in subsequent centuries for her love letters and diaries). Often compared to Rousseau (see source 4), whose work she explicitly engages with, de Genlis provided a similar model of childhood as a time to be nurtured and gently guided. Her work was considered to be especially useful as it combined philosophy with practical child–rearing and educational tips, and so offered insight into everyday life for the elite. Her most famous work, Adelaide and Theodore, offers advice in epistolary form – a series of letters between female friends – about raising children, with the Baroness d’Almane situated as the source of wisdom. It is an important example of a form of writing where women could be situated with an authoritative voice in the public sphere. The epistolary form was remarkably popular in the eighteenth century, where the format allowed for advice to be asked and answered, and as a writerly mode that could be used in everyday life. In the first few letters, de Genlis explores how women wishing to pursue this form of education might extricate themselves from fashionable society, whilst later essays largely account 117for the education of Adelaide and Theodore, contrasted with that of her friend’s children. As a source for the history of emotions, the text not only evidences ideas about the socialisation of childhood emotions, but the emotional tensions and dynamics of female friendship, and interesting reflections on subjects such as cruelty to animals. This version was translated into English from French in the eighteenth century.

comme autant de performances o les identits de Balzac et de sa destinataire sont sans cesse recres.

When Alice comes upon Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, she needs help. She has read Jabberwocky out of backwards book some time before, and though it very pretty, she cannot make any sense of the poem. Recognizing in Humpty Dumpty literary man of sorts (you seem very clever at explaining words), she asks him for an explication. Alice has come to the right place; Humpty Dumpty is know-it-all who can all the poems that ever were invented, along with some that have yet to be written. After reducing the mysteries of Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty seems to fall asleep. Alice walks away, muttering that he was unsatisfactory, and just then a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end. Neither Lewis Carroll nor the nursery rhyme tells whether Humpty Dumpty had anything to say after breaking into pieces. But it seems likely that if he ever managed to pull himself together, Humpty Dumpty would have lost both his glib confidence in language and its capacity to explain away mysteries. He might have become imprisoned in his own history, gothic autobiographer. But the chances are that Humpty Dumpty's fall simply put an end to his speeches altogether. Still, it did not put an end to the figure of Humpty Dumpty, at least in the imaginations of modern novelists. Tenniel's egg-man is, after all, almost too perfect symbol: the elevated position, the arrogance, the premature dependence on language as tool to explain away knowledge, and perhaps because of all this, the complacent snooze that results in fragmentation. If the image of Humpty Dumpty in bits on the ground begins to remind the reader of the figures the modernists chose to exemplify their heritage (broken towers, ruins of all sorts, invaded or arid gardens, ripped-up books), then it is no wonder that he is revived in that most literary of modern novels, Finnegans Wake. In his metamorphosis into HCE (in The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly), Humpty Dumpty stands in for Everybody, and rises again. But he is not always so lucky. Early in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Jacques Laruelle picks up an unmailed love letter written by the Consul and intended for Yvonne. In it, the Consul declares what he should have been doing with his time while he was drinking: producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty.. . Or books on secret knowledge. Or magical prophecy. Humpty Dumpty never has his triumph because the poems-and those other literary works-never get written. Worse yet, the letter in which he is mentioned never gets to Yvonne, and by the time Laruelle

:Objective: To examine whether the love letters of erotomania, have potential to assist in the clinical process of assessment.Method: A series of illustrative love letters from case examples were selected. The characteristics of the conditional variants were embedded into an adaptation of the technique of forensic psycholinguistic analysis, with a focus on discernible psychopathology, and the likely meaning for the individual.Conclusion: In all cases, analysis of the erotomanic love letter showed clear potential to be a significant augmenter in the process of clinical assessment. They should, therefore, be retained, reproduced and valued, rather than overlooked or discarded. This paper outlines a suggested approach to make the most of this valuable data source, including a clinical template which may be of assistance to other clinicians. This paper also serves as a general reminder of the ongoing need to recognise verbatim as of high clinical currency in forensic psychiatry.

One of the leading European writers and intellectuals of her day, Madame de Staël (1766–1817) was to have a major and lasting influence on British Romantic‐period writing, her influential disquisitions on national identity and gender relations providing subsequent British writers with a stock of images and vocabulary that would persist throughout much of the nineteenth century. Politically popular in England due to her exile from post‐revolutionary France, though criticized for her unconventional domestic life, her writings, especially Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807) and De l'Allemagne (1810–13), were received variously as anti‐Napoleonic propaganda, subversive feminist manifestos avant la lettre , blueprints for constructing national identities from fragmented states, and a powerful affirmation of the link between imaginative literature and public life. Her work attracted increasing attention within Anglophone criticism with the development of feminist criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century, although there is as yet no standard collection of her entire corpus of writing available in English.

Introduction. While teaching assistants with diverse backgrounds are subject to biased evaluations and perceptions of capacity due to race and gender, academic perspectives and emotional and psychological impacts of teaching on diverse teaching assistants is lacking. Objective. Applying post-qualitative methods of writing and autoethnography, three PhD level teaching assistants applied a love-centered program evaluation to assess whether they have what they need to facilitate an online asynchronous IPE on allyship. Methods. Over the course of five weeks, the teaching assistants met to discuss a need for this work, designed, and completed the program evaluation. Core evaluation activities included writing a series of self-addressed love letters and meeting for group reflections on the teaching experience and the content of the love letters. What Emerged. Systemic barriers to engaging left the teaching assistants feeling less effective than they had desired. The lack of training and ongoing support systems led to experiences of unanticipated harm. Conclusion. This evaluation aligns with research that suggests that structurally marginalized teaching assistants may require additional support to do their work without harm. Hiring and fairly compensating a small group of teaching assistants to design and deliver a curriculum that aligns with their values and is structured according to realistic learning outcomes may be one way to reduce the harm experienced by teaching assistants facilitating an allyship course.

Reviews 179 With names like Jeter, Miz Purdy, Mam, and Mayda, the characters are often displayed through colorful and pithy writing. In “Living,” Silas Brame has “cut more throats than a meat market butcher,” and we find him with “his eyes walled back and tobacco juice spilling over his cheek like worm’s blood.” In “Trip in a Summer Dress,” the young narrator resists letting her illegitimate son be raised as a brother: Finally 7 said—so loud my father ran off the road, “He’s not your child! I birthed him. I’m his mother, and I’m going to raise him up to know I am! Now what’s the matter with that?” My mother said, “Count the I’s, and you’ll know.” These stories also reveal a self-referential level. For example, in the subtly incestuous “Six White Horses,” the brother Hector “hectors” his sister and cuts down a pear tree (“pair” tree) when she begins dating at forty. In “Harvest,” Jess Earl and Mayda’s unaccomplished son is killed. The lack of success on their farm parallels the son’s and when Mayda says, “A pitiful few straggles is not a crop!” she is speaking of more than the soil beneath their feet. As always, such levels can deepen a work’s thematic resonances. In keeping with the general nature of the Southwest Life and Letters series, Sanford’s stories favor a revelation of territory through dialogue and detail peculiar to the region. D. L. WRIGHT University of Utah The Admirations. By Lex Runciman. (Amherst, Mass.: Lynx House Press, 1989. 72 pages, $8.50.) Although only one of the poems in this volume carries the title “Nostalgia,” many others could have been so titled. The poems are filled with homey images of family, furniture, linoleum, and barns—the images of ordinary middle-class domestic life, even in the West. And here is the point, the breakthrough from the more artificial limits of regionalism: precious little in the poems is distinctly western, yet they hold in particular example the universal experience of com­ monplace human existence in our houses and neighborhoods. The warm comfort of such experience pervades the poems even though it does not make them distinctly western. The poem “1492 Fremont” captures the outward signs of stressed inner tensions, longings, inescapable dreams characteristic of the poems in the volume when a “gray, spiteful woman” carefully washes her derelict Buick which she constantly sees from her kitchen window. In “City of Roses” we are in a “white and mechanical room” amid “relatives and a family of technical strangers,” awaiting a dying. From all of this life experience what'can be salvaged? What can be used by those who endure, the “Walkers” who “walk for the time it takes, / for whatever they see”? 180 Western American Literature R ecollection of fam ous figures of our culture makes up part of that com ­ m onplace life also. Poetic responses to Verm eer, to Robert Frost, to H em ing­ way, to W inslow H om er in the volum e help fulfill this facet of our shared experience. T h e strength of these poems lies in their portrayal of the hum an condi­ tion am id fam ily and reminiscences of fam ily, in present love and remembered continuing love. JA M ES R. SA U C E R M A N Northwest Missouri State University Mapping the Distance. By A licia Hokanson. (Portland, Oregon: Breitenbush Books, Inc., 1989. 56 pages, $8.95.) Mapping the Distance, A licia H okanson’s first book of poetry and 1988 w inner of the K ing County Commission Publication Prize, demonstrates clearly that Hokanson is a first-rate poet w ho bears close w atching. H er poetry has an elegance and delicacy secured by a sure presence of voice and control of line. T h e poem s tell of an accum ulation of sorrows w hich are redeemed finally by love. T he book “m aps” the “distances” from dark to light, winter to spring, death to life, in increasingly personal terms. U ltim ately, the central tension of the book becomes the fragile balance betw een...

This article uses a series of love letters exchanged between an African Anglican priest and a teacher-in-training before their marriage to investigate the relationship between the fashioning of the individual self, marriage, and community at the dawn of Tanganyika's independence. When seen through marriage's historical position as an institution central to community composition, these letters illustrate how the family – and the intimate process of building families – could become an alternate site of national imagination. These two young lovers understood their marriage as an explicitly political act of community composition, and cast themselves as characters in the drama of national imagination. In negotiating their twentieth-century marriage, Rose and Gideon became political innovators, selecting, producing, and testing the content and boundaries of the nation.

This chapter takes a look at Nicholas Maw’s The Voice of Love. It illustrates how this cycle rewards the careful study needed to master its difficulties, and represents the composer in his most compelling form. Such sumptuous vocal lines could seem to encourage a stream of warm, unvaried tone, but the eight movements give the singer the opportunity to display the widest possible range of mood, timbre, and character. In addition, Peter Porter's resonant texts are taken from a series of seventeenth-century love letters. The vocal writing is rich and powerful, and shows the influence of the Second Viennese School. Phrases are of a length to strengthen and exercise the voice.

Reviews 241 nor his son Solomon is believed to be his equal in the corruption of so many young women, nor even Jupiter (as long as his sophisticalflatteriesfell upon girls)'(P 122). Shopkow provides invaluable comment in endnotes about the many figures who float in and out of what is effectively an extended soap opera of the lesser nobility. M y only regret was that chronological annotations were not inserted into the main narrative to help the reader follow which decade was being talked about. Translation offloridLatinate prose is never easy. In breaking up extravagant sentences Shopkow has provided a valuable service, without sacrificing authenticity. O n occasion she includes some fascinating observation of inaccuracies in Duby's presentation of the History, as for example (p. 201 n. 86) about the way he presented illegitimate daughters of a noble house as the sexual preserve ofsons, while ignoring the way the narrative shows that they were treated like legitimate younger sons. There is much detail here that students could use to question some ofDuby's assumptions about aristocratic society. Duby's fondness for Lambert's admiring presentation of the grand seigneurs of Guines led him to argue that his account typified an aristocratic model of marriage, pragmatic and worldly, as distinct from an ecclesiastical ideal that was rigorous and otherworldly. Reading the History makes one question the artificial character of any such distinctions, as indeed any attempt to read a literary text as evidence of the ideology of society as a whole. Shopkow's translation of the History should be included in all courses on aristocratic society and culture in the Middle Ages. Constant J. Mews School of Historical Studies Monash University Wheeler, Bonnie, ed., Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman (The N e w Middle Ages), London, Macmillan, 2000; cloth; pp. xxii, 394; R.R.P. £30.00; ISBN 0333800303. The twelfth-century Heloise will forever be identified with Abelard; together they are the archetypal star-crossed lovers. She is known through her association with him, a w o m a n who, after her lover was castrated and retired to a monastery, took the veil as a nun. They then exchanged a series of letters about theological and philosophical issues. Here at last, in this carefully crafted symposium, we get an Heloise w h o is far more than that; she is a w o m a n who deserves to be 242 Reviews given recognition for who she was, for what she thought, said and did, as an eminent scholar in her o w n right. All contributors to this volume are to be congratulated for their excellent essays; moreover, each has read the contirbution of the others so that there is a pleasing unity in the collection dedicated to redressing the invisibility of an Heloise w h o has been interpreted only as the consort ofAbelard. It is arranged in a cyclic chronology of Heloise's life, beginning with an essay on 'Heloise the Abbess', by Mary Martin McLaughlin, which details the establishment and the expansion of the Paraclete. She points out the particular 'feminist' quality of the abbey whereby 'the commemorations of female saints [were] given marked prominence in the calendar'. (10) McLaughlin refers to the 'authenticity debate' in her opening paragraph, but confines discussion of it to a footnote: it is the next chapter, 'Authenticity revisited' by John Marebon, that takes up the issue. After a brief review of the chronology of the debate on the authenticity of the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, Marebon then concentrates on the ideological isuues surrounding the question of authenticity. His concluding remarks refer to the following chapter, 'Philosophical themes in the Epistolae duorum amantium: thefirstletters of Heloise and Abelard', by Constant J. Mews. Marebon says that M e w s ' identification of the lost early love letters ofAbelard and Heloise 'will do even more to bring new material and new knowledge about women in the twelfth century to bear on Heloise' (p. 30). Chapter Four, 'The young Heloise and Latin rhetoric: some preliminary comments on the "lost" love letters and their significance' by John O. Ward and Neville Chiavaroli, demonstrates through rhetorical analysis the...

434 CLA JOURNAL Between the World and the Addressee: Epistolary Nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and His Peers Emily J. Lordi When Toni Morrison, in a book-cover endorsement of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), stated that Coates was “clearly” the writer who could at last “fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died,” she bestowed the younger writer with what Coates himself might have called both a “garland” and an “albatross”(“Deeper”). Several public intellectuals defended or contested the comparison, with Michael Eric noting that Coates and Baldwin shared a“forensic, analytical, cold-eyed stare-down of white moral innocence,”and Imani Perry comparing the two authors’ interpersonal and class politics in a way that clearly favored Baldwin’s. As these commentators were well aware, Morrison was validating the comparison that Coates himself had courted. By structuring Between the World and Me as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates paid homage to, and aligned himself with,Baldwin’s letter to his 15-year-old nephew,first published in 1962 as “My Dungeon Shook” and soon re-issued as the first part of his 1963 civil-rights opus The Fire Next Time. Whereas the contentious Baldwin comparison, along with Coates’s receipt of the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction for Between the World and Me and his exceptional degree of literary celebrity, threaten to isolate Coates from his literary peers, this essay considers his work—specifically, his use of the epistolary form—within a broader network of writers who have recently engaged Baldwin’s legacy by writing their own intimate open letters.1 Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2013), for instance, which predates Between the World and Me, includes several letter-essays that revise Baldwin’s template. Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie writes a series of letters to a fictional poet of color named Continuum in 2015.Edwidge Danticat and Daniel José Older both contribute open letters to Jesmyn Ward’s Baldwin-inspired 2016 collection The Fire This Time. And a 2017 book of essays titled Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times—which assembles a diverse group of writers to offer what editor Carolina De Robertis terms a “multi-vocal response” to political disaster and an “antidote to despair”—features dozens of epistolary essays by writers and activists, mostly of color, including Junot Díaz, Elmaz Abinader, Jeff Chang, and Alicia Garza (10). 1 This discussion expands on my essay “The Intimate, Political Power of the Open Letter,” which was a briefer assessment of this literary phenomenon directly occasioned by the publication of Radical Hope. CLA JOURNAL 435 Insofar as these open letters are addressed to family members and cherished public figures, they are self-consciously indebted to Baldwin’s example. But they are also shaped by their immediate context: a moment when, if hardly anyone writes traditional letters anymore, countless people write open letters. Whether addressed to Barack Obama,“white people”in general, or Beyoncé, open letters are the Internet’s opinion genre of choice—a trend that the popular blog McSweeney’s has skewered with a column titled “Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond.” While some uses of the form justify Jack Hamilton’s critique of it as “the most overused mode of contemporary writing, a one-sided conversation with someone famous in which the performative bypass of audience creates an aloof sort of anti-intimacy,” many others eschew these pitfalls to achieve quite different ends. Amid and despite their blogospheric ubiquity, open letters have become powerful forms of literary activism for writers of color who have used them to protest anti-black violence and the rise of U.S. neofascism, as well as to build community. For instance, when, in March 2017, the artist Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the Whitney Museum calling for the removal of Dana Schutz’s controversial portrait of Emmett Till, Open Casket, Black did not merely protest Schutz’s work and the Whitney’s decision to display it; she also generated a community of cosignatories, who together sought to honor and reclaim Till’s memory for a...

This volume was originally published as part of the English Men of Letters series in 1902. This series aimed to bring a critical framework for reading and analysing novels to the large literate audience which had emerged as the result of mass education campaigns in the nineteenth century. Written by eminent scholars and combining biographical details with literary criticism, the English Men of Letters series was extremely successful and occupied a distinctive position in British literary education in the early twentieth century. Written by Victorian scholar and critic Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) this volume examines the life and literary achievements of George Eliot (1819–1880), the first woman novelist to be included in the series. Arranged around Eliot's published novels, the biographical discussion of her life detailing her domestic life and literary criticism of her works reveals late Victorian ideals concerning fiction and a respectable life.

Rapunzel Has Insomnia is part story collection, part fairy tale vignette, and part personal memoir, dealing with themes of mental illness and inheritance, the complexity of mother daughter relationships, and childhood trauma. Similar to the structure of a novelin-- stories, Rap unzel ’s connective tissue is made up of memoir, specifically dealing with the aftereffects of my mother’s Bipolar One disorder and subsequent psychiatric commitments throughout my childhood and young adult years. The other more peripheral narratives are magicalrealist in nature, which are made up of fabulist fiction stories. Both of these narratives are then tied to an over arching theme of “the fairy tale”, where tropes are subverted and the nature of reality is questioned. In essence, Rapunzel is a love letter to madness, my mother, and my own struggle with inheriting both my love and affinity for writing as well as mental illness from her, respectively. iii

We – as daughter and mother – offer our stories humbly as a love letter to our Asian American community, our Black and Brown siblings, and the broader education community. White supremacy has weaponized the model minority myth – the belief that Asian Americans have “made it” despite obstacles – to invalidate claims of systemic racism and ableism. We draw on Disability Critical Race Theory and Asian American Critical Race Theory to center intersectionality and the interwoven nature of racialization, gendering, and disablement. Using collaborative storying, we showcase our (un)learning and (re)learning about normativity, identities, and belonging with and from each other as dialogic and reciprocal. Although both of our voices contribute to this dialogic storytelling, this paper centers on the stories of the first author – as a neurodiverse 15-year-old youth – as there is much we can learn from listening to our disabled youth of color and their resistance practices.