Anglo-American Criticism Research Articles

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

Feminist Theories and Women Writers of Late Imperial China: Impact and Critique

Abstract Feminism, feminist theory, feminist literary theory were already highly contentious in what they represented to Euro-American critics and theorists in the 1980s, when scholars in Chinese literary studies began sustained research on women writers in late imperial China (ca. 1600–1911). Their research drew on developments in Western feminist theories while problematizing certain applications. In this article, I review major debates in 1980s and 1990s Western feminist literary theory, divided by the different approaches of Anglo-American and French feminist critics and gender studies, examining why specific arguments on women and language, genres studied, and theoretical underpinnings did not hold significant relevance to the study of similar issues when applied to women's writing in pre-twentieth-century China. Yet certain concepts were highly fruitful in critical analysis. Feminist theory was never monolithic, even when it was Eurocentric; theories were drawn from a plurality of different disciplines and schools. Concepts that came into currency—gender, gaze, voice, agency, subjectivity, authorship, and so on—from poststructuralist, postcolonial, cultural, and film studies proved to be useful tools in feminist literary studies. Some came to be deployed in scholarship on women's literature in historical China. In this context, I reflect on theoretical approaches in significant studies of women's writing of late imperial China and consider the impact or critique this subfield of Chinese literary studies posed to Western feminist theories and broader questions of the applicability of modern/postmodern feminist theories to literature of earlier periods and other cultures before the globalization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Gótico brasileño: el cine de Walter Hugo Khouri y José Mojica Marins

This paper seeks to connect the concepts of “terror” and “horror” proposed by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe to films by Brazilian directors Walter Hugo Khouri and José Mojica Marins. It will be discussed here how such concepts manifest themselves in the national context and in which senses, trapped somewhere between repetition and difference, Khouri and Mojica’s films can be deemed expressions of a Brazilian Gothic. Stemming from elements derived from Anglo-American criticism, but, highlighting the different meanings that these elements gain in Brazil. To interpret Brazilian films in the light of the Gothic means addressing the issue of “construction of meaning” in national history, as the Gothic has the potential to revive old traumas and generate discussions about specific social contexts.

К вопросу о терминологических трудностях определения понятия авторского театра

By the logic of the language, any object of art has an author - albeit a collective one, as in folklore - and therefore, should be called an “author”. However, this does not really help in determining the exact place of a work of art in the system of art concepts and terms; but not every director manages to create an individual author's style. In Western theatre studies, at a linguistic level, the borrowing from cinema of such terms as “auteur theatre” and “the theatre of the director-auteur” is rather reflected. The concept of “auteur” turns out to be the most acceptable in describing a new type of director who actively adapts dramatic plays, intervenes in them and thus creates their own script based upon the other whilst developing their own unique style. Today new terms have appeared in theatre studies such as post-auteur and neo-auteur, which have not yet been investigated and are riddled with contradiction. The post-auteur theatre considers the work of the director-auteur, not as an expression of an individual genius, but rather as a meeting place, a point of assembly of his biography, intertext, context and specific historical situation. The post-auteur theatre puts the personality of the director-auteur in the background, putting in the first place the collective nature of the work to create a film or performance. The director exists today in another socio-cultural formation. That is why the concept of “neo-auteur theatre” (or cinema) that may become appropriate to describe a new approach to directing that is characteristic of the contemporary cultural situation. The neo-auteurism approach suggests that the director, in addition to the film or performance, creates a certain “added value”. Directors are fully involved in the advertising process to promote their performances on social networks, the media, participation in festivals, lecturing and other forms of public presentation and promotion. “Auteur” has become a marketing category, a label that is actively and not always deservedly assigned or distributed to directors. Anglo-American critics pay attention to such a sign of auteurship in the credits or on posters such as “film by” or “performance by”. This is a kind of trophy. In such a situation, auteurship turns out to be nothing more than a category of status in the hierarchy of social values, a purely external attribute of the “packaging” of a film or performance. However, it is important to consider the rise of a new type of director and to allow the rational identification of his or her conceptual activity; more often than not displayed in the work of such avant-garde directors as Edward Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyer-hold, Bertolt Brecht etc.

Conceptual features of I. Turgenev’s artistic method in the aspect of Anglo-American critics in XX century

The article includes the consideration of the strategy of Anglo-American literary studies and investigation the significance of I. Turgenev’s personality in the world literary and cultural process from a new perspective. The use of historical-functional and comparative-typological methods represent the original approaches to the reception of I. Turgenev fiction through the allocation of spatial and interlinguistic oppositions in the structure of the artistic chronotope. The strategy of Anglo-American literary criticism was aimed at understanding literary heritage of Turgenev from a new perspective and represented the significance I. Turgenev’s personality in the world literary and cultural process as well. The original approach to the reception of I. Turgenev included the spatial and linguistic oppositions recognized the specifics of the artistic chronotope. Anglo-American critics believed that the spatio- temporal boundaries of the Turgenev`s narrative had been expanded due to speech characteristics. They paid solid attention to the conceptual features of the artistic method of the Russian writer and believed that the I. Turgenev creativity had based not only on one method and had been not exhausted by the potentials of the realistic context to which it had been traditionally ranked. The Anglo-American Slavic study was distinguished by its priority approaches in enlighting the Turgenev`s literary heritage, and the Western scientist researched new semantic artistic shades of literary texts regad less of hermeneutic, structural, and gender approaches. Representatives of existentialism, psychoanalytic criticism, as well as adherents of the mythological school, carried out their philological research. In the artistic world of I. Turgenev Anglo-American researchers revealed an internal contradiction between the ideas of the Russian writer about the self-worth of culture and literature and his real artistic practice, aimed at creating novels with pointed social and political problems.

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND GENDER INEQUALITY IN “THE TEMPEST”

The Tempest is one of the most famous and widely popular plays written by renowned writer and playwright William Shakespeare. The play revolves around the main protagonist Prospero who emerges as an all-knowing, benevolent patriarch who acts as the puppet-master who determines the fate of all the other characters in the play by virtue of his magic. Until the advent of post-colonial criticism, Anglo-American critics frequently read The Tempest as an allegory about artistic creation and Prospero was perceived to be a representation of Shakespeare himself whose motives are beyond reproach.The Post-colonial readings of The Tempest, provides us a deeper and a more insightful perspective of the play. A close inspection of his masterpieces gives us a glimpse of various aspects of the prevailing social structures, gender and cast roles, political conditions, beliefs and superstitions. The prevailing gender discrimination becomes evident by Prospero’s treatment toward Caliban (a black slave) as opposed to his behavior toward Ariel (a white slave) and his depiction of Sycorax. Claribel wedding also provides a glimpse of racial prejudice and the discrimination based on colour.Another major concept that comes to the limelight with the Post-colonial readings of The Tempest is the gender discrimination. These patriarchal ideals are heavily noted in The Tempest, especially with the appearance of the single female character, Miranda. Claribel is yet another example of how women were expected to play a passive, submissive role in the society. This is further enhanced by the lack of any other female character in the entire play. Depiction of Sycorax also provides us a glimpse of the deep rooted misogyny in the patriarchal society.Shakespeare often used social issues as a way to explore the way society functioned, using the stage to present a microcosm that represented the larger macrocosm of the universe. Thus critical analysis of The Tempest provides us with an accurate depiction of the social constructs, gender bias and the racial discrimination prevalent in the Elizabethan Era.

Идея этнопоэтики в современных исследованиях

<p>In recent decades, ethnopoetics has become one of the new philological disciplines. Its idea first appeared in the treatise of Nicolas Boileau “The Art of Poetry” (1674), in which the classicist theorist formulated the requirement of local and historical color in art. His rule was followed by many poets, playwrights and novelists of Modern history. In Anglo-American criticism, the term ethnopoetics was introduced in 1968. Jerome Rotenberg, who, along with Dennis Tedlock and Dell Himes, founded the principles and methods of studying American Indian poetry. In the 2000s. this concept has entered encyclopedic dictionaries in English and other European languages, but this word is still not in Russian terminological dictionaries. So far, the concept of poetics, which restricts the semantics of words forming a term, has received recognition. Already in the process of formation of ethnopoetics, its subject was expanded at the expense of middle Eastern and Jewish folklore, and later the oral creativity of other peoples. The word formation model (ἔθνος/ ethnos + ποιητική/poetics) cancels limited interpretations of the term. In modern usage, the term ethnopoetics is used in a wide range of meanings that have not yet been marked by lexicographers, but convey the full semantics of the words forming the term. The idea of ethnopoetics gave rise to not one, but several of its concepts. The author of the article develops his earlier understanding of ethnopoetics as a discipline that should study the national identity of the oral and written text, describe in the categories of poetics the specific things that make national literature national. It is characterized by concepts and conceptospheres, they form the mentality, reveal the cultural code of national literatures. The analysis of ethnopoetics opens up great opportunities in the comparative analysis of thesauri of different authors and their works.</p>

Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur ed. by Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek

Reviewed by: Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur ed. by Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek Andrew B. B. Hamilton Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek, eds., Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2017. 168 pp. The publication of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 was a watershed moment in Anglo-American criticism, but its significance outside the anglophone world has largely been more muted and indirect, if no less extensive. A new edited volume, Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust, sets out to address Bloom's terms directly, in the context of contemporary Austrian literature. The editors' foreword summarizes the objective of the book: Die Beiträge sind Versuche, an ausgewählten Beispielen aufzuzeigen, wie Schrift stellerinnen und Schrift steller unterschiedlicher intellektueller und ästhetischer Provenienz in ihrem Schaffen auf diverse Facetten der spezifisch österreichischen literarischen Tradition reagieren, inwiefern diese Tradition als Chance der Innovation begriffen wird bzw. werden kann, ohne den Gedanken an Originalitat und Autonomie überzustrapazieren. (7) This formulation of tradition as an occasion for innovation is familiar to anglophone readers from T. S. Eliot's influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which would in turn provide the skeleton for Bloom's model. The key here, though, is the insistence on the specificity of the Austrian case. For if Bloom's readings of Milton or Shelley must overcome the reader's skepticism about the posited Traditionsproblematik, the location of such Einflussangst in the centermost current of Austrian literature in the twentieth and twenty-first [End Page 87] centuries all but goes without saying. The question is not a theoretical one about poetry in general but a direct one about a specifically defined corpus: What does Bloom's model do to shed light on Austrian literary production of the present? The first of the volume's fourteen contributions comes from Günther A. Höfler. "Harald Blooms ödipale Einflussmystik und die Rolle der literarischen Vorläufer in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur" sets the tone for the volume and effectively elucidates the key ideas. The reader does not have to be familiar with Bloom's work to benefit from this collection. The first two sections of Höfler's essay are called "fragliche Zusammenhänge" and "Harold Blooms ödipale Geniereligion," and they offer a fine overview of what Bloom means by "Einflussangst/anxiety of influence," by "clinamen," by "poetic history," and by "genius," these being the key terms that drive his theory. But Höfler offers more than an overview or summary—he moves quickly to the discussion of specific Austrian cases. He points out a lovely affinity between Bloom and Thomas Bernhard, the latter having described to an interviewer shortly before the publication of The Anxiety of Influence that he sees himself as the enemy of his literary forebears and that the authors most important to him are those he most struggles with. For his part, Bloom included Bernhard's 1984 novel Holzfällen in his taste-making book The Western Canon. Höfler steps directly into one of the main difficulties posed by any study of literary influence when he titles the fourth section of his essay "Niemandes Söhne und Töchter: die literarische Generation Y," without offering at least a tentative definition of this generation. After all, people are born every year, and the genealogical metaphor implies a distinct division into generations, into parents and children. He does offer one defining characteristic of Generation Y, by way of Hurrelmann's and Albrecht's book Die heimlichen Revolutionäre: Wie die Generation Y die Welt verändert. He calls them the first digital natives—a solid and familiar premise, to be sure, except that the authors he turns to first of all as examples are born as early as 1978 and as late as 1990, too wide a range to claim a shared relationship to new technology, in my opinion. This is meant not as an attack, but only to point out how slippery these terms always are and how much Bloom is able to sidestep by putting a few centuries between himself...

(Dis)locating Spain: Performance Intertextualities in Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre

Building on Tim Bergfelder’s distinction between reputedly “open” Hollywood films and “culturally specific” European fare, this article focuses on the production and reception of Pedro Almodovar’s Todo sobre mi madre (All about My Mother, 1999). Critics have pinpointed intertextual references but have assumed that the Spanish filmmaker draws on “universal” texts to make a “culturally specific” vision legible for international audiences. The binaries on which such a model is predicated do not withstand close cinematic or sociohistorical scrutiny. Todo sobre mi madre conveys distinct meanings in Spain as compared to the international arena; this is not exclusively, or even necessarily predominantly, the result of autochthonous reference points; it is also due to the contingencies of reception when Hollywood films are translated out of their domestic habitat. Tracing some of these journeys and identifying various interpretive communities will develop understanding of Almodovar’s craft and commercial success, and also help contextualize and potentially reconcile some of the frequently embittered battles between Spanish and Anglo-American critics over the right to define and describe his cinematic output.

FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015, 273 pp.If Roland Barthes's seminal 1968 pronouncement of the "Death of the Author" helped give birth to postmodern literary theory, it is our own digital age that has led to the crashing fade-out of the professional-and even semiprofessional-film critic. Over the last decade, we have read a litany of postmortems, ranging from the snide "good riddance" to elegies invoking the ghosts of Pauline Kael, James Agee, Andrew Sarris, and other pre-digital critical auteurs.Although there has been a flurry of online articles underscoring this seismic shift, Film Criticism in the Digital Age ambitiously bills itself as "the first book-length study of its kind" (13). To that end, coeditors Frey and Sayad assemble both academic and popular analyses on the dearth-perhaps death-of the working film critic, caught up and rubbed out in the brave new World Wide Web of bottomless blogs and 140-character tweets. Refusing a simplistic "thumbs-up/thumbs down" approach, this useful if fitful anthology merits several stars, at least because it has the audacity to deliver its content in the old-school, contemplative, and tactile platform of print.Frey's introduction provides a valuable recap of recent reports on the demise of film criticism-which, unfortunately, has not been exaggerated by those men (and a few women) who have remained standing since journalistic ink started running red in the 1990s. Frey cites the Salt Lake Tribune's Sean Means, who lists over fifty film critics purged from 2006 to 2010-including such stalwarts as David Ansen of Newsweek (itself now out of print) and Variety's Todd McCarthy. From these opening shots, Frey focuses in on the book's main debates: for example, the relationship between the critic and his or her audience; the effect the new media forms have on criticism itself and the critic as occupation; and perhaps most Orwellian, whether "evaluation" should be the purpose of film criticism any longer in an age of cultural fragmentation and relativism. (To the latter, we might also add the morphing of popular film and TV into cultish mass constructs-Hunger Games or Game of Thrones anyone?)Contributors to the book, from noted scholar Thomas Elsaesser to controversial critic Armond White, primarily discuss the anarchic state of Anglo-American film criticism; however, also included are several globally oriented studies that will be of less interest to US readers. Threading through many of the essays are thoughts on the deeper debate regarding the culture and practice of the Internet itself. With no editorial "gatekeepers" anymore, nor the necessity of a media infrastructure per se, now anyone truly can be a critic (or, for that matter, an anonymous, toxic "troll"). As a result, this hyper-democratized explosion of popular voices has not only leveled the critical playing field but largely paved it over, engendering an equivalence of sorts between onetime elite (and discretely exclusive) print publications and the amateur "citizen journalist" writer. An upstart reviewing site can appear in a Google search within spitting distance of, say, the New York Times or Variety (especially if it is addressing an offbeat film or topic), and popular aggregate film sites such as Rotten Tomatoes tend to squish all the quoted reviewers together in one visual and evaluative field. Recently, Rotten Tomatoes has even begun grafting in audience comments, mutating into even more of a weedy, Franken-site hybrid.In the shrinking big picture of professional journalism in the age of Craigslist and Facebook, film criticism is only a small, if more battered, back page. Although Frey and Sayad competently treat the narrow issues, they tread lightly around the elephant in the (chat) room: the "free" and uncontrolled nature of Internet content that makes most for-profit news, arts, and culture sites slavishly dependent on (generically derived) advertising revenue, which is only a trickle compared to the streams that once flowed in print's heyday. …

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics ed. by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar (review)

Reviewed by: Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics ed. by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar Gabriela Stoicea Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics. Edited by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Pp. 293. Paper $40.00. ISBN 978-0803245105. The emergence of a corpus of secondary literature on Herta Müller is a relatively recent development. The first collections of essays on the Romanian-born writer appeared in Germany in 1991 and 1997 under the editorship, respectively, of Norbert Eke (Die erfundene Wahrnehmung: Annäherung an Herta Müller) and Ralph Köhnen (Der Druck der Erfahrung treibt die Sprache in die Dichtung: Bildlichkeit in Texten Herta Müllers). Anglo-American criticism lagged behind that of Germany, with the first English-language collection appearing in 1998 (Brigid Haines, ed., Herta Müller). Predictably, the tide of academic interest in Herta Müller shifted in 2009. The last few years since she won the Nobel Prize have seen a steady increase in the number both of monographs and of edited collections on Müller’s diverse literary output. The volume under discussion inscribes itself precisely into this trend. The fact that its publication coincides with that of another edited collection on the same topic (Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven, eds., Herta Müller [2013]) testifies to the ongoing enthusiasm for Herta Müller in academic and publishing circles. But it also raises the question of similarities and differences between the volume under review and others like it. In the editors’ words, Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics “presents a variety of literary, cultural, and historical approaches” to Müller’s writings, and it addresses “a general English-speaking academic audience with an interest in dissident, exile, migration, experimental, and transnational literature” (6). Other collections offer a similarly heterogeneous perspective on the subject matter and target the same kind of audience. Also familiar from previous collaborative projects on Herta Müller is the coming together of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, some less seasoned than others but equally astute and indicative of a growing research community centered on the Nobel laureate. Not uncommon in Herta Müller scholarship of the past decade are also some of the thematic lenses through which contributors to the present volume read the author’s works: Heimat and exile, alienation and alterity, trauma and memory, as well as the strongly autobiographical dimension of Müller’s works—including her dual linguistic and cultural heritage (Romanian-German), and her experience with totalitarianism under the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Last but not least, like many other edited collections before it, Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics spans the full range of genres represented in Müller’s oeuvre, from essays and collage poems to her Nobel-winning novel Atemschaukel. For all the similarities it shares with other studies of its kind in terms of scope, purpose, thematic emphasis, methodology, contributors, and target audience, the collection edited by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar occupies its own place in Herta Müller scholarship, and this for several reasons. First of all, because it brings [End Page 704] academic scholars into direct dialogue with the literary author through the inclusion in the volume of Müller’s Nobel lecture and of four hitherto unpublished collage poems. Even though these primary texts do not form the immediate object of the critical essays that make up the bulk of the collection, they do set the tone for what follows by announcing many of the themes and tropes that tie the volume together. Müller’s Nobel lecture, for instance, illustrates, through its compulsive fixation on handkerchiefs, the centrality of household objects to the author’s oeuvre, as analyzed from different viewpoints by Brigid Haines, Paola Bozzi, Beverley Driver Eddy, Monika Moyrer, and Anja Johannsen in their respective contributions. Similarly, Müller’s collage poems from the first part of the book tie in nicely with several essays from part 3 dedicated specifically to the author’s collage aesthetic, but also with the more generally recurring idea of hybridity in Müller’s thought and writing. The volume also stands out for what it promises in the...

Villette: Anglo-American Feminist Criticism Revisited

Villette: Anglo-American Feminist Criticism Revisited

Service and Servants in Early Modern English Culture to 1660

This review essay surveys the last ten years of literary scholarship on service and servants in early modern England, with a particular focus on Shakespeare, to offer an overview of approaches and a sense of new directions in the field. The essay examines how studies have often pivoted between considering the act (‘service’) and the person (‘servant’) who performs it. Definitional ambiguities seem permanently to hover around these key terms. But rather than portending incoherence, the continuing presence of multiple definitions signals that scholarship about service and servants has reached a certain maturity. In the period under review, the field has matured to the point that critics no longer need to prove that service deserves consideration as an object of study, with the result that they can pursue vigorously the ways in which service and servants are imbricated with larger ontological and phenomenological questions. Investigating recent criticism on service takes this essay into critical territory that encompasses not only social class, economics, occupational identity, and subjectivity, but also aesthetics, ethics, affect, gender and sexuality, politics, race and colonialism. One important conclusion is that a growing body of work, some of it tracing the development of inter-Atlantic slavery from paradigms of service, offers a material, historical perspective on the ways in which servants enable freedom for others without being enabled to experience it for themselves. Looking to the future, the author encourages Anglo-American critics to think more expansively and comparatively about service, so that new connections might be drawn between the supposedly vanished world of servants and service and the global service economy in which we all participate today.

French Caribbean prose d'idées in Translation

Édouard Glissant's work fascinates Anglo-American academics and critics, as the proliferation of work on his oeuvre in the last decade clearly shows. Celia Britton's (1999) book is evidence that Glissant's theoretical work (and that of the wider French Caribbean critical community) has been gaining ever-greater visibility in contemporary postcolonial theory, and translations have a clear role to play in the dissemination of the prose d'idées from the French Caribbean. This essay analyses the translations from French into English of three influential theoretical works by Édouard Glissant: L'Intention poétique (1969) translated by Nathalie Stephens in 2010, Le Discours antillais (1981) translated by Michael Dash in 1989, and Poétique de la relation (1990) translated by Betsy Wing in 1997. Each of these treatises proposes strategies to break the silence stemming from the unresolved split in cultural identity in the Caribbean consciousness. Spanning four decades in theoretical Martinican writing, the influence of these texts on Caribbean literature, and the way it is perceived, is widely acknowledged, as demonstrated by their frequent referencing in academic articles and books. The counterpoetics, creolization and Créolité are not only described theoretically in these texts, but also inherently ‘performed’, ‘acted’, in their language and style, rendering any translation attempt more difficult. Here, translation can be seen as a continuation of the process of Creolization and Créolité. Through specific examples from the translations, I hope to illuminate how translators have attempted to render the fragmented, multiple language in the English target language, bringing the text to a new audience. Consequently, the essay studies how an English-speaking audience's understanding of Glissant's work is influenced by the linguistic transfer and questions the role translation plays in the critical corpus on Glissant's work.

Jean Louis Schefer: screen memories from L'Homme ordinaire du cinéma

Jean Louis Schefer is one of the less well-known French philosophers of cinema, and yet his seminal work from 1980, L'Homme ordinaire du cinéma, which has gone largely unnoticed in Anglo-American criticism, has been very influential on French film thinking. This paper sets out to frame Schefer's work in a manner that makes more accessible his unconventional manner and analysis of cinema history. Schefer's philosophy of cinema offers a very personal understanding of how the ‘ordinary person’ experiences cinema and, in particular, how individual films have the ability to shape personal interactions with history and culture, forming an ‘inner history’ that has been a part and continues to be a part of twentieth-century existential being, often confronting us with the more difficult moments and events in recent human history.

Route 66 and No End: Further Fortunes of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66

AbstractAt the SHINE-conference in Murcia in 1999 I claimed that sonnet 66 has been largely disregarded by Anglo-American critics whereas, in continental Europe, it has been frequently used as a medium of protest in crucial political situations. In the light of more recent findings I will revise this claim and draw attention to English poets and novelists from the Romantic period to Modernism reworking or working with the sonnet with a political thrust

An Experiment in Gendered Reading: Enchi Fumiko's "A Bond for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings"

An Experiment in Gendered Reading:Enchi Fumiko's "A Bond for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings" Junko Umemoto (bio) Japanese women writers entered the canon of world literature about a decade ago, when Anglo-American critics, who had long been seeking to recover a feminine tradition of literature, extended their project to Japanese women's literature and began treating them from a gender studies point of view. The Woman's Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women's Writing (1996), a seminal volume that emerged from a 1993 Rutgers conference on Japanese women writers, consists of essays anchored in the idea of gendered reading, and it proves how theories derived from Western discursive practice can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of Japanese women's writing—and, conversely, shows how Japanese women's writing can make a contribution to discussions of world literature by women writers.1 Enchi Fumiko (1905-86) is one of the Japanese women writers analyzed in the Rutgers conference volume. Her work stretches from the 1936 novel 散文恋愛 (Sambun ren'ai) [Her Love Diary] to an autobiographical trilogy finished in 1968 and includes the 1957 and 1958 novels 女坂 (Onnazaka) (translated as The Waiting Years) and 女面 (Onnamen) (translated as Masks). Enchi did not reject Japanese traditional values, but she did try to anatomize women's bodies in terms that suggested sensuality and mystery. Her writings and thought were the forerunners of the modern feminist writers who described the sensual and physiological aspects of women. She skillfully treats sensitive and psychological problems derived from physical troubles, thereby challenging the old taboo of directly describing the female body. In so doing, she realized her mission as a female writer in the postwar period. The most distinctive features of feminist writing are seen in Enchi's works relating to the sexuality of middle-aged women. Why did Enchi focus [End Page 369] on middle-aged women? Many scholars believe that she was influenced strongly by the loss of her womb to cancer. 二世の縁 拾遺 ("Nise no en—Shui") ["A Bond for Two Lifetimes—Gleanings"], published in 1957, is only a short novel, but it is one of Enchi's most representative works in the way it reproduces Japanese classics from the Edo period (as reinterpreted by her).2 In addition, no other work more clearly depicts Enchi's obsession with female organs than this one. It includes the unusual expression "shikyu ga dokiri to natta" ("My very womb cried out in longing" in Phyllis Birnbaum's translation), which Doris Bargen, one of the contributors to the Rutgers conference, among other scholars, was taken with.3 Enchi makes the heroine realize her sexuality through the dull pain of her womb. It is a challenging description that shocks readers, underscoring as it does the tenacity of Enchi's consciousness as a woman. Enchi's obsession with her lost womb is heightened by her use of onomatopoeia: "dokiri" indicates a throbbing sound (Birnbaum's English translation does not replicate the onomatopoeia). Enchi thus spoke out using the female parts of the body as a symbol of "womanliness" and might be fairly described as a warrior armed with female consciousness. One of the most distinctive features of Enchi's literature is her reinterpretation of the Japanese classics. Enchi, the only daughter of a famous linguist and professor at Tokyo Imperial University, was well versed in Japanese classics, from the 源氏物語 (Genji monogatari) [Tale of Genji] to the comic literature of the late Edo period (1600-1867). She was introduced to them in her teenage years, and they color and enrich her works, endowing them with the elusive and eerie beauty that many of the classic Japanese tales have. Knowledge of classic Japanese literature is helpful to understanding the female protagonists Enchi created. For example, the behavior of Mieko, the protagonist of Masks, is never directly explained and can be inscrutable. Mieko uses her daughter-in-law and her own daughter, as well as the two men in love with her daughter-in-law, to wreak vengeance on her husband for betraying her in the early years of her marriage. Obviously, Mieko has spent many years plotting her revenge, which can be explained as the curse of an evil spirit, born...

The Art of Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Fiction Stephen Arata (bio) Henry James , "The Art of Fiction" (1884) Consult just about any anthology of modern literary criticism and you are likely to find Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" somewhere on the premises. This 1884 essay—I am not going out on a limb here—is the best-known theoretical statement on the novel published in Victorian England. Together with a handful of other essays and, more pyrotechnically, the 1907-09 prefaces to the New York edition of his works, "The Art of Fiction" established James's posthumous reputation as the foremost narrative theorist of his era. For Anglo-American critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that reputation was decisively shaped by Percy Lubbock and R.P. Blackmur. Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Blackmur's introductory essay to The Art of the Novel (1934) celebrate James for shaking the novel—theory and practice alike—out of its cozy Victorian slumber and charging it with modern sophistication and rigour. For the New Critics who read him by way of Lubbock and Blackmur, it was James's mastery of technique and his attention to novelistic form that separated his achievement from those loose, baggy monsters casually turned out by his immediate forebears. It was likewise, in this view, James's conception of his art as a sacred office that helped deliver narrative fiction from the banal moralism and misguided social activism characteristic of the Victorian novel. Such views have not worn well, and few would now argue either that Victorian novelists were unsophisticated in the practice of their craft or that James's own novels conform more than intermittently to New Critical standards. (Then again, neither would James.) If "The Art of Fiction" no longer seems the proto-Modernist manifesto it once was taken for, it nevertheless remains essential reading for literary critics. Its interest is not merely antiquarian, either. At this historical remove, what is most striking about the essay is the continuing relevance of the case it makes for the activity of criticism itself. In terms that are still recognizable, "The Art of Fiction" validates what we do. If some of James's evaluative criteria seem less compelling than they once did, his impassioned defence of the importance—as well as the pleasure—of criticism retains its freshness. This is not always the case with Matthew Arnold, whose apologies for criticism often sound, well, apologetic, as if Arnold were disappointed with the world for getting itself into such a state that criticism had become necessary and disappointed with himself for giving in to the critical impulse. It is doubtful that Arnold ever believed, as James did, that to exercise our critical faculties is to "enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures" (50). "The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle," James avers a few pages earlier, "but the theory too is interesting" (45). The occasional [End Page 53] dilettantishness of his phrasing should not obscure the serious, indeed crucial, benefits James attributes to acts of responsible criticism. He does not, as Oscar Wilde would a half-decade later, go so far as to say that criticism is on par with the other creative arts, but he does insist that the arts are immeasurably enriched by creative criticism. It seems clear that James was moved to write "The Art of Fiction" primarily in the hope of getting a discussion going. He is less concerned, that is, to insist on the validity of his own critical methodology (though he does so insist) than to open a space for critical debate. Throughout the 1880s, James continually presents himself as a critic in search of someone to talk with. Later commentators have pointed out that the critical landscape was not quite so arid as James made it out to be. There is some truth to their claim, but only some, as anyone who has spent much time reading Victorian periodical literature dating from prior to 1890 will probably attest. Much more common are sentiments such as those expressed by Walter Besant in the lecture to which James's essay was a direct response. "I, for one...

The third citizen: Shakespeare's theater and the early modern House of Commons

The new practices and theories of parliamentary representation that emerged during Elizabeth's and James' reigns shattered the unity of human agency, redefined the nature of power, transformed the image of the body politic, and unsettled constructs and concepts as fundamental as the relation between presence and absence. In The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold argues that recovering the formation of political representation as an effective ideology should radically change our understanding of early modern political culture, Shakespeare's political art, and the way Anglo-American critics, for whom representative democracy is second nature, construe both. In magisterial readings of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and the First Tetralogy, Arnold discovers a new Shakespeare who was neither a conservative apologist for monarchy nor a prescient, liberal champion of the House of Commons but instead a radical thinker and artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the moment of its first flowering. Shakespeare believed that political representation produced (and required for its reproduction) a new kind of subject and a new kind of subjectivity, and he fashioned a new kind of tragedy to represent the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of representing and of being represented. Representationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare's tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.