Autobiographical Elements Research Articles

Women's Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Carme Font

Reviewed by: Women's Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britainby Carme Font Claire McGann WOMEN'S PROPHETIC WRITINGS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN, by Carme Font. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017. 250 pp. $149.95 cloth; $49.46 ebook. Carme Font joins a cohort of scholars who have discovered creativity, intellect, and beauty in the prophetic discourse of seventeenth-century women. Despite the bodily suffering and self-abnegating authorial strategies often associated with this genre, Font's study helps to celebrate the highly personalized and empowering nature of early modern prophecy. In Women's Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Font illuminates the ways in which women became leaders of communities and activists for political and social change through their prophetic writing. Font demonstrates the empowering and personalized nature of seventeenth-century prophecy through the example of the Baptist Anne Wentworth (1629/30-1693?). In Wentworth's prophetic writing, her biblical imagery and doom-laden predictions also reference and condemn her own violent and abusive husband. Font observes that for women such as Wentworth the prophetic mode facilitated "the articulation of personal convictions as spiritual beliefs" (p. 214). This form of discourse allowed [End Page 199]women to produce authoritative texts that were shaped by their own experiences and that often "transformed their personal circumstances" (p. 214). Font also argues that seventeenth-century women used their prophetic voices to intervene and influence the politics and society around them. In another compelling case study, Font discusses the Baptist Elizabeth Poole (bap. 1622?-1688?), who was invited to deliver her prophecies to the army council in December 1648. Poole's speech was printed under the title A Visionin 1649. Addressing the heart of power, Poole reported a divine vision of "a man" (signifying the army) assisting " a woman crooked, sick, weak and imperfect in body" (signifying the nation) (qtd. p. 65). Poole explained that this vision was an expression of God's specific desire that the army should aid the ailing nation by preserving the body of King Charles I after his trial. With her anti-regicidal interpretation, Poole clearly endeavoured to intervene in the pressing political matters of the day with her prophetic discourse. In her analysis of Poole's writing, Font goes so far as to suggest that "the main motivation" for Poole's text was in fact "political," and that Poole's references to prophetic visions stemmed from a need to "build a public personafit for the occasion" (pp. 76, 86). As such, Font argues that Poole's passionate political discourse predominates her visionary material, which the critic describes as "brief, almost subdued" (p. 86). As illustrated by her discussion of Poole, Font is often less invested in examing the spiritual and theological arguments within women's prophetic discourse. Instead, Font's analyses frequently favor emphasizing the personal and political motivations of women adopting a prophetic mode. While duly acknowledging that religious and political matters were closely intertwined during this period, Font also argues that seventeenth-century prophecy could work as "a form of activism because social or political regeneration, and not religious conversion, was the primary concern of prophetesses" (p. 42). Indeed, what Font is often most interested in celebrating in her work is the way in which "women's prophetic narrative created an authorial center capable of confronting political adversaries, subverting institutional control, or dignifying the social status of women" (p. 217). Thus, according to Font, "to read prophecy as an adjunct of a religious discourse only is to deny its full discursive capability" (p. 217). One of the greatest contributions Women's Prophetic Writingsmakes to the study of early modern women's writing is the careful way in which Font nuances our understanding of the term "prophetic." As this volume's abundant source material illustrates, not all seventeenth-century prophecy resembled an inspired trance. As Font states, "women's prophetic speech in seventeenth-century Britain displayed a combination of ecstatic, exegetic, and autobiographical elements" that "could vary according to the prophetic personality of the individual" (p. 97). Accordingly, Font glosses a [End Page 200]broad spectrum of works in which women might be described as adopting a...

<i>Kirari</i> as Autobiography in Hausa Praise Poetry

This study shows that autobiography exists in oral civilizations by exploring Kirari in Hausa praise poetry. The study focuses on the forms of Kirari that clearly bring out the autobiographical elements that illustrate the autobiographer’s conscious awareness of the singularity of his or her life and achievements and the uniqueness of their identity among the members of their community and/or profession. These forms of Kirari are identified in excerpts from Hausa hunters’ heroic self-praise and from Bakandamiya by the singer Maman Shata Katsina.

A Palimpsestuous Novel: Claire Legendre's La Méthode Stanislavski

Claire Legendre's La Méthode Stanislavski (2006) is a complex web, if not play, with a broad variety of autobiographical and intertextual elements. Beyond sending its readers on a literary and autobiographical scavenger hunt, as well as being a riveting crime fiction, this palimpsestuous novel proposes an ambitious reflection on the essential dynamic nature of artistic creativity. Drawing on the typologies established by Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes and Seuils, as well as on Philippe Gasparini's Est-il je?, this article demonstrates how Legendre's multilayered narrative generates a metadiscursive reflection on hypertextuality and on first-person writing. La Méthode Stanislavski becomes first a literary and intermedial palimpsest since it makes references to numerous cultural items, such as cinema or classic French literature, and partially rewrites Constantin Stanislavski's La Formation de l'acteur. The latter work becomes both a literal and allegorical hypotext that enables Legendre to question the purposes of hypertextuality itself but also to posit a literary aesthetics that crosses borders between genres and the arts. Yet, La Méthode Stanislavski also constitutes an autobiographical palimpsest. In addition to featuring autobiographical elements that may be verified through a variety of paratexts, Hervé Guibert's novel L'Incognito also becomes an allegorical hypotext in Legendre's novel. As with Stanislavski's book, reworking Guibert's novel generates a metadiscursive reflection on first-person writing and, especially, on the problematic notions of truth and authenticity as applied to the genre.

Walt Kelly's Bridgeport

Although he was born in Philadelphia in 1913, cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote frequently in his essays about his affection for Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his family made a new home in 1915. Like the state's other urban areas in the early twentieth century, the Park City's population increased during Kelly's childhood because of industrialization that brought new jobs and attracted immigrants from Europe and families from the U.S. South. Kelly's nostalgia for the city manifests itself in Pogo in the form of P. T. Bridgeport, a circus bear based on P. T. Barnum and on Kelly's friend and mentor Charles F. Greene. In 1931 and 1932, Kelly and Greene collaborated on a series called "P. T. Barnum's Life in Pictures and Prose" for the Bridgeport Post. The following essay reads the bear's presence as narrator in the opening story of the 1972 Pogo collection We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us as both a nostalgic tribute to Kelly's friend and as an elegy for the artist's childhood. Drawing on Hillary L. Chute's recent article on the links between comics and poetry, this essay also draws on studies of nostalgia and poetic elegies to provide another critical lens through which to view the autobiographical elements in Kelly's work.

Editor's Foreword: Long Day's Journeys and Deposed Emperors

Might it be a register of our current cultural moment that several productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night—arguably O'Neill's darkest play—were performed this past year, four of which are reviewed in this edition of the EOR? Or that O'Neill's expressionistic portrait of a despotic ruler meeting his demise (The Emperor Jones) in the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival felt all the more poignant as our first black president left the White House after divisive elections? Or, when transferred across the Atlantic to the cavernous Armory, that Richard Jones's neon production of The Hairy Ape felt less like a period piece and more of a current snapshot of how the average Yank clashes with a culture obsessed with Fifth Avenue capital?It is precisely during times of tumult that we turn to great thinkers. With a country deeply divided since the election, works like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and It Can't Happen Here have risen to the top of best-seller lists. While O'Neill's dramas might not be among the must-read lists, they are certainly on the “must stage” list. For it is in the living room of Monte Cristo Cottage that we find insights into how families are torn apart; it is on the giant red throne that we find the possibilities—and limits—of tyrannical rule; and it is within the stokehole of a ship where we can see the sweltering labor for a chance to belong.Whether staged on Broadway, in Los Angeles, or within O'Neill's summer home in New London, Long Day's Journey Into Night was among O'Neill's most prominently performed plays this past year. Robert McLean recounts how the fine acting in the Palm Beach Dramaworks production resulted in one of the best Long Day's Journeys he has witnessed. The much-anticipated Broadway production of Long Day's Journey starring Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange delivered a raw and aching interpretation, with Lange giving a heart-wrenching portrayal of Mary Tyrone—and justly winning a Tony Award for Best Actress. On the West Coast, the LA production of Long Day's Journey featured a different—but no less stunning—pair of actors in the title roles: Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek. With dramaturgical work by former EOR editor William Davies King, this production included projections of O'Neill's family and recordings of O'Neill reading poetry to bring the autobiographical elements of the play to life, as Jaime Leigh Gray's review reveals. But what could be more autobiographical than staging Long Day's Journey within the home in which Eugene grew up? Robert Dowling's review shows how the Flock Theatre for the first time brought the play to Monte Cristo Cottage, where the house itself became a character. Sitting just feet away from the actors, the audience felt the intimacy not only of the actors' work but also of references to New London life.New York's 55,000-square-foot Park Avenue Armory drill hall functioned as another kind of actor in Richard Jones's transfer of his London production of The Hairy Ape. With the “gritty and charismatic” Bobby Cannavale leading the ensemble as Yank, Ryder Thornton tells us, the production was significantly restaged to take advantage of the site-specific space. In contrast to the expansive Armory, the Irish Rep's tiny theater—not unlike the original Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street—gave their revival of The Emperor Jones intimacy, demonstrating “that O'Neill is once again the playwright for another new American century, unmasking the appetites and transgressions that lie beneath the dream of empire,” as Kurt Eisen writes.Two deconstructed productions of O'Neill's dramas showed the desire to make new art and innovate, much as O'Neill turned away from the theater of his father. In an evening of one-acts (Recklessness and Now I Ask You) entitled O'Neill (Unexpected), the Metropolitan Theater Company subverted genre conventions, Zander Brietzke observes, playing the tragic Recklessness as comedy and Now I Ask You—O'Neill's only comedy other than Ah, Wilderness!—as tragedy. And Kurt Eisen describes the experimental nature of the Brooklyn-based Target Margin Theater in its fracturing of The Iceman Cometh under the title The Iceman Lab, in which different directors each took on one of the play's four acts.Whether deconstructing O'Neill's dramas with postmodern adaptations, enmeshing O'Neill's biography into the production, or casting Broadway stars in award-winning revivals, the slate of productions reviewed here reveals a need to wrestle with the challenges in front of us. We cannot afford to be crushed like Yank in a gorilla's cage, or be caged by the claustrophobic trauma of dysfunctional families. And we cannot afford to be complicit with despotic rulers. In this way, for our current moment, O'Neill is indeed unexpectedly relevant.

Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces

In order to uncover the fictional strategies that project Florescu's native Romania – particularly the former Habsburg region of Banat – as a homeland, an exploration of the consistency and particularities of the tropes of exile, displacement and homecoming, as revealed in his earlier novels, is an essential prerequisite. Given the relevance of autobiographical elements in this writer's work, this paper will focus on the author's first three novels,Wunderzeit(2001),Der kurze Weg nach Hause(2002) andDer blinde Masseur(2006), investigating the themes and dynamics of his exilic discourse. Drawing from contemporary theories concerning displacement and the search for real and imaginary homelands, the article explores the specific ways in which these issues surface as subjective reflections on the recent Eastern European past.

La representación del espacio en tres novelas de Josefina Aldecoa

Spanish writer Josefina Aldecoa has been the subject of relatively scarce literary criticism. However, her narrative is representative of the Spanish Mid-century Generation and she depicts the Spanish society of her time from a very particular perspective by the use of narrative space. This paper analyzes three works by Aldecoa and discusses autobiographical elements in her writing. The topics explored are the use of interior space as a representation of the identity of female characters in contrast to exterior space. It also explores the poetic use of key elements such as the home, the city, water, and mirrors.

Speaking English with an Accent

The essay which follows requires some introductory sentences in German.* In 1993 I was invited to give the opening speech at an international conference on exile in London, primarily dedicated to the many problems of integration which German-speaking emigrants encountered in Great Britain in the 1930s. In shared deliberations on shaping the programme of this conference, I noticed that the language problem had not received sufficient attention within the framework of exile studies to date. Therefore, I chose to examine this issue in my contribution. Refugees and emigrants arrive with their foreign pronunciation of English—the newcomer or the person who is new to a language is immediately confronted by the often uncomprehending natives, and if he even so much as begins to make Germanic guttural sounds, then the situation becomes yet more difficult. My topic certainly has a serious undertone, but it is simply inevitable that comedy prevails. Since I myself belonged to the group of which I speak here, my portrayal naturally also includes autobiographical elements. And finally, as my readers can see immediately, such a lecture must be reproduced the way it was originally held, even if its effect is somewhat weakened by the written form. It simply does not lend itself to transmission into German; in fact, it is not translatable.

KOBIECY KOMIKS AUTOBIOGRAFICZNY

The article is concerned with the works of Polish female comic book artists. I advance the thesis that in their artistic work harbours autobiographical elements which constitute an important element of the whole. I begin the article by clarifying certain notions, namely women's, feminist and autobiography as they may be ambiguously construed. Also, the works in which such autobiographical themes are present are divided into three focus groups: 1. Revisionist representation of history, 2. Emotions, sex life, motherhood, 3. Relations of women with the world, the family, and oneself.

Blind cave of eternal night: The work of mourning in Tagore's Play of Four.

This paper correlates Sigmund Freud and Rabindranath Tagore's writings on mourning through two specific texts. Despite being contemporaries and profoundly influential, Tagore and Freud's spheres of influence have tended to be separate, so that there have been but few attempts at connecting their philosophies. This essay examines the second chapter of Tagore's novella Play of Four (Chaturanga, 1916) in the light of Freud's essay 'Mourning and melancholia' (1917). It explores how mourning may at once demand confirmation and denial; how it affects love and desire. The essay examines the Freudian concept of the unconscious through Tagore's symbolism; it also looks at Tagore and Freud's references to autobiographical elements and Shakespeare in their writing. The paper thus offers a close and juxtaposed reading of texts by two of the most important writers of the past century, who wrote and revolutionized our thinking about human minds and lives. In doing so, it throws new light on Tagore's novella and further proves the universality of Freud's propositions.

Analysing Style and Autobiographical Element in Alice Munro’s “Dear Life”

The paper aims to stylistically analyze the autobiographical elements in Alice Munro’s Story “Dear Life.” It is discovered that from the starting to the end of the story, it is full of the events which are very closely linked to Munro’s own life. Although the events have close resemblance to Munro’s life, these are factiously and artistically depicted so that they serve the purpose of literature and the stylistic aspects of the story. The researchers in the paper analyze and discuss the stylistic characteristics of the author with the help of the textual evidence from the story and to further support these, they cite the literature on the similar aspects. Finally, it is found that Munro’s fantastic style and the blend of the autobiographical facts and fiction make her story ‘Dear Life’ very interesting and worth reading.

Growing up Dalit in Bengal: Conversation with Manohar Mouli Biswas

Abstract This is an interview of Manohar Mouli Biswas, Bangla Dalit activist and writer, where he expresses his views about the identity of Dalit people and the historiography of caste in India. He further speaks about the uniqueness of Bangla Dalit literature, its similarities with Dalit writings in other Indian regional languages and the position of Dalit women writers. He is candid enough to speak about certain autobiographical elements that provided him with the impetus to be a Dalit writer. He further speaks about Dalit drama and its performances which is a marker of its acceptance amongst the viewers. He emphasises on the role of translation of Dalit literature to generate awareness among the larger reading public towards Dalit literature.

Esther Kim Lee, The Theatre of David Henry Hwang

Esther Kim Lee’s The Theatre of David Henry Hwang is an able critical study of this important and well-known Asian-American playwright’s life and works. It pays close attention to the autobiographical elements in Hwang’s plays, as well as his theatrical forms and production styles, and engages with his signature theme of identity politics.

Compromising Genre in Agatha Christie’s South African Detective Novel, The Man in the Brown Suit

SummaryAgatha Christie is so closely associated with the genre of the “whodunit” detective novel that her work is often invoked when the genre is defined. According to Tzvetan Todorov’s influential essay, “The Typology of Fiction” (1966), the generic innovation which often characterises great literature is not appropriate in detective fiction where rigidity of form is intrinsic to the satisfaction the work provides. This is related to the moral function of detective fiction; the identification of the villain and the execution of justice are crucial. It amounts to the expression of an ideology, which according to Michael Green celebrates the individualism of the middle classes and their ability to maintain an ordered society in which they can be psychologically and culturally at home. Christie’s only novel set in South Africa, The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) uncharacteristically transgresses these hallowed conventions of the genre. It is my contention that this is the result of autobiographical and personal elements in the work as well as the intrusion of other genres provoked by the novel’s (South) African setting. While these elements jeopardise the success of the work as a whodunit, they have also prompted a narrative innovation which has largely been ignored by critics. When successfully subjected to the jealous demands of the genre in a later work by the same author, this innovation produced what has been acclaimed by some as the greatest detective novel of all, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).

When Harry Met Jimmie: Trauma and Ambition in Sullivan’s Long-Term Domestic Relationship

In her biography of the innovative and influential psychotherapist Harry Stack Sullivan, Helen Swick Perry has provided a brief secondhand report of the circumstances under which Sullivan met James Inscoe, the youth who “came to stay” for the rest of Sullivan’s life and became known as his “adopted son.” Inscoe also wrote letters to a friend with an account of how they first became acquainted. The present article proposes that a case history of Sullivan’s contains hitherto unrecognized autobiographical elements that furnish a fuller picture of a domestic relationship founded on economic, emotional, and sexual adversity and pressures to appear successful. Perry is critiqued for the positive spin she puts on Sullivan’s life as she withheld significant information and clouds other inescapable conclusions in her otherwise painstakingly researched biography.

Infancia e historia: Actos de la memoria en Dios tenía miedo de Vanessa Núñez Handal y Mañana nunca lo hablamos de Eduardo Halfon

This essay studies the traumatic encounter between childhood and History in Vanessa Núñez Handal's Dios tenía miedo (El Salvador, 2011) and Eduardo Halfon's Mañana nunca lo hablamos (Guatemala, 2011), by exploring the relationship between memory and history as a bi-directional corrective exchange. Both texts represent narratives produced by authors who were born between the 1960s and 1980s and grew up during some of the most radical decades of 20th-century Latin American history. As opposed to the children of parents disappeared by the terror of the State—who narrate from a point of irretrievable loss—, authors like Núñez Handal and Halfon turn to writing in order to exorcise what Gabriele Schwab calls "unprocessed toxic knowledge" and/or "unwitting complicity" (28, 34). As adults, they are driven back to the past by inquisitiveness, anxiety, guilt, shame, or the pain produced by their latent affective memories and the silence surrounding them. Fusing together autobiographical elements, memory, history, and invention, they create a fictional fabric, which allows them to take a different look at the past in order to understand it and themselves. This questioning of the past that returns and haunts is also a questioning of a subject and a subjectivity in the present. Memory work in these texts is a vehicle for reflection on History, a way of taking a position regarding the authors' social class, and a mode of approaching the past as class experience.

Memory, Desire and Alienation: Diaspora Issues in Rohinton Mistry’s “Swimming Lessons”

Diaspora authors are disparate, but project some common themes in their works. In delineating the realities of diaspora people they use their first hand knowledge of migration and relocation. The diaspora people are constantly shaken by two opposite pulls—that of the past coming from the nostalgic yearning for the lost homeland and that of the present born out of the newly adopted life. In fact, they live an in-between life, constantly subverting their national identity by hybridity and hyphenated identity. Among the diaspora authors from Indian Parsi background, Rohinton Mistry has adequately dealt with the various realities of migration. Even amid the upheavals of migrations, Mistry has been sharply recalling his city of birth and youth and has provided a fine blend of fiction and autobiography through recreating his lifelike situations in his fiction. His first commendable work of fiction, Tales from Firozshh Baag (1987), is spread with such examples, though he has refuted to have any deliberate intention at adding autobiographical elements to his fiction. “Swimming Lessons”, an important story in that collection, well exhibits his employment of autobiographical elements through the means of memory. The present paper seeks to explore the author’s engagement in the diaspora issues, especially the tendency to indulge in memory of the native land, within the short span of this very story.

Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare's Roles for Women

lengthy stays elsewhere, including in Ireland and Syria. The usual autobiographical elements are present: Bachi describes living in small Parisian apartments during his student years as well as his love life and his development as an author. Bachi also engages in a sort of dialogue with Albert Camus (1913– 60), another child of Algeria who loved his native land but could not survive there. Some of the most moving moments of Bachi’s book are found in the descriptions of his trips back to Algeria, in order to visit his family: “There is nothing left of the Casbah where my father was born, nor of Belcourt where he grew up: many of the working-class neighborhoods that were neglected for half a century now resemble bombed-out ruins.” Bachi often points out that the main mission of a writer is to bear witness, something he does clearly, honestly, and eloquently in his latest work. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Harriet Walter. Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women. London. Nick Hern Books. 2016. 210 pages. British actress Harriet Walter (who won a Tony Award nomination for Mary Stuart on Broadway in 2009) offers feminist essays on major Shakespearean roles for women as well as some of the male roles. Her chapters on Ophelia, Imogen, and Lady Macbeth are abridged or edited versions of earlier incarnations elsewhere (Players of Shakespeare and Clamorous Voices, for instance), but her collection (while neither an academic treatise nor a practical handbook) is a kind of autobiography spanning over thirty years of her career, moving from female roles of great vulnerability (Ophelia, Helena, Imogen) to those of confident complexity and wisdom (Beatrice, Portia) and culminating in a Cleopatra of genuine insecurity. When Walter was offered three “trouser roles”in1987—herYearoftheBoy—shewas able to discover how Shakespeare’s women use disguise variously and for different purposes : to get a job in an exclusively male court (Viola); to survive outside the court (Rosalind); or to enter a world from which women were normally barred (Portia). The essays show a deep study of text, though some of the supplementary resources (such as consultations with psychiatrists, bereavement counselors, or prisoners) could seem excessive to those who put a primacy on the actor’s imagination rather than on psychiatry or sociology. However, the theatrical results, according to her evidence, bore good fruit (especially for interpreting Lady Macbeth), though her take on Beatrice as “an old maid” (something becoming ever more prevalent in our time) is idiosyncratic, if not downright wrong. The most provocative sections of her book are, of course, the essays on Brutus and Henry IV, and her cordial letter to Shakespeare, all of which are critical of the male template. Walter believes that if it was legitimate for boys to play women (even Cleopatra) in Shakespeare’s day, then it is equally legitimate for women to play men. Well, not necessarily, because gender illusion is usually defeated by an actress’s natural vocal pitch and physical movement. While women can, indeed, bring feminist insights to male roles, how should Lady Anne, for instance, be played opposite a female Richard III? Nevertheless, Walter’s book presents many valuable insights from a skilled Shakespearean player’s point of view because she strives to retrace Shakespeare’s steps from word to thought to motivation to the heart of character. In the process, she offers us much to ponder as she challenges theater audiences to broaden their definitions of man and woman, hero and heroine. Keith Garebian Mississauga, Ontario Pierre Voélin To Each Unfolding Leaf: Selected Poems (1976–2015) Trans. John Taylor Bitter Oleander Press This edition brings the major works of Swiss poet and essayist Pierre Voélin to anglophone readers for the first time. Presented en face, Voélin’s poetry confronts the inhumanity of man to man while navigating the complex relationships between humanity and the natural systems that produced such a complex and conflicted animal. Nota Bene STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION 1. Publication Title: World Literature Today 2. Publication Number: 060-680 3. Filing Date: September 1, 2017 4. Issue Frequency: Bimonthly 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: Five 6. Annual Subscription Price...

Philip Roth, Trick E. Dixon, and Curt Flood: Baseball as Satire in the Tradition of Jonathan Swift

Philip Roth, Trick E. Dixon, and Curt FloodBaseball as Satire in the Tradition of Jonathan Swift Ron Briley (bio) Prolific novelist Philip Roth, who died from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018 at age eighty-five, was a celebrated chronicler of the American experience during the twentieth century. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature eluded Roth, his work was honored with two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Man Booker International Prize.1 Nonetheless, Roth's writing also elicited considerable criticism, and the Jewish writer was accused of promoting anti-Semitism as well as exhibiting misogyny in his depiction of women. Often incorporating autobiographical elements into his fiction, Roth explored themes of Jewish identity, sexuality, literature, growing up in Newark, New Jersey, and, yes, even his favorite sport of baseball. Roth seemingly brought these themes together when his Jewish protagonist Alexander Portnoy in the controversial Portnoy's Complaint (1969) relates to his psychiatrist a youthful experience about masturbating into his baseball mitt while fantasizing upon an attractive young Gentile woman ("a shiksa") during a nocturnal Newark bus ride. Alexander Portnoy, however, does employ his baseball glove for other purposes, and he waxes poetically about the beauty of playing center field where one is finally able to break free from the clutches of one's family background and baggage—"Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder, and nothing more."2 Indeed, homages and references to baseball show up in much of Roth's work, and with The Great American Novel (1973), he even devoted an entire book to the subject, using the national pastime to interrogate post-World War II America and the Red Scare in a humorous but insightful satire.3 When he was asked why he selected baseball as a metaphor to explore American literature and history, Roth in a tribute to Herman Melville quipped, "Whaling has already been used."4 Roth, however, was much more enamored with baseball than this bit of dismissive humor might indicate, and his understanding [End Page 142] of the role played by baseball in American culture is well exhibited in the oft ignored satirical Our Gang (1971), which followed the blockbuster Portnoy's Complaint.5 Written in the satirical style of Jonathan Swift, Our Gang concentrates upon the presidency and character of President Richard Nixon, but Roth's clever introduction of baseball's Curt Flood into the narrative indicates his grasp of how American culture and significant institutions within the culture were changing amid the stresses and strains of the turbulent 1960s. Before examining the satirical Our Gang in greater detail, it is worth expanding a bit on the relationship between Roth and baseball. In a piece for the New Yorker following Roth's death, Kathy Woldman discussed the author's vision of baseball, concluding that for Roth, "The sport embodied the country's unattained ideals."6 Thus, Woldman argued that Swede Levov, the main character of Roth's American Pastoral (1997), was a gifted high school baseball player who symbolized the assimilationist dreams of Newark's Jewish community. Life, however, is complicated, and Levov's vision of a pure and pastoral America was destroyed during the havoc of the 1960s. The Vietnam War, political assassinations, and urban and campus unrest demonstrated the fragility of the American dream when confronted with the realities of life in the post-World War II United States. Even institutions such as Major League Baseball (MLB) exhibited the corruption of the American ideal and became the target of Roth's satire.7 In an essay written for the New York Times on the eve of the 1973 MLB season, Roth emphasized the important role played by baseball in his youth. He grew up watching the Newark Bears play the New Jersey Giants, listening to the games of his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, and reading the baseball adventure stories of John Tunis. Roth wrote that during his college years a love affair with literature came to somewhat replace his infatuation with baseball. Roth, nevertheless, insisted, "Baseball with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal association, its native authenticity, its...

O'Neill In and Out of the Classroom

O'Neill In and Out of the Classroom