Black Cat Research Articles

Can Cat and Bird Be Friends? by Coll Muir

Reviewed by: Can Cat and Bird Be Friends? by Coll Muir Deborah Stevenson, Editor Muir, Coll Can Cat and Bird Be Friends?; written and illus. by Coll Muir. Harper, 2019 [32p] ISBN 978-0-06-286593-9 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 1-2 "Are you a bird? . . . Then I must eat you," says the black cat formally to the white bird he's just encountered. The bird politely suggests that they could become friends instead, noting that he knows lots of cat-pleasing possibilities ("'I know the best car for a cat to hide under.' 'I agree. This is a fantastic car to hide under'"); in turn, the cat offers bird delights such as a hot spot for juicy worms ("These worms are totally tasty!"). They sadly realize they don't have much common ground, though, and regretfully plan to part ways—until they realize they both like painting, so they can be friends after all. While there's validity to the point about friendship coming from sharing experiences rather than categorization, the fun here lies largely in the comically solemn dialogue (conveniently color-coded) and the tour of cat and bird experiences. The speech-only text, repetition, and spare, funny prose make this a treat for beginning readers, but picture-book audiences will relish the goofy friendship story as well. The streamlined digital art adds to the humor: palette is limited to black and white on taupe backgrounds, and while there's some soft shad-ing on and around the added objects, they largely have the crisp-edged simplicity of collage. This hits the sweet spot for dry humor that's still kid accessible, and youngsters looking for a change from the more voluble beginning readers about odd pairings will offer appreciative snickers. [End Page 445] Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Gothicizing Domesticity – The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract It is critical common knowledge that domestic narratives and the structure of traditional domesticity are subverted in Gothic fiction (Smith 2013). The household and its apparent security are threatened from within by unknown supernatural forces. What seems familiar becomes upsetting, strange and ‘unfamiliar’. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat” give comparable views on American domesticity, both questioning two important aspects of domestic life (family and a blissful household). The two writers create a mad discourse in which the inexplicable and the uncanny infiltrate into reality and the sentimental domestic narrative is undermined.

“Such as might have arisen only out of hell”: A Note on Poe’s Hellenic Motifs in “The Black Cat”

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years from a variety of perspectives, not least the domestic and symbolic presence of Pluto in the story. Kent Ljungquist (1980) saw Poe’s narrative in terms of classical literary tradition, specifically the notion of the daemonic, yet confined his study to Pluto’s demonic features, arguing that the cat may be an infernal spirit sent to castigate the narrator. Other studies, such as Clark Moreland and Karime Rodriguez (2015), have reached similar conclusions. However, there is a surprising absence in the literature of any discussion of Poe’s decision to name the ‘phantasm’ of his narrative after the Hellenic god of the Underworld. The present paper seeks to address this, and proposes that Poe’s Pluto may not simply function as a demonic spirit, but rather as the Pluto of Hellenic mythology himself.

Death, Decay, and the Daguerreotype's Influence on “The Black Cat”

Abstract In “The Black Cat,” Poe's narrator discovers an odd pictorial representation of a crime he just committed. An “impression” of the cat he killed appears with astonishing accuracy—even the rope around the animal's neck—on his bedroom wall. This portrait resembles a daguerreotype in its placement, its durability, its verisimilitude, and its effect on viewers. The narrator's explanation for how it was produced alludes, moreover, to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's pioneering technique for developing images on photosensitive plates that have been exposed in a camera obscura. Indeed, “The Black Cat” grotesquely parodies each step in Daguerre's procedure, as Poe himself depicted it in his initial essay on “The Daguerreotype.” The proliferating forms, figures, and facsimiles of the black cat—including how the story's second half recapitulates the first—recall other aspects of daguerreotypes, such as their print reproduction and their use in postmortem portraiture. Although the processes described in this story clearly suggest daguerreotypy, they produce different results. “The Black Cat” reflects not only Poe's familiarity with early photography but also his awareness of techniques for resisting or assisting decomposition, as explained by chemists like Humphry Davy, Justus von Liebig, and Alexander Petzholdt. Whereas early photography provided a means to preserve optical reflections—including those of family members who have died—Poe's narrator attempts to abolish such traces of the past. By modeling the macabre processes that the narrator describes on Daguerre's technique for developing latent photographic images, Poe's horror story transforms the very nature of the daguerreotype portrait to emphasize not preservation, but decay.

Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

Food and Feeding Habits of Black Spot Cat Fish (Auchenoglanis biscutatus) from Lower River Benue, Makurdi

The present study is aimed to provide information on the food and feeding habit of adult Auchenoglanis biscutatus in Lower River Benue. The natural food of A. biscutatus in the Lower River Benue was studied from stomach contents of the fish. The stomach contents were analyzed using two methods; the frequency of occurrence and point methods. A total of 100 stomachs were randomly examined. Eleven major items constituted the diet of A. biscutatus. The stomach content analysis of A. biscutatus have shown that they fed on the various food items ranging from plant parts, detritus, seeds, digested food particles, fish parts, mollusc, sand/mud, insect parts and algae. This indicates that A. biscutatus is an omnivorous bottom feeder since; bottom dwelling immature insects dominated most of the food items of animal origin, digested food and detritus. A. biscutatus in Lower Benue River feeds on a wide range of food items which could make it to be regarded as an omnivore. Future attempts to culture this species must take cognizance of its food habits in the wild.

Defense Mechanisms in E. A. Poe's Selected Short Stories the Black Cat & the Tell-Tale Heart

Defense mechanism is strategies the ego uses to defend itself against the anxiety provoked by conflicts. The aim of the research is to describe the types of defense mechanism in two of Poe’s selected short stories, The Black Cat & The Tell-Tale Heart & to reveal the implementation of characters’ mechanism in solving the conflicts. The research employed a descriptive qualitative method with a psychoanalysis approach Sigmund Freud’s theory of defense mechanism. The data constitute both primary & supporting data. The primary data derived from E. A. Poe’s Selected Short Stories The Black Cat & The Tell-Tale Heart, while the supporting data were taken by means of library research mainly from books, theses, dissertation, electronic articles & journals. The results show that the characters have performed a range of defense mechanisms in Poe’s selected short stories. In The Black Cat & The Tell-Tale Heart stories, the characters are mainly concerned with repression, denial, reaction formation, rationalization, displacement of self-defense. These characters performed a range of defense mechanism in order to resolve the conflicts.

Conflict Analysis of the Main Characters in Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

This qualitative research aims to (1) describe the types of conflicts of the main characters in short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, (2) describe the effects of conflicts of the main characters in short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The researcher used theory by Nurgiyantoro (2002). There are two types of conflicts, internal conflict and external conflict. He divides the external conflict into social conflict and physical conflict. The data source were short stories by Edgar Allan Poe they were: (1) The Tell-Tale Heart (2017), (2) The Black Cat (2017), and (3) The Hop Frog (1849). The data in this study were in the form of main character’s dialogues or utterances, and behavior in the three short stories. Techniques of data analysis done were data reduction, data display, and data conclusion drawing and verification by Miles and Huberman’s theory (1984). The researcher found sixteen data from three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, there were four data from The Tell-Tale Heart, ten data from The Black Cat, and two data from The Hop Frog, and the details are : Six data of internal conflicts, five data of social conflicts, and five data of physical conflicts. Then, the details of the results on the affects experienced by the main characters are : One datum of positive affect (enjoyment or joy, interest or excitement, and surprise or startle), and fifteen data of negative affect (anger or range, disgust, dissmell, distress or anguish, fear or terror, and shame or humiliation). The researcher expects the next researchers to study concept of conflict analysis or main character in different subjects.

The Science of Psychopathy and Poe's “The Man of the Crowd”

Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London's urban populations in a period of mass immigration and urbanization. As the story begins, the narrator sits in a café observing people walk by. While classifying the mostly degenerate amalgamation of people into a taxonomized catalog, he identifies “a decrepid [sic] old man,” who immediately captures his attention, prompting a daylong pursuit. In the end, the narrator concludes that the man is “the type and genius of deep crime.” Criticism on this story often focuses on this flâneur, but when broadened to include the crowd, a “psychopathic crowd structure” is revealed. Similarly, Vicki Hester and Emily Seger's analysis of Poe's “The Black Cat” suggests that the narrator's behavior is consistent with current forensic research on psychopathy. Yet, for “The Man of the Crowd,” Steven Fink identifies the flâneur as the author's version of the legendary Wandering Jew. However, when readers juxtapose the evolutionary history of psychopathy from the nineteenth century to today, alongside the political and social conditions of the nineteenth-century crowd, the paranoia and fear embedded in modern city life reveals otherwise. A breeding ground of mass suspicion between individuals—beyond the narrator and old man—is a psychopathic crowd structure in which everyone is “a man of the crowd.” And despite psychology's rapid evolution in the past century, the psychopath in our world remains nearly as elusive as in Poe's.

Down Deep in the Dark: A Semiotic Approach to Edgar Allan Poe’s the Black Cat

Semiotics is the investigation of the nature, type and function of signs in all walks of life. It is the science of interpreting signs and showing how meaning is generated by and through a shared cultural code. Being a verbal corpus of imaginatively works of art, literature with all its genres, i.e. poetry, drama, fiction, the short story, etc. lends itself to semiotics scrutiny. Verbal works of artifact as such can be analyzed in terms of semiotic theory. This paper purports to explore Edgar Allan Poe’ The Black Cat as a structure of interconnected signs which are organically rooted into the code of horror. If culture, in one sense, is the complex network of beliefs, behaviors and patterns of thinking, these psychopathic cognitive patterns are wittingly structured in the semiotic system of Poe’s narrative work of art. The study proceeds with the hypothesis that Poe’s The Black Cat is a semiotic metaphor or a representation of the actual world of insanity which is resulted from obsession in things. The short story is analyzed in terms of the newly semiotic approach, namely The Semiotic triangle. This tripartite model is a three-dimensional model whose axes are: syntagmaticity, paradigmaticity and signification. The dimensions are supposed to be the foundations of the construction of Poe’s literary text. One result of the study has shown that fear is not an organic human nature in The Black Cat, but a newly born behavior which has led to a serial of crimes committed by the unnamed author. This abnormal behaviorism is encoded in the semiotic veins of Poe’s newly literary genre, i.e. the narratology of horror. The scope of the study is limited to Poe’s The Black Cat as a par excellent narrative work of that creative genre. The paper is rounded up with concluding remarks elicited from the semiotic analysis.

Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns: A Conversation with Neeli Cherkovski

ABSTRACTNeeli Cherkovski is a celebrated poet and literary biographer who also has significant experience editing and publishing little magazines, both alone and in collaboration with fellow poets. The best known of these publishing ventures is Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns, which he produced with Charles Bukowski. Other magazines with which Cherkovski has been associated include Black Cat Review and Beatitude. In this interview, he discusses his experiences in little magazine publishing.

Coming out of the dark: the trickster archetype in “The Black Cat” and “The Loves of Lady Purple”

Coming out of the dark: the trickster archetype in “The Black Cat” and “The Loves of Lady Purple”

Niblet & Ralph by Zachariah OHora

Reviewed by: Niblet & Ralph by Zachariah OHora Sarah Sahn OHora, Zachariah Niblet & Ralph; written and illus. by Zachariah OHora. Dial, 2018 [34p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-7352-2791-0 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-525-55257-4 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-8 yrs Ralph and Niblet are orange, black, and white cats who live in the same apartment building, and they’re best friends. One day, the cats try to visit each other and inadvertently swap places, leaving their human owners suspicious about the changes in their pets. The two children make posters and set out to find out why their cats have been replaced by imposters, and soon they bump into each other and get their pets back home—and also end up friends. Ralph and Niblet’s tale of mistaken identity is warmly humorous, sure to elicit giggles without getting young listeners too wound up before naptime. Kids who have worried about a lost pet will empathize with Dilla and Gemma and be reassured by the happy ending (and the fact that neither cat was ever in any peril). Bold acrylic illustrations dominated by red, gold, and teal are ideal for viewers, with thick black outlines and simple expressive features on children and animals alike. Additional dialogue in speech bubbles and smaller details in the artwork invite independent reading, and older kids will enjoy reading to and with younger siblings and classmates. Though it begins with the two cats, this story of friendship is just as focused on bringing together Gemma, Dilla, and their parents. Their interracial friendship takes root against the backdrop of a vibrant, diverse neighborhood that audiences will want to revisit. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Poppies of Iraq by Helge Dascher

WORLDLIT.ORG 93 write the Moroccan collective memory of the Years of Lead during the reign of Hassan II. Nisrine Slitine El Mghari University of Oklahoma Jorge Carrión. Bookshops: A Reader’s History. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2017. 304 pages. Jorge Carrión begins this paean to bookshops by writing: “Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world.” This axiomatic declaration is important as it establishes the metaphor around which the book is constructed, which Carrión expounds shortly after: “You need no passport to gain entry to the cartography of a bookshop , to its representation of the world—of the many worlds we call world—that is so much like a map, that sphere of freedom where times slows down and tourism turns into another kind of reading.” The director of the master’s program in creative writing at Barcelona’s Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Carrión is the author of three novels as well as numerous travel books and collections of essays. Librerías, translated as Bookshops (the English edition carries the subtitle A Reader’s History, not present in the Spanish), was a finalist for the Anagrama Essay Prize in 2013. It is the first of Carrión’s books to be translated into English. In the chapter “Bookshops Fated to Be Political,” Carrión moves between Hitler’s Germany to Cold War Berlin and, not surprisingly, to Cuba, to discuss the role bookshops have played in fomenting and propping up totalitarian regimes. As a frequent visitor to Havana, this was of particular interest to me. He writes: “It was in the Communist bookshop on calle Carlos III in Havana that future commander and repressor Fidel Castro bought the two key books in his life: The Communist Manifesto and The State and Revolution.” While the bookshops on calle Obispo remain (La Moderna Poesía, which dates to the nineteenth century, comes to mind), they have been reduced to little more than tourist spots whose sparsely stocked shelves sell official histories of the revolution and biographies of Che and Fidel. Bookshops is translated ably by Peter Bush, a renowned translator of Catalan and Spanish literature, including works by authors as diverse as Spain’s Juan Goytisolo, Cuba’s Leonardo Padura, and Uruguay’s Juan Carlos Onetti. Bush’s translation is a delight to read, beginning with his decision to translate the title Librerías as Bookshops instead of “Bookstores” (Amazon is a bookstore, but it most certainly is not a bookshop). In the end, there is much to like in this book and translation and little to criticize. For the obvious bibliophiles and amateurs of world literature who are reading this review, it will be a welcome addition to their bookshelves. George Henson University of Oklahoma Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim. Poppies of Iraq. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 120 pages. Poppies of Iraq, an autobiographical graphic novel written by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by Lewis Trondheim, contains familiar tropes of contemporary graphic memoirs. Findakly negotiates national identities with one parent from the Middle East, one parent from western Europe; she conveys a disarming coming-of-age story in war-torn Iraq, lured by the dream of France; and captures the beauty of home, even amid cultural and religious repression. With nonlinear pacing and vignettes, however, Poppies of Iraq adds a unique storytelling angle to the themes of Marjane Sartrapi’s seminal Persepolis and Riad Sattouf’s acclaimed The Arab of the Future. Findakly Nota Bene Catherine Woodard Opening the Mouth of the Dead Lone Goose Press New York City–based arts and literacy advocate Catherine Woodard searches through the stories and moments of childhood for a “spell” by which to understand death and pry into the parts of life that go silent with it. Drawing on the simple mystery of old attics and rites of passage into adolescence, the childlike speaker tries to make sense of the man she sometimes called her father. The limited-edition letterpress version of this book of poems features the artwork of Margot Voorhies Thompson, who worked closely with Woodard to “knit” their arts together. Yan Lianke The Years, Months, Days Trans. Carlos Rojas Black Cat The Years, Months...

Front Matter

Under the aegis of the UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program, Queer Cats Journal of LGBT Studies is an open-access e-publication of the QGrads @ UCLA graduate-student organization. We publish peer- and editorial-reviewed interdisciplinary LGBTQ research along with the proceedings of our annual QGrad (queer grad- uate student) conference. Queer Cats provokes discourse that inspires, expands and challenges our understanding of LGBTQ issues, from the local to the global. Queer Cats provides a critical space for queer knowl- edge production, as it unites a multiplicity of scholarly voices in a critical dialogue about the past, present and future of LGBTQ studies. The name “Queer Cats” commemorates one of the earliest LGBTQ uprisings in the United States (pre-Stonewall) that began on NewYear’s night, 1967, when the patrons of the Black Cat Tavern in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles protested police brutality in the name of queer freedom.

에드거 앨런 포우와 공백의 사유 : 「어셔가의 몰락」과 「검은 고양이」에 나타난 공백과 윤리

에드거 앨런 포우와 공백의 사유 : 「어셔가의 몰락」과 「검은 고양이」에 나타난 공백과 윤리

CONTAR! CONTAR! CONTAR! – A apresentação transcultural da vida norte-americana em A volta do gato preto, de Erico Verissimo

O escritor brasileiro Erico Verissimo viveu nos Estados Unidos em diferentes oportunidades, tendo transformado reflexões e observações sobre tais períodos em narrativas de viagens posteriormente publicadas. Entre setembro de 1943 e setembro de 1944, Verissimo e sua família viveram em San Francisco e Los Angeles, período no qual o escritor atuou como professor e conferencista a fim de estreitar as relações culturais entre os Estados Unidos e o Brasil – sua viagem, financiada pelo governo norte-americano, deu origem à narrativa A volta do gato preto. No presente artigo, pretendeu-se analisar a narrativa de viagem A volta do gato preto à luz da teorização apresentada por Mary Louise Pratt em Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, empreendendo uma leitura norteada principalmente pelos conceitos de transculturação, anti-conquista, autoetnografia, zona de contato e seeing-man.

“The Black Cat” Revisited: A Prolegomenon to Poe's Greek Imitators

Abstract This article seeks to show how Poe has influenced writing in Greece since his somewhat late introduction into Hellenic literary spheres, despite several claims that no major Greek author or translator has yet come to understand or appreciate Poe's storytelling fully. Toward this goal I will explain some of the reasons for the late arrival of Poe's tales and poems in Greece, and will then consider a story by Emmanuel Rhoides, published in 1893, which bears numerous similarities to Poe's “The Black Cat.” Rhoides was the first Greek translator of Poe, and his admiration for the American writer will be underlined here through an overview of the points of convergence, as well as the dissimilarities, between the two works. Such a comparison will cast doubt on the position of a number of critics who have played down the significance of Poe's oeuvre in Greek literature. Finally, the present article aims to shed some additional light on Poe's impact on the Greek literary world, an insufficiently explored topic in the study of Poe, and one that serves as the prolegomenon for a forthcoming, systematic study.

“A Problem in Detection”: The Rhetoric of Murder in Poe's “The Black Cat”

Abstract The narrator of Poe's “The Black Cat” is a murderer penning a confession on the eve of his execution. This much he admits. He also believes he is the victim of a malevolent, supernatural being, a witching cat—the doppelgänger of a cat the narrator hanged. In the end, this second cat, the narrator claims, fiendishly worked his undoing by tormenting him mercilessly, using its “craft” to seduce him into murder. T. O. Mabbott, in fact, calls this narrative “a story of ‘orthodox’ witchcraft.” Still, the narrator's word choices and paragraphing offer evidence of another hypothesis. The being who tormented the narrator, his “incarnate Night-Mare,” was not the second cat, as such, but the narrator's wife. In his story, the narrator unwittingly reveals his psychological motivation, which, in part, involves his perception of a confederacy between the wife and the second cat—which is not to say that a coherent case for this motivation can disregard the narrator's otherworldly dread. Nevertheless, from his initial discussion of domestic life to his characterization of the murder as an assassination, the narrator rhetorically reveals enough about his inner thoughts, including his sexual discontent, for a reader to hypothesize that the narrator's crime against his wife was personal.

The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation

The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation