Book Critics Circle Award Research Articles

The Function of Time Figuration in Reading Atonement

This study investigates the relationship between time and memory in McEwan's novel Atonement and the role the three different kinds of time figuration play in constructing the harmony among characters, authors and readers. Atonement is another masterpiece after First Love, Last Rites and Amsterdam, for it gains several literary prizes: the Smith Award, the National Book Critics Circle and Santiago European novel Award. In Atonement, McEwan describes the protagonist Briony's memory dilemma through disrupting the linearity and stability of narrative and readers are often caught in a Foucault-like maze in reading. Ricoeur's interpretative theory of mimesis and figuration provides a new hermeneutic dimension to the interpretation of the text and an alternative perspective to the reader. In fact, the understanding of the novel can be helped by the dynamic cycle of figuration chains including prefiguration, configuration and refiguration. In prefiguration, the underlying reasons for the central event in Briony's memory are introduced. The key links between historical and individual events, the past and the present, the main and messy plots scattered throughout the novel could be organized by emplotment in configuration. In refiguration, Briony's reconstruction of the same events is achieved by meta-narrative strategy. To sum up, the time figuration model contributes to the interpretation of Atonement and the analysis of the figuration strategy provides possible spiritual sustenance for the child who experiences traumatic events in the early stages.

The Autobiography of a Yankee Mariner: Christopher Prince and the American Revolution (review)

Book Critics Circle Award, contains "Mutilated World" and numerous other examples of Zagajewski's more recent work. Gone is the angry edge of Zagajewski's early activist days, when his poems gamed fame for a kind of naked honesty, an uncanny abUity to expose poUtical and social subterfuge and the falsity of "official language." Most of the poems in this coUection instead demonstrate a continuing growth in Zagajewski toward the meditative lyric, the constant questioning of the biographical-existential role of the protagonist of lyric poetry, and a praise for Ufe viewed in its changeabiUty, its pulsation, its ambiguity. Indeed, though perhaps not surprisingly considering his long exUe from Poland, Zagajewski's most successful poems here are told in the voice of a traveler-protagonist, a social outsider writing invariably from within a tram or plane, hurriedly, observing the world outside as best he can. Poems such as "The Churches of France," "To Go to Lvov," "Over America," and the exceUent "Watching Shoah in a Hotel Room in America" work as poetic snapshots, capturing perfectly (as strangers have a tendency to do) both the unexplored hypocrisy and the forgotten beauty of the society surrounding him. Less successful, to my ears at least, are "That Force" and "The World's Prose," poems in which the writing of poetry becomes a sometimesforced metaphor for a larger, indescribable something. Lines such as "The force that grows/in Napoleon's dreams/and teUs him to conquer Russia and snow/is also in poems," or "The prose of Ufe spreads out around us,/whUe poetry crouches in the heart's chambers," seem too seU-referentiaUy easy, too much Uke cheerleading for the art form instead of an embodiment of its best points. Furthermore, in this tense poUtical climate, poems such as "Europe Goes to Sleep," which ends with an image of a benevolent America keeping "watch/over the poor mute world," seem almost naively patriotic, dangerous in aU the wrong ways. StiU, the vast majority of these poems are very successful. Readmg this coUection is equivalent to encountering a photo album put together by a skUled photographer at the height of his or her powers. One has the feeling of transcending the mere mimetic, of experiencing subtle yet profound truths. (BM) Reviewsby:JeffStayton, Scott Kaukonen, Walter Bargen, Michael Piafsky, Tom Bligh, Elicia Parkinson, Leslie Wootten, Evelyn Somers, Steve Yates, Brad Summerhill , Bern Mulvey MR Lost Classic The Autobiography of a Yankee Mariner: Christopher Prince and the American Revolution Edited by Michael J. Crawford Brassey's, Inc., 2002, 263 pp., $26.95 One of the rarest manuscripts of its kind, Christopher Prince's The Autobiography of a Yankee Mariner provides a new historical perspective on both a country coming of age and—perhaps as importantly—the day-in, day-out struggle of the man 188 · The Missouri Review of the sea in colonial America. Ably assembled and edited by Michael J. Crawford, the memoti was written as a kind of famUy keepsake, something for Prince's descendants through the years to ponder in order to gain a sense of the man and of his time. Prince (1751-1832) began his autobiography in 1806: by then he had been captured and served in the British navy; met and brought food to a manacled Ethan AUen; been infected with and survived "the pox"; fought for his own country; had a successful, albeit tumultuous, run in privateering; and found his reUgious calling, becoming a pious man of God in the Protestant faith, even whUe continuing to Uve and work against a backdrop of violent deeds and violent oaths. It is Prince's constant seesawing between vice and virtue that lends what is probably an unintended theme to these writings —a theme that becomes, finaUy, the dominant one of the book. Prince frequently rebukes himself, and his knowledge that he is doing wrong, even as he does it, is enough to shame aU of us with any awareness in this age of reaUty TV shows and sex at aU costs. "I felt very lonesome, and had to go to Taverns, and spend evenings improperly," Prince writes after he is separated from the woman he loves. Such ignominy. When later contemplating...

A Government of Two

Two or three years ago, something happened to my friends Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon that I'd never seen in the literary world before. Up to that time each was well known to poetry audiences?he as a senior American poet and recent recipient of the National Book Crit ics Circle Award, she as a younger poet with a growing reputation. Then, their relationship itself became famous. Through their co-read ings, their joint interviews in print and on the PBS show Fresh Air, and most importantly, their starring roles in the Bill Moyers special, A Life Together, millions of Americans came to know of the life in poetry the two shared as husband and wife in rural New Hampshire. Audiences also discovered the couple's sorrows: Kenyon's life-long struggle with depression, and Hall's colon cancer, which metastasized to the liver and despite a successful operation, seemed likely to return. Later on, of course, those who had followed the Hall-Kenyon story learned of its ironic and heart-rending conclusion: fearing the fatal recurrence of his disease, the couple discovered a cancer growing in her?the leukemia that, despite a bone-marrow transplant, finally killed her, and left him in a period of grieving that has lasted to this day. moving and ultimately tragic story of their life together has created a new interest in the poetry of Hall. It has created even more interest in Kenyon, whose death in mid-career has not only cast a spell upon many readers, but caused confusion about work. I have heard readers attribute a variety of melancholy poems to bout with leu kemia, when in fact, only one poem, The Sick Wife, was written in the months of fatal illness. Compounding the error, the review of new and selected volume Otherwise in Publishers Weekly asserted that all of the book's new poems were about her pending death. Yet if the legendary story of Kenyon and Hall makes verse and his harder to see and assess, that story also suggests a new way to examine their poetry. For the truth is, their life together was vital to their development as poets, influencing everything from work methods to the content of work produced. In fact, it made their best poems pos sible.