Christ-like Figure Research Articles

Car la Lettre tue mais l’Esprit vivifie : une relecture des textes bibliques selon Elizabeth Gaskell

As the anonymous author of “The Hard Church Novel” underlined in his article, “Theology and Literature – the study of God and the study of Man – need to go hand in hand, and are only just beginning to know it”. The links between literature and religion are in fact much older than we might imagine when reading this statement; however, it is a fact that the Victorian period was a time when many authors tried to reconcile secular writing and the Scriptures, to the extent that a new literary genre, the religious novel, was born. Although Elizabeth Gaskell’s works do not belong to this category, she set her heart on reconciling her vocation as a novelist with her beliefs as a Christian. Unlike her husband, she was not a Minister and therefore her own way of preaching the Word of God was to write fiction. She was convinced that the Pharisees had not disappeared with the Advent of Christ and, in her novels, she used her own, sometimes unorthodox, interpretation and rewriting of the Gospels to convert the Pharisees of her own time to the true essence of Christianity. Indeed, her Unitarian education granted her a greater freedom than most of her contemporaries in terms of biblical exegesis, as we can see in many of her works, but most particularly in Ruth, in which the eponymous heroine, a fallen woman, is not only described as a Magdalen but soon turns into a Madonna and then a Christ-like figure.

Tradition and subversion in Renaissance literature: studies in Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne

Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement. This title includes chapters that explore Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Faerie Queene, Volpone, and Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose - which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus. The tension between tradition and subversion, both linguistic and cultural, then, can be seen to produce not aporia in any negative sense, but a positive complexity of response from the audience, animating and profoundly enriching each work. In Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare merges the previously despised figure of the merchant with a Christ-like figure, brilliantly reasserting the Christian condemnation of profiteering while simultaneously advocating its seeming opposite, a validation of the burgeoning mercantile activity of the Renaissance. Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature is a thoughtful study, rich in both historical scholarship and in its survey of modern criticism. Even those who are quite familiar with the texts discussed here will find Roston's focus on the tension between maintaining the expectations of the culture and pulling toward new ideas an illuminating way to freshly consider these literary works.

Raising the Wind

Raising the Wind Sean Latham In the last few years, Baruch Spinoza has certainly come into his own as a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophers and theorists as diverse as Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze, and Martha Nussbaum. The eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher’s work on ethics, religion, and the material world, in fact, absorbed the attention of some of the twentieth-century’s most formidable figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein invokes his logical ethics in the Tractatus, for example, while Albert Einstein and Jorge Luis Borges both counted him among their most important influences. Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher who helped establish the deep ecology movement, draws heavily on Spinoza’s arguments about the rights of animals and the ways in which they can be balanced against the demands of human utility. Even P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is caught reading Ethics in “Jeeves and the Greasy Bird,” though he later pronounces it “fundamentally unsound”—why, we will never know. Elizabeth S. Anker begins this issue of the JJQ by drawing on the expanding theoretical interest in Spinoza’s work in an effort to reconsider the troubling conclusion of Bloom’s day in Ulysses. “Where Was Moses When the Candle Went Out?: Infinity, Prophecy, and Ethics in Spinoza’s Philosophy and ‘Ithaca’” explores two key elements that help us better understand the narrative structure and underlying ethics of the episode Joyce called “the ugly duckling” of Ulysses. First, she seizes on Spinoza’s concept of revelation as an encounter with a kind of infinitude that constitutes the very essence of the Other. Bloom’s sleepy reflections on the infinite, she contends, are imbued with this Spinozan awareness of alterity, forming a distinctive ethics—an “admixture of resignation and avowal”—which allows him “to assume a selflessly generous posture of magnanimity and forgiveness.” Second, she argues that Joyce draws heavily on Spinoza’s concept of the prophet in constructing Bloom, rendering him at the end of this book less an ascendant Christ-like figure than an Old Testament prophet racked by the incompleteness of his own revelation. The essay thus offers not only a provocative intertextual reading of Joyce and Spinoza, but opens up an ethically inspired way of reading the irresolute end of Ulysses itself. From doubts about revelation, the issue turns next to the equally uncertain—and therefore endlessly productive—meeting between Joyce and psychoanalysis. In the elegantly written “Circuits of Meeting and Telling: Joyce, Psychoanalysis, and Narration,” Tony [End Page 645] Thwaites draws on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to explore the generative doubt produced by free indirect discourse. This narrative form, he contends, functions as a symptom of language itself, “the enigma at the heart of sense, the knot that, although it is itself meaningless, holds meaning together.” This essay then redefines Joyce’s modernism, exploring the complex ways it seeks to elude the imposing strictures of the realist novel. Rather than focusing solely on narrative elements like free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, however, Thwaites instead identifies the ways Joyce channels the flow of language to produce a subject and a book never fully coincident with itself. This leads to a conclusion at once simple and elegant: “For there to be that incessant murmur of interiority, interiority must be ever-so-slightly dislocated from itself, never quite coincident with itself, able to address itself in a circuit across a gap that is at once unimaginably thin . . . and unimaginably vast.” This essay urges us to work in that gap from which Joyce’s texts continue to whisper their urgent challenge. These theoretical considerations give way to historical ones in the next two essays, both of which attend to the complex interplay between life and fiction in Joyce’s work. In “‘Time Drops in Decay’: A Portrait of the Artist in History (ii), Chapter 2,” Andrew Gibson continues his own deeply researched attempt to locate Joyce’s first published novel in the precise historical conditions it so critically and directly engages. Focusing here on Chapter 2, the essay looks specifically to Dublin in the 1890s and ranges across the controversies and debates surrounding the Revival, the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, and the period’s subtly attenuated...

Unpaid Wages: Local Narratives and the Imagination of the Nation

This paper explores how official nationalist discourse is appropriated and reworked in local constructions. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the district of Aileu, East Timor, conducted before the Indonesian invasion and after the 1999 referendum. Bridging these two periods is a Mambai narrative tradition about a Christ-like figure named Tat Felis, who comes to Aileu with the first missionaries and is persecuted by local chiefs. In different ways, the paper argues, Mambai have entwined the story of the suffering inflicted on him by their ancestral chiefs with the suffering endured by the people in the nationalist struggle. Such narrativised ordeals evoke a cultural code of reciprocity in which whoever suffers to bring something forth must be repaid. In referencing their own enduring obligations to Tat Felis, people implicitly or explicitly remind nationalist leaders that the nation was purchased with their blood.

The Taste of Love: Salome's Transfiguration

The Taste of Love: Salome's Transfiguration Anne L. Seshadri In this article i offer a rezeptionsge-schichte of the premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome within a framework informed by postcolonial theories of race. In 1905 audiences at Dresden's Königliches Opernhaus interpreted the work as a Judenoper, but not in the way that Sander Gilman has argued. Taking a postcolonial perspective on early-twentieth‑century European imperialism leads to new conclusions about Strauss's Salome a century after its premiere. In this study I go beyond the recent writings on Salome that have focused on constructions of gender and Orientalism to identify the rhetorical features and musical signifiers of Jewishness, exploring the subjective and collective meanings of Jewishness as a category of racial and national identity.1 This essay is in part a response to Gilman's trenchant discussion of Strauss's opera.2 I concur that Strauss constructed musical signifiers of racial difference to establish a distinct Jewish identity that enabled his audience to understand the work as a "Jewish opera." While Gilman, in "Strauss and the Pervert," concentrates his discussion on the link between Oscar Wilde's homosexuality and Strauss's presentation of the stage Jews as representative of the avant-garde, I argue not only that Dresden audiences understood the work as a Judenoper but that Salome served as a metaphor for the Judenfrage (Jewish question). Between the [End Page 24] Jewishness of Herod's court, where the Jew was constructed as the unchanging racialized Other, and the Christ-like figure of Jochanaan stood Salome, a signifier of transformable cultural Hebraism. In the opera contemporary audiences heard a redemptive quality in Strauss's music that distinguished the work from previous Salome representations. Gilman acknowledges, in passing, the redeeming nature of Strauss's music, yet he insists that "the charge of perversion remained."3 After an extensive examination of the Dresden reviews and early monographs I argue that the notion of perversion was far less important to Dresden audiences than was the notion of transfiguration. In the closing scene of Strauss's opera Salome's death was not identical to the death of Wilde's Salomé. The Jewish princess Salome, through the music of Strauss, transcended her Jewishness and was transfigured. Some critics further interpreted her transfiguration as a conversion to Christianity. For them, Strauss was not perceived as a "pervert"; instead, he stood as their prophet. Within the context of European imperialism Salome, like many of opera's female protagonists, stood as a placeholder for national and imperial ideologies. The Jewish Question In Salome the musical representations of the protagonists were produced by a complex set of interdiscursive processes in which constructions of language, culture, and nation invoked a racial narrative. In Europe Christian hostility to Jews revolved around a series of related theological and social issues. During the nineteenth century the religious concept of the Jew fused with the secular notion of a Jewish ethnicity in which Jews were perceived as being a nation apart. During the 1840s the "Jewish question" emerged in Germany, addressing the problems of the existence, integration, and emancipation of Jews into Christian societies and states.4 Germans questioned how this "foreign" nation of Jewish people could live symbiotically within German society.5 In 1869 Jews living in both Germany and Austria-Hungary were granted emancipation. Religious freedom, including the conversion between Judaism and Christianity, was guaranteed by law. The emancipation of the Jews was met with a mixed response. A playwright and friend of Richard Wagner, Heinrich Laube, expressed a common concern: "What bothers us about the Jews—their foreignness—can only be transformed by a thorough nationalization of the Jews among us." He provided two commonly held answers to the Jewish question: "Either we must be barbarians and root out [austreiben] the Jews to the last man—or we must assimilate them. The latter alternative must come to pass inevitably."6 The German obsession...

Introduction: Being There: Melville and the Romance of Real Life Adventure

Title page, with illustration by Mead Schaeffer, for Herman Melville, Typee (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1923)- INTRODUCTION Being There: Melville and the Romance of Real Life Adventure G. R. THOMPSON There is no Frigate like a Book —Emily Dickinson (c. 1873) "You got tuh go there tuh know there." —Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) As an introduction to this symposium on the "actuality of place" in Melville's first romance-novels, the two quotations I offer as epigraphs suggest the broad territory ahead: reading and imaginative writing in relation to experience. "There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away, " Dickinson writes. Nor are there any "Coursers" quite "like a Page / Of prancing Poetry" to take us swiftly to places we have not physically been; with such "frugal" economy can a book become the "Chariot" of the "Human Soul."1 Janie, in Hurston's novel, expresses the other (though not the opposite) side of human understanding : experientially being there. The context of course is rather different; Janie is talking about understanding what it means to free herself from the "slavery" of gender. But Melville's narrators also express the tension between the mental slavery of socially determined preconceptions and some "other" actuality of things. The multiple aspects of these issues of objective and subjective truth and the limitations of the human condition are ESQ \V.51\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS I 2005 1 G. R. THOMPSON also suggested by the allusion in the main title of this introduction . Being There, Jerzy Kosinski's 197° novel and subsequent screenplay (l979)> describes the interpretations and misinterpretations of a possibly wise but simple-minded witness who adopts the multiple personalities of those simulacra he watches on television. He is a suspect Christ-like figure, a tender of the "gardens" of the world, significantly named Chance, who would like to turn away all the unpleasant things he sees by "switching channels." And although he may, for the most part, be able to switch off what he doesn't like, the reader-viewer can't. Another relevant meaning of "being there" involves the intersection and intermingling, if not merging, of the issues of truth and fiction, the familiar and the exotic, humanity and inhumanity. Especially implicated is the interaction of the aesthetically imagined with the presumed "real" that seems to be "out there"—that is, the actual as the intersection of inner subjectivity and outer objectivity. The symposium articles that follow contain both scholarly and personal responses to the complex actuality oÃ- Typee (1846) and a few of Melville's other "island" writings, especially Omoo (1847) an I found that what my imagination had romantically anticipated was not diminished by the reality of place or the distance of time. A good example of anticipatory imagination (by which I mean to implicate both that of Melville's narrator and that of the reader) occurs in the first chapter of Typee. "Hurra, my lads! It's a settled thing; next week we shape our course to the Marquesas!" The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nut—coral reefs—tatooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices. Such were the strangely jumbled anticipations that haunted me during our passage from the cruising ground. I felt an irresistible curiosity to see those islands which the olden voyagers had so glowingly described.8 Was it really like that? Is it still anything like that? In chapter 2, the narrator follows up on the intersection of imagination and reality: MELVILLE AND THE ROMANCE OF REAL UFE ADVENTURE Those who for the first time visit the South Seas, generally are surprised at the appearance of the islands when beheld from the sea. From the vague accounts we sometimes have of their beauty, many people are apt to picture to themselves enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over with delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks, and with the entire country but little elevated above the surrounding ocean...

Jaunts, Jottings, and Jetsam in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts

A pageant of curiosities and dynamic images inhabits the margins of manuscripts, sometimes ornamenting, sometimes competing, sometimes commenting on the text they surround. They are a commonplace of codicological study, even more so since the publication of Lilian Randall's Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts in 1966 and of Michael Camille's Image on the Edge in 1992, which has done much to bring us to understand and interpret this panoply in ink and paint. The images these writers treat, of course, are late, and it is the more rich and entertaining margins that command the attention, such as the copulating figures in the top margin of a book of hours (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 754, f. 65v), or the Christ-like figure showing forth his buttocks to a spear-wielding, monkey-like creature mounted on an ostrich in the Rutland Psalter (London, British Library, Additional 62,925, ff. 66v-67r). The margins of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts seem, by comparison, rather barren fields. There are certainly some notable exceptions, such as the illustrations in the Bury St Edmunds Psalter (Rome, Vatican Library, MS Reg. lat. 12), or perhaps those in the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, ff. 78r, 87v, 123r). But in truth, such examples are few in number and rather sober occasions in any case, lacking the spirited, immensely entertaining, and often surprising creations that fill the margins of later manuscripts. But if the Anglo-Saxons possessed vastly different conceptions of space, margins, and response to text than later generations, we nevertheless often find in their manuscripts a quiet, typically hidden or overlooked world of text and image entered into manuscripts by Anglo-Saxon and later users of these codices.

Biblical Motifs in Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Placeof the Skull

The 1968 publication of Chingiz Aitmatov's Plakha (The Place of the Skull, in Natasha Ward's translation) created a heated discussion around the controversial topics of drug smuggling and ecology, the author's choice of a pair of wolves and a former seminarian as the main protagonists, and the complex juxtaposition of three separate story lines in one novel.l One of the most controversial questions proved to be Aitmatov's introduction of Biblical materials into the otherwise contemporary plot, and its significance for the novel's philosophical and ethical interpretation. In assessing the role of Biblical references in The Place of the Skull, the critics reproached Aitmatov for his arbitrary treatment of the Bible. Vadim Kozhinov admonished the author for his distortion of the Biblical story of Pilate's interrogation of Jesus, his incorrect portrayal of Pilate as the chief culprit, and his depiction of Jesus as a liberal humanist strongly opposed to the Roman Empire.2 Similarly, Igor Zolotussk admonished Aitmatov for his oversimplification of the Biblical narrative of Pilate and Jesus, which Aitmatov presented as a polemic on the question of power and authority versus individual free will. He was also criticized for his depiction of Christ as a social revolutionary, who questioned the authority of the state, while defending the interests of the poor and the oppressed.3 The sharpest censure of Aitmatov's treatment of the Bible came from Sergo Lominadze, who accused the writer of misrepresentation of Biblical ideas, and the debasement of Christian teaching, particularly with regards to his rejection of the idea of the Last Judgment.4 The second major criticism of Aitmatov's treatment of the Biblical material was directed towards the striking similarity between The Place of the Skull and Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita. Lev Anninsk considered the Biblical episode in The Place of the Skull a paraphrase of the same story in The Master and Margarita,5 while Natalia Ivanova criticized Aitmatov for placing the figures in exactly the same positions as did Bulgakov fifty years earlier.6 And Sergei Averintsev reproached Aitmatov for following too closely Bulgakov's approach to Jesus as a historical figure, a tradition which, according to the critic, has been exhausted in Russian literature by The Master and Margarita.7 The criticism of Aitmatov's dependence on Bulgakov and its purported distortion of the Biblical story of Jesus and Pilate was carried out in a polemical fashion, without substantial analysis of the questions concerned.8 The purpose of this article is to examine these questions closely by juxtaposing Aitmatov's Biblical story with the New Testament and Bulgakov in order to identify both similarities and differences. More importantly, the article will also examine the links between the Biblical story and the rest of the narrative, and assess the role Biblical references play in a novel dealing with contemporary issues.9 The Biblical motifs are introduced into The Place of the Skull both in overt and covert forms. The most obvious instance is the embedded story of Pilate's interrogation of Jesus, inserted into the subplot that deals with Avd Kalistratov's attempts to change the world into his Christian ideals. The embedded story appears as Avd's delirium, following his confrontation with drug smugglers who throw him from a moving train. Lying semi-conscious by the railroad tracks, Avd hallucinates about Pilate's interrogation of Jesus. The link between the Biblical story of Jesus and the contemporary story of Avd is not coincidental, since Avd is portrayed in the novel as a modern Christ-like figure, preaching Christian ideas of forgiveness and love, and the rejection of evil. Reconstructed in the mind of the delirious protagonist, the story of Pilate and Jesus retains most of the elements of the New Testament version.I0 For example, it preserves the same participants: Pilate and Jesus appear as the main protagonists; Caiaphas, the Jewish elders, Judas, and Pilate's wife are secondary characters. …

THEOLOGY IN ASYLUM. THE FAILURE OF SALVIFIC STORY IN MALCOLM LOWRY'SLUNAR CAUSTIC

Lunar Caustic tells a story of a failed jazz player who stays briefly in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Like Under the Volcano, the novella partakes of the quality of Lowry's madly revolving world. The asylum experience of W. Plantagenet, the protagonist of Lunar Caustic, is based on an episode from Lowry's own life.1 During his stay in New York in 1935 his alcoholism became too difficult a problem for his friends who decided to commit Lowry to a psychiatric ward. Later Lowry presented the fact in a different light, claiming that he had made a deliberate pilgrimage to Bellevue in order to gather material for his story.2 Initially, the story was to evolve into a novel which would become the Purgatorio part of the author's drunken Divine Comedy.3 William Plantagenet is shown in the text as the one who makes a pilgrimage to the place of his ordeal. The perspective of a Dantean visitor is blended with that of the Christ-like figure that Plantagenet attempts to be. What seems striking is the fact that Lunar Caustic abounds in remarks and images that yield to theological interpretation. They are signs that seem to have been emptied of their original meaning. The asylum provides a suitable frame for all the strategies of displacement that dissociate the signs from their Judaeo Christian framework and set them afloat. Accordingly, I would like to demonstrate that the theological elements of Lunar Caustic are diffuse traces of a religious system that is no longer available to or salvific for the characters. In my analysis, I will use a midrashic fragment from First Epistle of Peter to interpret the novella. The fragment weaves together two questions that surface as the main motifs in Lunar Caustic. They are: Christ's descent into the abyss and the deliverance of Noah.

The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will (review)

132Philosophy and Literature Méirsyas, the foolhardy mortal who challenges the god Apollo to a musical contest only to be flayed edive as the penalty for losing. The artist's painful struggle on the road to Truth parallels the moral struggle in quest of the Good. This theme, complementing the treatment of evil, finds Murdoch equally austere. Her Platonic Good is unreachable and absolute and in pursuit of it only "a fairly honourable defeat" can be hoped for, die fate ofthe Christ-like figure Tallis Browne in the novel of that tide. No wonder the novels provoke such unease. Dipple clearly shows that understanding diese works, beneath their dazzling surface, requires mastery of an abstract interpretive vocabulary: "fantasy," "demonism," "the good," "saintliness," "truth," "consolation," etc. But she rightly rejects as simplistic and "clichéd" the tag "philosophical novel." Philosophy is only one part of a rich edlusive frame which the novels invoke, including Greek myth, Christianity, Shakespeare, mysticism, and the visual arts. It would be difficult to find a better guide than Professor Dipple to these complex interlocking themes. It is a pleasure to recall die novels in her company. Admittedly, though, I write as one irresistibly compelled. University of Stirling, ScotlandPeter Lamarque The Literary Freud: Mechanisms ofDefense and the Poetic Will, edited by Joseph H. Smith, M.D.; xix & 390 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, $30.00. This fourth volume in the Psychiatry and the Humanities series explores, in the words of editor Joseph H. Smith, "the preliminary imaginative grasp of both strong science and strong poetry" (p. xv). This unusually varied collection of twelve essays by psychiatrists emd litereiry critics offers Freudian and Lacanian interpretations of important authors as well as critical readings of Freud's works. The opening piece, Harold Bloom's "Freud's Concepts ofDefense and die Poetic Will," certainly the most provocative of the essays dealing widi Freud's writings as literary texts, reads Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a "post-Romantic crisis-lyric" (p. 11), in which Freud moves from scientific empiricism to mythological speculation by viewing biological drives as psychic defenses. Bloom convincingly demonstrates diat Freud ultimately created a concept of the deadi drive equivalent to literal meaning and of the pleasure principle equivalent to figurative meaning, so that, just as die poet uses figurative language to achieve immortality, he could find in Eros "die will's revenge against time's 'it was' ... to be carried out by the mind's drive to surpass all earlier achievements" (p. 27). John T. Irwin's "Figurations of the Writer's Death: Freud and Hart Creme" argues in the same vein that Freud's repressed allusions to Mach and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, like Crane's repressed references to William Cullen Bryant and T. S. Eliot in "The Bridge," reveal die artist's attempts to protect his works from the accusation ofunoriginality and, uiereby, to survive physical death through the posthumous fame accorded to original writings. Meredith Anne Skura's "Revisions and Rereadings in Dreams and Allegories," a clearly-written and highly useful comparison of Freud's mediod of dream analysis and the literary critic's interpretation of allegory, suggests that dreams closely Reviews133 resemble allegory in the conflict they create between different layers ofmeaning. She concludes that dreams are related to allegories as metonomy is to metaphor and that, in fact, die true difference between dream and allegory resides in the allegory's sophistication. Susan Hawk Brisman and Leslie Brisman's "Lies Against Solitude: Symbolic, Imaginary and Real" sees both lyric poetry and Lacanian psychoanalysis as attempts to overcome alienation and achieve recognition from a responsive addressee. Applying Lacan's theories to the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake, they conclude diat the artist's creation ofan ideal auditor is comparable to the role oftransference in psychoanalysis and acts as die primary source ofpower in poetic discourse. William Kerrigan's "The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance" posits that the development of die Renaissance linguistic ego from Latin back to die vernacular exacdy parallels Lacan's model of normal ego development through the stade du miroir and diat die Renaissemce peculiarity of viewing the macrocosm in terms of the microcosm...

Group 15: Mystic Mischief: Banned Books in Classrooms

This poster will look at children’s literature that has been banned from schools due to themes of magic, witchcraft, or mysticism. We will be looking at four different popular children's novels, and dissecting the reasons behind their prohibition. These include: C. S. Lewis’ (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which, although it has never been banned, has been challenged by numerous public schools, religious communities and public libraries, as its main character, the lion Aslan, can be interpreted as a Christ-like figure. The novel The Witches by Roald Dahl, another celebrated children’s author, has, however, been banned due to its glamourization of witchcraft, as well its misogynistic views. We draw on scholarship on magic and modernity (eg. Randall Styers 2004) to contextualize the fear over magic and mysticism in relation to “legitimate religion” and with respect to the supposed moral vulnerability of children.