Dead Son Research Articles

American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford. By Roland De Wolk (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2019) 299 pp. $34.95

There are many ways for a work of history to draw upon the skills and insights of other disciplines, whether of sociology, psychology, or, in the case of the book under review, journalism. De Wolk had a long and successful career as a journalist before undertaking the lengthy period of archival research that more typically is the province of the historian. Happily, the resulting book has many of the strengths that one might anticipate from this combination, such as vivid prose and a strong narrative drive.The title is indicative of De Wolk’s argument that Leland Stanford was, as the driving force of capitalism, the living embodiment of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.”1 That is, Stanford and his colleagues in the Big Four of railroad magnates who built the Central Pacific, with a shaping influence on the history of California and the nation as a whole, did not let ethical niceties stand in the way of their push to build a transcontinental line. This line would famously be completed at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869, when its eastward-bound tracks met those of the westward Union Pacific. But Stanford, in particular, can be faulted for openly using high office as a Civil War governor of the state to advance the interests of the Central Pacific, as De Wolk makes plain.Stanford was born in upstate New York in 1824, in a large family. Nothing in his early life—a failure to persevere in any one course long enough to be successful and a lack of commitment to education were outstanding characteristics—foretold his later towering role. Having led an undistinguished life before arriving in Sacramento in July 1852 to join his four brothers, he did not immediately strike it rich. But the store that they ran had two notable neighbors, Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins, and the nucleus of the Big Four became acquainted with one another (Charles Crocker was the fourth). Within less than a decade, and under the influence of the pioneering engineer Theodore Judah, who had figured out how to conquer the Sierras, the Big Four were on their way to amassing fortunes with their creation of the Central Pacific, even if they would soon become archetypal Robber Barons—defined as those who become rich through unscrupulous means.Two main criticisms can be leveled at the book. First, It contains a number of generalizations that seem overly broad or even unfair. To cite one example, De Wolk gives short shrift to abolitionists, even though they, while a minority, would play an important role in shaping public opinion in the Golden State during the Civil War. The other criticism concerns De Wolk’s suggested connection between Stanford—the human disruptor—and Stanford University—the institution that Stanford and his wife Jane founded to honor their dead son. The university has been a disruptive force in the Santa Clara Valley by being a catalyst for Silicon Valley. Rather than taking criticism for suggesting the connection, he should have made a more forceful case. He tells us that the Stanfords endowed the university with a land grant of more than 8,000 acres, spanning what is now not only Santa Clara County but also San Mateo County. That land was in the hands of Leland Stanford because of the ruthless way in which he had pursued wealth. His initial success with the railroad led to vast riches, but it was not the only mode by which he gained his wealth, as De Wolk makes clear.De Wolk devotes some attention to the death of Stanford’s wife Jane in 1905 (twelve years after her husband’s), while she served as president of the university's board of trustees. Notwithstanding the machinations of David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University at the time, whom Jane did not like, De Wolk confirms that she was poisoned by a person (or persons) unknown whose identity is impossible to trace at this point.Flash forward to the twenty-first century. A newspaper story in the November 3, 2019, issue of the San Jose Mercury News, “Who Owns Silicon Valley?” identified Stanford University, owning holdings with a current market value of $19.7 billion, as the county’s property owner with the most valuable holdings—exceeding, for example, those of Apple, Google, and other tech firms—without even taking into account the value of the land in San Mateo County. Thus, a direct line clearly runs between the Robber Baron tactics responsible for Leland Stanford’s success and the extraordinarily powerful institution that he and his wife founded, an institution with resources virtually unmatched in higher education on a global level.In sum, this flawed but valuable book provides a good summation of the life of an important American, in a highly readable way. But it should not be regarded as the last word.

The ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: The Achievement of a Classical Arabic Allegorical Form

Abstract This paper aims to examine the renowned Early Islamic elegy, the ʿAyniyyah of the Mukhaḍram poet Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī in two respects. First, it examines the poem as an entirely unconventional example of a Classical Arabic elegiac poem (rithāʾ) in terms of its thematic structure of introductory lament to the poet’s dead sons followed by three panels: the onager, the oryx and knightly combat. It concludes that the tragic endings of all three panels constitute a dramatic inversion of the triumphal outcomes of such thematic panels in the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah in a manner that reflects al-Jāḥiẓ’s structural insights into the semantic functions of the animal panels in both elegy and qaṣīdah. Second, the paper explores the allegorical aspect of the thematic sections of the poem, the elegiac lament and the three tragic panels, in order to argue that they are a key to understanding the allegorical dimensions of such panels in the Early Arabic qaṣīdah tradition. The paper next explores Arabic critical terminology for the Western term “allegory,” such as tamthīl, umthūlah and majāz, only to conclude that none of them are adequate. Building especially on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s proper understanding of majāz, the paper finally proposes a new etymologically and semantically sound neologism as an Arabic critical term for allegory: umjūzah.

Stage text of the musical «Next to normal» in Michael Grief’s production

Stage text of the musical «Next to normal» in Michael Grief’s production

The Prosthetic Impulse Revisited in <em>A.I. Artificial Intelligence</em>

The Prosthetic Impulse Revisited in <em>A.I. Artificial Intelligence</em>

The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Richard Hunter

Reviewed by: The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Richard Hunter Jonathan S. Burgess Richard Hunter. The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 254. $44.99. ISBN 978-1-108-42831-6. Referring to his recent monographs on Hesiod and Plato, Hunter describes this book as completing a "trilogy" on foundational literature. The author notes that he will not repeat himself on Hellenistic poetry or cover reception of Homer in drama, imperial epic, and philosophy of later antiquity. As this learned inquiry amply demonstrates, there remains much other material by which to "measure" the influence of Homeric poetry. In an often digressive and accumulative manner, the five chapters explore a number of different themes. Chapter 1, "Placing Homer," argues that the effect of Homer was geographically extensive and socially deep. Chapter 2, "Homer and the Divine," discusses ancient reaction to select Homeric passages featuring divinities. Chapter 3, "The Golden Verses," surveys the attention given to Odysseus' symposiastic address to the Phaeacians in Odyssey 9. Chapter 4, "Homer among the Scholars," discusses ancient critical explication of a number of Homeric passages. Chapter 5, "The Pleasures of Song," focuses on two key passages, the song of the Sirens in Odyssey 9 and the heroic song of Achilles in Iliad 9, with attention to divergent explication or utilization of them in antiquity. Despite the term "reception" in the subtitle, "heritage" might be the better word for this work's celebratory exploration of Homeric influence. Besides referring to a wide variety of literature that discussed Homeric poetry, Hunter also searches out everyday texts, often epigrams of the eastern Greek world, that seemingly reflect Homer. The point is that the implicit employment of Homer in even obscure texts especially affirms the reach of Homeric influence. At times Hunter's optimism that we are "invited" to perceive Homeric allusions may not convince. An early example is a "humble" epigram from Cappadocia (5–6); it is undoubtedly epicized, but a father grieving a dead son does not bring to my mind the parents of Hector watching their son being dragged in Iliad 22, despite the correlation of two common words. Though Hunter refers to the use of Homer in ancient education, this usually involved rote copying and memorization of the early parts of the Homeric epics; more socio-economic analysis would be required to demonstrate that Homer penetrated "all levels of society" in a specific and sophisticated manner. An interesting section in chapter 4 reveals that ancient scholars were actually quite alarmed at the attention given to humble characters and activities in the Odyssey. In many ways the book gathers strength as it explores the undoubted importance of Homer in antiquity. Hunter is particularly informative in his subtle yet dogged pursuit of the shifting employment of various themes, such as the snatching of a mortal to heaven or the song of the Sirens. Though the author excellently [End Page 113] explains the mechanics of ancient interpretation of Homer, not every reader will be as sympathetic to its methods and conclusions. For example, Hunter is rather accommodating with Longinus' biographical hypothesis that an aging Homer composed the Odyssey as an epilogue to the Iliad. The argument that Nestor's speech to Telemachus in Odyssey 3 ("the sufferings of the Greeks at Troy, the sacking of the city … , and then the νόστος") suggests the "shape of the Iliad followed by the Odyssey" is carefully worded yet misleading. Three of the four dead lamented by Nestor belong to cyclic traditions, not the Iliad, and in general the Odyssey looks back to non-Homeric episodes and famously avoids Iliadic material. But there is no doubt that readers will come away from this book much better informed about ancient responses to Homer, and this work should prove to be an impetus for further consideration of the extent of reception of the Homeric poetry in the ancient Greek world. Jonathan S. Burgess University of Toronto Copyright © 2019 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio ed. by Neil Carpathios

Reviewed by: Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio ed. by Neil Carpathios Shea Daniels Neil Carpathios, ed., Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. 176 pp. $47.95. As a young Appalachian woman so much of the writing I encounter from and about the region pulsates with contemporary geopolitics, pulsates with a strong desire to convey this particular place, to capture this particular Ohio. In this sense, the collection of poems and short stories in “Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio” is a torch song. These stories and poems moor themselves on experience, on a love of a [End Page 95] place. From that love of place come ruminations on inequality, stories of a deadly accident, and dirges on outmigration. Many of these writers crave universality, hoping it will bring economic possibility or credibility. Tf they can find the right words to ground folks who haven’t grown up in these foothills, they seem to think, they can take back some measure of regional power or dignity, disarm the rhetoric of geopolitics. They hope they can subvert the importance of modernity and replace its importance in ways that make sense here, in this Appalachia, in this Ohio. Yet like the old men in my town who refuse to call our factories by their current corporate names, our best writers understand the universal is most aptly conveyed in the singular. Donald Ray Polluck’s “The Jesus Lights” watches a couple bring their dead son’s car home to rust in the front yard. Christina Jones’s “The Last Shot” explores the complexity of ruin. Joel Peckham’s “Psalm 96” soapboxes the intricacy of sorrow. Throughout these poems and stories almost as much attention is paid to our land as to plot and character, from sycamore trees and foothills to the exploded hillsides lining our highways. And throughout these stories and poems, much like throughout these foothills, the land itself empowers and limits these plots and characters. They are intertwined and interdependent and, as this is writing from the Appalachian foothills, it simply could not be any other way. I grew up reading voraciously. So few of those voices explored what it meant to resolutely love a place at times unloved and feared by others. So few of those characters had the same valleys in their vowels as my Ohio. Later folks told me little writing came from Appalachia, like these foothills were something landlocked and barren. But like this anthology represents, these foothills are the furthest thing from landlocked. Every single river on earth leads right back to them. [End Page 96] Shea Daniels Ohio University Athens, Ohio Copyright © 2018 Paul Mokrzycki Renfro

The Road to Healing: Pilgrimage and the Vietnam War in Let Their Spirits Dance

The Road to Healing:Pilgrimage and the Vietnam War in Let Their Spirits Dance Nadia Avendaño Current research on pilgrimage shows that travel in search for clarification or quest is drawn from either traditional practices within established religions or from rituals that can be melded with new contemporary forms of spirituality. Studies show that pilgrimage is therapeutic in biological, psychological, social, and spiritual ways. When one thinks of pilgrimage, religion generally comes to mind, however, secular pilgrimages have emerged as a viable means of connecting deeply in an existential manner. Upon completion of the journey, pilgrims generally experience life as significantly more meaningful and their psychological or spiritual woe is overcome. In the novel, Let Their Spirits Dance (2003) by Chicana author Stella Pope Duarte, the Ramírez family has lost a loved one in the Vietnam War. They have never healed from this tragedy and some 27 years later, Alicia, the matriarch of the family, claims to hear voices in the night that she believes to be of Jesse, her dead son. This study draws on current anthropological scholarship on pilgrimage to analyze the theme of pilgrimage and its' therapeutic capabilities in the Ramírez family. In the Catholic tradition pilgrims embark on journeys to a specific place with the purpose of venerating it, in order to ask for supernatural aid or to fulfil a religious obligation (Dubisch and Winkelman xiii).1 A less overtly religious definition of pilgrimage is simply put as "outer action with inner meaning" (Clift 12). Both definitions are particularly helpful in understanding the relationship between the Ramírez family's journey and pilgrimage. Alicia, an extremely religious woman is motivated by a religious calling to touch her son's name on the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. She declares: "I vow this day, before all the hosts of Heaven, before God, una manda. I'll get to the Wall before I die and touch my son's name. If it's the last thing I do on this earth, I promise I'll touch Jesse's name!" (93). Her daughter, Teresa, the protagonist-narrator, devoid of a religious obligation, is experiencing her own need for healing, still mourning her brother's death, and accompanies her mother on this pilgrimage, along with several other family members and friends. Alicia insists that the whole family go as well as Jesse's fellow veteran friends. What begins as one mother's quest to fulfil a promise, becomes a family's collective search for healing, and results in a search for both an individual and national identity. According to sociologist Raymond Michalowski and cultural anthropologist Jill Dubish, pilgrimage begins with the idea of a journey, and that traveling to a different or [End Page 104] special place will bring about a change in one's life, in one's viewpoint, in one's state of being. The physical journey is thus paralleled by a spiritual or psychological one. Both the journey and destination are important and incorporate a mixture of religious and secular motives (163). Almost any journey may be termed "a pilgrimage" these days, its meaning defined by inner feelings and motivation rather than by external institutionalized forms (Dubish and Winkelman xvii). While many kinds of places can become the object of a pilgrimage, such sites whether religious or secular, tend to have what anthropologist James Preston has termed "spiritual magnetism" (Preston 33). Whereas some pilgrimage sites are associated with major mythological or historical events within a specific religious tradition, or are established spontaneously because of miraculous occurrences at the site, in some cases, a pilgrimage site was not intended or foreseen, such as is the case with the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. Since its inauguration in 1982, it has become an important pilgrimage destination for veterans and nonveterans alike (Dubish and Winkelman xix). For example, the "Run for the Wall" that started in 1989 is the largest annual pilgrimage to the Memorial Wall consisting of Vietnam Veterans, friends and supporters all traveling on motorcycles. Turning now to the novel Let Their Spirits Dance, Teresa believes she is taking her mother on this trip to fulfill a vow, but...

Show Me a Hero

Show Me a Hero

Letters to Lord Ganesha

Letters to Lord Ganesha

WACANA MANTRA DUKUN BERANAK MELAYU RIAU

This study aims to describe (1) Content of mantra, (2) the form of mantra, (3) function, (4) inheritance of mantra Melayu Riau. This type of research is qualitative research. The data in this study a lingual unit that forms a spell Melayu Riau. The data used in this study is three, namely Datok Sodah, Nenek Lambiah, and Nenek Terima. The method of providing data in this study using records. Techniques providing data using the tapping technique. The validity of the data by using the extension of participation and persistence observations. Data analysis method used is the method of ethnography. The data analysis was done by using domain analysis. The results showed that (1) Content spell includes stages prenatal, childbirth and postnatal, which rejects interference, testimony, and plea. Tapahan prenatal can be viewed Kato landslide Dead Bedarah, Cus Sibalucus, Si Tampun-Tampun, Sireh Lillah, Eggplant Lillah, Oil Lillah, Dokon foursome, and Petandoan. Stages of the birth process, namely Ring Geligo Sea, Membukak Lawang (Datok Saodah), Membukak Lawang (Grandma Lambiah), Dokon Betujoh, Key Sire Ali, Wada Wadi Maknikam, Tetak Duri Tampong Duri, Officer King Ali, Selusoh carrion, Said Witness, if Dead Son, Birah Black (Datok Saodah), Sibalucus, Membukak Lawang (Grandma Accept), Tawa Stickiness Uri, Selusoh Slaves, Ketigo Chicken, Nature Teberakai, and Sindai Teruno. Sindai postnatal stages uno, Children Anjeng Kuyok Buto, invisibility Rayo, Senengkat, invisibility Chaff, Tiong Gano, Sirejang Anjeng, Birah Black (Grandma Lambiah), Salam Gumi, Hillahi Tegu, Origin Land, and Tawa Param. (2) Form spell, namely poetry, prose and free verse lyrics. (3) Function spells, which accelerates the process of birth, to overcome the difficulties in childbirth, birth overcome distorted, and the safety of women and their babies. (4) Inheritance spells Melayu Riau open to the public.

Life-in-Death: Raising Dead Sons in New Orleans

ABSTRACTThe social and religious work of African-American women in New Orleans who mourn and memorialise the dead attends primarily to sons and grandsons, the young black men who are most frequently the victims of homicide. Based on ethnographic and historical research in two Christian congregations, this article examines the forms of relatedness that women have developed to support and advocate for each other, the displaced, and the deceased. Tracing more broadly the development of vulnerability and violence at the urban margins, I argue that this work unfolds in a continued context of social death, predicated on dominant and still racist determinations of human value. I thus examine the transformative potential of African-American religious women’s relational practices, highlighting in particular their assertion of black social and spiritual value, in the kingdom of God if not yet in the inclusive, just, and sustainable city and world they envision.

The Byzantine Narration of Our Father Agapius and Its Slavonic Translation

The paper introduces the Greek original of the hagiographic text The Narration of Our Father Agapius (presumably from the 5th–6th centuries), which was widely known in Slavonic tradition but remains almost unknown neither to historians of Byzantine culture and to Slavists. The paper consists of two parts. Drawing upon the critical edition of the text, the first part discusses the peculiarities of the Greek tradition. The manuscript from Athens is much more accurate than the second of the two existing Greek manuscripts, from St. Petersburg. Nevertheless, in some cases the Athenian manuscript is defective. Thus, the first culmination of the narrative, the description of the theophany in the Garden of Paradise, is absent. The episode of the raising of the dead son of a widow is also reduced, probably due to its somewhat magical flavor. However, the manuscript from St. Petersburg in its second part is inferior to the Athenian manuscript reducing vast descriptions—prayers and various details of the rites. A comparison of the two Greek manuscripts reveals vivid folkloric and evangelic images of the Greek original that were concealed by various mistakes made by scribes. The second part of the article compares the Greek original of the Narration with the Slavonic translation. The text from the Uspenskij Sbornik is the main focus of the comparison, but other evidence from the South and East Slavonic traditions are also taken into account. The translation eliminated quite a few major traces of the Greek original. Thus, an intimate first-person narration and a striking detail in which the main character himself tells about his death are eliminated. The names of Paradise sites, theological discourses, exhortations, any vast descriptions disappear. The adjusted symbolic structure of the Narration that reveals the transformation of the character from myst to mystagogue is eliminated in the Slavonic tradition and the main idea of the Greek text—the idiorythmia predominating over the koinobion—is scarcely readable. In the Slavonic tradition the text becomes more and more similar to a fairytale.

Virgil’s Ascanius: Imagining the Future in the Aeneid by Anne Rogerson

Reviewed by: Virgil’s Ascanius: Imagining the Future in the Aeneid by Anne Rogerson Patricia A. Johnston Anne Rogerson. Virgil’s Ascanius: Imagining the Future in the Aeneid. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. viii, 237. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-107-11539-2. Ascanius, argues Rogerson (1), the Aeneid’s smallest hero, not only represents the glories to come after the Aeneid; Vergil also “uses Ascanius to represent the manifold difficulties associated with looking forward beyond the present.” While this could appear to be a clear statement of the obvious, in fact Rogerson masterfully pursues the ambiguities in Vergil’s Ascanius, whom she compares with numerous other versions of this character. The picture of him as a small child “clinging to his father’s hand and following in his footsteps as he escapes” from Troy was the dominant one from the late-sixth century bce. Rogerson, after developing this picture, then explores the “ambiguity” implicit in this singular figure (although noting his multiple names even in Vergil), examining him as a symbol of “a contested future” that suggests “alternative visions” (11). Chapter 2 examines the myths around the sons (plural) of Aeneas: “Virgil has tidied up the family tree” (15). Homer’s Poseidon mentions several sons, as well as sisters, of Aeneas (Il. 20.307–308), as do Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1.55.3) and Servius (ad Aen. 4.159). Rogerson also discusses the ambiguity between the names Ascanius and Iulus, and the implied conflicts between him and the son of Silvius, son of Lavinia. In chapter 3, “Ilus to Iulus,” she examines “how the Trojans are to leave enough of their Trojan-ness behind to become Roman” (37). Jupiter promises that Ascanius will rule the new city his father is about to found until the birth of Romulus and Remus, donec regina sacerdos/Marte gravis geminam partu dabit Ilia prolem (Aen. 1.273–274), “until a royal priestess of Trojan descent, pregnant by Mars, gives birth to twin progeny” (40): Rogerson here argues that the name Ilia edges Ascanius out of the line of succession. Chapter 4 examines the responses of Andromache (who associates him with her dead son Astyanax) and Dido; in the case of Dido, he becomes (through Cupid’s impersonation of him) “a further example of the destructive nature of substitutions and false imagines in the Aeneid” (72). [End Page 588] Chapters 5 and 6 examine his strength in the Trojan games, the frenzied reaction of the Trojan women to the fire of the ships, and the omens of fire with both Anchises (2.647–649) and Ascanius (2.679–684), as well as with Aeneas at 8.680–681 and 10.270–271, and the broader tradition of these omens. In the concluding chapter 10 Rogerson compares the roles of Ascanius and of Pallas, each of them embodying his father’s hope for the future (194). She elaborates numerous parallels between the two of them, concluding that the exact nature of the relationship between them is not clear: “While Ascanius is still seen as the future ruler in Italy, it is nonetheless Pallas who plays the active manly role in Aeneas’ imagined (if impossible) continuation of his son’s story” (201); “And standing as a symbol of hope for the future . . . he reminds us of the inexorable and . . . unknowable workings of fate” (203). Rogerson has done a fine job of defining and substantializing the figure of Ascanius in Vergil’s Aeneid. A study such as this also helps to define how Vergil worked with and brought together some rather obscure strands of Trojan/Roman history into his epic in a way that makes it so much more powerful than it might have been without this appealing child who comes to embody the Trojan/Roman hope for the future. Patricia A. Johnston Brandeis University Copyright © 2017 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc

Materiality, rhetoric and emotion in the Pietà

This study focuses on the representation of materiality on wall paintings, as depicted objects functioned as triggers of emotion to convey meaning in images. In medieval aesthetics images were made to engage all the senses in the spectator so as to create a truthful experience. The material perspective combines well with medieval rhetoric in understanding this process, particularly the concepts of ekphrasis, enargeia and ductus. By doing close readings of images, and identifying materials, figures, objects, gestures and so on, in the same manner as one can close read texts, narratives of the images can be discovered. It is also a reading that helps in identifying emotive expressions and rhetorical gestures that together with material aspects of images and texts also help in identifying gender-related contents. During the 15th century the Pietà (the mourning Virgin Mary holding her dead son) was introduced in Sweden. The image is key in understanding the Marian cult as it was established alongside the expanding devotion to the Virgin in the Nordic countries. By fusing the material aspect and rhetoric in a close reading of the motif that focuses on gender and emotion this study aims to find alternative paths in analysing medieval art.

Returns: Youth, Time, and Maturity in The Ambassadors

In this essay, I study numerous spatiotemporal returns in The Ambassadors to make three points. First, youth is multitemporal and relational rather than chronological and individual in this novel. A chronological view of Strether’s lost youth and Chad’s precarious youth eludes the returns of Strether’s young self and his dead son to figure in Strether’s relationship with Chad. Second, Strether’s consciousness analytically moves forward by temporally moving backward: his progress has to be backward. And third, Strether and Chad are boyish characters not necessarily because they are immature by nature but because their representations botch the telos of maturity.

James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life

James Joyce: Portrait and Still Life* MARIANNE McDONALD My title plays on Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with its hero, Stephen Dedalus, named after the Greek artist Daedalus, who created the Labyrinth. The Greek craftsman made wings for himself and his son, Icarus, held together with wax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun; the wax melted and the son drowned in the sea. He was a good symbol for the creator Joyce, who invented a new type of literature that was shot down again and again as he tried to get it published. But Dedalus also is a character in Ulysses, and this is the identity Joyce intended to be his own. Joyce in all his work is conscious of death. We think of “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners, in which priests sleep in coffins to keep them mindful of their end. Stephen in Ulysses “sees corpses rising from their graves like vampires to deprive the living of joy.” But Joyce could be equally resistant to its fascination, as Leopold Bloom, after brooding on his dead son and father, says in Glasnevin Cemetery, “They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm full-blooded life.” Death permeates life for Joyce: bride-bed, childbed, and the bed of death, a necessary cycle, but this realization can make every day an adventure and bring gratitude and love for life out of still life. A portrait can be a still life, something unmoving. While that can be a corpse, it may also be something living—and after so many years there is still life in all of the writing by *Based on a talk given on Bloomsday, 2015, at the University of California, San Diego. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1944), born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin. In the Portrait we learn he was “educated” by the “holy fathers” and regularly beaten. Both his overloaded religious name and education almost guaranteed he would be an atheist. When after his death a Catholic priest offered a religious burial, Joyce’s wife Nora said she couldn’t do that to him. Joyce died in Zurich, having wandered Europe much as Bloom (both Jew and Irishman) wandered Dublin. The parallels between Joyce and his Bloom lie partly in the thirteenth -century legend of the wandering Jew who insulted Jesus on the cross and was cursed to walk the earth until Christ should return. Joyce, for his part, was never devout and could also be insulting about religion—especially Irish Catholicism—as well as people. As a result, most of his works were banned for many years. Wandering, then, for him was a blessing (as he soon tired of most places and most people), not a curse. Ulysses, loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, was aptly a tale of wandering throughout Dublin, but also in the underworld (episode 6, Hades). Joyce continually resurrects the dead in his use of the Greek classics. Here I am reminded of what Bryan Friel in Translations has the schoolmaster, Hugh, say to Lieutenant Yolland, who is working on a map and renaming places from Irish into English (for the people who occupied Ireland for about 800 years): “Wordsworth? . . . no. I’m afraid we’re not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean. We tend to overlook your island.” Yes, the Irish prefer Greece and Greek Literature. The Irish have come to wear their religion lightly. In an interview with an Australian newspaper, an Irish taxi driver, asked how he felt about the same-sex marriage referendum just passed, answered with a straight face, “Oh I approve of it. After all I’ve been having same sex with the wife after thirty years.” Another variation on still life? A funeral—for another example of this sort of levity—can be “funferal,” as in the song Finnegan’s Wake, when it james joyce: portrait and still life 88 describes a hooley or donnybrook (Irish words for brawl)— which ends up reviving the dead Finnegan. Thus the correct name of...

A Study on the Ceremonial Writing at the First Memorial Rites to Allay His Dead Son by Kim Chang-hyeop (with pen name of Nongam)

A Study on the Ceremonial Writing at the First Memorial Rites to Allay His Dead Son by Kim Chang-hyeop (with pen name of Nongam)

Vode i Vetrovi by Nenad Miloevi

N. Lombardi Jr. The Plain of Jars Roundfire Books Dorothy Kozeny goes halfway across the world in the search for truth, from Ohio to Laos, to uncover what the Air Force tried to hide about her dead son. She enlists the help of a local guide and treks deep into the mountains and villages of Laos. Heartfelt, rewarding, and at times hilarious, The Plain of Jars is a compelling novel. Pascale Kramer The Child Tamsin Black, tr. Bellevue Literary Press The Child is a raw look at the cycles of decay that stalk our lives—the violent deterioration of a low-income neighborhood, the physical degradation of a cancer-wracked body—and the unexpected sources of hope that keep us going. Simone and Claude have resigned themselves to quiet despair when a young boy arrives and brings renewed life to their home. Nota Bene the stars of the divine (“Illumined Night”) to find a center of what poetry is: earthly and spiritual. Aimee Fagent San Diego, California Jean-Paul Michel. Quand on vient d’un monde d’Idées, la surprise est énorme / When One Comes from a World of Ideas, Vast Is the Surprise . . . Michael Bishop, tr. Bedford, Nova Scotia. VVV / William Blake & Co. 2013. isbn 9782841032051 Set in free form, Jean-Paul Michel’s idealistic and analytical poetry shows him struggling with the confrontation between intellect and life. The poet attempts to answer a question that is fundamentally important to Western dualism: how to reconcile the highest, purest ideals with the messy candor of daily life. Beauty and poetic mystery live somewhere between these extremes, yet they remain elusive. In Michel’s poetry, they are found in a coded language rooted in the tension between an ever-changing original picture and its immobile image. This disconnect is reflected in the carefully constructed de-composition of the poems and in the unusual caesurae of certain words. To translate this disconcerting and difficult work takes a translator whose style can faithfully mirror the poet’s. Michael Bishop, Michel’s lifelong translator, has the exact degree of literalness with a British charm that softens the violent austerity of Michel’s thought. The editors’ choice of placing the French and the English texts sequentially, instead of side by side, emphasizes the disconnects present in the French version. From the poem “Du diaphragme à la barri ère des dents . . .” (From diaphragm to the teeth’s gate . . .): “Décide le Dieu du jour à venir. / Va / avec confiance à / ce qui vient. S’il est dit / que l’heure est bonne un vent / chassera les nuages. / Si l’heure est mauvaise, médite. Fais silence.” (Choose the coming day’s God. / Go / with confidence towards that / which is coming. Should a good hour / be announced, a breeze / will chase the clouds away. / Should the hour be bad, meditate and keep silent.) The founder and publisher of William Blake & Co. Editions located in Bordeaux, a child of 1968 whose masters include Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Michel has been active on the French literary scene since the early 1970s. To date, he has published twenty-three volumes of poetry. His latest distinction was the 2013 Grand Prix Léopold Senghor de Poésie awarded by the Paris-based Cénacle de Poésie, Arts, et Lettres. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Nenad Milošević. Vode i Vetrovi. Novi Sad. Umetničko društvo Vujica Rešin Tucić. 2012 (rel. 2013). isbn 9788689457001 In his seventh collection of poems, Vode i Vetrovi (Waters and the winds), Serbian poet Nenad Milošević shows his poetic maturity through the utilization of themes underscored by a feeling of high anxiety—the passage of time and the change that comes with the flow of waters. The book has four named sections: “Waters and Winds,” “Hotel Room on the Moon,” “House for Sale,” and “What Remained in the Last Century.” He begins with a disaster, “The Hundred Year Level Water” of the Sava River, when the speaker and his friend drag their boat to a houseboat to get drunk. By toasting the past, the friends vow to remember January–February 2014 • 71 72 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews these waters in the future. In the...

Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, and Actualized Metaphors inMrs. DallowayandRaymond

This article takes up Rita Felski's recent call to modernists to explore how Bruno Latour's latest work on actor-network theory might be adapted for literary studies. It examines two accounts of World War I soldiers who (allegedly) return from the dead in material form: Virginia Woolf's fictional account of Septimus Smith, who is convinced his friend Evans has come back from the dead, and Oliver Lodge's best-selling memoir, Raymond, or Life and Death, which recounts in detail how Lodge believed his dead son sent messages to the family to assure them of his continued material existence. That these moments may be read as obvious signs of delusion or unresolved grief tells us little about the power such images had in the early twentieth century or about how metaphors at a particular historical moment might be read, shaped, disrupted, and made real. A Latourian approach, instead, demands a shift in interpretive practices: rather than reading vertically for a latent meaning that might lie hidden beneath a text, we read horizontally, tracing actively a network of places, times, and objects, a network that offers a new understanding of the interactions between historical contexts and literary studies.

Memory, Mediality, and the “Performative Turn”: Recontextualizing Remembering in Medieval Scandinavia

Introduction Scandinavia's longest runic inscription, the visually and textually imposing early ninth-century Rok stone, opens in a way that serendipitously illustrates the memory, media, and performance triad this essay--In (aft) Vemoor stand these runes (runaR). And Varinn coloured (faoi) them, the father, in his dead son. say the folktale (sagum mogminni). (1) Rok, just like several thousand other rune stones, is concerned with in a most basic and obvious sense, in that many stones were expressly carved and erected as memorials to--in of (aft)--dead people. (2) Expanding the sense what is remembered at Rok, however, is a phrase that appears repeatedly throughout its text-both verbatim and implied--sagum mogminni, usually translated as I tell the memory. (3) Clearly, a compound the folk memory sort evokes, not the individual a bereaved relative for a dead kinsman, but rather a different sort memory, that is shared, memories that are at once cultural and communal, what we might more readily recognize with a different appellation--namely, tradition; (4) and, indeed, the Rok text alludes time and again to narrative traditions largely unknown to us now. The inscription's other repeated formulation sagum, I say, I tell, and so on, emphasizes the highly performative nature the text, performances acted out both by its fictional (or perhaps historical) I, and, more notably, by what must have been the repeated reading aloud the text by each new viewer the stone capable the task. (5) One quickly understands, too, that the public declarations sorrow and respect such memorial stones represent are meant as lasting elegiac performances, acts to honor the dead that, given their lithic nature, are inherendy frozen in time. Yet these proclamations are also, as in the case sagum, but now for the text in its entirety, re-enacted with each new attempt by a passerby to read the inscription. And it is not difficult to imagine that further performances--rituals or ceremonials various sorts--accompanied the erection and dedication such stones; it would be perverse to imagine that the stones were silently tipped into position without the accompaniment familial or local ritualized behaviors one sort or another. (6) Finally, one cannot help but be struck by the obvious self-conscious mediality the monument. Not only does the text note its own corporeal existence--stand these runes--but the father's, Varinn's, role in the physical production the monument is expressly referred to. Knowledge runic writing, or runacy (a neologism meant to capture for runic writing the same sense literacy has for alphabetic writing; cf. Spurkland 2004), and thus the written word as a medium for preserving, even enshrining, memories and thoughts, had been used in Scandinavia for half a millennium at the time the Rok stone was carved. Although the epigraphic system associated with Christianity would in time become the principal vehicle for the written word in northern Europe, (7) beginning roughly at the time Rok, even exemplified by Rok, runic writing entered into an era enormously expanded use. Throughout the Viking and the Middle Ages, Scandinavians were acutely aware runic mediality, as they would also in time be about Latin and manuscript culture: the relationship between the self-conscious written text and its narrative was much more diverse and complicated than simply the fact the story or sentiment being recorded, as a number recent studies have emphasized, and as the example from Rok suggests. (8) In fact, it is anything other than happenstance that the Rok stone's opening focuses on memory, mediality, and performance: these functions were at the heart such monuments, their production, and their performance. The paradigm shift we have witnessed in recent decades in Old Norse studies away from formalist approaches, which were long in vogue, and toward so-called performance and media studies, premises well-suited to the contextualization our inherited goods to their cultural moments, was long in coming (cf. …