Fictional Attempts Research Articles

Dislocating the Language of Modernity in Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of Reason

Abstract: Engaging with Amitav Ghosh's recent essays that link imperial modernity's mechanistic view of the world to the novel's failure to imagine climate change, this article examines how Ghosh's fiction attempts to dislocate narratives of modernity to reveal a world constructed by capital and naturalized through reason. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists on the introduction of Western science to India, this article returns to Ghosh's first novel, The Circle of Reason , to focus on the intimate scale of the transformations that imperial modernity enacted on the human body and psyche. Though underrepresented in scholarship on Ghosh, this novel is a critical site for understanding Ghosh's view of how the ideology of modernity gets entrenched as scientific reason, reshaping humankind's relationship with the human body and the surrounding world. The novel's representation of the body, moreover, proposes an intimate and uncanny space that discloses alternative ways of imagining the world.

George Gissing Goes Out in Style: The Syntax of Class after 1890

Abstract Literary historians often cite George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) as a chronicle of a waning literary scene, but his sentences offer altogether stranger demonstrations of how a threatened form of realism attempts to grasp a radically transformed and transforming social situation. Drawing on recent work on the politics of style, this essay argues that Gissing’s narrative style is best understood in terms of two motivating forces powerfully at work in late nineteenth-century Britain: an ascendant popular culture and the massive expansion of the imperial regime. By focusing less on the rumble and verve of an incipient modernism than on the creaky cadences of a realism not long for the world, we begin to discern tectonic shifts at the level of the sentence within and beyond Gissing’s late novels (and the triple-decker). Such shifts allow us to understand how the residual realism of nineteenth-century social-problem fiction attempts to map the world-system. A discussion of Gissing’s style is thus an opportunity to specify the motivating forces at work in his writing and to speculate more broadly about how novelistic prose registers working-class massification and the internationalization of British economic and social worlds in the late nineteenth century.

Reproductive Justice: The Final (Feminist) Frontier

From Gattaca to Star Trek, problematic tropes surrounding reproduction can easily be found in works of mainstream science fiction. Such tropes uphold conservative anxieties around reproductive technologies, abortion, and pregnancy, and these works thus become influential in legal, ethical, and policy discussions on these issues. In contrast, feminist science fiction attempts to expose reproductive injustice, both current and future, through portrayals of prototype social-legal contexts. In this article, I argue that feminist science fiction works are, therefore, of importance for feminist legal theory as they can help us imagine a radically transformed future for reproduction. I consider the work of Octavia Butler and Laura Lam as examples of reproductive dystopia highlighting current, past, and potential future socio-legal injustices. These feminist works call for change grounded in the lived experiences of women and people capable of becoming pregnant.

Samuel Beckett and the Impasses of Sexuation in How It Is

Abstract The confusion of sexual identities in How It Is testifies to the collapsing of the imaginary register that situates male and female as distinct and complementary in society. The body as a specular whole thus gives way to a relationship to language, where the universal ‘phallic’ register inscribes irreducible feminine alterity. The tormentor/tormented couplings, as well as the serial expansion of crawlers compose fictional attempts revealing a fundamental failure to institute sexual complementarity. The sexual is thus shown to reside within speech itself, pointing to the text’s very engendering. The impossible “sexual rapport” is thus the source of creation.

Translation as Method

Abstract Taking Lu Xun's work as its starting point, this essay examines translation as a methodology for negotiating not between different languages or dialects but rather between different voices. To the extent that some fiction attempts to manifest the voices of socially marginalized figures, this translational approach offers a way of examining the possibilities and limits of this sort of negotiation. By extension, a similar translational framework may also be used to understand the attempts by critics to assess fiction's own attempts to render these marginalized voices.

Neither Chuckwagons, nor Saskatoons, and a Missing Marlboro Man: Postcolonialism, Regionalism and the Ineffable Canadian West

Contemporary transnational and transcontinental trends of theory enable a mandatory analysis of how region and regionalism have been fundamental in the solidification of the Canadian national ethos, making locality and globality go hand in hand. Negotiating the meaning of regional identities is therefore a consequence of the processes of globalisation, which have been affecting how we (de)construct the nation. This paper addresses how a vested representation in fiction from the Canadian west and the prairies helped keep at bay the spectrum of fragmentation that threatened the hermetic body of a national literature and culture. Whereas traditional patterns of history and fiction have constructed the west under a recurrent attention to ossified issues of landscape, the west and the plains were more recently conceptualized in attention to a different tackling of time / space: one that unified the former prairies and the west in just one single experience. Anticipating much of the theoretical approach to the global through locality launched in the early 21st century, while also being inheritors of previous theoretical and fictional attempts at renewing regional myths, Guy Vanderhaege’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996) and Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1997) make the structuring potential of their times and spaces lose their hegemony, thus favouring the rooting of postmodern myths and ineffability to unmark the borders of region, and destabilize those of the national discourse.

Tomorrow

This article explores the ramified meaning of the idea of ‘Tomorrow’ in the mid 1950s. It looks at a number of fictional and non fictional attempts to predict futures on the basis of extrapolating from the technological and cultural phenomena of the then present. With particular reference to the 1956 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, the author seeks to establish the parameters of conjecture as well as the timely cultural politics of the Independent Group. He suggests how writers and thinkers, such as Charles and Ray Eames and Norbert Wiener, combined with the filtering of information theory in contemporary science fiction to generate significant harbingers of digital culture in the formulations of the ‘Tomorrow’ of 1956.

Anglophone Fiction in Swaziland: A Preliminary Study

Literature in Swaziland is a relatively recent phenomenon, and literary production by Swazi writers in siSwati and in English is somewhat limited. In turn, only minimal scholarly attention has been directed towards the nation's literature. This article offers a preliminary study of selected anglophone fiction, situating the texts within the genre of popular literature and examining how institutional and cultural forces have influenced its production and reception. I find that the generic constraints of the popular novel form often inhibit any real critique of oppressive paternalism embedded in local custom and tradition, while the more fully individualized short fiction attempts various forms of intervention. As a result, the authors produce contradictory visions of a postindependence Swaziland across their fiction, as their novels conform to the conventional demands of a publishing house concerned primarily with marketing educational texts, while their more textured short fiction often displays a marked ambivalence towards traditional structures.

“Under a Foreign Sky:” Place and Displacement in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Critical readings of James Baldwin’s Giovanni Room have largely focused on what is considered its displacement of blackness unto whiteness in the form of the novel’s white protagonist, David, and stage a sort of lynching party to search out and expose to the critical gaze the “absent black man” in the text. Only a few recent readings, beyond biographical surveys of expatriate writers, have considered expatriation outside of Baldwin’s biography and essays, or seriously attempted to locate exile as a key theme and strategy in his fiction. Since, as Méral has noted, Paris is “closely linked with the first fictional attempts to deal with the subject of homosexuality” (223), there must be something about the city which is ripe as a setting for exploration of homosexual themes.In an attempt to address this lacuna, and to unite Baldwin’s biographical and fictional interest in the productive functions of expatriation, this article examines the symbolic function of the places and displacements in Giovanni’s Room through the prism of the décalage afforded by Parisian exile. I argue that, through the depiction of the Parisian spaces—the city itself, the gay bars, and Giovanni’s room—and their contrast with American spaces, Baldwin shows the function of exile and otherness in not only evading, but producing and reinforcing (sexual) identities. With the freedom afforded “under a foreign sky” to ‘find oneself,’ David explores, then excises and exorcises, his hidden, “dirty,” “dark,” gay self in the figure of the guillotined Giovanni. As such, David reproduces heteronormativity through, literally, torturous means, highlighting the contortions required to maintain the heteronormative status quo, as well as white American identity.

Implied Narrative

Implied Narrative Claudia Smith (bio) The Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. Edited by Tara L. Masih. Rose Metal Press. http://www.rosemetalpress.com. 168 pages; paper, $15.95. The cover of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction resembles the old field guides from off my grandparents' bookshelves, with Audubon-looking pictures of natural things...covers that in my memory always seemed to be illustrations of birds. This field guide is no exception; the birds are there. Rose Metal Press, in providing a guide for students and teachers, is filling a void and breaking some new territory. It's an ambitious undertaking. Tara L. Masih's thorough introduction, at twenty-five pages, might at first seem rather long, but it sets the tone for the rest of the guide. There isn't anything, as far as I know, like this book out there yet, and so some sober discussion feels necessary. Masih's introduction traces the history of the short short, all the way to its present form, and provides the backbone of these essays. "What The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction attempts is to take this rather wild-running flash adolescent and settle it down a bit to get a better understanding of its past, present, and future," Masih writes. And that is just what this guide proceeds to do, in twenty-five short, accessible essays from writers in the field. All but the last essay, written by Ron Carlson, are followed by an example of the form and a writing exercise. Like a field guide, this book is browsable and accessible, as well as illuminating to the layman, the novice, the aspiring writer, the old teacher. Like two solid bookends, Pamela Painter's essay introduces, and Ron Carlson's concludes. Painter makes the case that writing exercises "can be as important to a writer as exercises are to an aspiring musician or singer" and argues that such exercises can be fruitful to novices and masters alike. Painter writes about her own experience with prompts, and [End Page 25] her realization that the only thing artificial about a prompt is the prompt itself. The essay informs the others, providing some insights into what these prompts are for, and how far reaching they can be. When I was a young student, I thought of published, professional writers as existing in some perfect, static place. They had done their exercises and were beyond me. Then I became one and realized just how messy we still get, how we constantly reach for our tools. Painter describes how spilled seltzer becomes the inspiration for a short. Then she presents her own draft—imperfect and in need of revision. This strikes me as a particularly good move on her part, as a teacher. Students reading will be reminded that writers continue to draft, to work, to revise, to evolve, no matter the age or experience. This isn't just a book about flash; it is also a teaching book. And as such, I think it's an effective one. As I responded to some of the exercises provided, I thought about just how idiosyncratic teaching and the process of writing can be. Some of my favorite essays were followed by prompts that turned into something wildly different for me. Sherrie Flick's call to write outside time's boundaries is followed by the wonderfully quirky exercise "Writing A Warped Encyclopedia Entry." The exercise is followed by her "Oklahoma Men," a short where Oklahoma men seem suspended in a magical, precise world of their own. I tried this exercise, and it rendered a story that veered away from the strange flat world of Oklahoma men to something more character driven. But it worked. As Painter recognizes, what emerges from these exercises becomes "organically your own." I did not attempt Lex Williford's exercise, which seems particularly suited to the classroom. Williford gets his fingertips inky and asks his students to generate their own inkblots. He bases his exercise on the Rorschach test; after searching for images in the blots, writers think about ten images, then...

<i>Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics Jack Skeffington (bio) Transpacific Imaginat ions: History, Literature, Counterpoetics. By Yunte Huang. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 202 pp. Cloth $35.00. Yunte Huang's Transpacific Imaginations makes much of Herman Melville's use of the phrase "the deadly space in between" (Huang even, at one point, used it as a working title). Differing from works that seek to track the migrations of a people from one shore to another, to drive traffic to underappreciated beachheads, or to correct imbalances in the flow of power, Transpacific Imaginations remains content to stay at sea, where it draws a Venn diagram of Pacific fantasies. Huang is interested above all in discourse and more specifically in where the discourses of those powers invested in the Pacific come into contact, and, at times, conflict. Many are happy to measure the waves as they crash ashore; Huang, by contrast, attends to those places many [End Page 100] leagues from shore where currents meet and mix with currents and winds press against unseen waves. Transpacific Imaginations remains at sea by charting a wide-ranging and eclectic selection of discourses—the resultant course visits Mark Twain's travel writing, Henry Adams's autobiographical omissions, Chinese historian Liang Qichao's explorations of America, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the graffiti left by immigrants laid over at Angel Island, Lawson Fusao Inada's internment camp poetry, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, and, in the conclusion, Araki Yasusada's hoax. This itinerary demonstrates the provisional nature of constructions like "the Pacific" but also indicates the depth of understanding an ethical reader must bring to bear on these constructions born of competition and conflict. Huang begins the first third of the book, "History," with a declaration of his intent to demonstrate that beyond being a contested, multinational space, the transpacific has become an ideological construct of such importance and such varied composition as to inherently undermine "all appropriative discourses that rely on the definitive formulas of 'the Pacific IS'" (12). Through Twain's business-boosting travelogue of his sightseeing tour to Hawaii, Huang uncovers the innumerable "intentional and unintentional misreadings" produced by any accounting of experience, and through what was not written into Adams's autobiography, he manages to find "the limits and pitfalls of America's transpacific vision, or, rather, double vision" (23), a vision that becomes a "double denial—of history and of historical worth" (24). China's transition from the Middle Kingdom to a nation among nations—experienced at the personal level as "a process described by Liang as one of change from a villager (xiangren) to a citizen (guoren) and then to a cosmopolitan (shijieren)"—is the background against which Liang's struggle with the new space of the Pacific, the question of the role of historians, and the art of poetry unfolds (42). The juxtaposition of these figures illustrates the undeniably fluid grounds on which any "history" of the Pacific must be futilely built. Having firmly established the contested and imaginary historical space of the Pacific in the first third of the book, in the second section, "Literature," Huang narrows his focus to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick . He explicitly breaks with traditional allegorical readings, which tend to view the work in terms of a series of binaries (good/evil, light/dark, etc.), and also with more recent criticism, which ties Melville closely to America's imperial expansion. Huang illustrates a resistance to industrial and imperial processes inherent in the novel by "looking at 'collection' as a central motif . . . and by studying the subversive poetics embedded in the antiquarian, anti-utilitarian mode [End Page 101] of collecting" that runs through Moby-Dick (53). Huang works through Benjamin to establish collecting as an essentially anticapitalist practice and suggests that Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, as a practice outside of the usual channels of production and use, establishes a counternarrative at the heart of a novel ostensibly about the triumph of an industry and America's Pacific expansion. In "Counterpoetics," the book's third, but not really final, section, "history is interrogated for its fictionality and fiction attempts to reclaim its historicity" (97). Calling attention to...

Sloth: The Besetting Sin of the Age?

Sloth: The Besetting Sin of the Age? Daniel McInerny (bio) In a review of J. F. Powers’s Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947), Evelyn Waugh observed: “Prince of Darkness” is a magnificent study of sloth—a sin which has not attracted much attention of late and which, perhaps, is the besetting sin of the age. Catholic novelists have dealt at length with lust, blasphemy, cruelty and greed—these provide obvious dramatic possibilities. We have been inclined to wink at sloth; even, in a world of go-getters, almost to praise it. An imaginative writer has advantages over the preacher and Mr. Powers exposes this almost forgotten, widely practiced, capital sin, in a way which brought an alarming whiff of brimstone to the nostrils of at least one reader.1 The deadly sin, or capital vice, of sloth—what the medievals called acedia—remains as obscure for us today as it did sixty years ago when Waugh penned this review. We usually don’t go further than the common association of sloth with laziness and procrastination, with the result that sloth does not seem to have much place in our hyperactive “world of go-getters.” Nonetheless, Waugh conjectures [End Page 38] that sloth is, not merely a deadly sin, or a pervasive sin, but the besetting sin of the age. This leads us to wonder about the true nature of this most elusive of capital vices, as well as the character of the present age, which, perhaps more now than sixty years ago, makes it so vulnerable to sloth. Waugh did not pursue these questions in his review of Powers’s book. He did return to the subject of sloth, however, some years later. In 1962, Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and member of the editorial board of the London Sunday Times, invited Waugh to contribute an essay to a Sunday Times series on the seven deadly sins.2 Joining the likes of Edith Sitwell, writing on pride, and W. H. Auden, writing on anger, Waugh contributed a marvelous essay on sloth. Still, it is not so much in this essay, which is very brief, but in Waugh’s novels that we find the argument for his claim that sloth is the besetting sin of the modern world. For one way to read the dramatic arc of his oeuvre is to see it as an extended reflection on the nature of sloth and the way in which the moral, political, and spiritual conditions of modernity make us particularly prone to it. To say this is to assume that we can find in Waugh’s novels a moral argument at all, as opposed to mere dramatic illustration. Do works of narrative fiction make arguments? Does not an inquiry into the nature of sloth and its relation to modernity better belong to revealed theology, philosophy, sociology, or some combination of the three?3 Works of narrative fiction do make arguments, not of course demonstratively, but in what we might call a dialectical mode. For the images that such works place before us are images that combine “poetical” form with philosophical or theological content. A successful plot places such complex images in conflict, setting up a dialectical debate that proceeds toward the story’s ultimate crisis, climax, and resolution. In constructing this debate the writer of fiction attempts to show the incoherence of one or more of the contending images, which is to say the incoherence of a given philosophical or theological outlook, espoused more or less reflectively by one or more of [End Page 39] the characters. At times, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, writers end their stories with this incoherence, leaving the reader to infer how what is defective in the thoughts and desires embodied by the characters and their situations might be made whole. At other times, as in Jane Austen’s Emma or in Waugh’s own Brideshead Revisited, writers present an image that emerges as a clear victor in the dialectic of the plot, thus showing how what is incoherent in the defective images is made coherent. In either case, the debate proceeds in and through images...

The Rainmaker’s Mistake

Reviewed by: The Rainmaker’s Mistake Kelly Baker Josephs (bio) Brodber, Erna. The Rainmaker’s Mistake. London: New Beacon, 2007. “If who know, nah talk, you haffi work it out child. You just haffi work it out” (59). Erna Brodber’s fourth work of fiction attempts to “work out” the question of present day black diasporic identity. The text offers readers a challenge that, in form and content, is simultaneously novel and not novel. In general, Brodber’s writings consider the importance of the past in shaping the present and the future of blacks in the Caribbean and North America. [End Page 938] Her new offering turns to fantasy, fairy tale, folk tale, and myth to creatively imagine a past for the New World present. It focuses more closely than her previous works (both fiction and non-fiction) on historical links between various populations of the African Brodber fans will first recognize the characteristic Errol Lloyd cover, with its layered and suggestive images that, like the text it bounds, can reveal new meanings upon successive viewings. The textual layers are evident in the beginning as readers encounter what seems to be an omniscient narrator only to find they have been “listening” to Queenie’s recounting of the creation myth/mystery that drives the novel. Queenie, whose interest in education and social science corresponds to Brodber’s other fictional heroines, carries most of the narration, but she is joined by other “I”—s six others, in fact—who, like Queenie, search for answers to their present with questions about their past. The Rainmaker’s Mistake begins in an unspecified time and place. Mr. Charlie, landowner, looks out on his “patent” and decides he needs labor. He plants his seed in the earth, raises yams from this planting, and cultivates these brown yams into brown people who are “young and old, big and small, male and female, brothers and sisters, children of one father dug from an everlasting underground source” (2). After Mr. Charlie’s planting is revealed as an oft-told tale within a tale, readers are introduced to the Eden-like existence of the people who believe they were once brown yams. Each time readers feel as though they have grasped the direction of Brodber’s storyline, or deciphered some meaningful historical or contemporary connection, a new voice or idea enters the narrative, unbalancing any appearance of stable metaphorical correlations. For example, early in the text Mr. Charlie announces from his verandah, “It is 1834: You are under six years old and you are free” (10). This first concrete evidence of time is comforting and the reference to freedom indicates that the “brown yams” are slaves on Mr. Charlie’s patent of land. The previous mentions of labor, naming, missing women, and new babies begin to fall into place as evidence of life on a plantation. With this clue, readers can now settle in with the innovative metaphor, reveling in the conflicts created by impending freedom and the appearance of a yellow yam baby, Sallywater, who has unusually soft and straight hair. But in the very next paragraph, Mr. Charlie reappears to announce, “It is 1838 . . . you are free” (11). Thus, just as it is offered to the reader, the gift of chronological certainty is revoked. But the reference to these specific years still indicates that the story is set in a West Indian British colony and that the relationship between Mr. Charlie and his “children” is one of master and slaves. However, as Queenie grapples with this idea of freedom “And what was this he was saying: ‘You are free’ and behaving so strangely because of this thing called ‘free’” (11)—one of her brothers, Woodville, laughs Mr. Charlie’s house off its base. The house disappears into the sky, leaving the former slaves (though this word is never used) to fend for themselves in a changing landscape. And readers are once again left with as much foundation as Mr. Charlie’s house. The ensuing neglect of the land causes the rivers to run and separate the land into three continents: Woodville on one, Sallywater and her “caretaker” I-Sis on another, and the rest in the middle. These...

Turning the Pages: Rereading Atwood’s Novels

DESCRIBING A BOOK AS A PAGE TURNER is often taken as an insult: a dismissal of the book on the grounds that its primary, and possibly only appeal is at the level of plot. But all fiction attempts to appeal to its readers, and those readers should be tempted to turn the pages. In the case of Margaret Atwood's fiction, however, readers are tempted to turn the pages both ways. Her fiction urges first-time readers forward, forward toward richly satisfying, if not entirely conclusive, moments of closure. But her fiction also demands readers to turn backwards, to turn the pages in the other direction as well: to go back to read again and reassess in light of the new insights they have gleaned as they have read forward. Think, for instance, of the difference between a reader's first encounter with Offred in The Handmaid's Tale and that same reader's return to the novel once s/he understands that Offred's story has been pieced together by the insidious Pieixoto. Similarly with each new addition to the oeuvre of this prolific author, while readers find themselves moving on to meet new fictional characters and landscapes, they also find themselves returning, turning back as it were, to earlier Atwood works in order to read those works through a new lens and with new insights. Take, for example, Blind Assassin, which, upon first reading, appears to be a character study of a woman's journey through life to age, occupying thereby a similar position to The Stone Angel in the oeuvre of Margaret Laurence or The Stone Diaries in that of Carol Shields. As readers reach the concluding pages, however, they recognize that the is one of the titular blind assassins;' as she confesses both her crime and the complex nature of her culpability This is a novel-length version of Robert Browning's My Last Duchess; a poem that becomes the focus of explication in Atwood's 2007 short story of the same name, where the central characters disagree to such an extent on the nature of the Duke's that it contributes to a growing distance in their relationship to one another (Moral Disorder, 63-95). In Margaret Atwood, A Critical Companion, I argue that Blind Assassin is the third of Atwood's villainess novels, the first two being The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. As such, it differs in kind from the old lady novels of Laurence and Atwood, and its protagonist more closely resembles Alice Munro's crafty Et, who confesses both her crime and exposes her cunning to the reader in Something I Have Been Meaning to Tell You:' Compared with these other heroines of the Canadian canon, The Blind Assassin's Iris scales greater heights of villainy (Cooke, 155), but also wins greater sympathy than the other villainess, Munro's Et. I suggest that, with more time and critical distance, Iris of The Blind Assassin will come to be compared at greater length with the villainesses of Roman and Greek antiquity The figure of Ismene in Sophocles' Antigone strikes me as one fruitful avenue of critical inquiry for future scholars (Cooke, 153-54). The recent stripping away of veils from Atwood's fictional villainesses has also invited us to recognize acts of violence in some of her earlier works. In this issue of English Studies in Canada, for example, Kiley Kapuscinski holds up to scrutiny both the national myth casting Canadians as pacifists, as nonviolent victims rather than victimizers, and the very binary structures upon which such meta-narratives are based: pacifism and violence, victim and victimizer, Canadian its seeming antithesis (as articulated in Surfacing at least), American. Kapuscinski locates violence in the acts of Atwood's female characters--the titular protagonists of the villainess novels, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin, and the antagonist of Cat's Eye--and ascribes to them the role of challenging myths of vulnerability and other narratives central to the Canadian imaginary:' The specific focus in Kapuscinski's article, however, is on the unnamed protagonist of Surfacing: on her growing awareness of her own complicity in acts of violence, on the inaccuracies of equating the Canadian imaginary only with pacifism, and on the surfacing more generally of her awareness that the binaries of victim and victimizer, Canadian and American, no longer hold. …

Naming the Bones: Bodies of Knowledge in Contemporary Fiction

Does fiction function as archive or as repertoire? Diana Taylor's distinction between these two modes of memory fails to fully explore fictional attempts to capture a repertoire of performance within the archival page, while Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Janet Frame's The Carpathians, and Jose Saramago's All the Names posit the novel as a site where repertoires of embodied knowledge can be captured within the literary archive, producing memory as a powerful presence by interring its mediated images within the silent page. A comparison of these novels suggests the richly paradoxical relationships among fiction, cultural performance, and memory.

Introduction: Children's Literature and Religion

Introduction:Children's Literature and Religion Naomi Wood (bio) Little round planet In a big universe Sometimes it looks blessed Sometimes it looks cursed Depends on what you look at obviously But even more it depends on the way that you see. —Bruce Cockburn Religion in children's literature functions as a mechanism of social ordering, of setting up hermeneutic categories with which to view the world. As such it is both ideological and imaginative: narratives are constructed to support an ideological understanding of the world and human behavior and also to reflect the categories of cosmic organization defined by the particular religion or worldview that informs them. At the same time, because religion determines the shape and texture of narratives, it can be seen as a source of all creative activity—the source of fiction-making itself. "In the beginning was the Word," the gospel of John tells us, and J.R.R. Tolkien affirms in his classic essay on fairy tales that "we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker" (145). The creative process rivals the authority and power of the gods and the cosmos, yet it also pays homage to them. Ever since the Puritans codified the doctrine that children, no less than adults, need to read the Bible and understand what it says, religion and religious issues have been part of children's literature. Indeed, it could be argued that children's literature as we know it here in the West grew out of the Puritan revolution. The effort to influence children's worldviews and psyches, to teach them what is considered essential to their well-being in this world or in the hereafter through appeals to their love of narrative and drama, has always characterized much if not all children's literature. In the nineteenth century, authors as disparate as Charlotte Yonge, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Kingsley, and George MacDonald all deployed story to innoculate readers with religious faith. By following the trials and triumphs of narrated children, readers might learn to "[draw] nearer to the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother" (Alcott 80). From the Romantic movement on, however, overt and even covert advocacy of religion (particularly Christianity) in secular children's literature has become increasingly suspect and subject to censorship. Even writers with strong religious convictions, such as Katherine Paterson or Madeleine L'Engle, write covertly about religious faith; reluctance to proselytize and awareness of a diverse readership may contribute to this reticence. At the same time, general societal interest in the world of the imagination, imaginative connections with the past, and spiritual exploration has, if anything, increased. Readers consume with equal avidity C. S. Lewis's translation of the Christian story into the Chronicles of Narnia, Philip Pullman's reaction against the thesis of Paradise Lost in his Dark Materials trilogy, and Sheri Tepper's ironic celebration of human ills in Plague of Angels. Such speculative fiction lets us explore the moral and theological questions that humans have posed for millennia, offering new mythologies to imagine old moral dilemmas. Many contemporary works of fiction for children also demonstrate the ways religious belief as expressed through folkways connects children with the past, their heritage, and thus their identity. Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm and Virginia Hamilton's Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl are just two examples. All of L'Engle's speculative fiction attempts to establish connections between scientific truth and spirituality: from A Wrinkle in Time onward, L'Engle reads science through the lens of spiritual understanding. Ten years ago Craig Werner and Frank Riga argued in their introduction to ChLAQ's previous theme issue on children's literature and religion that "religion is what provides the necessary mental and spiritual security to bring order out of the chaos that modern writers are concerned with" (2). This strong ordering mechanism, as the following essays will show, has its positive and negative aspects. That earlier issue on children's literature and religion featured contemporary...

Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story , and: Risen Sons: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of History (review)

Reviewed by: Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, and: Risen Sons: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of History William Burke Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer , eds. Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 1987. 152 pp. No price given. John F. Desmond . Risen Sons: Flannery O'Connor's Vision of History. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987. 135 pp. $18.00. Since Flannery O'Connor could surprise readers who expect a focus on the work and influence of Flannery O'Connor. That subject is literally at the edges of its concerns. This collection of fourteen essays contains four essays on O'Connor, two each bookending the volume. The first two treat O'Connor's "Geranium" and its reworking into "Judgement Day"; the last two discuss O'Connor's influence on the work of Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver, respectively. In between are essays on the work of a variety of contemporary writers, from Welty and Cheever to Doctorow and Ozick (twice), but nothing on, say, Phillips or Wolff. Presumably some principle guides the selection of writers included, but the only clear foundation is that of all of the writers spotlighted, O'Connor died first. Maybe that is enough. More surprising is the uneven quality of the essays. Several in this potluck offering are informative, fresh, and engagingly written—let me recommend the pieces on Donald Barthelme by Clarke Owens or the one on postmodern fiction by Lance Olsen—but several others seem to have escaped editorial review. The essay showing the development of the grotesque from O'Connor to Mason is at least one revision from publishable quality. The author does not define "grotesque" and applies the term uncritically to situations in Mason's fiction that are more easily read as conventional realism. Additionally, she attributes a "vigorous espousal of Christianity" to the grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," an astonishing judgment. The author even claims that a critic who has predicted the survival of the grotesque "as long as the South continues to evolve" now "proves his assertion with the publication" of a "collection of essays." Such lapses of judgment and logic should have been remedied, or what is an editor for? Barbara [End Page 247] Lonnquist, on the other hand, writes a compelling essay on the "powerful presence" of O'Connor in the fiction of Raymond Carver. In Carver's as in O'Connor's fiction, Lonnquist argues, meaning is disclosed in moments of epiphany, the dramatization of the "smallest gesture" that produces a "sense of simultaneous recognition and discovery." Here is not the anxiety but the efficacy of influence, Carver's secular accomplishment deepening in the light of his religious precursor even as his work adjusts our understanding of O'Connor. T. S. Eliot would approve. The two essays treating the maturing of "Geranium" into "Judgement Day" are professional and competent pieces. In a less obvious way, John Desmond's Risen Sons relegates O'Connor to the edges of its interest. The stated purpose of the study is to show that "O'Connor's historical sense and her artistic sense [are] inseparable within the creative act." For Desmond, her historical sense derives from "the Incarnation of Christ . . . the event in history which her fiction attempts to imitate." Her artistic technique is to effect this imitation through analogy: "an analogical view of reality is at the core of [her] vision and practice." After a labored chapter building the conceptual framework for his study, Desmond discusses the relation of framework to fiction. He writes an effective chapter on her early neglected work (those stories not included in her two collections), discusses the shortcomings of Wise Blood, and gives several of O'Connor's classic pieces a slightly different look. Mrs. Turpin's vision at the end of "Revelation," for example, displaces her from a private and privileged history to one within a "mystical community." Desmond argues further that O'Connor's career discloses a development of her historical vision through her mastery of analogy as a technique. "Geranium," for example, is inferior to "Judgement Day" because the former fails where the...

Comic Pastoral: Henry James's The Europeans

The Europeans was the first really successful "American" story that Henry James wrote. All his previous fictional attempts to capture the personality of Americans at home in their native land had been flawed in various ways. The plots of these earlier stories had been unconvincing or excessively melodramatic, the themes usually fanciful or absurdly morbid. A more fundamental fault was that James tended to see his American characters and their settings through the spectacles of British fiction.