Subject Of Fiction Research Articles

Esthetique du rire

Alain Vaillant prefaces this collective volume with an Introduction noting the vast interest scholars now devote to its subject, while insisting, perhaps temerariously, that ‘le rire est un’ (p. 11) and should be analysed in itself, not via its purpose. The ensuing thirteen contributions, concentrated almost exclusively on French literature, are arranged chronologically. Jean-René Valette treats a medieval corporeal humour that specifically underlines man's fallen nature, while Daniel Ménager considers a Renaissance grotesque seen as healthy in its main proponents (witness Boccaccio and Rabelais), though disturbing elsewhere (for example, in the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel). Within the seventeenth century, Dominique Bertrand argues that authors like Paul Scarron and Charles Sorel tend to substitute the all-embracing curative laughter of a Rabelais with an increasingly elitist humour of refinement, and Bruno Roche sees libertines like Cyrano cheerfully and fruitfully rehabilitating sex and the body. Christophe Martin describes how classical aesthetics is similarly undermined by the humour of badinage, traced from Marot through La Fontaine even up to Fontenelle, but which Voltaire and the Enlightenment ostensibly reject. Moving on to the First Republic, Antoine de Bæcque observes how the Revolution's oppressive solemnity was challenged by festivity and satire, as revealed particularly in the anti-Jacobin journalist Alphonse Martainville. The nineteenth century provides Matthieu Liouville with evidence of how ‘textes mineurs’ like Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose and Hugo's Chansons des rues et des bois gain literary significance by subverting established categories in a spirit of playfulness and laughter, a theme that Jean-Louis Cabanès parallels by handling ‘La Fantaisie et le grotesque’ and seeing how poets like Laforgue and Verlaine break canonical standards, their humour remaining, moreover, tainted with a negativity encapsulated in Paul Margueritte's fin-de-siècle pantomime Pierrot assassin de sa femme. Concentrating on the nineteenth century, Bertrand Tillier addresses the theme of caricature, construing its humour as similarly impure, even hostile and brutal (perhaps an exaggeration). Vaillant devotes his own chapter to irony, rejecting Bergson, theorizing his subject in depth, and exemplifying its literary application within the melancholic humour of, for example, Baudelaire and Flaubert, one that Mallarmé supplanted via a new trend of liberating postmodern irony. Three final chapters come bracketed under the rubric of ‘Le Rire démocratique’, the first comprising Jean-Marc Moura's attempt to define l'humour as contrast to le comique, which perennial riddle he resolves by seeing the latter as implying mockery, while the former is ambivalent and self-inclusive: more a rire avec than a rire de. Catherine Rouayrenc approaches carnivalesque themes in modern fiction, amply illustrated in such authors as Vian and Queneau, but resurrects the ‘rire tremblant’ (p. 354) that Vaillant esteems outdated. Hence, while she may describe an ‘édifice […] ébranlé’ of language, Moncelet in fine traces in modern linguistic games (la création verbaludique) a positive dysfunctionality richly exploited in literature and not inappropriate to pedagogy. Despite rare lapses, the editorial standards remain as high as the apparatus of each contributor is deep, although one regrets that the Baudelairean mantra of rire absolu is not examined more critically. Vaillant also supplies an ample and up-to-date bibliography to what is a thoroughly useful book.

A adaptação fílmica como procedimento de tradução intersemiótica: o caso "Budapeste"

Based on the semiotic theories of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, this article analyzes Walter Carvalho and Rita Buzzar’s film adaptation of the novel Budapeste , by Chico Buarque (2003). According to Peirce, a sign is anything that can take the place of something else in any situation — in this sense, in a representation context. If the sign is a representation device, we use it to make translation processes, that is, we put a sign in place of another sign so that we are able to relate to reality through language. An important issue, from this theoretical point of view, is to question how film adaptations, translations of translations, are related to literary texts. For the reading that we propose, from a semiotic perspective, we shall apply the most famous Peircean classes of signs (icon, index and symbol), considering their functionality, but we shall mainly use the icon category, because of its property of representing based on similarity relations between signs and their objects. The hypothesis we are considering initially is that, in both narratives in issue (the literary and the film one), the mirror metaphor, or the duplication metaphor, can be self-referential ones, taking part in a labyrinthine game of digressions and interruptions in the plot, which is an attempt to deconstruct the verisimilitude and so is also an icon of the fictional subject. In order to explore the analytical potential of the Peircean categories, we shall discuss the film adaptation as an intersemiotic process, trying to find out which interpretation of the novel is in the filmmaker’s reading, following the clues of this translation process and considering the implications of Peirce typology to a theoretical-critical appreciation of the film.

De la Révélation de Soi à L’auto-Compréhension : Assia Djebar , L’amour , la Fantasia et Nulle Part dans la Maison de Mon Père

A writer of fiction since the late 1950s, Assia Djebar began introducing autobiographical elements into her texts with her fifth novel, L’amour, la fantasia , (1985) published in English as Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade (1985). Fully aware that subjectivity in life and fiction are often considered transgressions in Algerian culture, the novelist responds to by implementing narrative strategies in the text that signal an original approach to autobiography -- fragmented autobiography, polyphonic discourse, and autofiction. Two decades later, Djebar offers her readers, Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (2007), a personal history that sheds further light on a life story that is both exemplary and unique. This text is crucial to our understanding of the novelist’s autobiographical project for several reasons. First, we can now view Djebar’s narrative unveiling as a two-stage process that began as a collective project but has resulted in the production of a singular life, a singular voice. Second, her previous focus upon unearthing occulted colonial history is now a personal quest, as she recovers, through memory, hidden personal history. Third, we see more clearly the ambiguous relationship between the young girl and the father who is alternately liberator and censor, a conflict that reflects, in part, the tension between the writer and the French language. Fourth, as we witness the unfolding of the autobiographical project, we become aware that Djebar, trained as a historian, is first and foremost a novelist, someone for whom the construction of a literary persona is a cornerstone of her craft, the blending of fact and fiction an important component of her writing. Finally, her approach to self-representation forces readers to consider two related questions that concern the Algerian writer’s work in particular and the realm of women’s autobiography in general: Does the autobiographical process heal the fragmented narrating self? Does it effectively challenge patriarchal structures and ideology or merely create nostalgia for a lost Eden in which women are jealous guardians of tradition?

Processual Passing: Ron Vawter PerformsPhiloktetes

Experimental dramaturge-director John Jesurun in 1994 devised a multi-media theatre adaptation of Sophocles' Philoctetes at the behest of the iconic American avant-garde actor Ron Vawter, who at the time was dying of AIDS. Feeding on classical Greek drama and Jesurun's own trademark ‘mediaturgies’ alike, this production presented its audience with a barren and alien landscape where communication is both problematic as well as the only possible means of salvation. More concretely, it featured Vawter in the lead role creating a troubling tension between the play's fictional theme of physical suffering and the ‘embodied liveness’ it highlighted through the HIV-induced purple Kaposi rash on the actor's naked body. At the same time Jesurun'sPhiloktetesis also a funeral play about a stricken warrior narrating his own demise from beyond the grave, a memento mori that unsettles its ancient predecessor by recycling the mythological story of Philoctetes the existential transgressor who refuses to either die or live as he rather opts physically to rot in the isolation of a deserted island. The production thereby deliberately dramatized the actual crossing of the border between life and death with Vawter's naked Philoktetes re-enacting and commenting the process of his passing – all while literally decaying before the eyes of the spectators. Arguably, therefore, when the stricken warrior of Jesurun's play hauntingly reminds us that “the body knows the answer” whereas we ourselves “don't know the question,” he opens up a panoply of problems with the potential to range far beyond mere descriptions of story, scene, or theme. If anything, the case of Vawter'sPhiloktetes-performance indeed indicates that drawing attention to the mediation behind the artistic creation, and particularly the physical embodiment of the actor performing it, highlights both the artificiality and – above all – the negotiability of the illusion, thereby intrinsically invalidating reductive readings.

Visão e viagem do Oriente na Lusitânia Transformada.

A journey to the East motivated vast and rich literature during the 16th century. However, if on one hand we wrote long descriptive pages of new places, people and customs, on the other literary texts often accentuated a dysphoric vision, pointing ambition and greed as motivations and corruption as a result of Portuguese maritime company. This vision lasted in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the publication of the Peregrinacao and the Historia Tragico-Maritima, by Bernardes Gomes de Brito, but not earned place as a theme in fiction novelistic during Mannerism and Baroque periods. The big exception is the Lusitânia Transformada (1607), by Fernao Alvares do Oriente. In this work we intend to show the vision of the East in this novel pastoral journey and the reasons for the absence of this theme in fiction till the second half of the 18th century.

Invisibility cloaking based on geometrical optics for visible light

Optical cloaking has been one of unattainable dreams and just a subject in fiction until recently. Several different approaches to cloaking have been proposed and demonstrated: stealth technology, active camouflage and transformation optics. The last one would be the most formal approach modifying electromagnetic field around an object to be cloaked with metamaterials. While cloaking based on transformation optics, though valid only at single frequency, is experimentally demonstrated in microwave region, its operation in visible spectrum is still distant from realisation mainly owing to difficulty in fabricating metamaterial structure whose elements are much smaller than wavelength of light. Here we show that achromatic optical cloaking in visible spectrum is possible with the mere principle based on geometrical optics. In combining a pair of polarising beam splitters and right-angled prisms, rays of light to be obstructed by an object can make a detour to an observer, while unobstructed rays go straight through two polarising beam splitters. What is observed eventually through the device is simply background image as if nothing exists in between.

Finding God(s) in Fantasylands: Religious Ideas in Fantasy Literature

The following paper analyzes how fantasy literature addresses the topic of religion. The discussion of the genre’s dependence on myths, supported by Mircea Eliade’s claims about the sacred and profane spheres of human life, offers an answer to the questions why religion is one of the most prominent themes in fantasy fiction. The analysis of a selected group of fantasy novels (the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, C. S. Lewis, Guy Gavriel Kay, Celia S. Friedman, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Philip Pullman, Dave Duncan, George R. R. Martin, and Brandon Sanderson) presents various ways in which a fantasy narrative may approach religious themes: by inventing secondary religions that enrich the imaginary realm, by reworking particular religious themes and turning them into an axis of the narrative, and by supporting, promoting, or criticizing a certain faith through the means of fantasy fiction.

Universal Salvation in a Universal Language? Trevor Steele’s Kaj staros tre alte

Abstract Extensive secularisation in Europe and several other parts of the world in recent decades has not diminished the attractiveness of Jesus as a theme in contemporary fiction internationally. Fictional biographies of him continue to appear in many languages. Among the novelists who have tapped their imaginations to fill in gaps in the canonical gospels and construct a Jesus who fits their own agenda is the Australian Trevor Steele. His work of 2006, Kaj staros tre alte, presents Jesus as essentially a supernaturally gifted healer but also as a teacher of universal brotherhood. Steele argues that the effectiveness of Jesus was severely limited by contemporary notions of Jewish apocalypticism and Messianism. Steele’s literary device for providing extra-biblical information about Jesus is a manuscript purportedly written by a Roman tax officer who was stationed in Caesarea approximately a decade after the Crucifixion. Discovered in 2001, this Greek text forms the fictional basis of Kaj staros tre alte.

“A Tale of New Mr. Braggadocio”: Narrative Subjectivity and Brain Electricity in Late Qing Science Fiction

“A Tale of New Mr. Braggadocio”: Narrative Subjectivity and Brain Electricity in Late Qing Science Fiction

Belief in Zamyatin’s we and Tarkovsky’s Stalker: Critique Versus Legitimation of Utopia Through Art

The paper offers a comparative analyses of a novel and a film with a science fiction theme, but instead of interpreting the theme, the analysis interprets the structure of the two works. The claim is made that the narrative structure of a work (which, according to the Structuralist model, is much more encompassing than the linear narrative) is implicated in the construction of belief and value. On analysis, the value constructed in Zamyatin’s novel is that of a heterogeneous Modernist subject of the unconscious, while Tarkovsky’s film is ambivalent but could be read as a pseudo-scientific utopia of sectarian ‘pure belief’.

Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption (review)

Reviewed by: Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption Clive Edwards (bio) Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption. By Peter Betjemann. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. ix+267. $35. This examination of craft in literature will be of genuine interest to readers of Technology and Culture. It examines the language of craft, labor, work, and making in the period 1840–1920. The author argues that in this period there was an interweaving of textual products with actual crafted products as well as with their processes of making and the makers themselves. Peter Betjemann posits that craft as a written phenomenon ensured that texts were the most visible artisanal medium in the period. In other words, we need to think and read about the idea of craft, skill, and workmanship as both textual and artifactual. Betjemann extends the meaning of craft by showing how it has been variously manifest as material artifact, moral principle, expression, value system, stylistic label or grammar, fictional subject, authorial practice, technical lexicon, and theoretical discourse. Using the backdrop of increasing industrialization and the apparent craft reaction to “the machine,” Betjemann skilfully studies artisanal works through literary analysis. The first chapter considers the nineteenth-century translations of the autobiography of renowned Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini. For many in the nineteenth century, including translators, connoisseurs, writers, musicians, and, not least, metalworkers, Cellini was a model of the charismatic and “vital” artisan persona that offered an alternative to the slavish and repetitive machine culture. There is little technical discussion in the autobiography, but Betjemann shows that there are many links to the idea of “being in and of the world” as well as invocations of the “hand of the maker” in the text. Cellini thus represented the full life of human labor as opposed to the tedium of the machine-minder. Betjemann’s analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional works highlights Hawthorne’s questioning of handiwork as a metaphysical ideal. Hawthorne tried to protect the materiality of craft from impractical “art is life” utopian dreaming. At the same time, anxiety about the fate of the artisan within industrial culture was central to his writing about craft. [End Page 932] This same anxiety, expressed in a different way, is found in the next chapter. Betjemann argues that John Ruskin and other Gothic revivalists were more interested in how objects communicate ideas than in the details of technical production. Skill was seen as something legible in craft outputs rather than as the source of production, thus serving as a kind of supra-commodity. Sensibility, rather than physical practice, was the goal of the Gothic revivalists—a conjunction of making and intuition about making. This distinction between making and thinking about making is developed by a consideration of Thorstein Veblen’s The Instinct of Workmanship (1914). In his discussion of craft, industry, and skill, Veblen makes valuable distinctions between the instinctive nature of workmanship compared to the bodily accomplishments of craftsmanship. The fourth chapter looks at Gustav Stickley and the meaning of craftsmanship in reference to artisans’ ability to meet the needs of American identity, which demanded “the real thing.” He saw the craftsman as a “translator” who begins with an idea, then uses natural materials to achieve simple but thoughtful objects. Stickley’s The Craftsman magazine and his furniture company literally linked words and things. The fifth chapter returns to the literary vein, considering Henry James’s 1897 novel The Spoils of Poynton, again focusing on the relations of words and things. In particular, the connections between writing and other crafts are made clear. As machines were capable of close imitation and reproduction, it was the role of craft to provide expressive narrative and sensibility. The idea of craft extended beyond the workshop (i.e., beyond the reproducible by machine), so its effectiveness is found in our reading of objects and the process of “talking shop,” both of which give voice to crafted things. Clive Edwards Clive Edwards is professor of design history at Loughborough University, UK. Copyright © 2012 The Society for the History of Technology

Of Dignity and Ridicule: Virility from Mosca to Muffat

In an era (ours) in which the (current) symbol of male potency may be found in small blue pills, one can rightly muse about the line between maintaining dignity and risking ridicule in the domain of male virility. In order to so muse, I propose to look briefly at constructions of masculinity and virility in several figurations of the troisième âge in nineteenth-century French fiction. I suggest that just as our contemporary trope of virility has taken on particular modes of expression and risks of ridicule, the desiring impulsion that both makes and undermines male virility and dignity is a subject in nineteenth century French fiction that has been taken as a given rather than problematized fully. Focusing on two characters among many likely examples—the count Mosca from Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), and the count Muffat from Zola's Nana —, I consider briefly how these figurations crisscross the fine line between dignity and ridicule, and to what narrative ends.

The Rebirth of the Musical Author in Recent Fiction Written in English

In his 2005 monograph on The Author, Andrew Bennett reflects on how “authorship is central to the way in which critical practice is currently conceptualized and theorized”. The rebirth of the author in contemporary criticism is being accompanied by a renewed fascination with the figure of the author as the subject of recent fiction. This can be seen reflected in current portrayals of real and fictional writers such as Henry James, in David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004), or Olive Wellwood, in A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009). Moreover, the recovery of the author can be traced as well in the context of the emergence of music as a fertile referent for interartistic narratives. In terms of the dialogue between contemporary fiction and music, there seems to be a common interest in the image of the author, both in the act of creation, as a composer, and of re-creation, as a performer. Works such as Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes (1997), Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (1999), Conrad Williams’ The Concert Pianist (2006), or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009) favour the author-musician’s perspective as they interact with music in different ways. In light of this, the aim of this article is to explore the process of rebirth of the musical author in recent fiction written in English, analysing this trend as part of a more general tendency to recover the author’s presence and voice in both fiction and criticism.

Muriel Spark: Some Biographical Sources of Satire

It is a truism that serious fiction is not necessarily fantasy, but is often grounded in the reality of the author's life. However, many fictional characters, plots, philosophical themes, and descriptions of places and events have their source in unconscious determinants linked with the author's experience. I include fiction that employs satire, even though satire seems to be directed to certain character types as well as institutions, customs, and beliefs worthy of ridicule. Consequently, personal elements in the writer's background may not be obvious. For this reason I have chosen the novels and short stories of the late Muriel Spark, for several decades one of the most widely read and admired satirists in her native Britain and the United States. Using a broadly defined psychoanalytic framework, including references to Object Relations theory, I have examined the following determinants of Spark's fiction: familial, religious, interpersonal, psychosexual, and psychosis-induced experiences. The emotional sub-stratum of Spark's satire is anger, the apparent analogue of her feelings toward the real people in her life. By generalizing these feelings, often bitter and resentful, Spark has given her readers a view of the human race that is deeply pessimistic, written in a style that is concise and oddly amusing, with occasional overtones of supernatural forces at work.

Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (review)

Reviewed by: Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley Melissa E. Sanchez (bio) Mario DiGangi . Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 296. $65.00. In his smart and innovative new book, Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley, Mario DiGangi expands the boundaries of the history of sexuality even as he shows how that history is intricately connected to social and political history. DiGangi defines the "sexual type" as a figure who reveals the ideological tensions inherent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of character in its social, psychological, and literary registers. On the one hand, the sexual type is an easily recognizable figure (one might even say caricature) of deviant or deformed expressions of gendered or erotic identity. On the other hand, the sexual type participates substantially in familiar and normative social relations and thereby exposes the tenuous and fictional nature of the boundaries between perversity and normality, outsiders and insiders. Moreover, the sexual type is not just "sexual" in a narrow sense. ather, representations of the sexual type reveal the intricate connections between gender and sexual identity and social, economic, and political ideals and loyalties. Focusing on six sexual types—the sodomite, the tribade, the narcissistic courtier, the bawd, the citizen wife, and the monstrous favorite—DiGangi shows how "signifiers of gender and (more subtly) of sexuality serve to convey arguments about political loyalty, military ethics, and aristocratic comportment" (3). The sexual is not merely a metaphor for sociopolitical anxieties but a symptom of the contradictions that informed early modern attempts to align various forms of agency and embodiment into stable and recognizable categories. Accordingly, the types that DiGangi analyzes "unsettle the taxonomical thinking that produces them" (9). DiGangi's study of sexual types also promises to unsettle several modern scholarly taxonomies. For while his project is clearly informed by work in queer studies, DiGangi challenges many of the implicit boundaries that tend to shape scholarship in that field. Most prominently, rather than focus exclusively on early modern representations of same-sex eroticism, Sexual Types includes figures of indeterminate (or "bi-") sexuality (the narcissistic courtier, the monstrous favorite) and figures that fit modern definitions of "heterosexuality" (the citizen wife, the bawd) as well as those that appear to conform to the modern definition of "homosexuality" (the sodomite, the tribade). By examining a range of gendered and sexual behaviors, DiGangi reminds us of the power of early modern studies to destabilize both past and present identitarian categories of male and female, homo- and heterosexual. In addition, Sexual Types gracefully combines formalist, historicist, feminist, and queer methods of reading. By showing how sexual taxonomies are inseparable from social, economic, and political ideologies, [End Page 247] DiGangi reveals the importance of private, affective, embodied experience to these public structures of identification. Finally, DiGangi examines a wide range of early modern writing. In addition to a number of plays by Shakespeare, Sexual Types includes careful analysis of less commonly read work by Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, Massinger, Killigrew, and Shirley. These plays are, moreover, set in conversation with legal tracts, political pamphlets, crime narratives, character studies, travel writing, and medical texts. The effect is quietly to remind us of the artificiality of both modern hierarchies of literary value and modern distinctions between aesthetic and sociopolitical realms of thought. Sexual Types is divided into three parts, each of which examines a pair of types, one male and one female, that foregrounds a particular set of ideological issues. Part 1 includes chapters on representations of the sodomite and the tribade in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Winter's Tale, each of which unsettles categories of masculinity and femininity, perversity and familiarity. In chapter one, DiGangi argues that the sodomite should be conceived as neither an alien figure (as Alan Bray and Paul Hammond have argued) nor as a purely fictional subject constructed through discourse (as Gregory Bredbeck and Jonathan Goldberg would have it), nor yet as a familiar figure with whom playgoers might pleasurably identify (as in Bruce Smith's and Mary Bly's accounts...

Ideas in Science Fiction: Probing Contemporary Contexts through Science Fiction Texts

This paper is based on an action research done in an undergraduate class on science fiction. The course, SKBS 2193 Science as Narrative, is part of the BA Literature in English programme at the National University of Malaysia. The objectives of the course are to develop students’ communication and critical thinking skills through discussions of different themes within science fiction and to train students to be critical and perceptive to the connection between science fiction and real life issues. This paper demonstrates how studying science fiction helps students become creative and critical thinkers. This is achieved by probing the texts and connecting them to current themes and issues especially those relating to the future of mankind. We also show how the course helps students carry out group projects with outputs in the form of multimedia productions that relate science fiction themes to contemporary issues.

In Search of Justice: Political Commitment, Trauma, and Memory in Post-World War II French Literature

In post-World War II France, literature was the medium that could aid in an emergence from the terror of the world surrounding them. For some, the task of literature was to serve as the vehicle to reflect to the reader his own complicity in the legitimization of violence and terror and prompt him to make a choice: to change his behavior or to become an accomplice of the executioner. However, for others, a literature committed to such a task might only serve to continue to make both reader and writer complicit with terror. For others still, literature would serve as the way to give a voice to those who had lost theirs in the violence of the war and, possibly provide them with sort of justice.In the first part of this project, I explore the concept of 'committed literature', literature with politics as its subject and its task. I examine three of the main figures in the debate on committed literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, and Albert Camus and discuss their reasons for advocating for and against such a notion. Jean-Paul Sartre claims that it is the writer’s responsibility to situate his work in the political. An ‘uncommitted writer’, for Sartre, is irresponsible and guilty of not only ignorance but also complicity.In the second part of this project, I then turn to literature which takes the Holocaust as its subject. Is the same responsibility appointed to Sartre’s committed author present in Holocaust literature? Or is it irresponsible to use an event that is so exception, violent, and painful as the subject of fiction? Furthermore, is it irresponsible for somebody who is not himself a victim of the concentration camps to use the Holocaust as his subject? I first consider some of the theoretical debates surrounding Holocaust literature and then examine the way that two strikingly different novels, Michel Tournier’s The Ogre and Georges Perec’s Wou Le Souvenir d’Enfance, approach the subject of the Holocaust.

An Alien Nation

One major theme in recent Anglophone Indian science fiction is the specter of an alienated postcolonial subject caught in the flux of historical eddies. Such subjects are torn by the forces of a rapid industrial progress, caught in the lure of immigrating to the first world and by the traps of traditional Indian values, resulting in severe anxiety and multilevel alienation. Vandana Singh uses science fictional strategies to make the reader confront these estrangements from a different perspective that is less constrained than realistic narrative. Singh's narratives also seek alternatives to such alienated existences through radical estrangements of normal space and time, probably suggesting that only a radical shift in social consciousness can engender a hope for dis-alienation of these marginalized subjects.

Visions of Tribulation: White Gaze and Black Spectacle in Richard Wright’s Native Son and The Outsider

While filmic readings of Native Son have long been a part of Richard Wright criticism, scholars have not yet fully considered way Wright s cinematic construction redefines his protagonist's subjectivity. Moreover, little has been written regarding subtle ways in which filmic tendencies inform Wright's technique in The Outsider. Wright relies on visual techniques and Hollywood studio tropes in creation of his male protagonists, accomplishing in prose what filmmakers accomplish in celluloid. In both texts, Wright anticipates power of to shape behavior, attitudes, and even sense of self. This narrative technique allows Wright to control way readers see his main characters and, by implication, how these characters see themselves. Reading novels in context of Wright's filmic understanding of power of observation and expectation allows us to move away from established interpretations focusing on castrating nature of Wright's female characters, and to foreground what I suggest is a more nuanced male sexuality in Native Son's Bigger Thomas and The Outsider's Cross Damon than has previously been considered. (1) I focus on filmic formulation of text itself that illuminates Wright's treatment of women; in both Native Son and The Outsider, Wright overtly constructs women's bodies in terms of gaze, and this pattern of filmic portrayal carries implications for all of Wright's characters, male and female, black and white. In both novels, Wright offers a complex interpretation of gaze in which desire and its role in identity, subjectivity, and agency compel his protagonists to action. The desires, and thus agency of Bigger and Damon are limited by a gaze that keeps them subjectified; panopticism of dominant culture situates them as objects, not agents; observed, not observers; passive, not active. I am interested in extending conversation regarding cinema and Wright's fiction in two ways. First, rather than merely examining film as a subject in Wright's fiction, I delineate ways in which Wright's representation of visual within these novels maps to specific cinematic techniques. Second, I wish to broaden discussion of Wright's use of film to include The Outsider, which has been treated almost singularly as a product of influence of French existentialism and Marxist politics. I argue that film is more important as a narrative technique than as a source of social commentary and control in Native Son: Wrights construction of gender and subjectivity is inextricably bound with cinematic notions of spectacle and desire. This interpretation complicates existing readings of Wright's treatment of gender; in particular, it complicates how we read Bigger's masculinity and his response to women. But this reading of Native Son is not merely an end in itself. It is also a means of interrogating writing strategy of The Outsider, in which explicit cinematic references may at first gloss seem inconsequential, a shadow of their presence in Native Son. However, if one continues to understand Wright's use of film as narrative technique rather than as narrative subject, and considers also Wright's well-documented experience with Hollywood in 1940s, filmic presence in The Outsider is as fundamental to text as it has long been considered such in Native Son. Wright's construction of Cross Damon, in particular way he imagines desire--both his own and others' for him--is an extension of cinematic style of Native Son. I will begin by examining film's influence on Wright's narrative technique in Native Son, unpacking writing strategies that are vital in offering a new reading of The Outsider. Cinematic spectacle, represented most notably in Native Son with Mary Dalton, and eventually, with Bigger himself, is replaced in The Outsider with Wright's notion of the outsider, which, while argued by both Cross Damon and his pursuer, Ely Houston, as being a mental state rather than a physical characteristic, is repeatedly marked through physical difference. …

Sex, Rocks, And Taxidermy: A Conversation With Chris Offutt

I first met Chris Offutt outside the fabled Foxhead bar on Iowa City's east side. What I had heard about Chris Offutt was that he graduated from the Workshop during the fabled Conroy days when Frank Conroy ruled the Workshop with painstaking intensity and tough love and that he wrote about hunting. I had shot a pigeon with a BB gun at age twelve, from the second-story window of my frienďs brownstone in the Bronx, an experience that continues to plague me with guilt. Chris was standing outside, surrounded by a cabal of other writers, all dressed in their tackle-shop flannels and worn leather boots, their plumes of cigarette smoke gathering in the glow of the bar's single neon. You're a poet, right? Chris said. I'm on the fiction side, actually. Really? he asked. 117 Was there something about the way I was dressed that made the fact that I was a fiction writer so unconvincing? The other writers ashed their cigarettes and looked at their feet. Well, Chris said, tossing his cigarette, good to meet you, man. He went back into the bar, and I went home. Our next meeting was in a seminar taught by Charles D'Ambrosio. Chris had come as a guest speaker on the subject of fiction versus nonfiction. The nonfiction piece of his we were assigned was Porn Bought My Football. I had not read it.