Frank Kermode Research Articles

The Shape of Things to Come: Toward an Eschatology of Literature

Elie Wiesel, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has characterized the twentieth century as a century in desperate need of What began in a spirit of optimism brought on by economic prosperity, technological advances, peace, and good will ended with death camps, bombs, and, for many, a of despair. When look around the world, writes Wiesel in one of many books on the Holocaust, I see nothing but hopelessness (qtd. in Schuster and Boschert-Kimmig 63). Andrew Delbanco, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, sees a crisis of as the defining feature of postmodernism. In his book The ReaIAmerican Dream: A Meditation on Hope, Delbanco contends that has lost faith in any transcendent vision of the future, whether it be commitment to the Christian God, with its communal ethic of loving one's neighbor, or commitment to citizenship in a sacred nation. we have gotten very good at deconstructing old stories, Delbanco worries, when it comes to telling new ones, we are blocked (106). In today's consumer instant gratification is the hallmark of the good (96), and hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone (103). Though Delbanco does not write from a Christian viewpoint, his insights are pertinent to my purpose here, which is to present a perspective on story that is grounded in Christian eschatology, appropriately defined by German theologian Jorgen Moltmann as a of hope. According to Moltmann, it is that maintains and upholds faith and keeps it moving on, if it is that draws the believer into the life of love, then it will also be that is the mobilizing and driving force of faith's thinking, of its knowledge of, and reflections on, human nature, history, and society (Theology of Hope 33). Commenting on this passage, Oxford theologian Alister McGrath observes: It is therefore imperative that Christianity rediscovers [sic] its eschatology and realizes [sic] its enormous importance to a world which is longing for hope, and seeking outside the Christian tradition. Only by rediscovering its own theology of can the [C]hurch to gain a hearing in a secular culture (Christian Theology 565). Could this be true in literary studies as well? By defining and making central a Christian theology of that pertains to the study of literature, might Christian scholars offer something hopeful to those who have lost faith in the meaningfulness and value of literature? In the pages that want to consider an approach to literature that foregrounds Christian eschatology, an approach that does not follow [...] after the Zeitgeist and bear [...] its train, as Moltmann says, but carries a torch before it, enkindling and enabling (Experiment Hope 46). Connections between eschatology and literature have been the focus of several studies, including two recent books by Paul Fiddes: Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine and The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature. Fiddes analyzes modern and postmodern theorists Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur to enrich the emerging dialogue between theology and literature. What these theorists have in common, according to Fiddes, is a growing awareness that all narrative is to some degree eschatological (Promised End 5). To approach a literary text eschatologically means to consider whether and to what extent the narrative organizes the whole (Kermode); expresses a desired world (Frye); disperses, defers, or unravels meaning (Derrida); or opens up (Ricoeur) (Promised End 55). The endings of humanly created stories may or may not have anything in common with the promised ending of the Christian story. Obviously many stories today deal more with despair than While postmodern theory emphasizes indeterminacy and openness, Christian eschatology offers varying degrees of openness and closure, but in either case provides a coherent and hopeful sense of an ending. …

The Matrix of Ancient Judaism

The Matrix of Ancient Judaism Yaron Z. Eliav Seth Schwartz . Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001, xi + 320 pp. Seth Schwartz's Imperialism and Jewish Society offers a fresh look at the various factors—political, social, and religious—that shaped Judaism in the Greco-Roman and subsequent early Byzantine worlds. Although the book centers on history rather than literature, it holds far-reaching implications for any study of ancient Jewish texts (and art). Literary production does not operate in a vacuum: the historical context in which ancient authors created their texts is critical for the modern scholar's understanding of these writings. A story exhibiting the Rabbis as community leaders, for example, the likes of which are found throughout talmudic and midrashic literature, would be read differently if one believes that the protagonists in fact held such roles or if they were struggling with only limited success to achieve leadership. Schwartz's book, therefore, is essential for modern readers of ancient Jewish literature. As Frank Kermode has taught, the interaction between literature and its historical contexts is a subject calling for subtlety and caution.1 Indeed, much of Schwartz's discussion deals with what can and cannot be extracted from literary sources about how ancient people lived, organized their societies, and shaped their religious and cultural landscapes. In doing so, he himself becomes a particular reader of texts, utilizing tools from the literary disciplines in his historical analysis of the sources. Among its many assets, Schwartz's book is important both for its claims regarding the historical context of Second Temple and late antique Jewish literature and for the methodologies and strategies that inform his own reading. In the twentieth century, historians of the ancient world operated on two tracks: one, fastidious in its attention to detail and restricted in its focus (its critics [End Page 116] rate it as anywhere from deathly dull to entirely expendable); and the other, general and widely embracing the full historical spectrum. Advocates of the first believe that the whole contains only what its constituent elements impart to it. Historians writing in this mode fasten their attention to sources and submerge themselves in minute details—deciphering them, teasing out information, cross-checking them, identifying and resolving contradictions. Only then do they attempt to integrate these details into a broader picture. Menachem Stern's Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism represents a classic product of this school.2 The second approach seeks to illuminate a more expansive and complete picture of the past, in which the whole imbues the details with significance. The ultimate objective of these works lies not in a particular source or subject, but rather in a comprehensive reconstruction of the past, drawing on many sources. Schwartz's book fits solidly into this latter model, as he himself states: "[H]ypotheses about the society that produced the artifacts must necessarily accompany the interpretation, and the evidence as a whole must be used to construct these hypotheses. Thus it seems worthwhile to get a sense of the entire system before, or while, examining its parts" (1; emphasis added).3 The mast around which Schwartz has rigged his sails, if for the most part loosely, is the relation between imperial power—Persian, Greek-Hellenistic, Roman, and finally Byzantine—and Jewish society. He is particularly interested in the influence that imperial recognition of the Jews had on the crystallization of Jewish society, its character, and its identity. He fills his sails with a good measure of claims and diagnoses about Jewish experience in the ancient world, the forces that acted within that civilization, and the trends that set its direction. From these, he produces a new story of the Jewish people's history in the thousand years between the Hellenistic conquest and the rise of Islam. The story that Schwartz tells in Imperialism and Jewish Society is one of collapse and revival. In a sense, Schwartz operates within the traditional historiographic model that portrays the first century C.E. and the beginning of the second century C.E. as a great divide in Jewish history: the failure of...

Back to the Future

Back to the Future David Alderson University of Manchester The Reification of “Theory” The demise of “theory” has been variously predicted, willed, resisted and repudiated since the start of its career.f In the early days of that career, reactions against it were often conservative, so that it became a badge of one’ s progressivism to be a principled supporter of it, even if only because of a general democratic belief in the importance of debate. Despite his disagreements with structuralism, Raymond Williams supported Colin McCabe in the Cambridge debacle of the early eighties, as did Frank Kermode. (Both Kermode and Williams developed complex relations to theory as it came to be known and practiced, though for different reasons.) The radical credentials of theory were considerably bolstered by Terry Eagleton’ s own Literary Theory (1983), a text which has been crucial in the establishment and dissemination of a certain canon oftheory to more than one generation of undergraduate students. Doubtless, the mere fact that Eagleton, as a Marxist, was on the side of theory also contributed to the perception of its inherent subversiveness. Today, in the u.s., the language and values of theory have become identified with those of the left to the t This review article examines Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (Cambridge MA: Basic Books, 2003, 231 pp.). ESC 30.4 (December 2004): 167-187 David Alderson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Terry Eagleton (Palgrave, 2004) and Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness, and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Manchester UP, 1998), and the co-editor of Territories ofDesire in Contemporary Queer Culture (Manchester UP, 2000). extent that an attack on the former appears by definition to be an attack on the latter, though the reality of this situation is cast in partial doubt by one of the most forthright critics of the politicized academy: “the real battle that is now shaping up is not between radicals and conservatives but between radicals and old-style liberals. Or perhaps one should now say that the classical liberal position—which fought for ideals of quality, disinterested scholarship, and for advancement according to merit, not adherence to a given political line—is now castigated as conservative and reactionary” (Kimball 229). Clearly, for Kimball, the current conjuncture represents a change in understanding of what constitutes reaction. His truck is with a real or perceived relativism which is nonetheless hitched to an expressed desire to undermine dominant political, institutional and ideological arrangements. This seems to me accurately to capture the gen­ eral ideological complexion ofwhat appears to have been a determined and highly organised backlash against theory in the u.s., one which, as Ellen Messer-Davidow has demonstrated, has been highly successful in denying funding to theory-led projects, especially those perceived (consequently) to be left-wing (193-233)- In this context, any challenge to theory may be perceived as part of a more general reactionary agenda, and indeed, informally, I have heard responses to Eagleton’s After Theory along pre­ cisely these lines. This is no doubt because, superficially, Eagleton appears to share certain preoccupations with the Kimballites, since attempts to rehabilitate ideals of truth, objectivity, virtue and morality and to return to foundational thought, tend to be considered self-evidently the province of the political right these days. But here we touch on a paradox, since Eagleton, who has maintained a principled commitment to Marxism through a period when many fell offthat academic bandwagon with greater or lesser degrees of dignity, has begun to sound merely old-fashioned. In part Eagleton’ s own argument helps to illuminate why this should be, since that paradox is generated by theory’s complicity with modernity. What I mean by this is illustrated in part by Eagleton’s dismissive opening discussion of cultural theory’ s concern with the body. The parodic qualities of his account do Eagleton few favours, and are likely to be unconvincing to those who have found the work to which he alludes compelling, but his general point is, as usual, a dialectical one which recognizes that such apparently dissenting work is mostly in keeping with our desublimated times. To...

Myth Launchings and Moon Landings: Parallel Realities in Susan Power's The Grass Dancer

Myth Launchings and Moon Landings:Parallel Realities in Susan Power's The Grass Dancer Lee Schweninger (bio) In her novel The Grass Dancer (1994), Dakota writer Susan Power describes the United States' scientific and technological advances in the context of the lives of the members of several families on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. She juxtaposes the 1969 moon landing reported on television, for example, with the traditional preparation of corn soup as Margaret Many Wounds lies on her deathbed. Through such juxtapositions, Power reexamines and questions the significance of the technological revolution, showing that her characters derive their worldviews as much (or perhaps more) from ancestral histories and ideologies, from non-mainstream beliefs, as from post-World War II technologies such as lunar modules and televisions. Power offers the reader new ways of understanding the place of mainstream Western technology and Western epistemologies, and her characters also suggest alternative ways of perceiving reality. The author thus calls into question Western or mainstream conceptions and understandings of what constitutes reality, and she thereby problematizes the typical boundaries of realistic fiction. Like the character Pumpkin, the mainstream reader may well "have to put aside one worldview—perhaps only temporarily—to take up another."1 Although Pumpkin identifies one worldview with what she calls "the Indian community," I intend no such generalization. Mainstream readers in my context here may well be Native American just as some non-Native readers may be fully enculturated into the specific Dakotan culture Power describes. In this particular context, I argue that the author's challenge is to demonstrate to an uninitiated or mainstream reader the power and presence [End Page 47] of an alternative reality. This essay suggests the ways Power does indeed make evident the possibility of such realities. William Cronon epitomizes the typically-privileged, mainstream view of what constitutes realism when he argues that "stories cannot contravene known facts about the past;" he maintains that "the biological and geological processes of the earth set fundamental limits to what constitutes a plausible narrative."2 Arnold Krupat has challenged Cronon's ethnocentric worldview, writing in Red Matters, for instance, that "both mythical and historical stories are true. [. . .] History is public knowledge of the past [. . .] public in the sense of being culturally shared;" Krupat also writes that we need to "abandon the ethnocentric insistence that there can be no history without fact, accuracy, and scientific rationality."3 In his essay "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Hayden White concludes that historians have "a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can be only imaginary."4 White argues that story or narrative actually shapes reality and that, therefore, one cannot attain any objective truth through narrative. Whereas Cronon and White are writing about history and historical narrative specifically, Catherine Rainwater suggests that considerations of historical narrative are equally applicable to literature. Both are forms of storytelling. In one specific context, for example, Rainwater suggests that the "Pueblo-Navajo cosmological material may be judged 'true' or 'mythical-imaginary' depending on the reader's epistemological screen."5 There are, to be sure, significant differences between history and literature, but it remains important to examine the ways in which both forms of storytelling manipulate or organize the facts. In order to maintain the illusion of reality and the verifiable, realistic fiction must observe Cronon's "known facts" of the physical world typically accepted by the reading community. Like history, realistic fiction presumably must deliver a faithful representation of life; it must adhere to what its readers deem the actual and verifiable. In the nineteenth century this notion of realism was expressed by such writers as William Dean Howells, for example, who maintained that fiction should be "true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life [End Page 48] of actual men and women"6 In a brief introduction to theory, Hoffman and Murphy paraphrase Frank Kermode, writing that as fiction "has moved away from the realistic presentation of the nineteenth century, it has attempted more and more radically to represent how reality is perceived and experienced."7 In the...

“Is This the Promised End?”: Witness in King Lear and Apocalyptic Poetry of the Twentieth Century

Is This the Promised End?” Witness in Kin^Lear md Apocalyptic Poetry of the Twentieth Century Jacqueline Kolosov T E X A S T E C H U N I V E R S I T Y Before the descent into Kiti0 Leary let me focus the direction which this paperwilltake:afterdwellingupontheplayas“animageofthathorror” (5.3.264),IwanttoconsidertheideaofwitnessingtheunthinkableinI^ar andinpoetrythatrespondstotheapocalypticdimensionsofthetwentieth century;despiteaseparationofcenturies,theworldsoftheplayandofthe poemsimaginelatehours;imagineworldsinwhichsufferingoccursbut doesnotbringredemption.Forcedtomeettheabyssheadon,thesetexts implicitlystresstheideaofwitnessas(perhaps)theonlyresponsetosuffer¬ ing: witness, compassion, and otherworldly wisdom—otherworldly because itcomesonlyatgreatcost—aftertheOrphicdescentintotheunderwor andbackintolight—“HadIyourtonguesandeyesI’dusethemso/That heaven’s vault should crack”—^that will never again look the same (5.3.257-58). Apocalyse can be defined as an image of human dealings in their extrem ity:an“imageofthathorror.”InLear,weareaskedtoimaginethestateto which humanity can reduce itself. Lear unfolds aworld in which natttral behaviorisexposedassomethingpredatory,bestial:“Humanbeings.●● behavenotasricketycivilityrequires,butnaturally;thatis,they.●● uponthemselveslikeanimals,havinglosttheprotectionofsocialrestraint, nowshowntobefragile”(Kermode184).AtstakeinLearythen,issome¬ thingbeyondtragedy.Fortragedy,asStanleyCavellremindsusmine AvoidanceofLove,”isabout“aparticulardeath,orset specifically about adeath which is neither natural or accidental, e^ inflicted ...and it [serves as] apunishment or an expiation (1»cmp a original).NeitherLear’sdeathnorCordelia’scanbereadintfrslight,tor punishment is inadequate when speaking about the play’s wreckage. As tor expiation: what is purged?—what the reward? Of all the characters, consider the flawless goodness of Cordelia who recognizes, from the play’s originat¬ ingmoments,thelimitationsoflanguagetobodyforthfeeling;Cordelia, whospeaksonlywhatshefeels,cries:“OthougoodKent,howshallIlive andwork/Tomatchthygoodness?Mylifewillbetooshort/andevery measure fail me” (4.7.1-3). Intheworldoftheplay,thehourisverylateindeed.Bythetimethe action begins, Lear has already divided up his kingdom. The opening scene witnessestheparcelingoutoflandstodaughterswhomthiskingandfather expects to speak their love and so claim their portions. Lear, in the originat1 8 9 IntertextSy Vol. 8, No. 22004 ©Texas Tech University Press 1 9 0 I N T E R T E X T S ing moments, is revealed as an old man who does not know himself, an old man who acts with poor judgment. In his compelling, “Lateness in Kin£f Lear” LyellAsher argues that the questions the play asks—^voiced by avery old man—inevitably stress the irrevocability of what has come before; irrevo¬ cability without the promise of the future. Lear poses the question: “Who is itwhocantellmewhoIam?”(12.4.227).GivenLear’sage,thequestion must and inevitably translates into: “Who have Ibeen all of these years?”The playtakesLeartotheextremelimitofhisexistenceand,oncethere,itexpos¬ eshimto“^o^w/loss—alossthatstretchesnotonlyforward,devastatinghis future, but backward devastating his past” (Asher 23; emphasis original). Inthemidstofsomuchdevastation,whattreblestheagonyandthe mysteryofLearisthefactthattheplayentirelydisavowsaredemptivevision of suffering. In this way, Shakespeare makes old stories, specifically the Book ofJob,somethingradicallynew.Job’spatientenduranceisultimatelymade rightwhenheisrestoredtohisposition.Thereisnosuchrestorationin I^ar. Instead, suffering is represented as acondition of the world as we inherititormakeitforourselves.Itistheresultofevilinflicteduponthe goodbythebad,and“itcanreducehumanitytoabestialcondition,under ^g^PP^^^riy indifferent [or Iwould add—powerless] heaven” (Kermode I earc mg for redemption in Lear we reach in vain. Yes—in his diminished circumstancesthebrokenkingdoeslearncompassion,butthisknowledge comestoolate.WiththelossofCordelia,Learcannotgoonliving.Ifwe oo to the subplot involving Gloucester, here too we look in vain for re emption. Frank Kermode attends to this with his focus on the crucial no?\ whichhenames“aminiatureoftheplay’sintentions” gareaveshisfatherinshelter,thenheadsofftofight.BeforetakcomfortV ^ 9 ^ ^ 1●-o b). Edgar does not return with words of comfort. Rather, hereturnswiththebitternewsofLear’sdefeat. Such is the world of W. What Lear has to say about the world—“A man may see how this world goes wit no eyes (4.6.151-52)—struck atroubling chord in acentury tatasknownwarandgenocide:countless“imagesofhorror.”HereIconnecterror ^thMauriceBlanchot’sdefinitionofdisaster:“utter-burn... [inwhich]themovementofMeaning[is]swallowedup”(Sicher298).Lear ^acts the unthinkable. And yet there is an afterwards for Edgar and for ^ntandandfortherestofus.Wehearthisin Albany’sclosingwords: Friendsofmysoul,youtwain,/Ruleinthisrealm,andthegoredstatesus¬ tain” (5.3.317-18). Asfortheaudience,theabsoluterealityofevilandtheunmitigatedrep¬ resentations of the self in extremis are what Shakespeare leaves us with—and KOLOSOV: “Is This the Promised End? 1 9 1 yes, he leaves us with witnesses: Kent and Edgar. “We that are young shall never see so much nor live so long” (5.3.323-24). Edgar’s words close the play. Kent’s profession that “[a]ll’s cheerless, dark and deadly” attests to the reality of suffering and evil—without expiation, explanation or compensa¬ tion (5.3.288). But what of them? What—beyond the world of the play—^is the survivors’ inheritance? And what is their responsibility? And, Iwould add, our own? Ultimately, these are the questions the play asks; questions I...

Sex, Literature and Censorship by Jonathan Dollimore (review)

REVIEWS Sex, Literature and Censorship. By Jonathan Dollimore. Cambridge: Polity. 2001. xii + 2o6pp. ?50 (pbk ?12.99). ISBN 0-7456-2763-3 (pbk 0-7456-2764-1). Few people writing today are as keenly alive as Jonathan Dollimore to the perverse relations between ethics and aesthetics. 'The idea that literature in and of itself is lifeenhancing ', he remarks in this dazzling and captivating book, 'has to be one of the most enduring delusions of humanist culture' (p. 121). Dollimore argues that those arbiters of taste who affirmart's timeless values by attempting to bury its destructive energies are in reality its most insidious censors. Amid some merciless debunking of the culture industry,Dollimore's desanitization ofliterature recovers the attractions of sexual disgust and inhumane fantasies while recognizing the dialectical complexities ofdesire, which 'can wreck us and bring us back to lifeand maybe both at once' (p. 35). Dollimore brilliantly exposes the absurdities of much recent infighting between lesbian and gay,bisexual and queer polemicists as they have sought to gain the radical ground in academia. While he is unsurprisingly intolerant of those traditionalists who champion literature as a touchstone for moral values, he is dismissive too of reduc? tive political criticism as a 'wishful theory' offering little more than a distortion of the world according to a preconceived agenda. Dollimore is no respecter of reputations old or new. Neither the 'self-indulgent sympathy' (p. 163) of Frank Kermode's humanist criticism, nor the 'psychoanalytically-inspired fantasy' (p. 40) of its postmodern successors such as Judith Butler's gender studies, escapes his iconoclastic gaze. Yet although much of this book seems to be concerned with the failures of theory, Dollimore is no anti-theorist??r se. He calls for a critical realism capable of recovering the 'dangerous knowledge' inherent in literature, requiring the critic to balance intellect with sensibility, 'being historically and imaginatively inside a per? spective which one is also critically resisting' (p. 45). We are ofTeredenough glimpses of Dollimore's own command of this demanding critical mode, in some fine ifsome? what fragmentary considerations of writing from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, to suggest that his critical vision can have a valuable practical application. Sections of this book may make for uncomfortable reading, as when Dollimore rips into conservative academic institutions where literature is used as an anodyne to 'the pain of being human' and is 'taught by people of limited life experience' who possess 'a deep fear of being' (p. 108). Dollimore's call for a shift in critical values from theoretical learning to experiential knowledge, taught not by those in the know but by those who have known desire and the losses it can bring, is admirable yet raises some tricky issues. While Dollimore himself is able to intersperse his criticism with remnants of his own sexual history,other academies may legitimately feel less inclined to narrate their own personal experiences of desire and loss. These observations may jar on the personal level, but they can nevertheless ring true on the institutional one, as when Dollimore criticizes the practice of 'entic[ing] fee-paying foreign students to take our higher degrees, some of whom are without even the qualifications for admission to a firstdegree' (p. 158). For Dollimore, literature is inseparable from politics at every stage, from the moment it is penned to its analysis in the seminar room. The focus forthis is Shakespeare, whose complexity should be fully explored without necessarily trusting his moral vision: 'The academic Shakespeare industry is forthe most part an intellectual embarrassment, full of well-trained, mediocre minds climbing professional ladders' (p. 155). The less we revere art, Dollimore argues, the more we can give it the passionate consideration it deserves. Dollimore's style ranges fromthe disarmingly colloquial to some exquisitely crafted prose. He writes brilliantly on desire: 'Ecstasy pressured by loss'. Much of the suavity of his argument comes from some perceptively fluid and dialectical thinking, as when 946 Reviews he argues that straight sexuality is often more radically diverse than its supposedly more dissident counterparts. 'To be alive is to desire', afnrms Dollimore, and 'to desire is to be deeply and maybe destructively confused, sooner or later' (p. 36). That Dollimore...

"Pure Rhetoric of a Language Without Words": Stevens's Musical Creation of Belief in "Credences of Summer"

From his earliest to his later poems, Stevens longs for respite from the ever-moving world and to feel at one with the world about him. In "The Man Whose Pharynx was Bad," his speaker decries time's motion and wishes that summer would come to rest "lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed / Through days like oceans in obsidian"1 (stanza iii, lines 3-4). In "This Solitude of Cataracts," he longs "to feel the same way over and over," for "the river to go on flowing the same way" (ll. 8-9). To feel even a momentary release from the flux would be "enough," cries the speaker of "The Ultimate Poem is Abstract": "It would be enough / If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed / In this Beautiful World of Ours and not as now, / Helplessly at the edge" (ll. 16-19). While in many poems Stevens expresses despair at the relentless change of the world, in "Credences of Summer" he creates a poem which, more than any other, expresses a relief from the universal flux. In each of its ten cantos, Stevens expresses one way that we can perceive a permanence, a wholeness in summer. Stevens's "credences" do not, however, at the poem's end, comprise a unified system of belief, nor do they provide us with a still picture of summer. Although he offers us a vibrant summer world—complete with greenery, roses, hay, birds and their accompanying hymns, silences and birdsongs—and confidently urges us to believe in summer's wholeness, Stevens's voice is not uniform. While some cantos express an exhilarating, even an empowering belief in our ability to attain wholeness within the natural world, others admit more doubt and even question, at times, whether such permanence is possible. Stevens's unevenness of tone in "Credences of Summer" has, in large part, sparked the critical controversy that has surrounded the poem. In contrast to those critics who argue that Stevens's [End Page 122] shifting tone represents a tenuous hold on his celebration of the present, I would argue that his changing tones are, rather, illustrative of a larger musical and rhetorical design in the poem which enables Stevens to urge us successfully to "believe ... beyond belief" in summer's lasting presence ("Flyer's Fall," p. 6). Many critics question whether Stevens sustains throughout its development the confident tones with which he opens the poem, as well as whether the uneasy relation between Stevens's variable voice and what Harold Bloom calls "the rival eloquence of mere nature" ultimately mutes Stevens's summer celebration.2 Critics such as Frank Kermode,3 Thomas Hines,4 Adelaide Kirby Morris,5 and Joseph Riddel6 take Stevens's marked and elevated tones as their focal point and find in "Credences of Summer," if not "Stevens' consummate hymn to the paradise of living . . ." in Morris's terms,7 then, as Riddel writes, "a moment of apogee and not apology in the poet's emotional weather."8 At the other end of the critical spectrum, Helen Vendler concentrates on the questioning undertones that persist throughout the poem and elucidates the darker poem beneath its jubilant surface.9 While Harold Bloom insists that "Credences" is "more cheerful than Vendler allows," he, too, maintains that it "would like to have been rather more celebratory than finally it was."10 In what remains one of the best pieces on "Credences of Summer," Isabel MacCaffrey argues that Stevens's aim in the poem is not only, as Vendler writes, "To fix his attention on the present ... in the present,"11 but to affirm the power of the imagination as it faces "The 'silence of summer,' a stasis where there can be no speech."12 MacCaffrey neither proclaims nor qualifies the poem's celebration but, rather, explores the "special kind...

The Tempest by Virginia Mason Vaughan , Alden T. Vaughan , William Shakespeare (review)

YES, 32, 2002 YES, 32, 2002 reviews, of specific theatrical productions. Even if the reader is familiar with these productions (as I was with the Michael Bodganov Macbethdiscussed by Barbara Hogdon and the Greenwich production of The Duchess of Mafi discussed by John Russell Brown), the interest of these essays seems rather limited. So if Rosenberg has helped create an environment in which the dramatic aspects of Shakespeare's work are no longer neglected (in fact, as Lois Potter points out in her essay, there is still a reluctance among many critics to acknowledge that Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright), he may also (albeit unwittingly) have given licence to a branch of scholarly pedantry on the one hand, and to a somewhat lazy form of review essay on the other. The two opening essays of the volume illustrate nicely the different uses to which Rosenberg's methods are now being put: both are concerned with the role of Gertrude in Hamlet, but whereas Ellen J. O'Brien uses her discussion of the queen to explore larger issues, such as the distinction between 'role' and 'character', G. B. Shand's conclusion that 'the constraining simplicity of the QI Queen-role results from deliberate and accomplished theatrical shaping of the role toward a single prescribed signifier' seems hardly to justify the detailed discussion of differences between the Qi and Q2/F versions of Hamlet that precedes it. Another instructive comparison is between Hugh Richmond's 'ALetter to the Actor Playing King Lear' and Sidney Homann's '"What Do I Do Now?": Directing A MidsummerNight's Dream'.Both essays offer highly subjective reflections, based on personal experience, on the challenges of staging two of Shakespeare's best-known plays. However, if Richmond's rejection of a nihilistic view of Learin favour of a reading which 'looks forward to the providential world of Cymbeline' is rather reactionary and patronizing in tone ('If you can, you must convince your director not to make Cordelia an implausible paragon though I must warn you that no modern actress backed by feminist hatred for "the Patriarchy" will happily surrender to this more realistic view of her role!'), it is at least situated in an informed and informative discussion of recent performance history, whereas Homann, who prides himself on his refusal to prescribe interpretation ('Here, rather than asserting a single meaning [...] the focus is on options, choices, process and discoveries'), actually paraphrases speeches from the Dream in ways that simplify and curtail their meanings, without referring to any other productions of the play. Overall, then, this is an interesting if variable collection, and certainly it will serve a useful purpose in alerting new readers to the work of Rosenberg himself. UNIVERSITY OF READING DAVID BRAUNER The Tempest. Ed. by VIRGINIA MASON VAUGHAN and ALDEN T. VAUGHAN. (Arden Shakespeare) Walton-on-Thames: Nelson. I999. xx + 366 pp. [30 (paperbound [6.99). The Arden 3 editors of The Tempesthad a challenging task: outdoing the success of the Arden 2 version edited by Frank Kermode in I954. For forty years Kermode has dominated readings of the play, challenged only marginally by Stephen Orgel's sophisticated but slightly perverse I987 edition in the single-volume Oxford series. Arden 3's Tempestis not a new Kermode, but in many ways it makes an easier text to work with. Following their very successful history of the different Calibans recreated on stage and in critical views, the Vaughans here offer an edition blessed by a judiciously conservative text, a reasonably thorough set of notes, and a history of the play's reception through the ages and spaces which is by some way the best I have seen so far. reviews, of specific theatrical productions. Even if the reader is familiar with these productions (as I was with the Michael Bodganov Macbethdiscussed by Barbara Hogdon and the Greenwich production of The Duchess of Mafi discussed by John Russell Brown), the interest of these essays seems rather limited. So if Rosenberg has helped create an environment in which the dramatic aspects of Shakespeare's work are no longer neglected (in fact, as Lois Potter points out in her essay, there is still a reluctance...

The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics of Romance by Edward Dudley (review)

REVIEWS119 On some occasions, however, the verse translation can make the translator indulge in some awkward syntax, for example, the opening lines of Cligés. He who wrote Erec and Enide, Commandments Ovid once decreed and Art ofLove in French did write, and write about the shoulder bite, about King Mark and fair Isolde, the metamorphosis retold of hoopoe, swallow, nightingale, about a youth begins a tale who was in Greece, kin to King Arthur. On the whole, nevertheless, there is always a sincere attempt to find the balance between the original Old French and the modern English. So Alexander laments his new-found state of anxiety: I thought in Love thete could be shown nothing but good and good alone but find him wicked in his ways. Nobody knows what game Love plays until he enters in the fun. Fool he who plays with such a one; to harm his own in Love's sole care. Indeed, his game is not unfair; it's dangerous to play Love's game; I think my downfall is his aim. With a solid introduction to each romance, about eleven pages of textual notes, and a selective bibliography, Erec and Enide and Cligés are the worthy conclusion to a quarter-century of translation. DAVID STAINES University of Ottawa edward Dudley, The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics ofRomance. SUNY Series: The Margins of Literature. Albany: suny Press, 1997. Pp. 316. isbn: 07914 -3526-1. S16.50. (hard); $21.95 (paper). Through a broad intertextual approach based on impressive theoretical background and erudition, Edward Dudley reveals the workings of the disguised and decayed mythic content inhabiting Romance discourse, from Chrétiens Percevalto Cervantes's Don Quixote and beyond, in his monograph The Endless Text, winner of the ipp8 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award. Among the arresting concepts incorporated within Dudley's methodology, his instinctual grasp of Romance as 'an informing force that underlies many. . .kinds ofstories' is pivotal. Although the purpose which he undertakes is ambitious, his substantial explication of such a discourse emerges as both absorbing and convincing. ARTHURIANA As both Celticist and distinguished Cervantes scholar, Dudley understands the defining qualities ofspecial knights and their literary functions. His deep analysis of the Perceval type, which predominates in the first half of The Endless Text, uncovers meanings ofsuppressed ritual energy, which, according to his argument, account for numinous undercurrents resonating in countless Arthurian and other stories. While acknowledging his indebtedness to the likes ofJessie Weston, Roger Sherman Loomis, D.D.R. Owen, Norris Lacy, John Darrah, Alwyn and Brinley Rees, Martin FIeidegger, I lans-Georg Gadamer, Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, Ruth EI Saffar, Luis Murillo, Martin de Riquer, Harvey Sharrer and many other Arthurians, theorists, Celtists, and Hispanists, Dudley offers a highly original consideration ofsuch factors as story and character impetus, and the unsuspected ways in which myth can become dislocated without losing its impact. His argument on the irrepressible nature of this phenomenon, regardless of reader or even storyteller awareness, may prove controversial, even though a commanding body of story evidence and a keen interpretive acumen fully support his assertions. For instance, his preliminary contrast among the Quixote, JamesJoyce's Ulysses, and the Biblical Gospel ofMark demonstrates the functions of Romance features, and self-conscious hermcneutic dilemmas, found in all three of these seemingly unrelated texts. Furthermore, as suggested by this uncommon textual grouping, Dudley's work applies post-modernist concepts and meaningfully examines important contemporary issues such as that of the language ofwomen and other key questions pertaining to gender studies. From this basis, then, Dudley enters compellingly into the metaphysics oflanguage, meaning, truth, and fiction and also into the relationship between such issues and the history of ecclesiastical and feudal power. His commentary on the faith crisis arising from Renaissance Humanism, for example, shows that in exegetical terms the problem has been in train since at least the time of the Roman Empire, and that its political manifestations are integral to its literary ones. Drawing on these contexts, and pronouncing Cervantes's celebrated novel to be the 'supreme metatext of the Renaissance,' the author ofthe study uncovers a much richer fiction in Don Quixote than mere parody ofmedieval...

Short Reviews

Short Reviews Get access Shakespeare's Reading. By Robert S. Miola. (Oxford Shakespeare Topics) Oxford University Press. £25.00 (hb), £12.99 (pb).Shakespeare's Language. By Frank Kermode. Penguin. £20.00.Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning and Recuperation. BY Heather Dubrow. (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture) Cambridge University Press. £40.00.Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters. By Geraldo U. De Sousa. Macmillan. £45.00.Shakespeare and Race. Edited By Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press. £35.00 (hb), £12.95 (pb).Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances. BY Constance Jordan. Cornell University Press. £16.95 (pb).Hamlet. Edited By Robert Hapgood (Shakespeare in Production) Cambridge University Press. £37.50 (hb), £13.95 (pb). Andrew Hadfield Andrew Hadfield University of WalesAberystwyth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 50, Issue 198, Autumn 2001, Pages 263–268, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/50.198.263 Published: 01 October 2001

The End of Erendira's Prostitution

Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they are immanent. (Frank Kermode 175) HE criticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works usually accomplishes the difficult task of considering both his formal innovations and his criticisms of Latin American society and politics, but in the secondary literature on La increible y triste de candida y de su abuela desalmada (1972), the magical, fairy-tale elements have been analyzed much more thoroughly than its main theme of oppressive child prostitution. For example, Joel Hancock discusses Erendira and the Brothers Grimm (1978); Barbara B. Aponte examines el rito de initiation (1983); Marta Morello-- Frosch analyzes the funci6n de lo fantAstico (1984-85); Efren Ortiz gives the story una lectura mitica (1980); Antonio Benitez Rojo calls la Bella Durn-dente de Garcia (1987); Roberto Reis writes that the estructura de Poder is questioned through the use of the fantastic (1980); Jasbir Jain calls it Reversal of a Fairy Tale (1987) and Mario Vargas Llosa places his comments on within a chapter titled the Hegemonia de lo imaginario in his 1971 biography of Garcia Marquez, Historic de un deicidio. The social problem that La increible historic addresses deserves a more frontal treatment. (I will use this short form of the story title to distinguish it from the film, for which I will use the character's name within quotation marks: Erendira). Overlooked in comparison to genre and myth, the story's social themes and realist strategies reveal Garcia Marquez' early interest in criticizing aspects of women's oppression. In this article I first remind readers of the Colombian author's insistence on the autobiographical origins of the Erendira-Abuela pair, and then discuss prostitution in several other texts by him. Finally I seek to explain the controversial ending of La increible historia by highlighting its faithfulness to its genesis and analyzing where the fiction diverges both from those origins and from literary norms. My contention is that Erendira!s prostitution is comparable to the massacre of the banana workers in Cien anos de soledad in that they are narrathemes based on real events which are treated by the fictions as unreal. In Cien anos, the historical massacre is represented, but then the sole survivor cannot find anyone to believe his testimony. All deny his tale and declare him mad. Hyperbole and improbability weight the evidence in the fiction in favor of the massive coverup, the Big Lie in which a massacre on such a scale never could have happened. Yet history has witnessed such an event. Similarly, the nature of Erendira's slavery is couched in the language of fable and fairy tale, giving the appearance of fictionality, of its impossibility or untruth in any literal sense. Hyperbole and improbability have led to reader incredulity. Yet Erendira!s barbaric treatment by her grandmother and the huge number of men who have paid-sex with her in fact could happen and does happen in reality. According to published interviews with the author, La increible historic is based on an experience when, as a sixteen-year-old, Garcia Marquez saw an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute. She was accompanied by a woman whom he presumed to be a relative. At a decisive moment in the fictional story, the text similarly anchors itself in the reporters look, in personal testimony, rather than the omniscient authority of a storyteller. The episode with the bordello prostitutes is witnessed by a first-person, participant narrator who enters the text on the page before (126), interrupting the third-person omniscient narration. Like Garcia Marquez' newspaper account of seeing the young prostitute abused by a relative, this unnamed participant narrator is a young man. In this segment, a group of sex workers from the local brothel are angry because has attracted all their customers to wait in lines at her tent. …

On the apocalyptic sublime

In this essay we argue that an eschatological discourse we term the “apocalyptic sublime” has emerged, as the postmodern alternative to traditional apocalyptic rhetoric. Drawing on the work of Frank Kermode and Jean Baudrillard, the essay isolates two key features of the apocalyptic sublime as (a) a reliance on non‐linear temporality and (b) a kind of destabilized subjectivity characteristic of that described in the sublime theories of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. The apocalyptic sublime is then used to explain the rhetorical dimensions of the project for a Critical Rhetoric begun by Raymie McKerrow in the late 1980s.

The Short Story as Miniature: Barry Callaghan’s ‘The Black Queen’ and Gloria Sawai’s ‘The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts’

In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode sympathetically refers to Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of the ‘impression-point,’ that incisive moment of a life or a text which ‘gives articulation to the whole’ (147n4). Concerned primarily with the ‘impression-point’ as an aspect of reading, Kermode is attentive to the provisional nature of such moments. He maintains that this particular exegetic approach may involve either ‘discovery or choice’ (16); that is, these openings need not be determined solely by textual guidance, but can instead be generated by the reader. While it is irresolvable whether a life or a text offers the unity necessary for an interpretation that relies upon the revelatory impression-point, it is readily apparent that the short story fundamentally solicits (and critiques) the hermeneutic examination of the relationship between part and whole. Traditionally, the genre has engaged the notion of the impression-point through its propensity for the epiphany, but one can expand this observation to say that short fiction generally activates a version of the hermeneutic circle. It is surprising that no short story theorist, to my knowledge, directly acknowledges hermeneutics as part of his or her methodology, since it is clear that the discipline’s early principles have generally influenced the scholarly and popular discourse surrounding the form.

The Little Manx Nation: Antiquarianism, Ethnic Identity, and Home Rule Politics in the Isle of Man, 1880–1918

As imperial pride flourished in the racial discourse of late Victorian British politics, ethnic revival and Celtic nationalism also gained purchase and resonance. These complex and seemingly competing issues of identity extended beyond the “four nations” of the United Kingdom to the Isle of Man, a crown dependency constitutionally outside the United Kingdom but at the very center of the British Isles. In this “land of home rule,” adrift in the Irish Sea, the juxtaposition of Britishness and Celticism was particularly acute, compounded by the proud persistence of Norse traditions. Manx independence within the Atlantic archipelago was symbolized by the annual Tynwald Day ceremony, a Viking “Thing” or general meeting, at which the year's new legislation was promulgated in both English and Manx Gaelic. In the late Victorian period, as Anglo-Manx business syndicates invested heavily in the “visiting industry,” transforming the island into “one large playground for the operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire,” gentlemanly antiquarians constructed (and/or invented) the necessary traditions to safeguard Manx cultural distinctiveness and its devolved political status. Through the assertion of Celticism, a project that tended to downgrade Norse contributions to the island's past, the little Manx nation girded itself against cultural anglicization, yet remained unquestionably loyal to the British empire.Slightly other than English, the Manx have displayed what Sir Frank Kermode has described as “mild alienation” and “qualified foreignness,” characteristics that need to be considered in the wider debate about British identity.

Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels

Koelb, Clayton. Legendary Figures: Ancient History Modern Novels. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P 1998. viii + 186 pp. $40.00. Clayton Koelb's new book consists of series of stimulating, albeit loosely related on Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Thomas Mann's Joseph tetralogy, Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and Christa Wolf's Cassandra. It his thesis the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic change the way people felt about their relation to the (xxvii) and these seven novels reflect the new sense the past distant and alien world and no longer what Georg Lukacs called prehistory of the present. We are not surprised when an author, three of whose previous books feature the words reader or reading their titles-The Incredible Reader (1984), Inventions of Reading (1988), and The Passion of Reading (1999)takes to mean not only belonging to but also, its strict etymological sense, legenda or that which to be read. Koelb expands the meaning to embrace all experience because can be apprehended only by an act of historical reconstruction (30). This view the past an Other whose recapture motivated by desire often becomes erotic bulwarked the introduction by reference to Lukacs, Frank Kermode, Dominick LaCapra, Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, and Fredric Jameson. Koelb's theory generates interesting insights. The sensuous desire with which Flaubert viewed ancient Carthage imbued past with mythic presence. Pater's figures, experiencing their present as though it were already past, anticipate modern attitudes toward past. Mann's Joseph concerned not with experience but with signification: the mysterious signs connect the present with the past. Broch's novel exposes the legendary qualities Virgil's mind shares with the history of his world. Wilder seeks to demonumentalize Caesar an effort to rescue him from the modern dictators who claimed him as their model. Yourcenar shows how Hadrian's deathbed search for the meaning of his life gives shape to the world he inhabits. Wolf, admittedly possessed by Cassandra, exposes the ancient world the patriarchal roots of modern society Yet these readings remain essays because, despite the appeal to contemporary theorists, Koelb makes no attempt to ground his interpretations the existing scholarship on his subject. To cite only the discussions of German novels: he does not confront Henry Hatfield's claim Mann's Joseph is not, any important sense, historical novel, or Mann's remark to Karl Kerenyi he was seeking through psychology to wrest myth from the Fascist obscurantists, or the figural topos in FuBstapfen gehen determines Joseph's thinking; he makes no use of the detailed studies (e.g., by Lutzeler and Ziolkowski) of Broch's knowledge of Virgil; and he does not refer to the important writings by Volker Riedel and others on the exploitation of ancient myth by East German writers. His readings, as meditations on narrowly defined questions, do not amount to general discussions of the novels. Indeed, Koelb makes heavy demands on his readers, expecting them to supply the context and continuity of the works he treats. Essays, too, to the extent the chapters show no real progression and no consistency of approach from novel to novel. The book based on the claim dramatic change historical perception occurred the nineteenth century, but the only evidence adduced, apart from Lukacs and modern theorists, an 1859 statement by Flaubert and review of contemporary developments paleontology, geology, and archeology. …

Apocalyptic Narratives: The Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

The radically performative laying down of law by legislator must create very context according to which that law could be judged to be just: founding moment, pre-, is always already inhabited by post-. Geoffrey Bennington (132) Thus veil had to fall so that with it strongholds of reactionaries preventing women from being educated and participating in public life would fall. Amina Said (360) In Book of Revelation, John is living in forced exile on island of Patmos.[1] Opposed to and alienated from existing social and political order, he predicts overthrow of a corrupt and everlasting reign of New Jerusalem. In this revolutionary prophesy, John imagines himself as consciousness of collective; boundary between and word, between narrative and history, must dissolve, and all margins, including one he inhabits, must be eradicated to complete this dream of a perfectly integrated at end of history. [2] While belief in actual or imminent end of has receded, Frank Kermode argues that the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of world (28). With shift from God's plan for humanity to secular dreams about world, nationalist narratives that both replace and echo Revelation are one of ways we order that world. Apocalypse continues to be understood in a secular context as a revelation or unveiling (from ancient Greek apokalupsis), and this paradigm underlies nineteenth-century teleological narrative of modern nationalism, where emergence of nation is understood as point of arrival for an imagined community (Anderson 6). As Benedict Anderson has suggested, as traditional religious belief wanes, national narratives come to satisfy desire for origins, continuity, and eternity (11). Like biblical story, secular apocalyptic writings about nation also express dreams of ostracized and oppressed about renewal or rebirth of a community; call from beyond (the interference from Other) that characterizes apocalyptic writing challenges established order, confuses accepted rules, and ignores prevalent codes of reason. As Jacques Derrida writes, By its very tone, mixing of voices, genres, and codes, and breakdown [le detraquement of destinations, apocalyptic discourse can also dismantle dominant contract or concordat (Of an Apocalyptic Tone 89). It is not surprising then that Romantic poets, and Blake in particular, conceived of French and American Revolutions in millennial terms; violence and upheaval of these events seemed to mark dawn of a new earthly order, freeing man from tyranny of monarchy and church.[3] And in Writing Apocalypse, Lois Parkinson Zamora reads both Hebrew (Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah) and Chri stian (Mark 13, Matthew 24, 2 Peter, and Revelation) apocalyptic texts, with their emphasis on merging of private and public destinies, as inspiring communal or national fictions of Latin American writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar. However, events of twentieth century have also cast doubt on apocalyptic nationalist narratives. In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Aziz clearly joins revolutionary chorus when he declares that shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one! (289). But while Forster suggests that colonial presence in India is intolerable, completing his novel in aftermath of First World War, he is clearly not convinced by revolutionary promises of nationalism: Fielding taunts Aziz with remark a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to drab nineteenth-century sisterhood!(289). And as a Muslim, Aziz himself is only half taken with idea of modern nation as he recognizes es of teleology and origins that accompany this model. …

"Every Goodbye Ain't Gone": The Semiotics of Death, Mourning, and Closural Practice in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

... we think terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with conflict between deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter structure, relations of beginnings, middle, and end. --Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending Closural practice twentieth century African American literature is, to borrow Wallace Stevens's trope, discourse in act of finding what will suffice.(1) The strategies that black writers construct to bring their to a sense of an ending create order out of welter of experiences that shape our collective existence. The apocalyptic significance human beings assign to endings--and their relationship to middles and beginnings--are, as Frank Kermode asserts, fictions shaped by our collective need to assign value to life as well as to death: Men, like poets rush `into middest,' medias res, when they are born; they also die medias rebus, and to sense of their they need with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly preoccupations. (The Sense of an Ending 7) Birth, death, marriage, and aging are universal intermediary that contribute to vast European literary landscape with which Kermode is concerned. The desire to make sense of [our] span is one of many possible primordial sources of human imagination. Human beings find fictive concords that will suffice to living meaningful by connecting seemingly random moments life to seamless geometry of beginnings, middles, and ends. Closure life, then, as closural strategy fiction, emphasizes what David Richter referring to moral fable calls completion, or, as Marianna Torgovnick puts it, a sense that nothing necessary has been omitted from work (Closure Novel 6). Successful closure, however, does not depend on completion any strict structural or thematic sense. Endings that fill gaps or indeterminancies (Iser) text ways that preclude further interpretation, fairy tales for example, or that restrict reader's participation making meaning by such devices as authorial intrusions occur infrequently twentieth century narrative practice. In Torgovnick's view, structural symmetry is far less revealing litmus test for successful closure than the honesty and appropriateness of ending's relationship to beginning, middle, not degree of or resolution achieved by ending (Closure Novel 6). This important point is virtually an article of faith modern and postmodern closural practice African American novel.(2) Most twentieth century African American novels general, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) specifically, resist finality or resolution achieved by ending expressed as organic wholeness, i.e., structural unity, or themes that mirror prevailing social mores, or cultural constructions of preoccupations such as death and mourning. Song of Solomon accomplishes this by its dependence on narrative fragments that ultimately form interconnected circles within circles that resist simple or closure by stressing familial, experiential, and human ties that bind constantly changing ways. The broad cultural resonance of this teleology is implicit, for example, traditional African American aphorism, goodbye ain't gone, every shut eye ain't sleep. As trope of resistance, goodbye ain't gone is textual site for any number of possible political, physical, and metaphysical struggles that form an historical map of universal particularity of African American experience, including slavery, migration, racism, religion, and family. …

A Note on the Lottery of Queen Elizabeth I and Coriolanus, 5.2

subject of some dispute among editors of play. The sense seems, at first, obvious enough: Menenius proposes assuringly, you have heard your general talk of Rome / And of his friends there, it is to / My name hath touch'd your (5.2.9-11).1 Menenius hopes to parlay his once-intimate standing into a sort of backstage pass. Frank Kermode asserts that phrase to implies an absolutely certain likelihood of Menenius's fame having reached even Volscian guards.2 (Menenius's claim echoes an earlier one by Aufidius: O, doubt not that. / I speak from certainties [1.2.30].) On a second look, exactly how Shakespeare conveys this sense appears far less clear. Many editors, following SamuelJohnson, gloss to as tickets to non-winning since are in lottery.3 (As corroboration, it is often mentioned that French lot maintains this sense; gros lot signifies grand prize.) The main opposition to this reading came first from Edmond Malone, who argues that Dr.Johnson here mistakes ... Lots were term in our author's time for total number of tickets in a lottery. .. .The were of course more numerous than blanks. If lot signified prize, as Dr. Johnson supposed,... Menenius must be supposed to say, that chance of his name having reached their ears was very small.4 Menenius cannot wish to scuttle himself that quickly. According to Malone, then, lots must be taken to mean entire set of possibilities, both winning and losing tickets, with being much greater in number (the traditional ratio). Thus difference between lots and blanks is negligible; there is a nearly one-toone ratio, a sure bet, that Menenius's reputation precedes him.5 Additional objection to theJohnsonian reading derives from notion of a high ratio of winning tickets to blanks-not particularly striking odds. Does Menenius mean to imply only that chance of his being known is fairly good? E. K. Chambers, in first Arden edition of play, also holds lots to mean prizes but escapes logical incoherence by proposing a somewhat ingenious solution: the point of metaphor lies not in number of lots, which is of course less than that of blanks, but in their relative

Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Woolf: A Camp Reconstruction of Bloomsbury

The novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, and critic Angus Wilson received comparatively rare honor of knighthood in 1980, mark of his public significance then matched by critical esteem in which his work was held. He was a darling of intellectuals and the most ambitious novelist in British English since war.1 Nevertheless, despite also being an acute and perceptive observer of literary mores, Angus Wilson has not yet enjoyed long overdue recovery for his reputation that he was able to hasten for Zola and Kipling.2 The mistaken identification of Wilson with post-war revival of traditional forms has undoubtedly contributed to decline of his popularity, while platitudinous, liberal humanist readings of his fiction have reinforced this perception of Wilson as an essentially middlebrow and reactionary novelist. The publication of his third novel, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), seemed to confirm Wilson's liberal-humanist credentials because, at least on surface, this was positively heart-warming study of an upper-middle class woman's struggle to confront her loss of wealth and status in an incomprehensible society. The novel was awarded James Tait Black Memorial Prize and tremendous critical acclaim. For Kerry McSweeney, this was the finest of his [Wilson's] first three novels . . . an attempt to combine nineteenth-century diversity with modernist depth while Frank Kermode deemed it Mr Wilson's most distinguished performance and claimed for its author

Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World

Introduction: on making ends meet, Malcolm Bull. Part 1 How Tim acquired a consummation, Norman Cohn Upon whom the ends of the ages have come - apocalytic and the interpretation of the New Testament, Christopher Rowland the end of the world and the beginning of Christendom, Bernard McGinn pattern and purpose in history in the later Medieval and Renaissance periods, Marjorie Reeves 17th-century millennarianism, Richard Popkin. Part 2 Secular apocalypse - prophets and apocalyptics at the end of the 18th century, Elinor Shaffer Saint-Simonian industrialism as the end of history, August Cieszkowski on the teleology of universal history, Laurence Dickey apocalypse, millennium and utopia today, Krishan Kumar Part 3 The apocalyptic tone in philosophy - Kant, Derrida, Foucault, Christopher Norris waiting for the end, Frank Kermode, beginning and ending - Adrono as lateness itself, Edward Said.