Human Plight Research Articles

Doppelganger (review)

Reviewed by: Doppelganger April Spisak Stahler, David, Jr. Doppelganger. Eos/HarperCollins, 2006258 p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-087233-0$17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-087232-2$16.99 R Gr. 7-12 In Stahler's otherwise ordinary world, doppelgangers murder humans and then adopt their forms and lives; it is therefore fortunate that their own existences are not complicated with names, societal rules, or consciences. One sixteen-year-old doppelganger cannot seem to settle into his fate—perhaps because he is part human, or perhaps he developed sympathy for the human plight from watching television in his isolated cabin while his absentee, indifferent mother came back only to feed him. After his mother kicks him out, he is forced to make his first kill to disguise himself, and he selects a sick, elderly man whom he can pretend was ready to die; he next kills Chris, a violent teen who had tried to murder the doppelganger, and he discovers that there may be lives crueler than his own when he becomes enmeshed with Chris' sad, violent family. The book raises interesting moral questions about the nature of monsters: the murderous doppelganger haunted by his seemingly unavoidable destiny is contrasted with Chris and his father, both angry and abusive men who cannot change their actions. The doppelganger's painful and realistically agonized first-person narration heightens sympathy, as do the sacrifices he makes to avoid fulfilling his murderous destiny. Stahler has written a powerful novel about crushing violence, fragile idealism, and the sometimes insurmountable difficulty of outrunning one's upbringing. Teens struggling to create their own paths, especially those raised in difficult homes, will identify strongly with the protagonist and his onerous choices. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

La Voix de l’ombre: pastorale et mélancolie dans l’Arcadie de Sir Philip Sidney

The melancholic pastoral mode plays a limited but essential role in the complex architecture of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia. It contributes to the narrative demonstration that the pastoral retreat is a trap. The princes increasingly seek the solitariness of deserted places ever further away from their original heroic focus until they withdraw into the cave which inverts the temple motif of Montemayor’s Diana. Pastoral melancholy is also essential in the poetic production of the eclogues that cannot be discounted in spite of the unfinished state of the text. Solitariness triggers a reflexive, involved and existential poetry in which the princes ponder on the somber aspects of the human plight. Erotemas, oxymorons, phonic and semantic echoes, inverted vistas, the expressionistic accents of pathetic fallacy fashion and refashion wavering and uncertain mental landscapes. Interrogations multiply and enduring meaning often seems beyond reach. The speakers seem swayed by violent passions and impotently falter, in the throes of delusions. But their dark ruminations ultimately lead them to acknowledge the need to trust in Providence to answer the needs of a failing and fallible creature.

"The Dreaded Voyage Into the World": Jane Bowles and her Serious Ladies

One may liken dread to dizziness. He whose eye chances to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But the reason for it is just as much his eye as it is the precipice. For suppose he had not looked down. Soren Kierkegaard(1) Let yourself fly! Release all! Lose All! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters (literature). Listen nothing is found. Nothing is lost. All is for the seeking. Go, fly, swim, leap, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love that which has not yet been seen, love anyone, what you are, what you will be, leave, acquit yourself of the old lies, dare that which you do not dare ... Helene Cixous(2) Jane Bowles' memorable rendering of women's anxieties in her short fiction and her novel, Two Serious Ladies, vivifies a concept of dread born of the angst and agoraphobia which harass individual choices of vocation, sexual preference, spiritual aspirations, and moral codes. As a philosophical concept, dread has historically been appropriated by pontifical male philosophers, such as Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, and distilled into a necessary existential condition for the becoming (male) self. As a condition, mood, emotion ascribed to female experience, however, existential dread is more culturally and psychologically freighted. I suggest that Bowles' work has been unjustly neglected, not only because of her limited production and her reputation as an eccentric or avant-garde writer, but also because her subject, the dread which accompanies choice, has disquieting implications, particularly for women readers and writers. Bowles' heroines employ original strategies in confronting dread by exercising their existential freedom and responsibility to choose in both Bowles' long short story, Camp Cataract, and her only completed novel, Two Serious Ladies. Bowles came to confront the act of writing by way of Europe, through the Swiss education she received during her teen years. Claiming as her literary forbears Proust, Gide, and Celine, she wrote her first novel in French, Le Phaelon Hypocrite (a piece of juvenilia which has since been lost). Both Bowles and her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, were drawn to the existentialist aura emanating from Paris in the 1940s, Jane Bowles' most productive period. French existentialism, which foregrounded the individual, freedom, choice, and the erasure of God, impinged upon the shape and substance of the narrative patterns in both their fictions. Jane Bowles appeared to acknowledge the purer existential position of her husband, claiming that he came to write in true relation to his isolation(3) in novels like The Sheltering Sky, where individuality is exposed as a flimsy myth and the universe invoked as bleakly indifferent to the human plight. Possibly more than the fiction of any other American writer, Paul Bowles' work extends the literary existentialism of Sartre and Camus into the postmodern and post-Western world. While existentialism challenged Jane Bowles' conception of herself as a writer, in turn her work challenges the masculinist construction of this lived philosophy. While post-structuralists would dismiss existentialism's focus on the authenticity of individual experience as linguistic artifice, feminist literary critics who argue for the value of female experience have largely ignored possible connections between representations of women's lives and existentialism. A likely source of this disaffection is suggested by the feminist philosopher Jeffner Allen, who has analyzed the patriarchal context from which existentialism developed, pointing to Kierkegaard's, Nietzsche's, Sartre's, and Camus' exclusive preoccupation with the male individual's freedom to choose. Allen is also critical of the hubristic tendency of the agnostic male existentialists to replace God with man as the center of meaning. …

Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth

More than any other recent painter's work, Anselm Kiefer's painterly postpainterly project has called forth ruminations about national identity. American critics in particular have gone to great length in praising his Germanness, the authentic ways in which he deals in his painting with the ghosts of the fatherland, especially with the terror of recent German history. The use of profound allegory, the multiple references to Germanic myth, the play with the archetypalall of this is held to be typically German, and yet, by the power of art, it is said somehow to transcend its origins and give expression to the spiritual plight of humanity in the late twentieth century.' The temptation is great to dismiss such stereotype-driven appreciations of national essence as a marketing strategy of the Reagan age. Pride in national identity is in. Even the Germans benefit from it since Ronald Reagan's visit to the Bitburg cemetery gave its blessing to Helmut Kohl's political agenda of forgetting the fascist past and renewing national pride in the name of normalization. In an international art market in which the

Millay's Aria Da Capo: Form and Meaning

SO STRONG "was the appeal of the commedia dell' arte that it has, in various guises, survived into the present."! One modern play of this type is Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo (popular with drama students despite its requirements of skillful directing, acting, and creative setting), which portrays one aspect of the human plight as an image become flesh on the stage, and which is at the same time broadly comic and deeply tragic. Millay did not choose to write theater-poetry based on folk myth or ritual, as so many playwrights did in the twenties; neither did she write a thesis play on social reform; nor did she write an intellectual farce, in which the point is in the game of ideas. What she did write had a dash of the first, a pinch of the second, a generous sprinkling of the third, with the commedia dell' arte form as one of the main ingredients.