Individual Tragedy Research Articles

강제징용으로 시베리아 포로가 되었던 한 남성 독거노인의 생애사 재구성

The purpose of this study is to examine biography of an elderly man living alone who was a Siberia Forced laborer, and pursue the substantiality of his life. The subject of this research is one elderly man living alone who has experienced Forced laborer in Siberia, and we collected data through in-depth interview. The researcher analyzed it according to Rosenthal's research method in order to accomplish the purpose of this study. As a result, By contrasting the life-story as narrated with life as lived, we realized that there was a recognition across his lifetime that his life is “a weary life that had to be dragged around regardless of his own will”. The researcher discussed efforts to sublimate an individual's tragedy into social memory, importance and direction of logotherapy at old age, and compensation for forced laborers in the period of Japanese colonialism based on the research results.

Musical ecologies of grief: breathing and environmental justice in Love Ssega’s “Our World (Fight for Air)”

This paper will consider how ecological grief is managed in “Our World (Fight for Air)”, a single released in 2021 by British-Ugandan musician Love Ssega, which addresses the deadly consequences of air pollution on the South Circular road in London. In light of sparse musicological engagement with ecological grief and air, I bring together the concepts of a “political ecology of air-and-breathing-bodies” (Allen 2020) and “weathering” (Neimanis and Walker 2014) to illustrate that, in Ssega’s work, (safe) breathing becomes political, traversed by vectors of race and class. Paying attention to air and breathing facilitates an understanding of how Ssega’s music can help us grieve well, on scales attuned to both individual tragedy and the enormous, distributed nature of environmental pollution. I argue that this music shapes “ecologies of grief” which are communal and therefore can help us engage with loss, not merely as mourners, but as makers of safer futures.

Сергей Параджанов и Тифлис: «гид» культурной памяти, городское пространство и его трансформация

This paper considers the great director Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990) as a “guide” and a connoisseur of his hometown of Tiflis, and an interpreter of urban space. Specifically, it focuses on the analysis of the screenplay “Confession” that describes the transformation of the urban landscape. The cemeteries of the Old Tiflis era (the Old-Veria and Khojivan cemeteries) were being destroyed and turned into cultural parks. Such transformations became a tragedy for many families. The destruction of cemeteries wasn’t merely an individual or generational tragedy, but also had a political component. The analysis showed that in Georgia, during the Soviet era, a nationalist, chauvinistic cultural, commemorative policy of oblivion was carried out, which continued during the reign of Mikhail Saakashvili (2008–2013). The article substantiates the following thesis: Tiflis has become an object for reflection of the great director, creative and commemorative material. The article is divided into two parts. In the first part (Tiflis as a microhistorical space), Sergey Parajanov is presented as an expert, “guide” of his city, who reveals various transformations in the urban space, such as, for example, “the funeral of cobblestones”. Parajanov shows the great screenwriter Tonino Guerra how the cobblestone is being replaced by asphalt or how in the ateliers of old Tiflis sewed “aerodrome”-caps on blanks, the prototype of which was the Sicilian Coppola. The second part of the article (The City as Imaginary and Signified) analyzes the film script “Confession” from the point of view of the urban landscape, as well as an object of individual, cultural and historical memory.

Georg Simmel’s nationalism and transnational rationalism

The purpose of the article is to determine the change of worldview paradigm from “nationalism” to “transnational rationalism”, which was embodied in the concept of the “Ideal Europe”, on the example of journalism and scientific works of the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel during the First World War (1914–1918). Research methods: idiographic, system-structural, rational reconstruction of the text. Main results. G. Simmel was between two polar camps, which in the conditions of heightened perception of social reality led him to an individual tragedy and demonstrated the difficulty of choosing between two worldview paradigms – “nationalism” and “patriotism”. G. Simmel didn’t escape the general admiration of German intellectuals for the “ideas of 1914” at the initial stage of the war. He supported propaganda slogans in journalism, hoping that the war could unite the German people to a “political nation”, overcome the dichotomy of individual freedom and universalism. Shattered hopes of supporting the international intellectual environment to explain Germany’s position in the war, censorship harassment and accusations of anti-German activities contributed to his more moderate position. Analyzing the problems of the “crisis of culture” and German national consciousness, G. Simmel advocated the synthesis of “nationalism” and “transnationalism”, which he formed in the concept of the “ideal Europe” as a spiritual supranational community. Scientific novelty: for the first time in national historiography, a comprehensive analysis of the works of G. Simmel of the war period is carried out. Type of article: analytical and descriptive.

A Review of Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer worldwide is the most common cancer among women. And it is the leading cause of Oncer mortality, and one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in women worldwide [1, 2].Fifty years ago cancer of the cervix and child bearing complications were the leading health care problems of wom en Breast cancer is a multifactorial disease and various factors contribute to its currence.15! Hreast cancer occurs all over the world, its incidence, mortality, and survival rates vary considerably among different parts of the world, which could be due to many factors such as population structure, Mestyle, as well as both genetic and environmental factors.co The main risk factors are ape, low parity, and a low rate of breastfeeding. This is why it is common in high resource nations, however it is increasing in almost all countries. [4] Changes in risk factors have led to an increase in the prevalence of breast cancer.[7] The world population continues to rise and the life expectancy for women has reached 80-plus year in most nations, especially western.The single most important demographic factor determinine future health care burdens will be age. One oncolog cal disease certain to increase in all nations is breast cancer.Breast cancer is an individual tragedy for those affected. It is a highly curable disease when detected early, and an inevitably fatal disease when discovered too late. Access to high-quality care leading to early diagnosis and proper surgical and medical treatment can mean the difference between lide and death. 17 Breast cancer is a major health care burden. Screening programs are costly and difficult to organise, involving major lopatie and quality control issues.Proper surgical treatment requires appropriate operating roor facilities and highly qualified healthcare providers Local radiation requires facilities beyond the scope of most health care systems in low income countries. Adequate systemic treatment with chemotherapy and hormonal therapy is costly both in itself, as well as in mangement of their potentially severe adverse effects. All sophisticated breast cancer treatment requires the resour es of advanced pathological laboratory investigation including immunohistochemistry and molecular pathology analysis.New targeted therapis remain an evolving field where only one thing is certain, individual treatment costs are already threatening the best founded healthcare system. Breast cancer is a challenge for all countries. Organizing and centraling breast cancer care around integrated breast Cancer Centers can potentially provide optimal care to individual patients within different health care sy tems the reverse wil strain healthcare systems.

Da Brindisi a Lampedusa: le migrazioni via mare nella cassa di risonanza della <i>popular music</i> italiana

From the landing of thousands of Albanese people on the Apulian coast in 1991 to the daily arrival of refugees on the Calabrian and Sicilian coasts since 2000, immigration by sea and the lifestories of the countless victims of this situation have become part of the ‘public awareness’ in Italy. To narrate the tragedies we are witnessing day by day, different communicational strategies have been adopted, depending on the respective media and on the political objectives pursued by individual ‘speakers’. The attention writers, film directors, and artists have payed to the recent migration movements towards Italy has gradually given a more profoundly human dimension to the phenomenon and has brought the public closer to the individual tragedy. Italian popular music in particular has actively contributed to establishing an artistic counter-discourse, which will be discussed in the present article. Examples of different musical genres will be analysed, covering the time frame in question, whereas the methodology pursued will be that of Imagology and that of Cultural Studies.

Environmental Depredation and Aesthetic Reflection in Wilhelm Raabe’s Late Fiction

In the winter of 1890 to 1891 the city of Braunschweig experienced a precipitous decline in the quality of its drinking water. The cause: beet sugar factories in the surrounding duchy were releasing hydrogen sulfide—the major byproduct of beet sugar production—into the Oker River watershed in quantities that exceeded the capacity of local water purification facilities. Wilhelm Raabe described the town’s situation in a letter to his daughter on January 17, 1891: “Be glad that you are not in Braunschweig. An absolute pigsty! We no longer bathe, we no longer brush our teeth, even in our cooked food you can taste the water from the Oker, spoiled by twelve sugar factories: Pfister′s Mill in its most terrible completion!” (Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, H III 10 : 2).1 The letter describes the intrusion of a byproduct of modern industry into a city that Raabe had once praised for the “ancient magnificence and beauty of lower Saxon bourgeois splendor.”2 In the letter Raabe understands environmental crisis as an aesthetic crisis, one that then precipitates a civilizational crisis: quotidian habits of hygiene and consumption are suddenly disrupted as the ugly signs of modern industry move from the duchy’s peripheral industrial settlements into the beautiful, pre-industrial urban core. Pfister’s Mill (Pfisters Mühle) is Raabe’s 1884 novel about water pollution from a beet sugar factory driving a mill out of business. If Pfister’s Mill reaches its “most terrible completion” in the calamity of 1891, then it is because what appeared in the novel as an individual tragedy has grown into a disaster for an entire city.

“I’d rather be dead than disabled”—the ableist conflation and the meanings of disability

ABSTRACTDespite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disability, I argue that the reason the medical model of disability remains so gallingly entrenched is due to what I call the “ableist conflation” of disability with pain and suffering. In an effort to better equip healthcare practitioners and those invested in health communication to challenge disability stigma, discrimination, and oppression, I lay out the logic of the ableist conflation and interrogate examples of its use. I argue that insofar as the semiosis of pain and suffering is structured by the lived experience of unwelcome bodily transition or variation, experiences of pain inform the ableist conflation by preemptively tying such variability and its attendant disequilibrium to disability. I conclude by discussing how philosophy of disability and critical disability studies might better inform health communication concerning disability, offering a number of conceptual distinctions toward that end.

Introduction: Australian Perspectives: Genocide, the Health Professions, and an Inglorious Past

Health & History, 2016. 18/2 1 Introduction Australian Perspectives: Genocide, the Health Professions, and an Inglorious Past Michael Robertson, Kirril Shields, and Linda Shields This special edition of Health and History falls on the seventieth anniversary of the verdicts of the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal war crimes trials, and the commencement of proceedings in United States-v-Karl Brandt et al. (the so-called ‘Doctors Trial’).1 It is therefore timely to reflect upon current historiographical and sociocultural engagements in relation to health and health practice that are legacies of the Holocaust. The aim of this special edition of Health and History is to provide an Australian scholarly voice to that history and historiography; to examine the role of health professionals within genocidal events that are not solely the Holocaust, but extend, in this case, to Armenia, Bosnia, and Australia. The term ‘genocide’ was coined in 1944 by Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who defined the act as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’.2 Yet the definition is problematic and the discipline of ‘genocide studies’ has come to integrate multiple discourses that reflect this divergence in opinions over what exactly constitutes genocide.3 Here, in this edition of Health and History, the nature of these killings and their location extends beyond Auschwitz, to other European locations, and to Australia itself. What is not included are the plethora of other genocides that erupted in Cambodia, Rwanda, and South Sudan; much of the ethnic cleansing of the colonial era both in and outside Australia; the program of state sponsored mass murder under Stalin’s rule; and recent events in Syria and Iraq. While genocide is not a criminal act particular to the Holocaust, the Holocaust is often considered the most bureaucratic of genocides given its reliance on the apparatus of the modern industrialised state. This apparatus included the government’s need for efficient transport infrastructure, the use of police and security services, certain functions of governmental hierarchies, the compliance of professions, a culture of scientism, and a willing 2 MICHAEL ROBERTSON, KIRRIL SHIELDS, LINDA SHIELDS or tightly controlled press.4 The uniqueness or distinctness of the Holocaust has been subject to considerable debate, often polemic and intensely political.5 Discourses surrounding the Holocaust are multi-faceted, shifting from suggestions that the Holocaust was a unique German act built from a particular meld of anti-Semitism and fascist politics, to the idea that this murderous episode was one of numerous killings carried out in the so-called ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe.6 Included in this shifting focalisation are politicised debates over the use of the term ‘Holocaust’ to denote any victim of the National Socialist regime. Regardless of semantics or what might be considered the appropriation of blame, included in this bureaucratic system were health professionals such as nurses, physicians, paediatricians, and psychiatrists. This edition of Health and History examines the role of these health professionals as participants in this particular killing apparatus, but also as the victims of these measures, including Jewish health professionals denied the right to practice due to Nazi regulations. Garry Walter provides a biographical overview of his grandfather, the Austrian-Jewish doctor Otto Walter. The paper traces Otto’s early days as a reputable clinician inVienna prior to the Anschluss, and the subsequent repercussions National Socialism had on his life, family, and medical career. The narrative of Otto Walter’s life as an émigré European Jew in Australia demonstrates how institutionalised racism in the Australian academy, such as Sydney University’s Faculty of Medicine in the 1950s and 60s, was redolent of the racism he encountered in nazified Europe. Garry Walter’s personal homage to his grandfather bears witness to an individual and family tragedy against the backdrop of Mitteleuropa, drawing an arc of racist exclusion from Vienna to the xenophobic angst of the mid-century Sydney medical profession. Such observations intersect with Colin Tatz’s contribution, in which he considers more generally Australian attitudes to the genocide of the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. Here Tatz outlines why he believes this killing and subjugation of indigenous Australians is a genocide. Tatz’s paper “Australia: The ‘Good’ Genocide Perpetrator?” seeks to define...

The true cost of maternal death: individual tragedy impacts family, community and nations.

The death of a woman in pregnancy and childbirth is globally considered an individual tragedy and a human rights violation. Given the inequities in death that occur to marginalized, poor, and vulnerable women in low and middle income countries, there is no doubt that maternal death is a horrific injustice. However, the long term global burden of disease goes far beyond this tragedy. Recent research is demonstrating that there are disastrous consequences in infant and child mortality, loss of economic opportunities, spiraling cycles of poverty in the families and communities where women die giving birth. The journal Reproductive Health has published a supplement “The True Cost of Maternal Death,” which includes original research from two major study groups. Harvard’s Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights conducted a multi-country, mixed methods study of the impact of maternal mortality on newborn health and survival, family functioning, interrupted education and economic degradation in four high maternal mortality countries, Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, and Ethiopia. A collaborative group from Family Care International (FCI), the International Center of Research on Women (ICRW), and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)-Center for Disease Control (CDC)-Research Collaboration conducted research into true costs of maternal death in Kenya. These articles demonstrate the enormous costs that ripple out from the maternal death, and the intergenerational and multi-sectorial disruptions related to maternal mortality. It is important in this period of post-MDG strategy planning period that donors, governments, and NGOs be aware not only of the individual level tragedy of the loss of a mother’s life, but also the financial and health costs associated with maternal mortality, and to keep the focus on maternal health as a key issue in all aspects of development, not just health.

ENGELLİ BİREYLERDE BİR SOSYAL BASKI ARACI OLARAK DAMGA: GİZLİ AJAN

The social psychology of disabled individuals is directly related with his/her position, role and behaviours in the society. The concept of disability, which can be defined as a functional deficiency, deeply affects one‟s individual, psychological, social and cultural life in a negative way. According to sociologist Erwing Goffman, disabled individual isstigmatized by the society. In his „Theory of Stigma‟ Goffman classifies the attitudes developed for the disabled individuals as invidual or medical, psychological, sociological and cultural models. Joseph Conrad‟s novel called The Secret Agent, which tells about nineteenth century England, emphasizes thet riviality of disabled individuals in the society. It is seen that mentally disabled Stevie is sacrificed for Verloc‟s bomb attack plans, easily. Infact, Stevie‟s individual tragedy is due to his passive position and innocence originated from his status and social identity as a disabled. Stevie, who is an intro vertand mentally disabled, is the victim of thes ociety. In this concept, the fact that disabled individuals in the nineteenth century are excluded from the society by stigmatizing in terms of economic, social, psychological and cultural levels is clear

Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway

Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway

Using Historical Materials to Teach Representations of Disability: A First World War Case Study

Using Historical Materials to Teach Representations of DisabilityA First World War Case Study Emmeline Burdett (bio) Thinking critically about disability involves recognizing that the idea of disability as an “individual tragedy” for the disabled person is entirely insufficient and unhelpful. This traditional approach encourages the idea that the disabled person’s social circumstances are irrelevant. Disability studies instead views disability as something which takes place within a societal context rather than in a vacuum. As Hugh Gregory Gallagher writes, “There can be no doubt that the way a society perceives and deals with a handicap is a major factor in determining just how disabling – in a real sense – the handicap will be” (25). Gallagher gives a number of examples of how societal perceptions of disability work in practice. He writes: A condition such as poor eyesight is largely a trivial matter in a society where eyeglasses are readily available. In an aboriginal hunting society, poor eyesight is a calamity. In traditional Inuit society, the insight of a schizoid personality is often valued; in modern America it is often feared. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was accustomed to a life of valets and chauffeurs found his paraplegia a less disabling condition than would a poor man who was similarly paralyzed. (25) Gallagher’s examples are instructive and provocative, introducing as they do the idea that disability is not an unchanging condition, but one that has differing effects in different circumstances. This idea is of fundamental importance to disability studies. It also opens the door to an appreciation that there is another level to what the disability studies academic Donna Reeve has termed “psycho-emotional disablism.” Reeve defines this as behavior on the part of others which constitutes a “barrier to being” for a disabled person. Reeve contrasts this with “barriers to doing,” which are restrictions on a disabled person’s freedom of movement caused by living in an inaccessible structural environment – although it should not be forgotten that this kind of spatial apartheid often also has adverse psychological effects. According to Reeve, “barriers to being” may include such things as “When a disabled child is not invited to a family wedding because they might be ‘disruptive’” or “Being subjected to jokes or stares from strangers because someone walks differently or uses a wheelchair” (Reeve 123). [End Page 179] Reeve writes that the internalization of the acceptability of this rude and hurtful behavior may be particularly problematic for people who become disabled. This is because someone who acquires an impairment may, potentially, have lived for years or decades unaware of the existence of this kind of prejudice, or may – before being on the receiving end – have assumed that it is just something that a disabled person has to accept. One way to help students think about these issues is through novels. With the recent commemorations marking the centenary of the First World War (which began in 1914), Louisa Young’s 2011 novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You provides a useful way in to a discussion of these issues, not because it offers a disability studies-friendly portrayal of impairment, but because prior knowledge of disability studies can help students analyze the book critically, and instructors can suggest areas of research about aspects of disabled ex-soldiers’ lives which Louisa Young herself seems not to have considered.1 I came across My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You through a book group at London Metropolitan Archives (lma), in Clerkenwell, in London. Because the group meets at an archive, the archivist who runs the group always brings documents that relate to the novel we are discussing. On this occasion, she had two scrapbooks: one from the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, which pioneered techniques of facial reconstruction. Louisa Young’s character Riley Purefoy is treated there after the lower half of his face was badly damaged by a bomb blast. A second scrapbook came from its sister hospital in Roehampton, where soldiers with wounded limbs received treatment in the form of prosthetic limbs, and rehabilitation. The newspaper clippings in these scrapbooks demonstrate striking differences between the ways in which men at the two hospitals were portrayed in the press (Burdett). While men at...

Disabled people in rural South Africa talk about sexuality

Disability is emerging as a human rights issue of public concern, rather than an individual tragedy requiring medical attention. The issue of sexuality remains relatively neglected in this agenda, particularly as regards the exploration of the complexities of sexuality encountered by disabled people themselves. This paper focuses on the experiences of sexuality of disabled people and parents of disabled children in settings of poverty in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Three individual interviews and two focus groups were conducted with disabled adults and parents of disabled children. Thematic analysis of the interviews identified three principal themes (1) sexuality development in the family of origin, (2) sexuality in the community and (3) adult sexuality and creating families. Each of these larger themes encompasses various sub-themes that are discussed in the findings. The paper concludes that while sexuality is a very difficult aspect of life for a disabled person due to myths and discrimination against disabled people, it is also an important arena for affirmation and establishing self-worth. It is therefore critical to consider the development of a healthy sexuality amongst disabled people and the promotion of their sexual rights.

Seasons of Change: Arab Spring and Political Opportunities

Seasons of Change: Arab Spring and Political Opportunities

"The Faithful Gravedigger": The Role of "Innocent" Wash Jones and the Invisible "White Trash" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

"The Faithful Gravedigger":The Role of "Innocent" Wash Jones and the Invisible "White Trash" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! John Rodden (bio) "They mought have killed us but they aint whupped us yit air they?" —Wash Jones in Absalom, Absalom! Although his appearance in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! spans, strictly speaking, no more than a dozen pages, Wash Jones is a pivotal character whose actions have far-reaching impact upon the outcome of the Sutpen story and whose plight, along with that of his granddaughter, Milly, extends beyond an individual tragedy to reveal the delusions and helplessness of the "poor white trash" in the Civil War South. After Rosa Coldfield has rebuked his crude proposition, it is to the Jones family, specifically to Milly, that Thomas Sutpen turns in a last desperate attempt to accomplish his "design" for a dynasty with a male heir. Sutpen's dynastic failure becomes cruelly definitive and attains horrific dimensions when Wash murders Sutpen and then proceeds, in a rampage borne of inconsolable humiliation and despair, to cut the throats of both his granddaughter and her out-of-wedlock child (by Sutpen) immediately after the infant's birth. Rosa and Jason Compson relate the incident at different times, yet the person whose veracity we are actually called upon to trust is Wash, for he is putatively (in Shreve McCannon's speculative [End Page 23] reconstruction) the only first-hand witness to the central event of the novel: Henry Sutpen shooting Charles Bon. Wash reports it to Aunt Rosa: "'Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come out yon. Henry has shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef'" (133). Thus, Wash Jones assumes a significance far greater than his mere physical presence in the novel would suggest. He cuts down Sutpen, thereby smashing the Colonel's design and quest for immortality, and is so disillusioned that he even ends his own ancestral line in the annihilation. Beyond the Coldfields, the Compsons, and the members of other more respected families, Wash is the ultimate authority for the circumstances of Charles Bon's death. Therefore, merely in the novel's basic narrative facts, Wash plays a role of crucial importance. Accordingly, this essay illumines Faulkner's art by examining Jones not simply as a reporter of events but as an analogue and foil to Sutpen, both of them tragic Innocents of approximately the same age and sharing the same poor white southern tradition. Even though Sutpen exemplifies the southern nouveau riche aristocrat and Jones the white "riffraff"—the latter relegated to a similar social stratum to southern blacks and ridiculed by the slaves themselves—the circumstances of Sutpen's and Wash's origins, lives, and deaths contain many parallels. Their fates, as Wash laments inarticulately, shortly before his death, do seem inextricably bound together. Faulkner's repeated, vividly descriptive images of young Sutpen and old Wash, and later of Ellen Coldfield and Milly Jones, invite comparison because he draws them in precisely similar language. Wash resembles the young Thomas Sutpen, who never discovers his innocence, but the parallel ceases with Sutpen's unpardonable degradation of Milly. When Sutpen jokes cruelly that Milly would have been more valuable to him if she had been a mare, Wash does not sulk and vengefully conclude that he must form a materialistic design, as did young Sutpen after being confronted by the "monkey nigger" butler (189). Jones's reaction, the response of a poor white rather than a planter, is blurred, uncomprehending, impotent moral outrage. Wash, an enraged old man with a scythe, lashes out and cuts down Sutpen. The scene is richly symbolic: Time ultimately "kilt" the Sutpen design, but it cannot teach a doubting Thomas his real mistake. Who is Wash Jones? According to Quentin's and Mr. Compson's imaginative recon struction of events, Wash Jones is "a gangling malaria-ridden white man" (183). He is more than sixty years old by the time of his death in 1869 and has lived with his granddaughter for fourteen years [End Page 24] as a squatter and handyman in Sutpen's "abandoned and rotting fishing camp in the river bottom" (125). The short story "Wash," first...

2009 in Review

2009 in Review

Suicide. The hidden side of modernity

Suicide. The hidden side of modernity

Love or Politics: The Man or the King? <i>Edward II</i> in Modern Performance

Directors, Actors, Audiences: Dynamism of Instability Love or politics; the man or the king: these are the polarities of choice for a director of Edward II. individual tragedy of love, with politics only the politics of sex, is the emphasis of the most widely-known modern production, Derek Jarman's film adaptation? range of focuses with which the play can be staged admits of no simple summary. Within its chronicle narrative there is a dramatized debate, complex but readily recognizable for the first audience, about the responsibilities are the obverse of the king's rights--responsibilities to the Church, to the nobility, and to the commonwealth. How far political drama is brought to the fore, how it interacts with the love story of Edward and Gaveston, and how love story itself is seen--with its mixture of on one side idyllic ideal and ruinous obsession, and on the other exploitative manipulation and real devotion--is open to a variety of presentations. Until the king's defeat any audience is likely to be alternately drawn to and repelled by each of the main characters--Edward, Gaveston, Isabella, Mortimer. This unstable network of interacting attractions and repulsions is complicated by a political conflict of complex and varying rights and wrongs which similarly stabilizes only late in the action, as legitimate power passes to Edward III, and Mortimer hardens into a pure overweening Machiavel. Instabilities of judgment in relation to character and political arguments are further complicated by the play's aesthetic variety--its mixture of chronicle-type realism with (moral) emblems or tableaux; and its partly loose structure is complemented by patterned echoes and symmetries. While all these elements give directors, actors, and audiences a good deal of freedom of interpretation and response, response is also steered by guidance written into the text about expressive action, costuming, and setting. first audiences and modern audiences equally are likely to feel Marlowe invites a range of responses to and judgments about Edward. However sympathetic the presentation, his feelings are bound to appear from the start in some measure egotistical and self-absorbed. He is cruel and violent towards Isabella; his accusations about her relations with Mortimer are, at best, no more than partially justified. He is careless of the common good in his attitudes to taxation (the use of the broad seal [2.2.146-7]) and to invasion (by the French [2.2.9-10; 3.1.66-8], elaborated in relation to the Irish, Scots, and Danes [2.2.160-66]: all in the context of his overriding pre-occupation with Gaveston). (2) Edward's failure at Bannockburn--the great national disgrace of his reign--is presented all too credibly as characteristic (2.2.178-94). His feelings leave him open to manipulation by the unscrupulous (as appears to be in his opening soliloquy; as Spencer and Baldock appear to be in their first exchanges). He sees only his rights in a complex context of rights are recognized as not absolute, but as entailing responsibilities. Limitation of the Church's power proper in Elizabethan terms (Edward's thoroughly Tudor denunciation ofProud Rome [1.4.96-103]) does not sanction unprovoked attacks on churchmen (the Bishop of Coventry [1.1.185-205]). While much draws an audience's sympathies from Edward, his homosexuality is largely treated neutrally. To Coventry, his favorite is that wicked Gaveston (1.1.175) (which must surely mean sexually corrupt), and the barons express some contempt for him as Edward's minion; but, though this can be made to appear homophobic--as it emphatically is in Derek Jarman's film--it is entangled with, and can largely be absorbed into, the barons' class antagonisms. Broadly, the play takes the view of Mortimer Senior: The mightiest kings have had their minions (1.4.390). Edward's love for is a matter of indifference so long as it does not impinge on affairs of state. …

Disability Haunting in American Poetics

In medicine and rehabilitation, disability has been exclusively narrated as individual tragedy and deviance from bodily norms. As a result, humanities scholarship has only recently begun to understand disability as a foundational category of social experience, and a matter of symbolic investment. The essay examines the language of haunting used by Robert Pinsky in his analysis of American poetry as constitutive of a uniquely American memory. Poems featured in Pinsky's discussion–namely Abraham Lincoln's My Childhood Home I See Again and William Carlos Williams's To Elsie–are re-read as relying on unacknowledged representations of disability. The essay designates this spectral presence of disabled people's material circumstances in print and media as disability haunting. A disability studies approach to literary analysis can provide readers, teachers, and critics with the ability to concretize such haunting subject matter. Hence, the essay seeks to make surface a 'poetics' of disability in literary wor...