Literary Choices Research Articles

Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD

What is the relation between history as contingent traumatic experience (Julian's Persian campaign), history as narrative of that experience (Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus) and the historian as author/narrator/participant (Ammianus Marcellinus)? The documentary dimension of the historian's experience, usually accepted at face value, is problematized. The historian's intermittent appearances in the text as participant are literary choices establishing the evidentiary value of the narrative.

The Time of the Butterflies

This manuscript argues that Julia Alvarez, the author of the novel In the Time of the Butterflies, by immersing herself in both cultures, United States and Dominican, overcomes all the adjustments a foreigner generally faces in becoming multicultural; through this accomplishment, she is able to make self-conscious literary choices to communicate effectively her message to both cultures.

De F. N. Murav´eva à Théone : réalité et mythe littéraire dans le sentimentalisme russe

F. N. Muravieva — Theona : Reality and a Sentimentalist Literary Myth The article focuses on the figure of Fedos'ja Nikitična Murav'eva (1760?-1792), sister of the Russian Sentimentalist writer Mixail Murav'ev, to whom he wrote numerous letters and dedicated several literary works (addressing her as Theona). After characterizing her cultural profile on the basis of many unpublished documents, it shows how the epistolary dialogue with her influenced Murav'ev's stylistic and literary choices. It sets the problem of the psychological and culturological meaning of the brother-sister relationship and of its turning into a fact of literary significance, and makes some hypotheses about the choice of the literary name of Theona, that allows to enrich the picture of the 'feminization' of Russian literature brought about by Sentimentalism.

The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (review)

The Eye's Mind is a study of literary modernism that we have needed for a long while. Our post-structuralist obsession with visuality is everywhere apparent; but it has taken a scholar with Karen Jacobs's deep learning and range of knowledge to help us understand how our contemporary critique of ocular epistemology relates to the rise of a particular kind of visual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. She is able to do this, and to do this so well, because her study is genuinely interdisciplinary; its primary strength lies precisely in its synthetic and comparativist aims. Jacobs knows as much about photography as she does about literature; as much about French existentialism as American anthropology. Although almost every sentence of this study is theoretically inflected, she never lets theory do her thinking for her. On the contrary, her references to Baudrillard, Benjamin, Marx, Jameson, Eagleton, and Zizek provide the conceptual grid through which she performs her own specific analysis of modernist visual discourse. And her literary choices demonstrate the far-reaching explanatory power of her cultural investigation: this is a book where Henry James and Zora Neale Hurston can actually be located together [End Page 538] on a modernist map; where Lolita and Invisible Man inhabit the same American landscape; and where local village theatre in Virginia Woolf is only a step away from Nathaniel West's Hollywood.

Applying the Canon in Islam

According to Smith, the Ndembu diviner applies a "canon" of twenty-four fixedobjects to a client's situation, first selecting a few of the objects by shaking the basket,interpreting the selected objects according to a range of meanings fixed by pub­lic convention, and matching the meanings to the client's particular condition.Brannon Wheeler, in his Introduction to Applying the Canon in IslamWhen the idolaters inimical to the message of Muhammad, upon him bepeace, attempted to criticize the Qur'an for its use of the lowly and the trivial inits rhetorical repertoire, the following verse was revealed in reply.Behold, God does not disdain to propound a parable of a gnat, or of something evenless than that. Now, as for those who have attained to faith, they know that it is thetruth from their Sustainer whereas those who are bent on denying the truth say,What could God mean by this parable? (2:26)This exchange then became the basis for djscussion and debate among theclassical Arabic rhetoricians on the subject of what might and what might not besuitable for use in similes, metaphors, and other comparative ljterary devices.That this debate shouJd be recalled at the outset of a review of a work dealingwith Hanafi fiqh scholarship might seem slrangely out of place. Yet, once onehas acqurunted oneself with the underlying premise of this work, one cannothelp but recall the classical debate and the verses of Qur'anic scripture so oftencited in regard to it. What lies at the heart of the matter is that comparisonsdrawn between disparate and remote subjects are sometimes delightful andsometimes awful. This, after all, is the stuff of literature. There are some comparisons,however, that are simply offensive.In fact, there are some things people just don't like to see compared at all.Period. Things held near and dear often fall under this category, things like one'sreligion, ethnicity, culture, and so on. This is human nature. And that is dangerousground.Of course, I've oversimplified the matter. ln fact, I'm going in a direction thatwas certrunly not intended by the author for his readership. Wheeler's Applyingthe Canon in Islam is not a work of literature. Likewise, hjs use of models andexamples from other disciplines, like anthropology and the history of religion,is a methodological rather than a literary choice. But the fact remains that thechoice Professor Wheeler has made in this matter is one that will not likely bemet with objectivity by Muslims. If I may venture a comparison of my own, thisis rather akin to inviting a Muslim to partake of a meal, a sumptuous and hearty ...

"Hey, Who's the Kid with the Green Umbrella?" Re-evaluating the Black-a-Moor and Little Black Sambo

“Hey, Who’s the Kid with the Green Umbrella?” Re-evaluating the Black-a-Moor and Little Black Sambo Michelle H. Martin (bio) Place the Black-a-moor, the protagonist in Heinrich Hoffmann’s “The Story of the Inky Boys” from Struwwelpeter (1845), next to Helen Bannerman’s protagonist in The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), and the resemblance is obvious (see figures 1 and 2). Both children have dark skin, curly or Afro hair, and bright red lips. Both carry green umbrellas and wear a red garment. Even the body positions are similar: the illustration of Little Black Sambo walking home after regaining possession of his clothes (Sambo 45) mirrors the image of the Black-a-moor before and after his encounter with the three ruffians (Struwwelpeter 12, 14). The Black-a-moor is seen only wearing red shorts, and after Sambo’s encounter with the tigers, he spends six illustrated pages in the same near-naked state as Hoffmann’s Black-a-moor. Both amateur artists, Bannerman and Hoffmann illustrated these books with crude, somewhat surreal, and perhaps even child-like sketches. Writing during “the golden age” of children’s literature, Hoffmann and Bannerman ventured into uncharted territory in writing about children of color. The mere fact that black children were virtually invisible in children’s literature until the 1960s makes these early images significant (Harris 109). Sharing visual connections, common controversial publication histories, and important ideological messages that affect the depiction of black children in juvenile literature even today, The Story of Little Black Sambo and “The Story of the Inky Boys” beg comparison as forerunners of contemporary multiracial children’s literature. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Hoffmann’s “The Inky Boys” features one of the first—and maybe the first—European depiction of a black child in a children’s text. The Story of Little Black Sambo bears significance not only as a revision of this [End Page 147] earlier image but also as a means by which messages about the black child were disseminated to a substantially more vast international reading audience than Struwwelpeter reached. In spite of the sixty-year controversy concerning racism in The Story of Little Black Sambo, Bannerman’s text remains an important touchstone within historical children’s literature. Thus, as seminal representations, both Hoffmann’s and Bannerman’s texts have strongly influenced American depictions of black children in juvenile literature in positive and negative ways. In terms of its role within minority literature, The Story of Little Black Sambo improves upon the image of the black child created in Hoffmann’s “The Story of the Inky Boys” in its implicit messages about the protagonist’s race, class, and intelligence. These two texts were written fifty-four years apart, the former at the dawn of the golden age of children’s literature, the latter at the close of this significant era. To further situate this comparison within the history of children’s literature, I will discuss the ways in which these [End Page 148] two texts embody the nineteenth-century move from instruction to delight. To discover intertextual connections between Struwwelpeter and The Story of Little Black Sambo, one need only look at interviews with Bannerman’s children. Robert, one of her two sons, confirms that he owned a copy of Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter as a child and, although he did not specify the reasons, decidedly disliked it (Hay 174). Living in India with many native house servants, Bannerman was surrounded by dark-skinned people with whom she interacted daily. Given her experience with people of color, her illustrations of Sambo could have looked less like Hoffmann’s Black-a-moor, who is of African descent, and more like the Indians she saw on a daily basis. Nineteenth-century English education clearly delineated class and race distinctions, and as Elizabeth Hay comments in Sambo Sahib (1981), Bannerman was too well-educated and observant to confuse Africans with Indians (28). She made [End Page 149] a strategic literary choice in her decision about this character’s ethnicity. Given the resemblance between Hoffmann’s illustration of the Black-a...

Globalisation in Java in the 16th Century. A Review of Pramoedya's Arus Balik

Savitri Scherer This is a review of Pramoedya A. Toer's Arus Balik. In 751 pages the novel traces the period between the declining years of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom Majapahit, represented here by the coastal kingdom of Tuban (whose king Wilatikta had only recently been converted to Islam), and the rise in importance of the Muslim maritime coastal kingdoms represented by Demak, and Japara. The novel opens with an unannounced attack by Demak on Japara which was originally a dependancy of Tuban. Soon after that, the ruler of Japara, Adipati Unus, sends a military campaign against Portuguese Malacca, which fails. Unus himself is killed. The novel ends after the king of Demak, Trenggana, a brother of Unus, dies during his campaign to subjugate another non-Islamic kingdom Panarukan. The novel elaborates on the divisive and destructive condition of these weakened Javanese coastal kingdoms. In real historical time, Tuban was an important and prosperous independent port kingdom until it was finally defeated by Mataram in 1619. In the novel Tuban is already depicted as being in its downward cycle, one century before the real historical attack from Mataram, the strong agricultural based Javanese kingdom against which the Dutch traders had to fight before they established their colonial administration on the island. In writing this historical novel, its author (Pramoedya) takes a view as to who was to blame for the bad situation in the weakened coastal kingdoms, as depicted in the work, a situation which contributed to the increasing penetration of foreign traders in the archipelago, (and eventually to the Dutch colonisation of the area). The review analyses the novel by comparing its internal logic with the historical reality of 16th century Java. It also remarks on the timing of publication, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the independence of Indonesia from the Dutch. In that context, the review argues that the author glamorises the grandeur of Majapahit and disapproves of the trading activities conducted by the Muslim coastal kingdoms, because they contributed to the increasing foreign penetration of Java and its fatal destructive impact. One of the foci of the novel is the king Wilatikta of Tuban. This king is depicted as trade-crazy and wishy-washy, and is argued in the novel as a contributor to the destruction of his own kingdom. Pramoedya's literary choices as depicted in Arus Balik may explain why even 50 years after Indonesia's independence, aggressive, authoritarian and warring historical rulers like Pati Unus, continue to be tolerable, while a liberal figure like king Wilatikta has difficulties increasing his popular rating even amongst the Indonesian intelligentsia.

Sur le statut d'homme de lettres au XVIIe siècle. La correspondance de Jean Chapelain (1595-1674)

Fort déconsidéré après sa mort, tourné en ridicule pour sa Pucelle (poème épique long de trente mille vers), Jean Chapelain avait pourtant, de son vivant, connu une carrière éclatante. Il avait exercé une sorte de leadership dans le monde social des écrivains. Poète, théoricien de la littérature, académicien, figure éminente de l'Hôtel de Rambouillet, consulté par Richelieu, par Mazarin, puis par Colbert, fort riche, fort écouté, courtisé, il avait été au plein sens du terme une autorité.Malgré une bibliographie abondante et ancienne, il reste bien des zones d'ombre sur l'ascension et la puissance de Chapelain. Je ne me propose pas ici de les faire disparaître, mais, grâce à sa correspondance, d'approcher la question de son identité sociale.

"Far Lamps at Night": The Poetry of J. V. Cunningham

In 1974, my senior year at Brandeis University, I studied poetry writing with Galway Kinnell and J. V. Cunningham. Kinnell was that year's poet in residence and taught the undergraduate writing class, which I took spring semester. Cunningham was of course a permanent member of the Brandeis English department, and, though he was on leave that spring, I would bring him poems now and then and he would criticize them. Studying poetry with Kinnell and Cunningham was like studying political science with Jerry Rubin (pre-Wall Street) and William F. Buckley. The political analogy is apt for these were political times (we had not yet pulled our troops from Vietnam), and even literary questions and choices became political. Kinnell, for instance, refused to let his students write anything but free verse on the grounds that rhyme and meter repress emotion and free verse liberates it. Oddly enough, his defense of free verse and liberated feeling was deterministic, based on a kind of literary evolutionary theory:

The Divided Voice of Chinese-American Narration: Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter

Blinde is to be commended for her close and careful textual analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts, published in 1976.1 However, in her critical analysis of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, published thirty years earlier in 1945, Blinde displays marked prejudice based on superficial and biased reading of Wong's book.2 Her analysis of Kingston's The Woman Warrior is excellent. Blinde clearly demonstrates that Kingston's confusion in growing up as Chinese-American woman is revealed in her literary choice of a collage of genres, form which Blinde rightly identifies as demanding esthetic considerations beyond those accorded the static solidity of literatures that are easily designated 'novels,' 'autobiography,' or 'poems' (PLB, pp. 52, 53). Her well-thought-out thesis is appropriately complemented by her enviable style of writing, by her well-balanced sentence structure and her almost musical flow of words.

Perspectives. Re-assessments of four topics which interested Hopkins. 1. Ascorbic acid.

I would like to start by adding a further brief word of tribute to Hopkins’s memory. I knew him—intimately I might say—for some 26 years, from 1921 until 1947. Of his personal traits, almost the most outstanding, and to me the most endearing, were his benevolent kindliness and his unassuming modesty. To his pupils he was less a director of studies than an affectionate father, encouraging and stimulating. His essential humility made him at times seem almost timid; yet, in his presence, one was always impressed by the dignity of his bearing, and made aware somehow of his intellectual pre-eminence and authority. One sensed that one was in the company of one of the outstanding men of his generation. As to his achievements in biochemistry: these seemed to me to be distinguished by three pervading characteristics. First, he brought the specialized skills of an expert analytical chemist to what was then the still vague and little-explored territory of ‘chemical physiology’ (to use the term then current). Secondly, he had a flair for chemical isolations and separations. And finally, his outlook was that of a philosopher rather than of a narrow technical specialist—he was always anxious to peer ahead and seeking to discern in which direction the next major developments in biochemistry might be expected to turn. His breadth of approach is apparent also in the unusual style in which many of his papers were cast, and in their literary grace and careful choice of phrase.

Sidney's Sister as Translator of Garnier

In the major study concerning the relationship between the French dramatist, Robert Garnier, and the Elizabethan drama, the author, A. M. Witherspoon, tends to see literary choice as primarily motivated by casual personal considerations. He claims, for example, that Garnier, living in a period of civil strife in France, chose Roman themes for several of his tragedies because he admired ‘the Roman genius for organization’. Likewise he explains the Countess of Pembroke's attraction to Garnier's tragedies in that they centered around strong-minded women like Portia and Cornelia.Although one cannot, of course, discount the importance of congeniality of theme in a dramatist's selection of a subject to portray or of a translator's choice of a work to render, one must not at the same time overlook certain other influences which govern these choices. And, in fact, since both Garnier and the Countess of Pembroke wrote as members of learned and circumscribed coteries, we might expect external influences to assume more than usual importance.