Literary Merit Research Articles

Tribute: Walter Neustadt Jr. 1919–2010

TRIBUTE Walter Neustadt Jr. 1919-2010 Ifirst metWalter Neustadt Jr. on a hot day inAugust 1999. Iwas new in my job as theexecutive director of the World Literature Today organization at theUniversity ofOklaho ma, andmy wife, Julie,and Iwere meeting Walter and Dottie inDallas forour firstdinner with them.During thatdinner, Walter talked about hismother, Doris Neustadt, and how she endowed theNeustadt International Prize forLiterature, an award second only to theNobel Prize in global importance. He talked about the importance ofmaintaining the prize's focus on literary merit and absolute integrity, matters dear to his heart. But then Walter visibly brightened and became even more animated, as ifa lightbulb switched on over his head, and he began to talk about supporting students. He had a long-cherished dream toempower largenumbers of students beyond anything theNeustadt programs at OU had done before. As Iwatched the energetic and steady gaze of this distinguished man, I feltliftedby his passion and empowered by his dream. I rememberedKierkegaard's dictum thatpurity of the heart is towill one thing, and here was a man fully focused on thisone large and encompassing goal. During that dinner I readily signed on tohis cause?who wouldn't??and vowed todirect the Neustadt programs tobe an enginework ingon behalf of largenumbers of students as never before. What Walter and his family had already done for the University ofOklahoma was impressive in theextreme. Wal terSr. and Doris Neustadt gave the land to theUniversity of Oklahoma thatbecame Max Westheimer Airpark, thehome ofOU's aviation program. Doris Neustadt was also the first major private donor to supportOU's library. Walter's own career began with a bachelor's degree ingeology fromYale University and amaster's from OU. When Walter chose toofferhis service toOU as away togive back tohis school and his state,he was soon on theadvisory board fortheUniversity ofOklahoma Press, and he and Dot helped foundOU's Seed Sower Society,which honors donors of $1million ormore. Then, along with his brothers, Jeanand Allan, and theirsister,Joan, Walter made a $2million gift toOU toexpand theBizzell Memorial Library. Walter was also an Endowed Founder of theOU President's Associates Program, and hewent on to serve on theOU Board ofRegents from1969 to 1976, the last two years as chair. For thirty-one years, from 1965 to 1996,he served as a trusteeof the OU Foundation?think about thatforamoment: thirty-one years of volunteer service?and from1976 to 1986 he served as theFoundation's chair. In 1992he received the Governor's Arts Award as one of thestate'smost dedicated supporters of literatureand thearts,and then in May 2005,Walter received a Doctor ofHumane Letters award from theUniversity ofOklahoma, and it was one of theproudest moments ofmy lifeto speak onWalter's behalf forthatoccasion and to stand beside him at the lectern. Ihave discovered that itis impossible toknow someone like Walter Neustadt Jr.and not be affected by his passion forservice and for making theworld a betterplace. Iwas always struck thata very special kind of innocence persisted inWalter's relations with others. I saw this every time we met. He was a savvy businessman, but he had developed thehabit ofbelieving thebest about people until theyproved incontrovertiblyotherwise. His tendency tobelieve inpeople around him so readilymight have seemed na?ve to someone who did not know him, but in reality it was a principled act of courage?a courageous 81World Literature Today "Despite our difficulties inthese trying years, we are well placed in Americaforsuperior methods ofbuilding. A nation with almost inexhaustible native resources, and in our populationa fusedstockofpeople abounding invitality, inventiveness, and skill, we have an old world heritage and stilla new world enthusiasm. It isthe function of educators today to pour this civilizing heritage into this generation, so thatwe may more intelligently explore the sources of nature and mind, and pass on to posterity a truer comprehension of the forces physical, mental, and spiritualwhich combine to balance the individual, the state, the world." ?Walter Neustadt Jr.,"AChallenge to Educators" (1940) willingness toextend credit topeople until doing so ina particular instancewas no longerpossible. Over time,I learned, too, thatthisability tobelieve inpeople was an effectivestrategyfordemanding excellence fromothers as he demanded itfromhimself. At theUniversity ofOklahoma, we will miss Walter's lively intelligence and...

The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader James Phelan (bio) and David H. Richter (bio) Rader W. Rader consistently located his work within the tradition of Chicago School criticism, and he just as consistently characterized that tradition as a minor movement in the history of twentieth-century criticism and theory. But he only implied what we will now say explicitly and with the hope that in our current climate of renewed interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of literature more people will be receptive to the message. The work is part of only a minor tradition—and it’s a damn shame too. It’s especially a damn shame because, across Rader’s diverse body of essays on subjects ranging from Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” to Capote’s In Cold Blood, he sketches a coherent and compelling vision of the nature and significance of literature and an impressive way of translating that vision into interpretive practice. In this essay, we seek to reconstruct that vision and to explicate the interrelationships among several of its key components: Rader’s definition of literature, his understanding of the tasks of criticism and theory, his concepts of literary form and literary quality, his work on the history of the English novel, and his methods of interpretive reasoning. In a sense, we understand our task as doing for Rader’s critical work what he so often set out to do for another writer’s imaginative work: identify the core principles of its construction. One prefatory note before we take up Rader’s definition of literature: you will soon see that, from the perspectives of the current major traditions, those of [End Page 73] post-structuralist theory and of cultural studies, much of Rader’s vision is built on heretical ideas about authors, audiences, and literary language. In order to keep the focus on our task of reconstruction, we will not articulate the likely objections to Rader’s positions or his likely responses. Instead, we ask you to bracket temporarily your own objections as you try on the hypothesis that Rader has developed an alternative system of thought that is at least as deep and sophisticated as those underlying post-structuralist theory and cultural studies. Rader’s Definition of Literature and His Concept of Form In “Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation” (1974), Rader defines literature as that class of verbal compositions designed to be understood by immediate reference only to themselves through the reader’s grasp of the writer’s communicative act as directed toward the evocation of a certain pleasure in their own understanding. In this sense, literary works are verbal compositions in which “the act of understanding . . . is experienced as its own justification” (250). This definition has both a descriptive and an evaluative dimension. In its descriptive sense, the definition distinguishes literary works from non-literary works, the class of verbal compositions in which the reader’s act of understanding is directed toward her doing something else, often something practical (making a pie, voting for one candidate rather than another, writing a letter of protest, and so on). In its evaluative sense, the definition allows us to distinguish among degrees of literariness once we acknowledge that different members of the literary class offer their readers different degrees of pleasure-in-understanding and concomitantly different degrees of self-justification. For example, we could readily agree that Paradise Lost is substantially more literary than, say, Ogden Nash’s “Ode to a Baby”: “A bit of talcum / Is always walcum.” This painfully simple demonstration of the definition’s evaluative dimension also helps illuminate Rader’s understanding of the task of criticism. Why do we readily accept this judgment of Milton’s epic as a greater literary work than Nash’s doggerel? At least in part because the reference to Milton’s poem and the quoting of Nash tap into our intuitive understanding of each one’s literary merit. This answer doesn’t deny other influences such as Milton’s long-established place in and Nash’s absence from the standard canon, the cultural status of epics versus light verse and so on, but it keeps open the possibility that these other influences...

Texts

Texts Mavis Reimer The change of the name of this journal from Canadian Children's Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse to Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures in 2009 was the subject of many hours of discussion by the editorial and advisory boards. Among the questions we debated were the gains and losses in dropping the national descriptor of the journal, the best way to indicate that we intended to continue to publish in two languages, the implications of substituting the term "young people" for "children," and the grammatical relation implied by the order and punctuation of the three terms of our subtitle. The choice to replace "literature/littérature" with "texts," however, occasioned little controversy: it seemed obvious to us that texts was a more open and flexible category, one which formally signals our intention to work within a cultural-studies framework and our welcome of the submission of essays on a wide range of literary, media, and cultural objects and forms. But, if the obvious is typically a rich site for investigation, as ideological critics have demonstrated, then it seems useful to unpack the term to which we so readily agreed.1 The shift in literary studies from the common usage of literature to the common usage of texts to describe the object of study is registered in the different choices made by Raymond Williams in Keywords (1976) and by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris in New Keywords (2005): literature appears as a main entry and there is no entry for text in the 1976 "vocabulary of culture and society," while the opposite is true of the 2005 reference work. Williams explains in his 1976 entry that the word literature came into English "in the sense of polite learning through reading" in the fourteenth century (184). Since the eighteenth century, however, the history of the word has involved "a steady distinction and separation" of "well-written books of an imaginative or creative kind" from "other kinds of writing—philosophy, [End Page 1] essays, history, and so on—which may or may not possess literary merit or be of literary interest," as well as from those poems and plays and novels that "are not 'substantial' or 'important' enough to be called works of literature" (186). "Significantly in recent years," he notes in a concluding paragraph, literature and the literary have been "increasingly challenged, on what is conventionally their own ground, by concepts of writing and communication which seek to recover the most active and general senses which the extreme specialization had seemed to exclude" (187). Terry Threadgold's entry for text in New Keywords makes it clear that the challenge glimpsed by Williams was, indeed, consequential and far-reaching: not only are "all genres of writing" now referred to as texts "for purposes of analysis" in literary studies, but also "[a]ll of these enterprises are seen as aspects of a general textuality and as forms of textual practice," a category which also includes multimedia cultural texts "in which language is only one dimension" (346). The expanded notion of text, defined by Threadgold as "a pan-disciplinary concept that encompasse[s] any cultural object of investigation" (346), describes the understanding of texts that informs the title of this journal and that is generally used in contemporary international cultural studies. In his 2008 textbook Cultural Studies, Chris Barker observes that "it is an axiom of cultural studies that a text is anything that generates meaning through signifying practices" (490). Barker's gloss on text assumes the framework of semiotics, especially as developed by Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957). In one of the essays in that collection, Barthes analyzes the court appearance of a farmer who was charged with and convicted of murder, a case in which police, prosecutor, judge, and journalists all concurred in borrowing elements of classical rhetoric and literary [End Page 2] characterizations to describe the man, the event, and the scene of the trial itself. "Literature has just condemned a man to the guillotine" ("Dominici" 43), Barthes concludes, with literature here, as Simon During observes, meaning not just "the literary canon but the conventional system of writing and representation in which the canon remains...

Raza, novela de Jaime de Andrade, seudónimo de Francisco Franco

Raza, más allá de su valoración literaria, es un texto insólito por cuanto ningún jefe de estado o de gobierno en pleno ejercicio de su autoridad ha justificado su victoria por medio de una ficción donde, además, él mismo está visiblemente representado; menos aún que la novela sea algo provisional por estar destinada a convertirse en documento cinematográfico que, al tiempo, se ofrece como paradigma ejemplar en el contexto social de un estado autárquico. Este primerizo trabajo literario, entre sublimaciones argumentales e idealizaciones de personajes, establece, por medio de la ficción y con evidente huida de una realidad nociva para su honor, las líneas dramáticas de su «compromiso moral» según los conceptos de patria, nación, lealtad, etc., los cuales sustentan las bases de su personal ideograma vital. Lejos de formas literarias cercanas a la deshumanización del arte, como las generaciones de escritores coetáneos iban a establecer, el novelista se orienta hacia la expresión realista, si bien adornada con efectos de una retórica florida que aspira a funcionar como prosa de inspiración culterana.

American Science Fiction and Contemporary Criticism

As a feminist critic of science fiction, I have watched the field flourish over the past three decades. When I wrote my dissertation prospectus in the 1980s, the first version was returned because of my use of the word “alien.” My dissertation director felt it necessary to remind me periodically that, “you know, none of this is real, Robin.” In the twenty-first century, academic criticism of science fiction is now respectable, and the word alien no longer problematic. Yet, not unexpectedly perhaps, science fiction criticism’s growth has led also to its fragmentation. Early science fiction criticism had a singular purpose: to champion science fiction’s status as literature. Similarly, early feminist science fiction had to demonstrate first that there was a feminist literary tradition, and second, again, to present this tradition’s literary merit. This phase was necessary, but limiting. Now, critics of science fiction have as many approaches and concerns as critics of other genres of literature. Since Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing and renowned writers such as Margaret Atwood and P. D. James, among many other luminaries, have published acclaimed works of science fiction, it is difficult for anyone but a prejudiced critic to dismiss science fiction as unworthy of study. Four new books, published by a variety of university presses and one commercial press, demonstrate the complexity and development of science fiction criticism. The breadth of approaches points to the continuing interest in and the depth of science fiction as a literary genre, and an acknowledgment that science fiction offers unique generic properties especially suitable for social analysis and literary study. These four books, though, provide readers with very different views of science fiction and literary

Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda inThe Turner Diaries

When Agent William Eppright of FBI's evidence response team opened sealed envelope found in Timothy McVeigh's yellow Mercury, he found among clippings two highlighted passages from The Diaries. This novel of Aryan revolution was written by Dr. William Pierce, leader of neo-Nazi organization National Alliance (Serrano 218-20). During McVeigh's trial, The Diaries was first piece of evidence introduced, and prosecution called witnesses that testified to McVeigh's obsession with text. These witnesses told court that McVeigh had read novel repeatedly while in military and later sold it at a loss at gun shows (Griffin 8). While McVeigh's case brought The Diaries to public's attention, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented multiple cases since 1980s in which violent hate groups have cited Pierce's novel as influential. Two of these have even taken their names from novel (ADL). During dragging murder of James Byrd in 1998, driver, John William King, reported to have shouted, We are going to start Diaries early, as he shackled Byrd's legs to his truck (Meggido 2). Pierce's novel was first self-published in his periodical Attack! and then self -published as a novel in 1978. Since that time it has become required reading for Aryan groups and has been widely disseminated at gun shows throughout country. While no precise circulation numbers are available, as of 2001 estimates were that at least 300,000 copies had been sold (Griffin 138). As a vehicle for hate propaganda, Pierce's tract has been all too successful. The Diaries unambiguously a hate novel. According to its Foreword, novel a manuscript found in 2100 after a worldwide Aryan revolution. This manuscript diary of Earl Turner, a member of Aryan that started revolution that has led to worldwide massacre of all non-Aryans. The diary narrates beginnings of this revolution from perspective of and follows him through his guerilla war against documenting his methods and hate crimes. Despite its historical and political importance, critical research on The Diaries has been sparse- presumably because one finds simply reading it horrifying enough. Those critics who have examined novel write about it as hate speech: condemning its politics and psychology, and critiquing its narrative failings.1 For example, in a insightful discussion of novel's anti-Semitism and racism, Joe Lockard has noted that novel is not one that invites prolonged contemplation on issues of critical undecidability and that Aryan ideology exists beneath a fairly crude narrative surface (Lockard 121, 127). Evaluating novel's obvious ideological contradictions, Jonathan Cullick has argued that Turner assumes that Organization has freed his intellect from System, but he neglects to notice that Organization has only provided him with a different kind of prison (Cullick). Lockard's and Cullick's evaluations of novel's literary merit are accurate. The Diaries are crudely written and ethical position they invoke not only repugnant, but also often inconsistent and self-contradictory. However despite these failings, a cognitive prison exactly what novel intends for its reader. As a piece of propaganda fiction it not interested in trying to open up discussion or encourage deliberation and undecidability, but instead seeks to trap its reader within its ideology, persuading through identification and imposing its ideological authority. While Cullick sees the device of diarist-narrator [as] vehicle for a book that intended to carry heavy ideological freight, diaries and framing narrative are not merely trappings, but calculated propaganda techniques (Cullick). The voices of diarist narrator and editor work in unison to promote ideology of hate by urging reader to identify with while using editorial authority to foreclose ideological alternatives. …

Beyond Relevance to Literary Merit Young Adult Literature as “Literature”

Scholarly Communication is located on the fourth floor of Carol M. Newman Library at Virginia Tech. Scholarly Communication is a dynamic landscape, and we are continually evolving. Many scholarly communications activities have spun-off into their own departments, such as VT Publishing and Digital Imaging and Preservation Services, and Digital Library Development. Our focus is on supporting the creation and dissemination of scholarship.

Cooper’s Pioneer: Breaking the Chain of Representation

In Cooper‟s Pioneers, the transition from “national literature” and a realist epistemology of representation toward a Romantic imaginary and increasingly individualized politics is linked to the decline of liberal political philosophy and to the loss of landed property as the political basis of society. While the dominant narrative reconciles two families, healing the breach between colonial and post-revolutionary society, displacing Indian claims, and re-legitimizing land ownership, a tragic epilogue—the regressive departure of the pioneer toward a new frontier— opens up a Romantic sub-narrative of desire. A complementary psychosexual narrative and discourse relocates the origin, so deliberately theorized in this novel in terms of natural property rights, in oedipal problematics. It is a regressive move which, paradoxically, also constructs the post-Enlightenment subject. The position that the works of James Fenimore Cooper hold in the American literary canon has been considerably weakened during the past few decades. To an earlier generation of Cooper scholars, eminently represented by the American literary historian Robert E. Spiller, Cooper was a writer who shaped a characteristically American view of nature and the frontier—key features in American national mythology. Evidently the interest in this mythology has declined, and, subsequently, the perceived literary merit of Cooper‟s works. Postcolonial perspectives have exposed the oppressive aspects of his nationalism, in effect relegating his historical novels and romances to a secondary status in the canon. 1 Yet Cooper‟s declining reputation can be viewed in terms of a more distant origin since, as Jonathan Arac has shown, the interest in literature as a bearer of national history comes to an end in Cooper‟s time. 2 Against this broader background, the literary offenses that already 1 See, for example, Nadesan Permaul‟s “James Fenimore Cooper and the American National Myth” and Ezra F. Tawil‟s “Romancing History: The Pioneers and the Problem of Slavery.” 2 “The major narrative form that preceded literary narrative in the United States, and also succeeded it, was what I call national narrative” (16). What Arac calls

Gruppe 47: Literature, Politics, and the Political Economy of Postwar Publishing

ABSTRACTScholars have long acknowledged the significance of Gruppe 47's close ties to the literary market. Group meetings from the early 1950s onward included a large number of media and publishing representatives. This is generally seen as a strong indicator of the group's success. However, the circumstances under which the group was able to form these market connections remain poorly understood. Studies tend to imply that there was a natural transition from literary merit to widespread public attention. This article reveals that the common perception hinges on a teleological bias. Gruppe 47's rise to success was neither linear nor self‐evident. Most importantly, the group's success was not brought about by literary merit. Other factors had a far greater impact, including political orientation, and an organisational structure that facilitated market connections. As a model, the particular case of Gruppe 47 is indicative of both the potential and the drawbacks of any such institution: While a cultural organisation with close ties to the market is exceptionally effective at promoting and popularising talent, it is equally effective at eclipsing commensurate talent, especially outside its boundaries.

Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing in English

In her "Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing in English," Louise O. Vasvári discusses aspects and perspectives of women's life writing, including her criteria of selection, the problematics of sourcing, issues of translation, and processes of publication. While the authors listed in the bibliography are overwhelmingly Jewish and from Central and East Europe, there are works listed by others whose experiences also offer important testimony not only on the camps but also on other aspects of the Holocaust. The bibliography suggests that women have written as much and, especially during the last decades, more than men about the Holocaust. Vasvári postulates that life writing -- a term utilized mostly in gender studies but useful for other types of texts -- is a useful designation for the texts at hand because it elides generic boundaries between history, fiction, documentary, and literature. It also raises questions about issues much debated in Holocaust scholarship, including author versus narrator, witness, history, memory, interpretation, culture, identity, and canon versus social perspectives of literature. Finally, life writing also elides the often valorized judgment on the literary merit of individual works.

Eyeless in Glasgow: James Kelman's Existential Milton

Wood published a vindication of the award stressing Kelman's affinities with Franz Kafka and James Joyce, but (Sir) Simon Jenkins's likening of the winner to an illiterate savage sticks longer in the public mind.1 Even Jenkins's colleagues at the London Times were bewildered by the ferocity of Kelman's detractors. From some of the English Alan Chadwick observed, you might have thought he had been found in the Queen's bedroom. But the Scottish reaction, too, was less than enthusiastic. A former lord provost of Glasgow, Dr. Michael Kelly, boasted of having no intention of reading the first (and to date only) Scottish winner of the prize but deplored the novel's language and politics nonetheless. Kelman's sudden cachet as a left-wing agitant even caught the attention of the shadow chancellor. Eager to shake an already dour public image, but ever wary of appearing too Scottish, too socialist, or too intellectual, Gordon Brown let it be known that he hadn't made it to the end of the book in question (qtd. in Poole 8). The book in question was largely missing from all this. The vast majority of media comment barely managed to describe How Late It Was, How Late, let alone consider its literary merits. This is a familiar

’Of Seint Alex of Rome’. A Middle English Version of the Life of the Saint

In addition, a reassessment of the text’s literary merit is proposed, through a broader contextualisation of the narration. On the one hand Of Seint Alex of Rome is dealt with as part of the larger unit in which it is preserved, Ms. XIII B 29; on the other, its significance as literary discourse is analysed in relation to the cultural panorama that characterises the centuries of its diffusion in Western Europe.

Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature Zhu Mei (bio) Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, editors. Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2006. xi, 533 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-674-01775-7. The early Qing was an extraordinarily creative and vibrant period in Chinese literary history. Among the studies that center on the traumatic experiences of Chinese intellectuals caused by the collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China, this volume is a pioneering one in the West. It is the fruit of two separate conferences sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute in June 2000 and June 2001. Before this volume, the study of early Qing literature in China focuses on how early Qing scholars and officials adjust their lives under a foreign regime. Moral evaluation and political attitudes toward the Qing government have been the fundamental standards to judge the literati's place in the history of literature. The contributors to this volume, the leading Western scholars in this field, quite convincingly have called for a comprehensive rethinking of the aesthetic and literary significance of the Manchu conquest reflected in the works of the most famous remnant subjects. Although the Ming-Qing transition as a historical event was almost an apocalyptic experience, characterized by unspeakable rupture, violence, and devastation, contributors to this volume see it as a period of cultural innovation and rupture of literary traditions, the birth of a new literary mode. With this new perspective and theoretical framework, I find it quite enlightening for the editors to chose "trauma and transcendence" as a theoretical sounding title. Idema, Li, and Widmer situate the literature of this period in trauma theory, at the intersection of poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic theoretical approaches. At the same time, they pull it away from the moral-political interpretations that are commonly associated with it in China. Moreover, the capacity of language to articulate the experience of historical trauma is viewed as transcendence, which not only refers to a specific existential status but also relates to the cognitive faculty. Specifically, the transcendence examined in artistic and literary merits in literary works selected in this collection can be better termed "aesthetic transcendence." The twelve chapters in this volume and the introductory chapters on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transitional years. Therefore, transcendence here can be understood as this volume's defining feature at two different levels: transcending traditional moral and political evaluation to aesthetic evaluation, a first layer; and a second [End Page 210] layer, exploring the way of transcending traumatic experience of dynastic transition from latter Ming to early Qing through literary works. The twelve chapters cover a range of literary genres that deal with "historical trauma and aesthetic transcendence." They are divided into three different sections: poetry, prose, and drama. Each part is preceded by a general introduction to the part as well as a more detailed introduction for each genre by an editor. Part 1 examines early Qing poets represented by Qian Qianyi, Wu Weiye, and Hanke. By investigating the depth of the poets' lyrical engagement with the historical crisis, the contributors to this volume attempt to reassess their place in the canon. Part 2 contains five chapters on fiction, memoirs, and other kinds of prose that offer as many approaches to modern readers' understanding of the transition between 1644 and 1700. Oki Yasushi focuses on the lives of Mao Xiang (1611-1693) and Yu Huai (1616-1696). Robert Hegel's "Dreaming the Past" is similarly concerned with the individual, focusing on Chu Renhuo (1630-1705). Ellen Widmer's study is also organized biographically, but it offers yet another perspective on Ming loyalist experience and can be taken as an exemplary study in this field. Widmer's chapter on Huang Zhouxing's prose is titled "Between Worlds: Huang Zhouxing's Imaginary Garden." Widmer points out that utopia in spirit, Jiangjiu yuan, is the imaginary subject of Huang's prose piece Jiangjiu yuan ji and other pieces such as his...

Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature by Anita Heiss, Peter Minter

I > ^ I ^ I I H I I are "highly regarded for their work in themedium" while exhibiting a "strong historical knowledge that could guide them when choosing work fortheexhibition." The commentary that introduc es each artist or work is excerpted by Grenville from interviews with his co-curators. This conversational approach reinforces the informal nature of the presentation, but the contrasts in language utilized by each presenter provide insights into the influencesand specificitiesof the medium for which they are known. Whereas comics critics/practitioners Art Spiegelman and Seth employ highly specialized terms in theirdis cussions ("What appears to be extra neous linework or brushwork has a visual, directional quality that leads you through each page"), video game designer Will Wright's obser vations on landmark video game art never stray far from the tactile experience of actually playing the game. Remarking on the simplic ity of Pac-Man's technical design, Wright astutely notes that "players learned that the joystickmoves the character; it soon becomes so instinc tive that the player is no longer aware that his or her hand is control ling the game." Each media considered could (and in many cases, already has) warrant more nuanced explorations of theirindividual charms, so thereis littledoubt that scholars of any one of these fieldswill find some aspect of the selection process or resulting work under examination to be lack ing or incomplete. The cumulative impact ofKrazyl's disparate sources make a compelling argument for edi tor/curator Bruce Grenville's vision of a broader survey of these young and, in some cases, "outsider" art forms. The result, at least in print, is a vivid testament to the efficacy of that approach and leaves the reader eager toexplore aspects of each topic ingreater depth. Rob Vollmar Norman, Oklahoma Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Anita Heiss & Peter Minter, eds. Crows Nest, NSW. Allen & Unwin /Macquarie University. 2008. xviii + 260 pages. au$39.95. isbn 978-1-74175-498-4 The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature is a ground breaking collection of literary, cul tural, and historical importance. It is the firstof its kind, covering over two centuries of Australian Aboriginal writing. It opens with the first known text written inEng lish by an indigenous Australian (1796), a letterfromaWangal leader called Bennelong inquiring after the well-being of his sponsor, who has returned toBritain.Like many of the early textsin thisanthology?letters, petitions, political documents?the writing isunexpectedly compelling: Bennelong's letterreads like a short story. That the lyricism of his bro ken English is accidental does not detract from the literary merit of the prose: "I hope Mrs. Phillip verywell. You nurse me Madam when I sick. You very good Madam: thank you Madam, & hope you rememberme Madam, not forget.Iknow you very well Madam. Madam I want stock ings.Thank youMadam/7 Reading through theanthology, we witness the transformation of indigenous Australia. Eighty-one authors from different aboriginal backgrounds express their experi ence in fictional and nonfictional prose, poetry, and excerpts from plays. The editors of the anthol ogy, Anita Heiss and PeterMinter, ^^^H have made a point of presenting ^^^H only literature written inEnglish, as ^^^H opposed toworks inAboriginal lan- ^^^H guages gathered and translated by ^^^H anthropologists. But theAboriginal ^^^H linguistic influence remains strong. ^^^H Much of thewriting is infusedwith ^^^H Aboriginal rhythms and original ^^^H ways of saying things. Some of the texts are even written in a vibrant ^^^H AboriginalEnglishpidgin. In his ^^^H play No Sugar, Jack Davis (1917 2000), one of theforemost Aboriginal ^^^H poets and playwrights, uses a pidgin ^^^H from theMoore River Settlement to ^^^H powerful poetic effect.A character ^^^H recounts the murderous injustices ^^^H of Gudeeah (whitemen): "Gudeeah ^^^H bin kiU'em. Finish, kill'em. Bigmob, ^^^H Fromthe invigorating chantlikepoems ofOodgeroo Noonuccal to David Unaipon's detailed studyof Aboriginal culture . . . this anthology presents a panorama of indigenous Australia's most powerful voices. llllllilliillillllllllllMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 78 1 WorldLiterature Today ^^^^H 1926, kill'em big mob my country." A central theme in theplay, and of much of thewriting in the anthol ogy, is the loss of language and awareness of traditional culture. Another remarkable piece, among many, is "The Boomerang Racket," by JoeTimbery (1912-78), a poet...

The Literary Merit of the New Gallus

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DiscussionsThe Literary Merit of the New GallusTed SomervilleTed SomervilleRice University Search for more articles by this author Rice UniversityPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 104, Number 1January 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/603576 Views: 12Total views on this site [© 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] All rights reserved.]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

John Milton: Catching the Conscience of the King? Politics and Paradise Lost

The paper analyzes John Milton's activities as a political polemicist before and after the killing of Charles I. It examines in particular his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and Eikonoklastes, his support for the regicide, and his concept of governance of the Commonwealth. It argues that there neither any literary merit, nor any polemical brilliance in these tracts, and that they are inadequate in outlining any approach either to the law of the constitution or to improving the position of the Commonwealth. It shows that they were based on a complete misunderstanding of the legal position of the monarch, either in ignorance or wilfully. It suggests that in Paradise Lost, Milton himself may well have perceived it as a vehicle for articulating an until then unarticulated remorse for his rabid utterances in his tracts.

Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India: The Apaddharmaparvan of the Mahabharata. By Adam Bowles.

The didactic sections of the Mahābhārata have long been explained away as late interpolations, clumsily added to the text with no literary merit of their own. Indeed, the great Mahābhārata scholar, E. Washburn Hopkins, considered the didactic corpora to be ‘fungus’ with little or no relevance to the core epic narrative. In Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India: The Āpaddharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata, Adam Bowles not only demonstrates that the Āpaddharmaparvan is integral in terms of the ideological concerns of the text, but he also argues for its artistic integrity – that it is a unified textual unit that was composed and included within the Mahābhārata with a conscious awareness of the larger narrative strategies of the text as a whole. Chapter One provides a survey of Mahābhārata scholarship, with particular attention to views put forth about the didactic sections. The story of Mahābhārata scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present has been visited numerous times before, but Bowles' rendition is useful in highlighting how specific assumptions concerning the lateness and lack of literary quality of the didactic sections have been central features in debates about the Mahābhārata's history and development.

Artistic Liminality: Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory

Artistic Liminality:Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory Stephanie J. Pocock In March, 1902, Maud Gonne, rehearsing for the role of the Old Woman in W.B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory's short play Cathleen ni Houlihan, wrote to Yeats to suggest a small change. "My dear Willie," she began, We rehearsed Kathleen tonight, it went splendidly all but the end. It doesn't make a good curtain—We are all of the opinion that Michael ought to go right out of the door instead of standing hesitating. It doesn't seem clear if he doesn't go out. If he goes out Delia can throw herself on Bridget's shoulder in tears which makes a much better end. Please write at once and say if we may do that.1 Yeats acquiesced, as he was wont to do whenever Gonne pleaded with him, and the final step of Michael Gillane across the threshold of his small cottage in pursuit of the "young girl" with "the walk of a queen" met with roaring approval.2 The cheers of its nationalist audience have long since died down, although not, perhaps, the effects of the political fervor that the play inspired. Critics still ponder whether the play is better read as political propaganda, or as literature. The sensationalism of Yeats's political opinions—whether passionately nationalist or darkly eugenicist, as in his penultimate play Purgatory (1938)—have proven distracting to discussions of his plays' literary and theatrical merit. Because of his involvement in the creation of a national theater that sought to "build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature," Yeats's plays have often been considered artifacts of his public life, evidence of the political and cultural beliefs that under girded his creativity.3 Conor Cruise O'Brien cautions that Yeats's politics should not be overlooked as an important influence on his literature, for "throughout his life as a writer Yeats had abiding, and intensifying, political interests and passions. It is [End Page 99] misleading to make him essentially non-political, on the strength of certain disclaimers, refusals, and ironies."4 Yet, once Yeats's political involvement enters the critical fray, the temptation arises to oversimplify the relationship between politics and art, and to view political events as material from which the artist may draw. Such an oversimplification assumes that political views are inflexible sources for art, and remain unaltered by the process of artistic creation.5 For Yeats, the relationship between politics and art was far more complex; the imaginative force of art was as likely to shape political convictions as the reverse.His ideal artist occupied a carefully negotiated space between public and private goals, and was free to address relevant events and issues while maintaining a personal vision free from the tyranny of opinions. Yeats's political views depended upon the maintenance of this liminal space; he supported the creation of a nation in which poetry could be both created and understood, and he reacted both politically and artistically when he felt that ideal threatened. Though Yeats was for many years an ardent nationalist, Gonne's brand of nationalism troubled him. Single-minded violence or self-sacrifice in the service of a cause produced, as the narrator of "Easter, 1916" tells us, "hearts . . . enchanted to a stone," invulnerable to the ambiguities of their situation, ambiguities vital to the creation of literature.6 Yeats understood violence as a necessary part of the historical cycle, but only inasmuch as it led to rebirth and creativity. Without the artist to remember and to reinterpret heroic acts, to build on the ruins of objective violence like the honey-bees in the crumbling walls of Thoor Ballylee, political ideals were empty, and heroism merely self-immolation.7 [End Page 100] His disappointment with the Irish Free State arose from its failure to incarnate a uniquely literate society from war's ruins. Instead, he found himself, in Seamus Heaney's words, in a "world of illiterates and politicians"; a world where some of his compatriots were less concerned with the creation of poetry than with the burning of Ascendancy houses.8 Yeats's resulting despair is clearest in Purgatory, a...

Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness , and: Illness and the Limits of Expression (review)

Reviewed by: Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness, and: Illness and the Limits of Expression Rita Charon (bio) Lisa Diedrich. Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 224 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-4698-2, $67.50. Kathlyn Conway. Illness and the Limits of Expression. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. 158 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-11619-5, $50.00. Scholarly and creative writing about the events and experiences of illness has escalated recently for reasons too numerous to count and too telling to say. Even those who write about these phenomena, I submit, do not know exactly why they do so. There seems to be a summons to write about the body, as if some powers of the cosmos have directed our collective attention to corporeal situations—pain, pleasure, bliss, aging, dying, being ill, sometimes getting better. Two recent publications, one by a psychotherapist and the other by a literary scholar, illuminate in startling ways both the subject and the summons to examine it. Psychotherapist Kathlyn Conway admits that she herself has been seriously ill with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and breast cancer. Having published a memoir (Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness), she moves here into a conceptual/ reflective stance, taking advantage of her own having lived through the ordeals she examines to achieve meaning-making theorizing for herself and her colleagues in illness. Lisa Diedrich does not reveal any personal motives for having embarked on a study of other peoples’ illness narratives, nor should she feel a duty to do so. As a scholar of cultural and literary studies, Diedrich deploys the formal approaches of textual criticism to expose the inner workings of narratives published by seriously ill and dying persons. Illuminated by one another’s efforts, these two books reveal to us—shockingly and primally—what is at stake not necessarily in being sick, but in an existence that includes illness at all. Treatments promises, in its introductory apparatus, to be an analyticodiagnostic examination of representing illness and even of being ill—or, as Diedrich oddly calls it, doing illness. Initially, the book seems as if given from a plateau of academic separation—a bit cool, hyper-referenced, seeming to want to prove itself a rigorous scholarly undertaking. Its reader is reminded that this book began its life as a doctoral dissertation, and some early stretches, whether written early in the process or not, seem destined less for one’s readerly eyes than some supervisor’s corrective marginalia. But something happens to the writing and the thinking and the experience of absorbing it along the way. Gradually, as account after account of horrible illness and tragic loss unfold in the author’s treatment of the works under study, the reader is suffused with a deep sadness, a sense not of the literary merit of this [End Page 740] memoir or that, but rather, of our collective tragedy as organisms destined without fail to sicken and die. Although Diedrich explores the political and cultural currents of the changing landscapes of professional dominance and patients’ rise to power (e.g., in AIDS and breast cancer activism), she seems most committed to exposing the individual, interior, subjective, existential ramifications and potentials of illness. Calling illness a “crisis of subjectification,” Diedrich aligns her project with Foucault’s study of sexuality and power, hinting that, today anyway, being sick propels the individual not on a simple search for cure or care, but rather, a do-or-die, no-stakes-higher, elemental transformation and then confrontation with the self one is (25). As Treatments proceeds, the psychoanalytic aspects of “doing” illness—following Leo Bersani’s notion that writing (and other aesthetic works) makes desire visible—govern the discussion of the function of illness writing. A controversial though ultimately supported hypothesis is offered that “illness has the capacity to unbind the ego from the internal super-ego, and from the external, cultural super-ego as well” (59). Such a claim almost makes illness seem a necessity in post-modern life, as perhaps it has become. Like its object—sickness—itself, the book winds silently and organically toward a systemic entropic halt. This is...

The Boethian Testament of Love

The Boethian Testament of Love Jennifer Arch Though there is substantial scholarly disagreement on the literary merits of Thomas Usk's Testament of Love and on the motives and character of its author, all acknowledge that the Testament is, or aspires to be, "Boethian." This adjective appears frequently in summaries of the Testament as shorthand to characterize the treatise's form or ideas. It is clear that Usk intended to draw a parallel between his situation and that of Boethius and that he saw the Consolation of Philosophy as in some sense authorizing his own literary efforts ("Yet also have I leve of the noble husbande Boece . . . to come after his doctryne").1 His lexical debts to the Consolation, especially to Chaucer's translation of it, have now been fully documented. But the word "Boethian" remains extremely imprecise, referring, as it does, mainly to the Consolation to the exclusion of Boethius's other works. It can allude to form, as in dialogue, or more particularly a dialogue between a wise "physician" and suffering yet educable "patient"; or to allegory; or to specific features of Neo-platonic philosophy; or to a generalized concept of universal love; or to Boethius's description of Fortune, a commonplace by Usk's time; or to a particular system of epistemology; or, most commonly for scholars of later medieval England, to the general sense that Boethius encourages a principled withdrawal from the concerns of earthly life, whether that withdrawal is physical or intellectual. One part of my argument in this article is that this latter reading of the Consolation distorts the arguments Boethius actually puts forward, and that at least one medieval reader—Thomas Usk—interpreted Boethius's reasoning quite differently. It may seem that I am omitting reference to the more important reader of Boethius in the later medieval period: Chaucer. Usk incorporated vocabulary from the Boece and from Troilus in the Testament, and his interest [End Page 448] in Boethius may have come from a desire to imitate Chaucer's literary works, as he supposedly desired to imitate Chaucer professionally.2 But, as I hope to show, Usk had his own reading of the Consolation, one that moves beyond mere borrowings and translations into attempts to absorb and retransmit Boethius's ideas as fully as he can. Similar claims have been made for Chaucer. But the nature of Chaucer's uses of the Consolation are so very different, and the evidence that he at any point actively promoted Boethian philosophy, so ambiguous, that it cannot be claimed that Usk was promoting an identifiably Chaucerian view of the Consolation.3 Usk's Testament, in fact, offers a unique opportunity to examine a medieval reader's interpretation of an ancient text and, more specifically, to judge whether our use of the word "Boethian" would match his. In what follows I identify four areas—process of education, politics, heroism, and life and death—in which I take Usk to be "reading" the Consolation of Philosophy and incorporating it into his own world view. In some of these areas it could be shown, I believe, that Chaucer interpreted Boethius quite differently than Usk did, though I do not deal with Chaucer's Boethianism here. I argue, rather, that Usk's Testament presents a reading of the Consolation somewhat different from that often considered to be the late-medieval view of that text. Usk's interpretations could match those of other contemporary readers or could be his [End Page 449] own idiosyncratic readings: either way the matter is of some interest for those who study the impact of the Consolation on English writing in the Ricardian period. The facts of Usk's dealings in politics have been explained in detail elsewhere. In this article I will refer to Usk's political situation only insofar as it relates to his uses of Boethius in the Testament4. Process of Education In the Consolation, the process by which the prisoner Boethius achieves understanding of the truths Philosophy sets forward is as important as the truths themselves. Boethius the author shows the reader not just what to think but how to think.5 The method is a dialogue in which a person...