Literary Place Research Articles

Featured Photographer Wesley G. Morgan

Featured Photographer Wesley G. Morgan Samantha Cole (bio) Wes Morgan is a man of varied interests. He hikes approximately five hundred miles every year in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and enjoys string band and bluegrass music, playing the guitar, banjo and mandolin. Professionally, he is finishing a phased retirement from his position as a full-time professor at the University of Tennessee in the Department of Psychology. Like Cormac McCarthy, he was born up North, in his case in Albany, New York, and moved South as a youngster, to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1944. He first moved to Knoxville in 1962 when he entered graduate school and has lived there with his family since 1970. Morgan's impetus to begin photography came from his father, who was also an amateur photographer. Though not particularly interested in his father's hobby at an early age, Morgan believes that exposure to the activity during his formative years must have influenced him to take up a camera himself. His appreciation of photography came after sifting through some seventeen-thousand images in a collection of Farm Security Administration works paid for by the government during the 1930s and '40s. He felt a connection with the photographers he found there, such as Russell Lee, Walker Evans, and especially Marion Post Wolcott. McCarthy came later. Beginning about 2002, he began photographing the places McCarthy referenced in his early works set in Knoxville and East Tennessee. He felt a real urgency to document these important literary places before they were lost to the wrecking ball and urban redevelopment. Morgan did have a brief encounter with McCarthy once in the lobby of a Chicago theater after McCarthy's play, The Sunset Limited, premiered in 2006. He readily admits to being "starstuck." Morgan has assisted several translators in their work on the novel Suttree and published papers about McCarthy in Puerto del Sol and The Cormac McCarthy Journal. It was there where he first published the route followed by the father and boy in McCarthy's The Road. Wes Morgan also maintains a website, Searching for Suttree, which includes his photos of appropriate sites and an accompanying map. Amazingly, it also includes links to concordances that he, Christopher Forbis, and John Sepich prepared of the words used in all of McCarthy's published novels. [End Page 116] Samantha Cole Samantha Cole is a Berea College senior from Lee County, Kentucky, majoring in Appalachian Studies. Since her freshman year, her primary labor position has been with Appalachian Heritage. She has also served as the editor of Carillon, the Berea College literary magazine. Copyright © 2010 Berea College

Mapping Literature: Visualisation of Spatial Uncertainty in Fiction

The interdisciplinary project ‘A Literary Atlas of Europe’ aims to develop an interactive atlas as a research tool for spatial analysis of literature. The central questions of where do stories take place and what interactions exist between literary spaces and the real space are answered by means of cartographical visualisation. This paper provides an overview of an extensive systematic evaluation of the literary space and proposes a practical implementation of literary spatial data into a database. In this process, specific properties of literary spaces are identified: the narrated spaces are fragmentary; they have vague boundaries and are often hard to localize, if at all. Furthermore, they can be transformed and remodelled by the author and can be linked to any time period. Considering these properties of fictional data, it becomes clear that visualisation of inherent uncertainty is necessary. The main challenge of this research is developing appropriate visualisation methods that visually satisfy those above-mentioned inherent rules of individual literary places. Therefore, visualisation methods for several specific properties are suggested and subsequently implemented to allow automatic map generation.

Improved Density Estimation for the Visualisation of Literary Spaces

The elements that constitute the literary space can mainly be described by categories such as settings, zones where actions take place and routes along which characters move. Apart from the presentation of the specific locations and spatial distribution of literary places, we are also interested in the spatial pattern such places form, the boundaries that separate the literarily populated from the void regions and the varying density of the literary space. From a GIS point of view, the elements of the literary space correspond to point, line and area data types. However, the established method used to calculate the spatially varying density – the method of density estimation – is restricted to point data only. In this paper, we will present an improved method that is able to estimate the density regardless of the underlying data type. Our approach aims at adopting the typically radially symmetric kernel function to approximate also linear and areal features. We claim that this method treats point, line and area data in a consistent way by taking equivalent density contributions into account. The different steps of the improved method can visually be examined by the accompanying map examples.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Red Book

Publication of The Red Book is an occasion for considering Jung as a poet in the tradition of epic. His close familiarity with Dante’s Divine Comedy, as evidenced by references in The Red Book as well as later in many of The Collected Works, offers an opportunity to consider Jung as epic poet. Although the author has no desire to match “Liber Primus,” “Liber Secundus,” and “Scrutinies” to Dante’s three canticas—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—nonetheless, Jung’s three sections of The Red Book resonate on many levels with Dante’s three canticas that structure his Divine Comedy. The human quest to descend to the Underworld to confront the dead is part of the epic hero’s journey, as is, with Dante and Jung, the crafting of their experiences in a new poetic mode while remaining part of the tradition of epic. The Red Book as literary epic places Jung, with Dante, in the generic tradition of epic exploits and their poetic expression.

Pajala as a literary place: in the readings and footsteps of Mikael Niemi

This paper concerns the relationship between literature and tourism, with specific focus on the Swedish novelist Mikael Niemi and his influence on local tourism development in his home municipality of Pajala. Attention is paid to how the success of Niemi's breakthrough novel Populärmusik från Vittula has turned Pajala into a well-known ‘literary place’, at the same time increasing tourism in the region. This paper discusses the literary meanings of Pajala by comparing two alternative ways of comprehending the idea of ‘Pajala as a literary place’. Pajala is approached as (1) a stage for the local and regional identities represented in Niemi's novel, and (2) a re-produced real-world experience for ‘literary pilgrims’, tourists wandering in the footsteps of Mikael Niemi. This paper also discusses the contradictions and disharmonies between these two literary worlds and the implications that these may have for local development strategies based on literary tourism.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English Janet Hadley Williams Treharne, Elaine and Greg Walker, eds, with the assistance of William Green, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; cloth; pp. xiv, 774; 7 b/w illustrations (maps); R.R.P. US$150.00, £85.00; ISBN 9780199229123. Weighing in at one and a half kilograms, this substantial volume is not a handbook in the literal sense, but it fulfils many of the other requirements of the manual for guidance in a particular area. Besides Elaine Treharne's useful prologue, 'Speaking of the Medieval', which opens to scrutiny the continuities and changes of the long period from Old to Early Modern English, and Greg Walker's epilogue on the large question of when the medieval period ended, there are thirty-five scholarly essays, not all of which can be examined here. Aiming to cover 'key themes' (p. v), they are grouped in fives under the capacious and permeable headings, 'Literary Production', 'Literary Consumption', 'Literature, Clerical and Lay', 'Literary Realities', 'Complex Identities', 'Literary Place, Space, and Time', 'Literary Journeys'. An Index of Manuscripts, and a substantial general Index follow. The last has two entries, not cross-referenced, to Brunetto Latini (first and surname), both including Latini's Trésor, but giving different page numbers. Most of the essays are authoritative, yet also fresh and thought provoking. Some, such as Nicholas Perkins's 'Writing, Authority and Bureaucracy', Ralph Hanna's 'Literature and the Cultural Elites', and Thomas Bredehoft's 'The Gothic Turn and Twelfth-Century Chronicles', are innovative, in interpretation, material, and approach. A few, such as Nicola McDonald's on the primer, and Bella Millet's on the English sermon before 1250, draw helpful attention to understudied yet essential topics. Others, among them Gillian Rudd's 'Metaphorical and Real Flowers in Medieval Verse' and Alcuin Blamires's 'Individuality', offer alternative and recuperative readings. A. S. G. Edwards's 'Books and Manuscripts' is a highly competent opening to Part I. The chapter introduces core information on the coexistence of print, manuscript, and oral transmission; surveys the functions (administrative, literary, devotional) and locations of these activities (with reference to the most important productions), and examines the patterns of commercialization. There are brief footnotes in this essay (as in others) and a useful self-contained bibliography appended. (Not here, but in essays of others, there are a few footnotes without a corresponding bibliography entry, such as 'Treharne 2003', p. 5 and 'Pettit 1984', p. 380.) In 'Textual Copying and Transmission', Orietta da Rold takes an unusually direct look at manuscript-making processes and the agencies involved, which is extended [End Page 264] in Simon Horobin's lucid 'The Professionalization of Writing' and Elizabeth Evenden's informative 'The Impact of Print ... 1476-1575'. Within Part II, Siân Echard's 'Insular Romance' addresses the central matter of the non-English origins for works 'en romanz', and the generic difficulties of the term. John McGavin's 'Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama' looks at both medieval performers and, especially, medieval spectators, pointing out most perceptively (via town records and the play texts themselves) the interdependencies in public community contexts over time. This is matched by Elisabeth Dutton's 'Secular Medieval Drama' (Part IV), which discusses carefully the lack of sharply defined boundaries between the dominating religious drama and the secular productions that began in the 1490s, then developed into the household dramas of the Tudor period. In Part III, Andrew Galloway's 'Visions and Visionaries', benefits from the Handbook's removal of the tight time-limits often given to the term 'Medieval', considering with illuminating amplitude the possibilities of the long and varying tradition of dream works, literary and non-literary. The topics of medieval individuality, autobiography, representation of identity (in terms of authority, race, religion, politics reputation, common or singular good, social status, nationality), occupy the authors of Part V, beginning with the wide and informed sweep of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's 'Authority, Constraint, and the Writing of the Medieval Self'. Two essays, Kathy Lavezzo's and Samantha Zacher's, are concerned with the ambivalent presentation of Saracens and Jews in medieval literary texts; Jacqueline Stodnick's...

Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception by David James

MLR, 105.2, 2010 547 fifthchapter, which brings together Powers's Prisoners Dilemma (a book offering a counterfactual account ofWalt Disney's response to nuclear warfare) and Mc Ewan's Atonement. Here, the notion of 'trauma covers widely diverging historical, national, and gendered representations of the effectsofwar. A possible alternative to Crosthwaite's approach is Lyndsey Stonebridge's The Writing ofAnxiety: Ima gining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which supplements 'trauma with the narrower Freudian idea of 'anxiety'. Stonebridge's project of describing 'away of staying in relation to history without being consumed by it' (p. 4) is akin toCrosthwaite's, but arguably possesses greater explanatory force than some of his more generalizing claims. This is to say that trauma, despite its ability to cut across temporal levels, is itself subject to specific historical conditions. These criticisms notwithstanding, Crosthwaite's book offers a timely and ambitious intervention in the fieldof postmodernist studies. Its argu ment for the 'Return of the Real' (in Hal Foster's phrase) convincingly illustrates that the Real has been postmodernism's secret sharer, and one of its obscure origins, all along. Lincoln College, Oxford Benjamin Kohlmann Contemporary British Fiction and theArtistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Percep tion. By David James. London: Continuum. 2008. vii+195 pp. ?60. ISBN 978-1-8470-6494-3. Early in his study of style, landscape, and perception in contemporary British fictionDavid James approvingly quotes Edward Said's observation inCulture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993) that after Lukacs and Proust, we have become so accustomed to thinking of the novel's plot and structure as con stituted mainly by temporality thatwe have overlooked the function of space, geography and location' (p. 4). James argues that despite a widespread 'spacial turn' in conceptual thinking across the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, there remains in literary studies a curious neglect of literature's spatial features and their formal and ideological implications' (p. 4). It is this neglect that James attempts to remedy in his book, providing a wide-ranging but by no means comprehensive inquiry into the formal role that landscapes play in contemporary British fiction' (p. 2). James's enquiry is divided into five thematic chapters. The first, 'Landscape and Narrative Aesthetics', addresses the conceptual and critical complexities raised by James's examination of the relationship between location and narration. Each of the remaining four chapters focuses on a specific aspect of this relationship. Chapter 2 examines the 'horizons' of the regional novel, with particular regard to Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe. The third chapter's 'Urban Visionaries' are Iain Sinclair and J. G. Ballard, with Sinclair's writings revealingly contrasted against Monica Ali's Brick Lane. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between landscape and memory, chiefly examining fiction by Graham Swift,A. L. Kennedy, and Trezza Azzopardi. The final chapter, 'Island Encounters', discusses landscape, migration, and images 548 Reviews of nationhood in the work of Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy. Along the way, James also offers insightful complementary readings of texts by writers including Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Rose Tremain, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others. James's interest in the formal and ideological implications of the literary land scapes he surveys ismarried to a fascination with the specific textual devices through which writers actualize these landscapes and how these devices 'inform the reader's emotional interaction with narrative textuality' (p. 5).Why, for ex ample, do readers find certain settingsmore affecting than others? For James, the reader is less an impassive witness than an active participant in the construction of literary place. It is therefore through close attention to the experience of reading these texts that James explores the formal and ideological issues at stake in them. James's detailed and sensitive remarks on perspective, rhythm, rhyme, and even typography bolster his assertion that literary space acts as a stylistic catalyst for some of themost innovative writers inBritain today' (p. 26). James repeatedly signals his determination to remain scrupulously attentive to the particularity of thewriters and texts under discussion, and to the specificity of their literary landscapes. His discussion is therefore as concerned to explore the differences between these writers' techniques, concerns, and...

A New History of English Metre (Studies in Linguistics, 5) by Martin J. Duffell

548 Reviews of nationhood in the work of Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy. Along the way, James also offers insightful complementary readings of texts by writers including Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Rose Tremain, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others. James's interest in the formal and ideological implications of the literary land scapes he surveys ismarried to a fascination with the specific textual devices through which writers actualize these landscapes and how these devices 'inform the reader's emotional interaction with narrative textuality' (p. 5).Why, for ex ample, do readers find certain settingsmore affecting than others? For James, the reader is less an impassive witness than an active participant in the construction of literary place. It is therefore through close attention to the experience of reading these texts that James explores the formal and ideological issues at stake in them. James's detailed and sensitive remarks on perspective, rhythm, rhyme, and even typography bolster his assertion that literary space acts as a stylistic catalyst for some of themost innovative writers inBritain today' (p. 26). James repeatedly signals his determination to remain scrupulously attentive to the particularity of thewriters and texts under discussion, and to the specificity of their literary landscapes. His discussion is therefore as concerned to explore the differences between these writers' techniques, concerns, and settings as their similarities. While highly admirable, this does leave James's conclusion with a difficult task to do in bringing themany rich strands of his discussion together again. Nevertheless, this studywill prove valuable to students and scholars of the authors discussed, and of the contemporary British novel in general. Furthermore, as an examination of how space is conceptualized and depicted, its significance extends across disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences. James suggests in his conclusion that 'Particularizing something as ephemeral and abstract as literary space provokes us to reflect on current critical pursuits' (p. 168). James's own valuable reflections on this subject run through his fascinat ing study,which offers a perceptive map of contemporary concerns in the field of literary studies at the same time as ithelps to open up a new landscape for critical exploration. London Paul Vlitos A New History ofEnglishMetre. ByMartin j.Duffell. (Studies inLinguistics, 5) London: Legenda. 2008. xii+292 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1-905981-91-5. Some aremoved bymetre, finding a strange power ormagic in patterns ofwords. Some, too, write books on it. IfMartin Duffell (with his jargon and statistical tables) seems an unlikely guide to the songs of sirens, he yet has much to say on them, offering ample materials forothers to draw on. He writes not as a critic but a linguist, employing much technical vocabulary. The first two of his ten chapters discuss linguistic metrics and then comparative metrics. After that the approach ishistorical: theGermanic inheritance of English; the symbiosis ofmedieval English and French; the late Middle Ages inEngland and MLR, 105.2, 2010 549 Scotland. With the sixteenth century comes a divide, when English prosody (like religion and phonology) took on new rules. Three chapters deal with their emer gence, development, and (for some) outmoding. The book ends with the coming of freeverse, and English metrics in the twentieth century, followed by fifteenpages of statistics on poetry fromChaucer toHeaney, and a bibliography. The result is laudable. Objections are minor. However, despite the 'history of its title, the book can jar in its comments on the past. Its technicalities also make it heavy going, and it is not always easy to extract historical facts from it, on (say) the origins of rhyme royal or the Spenserian stanza. On the theories that the writer sets out this reviewer makes no comment, except towonder if some work on prosody (not Duffell's) is a kind of literary pyramidology, sharing its rancour and inconclusiveness, as even the author notes (p. 5,n. 6). Criticism of detail includes the following. On themetrics of Welsh (p. 47, n. 3) there are better writers than Robert Graves and Mark Abley, both untutored in that language. TheWelsh themselves cite The Princeton Encyclopedia ofPoetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Few historians will accept (p. 73) thatWilliam the Conqueror was 'theworst of England's kings' or...

Danzig als literarischer Ort (Grass, Chwin, Huelle)

In Giinter Grass'. Pawel Huelle's and Stefan Chwin's texts the literary place ,,Danzig comes into being as a unity of place and time on a intertextual and discursive level. The history of the real town, which was marked by national and cultural variety as well as by destruction and forced displacement, by resettlement and the search after a new home and identity, is conducive as background to the writers' criticism of a stereotype, nationalistic and ideological world of ideas. Similarly the novelists confront the openness, multi-formity and perviousness of the natural and cultural area with the nation states' struggle for totalitarian power. At the same time they doubt the Polish and the German post war historiography, which is marked by supersession and ideological falsification, and they want to replace it by a personal culture of remembrance.

Japanese Encounters with Latin America and Iberian Catholicism (1549–1973): Some Thoughts on Language, Imperialism, Identity Formation, and Comparative Research

PROLOGUE Almost one century after Cortes had conquered Nuova Espana in 1519, the Japanese delegation on board the San Juan Baptista docked in Acapulco on January 28, 1614. Consisting of more than 100 Japanese members, this delegation was lead by Hasekura Rokuzaemon Tsunenaga (1571-1622), a vassal of the Lord Date Masamune (1567-1636). The ship had set sail on October 28, 1613 from the port of Tsukinoura and took nearly three months to cross the Pacific Ocean. On board was Luis Sotelo (1574-1624), a Franciscan priest from Seville, who had accompanied the delegation. Upon his return to Europe, Sotelo dictated his experiences to an Italian archivist, Scipione Amati, who compiled the document Historia del Regno de Voxu in 1615. (1) In this history, Luis Sotelo triumphantly reported that seventy-eight Japanese were baptized in Mexico City, although the extant church records, as noted by Van C. Gessel, (2) make no mention of such event. It was also reported that a group of twenty or so Japanese sailed from Veracruz on June 10, 1614. One may presume that they passed Puebla in 1614 on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. They were probably the first Japanese countrymen to make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. On November 3, 1614 they met Pope Paul V, but this audience produced little in terms of concrete results. The Tokugawa Shogunate, founded by Ieyasu (1543-1616), had expelled the Christians in 1613, the year of Hasekura's departure. So, while the delegation was abroad, its goals had already been abandoned in Japan. On his way home, Hasekura received orders to stay in Manila for several years. It was only in 1620 that the Japanese authorities allowed him to return home. When Hasekura died two years later in 1622, his diary was confiscated and destroyed. The loss of this first-hand document makes it difficult to reconstruct this initial Japanese encounter with the new world. It was also in 1622 that Luis Sotelo disguised himself and made his way back to Japan. The priest was arrested and executed. His martyrdom took place on August 25, 1624. This diplomatic mission fascinated Endo Shusaku (1923-1996), the Japanese Catholic writer, and it became the inspiration for his novel The Samurai (1980; translated into English by Van C. Gessel in 1982). (3) The narrator of the novel, Velasco, is faithfully modeled after Luis Sotelo. In this book, Endo examines his own faith while, at the same time, his psyche while analyzing the mental and spiritual suffering of the Japanese people as a whole. Endo asks: why did all those who were involved in the mission have to suffer for the sake of Christianity? Was their suffering redeemed? Indeed, the writer's life-long concern was with human suffering and, in particular, the passion of Christ. Recent studies in comparative literature have re-examined Endo's novels from the post-colonial perspective. In this paper, I would like to briefly discuss three issues that are relevant to the historical and cross-cultural range of Endo's literary creation and place them within the larger context of our discipline. (4) I Christian encounters with Japan challenged the notion of universality. Firstly, European exposure to the Japanese language raised fundamental questions concerning how to incorporate it into the pre-existing system of knowledge. It is well known that Saint Francois Xavier's (1506-1552) letters from Japan led Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) to believe that Japan was the Kingdom of Prester John. Postel believed that the Japanese language offered the key to solving the Christian mystery. (5) Half a century later, in 1606, the Jesuit Joan Rodriguez (1561?-1639), a famous interpreter who was based in Japan, compiled and published Arte da lingoa de Iapam in Nagasaki. The book was the first grammar of Japanese ever written in a European language. Its description of Japanese grammatical structure was groundbreaking. Rodriguez regarded the particles of the Japanese language (the so-called te-ni-woha) as equivalent to the inflections in European languages. …

Salvador Dalí: i luoghi della letteratura

Investigating Dalí’s literary places is a way of learning about how painting and literature are articulated in the work of a modern artist. The meeting point between visual and graphic expression paves the way for a new revitalized mythology, where the explorer of poetry comes into play. In the artistic locus, through tekhnê, fantasies are expressed, which faithfully respect both the modern and classic forms, as a synthesis of reality and truth as realized through the work of art.

Cyclopedia of literary places

Place - setting, location - is as central to the study of literature as character. Whole course studies have been designed around it; papers as short as one page and as long as doctoral dissertations have addressed it. Now, for the first time, librarians, students, and teachers have a comprehensive reference source that addresses it. This 3-volume reference set is a completely new concept: a title-driven reference work that analyzes the use of place in literary works. Cyclopedia of Literary Places is organized and presented in a form that will be familiar to users of Salem's Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. It will also be integrated into Salem's established family of literary reference works, to which it adds something entirely new: extensive and intensive coverage of place in literature. The set supports, supplements, and is a dynamic companion to both Masterplots, Second Revised Edition (1996) and Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. Cyclopedia of Literary Places contains articles on more than 1,300 literary works - representing the works of more than 630 authors - selected from the 1,805 titles covered in Masterplots. The selected titles are those that best lend themselves to meaningful discussion of place as a literary device. These include virtually all the novels, most of the plays, and a selection of poetry. Every title covered in Cyclopedia of Literary Places also has related articles in both Masterplots and Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. Users will find detailed synopses and plot analyses in Masterplots and detailed character analyses in Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. The articles range in length from half-page articles for short stories, most plays, and poetry works, to one-to two-page articles for novels. Each article provides standard top-matter information: full title, author's name and vital dates, type of work, type of plot, time of plot, and date of original publication. A brief Introductory paragraph explains where the work is set and comments on themes and patterns in the work's use of place. The set contains more than 5,500 separate place entries. Help with the pronunciation of foreign names is provided in many entries. Discussions within the entries themselves focus on how locations are used as literary devices within the novels, plays, or poems. The entries explore such issues as how places help to establish mood, how they symbolize the actions and characters of the story, how they appear to change as the story develops, and what their overall contribution to the work may be. Geographically real and invented settings are treated equally here. Articles in this set are arranged alphabetically by the titles of the works they discuss. A complete list of the titles, including cross-references, can be found at the back of volume 3, where users will also find an Author Index. The Place Index lists places covered in individual entries, with substantial cross-referencing.

A New Modernism or ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’?: Hybridity in Georg Klein's Libidissi

Since unification, critics Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher, influenced by Karl Heinz Bohrer, have called for a return to a supposedly repressed modernist tradition in which aesthetic transcendence and subjectivity were valued more highly than any moralising agenda. Other editors and writers such as Uwe Wittstock, Martin Hielscher and Matthias Politycki, however, have promoted a so‐called ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’ based on Anglo‐American models stressing readability and story‐telling. In both cases, the guiding motivation has been the desire to define a space for German writing within the globalised literary market place. Georg Klein's Libidissi presents a model of a possible third way between a form of modernism that would retreat into the ghetto of the German literary tradition and imitation of the Anglo‐American mainstream. The present article thus reveals the manner in which Klein's novel plays with hybridity: hybridity of genre and influences insofar as the book alludes to the Anglo‐American tradition of the spy novel and hybridity as a means of resisting globalisation and the eradication of local cultures.

Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media ed. by Irene Gammel

ESC 28, 2002 desultorily by commenting on Nowlan’s fan mail before he switches for one page to Nowlan’s confidence as a writer, and then to Nowlan’s collaborations with Walter Learning. This discursive beginning results from too many loose threads that do not willingly tie into a noteworthy event in Nowlan’s life. W ithout a charted course, the biographical narrative wanders in search of meaningful direction, and if Nowlan were to turn here, he might not meet himself at all. Paradoxically, this welter of information most everywhere else in the book gives it its impetus, creates the multi-dimension­ al Alden Nowlan, and allows him to stare back at you from its pages. At times, readers can experience an illusion of dialogue with Toner’s subject or learn of the complexity of his person­ ality alluded to in the book’s title. There is also a scholarly collection of endnotes that references letters and interviews not before presented in this form, as well as a comprehensive biblio­ graphy and index. W ith a genealogical chart, tighter control over “narrative” strands, and more about the Canadian literary contexts of Now­ lan’s writing career, this book would be even better. But even without changes, this biography asserts itself as an indispens­ able window on the life of one of Canada’s most introspec­ tive writers. ED BALSOM / College of the North Atlantic Irene Gammel, ed. Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual SelfRepresentations in Life Writing and Popular Media. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 214. $41.95 (U.S.) paper. In her introduction to Confessional Politics, Irene Gammel de­ scribes how the association of “confession with femininity” (1) has meant that in Western culture women have “become the confessional sex par excellence” (2). Their writings are, there­ fore, inevitably “subjected to confessional modalities” (2) that proscribe the writings of women as confessional, whereas the same writing by men is classified as literary. She traces the roots 566 REVIEWS of the problem to the privatization of confession in the format of the Roman Catholic confessional in the sixteenth century. Using a Foucaultian critique, she proposes that, especially for women — from Dante’s Francesca through Freud’s Dora to the contemporary film-makers’ readings of Duras and Nin — we live in a society in which confession of sexuality is encouraged in or­ der to police the subjects who make them. This leads to the appropriation of their stories for the purposes of masculinist art, psychiatry, and ideology and the entrapment into power­ lessness of the women who made the “confessions” in the first place. Gammel proposes that the essays will show that women, who must make use of the intimate and the personal in their writing because of the very nature of the changes they wish to make in the world (the personal is, after all, the essence of the political), are finding new ways to circumvent the confessional traps that await them and “establish a new genre that encom­ passes the articulation of female sexual self-representation,” one that “uses self-conscious literary rhetorical strategies that fre­ quently approximate literary devices” (7). I find, given the essays that follow, that this is a large claim, since what they collectively tend to demonstrate is that, despite the sophistication of “rhetorical strategies” and “literary de­ vices,” all but the most aesthetically elite confessional acts are generally recouped by the larger patriarchal culture. Gammel and contributors may laud the courage of some of the women whose works they record, but in most cases they are preoccu­ pied not with the art that is made by the movement between the construction of rhetorical strategies and their maturation into literary devices, but rather with the ways in which the power of masculinist readings has stolen the sympathetic readings and, thus, the literary places these texts should occupy and substi­ tuted a craven voyeur’s reception in place of understanding. The overall effect of the book is to warn readers of the con­ tinuing dangers for women of confessional writing, which may seem empowering, but is ultimately disempowering, a disturb­ ing idea considering that confessional writing of various kinds is a powerful draw for...

Literary places, tourism and the heritage experience

Literary places can be defined in various ways, but principally they acquire meaning from links with writers and the settings of their novels. Such places attract tourists and form part of the landscape of heritage tourism. Several key concepts involving heritage are applicable to literary places, and empirical studies allow a greater understanding of their relevance. Research questions of this paper include how much awareness of literature tourists possess and what kinds of satisfaction they derive from their visit; how many literary pilgrims, and more general tourists, there are; and how relevant issues of authenticity and conservation are to this experience.

מכתב חדש אשר עַדֶן בימינו לא היה: המאסף

The author examines the phenomena related to the publication of the first modern Hebrew journal, Hameasef (1783-1811), in early Haskalah in Germany. While attaching importance to the earlier appearance of Kohelet Musar, edited by Moses Mendelssohn in the 1750's, the article argues for the primary historical and literary place of importance of Hameasef . In Hameasef , one notices significant trends related to the new and modern conceptualization of Judaism offered by Hebrew Haskalah. The journal manifested a newer, wider view of Jewish communities of Europe, and presented a re-interpretation of Jewish heritage. This journal, unlike the ephemeral Kohelet Musar , established a center of Hebrew literature, fostering the creative efforts of Hebrew writers and poets, transcending its boundaries and its time. The development of the European literary periodicals in the eighteenth century and the changes in cultural scene in Europe, especially the emerging middle classes, the setting up of readers' societies and public libraries, are cited as general backdrop for the launching of the Hebrew monthly. The article reviews the early literary periodicals in Germany, and concentrates on the Berlinische Monatsschrift , which started publication half a year before the Hebrew journal, and thus was said to have influenced the latter. By examining the introductions to both the German and Hebrew monthlies and the contents of their respective issues, the author concludes that while there are certain similarities between the two, their orientation was essentially different. There were certain similarities in format, size, and printing practices. However, other German periodicals, examined as well, shared these similarities. A comparison of the literary aspects of the two journals and their use of prevalent literary genres indicates general trends of 18th-century European literature, and does show that the Hebrew journal concentrated on its own unique Hebraic heritage, promoting the publication of original literary works. The ostensible affinity between the two is explained as an adherence to Enlightenment tenets, to literary conventions and to journalistic practice that the two had in common. The author goes on to review some of the other important German journals, such as the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (started in 1765), Magazin für die Deutsche Sprache (1782), Der Deutsche Merkur (1783), and Deutsches Museum (1776), in order to show the prevailing journalistic trends of the time. The Hebrew journal's affinity to the German periodicals in general is marked by its attempt to preserve a unique Judaic and Hebraic character for which there was no precedent except in the general literary tradition of Hebrew letters. Finally, there is an attempt to classify Hameasef in accordance with various definitions of Enlightenment periodicals, as suggested by such critics as W. Graham, R. Bond, and J. Wilke. The Hebrew journal is classified as an interdisciplinary periodical, dedicated to both creative work and thought, yet also as a journal desirous of disseminating knowledge and promoting the Hebrew Enlightenment.

Literary market place

Literary market place

A Paramount Narrative: Exploring Space on The Starship Enterprise

At the beginning of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a voice-over reminds us that the narrative we are about to see belongs not to the various persons, human or otherwise, who populate the show, but to the Enterprise itself. The Enterprise is accordingly privileged in the philosophy and iconography of Star Trek, both for its audience and within the internal logic of the series. Not only does the Enterprise provide the physical space within which most of the series' events occur, but it also creates imaginative, political, and communal spaces that give shape to the fictional world of The Next Generation. Near the end of the series, an episode in which the Enterprise becomes a sentient being makes explicit its ongoing role as a protagonist in the Star Trek saga. In this essay we explore this active, multiple space as it defines and enables the fictions it contains. In many fictional texts, a physical environment does not merely serve as the frame or the background of the narratives that unfold within its boundaries, but as a structuring force within those narratives. From Plato's cave through the Marquis de Sade's boudoir to Defoe's desert island, Sartre's hell, and Conrad's jungle, literary places have had a narrative life of their own, as they have contained tensions, possibilities, and potentialities that help constitute the stories of their inhabitants. In certain genres, particularly science fiction and utopic fiction, the elaboration of a work's physical setting often becomes an important and complex textual project in its own right. The premise of such works is that a particular imagined environment will generate distinctive narrative possibilities. Hence many of the most influential utopic and dystopic texts in our culture, such as 1984, Brave New World, and Blade Runner, begin with a detailed portrayal of a physical space. Various questions about a physical environment can become textually important in these works, including the relative isolation of the space in which the narrative occurs, its climate, its divisions, and its use of communal as opposed to privatized spaces. How convenient is this environment for meeting the needs of its inhabitants? What sorts of technology figure prominently within it, and how dependent is the environment upon this technology? What is its guiding aesthetic? In some science fiction, the question of how to interpret the nature and boundaries of a physical space is itself problematized, thereby taking the primacy of these concerns to a new level. The Enterprise D likewise does more than serve as a container for Star Trek's complex social and political vision through providing an imagined environment. As the show's privileged aesthetic object, it functions to depict and even to determine a fictional world. September 1997 marked the tenth anniversary of the first television appearance of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Though its creation had been under discussion for some time, its debut occurred in a cultural context markedly different from that of the Enterprise of the original series.

A Paramount Narrative: Exploring Space on the Starship Enterprise

At the beginning of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a voice-over reminds us that the narrative we are about to see belongs not to the various persons, human or otherwise, who populate the show, but to the Enterprise itself. The Enterprise is accordingly privileged in the philosophy and iconography of Star Trek, both for its audience and within the internal logic of the series. Not only does the Enterprise provide the physical space within which most of the series' events occur, but it also creates imaginative, political, and communal spaces that give shape to the fictional world of The Next Generation. Near the end of the series, an episode in which the Enterprise becomes a sentient being makes explicit its ongoing role as a protagonist in the Star Trek saga. In this essay we explore this active, multiple space as it defines and enables the fictions it contains. In many fictional texts, a physical environment does not merely serve as the frame or the background of the narratives that unfold within its boundaries, but as a structuring force within those narratives. From Plato's cave through the Marquis de Sade's boudoir to Defoe's desert island, Sartre's hell, and Conrad's jungle, literary places have had a narrative life of their own, as they have contained tensions, possibilities, and potentialities that help constitute the stories of their inhabitants. In certain genres, particularly science fiction and utopic fiction, the elaboration of a work's physical setting often becomes an important and complex textual project in its own right. The premise of such works is that a particular imagined environment will generate distinctive narrative possibilities. Hence many of the most influential utopic and dystopic texts in our culture, such as 1984, Brave New World, and Blade Runner, begin with a detailed portrayal of a physical space. Various questions about a physical environment can become textually important in these works, including the relative isolation of the space in which the narrative occurs, its climate, its divisions, and its use of communal as opposed to privatized spaces. How convenient is this environment for meeting the needs of its inhabitants? What sorts of technology figure prominently within it, and how dependent is the environment upon this technology? What is its guiding aesthetic? In some science fiction, the question of how to interpret the nature and boundaries of a physical space is itself problematized, thereby taking the primacy of these concerns to a new level. The Enterprise D likewise does more than serve as a container for Star Trek's complex social and political vision through providing an imagined environment. As the show's privileged aesthetic object, it functions to depict and even to determine a fictional world. September 1997 marked the tenth anniversary of the first television appearance of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Though its creation had been under discussion for some time, its debut occurred in a cultural context markedly different from that of the Enterprise of the original series.

A Literary Common Ground

A Literary Common Ground Lee Rust Brown Let me make note of a few things that have occurred to me during this conference. Some of these will be observations; some will be practical inferences. One of them, though, involves the crossing of an expectation, or maybe a fear, I had brought with me to Minneapolis. Since this has to do with the whole tone of the conference, we might as well begin with it. It, of course, was the question of the polemical nature of this gathering. Would this conference be diagnostic and denunciatory in nature, or would it seek to start something truly new? Certainly we all feel the need of something new—not new, either, in the sense that movements or ideological positions claim to be new, but in the sense of a fresh gathering of common attention in the place where literature is, the place where each of us who loves literature already goes alone. This would be a possibility for something original rather than just another novelty—which makes the question of polemics all the more urgent. An association that founded itself in complaint would be only one more identity-group making a virtue out of its grudge. And the grudge, in that case, would have been a sad reflex of feeling superseded and powerless. But where have the polemics against current orthodoxies been? I am delighted not to have heard them in any strenuous capacity. Even their relative absence hasn’t commanded any extended attention, and that may be an even more telling point. I take this to be partly the result of foresight and good sense. But the clean air here has been more than a reward for our mutual constraint. Instead, it seems evidence of the fact [End Page 193] that, when literature occupies our attention, there is no need for self-defense. Justice, or justification, happens by itself when we “do our own work,” as Socrates recommended. What is our own work, then? This association has made a point, it seems, of declining to prescribe what it should be. The only thing we are absolutely sure of is that its subject is literature, and that its standards and rewards should be of a literary nature. From there the field opens up—and this conference has succeeded in keeping it open in some very concrete ways. Let’s think briefly about the two panels we attended yesterday. The morning panel on “Intellectual Craftsmanship” seemed unified in its concern with the disciplined ways by which we commit ourselves to literary experience. Literature itself, as well as what we do with it, teaches us this discipline, which is “aesthetic” in every sense of that word. Roger Shattuck set the tone when he described the discipline of reading as an issue of preparation and assimilation on the one hand, and as a kind of complete perceptual openness on the other. Such openness, in our normal experience, allows us to be surprised, to see actual things, perhaps, instead of their institutional categories. But literature also requires that we craft our receptivity. The surprises we prepare ourselves to undergo are achieved breakthroughs, which makes them no less unpredictable but all the more deeply affecting. Criticism cultivates such surprising experience. (I think experience is the crucial word, by the way, since everyone on that first panel seemed to be devoted to a kind of free empiricism.) The spectacular moments of visionary power that Robert Alter isolated in Dickens are places that startle and disturb us—and we track our own surprise, and intensify it, when we look closely at how those dark places of power emerge from Dickens’s refiguring of a world where darkness otherwise tends toward an entirely unredeemable opacity. We have to read “synesthetically,” as Shattuck says, “with both eyes open,” to let ourselves be for a moment blinded by such literary places. Once again, the discipline of reading—devotedly and resistantly—frees us for the achieved experience. Slowing down, in Sven Birkerts’s sense of “retardation and deceleration,” is precisely a matter of stepping into a field of experience shaped (or, in an auditory sense, fostered and conserved) by the special demands of literature. It...