Male Narratives Research Articles

Versions and Subversions of Islamic Cultures in the Film The Stoning of Soraya M

SummaryThe aim of this article is to explore the idea of versions and subversions of narrative constructions and reinterpretation of Islamness or Muslim cultures from an analysis of the film The Stoning of Soraya M. This will be done by focusing on the narratives authorised by men in comparison to those narratives of Islam created by women in the film. It will be demonstrated that male-authored narratives are anchored in the dastardly law of the stoning/lapidation of women as found in the Hadith. In the fictional world of the film The Stoning of Soraya M, the stoning/lapidation of women is depicted as a gross distortion of the Qur'an. In short, it will be revealed that women can create their own narratives that shun and complicate the Qur'an and critique men, most of whom are the interpreters of the Qur'an. If male narratives in the film incline towards violent actions against women, women's response to these forms of violent narrative of Islamness is uneven. The film benefits narrative versions of women who reinterpret the Sunnah and its support of the practice of the stoning/lapidation of women. Through the character of Zahra, women in the film create alternative frameworks for self-help and the call to stop the abhorrent practices of the physical and spiritual stoning/lapidation of women. The film suggests that this action by women in the film, as in real life, is fundamental to the survival of the most democratic versions of Islam that are threatened by orthodox and inflexible interpretation of the Qur'an. The attempt at retrieving contesting narrative versions of Islamness means engaging with multiple re-evaluations of received histories of Islam imagined from a privileged cultural site of the film.

The Affront of the Aspiration Agenda: White Working-Class Male Narratives of ‘Ordinariness’ in Neoliberal Times

This article draws on accounts of white working-class boys (age 14-16) from South London in order to explore how they reconstitute their learner-identities within the ‘raising aspirations’ rhetoric. The current dominant neoliberal discourse in education, which prioritises a view of aspiration that is competitive, qualification-focused, and economic, shapes the subjectivities of these young males though there exist nuanced strategies of resistance. In an era of high modernity where youth feel increasing risk, the identities of young people are subject to tremendous change where traditional class and gendered boundaries are being subverted, reimagined, and reconstituted. Focusing on academic engagement as an identity negotiation, this research critically considers where young men enact strategies to construct themselves as ‘having value’ in spaces of devaluing where they reconcile competing and contrasting conceptions of aspiration.

Birth of Therianthropic Male Hero Narrative as Fox Goddess’s Transfiguration Process to Fox God and Initiation of Desire’s realization towards Humanization in 'Gu Family Book'

Birth of Therianthropic Male Hero Narrative as Fox Goddess’s Transfiguration Process to Fox God and Initiation of Desire’s realization towards Humanization in 'Gu Family Book'

Superando el Trauma Colectivo: Metaficción, Intertextualidad, y la Necesidad de Exteriorizar y Relativizar el Trauma en "Las Vírgenes Suicidas"

In a period when Trauma Studies have been assuming more and more importance, Jeffrey Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), happens to center precisely on the traumatic adolescent experiences of its protagonists. Its fragmented content mirrors the very structure of the dreamy narrative: after witnessing the Lisbon sisters’ mass suicide, the group of male narrators decides to tell a story truthful to their posttraumatic condition. This brings about the collective narrator’s failure to master the accuracy of the past events accompanied by their urge to recount the truth about the inexplicable suicides. In this paper, the novel is analyzed in terms of its connections with “another’s word”, to echo Bakhtin: on the one hand, the narrator negotiates with the community, with different kinds of written and oral accounts, even with their own childhood memories; on the other hand, the text communes intertextually with other texts. These connections help in the process of working through or coming to terms with trauma. It is argued that the path towards healthy mourning (as opposed to melancholia) must have recourse to the Other. In the novel, this is achieved via storytelling and subtle intertextual references to previous fictional works.

Entre las dos Españas: sobre el lugar ideológico de La Gaviota de Fernán Caballero

First published in 1843, La Gaviota is mainly considered as a conserva- tive novel written by a conservative author. According to recent studies, the aim of this article is to show that the male narrator (Fernan Caballero), far from being the spokesman of the severe female writer (Cecilia Bohl de Faber), seeks to conciliate the vibrant conflict between the partisans of the Espana moderna and the Espana eterna. He locates his attempt at conciliation inbetween the metropolis (Madrid) and the andalusian village (Villamar), in a place that combi- nes urban and rural, modern and traditional aspects of contemporary Spanish life: Sevilla.

Raymond Carver, Male and Female Interventions in "Cathedral"

Generally speaking, the narratives are divided into two categories; those written by men writers and those written by women writers. In other words, some narratives are narrated by a male narrator who employs distancing strategies and some are narrated by a female narrator using engaging strategies, which are respectively employed by men and women writers. This is what Warhol, the feminist narratologist, proposes while she bases her ideas on Genette's narratological theories concerning the narrators and a 'distance' they create between the readers and the story which is told in the narrative. Carver's Cathedral is an exception. Cathedral significantly represents a narrator whose gender changes throughout the narrative. Though, the whole narrative is recounted by a first person narrator, by a man, his gender changes from a male to a female narrator. Investigating Carver's aim of using this method, this paper probes the male and female interventions in the narrative.

Słuchająca „zamilkłych głosów” i jej opowieść. Myśl feministyczna Rachel Elior

The aim of this article is to present the feminist thought of Prof. Rachel Elior (the Hebrew University, Jerusalem), who is a world-known scholar working, mainly, in the field of Jewish mysticism in its different forms and aspects. Nevertheless, Prof. Elior dedicated some of her works also to the problem of Jewish women who, for centuries, have been, generally, absent, in social, religious and cultural life of Jewish communities living in different parts of the world. As the analysis of Elior’s feminist literature shows, the aforementioned absence of the women has been mainly caused by the patriarchal order, created “by men and for men”, by means of some male narratives and male mythology, in which women seem to be – usually - perceived as some inferior creatures or they are simply demonized.

Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery

Publisher Thomas Pomplun of Eureka Productions has long had a love affair with Edgar Allan Poe. When he decided to launch his now acclaimed Graphic Classics series devoted to comic book adaptations of classic works of fiction in 2001, Volume 1 was devoted entirely to thirteen new and reprinted stories and poems by Poe as adapted and illustrated by some of the best writers and comic artists in the field. Not satisfied with the first effort, Pomplun would return in 2004, 2006, and again in 2010 with three new editions of that first volume. Each time, while some stories were retained, new hands and drawing pens were put to work on fresh selections. As if such unparalleled devotion were insufficient, he has now produced an entirely new title as Volume 21 devoted to Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery.The volume includes fifteen stories and poems by Poe ranging across an interesting cross-section of his most popular works. Probably the best known is “The Tell-Tale Heart,” surely the most frequently adapted from the Poe canon in all of comics literature and a version of which appears in all the earlier anthologies by Pomplun. One would think that the ways of visualizing the story have been exhausted by now, but not so here. Seasoned comic book artist Ronn Sutton changes the game entirely by making the usual male narrator into a woman, but not just any woman—a neo-Nazi punk rock one. Everything else looks different there on out. Sutton alternates purely horizontal panels with vertical ones to create a reading experience that captures the increasing madness of the narrator. The art is stunning. This is a powerful piece of comic art that makes this overfamiliar story seem new again.Another frequently adapted story is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” many of which fail because they seem unable to reserve the solution to the murder mystery until the last part of the narrative. Writer Antonella Caputo and artist Reno Maniquis avoid that problem. In a semi-realistic style, with effective use of brown and olive colors, Maniquis provides a richly detailed re-creation of Paris in the 1880s, and Caputo uses literary, print, and intellectual references of the time to enrich the theoretical framework of this first detective story.“Berenice,” by Pomplun and illustrator Nelson Evergreen, uses pastel colors to a surprising effect in a basic horror story. But the colors darken as we move across the twelve pages, from a gloomy realism, to an increasingly frenzied set of displaced images, to conclude with a jarring bloody ending. You will not want to visit the dentist again anytime soon.“Hop-Frog,” as adapted by Rod Lott and drawn by Lisa K. Weber, moves to caricature and comic exaggeration to tell the story of the crippled dwarf who served as the court jester to a cruel and corpulent king and body of lords. The lively images and panel arrangements create a sense of watching an animated film as the jester renders his violent but well-deserved justice on them.Artist Brad Teare's “The Man of the Crowd,” adapted by Rich Rainey, combines a ragged wood-cut style with cartoon caricature to capture the strange story about crowds of people who seem to go nowhere. We are forcibly pulled along as the narrator pursues one man in particular for no one knows what reason.“King Pest,” written by Antonella Caputo and illustrated by Anton Emdin in grand cartoon style, is a wild and raucous romp relating the adventures of two none-too-bright seamen during the plague in London. Emdin's weird style and visual hyperbole fit the perverse mood of Poe's story exactly.Additional stories, and their writers and illustrators, include “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Pomplun and Michael Manning, “The Oval Portrait” by Pomplun and Craig Wilson, and “The Masque of the Red Death” by Stan Shaw. Also six poems are reprinted with illustrations: “Alone” by Maxon Crumb, “To Violet Vane” by Molly Kiely, “A Dream Within a Dream” by Neale Blanden, “Eldorado” by Roger Langridge, “Spirits of the Dead” by Andy Ewen, and “The Conqueror Worm” by Leong Wan Kok.The cast of creators is truly an international one, demonstrating the worldwide influence of Poe that abides down to the present, with contributors from Italy, the Philippines, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of course. The result is a highly suitable and worthy follow-up to Pomplun's earlier volumes, a continued demonstration of the attractions Poe holds for the graphic artist, and one more sign of the publisher's love and admiration for the imagination of a major American writer.

That Obscure Subject of Desire: France, Algeria, and the Circumscription of the Feminine in Kateb Yacine's Nedjma

In her provocative study of feminine desire, What does a woman Reading and Sexual Difference, Shoshana Felman responds to Freuds infamous question what does a woman want? by exposing the elusiveness of feminine desire in literary works by Freud and Balzac. Juxtaposing analyses of Balzac's Adieu and La fille aux yeux d'or with Freud's discussion of his dream about his patient Irma, Felman argues that, although these works attempt to master, control, and understand the desire of their female protagonists, at the same time they enact a form of resistance to such efforts. Her own readings, then, consist in tracing within each of her chosen texts inadvertent textual transgression of its male assumptions and prescriptions. (1) She attends to details that signal the woman's refusal to adhere to patriarchal codifications of desire, and shows how the works disrupt the male urge to cure, to make sense of, female madness, sexuality, or, in the case of Irma, pain. The fetishization of women's desire and the silencing of female characters ultimately serve to reveal a male anxiety towards feminine desire, and a parallel desire to possess the feminine by normalizing and then fulfilling the woman's needs. This essay will explore a similar urge to master inscrutable feminine desire, and a potentially comparable form of textual resistance, in Nedjma, a novel written in French by the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine. Published in 1956, the text revolves around the enigmatic central character of Nedjma, a putative symbol for Algeria and a fictionalized version of Kateb's own cousin with whom he fell passionately but hopelessly in love, and narrates her (fruitless) pursuit by four male protagonists (Mourad, Lakhdar, Rachid, and Mustapha). First, Nedjma can be seen, like Irma, as at once silenced and constrained, and at the same time the object of male fantasy. Secondly, however, this article will suggest that Nedjma's own desire on closer inspection may be not merely inscrutable, exotically mysterious, and ultimately an object of male fantasy, but a powerful, active, potentially violent force. This reading of Nedjma's agency will take the figure of Antigone as a potentially comparable signifier of active desire that cannot be read according to social and political expectation. Yet again, however, the danger with this portrait is perhaps that it too still remains the product of a fantasy produced by a male author, and the waywardness of her desire could itself be seen as a subject of fascination for the male gaze. Finally, the desire to master Nedjma can be understood also as bound up with the search for an independent Algeria, as critics have more than once read her precisely as a symbol for a new nation born out of the union of France and Algeria. Nevertheless, close reading of the work actually unsettles any straightforward association between Nedjma and Algeria, and she turns out also not to fulfill the characters', or the author's, putative dream of a hybridized but liberated new community. She remains, however, a site for a complex interweaving of a nexus of frustrated sexual and cultural desires. Nedjma is the axis around which Kateb's novel revolves, yet, like Irma, she herself rarely speaks, and never participates in dialogue with the other protagonists. She is figured as the object of desire of the male protagonists, but her own voice is largely excluded from the narrative, and in this sense, she could be seen to comply with Lacanian conceptions of femininity as lack, as excluded from the symbolic order. As critic Charles Bonn writes, est dite, elle ne dit pas. Elle peut etre lue des lors au centre du roman comme une sorte de noyau vide. (2) She is also constrained, married off to Kamel against her will, and in many of the male narrators' evocations of her she lacks agency. The early images of her at the villa reinforce this atmosphere of claustration, and the reader's first glimpse of Nedjma herself also conveys this sense of constraint: Etoffe et chair fraichement lavees, Nedjma est nue dans sa robe; elle secoue son ecrasante chevelure fauve, ouvre et referme la fenetre; on dirait quelle cherche, inlassablement, a chasser l'atmosphere, ou tout au moins a la faire circuler par ses mouvements. …

RABBI YITZCHAK GINSBURGH AND HIS FEMININE VISION OF THE MESSIANIC AGE

Since ancient times, the collective “People of Israel” has been depicted as God's female consort. This mystical, female image of the People of Israel has been challenged by the masculine discourse of religious Zionism. Spurred by post-modern tendencies and ideological disillusionment, the redemptive theology of religious Zionism has suffered a process of de-legitimization accompanied by the reactivation of the “feminine” messianic narrative. This paper focuses on an example of such redemptive feminine theology, one whose creator explicitly promotes it as an alternative to the male narrative of religious Zionism. The theology in question belongs to Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, one of the most controversial figures on the Israeli religious scene. Ginsburgh's messianic narrative is overwhelmingly feminine and is sceptical about rationalism. It offers an unusual synthesis of New Age spirituality, nationalistic rhetoric, and extreme political nihilism.

Male Homosociality, the Femme Fatale, and Gender Relations in Andrea Camilleri’s Il campo del vasaio

Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series raises serious issues of gender that require analysis and elucidation. The concept of male homosociality (as developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) is particularly useful for defining the relationship between Montalbano and his deputy Mimì Augello. A close examination of Il campo del vasaio will reveal how the balance of this particular homosocial relationship is upset by the presence of a woman — the femme fatale Dolores — before the status quo is restored through suppression of the female Other. From the homosocial angulation of Il campo del vasaio, it becomes clear that the male workforce of the commissariato is privileged over other relations. Consequently women are marginalized, or useful only as adjuncts to the male narrative, or threats to be neutralized.

Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen (review)

Reviewed by: Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen Colin Carman Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight, editors. Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. 303p. Call it what you will—hyperbolic, hagiographic, hilarious—but Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight, editors of Reading the Boss, liken their subject to a modern-day Shakespeare. Their introduction, "The Bard of Asbury Park," adumbrates some of the literary traits the two share; beyond a 2009 cover photo from Rolling Stone and its resemblance to the famous Chandos portrait of the Bard, there's Springsteen's abiding interest in loco-descriptive histories, or stories involving a particular place (i.e. Nebraska, Thunder Road, E Street), class struggle, song cycles and the fact that both the Boss and the Bard "offer a profound insight into the hungry human heart—and Springsteen, arguably, with more breadth and depth than any other current American singer-songwriter" (6). Filling a void in theoretical readings of the more than 260 songs that comprise Springsteen's catalogue, the first section attends to his influences, from the obvious (Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan) to the surprising (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy). The first of four, Section 1: "Reading Influence," provides not just the etymology of the musician's Dutch name—it means, literally, "springstone" or a stone from which a spring runs—but the novelists whose works Springsteen's songs flow beside and intersect: first, Walker Percy (1916-1990), the Southern writer who shares his attention to the disenfranchised in American culture, and second, O'Connor, another Southerner interested in violence and spiritual alienation. Two essays, by [End Page 126] June Skinner Sawyers (editor of 2004's Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader) and Michael Kobre, align Percy's and Springsteen's appreciation of history, heritage, and the lonesome seekers (ex-cons, bank robbers, and Mexican migrants) who populate their works. Springsteen himself acknowledged his debt to Flannery O'Connor in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1984, and according to Irwin Streight, they share, as storytellers, a sensitivity toward the "meanness in this world" as O'Connor herself termed it, particularly meanness as it conflicts with a Catholic worldview (58). Streight reads two of the songwriter's solo albums—Nebraska (1982) and the Steinbeck-inspired The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)—as "song narratives" in which he lets "his violence-driven characters speak for themselves, his own voice, as he intends, disappearing into their voices in a series of what are mostly musical dramatic monologues" (64). The pair of essays forming the book's second section, "Reading Place," deepens the collection's awareness of landscape in Springsteen's songs as both real and metaphoric. Thus to be a "nowhere man" represents a terrifying state of displacement. But the collection really deepens its engagement with Springsteen, in Section 3: "Reading Gender," with "'Who's That Girl?': Nostalgia, Gender, and Springsteen," and a consideration of nostalgia, that ardent clinging to one's "glory days." This essay, by Kenneth Womack, is one of the most sophisticated, theoretically speaking, in the collection. By linking music and psychology, Womack contends that, for the male narrators of Springsteen's love songs, women function especially as conduits to past emotional states: "She's Candy, Rosalita, and Terry. She's Bobby Jean. Although she comes in many guises, she's the female face at the heart of the sociocultural nostalgia that structures Springsteen's sense of pastness throughout his work" (121). Womack evokes Levinasian alterity, but he could have pushed the point further. He comes close when he identifies nostalgia as an encounter with the otherness of the past, an alterity that must be reshaped in accordance with the present, but he stops short of exposing the masculine, heterosexual ego as another fiction. (De Beauvoir or Butler would have bolstered here.) What happens to the heteronormative machismo we associate with Springsteen's iconicity—what Cadó and Abbruzzese call Springsteen's "tough image and burly appearance"—once the "dream woman" of his imaginary past becomes nothing more than a narcissistic projection (115)? "Growin' Up to Be a Nothing Man: Masculinity, Community, and the Outsider in Bruce...

From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán (review)

Reviewed by: From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán Joan Hoffman Walter, Susan. From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010. Pp. 177. ISBN 978-1-58871-178-6. In a nicely bound volume of the sort for which Juan de la Cuesta is well-known, Susan Walter undertakes the study of thirteen of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short stories published between 1892 and 1909. All of these tales have in common two narrative levels—an introduction presented by one framing narrator and a central narration as told by a second, internal, narrator—thus allowing Walter to “untangle the distinct voices of narrative authority in the texts in order to uncover the ideological positioning of the tale” (22). Also, the author views such stories as “an ideal place to look for an engagement with the theme[s] of gender ideology” and gender dynamics so prevalent in Pardo Bazan’s work (20). The first chapter of Walter’s study seeks to familiarize her readers with narratological frame theory and feminist narratological approaches. She takes a structuralist approach to narratology and cites such scholars as John Barth, Gérard Genette, Susan Lanser, Nilli Diengott, Robyn Warhol, and Kathy Mezei. In this introductory chapter, the author discusses structural patterns of narrative embedding, the relationships between narrative levels, textual point of view, the role of the narratee, and the use of direct address. The second chapter examines four tales—“Champagne,” “Paria,” “El encaje roto,” and “El revólver”—all narrated by female protagonists who are reluctant to tell their stories. The third chapter, from which the title of the book derives, studies “Afra,” “Madre,” “Los ramilletes,” “Sor Aparición,” and “Los buenos tiempos”—tales about women but narrated by men. In chapter 4, Walter examines male narrators who are, for the most part, protagonists in their own tales in “Delincuente honrado,” “Remordimiento,” “Banquete de boda,” and “Feminista.” As is evident in Walter’s selection from Pardo Bazan’s vast production, some of these stories—“Champagne,” “Sor Aparición,” “El encaje roto,” “El revólver,” and “Feminista” come to mind—have been extensively studied in other venues as well; others, such as “Los buenos tiempos,” “Delincuente honrado,” and “Remordimiento,” have not enjoyed the same level of scrutiny. Walter’s book is well-documented and makes an original contribution to an understudied area of Pardo Bazán scholarship, especially with respect to the stories included here that have not been previously studied. In addition to her reliance on the distinguished narratological scholars mentioned above, the author consults recognized Pardo Bazán specialists, such as Joyce Tolliver, Maryellen Bieder, and Susan McKenna, in this well-researched study. Despite areas of inevitable overlap—all deal with issues of gender and authority in Doña Emilia’s short fiction, for example—she makes fine use of these critics, often couching their findings in terms of narratological framing, thus providing one more perspective from which to approach Pardo Bazán’s complex work. That is not to say, however, that this investigation is free of flaws. Foremost among them, in my estimation, is a marked and unfortunate delay or omission on the part of the author in defining technical terminology. This tendency is evident in her use of the terms “homodiegetic” and “heterodiegetic,” for example. These terms, crucial as they are to any discussion of structural narratology, are used a handful of times, on pages 23 and 42, before the author defines them, telling her readers, on pages 43–44, that they “will be employed regularly in this study.” In addition, even a brief reminder of the definition of “free indirect discourse” would be helpful; the term is used three times, on pages 128, 152, and 153, with absolutely no reference to its meaning. A further example of imprecision on the part of the author also compels comment; this involves unfortunate repetitions in close proximity to one another. For example, the last sentence of the second paragraph on page 17 repeats almost verbatim the first sentence of that same...

And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women , and: African Women Playwrights , and: Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women's Script (review)

Reviewed by: And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, and: African Women Playwrights, and: Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women's Script Jeana DelRosso (bio) And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women edited by Muneeza Shamsie. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008, 386 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $15.95 paper. African Women Playwrights edited by Kathy A. Perkins. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 384 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper. Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women's Script translated and introduced by Wilt L. Idema. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009, 192 pp., $60.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper. Muneeza Shamsie's edited collection And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women opens with the compelling words: "What you hold in your hands is the only anthology of creative texts originally written in English by Pakistani women, ever" (1). Such a pronouncement establishes the significance of this new volume, yet it also raises some questions. Why did these Pakistani women choose to write in English, the national language of Pakistan under British rule? How does this choice shape the stories these writers tell? Does language change the voice of these stories—would they be told differently in a native language, for a Pakistani audience? Shamsie argues that "Pakistani women who employ English as a creative language live between the East and the West, literally or figuratively, and have had to struggle to be heard. They write from the extreme edges of both English and Pakistani literatures" (1). In other words, these women write from the margins. To set the stage for these stories, Shamsie's introduction provides an overview of the political history of Pakistan that is densely packed with dates and names and that focuses on women's education, activism, and writing. The themes of the stories range from politics to place, race to religion, sex to storytelling, violence to the veil, parda (veil) to Partition, war to Westernization, feminism to family, migration to marriage. Many of these stories are emotionally powerful, and all offer a message, whether subtle or overt, about gender and nationality. Several stories stand out as particularly incisive regarding contradictions between and across cultures. Fawzia Afzal Khan's "Bloody Monday" mixes memoir and poetry in a manner evocative of Adrienne Rich, but its movement from the Lahore Moharrum mourning processions to the Pamplona bull runs—and its comparison of the overwhelming masculinity in both—is decidedly original. "Defend Yourself Against Me" by internationally known Bapsi Sidhwa addresses how various characters embody the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and economics, particularly capitalism. These characters include the white American woman who is simultaneously a "computer programmer in an oil corporation" and the "very image of dutiful Brahmin wifedom" in her [End Page 209] marriage to a Hindu man (30); the narrator Joy, "an English-speaking scion of Anglican Protestants from Lahore" (ibid.) and English professor at the University of Houston (31); and the recent female émigrés with "their jewelry glinting like armor" (30). Despite their differences, these women discover commonality in gendered experiences of war: "Women are the spoils of war . . . no matter what you are—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—women bear the brunt" (40). Shamsie writes in her introduction that the goal of this volume is "to reveal how Pakistani women . . . challenge stereotypes that patriarchal cultures in Pakistan and the diaspora have imposed on them" (1). Many of the stories, such as Sidhwa's, do just that. Shahrukh Husain's "Rubies for a Dog: A Fable," which we might liken to the Chinese story of Mulan, includes a woman who dresses as a man in order to save her father. A dark view of war is depicted in Roshni Rustomji's "Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas." Like Sidhwa, Rustomji laments the useless spiral of endless wars and decries the effects of war on women and children. Bina Shah's "The Optimist" tackles patriarchal culture by writing from the perspective of a privileged male narrator. The narrator's new wife overturns his sense of complacent superiority. She despises him, having been forced into this arrangement by her parents, and abruptly leaves him...

Tripping

Tripping Leslie Richardson (bio) All of Your Messages Have Been Erased. Vivian Shipley. Louisiana Literature Press. http://louisianaliterature.org. 128 pages; paper, $14.95. I want to flat-out like Vivian Shipley's latest book, All of Your Messages Have Been Erased—there's so much that's excellent here. Shipley's metaphors are often surprising and apt, her language fresh, and her subject matter interesting. Even her titles and first lines inspire one to sit up straight and pay attention, appetite whetted. Take, for instance, "Ode to Virginia Tech, Blackburg: April 16, 2007": The Monday after Thanksgiving was a school holidaythat unleashed us to hunt with our fathers for the first day of deer season and soak plaid shirts with entrails of a buck.In Lejunior, Kentucky, after mopping off coal dust, we ate at kitchen tables stained with blood from squirrel meatchopped up for burgoo. Here the poet is telling us something new, and telling well: the language is tight, but not compacted or strained. Told from the point of view of a well-known Alcatraz prisoner and autobiographer, "This Sleepover is Voluntary" launches us into this unusual scene: First time for everything: a birthday cake outlinedwith sixty-three candles to celebrate the openingof Alcatraz in 1934. Balloons, hand colored, frame my nametag: Jim Quillen, 77, retired bank robber,kidnapper, burglar, prison escapee. The voices Shipley chooses are out of the ordinary, and beckon us with promises of unusual journeys. However, one doesn't have to be a grammar maven to be stopped by Shipley's grammatical problems, such as a plethora of dangling modifiers. Like potholes, they jar unexpectedly and the reader pulls to the side of the road, wondering things like, "Wait, I thought the narrator killed the baby?" "Refusing to kill what / love created, I had to do what you should have done." The sentence structure indicates that the "I," which follows the opening modifier "refusing to kill," didn't kill. However, if one searches the poem to re-affirm this reading, one will find proof that the male narrator, speaking to the condemned mother, is the killer: "Using gloves, I was careful, didn't leave marks on our son's / neck to condemn you." It's no fun to take time out like this to fact-check and mentally correct a poem. Other instances of the dangling modifiers are simply annoying. Here are two of five from "The First Poem I Have Labeled: Love Poem": "A precise / man with words, but no Williams Safire, to please you, I learned / dusk is the dim part of twilight that marks the beginning of night," and "A boy in Missouri, / milk delivered to the doorstep was in glass bottles capped with / waxed paper." A poem I liked, that I wanted to use to balance out my review, I discovered had lifted phrase Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from cover after phrase from a book review in The New Yorker. Perhaps such lifting is a kind of "poetic quilting" (the poem's title takes its name, in part, from the book review), but here, especially because of tiny synonym exchanges, the poem feels more like a slightly dishonest Freshman English paper. See for yourself Shipley's "A fire in her brain: Lucia Joyce in An Institution in Ivry—1907-1982" and Joan Acocella's book review of a Lucia Joyce biography (The New Yorker, December 8, 2003). I believe that readers are more than eager to follow poets, to enjoy the trip that is a poem. But we need to go along with a voice we feel is steady—at least on certain levels. There is much that is fresh and beautiful in Shipley's work: I just wish I trusted the poems more. [End Page 26] Leslie Richardson Leslie Richardson teaches at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. She has a PhD from the University of Houston and an MA from The Johns Hopkins University. Copyright © 2012 American Book Review

From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán (review)

Reviewed by: From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán Joyce Tolliver Susan Walter . From the Outside Looking In: Narrative Frames and Narrative Spaces in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010. 177 pgs. Susan Walter's monograph is one of three recent volumes by U.S. Hispanists dedicated to the study of the short fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán, appearing a year after Susan McKenna's Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), and in the same year as Linda M. Willem's edition, "Náufragas" y otros cuentos (European Masterpieces, 2010)—volumes that themselves were published in the wake of this past decade's marked increase in close readings of Pardo Bazán's short fiction with a focus on the intersection of gender and narrative voice. Walter's study thus forms a notable contribution to this critical "boom"—a very welcome turn in Hispanic studies that recognizes not only the importance of the 600-some texts that comprise Pardo Bazán's short story production, but also the significance and value of the genre itself. In From the Outside Looking In..., Walter examines a group of thirteen stories featuring framed narratives, categorizing them according to the genders of the protagonist and of the narrators. Her interest in examining these texts is double. Within an explicitly structuralist paradigm, she wants to answer Todorov's question, posed in The Poetics of Prose (Cornell, 1977), about what it is that narrative frames add to a narrative—or, more specifically, what the function of narrative frames is in these thirteen texts. Like McKenna, she explains how the framing structure of these stories often requires that the reader participate more actively in interpreting the events told. In terms of the representation of women's experience, Walter's claim is that the stories she studies tend to present "objectified images" (88) of women and their experiences when the narrative frame features a male narrator speaking in the first person about the experiences of a female character (as occurs in "Afra," "Madre," "Los ramilletes," "Sor Aparición," and "Los buenos tiempos"); and that the handful of Pardo Bazan's stories that feature female narrators telling their own stories "give the reader insight into the feelings and motivations of the female protagonists (57)." She specifies that, in the four stories studied in this category ("Champagne," "Paria," "El encaje roto," and "El revolver"), "this is achieved by giving a voice to these female protagonists so that they can narrate their own stories, from their very personal perspectives" (57). Finally, Walter examines four stories in which a male narrator represents the experiences of a male character, and concludes that each of these stories ("Banquete de boda," "Remordimiento," "Delincuente honrado, and "Feminista") "all succeed in questioning the traditional patriarchal social norms" even though there is no overt criticism of the characters' gender ideology (127). In keeping with previous critical studies of Pardo Bazán's stories, Walter draws on the work not only of the early structuralist narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Gerald Prince, but also on theories of feminist narratologists Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, referring regularly to Lanser's distinction between "public" and "private" narration. She also comments on the representation, in the stories, of public and private physical spaces, although she does not explore the potential relationship between the representation of public and private physical spaces and the "public" or "private" nature of the narrative voices in these same texts. [End Page 120] In each of the three chapters, Walter studies some stories that have already received critical attention in the U.S., and others that have escaped our attention. The studies presented here of "Afra," "El encaje roto," "Champagne," "Sor Aparición" and "Feminista" may seem familiar to those who have read analyses of these stories by other scholars. Many readers who have read the stories examined in this volume may take issue, on the other hand, with some of Walters' interpretative postulations—for example her claim that the...

Intoning the Male and Female Voices in a Novel by Eva Figes

AMY CHRISTINE PARKER University of Manitoba The book Light, with Monet at Giverny: A Novel is a story that imaginatively describes a day in the life of the Monet family. It is written by one of the feminist writers of the first wave which ended in the seventies, ‘‘Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millett’’, as described by Susan Watkins in Twentieth Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice. Watkins’ book describes these women as being opposed to contemporary interpretations of Freudian theory, and in particular to certain aspects of his description of the Oedipus complex which they see as patriarchal and arising from capitalist values and the hypothesis that hysteria is self-motived rather than a problem of sexuality. Yet what Sally Robinson recognizes in Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction as the refreshing plurality of the voices of these feminist authors is characteristic as well of those who remain faithful to religion or Christianity, which are traditionally feminine voices. This paper searches for the developing voice of women in this work of fiction by Eva Figes and recognizes as well the presence of the continuing male voices. A positive aspect of Figes’ novels is the fact that she often finds a way for a character to thrive despite harsh conditions. Throughout the novel, exterior sounds such as a clock counting the hours, a nearby passing train, singing birds and galloping horses create some sonorous effects. As the land lies amongst hills and a river, echoes can also be heard. These sounds punctuate the dialogues and silences within which much of the meaning of the story is contained. In this novel about an artistic family, the auditory effects are enhanced by visual motifs of light and color. In another of her novels, The Knot, there is a similar recurrence of ‘[n]ot

The Mustachioed Woman, or The Problem of Androgyny in Victoria Cross’ Six Chapters of a Man’s Life

While Victoria Cross’ novel Six Chapters of a Man’s Life has now largely fallen into obscurity, it has a new relevance in terms of contemporary theories of performativity and gender identity. The novel focuses on the impossibility of seeing androgyny as a coherent gender identity; instead, androgyny is presented as fragmented and illegible. Cross first published an excerpt from this novel in the Decadent journal The Yellow Book, and titled the short-story “Theodora, a Fragment,” which has been reprinted in Elaine Showalter’s anthology Daughters of Decadence. Both the story and the novel focus on the problems of desiring the androgyne. The male narrator, Cecil, finds himself first attracted to and then frustrated by the ever-shifting gender identity of his female lover, Theodora, who secretly cross-dresses as a man, Theodore, so that they may travel together unmarried. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of gender and identity, this article explores how androgyny functions as a primary gender tempered by its opposite—either feminized masculinity or masculinized femininity—and the impossibility of seeing androgyny as a coherent identity outside this gender binary.

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Histórias são naus que cruzam fronteiras

Este artigo é uma reflexão sobre a paixão pela literatura e a infancia. Apresenta a preocupação com a necessidade de ler, contar e escutar histórias que são abordadas aqui como experiências profundas e fundamentais para os seres humanos, experiencias quase únicas. Para as professoras e professores, entre tantas tarefas a serem realizadas com as crianças, encontra-se também aquela de propiciar um encontro feliz entre as crianças e os livros e, de forma mais geral, entre as crianças e o mundo das histórias; e sobre a responsabilidade e consciência de serem, para as crianças pequenas, narradores e narradoras, leitores e leitoras. A narrativa é mostrada como um espaço privilegiado de convívio, relação e experiências entre meninos e meninas, leitores ou não, e os adultos e adultas que com elas se encontram.