Men's Texts Research Articles

Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France by Lisa Algazi Marcus

Reviewed by: Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France by Lisa Algazi Marcus Tessa Ashlin Nunn Marcus, Lisa Algazi. Mother's Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative: Representations of Breast-feeding in Nineteenth-Century France. Liverpool UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-802-07064-4. Pp. viii + 176. This monograph examines representations of breast-feeding in literature, art, politics, and medical treaties from the late eighteenth century to 1900. Comparing depictions of nursing from various literary genres to statistics on wet-nursing, Marcus shows how male writers represented breast-feeding as a cultural signifier of motherhood despite the paucity of Frenchwomen actually nursing their own children. Marcus explains how Rousseau's writings on breast-feeding as a cure for social problems influenced authors' idealization of breast-feeding mothers. Contrasting men's texts with the midwife Marie-Angélique Le Rebours's 1767 breast-feeding manual, Marcus asserts that likening breast-feeding to a patriotic duty aimed to confine women to the domestic sphere without imparting any practical knowledge about nursing. With the rise of Romanticism, literary and visual descriptions of breast-feeding became rare. Marcus attributes this change to the Napoleonic Code's reduction of women to reproductive machines and the disappearance of the maternal icon of the Republic in favor of the masculine symbols of the Empire. Works by Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine represent nursing mothers as marginal, racialized, or grieving, and portray motherhood as superseding women's selfhood. In realist and naturalist novels, breast-feeding is associated with sexual pleasure or political agendas. Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola depict nursing through the male gaze either to present maternal nursing as crucial for the infant or to reveal a regressive identification with the suckling child. Drawing on the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, Marcus considers what is at stake when the male gaze constructs and controls maternal desire. The monograph offers an in-depth analysis of how Balzac compares motherhood to sexual gratification in Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841) and how Zola separates sexuality from motherhood in Fécondité (1899). In these novels, maternal jouissance, Marcus argues, exists for the pleasure of the male spectator. During the Third Republic, moralists, politicians, and novelists reclaimed the nursing mother as a symbol of Republican virtues and censured mercenary nursing as immoral and unsafe, though wet-nursing remained the norm in France until 1918 when pasteurized milk became readily available. Marcus examines the intertextuality between Fécondité and lesser-known texts, namely Alexandre Hepp's 1891 novel Le lait d'une autre, François Coppée's 1872 poem "La nourrice," and Eugène Brieux's 1901 play Les Remplaçantes, to investigate how these texts took part in political dialogues on depopulation, women's civic roles, and public assistance programs. The monograph's analysis of Marianne's breast as a Republican icon highlights how literature and art idealize or demonize the female body to advance political [End Page 282] goals. Though this book focuses predominantly on male authors, it points out that late-nineteenth-century feminists advocated for maternal breast-feeding and George Sand, who nursed her two children, represented breast-feeding as a normal aspect of life in three novels. Scholars researching or teaching the relationship between literature and politics in the nineteenth century as well as scholars in feminist studies will find this book a valuable resource. This accessible monograph could serve as supplemental reading for undergraduates studying Rousseau, Zola, or Balzac. [End Page 283] Tessa Ashlin Nunn Independent Scholar Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Our Thoughts and Prayers

Our Thoughts and Prayers Cacayo (bio) To the 20+ children a day who are victims of gun violence in the United States of América. Now I lay me A Boy asks his older sister to buy him a gun. She says no. The Boy buys rifle slings, a military carrier vest, and optics . . . down to sleep The Boy posts about buying a gun and being a school shooter . . . I pray the Lord The Boy buys online 60 capacity magazines and posts a 10-day countdown . . . my soul to keep, The Boy becomes a Man: he buys two high-capacity rifles and over 2000 rounds of ammo . . . watch and guard me The Man texts that he will kill his grandmother and shoot up the Elementary School . . . through the night, The Gunman posts: I just shot my grandma in her head. Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn. [End Page 160] and wake me with The Gunman arrives at the School, shoots at two bystanders . . . Teachers call 911. the morning light. Police see the Gunman enter the School . . . (It's 11:33 a.m.) Almighty God, The Gunman fires over 200 rounds. radiant with light, Police enter the school as the Gunman continues to shoot . . . cast your goodness Gunman fires 16 more rounds in a classroom. to shine upon me. Police announce that Gunman is contained . . . .Gunman fires 11 more rounds. Most wonderful Lord, More Police enter the School . . . creator of all things, Police post that students and staff are safe in the School . . . hold your truth Gunman fires another round. More Police arrive . . . to shield me. Parents beg to enter the School. [End Page 161] Angel de mi guarda Police discuss what to do . . . oh mi dulce compañía A Student calls from a classroom. Twice. She whispers: multiple students are dead. no me desampares Police look for a master key . . . ni de noche ni de día Students call 911 again. They whisper: Children and a teacher are dead. hasta que me entregues More Police arrive . . . en los brazos Students call 911 again. They whisper: 8 or 9 students are alive. de Jesús Police Chief tries master key on another door . . . y de María Onlookers beg for action. Parents try to break the windows. Con tus alas me persigno Another Student inside calls 911. A Classmate whispers to him: hang up. The Gunman fires 4 rounds. y me abrazo de la Cruz Medics set up triage . . . Police search for a master key . . . [End Page 162] y en mi corazón me llevo A Student from a classroom calls again. She is told to wait . . . quietly . . . (It is 12:36 p.m.) al dulcísimo Jesús. [End Page 163] Cacayo St. Mary's College of Maryland Cacayo CACAYO (JOSÉ R. BALLESTEROS) is a Professor of International Languages and Cultures at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Beyond multiple publications in anthologies and journals, he authored the poetry collection Love Dust (Izote Press, 2014); and co-authored the Spanish letters textbook Voces de España (Cengage, 2014). Cacayo is the editor of Bolivian and Ecuadorian poetry for the Library of Congress' Handbook of Latin American Studies and is the founder and editor of the bilingual literary Press Zozobra Publishing. Copyright © 2022 South Central Review

The Task of Allegorical Interpretation: African Women's Domestic Tales as Political Narratives

The Task of Allegorical Interpretation:African Women's Domestic Tales as Political Narratives Ayo A. Coly (bio) Susan Z. Andrade , The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011. ix + 259 pp. In the last two decades, African literary criticism has broadened its focus on male authors to acknowledge writings by African women, through such landmark studies as Irène Assiba d'Almeida's Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994), Odile Cazenave's Femmes rebelles: Naissance d'un nouveau roman africain au féminin (1996), Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi's Gender in African Women's Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference (1997), and Ken Harrow's Less than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women's Writing (2002).1 With the exception of Nfah-Abbenyi's study, which brings together women writers from Anglophone and Francophone Africa, studies of the African female literary tradition have generally held themselves to the Anglophone-Francophone divide. The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988, by Susan Z. Andrade, performs a rare crossing of the linguistic divide in African literary criticism by [End Page 191] examining the novels of writers from Algeria (Assia Djebar), Nigeria (Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa), Senegal (Mariama Bâ, Ousmane Sembène, Aminata Sow Fall), Somalia (Nuruddin Farah), and Zimbabwe (Tsitsi Dangarembga). Even more unique, in light of the tacit exclusion of North African literatures from the category of African literatures, is Andrade's inclusion of Algerian writer Assia Djebar. While I have situated The Nation Writ Small in the context of landmark studies of African women's writings, the scope of the book is beyond African feminine writing. Andrade analyzes the African male and female literary traditions side by side with an aim to document and unravel gendered reading practices in African literary criticism. Andrade thereby makes an innovative contribution to the critical literature on African women writers. The book takes issue with an entrenched tradition of (mis)reading African women's writings that is not attuned to the political import of these literary texts and has subsequently contributed to the ghettoization of African women writers and their marginalization from the political-narrative-driven canon of African literatures. Juxtaposing male novels acclaimed as political narratives with female novels perceived as apolitical because of their focus on domesticity, Andrade offers new readings and ways of reading African women's literatures that revise the apolitical reading entrenched by some of the landmark studies of African women's writings mentioned above. At the core of The Nation Writ Small is the following question: "At a time when novels written by men were understood to be deeply involved in the project of anticolonial nationalism, why were novels written by women understood to be apolitical?" (6). Andrade persuasively argues that the cultural nationalist genealogies of African literary criticism are at fault. African women's texts, much more so than men's texts, lay their narrative groundings in the domestic sphere and the space of the home. The failure of critics to read this narrative grounding allegorically, due to patriarchal reading practices that are informed by the nationalist confirmation of a separate domestic sphere, has rendered African women illegible as political contributors. Andrade states, broadly, that while texts by African male writers foreground [End Page 192] their allegorical character, texts by African women writers require the reader to excavate their (usually disguised) allegories. Women's texts, Andrade claims, demand more labor from their readers. The introduction does an excellent job of outlining the field of African literary criticism and the ways it was shaped by cultural nationalism and the gender politics of cultural nationalism. Andrade offers insightful readings of two key yet often overlooked texts in African literary criticism, Florence Stratton's Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994) and Olakunle George's Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003).2 The two texts have never been put in conversation before, and in conducting this exercise, Andrade is able to articulate an interpretive framework that attends to the gendered politics of representation in African literatures and literary criticism while paving the way for her robust engagement...

Serial Translation: Angela Carter's New Reading of Pabst's Wedekind's Lulu

This essay reads side by side the translations of the Lulu Plays by male writers, with that of Angela Carter, to-date the only translation by a woman writer (in The Curious Room. Collected Dramatic Works, 1996). In practicing what Naomi Schor has called an 'intersextual' reading, or what Nancy K. Miller has referred to as a 'gendered poetics that rereads men's texts in the weave of women's', I turn to translation as a unique record in printed form of the activities of reading, writing and rewriting.

Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender

In a 1663 epistle addressed to scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, Margaret Cavendish compares herself and her female counterparts to [b]irds in cages... [that]... hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad to see the several changes of fortune.17 Cavendish then associates women's exclusion from universities with their negligible influence in all public contexts. By an opinion, which I hope is but an erroneous one, in men, she observes, [w]e are shut out of all power and authority; by reason we are never employed in either civil or martial affairs.2 In this passage, iron bars are a prison, but, in other texts, Cavendish transforms such cages into arenas of civil possibility for women. In three of her plays-The FemaleAcademy (1662), Bell in Campo (1662), and The Convent of Pleasure (1668)-Cavendish reconfigures traditional distinctions between private and public by creating utopian heroines who take women's sequestration to extremes, completely insulating themselves from men's public spheres.3 The literal and ideological partitions they construct result in new publics in which women wield political power and authority. Like Cavendish's science fiction fantasy, The Blazing World (1666), the three plays demonstrate that utopia, as early modern men's texts construct it, is a highly conflicted space for her and for early modern women generally.4 In contrast to Thomas More and his seventeenth-century imitators, Cavendish does not situate her utopian designs in the new world. For the most part, early modern island utopias depend upon carefully controlled heterosexual reproductive economies.5 Because such utopian narratives valorize natural law and depend upon patriarchal paradigms for marriage, family, and the state, they seldom question women's nature and place.6

Derrida's Defence of Paul de Man's Wartime Writings: A Deconstructionist Dilemma

Derrida's attempt at a defence of Paul de Man's wartime writings put him in a difficult position. Had he remained loyal to his usual deconstructionist practice of interpretation, he would have been unable to defend de Man in a politically effective way. Derrida therefore chose a hybrid form of interpretation that is neither purely deconstructionist nor easily classifiable in any other way. Faced with a case in which a purely deconstructionist reading would not have achieved his aim of minimising the political damage caused by the discovery of de Man's wartime writings, Derrida opted for an interpretive approach which allowed him to read into de Man's texts what he wanted to get out of them, ignoring what seems obvious to less biased readers.

Pathos ("Allegories of Reading")

MANY READERS HAVE DIFFICULTY IMAGINING WHAT THE FORMS OF SELFHOOD proposed by poststructuralist theory are supposed to feel like, and some assume that the very idea of strong emotion is inconsistent with poststructuralist theories of the self. Alongside this concern runs another one, that poststructuralist texts are not very affective. De Man's work has been used to exemplify both the claim that poststructuralist writing is cold and the claim that it does not possess an adequate account of emotion.(1) John Guillory, for example, argues that de Man's students are forced by their belief in de Manian rhetorical theory to repress their passionate relation to de Man himself. Guillory implies that the emotions of de Man's students speak louder than their poststructuralist ideas, circulating in anecdotes alongside the doctrine ... but not in immediate logical relation to that doctrine.(2) Leaving aside, for the most part, the separate question of whether de Man's texts themselves seem to embody emotions, I would like to propose here that after 1971, de Man develops an explicit and highly organized theory of emotion consistent with poststructuralist notions of selfhood and de Man's own rhetorical principles. It is one of the main purposes of Allegories of Reading to convey this theory. The inverse ratio, in Allegories, between the ardor of de Man's chosen authors and his own apparent ease is interesting. De Man comments on his texts' emotionality in his preface: The choice of Proust and of Rilke as examples is partly due to chance, but since the of their tone and depth of their statement make them particularly resistant to reading that is no longer one could argue that if their work yields to such rhetorical scheme, the same would necessarily be true for writers whose rhetorical strategies are less hidden behind the seductive powers of identification.(3) De Man associates with thematics: urges the reader toward an entirely thematic interpretation. By thematic, de Man also means referential--not in the direct sense in which everything represented would be understood as having occurred, but in an indirect one in which the general meanings of the texts would be located in their authors' intentionality and psychology. Thus, de Man connects to the popular-epistemological assumption that keenly affecting texts must be based in the real--in real, not fictive, emotions. According to de Man, then, his book undertakes an expose of ostensible pathos in literary texts; it calls our attention to the deployment of as persuasive tactic. This self-description helps to create the impression that de Man is hostile to emotion, or at least believes it to be mere illusion behind which lurks a rhetorical scheme. But this would follow only if we assumed, first, that de Man believed all emotions were ostensible; and, second, that he believed such phenomena were not real emotions.(4) Allegories of Reading attacks the second of these views. De Man is skeptical about emotions in that he questions our motives for representing them and even having them: we use emotions, he argues, to mitigate epistemological uncertainties. When we don't know what to think, emotions give us something to feel; they make our unstable perceptions and sensations seem more stable and nameable. The analysis of emotions therefore reveals self-serving elements in the way we think about ourselves. To inquire into the motivation of emotions, however, is to doubt neither their experiential existence nor their ability to affect us. Indeed, de Man's preface assumes the power of emotions not only to move the self, but to become seductive, or contagious. Still less--and this should be obvious--does his inquiry underestimate, neglect, or somehow fail to face up to emotion. The originality and controversy of de Man's view lies in his identification of emotions and figures. …

Men's Texts and Race

Men's Texts and Race

Reading, Writing, and Recycling: Literary Archaeology and the Shape of Hawthorne's Career

N ATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was an avid reader. I wish to pursue that avidity in some detail in order to show the effect it had on his career and, consequently, on his writing. But my investigation will not be in any sense an oldfashioned study; rather, I will look at Hawthorne as an obsessive reader, what I call an intensive extensive reader, who used his reading as an archaeologist uses her digs: as a site and source of composition. I use the term literary archaeology to describe Hawthorne's attempt to recreate not only the cultural past but the cultural present by recycling cultural documents. Where many artists create out of their own experience, Nathaniel Hawthorne created out of other men's texts. This is especially true of the early Hawthorne.

De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception

Over the last ten years, the work of Paul Man has not become any easier to assimilate. Frank Lentricchia could not have been more wide of the mark when in 1983 he predicted the war between traditionalists and deconstructors would draw to a close by the end of this decade, with Man rediscovered as the most brilliant hero of traditionalism [39]. For even if Man's juvenile contributions to Le soir had remained hidden a few more years in the archive, it is clear Lentricchia would have lost his wager. The furor over Man's wartime journalism has at least had the virtue of making manifest the extraordinary violence with which his mature work is resisted. Doubtless, a measure of institutional success continues to attend de criticism. would be astounding if this were not the case, given the visible rigor of the methodology, the prestige and relative power Man himself was able to achieve, the cultural force of certain notions of comparative literature, theory, European philosophy, and so on. As a rule, however, contemporary criticism quarantines and ignores Manian theory by way of various hegemonic strategies of inclusive exclusion, supplemented by extravagant gestures of anthropomorphization and rejection. One could with considerable justice invert Lentricchia's formulations and claim the most significant realignments of institutional power in literary during the 1980s amount to wholehearted approval of the rhetoric of Criticism and Social Change. Nothing, it seems, is more obvious than the political inadequacy of Man's texts. The task of pursuing some form of historicism has taken on the self-evident necessity of an ethical imperative. It is a fact, Man wrote in 1972, that this sort of thing happens, again and again, in literary studies [AR 4]. What happens perhaps a little more rarely in literary is the event of an exemplary figure such as Man, capable of inspiring the most lurid gestures of monumentalization and ritual sacrifice. The pages follow seek to articulate Man's theoretical text with the politics of his reception and with the question of politics. I shall be pursuing the notions of history and politics inform Man's late texts, mounting