Mythical Dimension Research Articles

Presence in a Pocket. Phantasms of Immediacy in Japanese Mobile Telepresence Robotics

The paper addresses prospects of Japanese mobile telepresence robotics where small anthropomorphic devices are designed to act as intermediaries between remote interlocutors. First, an emic perspective of involved scientists and engineers is presented, focusing on example technologies being developed at the Hiroshi Ishiguro Lab in Kyoto ( Japan), particularly a „cellphone-type tele-operated android [...] transmitting human presence“ called Elfoid. It represents an attempt to get “behind the veil of the machine” (Sekiguchi/ Inami/Tachi 2001, about their RobotPHONE prototype which uses a similar concept) in that it is supposed to act as a solid substitute for a dialog partner through evoking a feeling of presence (sonzaikan in Japanese philosophy, the feeling that someone is sharing the same physical space). In such undertakings, specific utopian ideals of communication become apparent. Paradoxically, the high-tech developments aim at constituting seemingly immediate interactions, preferably bypassing any potentially troublesome interface. The existence of a phantasm of immediacy (Bolter/Grusin 2000) can be traced back to decisive moments in media history and belongs to the central promises of new technological interfaces. Interestingly, the engineers’ statements reveal a latent technophobia, an ambition to overcome the limitations of physical devices altogether and to move on to more direct means of communicative exchange (including the mythical dimension of telepathy). Two questions are of particular concern: 1. On what different levels does the notion of immediacy operate? Not only does it refer to a spiritual ideal of unmediated communion, but it also influences practical decisions in interface design. “Natural” and “Tangible” User Interfaces are the result of a practice of disguise in that they mask their factual hypermediacy to allow for a seamless knotting up of real and mediated environments. 2. What is the relationship between media and the immediate? The concept of immediacy has so far been met with an almost univocal intellectualist disdain on the part of media theorists. The reason for this rejection is simple enough: If one takes ideas of immediacy serious, the self-image of a whole field of study is called into question. The paper thus attempts to provide a contribution to the question of how media build on notions of immediacy. Any theoretical attempt at describing their operations should take into account the intricate relationship between media and the immediate.

Mito e representação feminina em "O Forte" de Adonias Filho

With the objective to analyzing aspects of gender representations that act as catalysts in the construction of identity, in counterpoint to the fonofalologocentric Eurodescendant legacy, from the constitution of the myth in O Forte, by Adonias Filho; this article defends the theory that the fragmented nature of the human being contraries the pretense of a universal homogenized human nature, whose leading principle is the idea of human rationality. Such phallic, white, Occidental rationality, whilst leading in the influence of knowledge, ignored the principle of human heterogeneity and prevented the development of alternative voices. The present article defends the hypothesis that the Fort is a totemic representation, breaking away from mythical relationships that formed taboos and permitted – by dismissing as a myth any theory that predated the Occidental concept of logical human behavior - a redefinition of gender, in opposition to the fonofalologocentric legacy present throughout the narrative. The unconditional love of Adonias Filho to the human condition opens the way – through this article – to explore the recondite secrets of human nature in a mythical dimension, recorded as much by geography as by time. If Occidental theory revealed, in its formation of standardized rationality, principles of unity – closing, order and the desire for the absolute – mythical theory transposes the predated one, allowing a more multifaceted perspective.

Da un metagrido a un grido

The article focuses on a case of rewriting of a short episode in the narrative of Erri De Luca. It is all about a cry: in 1930, in the harbour of Naples, an anonymous woman who is watching the departure of a ship suddenly cries out the name of Salvatore, probably her son being on the ship to emigrate to America. This episode, narrated in the tale “Udito: un grido” first published 1993, returns with striking lexical similarities in the drama L’Ultimo viaggio di Sindbad, 2003. Despite the similarities, one can not consider the second occurrence as a mere copy of the first, because of subtle variations on many levels: change of genre, narrator and perspective give the second occurrence of the cry episode a wider significance, strongly emphazising orality and actualizing a mythical dimension.

The Multilingual Subject

This book explores the experience of adolescents and young adults who learn a foreign language or use more than one language in daily life. Through ‘language memoirs’ and learners’ testimonies, it documents how these multilingual subjects occupy an embodied, socially and culturally inflected third place in language, filled with memories of other languages and fantasies of other identities. In its referential and mythic dimensions, language performs and creates subjectivities that these multilingual speakers use to conjure alternative worlds and virtual selves, both in real life and on the internet. Teaching to the multilingual subject would mean capitalizing on the potential playfulness, heightened reflexivity and aesthetic sensibility of the increasing number of people around the world who, by choice or necessity, experience life in several languages.

Washington Crossing the Media: American Presidential Rhetoric and Cultural Iconography

The Revolutionary War has been of prime importance to American self-perceptions and to the formation of its national identity. As a foundational moment with a strong mythical dimension it has become a cherished point of reference for the nation’s leaders, who, in their speeches and written communications, rely on the most widely accepted cultural iconography to recall this event. A time-honored, traditional discourse might, however, go together with the use of contemporary media technology as a means of distribution, as in the case of Barack Obama. Framing Obama’s rhetorical strategies within 19th- and 20th-century artistic representations of one specific historical moment from the Revolutionary War, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware river, this paper seeks to contribute to an enlarged understanding of the intricate relations between politics, the arts, and media development and of the ways they appropriate the past

Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History

OCTOBER 139, Winter 2012, pp. 59–76. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A historical and cultural model of remarkable strength and longevity has, through its mythical dimensions, structured art-historical writing in Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, given how profound a stamp it has left on the field—right down to the formal categories with which the discipline sought to order its objects scientifically—the historiography of art has not paid it much attention. Even before Edward Gibbon published his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), eighteenth-century Europe, especially France, extensively debated the role “barbarians” played in the formation of modern nations. But nobody had yet assigned “the barbarian invasions” a pivotal role in European history, and nobody had seen them as the matrix and origin of contemporary conflicts. It was not until barbarian times returned to the heart of European

Du fait divers médiatique à la critique sociale, représentation du 11 septembre dans Une lueur d’espoir de Marc-Édouard Nabe

On September 11th, Marc-Édouard Nabe wrote his reactions to the attacks, Une lueur d’espoir. It was immediately written off by the reading public as an apology for terrorism, and it did not fare better with academics, engendering little ink from the critics who considered it a provocation and a scandal. The text requires, however, a more nuanced approach. Nabe is clearly saddened by the human loss, and his primary aim seems to be focused not on the attacks, but rather on their coverage. Coverage he views as portraying the events in a spectacular fashion, aimed at preventing any reflection. In this paper, I argue that without ever using the word “fait divers,” Nabe is referring to, and speaking out against this category of information. He moves from seeing the event, “le fait,” as an accumulation of personal tragedies towards seeing it as collective event. The attacks then take on a mainly societal, but also mythical, historic, and metaphysical dimension. The social aspect is so manifest that September 11 is then no more than a pattern that functions as a pretext to develop a critique of Western Americanized society.

Sépharade by Eliette Abécassis

un penseur et un pédagogue qui nous fait découvrir les tourments actuels de cette âme africaine en question. John Carroll University (OH) Hélène N. Sanko Creative Works edited by Nathalie Degroult ABÉCASSIS, ELIETTE. Sépharade. Paris: Albin Michel, 2009. ISBN 978-2-226-19223-3. Pp. 456. 22 a. An accomplished novelist (and an agrégée de philosophie), Eliette Abécassis is best known for her trilogy that combines a metaphysical quest with high adventure : Qumran (1996), Le Trésor du temple (2001), and La Dernière Tribu (2004). Born in Strasbourg to a Sephardi—more specifically, Moroccan—Jewish family, Abécassis has turned her ongoing research on her heritage and identity into a vast historical saga (vast enough to require a family tree at the end of the novel). The narrative of Sépharade is built around a wedding. Esther Vital, who through her family history resembles the author, is about to marry Charles Toledano in Tel Aviv. For the ceremony that will unite two large Jewish Moroccan families, far-flung relatives and friends from France and Canada have gathered, bringing new stories and reviving old rivalries. Esther is portrayed as a halfhearted Sephardi, attracted to the ancient cultural traditions preserved by Moroccan Jews who have reluctantly resettled abroad, but also more comfortable in the French modernity in which she grew up. The tension between her vibrant but stifling family environment and her longing for an autonomous life is reflected in the city where she grew up, a city in which the relatively recent Sephardi community has come to outnumber its older Ashkenazi counterpart: “A Strasbourg, donc, il y avait deux communautés bien distinctes. Les ashkénazes, réservés, peu expansifs, précis, rigoureux, et les sépharades ” (24). Needless to say, Moroccan Jews embody in this novel the opposite of these cultural traits. The author devotes many pages to descriptions of the food, clothing, language (the now-disappearing Judeo-Arabic dialects of Morocco), family customs, and religious practices of her community. Some of her alternately affectionate and ironic descriptions of traditional family life recall the conventional “Jewish mother” jokes that are well known in the United States. Comic relief is also present in the ways in which Abécassis depicts the petty antagonisms and expressions of snobbery that persist between Jewish families from different Moroccan cities (or between Jews from Morocco and Tunisia). Abécassis links the nostalgia fondly expressed by her characters for Jewish life in Morocco (tempered by realistic accounts of periodic massacres) to the centuriesold civilization that flourished in Spain until the expulsion of all Jews in 1492. It is through these and other historical links that her narrative acquires an almost mythic dimension, linking widely divergent cultures (embodied, not without internal conflicts, by Esther) that initially seem to be radically separated by history and geography. At a stylistic level, there is something in the author’s lyricism, at once erotic and fervently religious—“O murmures de la fiancée au fiancé” (132)—that recalls the tone of Albert Cohen’s novels, which were also permeated Reviews 843 with longing for a distant, lost Jewish community. As the preparations for Esther’s wedding day progress, more family history is revealed, much of it darkly romantic and linked to an anachronistic belief in ancient magical arts. Each of the numerous characters also provides opportunities for broader historical considerations . Narrative continuity is provided by the Sephardi “secret” repeatedly alluded to, which is finally revealed to the main character toward the end of the novel, and which will transform her life. Unfortunately, by constantly breaking up her vivid storytelling in order to delve into lengthy historical and philosophical issues, Abécassis ends up wearying her reader through an accumulation of digressions . Tighter editing would have benefited a novel that starts out as very well written but eventually comes to seem overly long. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin BALDWIN-BENEICH, DENIS. Le Sérieux des nuages. Paris: Actes Sud, 2010. ISBN 978-27427 -8817-0. Pp. 264. 20 a. Denis Baldwin-Beneich, co-author of a 1984 bestseller, Softwar, has since published six novels on his own, the most recent being...

<i>Terra Nostra</i> and the Rewriting of the Modern Subject: Archetypes, Myth, and Selfhood

This article argues that one of the most important contributions of Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra is its rewriting of the modern subject. Through its metafi ctional dimension, the novel seeks to change the legacy of the recoding of subjectivities begun in the Spanish Golden Age. More specifi cally, it is through the construction of its characters and the way in which the latter depend on, and grow out of, the structure of the novel that Fuentes revises modern individualist conceptions of the subject. Although critics have tended to privilege the novel's realm of myth (understood as transcendent and timeless), this reading depends on the novel's evocation of a Marxist narrative of culture as strug- gle driven that Carlos Fuentes never loses from sight. The novel's structure arguably promotes a diachronic understanding of history into which both the mythic and material strands feed. Myth, in this reading, is a consciously embraced worldview that grounds, and dialectically informs, this vision of history rather than shying away from it. An overall critical consensus has evolved around Terra Nostra with regard to its mythic dimension: myth, cyclical time, and timeless moments are viewed as dominating the novel's historical framing, expressed through the well-known key dates of 1492 (the discovery of America, the conquest of Granada, the pub- lication of Antonio de Nebrija's Gramatica de la lengua castellana and the edict of expulsion of the Jews), 1521 (the fall of Tenochtitlan and the comuneros rebellion), and 1598 (the death of Felipe II). 1

Mythical Dimensions of the Tel-Aviv Century

Pondering on Hyperborean Winds in context of Tel Aviv century (1909-2009), brings to mind some mythical dimensions that have influenced practices, form and meaning in and of city. Of many gates into subject of mythical Tel Aviv, I chose four main features of myth of Hyperborea itself: North (the four winds); Plenty (youth, health, arts); Apollonian (clarity, boundaries, rationality) and Sunshine (light). The correspondence between components of Hyperborean myth and Modernist ideals is striking. Shifting between Tel Aviv as the first Hebrew and a modern metropolis like any other, this city readily provides contents for four Hyperborean categories. Urban design, related to these four dimensions, metamorphosed during Tel-Aviv entury along with mythical content. Similar to creations in other arts, it was always related not only to Hyperborean features, but also to their diametrical opposite, namely Dionysian: scarcity, darkness and South, or rather East. The Hyperborean Winds, and their countercurrents that permeated Tel Aviv design, were embodied in philosophical and literary works, in prose and poetry; some of which still feature among Israeli cultural landmarks.

Whose Raoul Wallenberg is it?: The Man and the Myth: Between Memory, History and Popularity

Raoul Wallenberg is widely remembered for his humanitarian activity on behalf of the Hungarian Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II, and is known as the Swedish diplomat who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag in 1945. While he successfully combated Nazi racial extermination politics, he fell victim to Stalinist communism – yet another barbaric, totalitarian regime of the 20th century.
 Given Wallenberg’s biography, his mission and his unresolved fate it is no wonder that Wallenberg became a figure of mythic dimensions. It is the mixture of heroics and victimhood, as well as the seemingly endless potential of possible adaptations that secures this historic figure and his mythic after-narratives its longevity. While it is without doubt the man behind the myth who deserves credit – first the man’s realness gives the myth credibility – it is the myth that secures the man’s popularity. The man and his myth depend on each other.
 In this article, I will give an overview of how Wallenberg was perceived and described by survivors, in popular scholarly literature, how he has been researched by historians, and how he has been presented in different media. It will become apparent that the narrators have sought to satisfy different needs, e.g. psychological, political, and commercial ones. The narrators’ intention and attitude towards the historic person and the myth which surrounds him is of primary importance. I will show how different approaches to, and uses of, the myth exist side by side and nourish one another. And yet they can all simultaneously claim existence in their own right. By providing examples from different times and places, I like to illustrate that the popular images of Wallenberg are far less one-sided, stereotypical and homogeneous than they are often portrayed and hope to draw attention to the great potential that the Wallenberg narrative has today, as his 100th anniversary approaches in 2012.

Niedergangsdiagnostik: Zur Funktion von Krankheitsmotiven in 'Buddenbrooks' by Katrin Max

600 Reviews between Sieben Legenden and Flaubert's Legende de Saint Julien VHospitalier, or Die Poggenpuhls and Der Marquis von Keith, is perhaps greater than von Matt suggests. Aust also engages with Fontanel criticism of the implausibility inmoti vation inKellers work and goes on to show Fontane doing similar things?though to different effect?in Effi Briest. He sees Fontanel criticism of Keller more as a consequence of Fontanel realism than as a falling-short ofmodernism. Section 2 groups together three thematically linked articles on the subject of secularization. Amrein considers images of death inKeller, with well-chosen illus trations, showing the effectofKellers atheist turnunder the influence of Feuerbach. The rejection of transcendence as a source ofmeaning provokes the simultaneous shift from romanticism to realism and painting towriting. Complementing von Matt, Amrein sees Sieben Legenden as a further example of the shiftof emphasis to the here from the hereafter, confirming both the substance of Fontanel criticism and his failure to grasp Kellers modernist tendency. The contributions of Zuber biihler and Walter-Schneider also complement each other in their treatment of Der Stechlin, thework most frequently cited as evidence ofmodernism in Fontane. Walter-Schneider's discussion of temporal rather than spatial contingency' neatly complements that of Andermatt. Building on an idea of Peter Utz (see 'Robert Walsers Jakob von Gunten: Eine "NuH"-Stelle der deutschen Literatur', DVjs, 74 (2000), 488-512), she also directs the debate forward, showing in Fontane's novel a certain affinity with Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten. As the only contributor to consider the political insight of the two writers as a sign of theirmodernity, Zuberbuhler introduces a slightlydissenting note. In a comparison ofDer Stechlin with Martin Salander, he focuses on the theme of the decline of idealism in an upwardly mobile society.Unlike Walter-Schneider, he recognizes in Stine &defence of timeless humanity rather than radical relativism. Standing slightly aside from the central theme, and standing out also for its scholarly elegance, is Karl Pestalozzi's paper on Der Stechlin. Taking a two-line quotation, hitherto overlooked by interpreters and misunderstood by editors, he patiently traces itsorigins and shows its function as a guide to the understanding of the novel?an object lesson in the reading of Fontane's 'Finessen', towhich one can only pay the ultimate compliment ofwishing one had been present to hear it delivered. University ofWarwick John Osborne Niedergangsdiagnostik: ZurFunktion vonKrankheitsmotiven in 'Buddenbrooks. By Katrin Max. (Thomas-Mann-Studien, 40) Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann. 2008. 412 pp. 69. ISBN 978-3-465-03557-2. In a letter of 1902 Thomas Mann described Hanno Buddenbrook as the last member of a 'sozial, okonomisch und physiologisch in Verfall geratene Familie> (Grofie kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, xxi, 199; the emphasis isMann's). Over theyears, scholarly interpretations of thework have certainly done justice to its social realism and its symbolic and mythical dimensions, but when considering MLR, 105.2, 2010 601 the implications of 'Verfall' they have focused primarily on its associations with 'decadence' as a literary trend and with such elements of late nineteenth-century intellectual culture as Nietzsche's reflections on 'decadence' and Max Nordau's book Entartung. Katrin Max's study?originally a dissertation presented at the University of Leipzig?takes Mann's emphasis on the physiological seriously, and systematically examines the significance of nineteenth-century medical theories of degeneracy for the composition ofBuddenbrooks. Max is able to demonstrate a high degree of correlation between Mann's char acterization of the successive generations of Buddenbrooks and the progressive advance of degeneracy as conceived by Benedict Augustin Morel in his Traite des degenerescences physiques, morales et intellectuelles de Vespece humaine (1857). Morel's thinking had been transmitted and popularized in the German-speaking world by Paul Julius Mobius (Die Nervositat, 1882), aswell as byNordau's Entartung (1892-93) and the equally well-known Vuomo delinquente of Cesare Lombroso (published inGerman translation in 1890), and also by various entries in Meyers Konversationslexikon, the encyclopedia on which Thomas Mann isknown to have drawn for his description of typhoid fever towards the end of the novel. Even if Mann's letters and notebooks do not identify specific sources for his allusions to degeneracy theory, the indicative evidence that...

No princípio era o mythos: articulações entre Mito, Psicanálise e Linguagem

À guisa de uma reflexão introdutória, são apresentadas, no início do presente trabalho, algumas das principais concepções de mito, surgidas no decurso da História do Pensamento e sistematizadas por diversos autores. O objetivo principal do artigo, porém, é dar um destaque especial ao que Freud e Lacan disseram sobre o mito, bem como à sua articulação com a Psicanálise, destacando a relação estreita de ambos com a Linguagem. Quando se afirma que o inconsciente é estruturado como uma linguagem por meio da ação significante e se constata que o mito é significante, pode-se dizer que o inconsciente estrutura-se numa dimensão mítica, no linguajar do mito. Sendo assim, o mito é um saber que nos atravessa sem que o saibamos, assim como o inconsciente. Concluímos que o mito, linguagem literária por excelência, tem a função de dizer o indizível, fornecendo-lhe um pouco de organização e proporcionando um resgate necessário à fala do inconsciente.

Actualité psychiatrique sur les vampires. Vampire : un mythe contemporain ?

This article concerns the mythical dimension of vampires. Vampires have made an impressive comeback through literature (Anne Rice), cinema ( Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, Blade, Vampires, Queen of the Damned, Underworld, Twilight…), role-playing games ( Vampire: The Masquerade), music and fashion (the gothic style). The authors's works on the evolution of family models help understanding this contemporary fascination towards vampires. It is surprising to see how much the features lent to these legendary creatures echo the contemporary psychopathological characteristics that the authors have already described and related to the evolution of society as well as of family values: individualism and “auto-reference”, hedonism and symmetrical relations, narcissistic fragility, difficult relations with others, phantasms of all-power and “auto-begetting”, etc. According to the authors, the vampire has become a myth constituting a reservoir of symbolic representations and allowing teenagers to better elaborate their maturing stages. Contemporary society is not capable of proposing effective rites of passages on the symbolic plane anymore and teenagers have to find their own rites and references. The vampire then takes all its importance as it has several characteristics of adolescence: a body which changes and which it is necessary to learn how to master, a new rapport with the others, the dangers of relations, the impression of immortality, etc.). Narcissistic perversion, the clinical entity defined by Racamier, is also the object of a parallel with the vampire, showing the symbolic relevance of this myth both on the social and cultural planes, but also on the psychological and psychiatric ones.

From The Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition

This collection of essays originated in a conference at the University of Chicago in 2005, held in memory of Bernard S. Cohn (1928–2003), anthropologist and historian, and one of the great pioneers of the modern study of South Asian history and society. Its main concern, apart from celebrating Cohn's seminal intellectual contributions, is to interrogate the notion that 1947, for all its drama, violence and mythic dimensions, was a critical dividing point in the history of the subcontinent. It underlines how deep and long-lasting were the many aspects of the colonial legacy, and how long it took for polities to emerge which were in a real sense ‘post-colonial’. Moreover, it questions the totalising model of decolonisation in the sense of ‘complete freedom from all possible cultural and institutional acts of domination by the colonizer’. Certainly in South Asia (and perhaps everywhere) ‘the colonizer and the colonized are often engaged in a hybridizing encounter’ (p. 3). The broad areas covered in five parts are issues of democracy; imagining minorities; caste, class and nation; law, capital and subject formation; and the imprint of the past on two major regions in India.

Madoc in Scotland: a transatlantic perspective on “Stepping Westward”

Wordsworth’s “Stepping Westward,” one of the “Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland” included in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), has received little critical attention compared with its companion tour poem, “The Solitary Reaper.” This essay offers a fresh angle on the poem by placing it within the circumstances of its time of composition in late spring 1805 – circumstances that included the personal grief of bereavement and fears for national security at a critical time in the war against France. More particularly, I propose that Wordsworth’s reading of Southey’s epic Madoc just prior to writing “Stepping Westward” opens transatlantic horizons of meaning within a poem that otherwise does little to explore the metaphorical potential of its title. Just as modern scholarship has unearthed a complex textual history beneath Southey’s published work that reflects his ideological journey during a tumultuous decade, so the strange irresolution of Wordsworth’s poem makes sense when both the mythic and contemporary dimensions of westward travel and migration are brought into play.

A Tribute to Paula Gunn Allen (1939–2008)

A Tribute to Paula Gunn Allen (1939–2008) Annette Van Dyke (bio) Out of her own body she pushedsilver thread, light, airand carried it carefully on the dark, flyingwhere nothing moved. Out of her body she extrudedshining wire, life, and wove the lighton the void. From beyond time,beyond oak trees and bright clear water flow,she was given the work of weaving the strandsof her body, her pain, her visioninto creation, and the gift of having created,to disappear. After her,the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,memories of light and ladders,infinity-eyes, and rain.After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rugand mend the tear with string. Paula Gunn Allen, "Grandmother" [End Page 68] So goes one of Paula Gunn Allen's early published poems. "Grandmother" not only introduces the reader to Allen's particular Laguna Pueblo idea of the sacred but also defines her approach to her work as a scholar, poet, novelist, theorist, political activist, and professor: "After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug / and mend the tear with string." In the tradition of The Grandmother/Spider Woman/Thought Woman, Allen attempts to repair what has gone awry in her Native American culture while acknowledging that she is inadequate to the task. Nevertheless, Allen is rightly considered one of the founders of women's/Native American spirituality as an academic discipline, and, indeed, spirituality is central to her work. Her early scholarly work, her dissertation "Sipapu: A Cultural Perspective" (1975), became the exceedingly influential The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986). This text contains her 1975 germinal essay, "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective," which was one of the first to detail the ritual function of Native American literatures as opposed to Euroamerican literatures. The Sacred Hoop is considered a foundation for the study not only of Native American gender but also of culture. Drawing upon Allen's own experience as a Laguna Pueblo woman, it calls attention to her belief in the power of the oral tradition now embodied in contemporary Native American literature to effect healing, survival, and continuance.1 Further, Allen's work discusses the importance of women not only in her own society but also across the Native American panorama and through time. Allen wrote from the perspective of a Laguna Pueblo woman from a culture in which the women are held in high respect. The descent is matrilineal—women owned the houses, and the primary deities are female. A major theme of Allen's work is delineation and restoration of this woman-centered culture. Elaborating on the roles and power of Native American women, Allen's "Who is Your Mother: Red Roots of White Feminism" came out in Sinister Wisdom in 1984. In this startling article, Allen articulated Native American contributions to democracy and feminism, countering a popular idea that a society in which women's power was equal to men's never existed. [End Page 69] She also has been a major champion to restore the place of gay and lesbian Native Americans, explaining their power as spiritual to be used for the good of the community. These ideas were first published in a groundbreaking essay in Conditions, "Beloved Women: Lesbians in American Indian Cultures" (1981), and then reworked for the Sacred Hoop. Allen's work abounds with the mythic dimensions of women's relationship to the sacred, as well as with the struggles of contemporary Native American women, many of whom have lost the respect formerly accorded to them because of the incursions of Euroamerican culture. Allen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land-grant village abutting the Laguna and Acoma reservations and the Cibola National Forest. She referred to herself as a "multi-cultural event," recalling her Pueblo, Lakota, and Scottish ancestry from her mother, Ethel Haines Francis, and her Lebanese heritage from her father, Elias Lee Francis, a former lieutenant governor of New Mexico. These influences account for her ability to bridge perspectives and offer understandings across cultures, religions, and worldviews. She attended mission...

O PAPEL DO MITO NAS NARRATIVAS ORAIS DOS KAINGANG NA BACIA DO LAGO GUAÍBA, PORTO ALEGRE, RS

This study deals with the mythical dimension of the Kaingang oral narratives, a Jê Meridionalsociety whose traditional territories are located in the south of Brazil. It is based on interviews carried outamong Kaingang communities located in the hydrographic region of the Guaíba Lake basin, Rio Grandedo Sul state, analyzed in view of the native etnology and of the myth theory. It was considered speciallythe studies of Egon Schaden (1913) and Mircea Eliade (1963), completed by the studies of RobertCrèpeau (1997), Rogério Reus Gonçalves da Rosa (1998) and Sérgio Baptista da Silva (2002). Thepreliminary data allow to recognize that the Kamé-Kairukré cosmologic dualism, revealed in the versionof the myth of the Kaingang origin collected by Telêmaco Borba (1908), remains as a wire coductor ofthe contemporary Kaingang thought, orienting its narratives, its history and nature conceptions, its life insociety and its duty notion.

Bakhtinian Approaches to the Indigenous World of Manuel Scorza

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BAKHTINIAN APPROACHES TO THE INDIGENOUS WORLD OF MANUEL SCORZA OSWALDO ESTRADA RELYING on the novel as the optimum medium to represent the dialogic encounter of various social languages, the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin recreated in the first part of the twentieth century a hybrid world of intertwining ideological systems. He conceived the novelistic whole as a puzzle of compositional-stylistic unities, made up of unique dialects, authorial literary-artistic narration, different forms of oral or semiliterate discourse, and the personalized speech of characters. As literary critics of today, we can still draw on his theorizations regarding the ambiguous nature of the novel, a heterogeneous genre that allows individual voices to have some degree of autonomy while they remain subordinated to a leading language that controls the course of the narrative. By virtue of this novelistic conflict between multiple discourses, also known as heteroglossia, the reader can observe how opposing languages – centrifugal and centripetal, official and unofficial – encounter each other dialogically to reflect “the interaction among different attitudes and opinions of a society” (Booker 479). This sort of societal representation is achieved in Manuel Scorza’s Redoble por Rancas,1 a neoindigenist novel that confronts various social languages.2 Divided in two intermingling parts, one that delineates the 1 Although I cite from the Penguin edition of 1997, the novel was originally published in 1970. 2 I apply the term “neoindigenist” to Scorza’s text taking into account Antonio Cornejo Polar’s study of this subgenre within the context of the Indigenist literary movement. In short, the Peruvian critic differentiates a “neoindigenist” novel from an “indigenist” text because the first one portrays: a) a perspective under the influence of magical realism that reveals the mythical dimensions of the indigenous universe; b) the intensification of YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 153 conflict between the comuneros of Yanacocha and the town of Yanahuanca , and another one that portrays the silent battle between the village of Rancas and the International Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, the novel takes us to the center of a heteroglossic world. Scorza’s “account of the transition from a semifeudal system of land tenure (‘gamonalismo ’) to more ‘modern’ forms of imperialist and capitalist exploitation” (Larsen 137) embraces the orality of the Peruvian Central Andes and delineates its social dialects. Loaded with autochthonous sounds from the highlands, the language of the extremely poor and unprotected peasants , the authorial voices of the gamonales, and the standard Spanish dialect of those individuals from the Peruvian capital who reside in the Andes, the text highlights the language of the Indian, one that relies on “traditional oral stories, proverbs, prayers, formulaic expressions, or other oral productions” to perpetuate its existence (Ong 11).3 From its opening sentences, Redoble por Rancas confirms the validity of Bakhtin’s postulates in regards to the “living words in a novel,” since every utterance of the indigenous or mestizo individual is “charged with value . . . entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents” (276). This is obvious throughout the novel, but particularly when the leader of the Indian peasants, Héctor Chacón, reassures the people of his village that they will lose all their pastures and communal lands, due to their failure to combat the semifeudal landowner of Junín. As this revolutionary confirms what seems to be a perennial state of Indian servitude, Héctor tells them, full of rage and irony, that they will have access to a better world “cuando vuelen los chanchos” (45). The presence of this deterministic proverb explicitly engraves in the text not only the agonistic situation of the subaltern but also the seemingly impossibility of his survival in the pres154 ROMANCE NOTES the lyric quality of the text; c) the enlargement, complexity and mastery of technical devices, through a process of novelistic experimentation; and d) the expansion of the proper space for a narrative representation of the indigenous, with the real transformations of his world (“Neoindigenismo” 549). I analyze Scorza’s novel under these parameters and other postulates regarding neoindigenism in my article “Diglosia neoindigenista .” 3 In defense of orality, Raúl Dorra reminds us that, although our contemporary world is reducing the survival of oral production, “la identidad...

Cultural Colonies: France and the Romanian Imagination

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. Far from depicting this relationship as being one-sided, it must be emphasized that while Romania long enjoyed its ties to France, France also depended on Romania as a satellite of its cultural empire in the nineteenth century. The French hoped to enhance their country's international prestige by preserving the balance of power in Eastern Europe. 2. Paul E. Michelson points out that “most of the accounts which present themselves as historical analyses of this crucial subject are in the nature of historical myth rather than descriptions of historical reality” (8–9). This remark certainly holds true for P. Eliade's study, which put forth the claim that Romanian development “was not merely a question of borrowing or imitating France, but a wholesale transformation by adoption. The transformation of ‘The Rumanian public spirit’ owed ‘exclusively’ to French influence and no other” (16). Ultimately Eliade develops a theory of myth and functions of myth in society. What does this say about his own understanding of Romanian national identity, itself containing a mythical dimension, i.e. highly mythified? 3. The Ottoman Empire and Poland represented, however, important entities to the French security system. The French could hardly afford to ignore the area in between and thus the Principalities were a cause of concern given the capricious princes who often forgot their position as Ottoman functionaries and pursued interests counter to the Empire (see Campbell 11). 4. See Jules Michelet, Principautés danubiennes; Edgar Quinet, Les Roumains; and Marin Bucur, Jules Michelet si revolutionarii Români (Cluj: Napoca, 1982).