Nameless Narrator Research Articles

Confrontation, Denial and Motherhood: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Narration of Talat Abbasi’s “Mirage”

The major purpose of this paper is to explore and expose the multi-narrative of Talat Abbasi’s short story “Mirage.” This paper also aims to analyze the multifaceted forms of psychological issues and internal agony of the Nameless Narrator, who is also a mother of a special child who cannot communicate and walk properly. Mother, in this story, shows a self-pity attitude towards herself and her son. Her distressed narrative, her painful discourses, and her embarrassing expression towards her son in front of others expose her psychological emptiness and spiritual anguish. This paper examines the Narrator’s distressing behavior while applying psychoanalytic theory to Abbasi’s short story. This paper also focuses on the narrator’s/ mother’s apologetic attitude at people’s long and questioning stares at her special child.

Psy wojny kontra kundle pokoju: siła hybrydowości w powieści Vieta Thanha Nguyena „Sympatyk"

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, as he often repeats, is a person of two minds. As the child of a Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest, he becomes a „hybrid” on the genetic level and later also in the cultural sphere. His upbringing has not only been influenced by the Catholic religion, communist indoctrination but also by the American literary canon, as he has graduated from a literary studies program in the US. He is a communist spy in the South Vietnamese Army during the war, and after the fall of South Vietnam he escapes to the United States as one of the few refugees. Loyal to the communist revolution in the US, he continues his intelligence activities going to any lengths and using any means considered necessary. The nameless narrator is not only a character that reminds a hero from a Hollywood action movie, but also a hybrid – a man who, through diversity or perhaps the merging of mutually exclusive identities, inhabits the sphere in between. This phenomenon, called nepantlerismo by Gloria Anzaldúa, means consciously navigating the gaps between the binary oppositions of those who belong to neither of the two sides. In the article, I look at the phenomenon of hybridity and consider to what measure it can be seen as an antidote to national chauvinism, imperialism and violence. I also examine what Viet Thanh Nguyen in his scholarly work calls the „industrialization of memory,” viewing Hollywood as a tool for producing memories of the Vietnam War operating within the US military-industrial complex.

Rombo by Esther Kinsky

Reviewed by: Rombo by Esther Kinsky Kayla Esther Ciardi ESTHER KINSKY Rombo Trans. Caroline Schmidt. London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2022. 232 pages. "EVERY LANDSCAPE," American geographer D. W. Meinig writes, "is an accumulation." Within it, "the past endures." Writers concerned with this relationship between landscape, place, the environment, and history/memory have underscored this inevitable accumulation in their works; W. G. Sebald will immediately come to mind. German writer Esther Kinsky too grapples with these themes throughout River (2018) and Grove (2020) and now in her latest novel, Rombo (2022). The landscapes in Kinsky's novels have always offered themselves up as sedimentary texts, where collective and individual traumas, memories, and histories are piled atop one another, laid to rest, later erased or deposited anew. Kinsky's peripatetic narrators are always attuned to the particularities of the landscape (urban and natural) before them, active wanderers participating in a process of remembrance. In Rombo, however, Kinsky's wayfaring narrator becomes a chorus of people affected by two natural disasters: the devastating earthquakes in May and September 1976 in northeastern Italy, in which a thousand lost their lives and tens of thousands were displaced. Buildings and churches turned to rubble. Ceilings collapsed in dust clouds of mortar. Well-worn paths were forever disrupted. Rombo takes its name from the phenomenon of il rombo: the deep, unfamiliar, and subterranean rumble felt and heard just prior to a quake. For the inhabitants of Friuli, this rombo haunts. It is an acoustic scar always lurking in their memories. Every rip of thunder is forever a reminder of this experience that "cannot be erased or redeemed, because it is beyond the categories of good and evil." Rombo alternates between the accounts of seven inhabitants in a remote Italian mountain village: Olga, Silvia, Gigi, Toni, Mara, Lina, and Anselmo. These accounts, which can be contradictory or inconsistent, read like interviews or oral histories, forming a kind of documentary chorus. This chorus of layered voices ultimately mirrors what Kinsky calls "the unreliable witness that is terrain." In their accounts, these characters reflect on a way of life in the middle of being lost. They are engaged in a process of reinscribing their memories into a completely changed landscape. Shafts, cavities, chasms, crevasses, and cracks in the earth become apparatuses of memory, remembering, and forgetting. Indeed, as the narrator notes of karstic limestone, rock comprised of living organisms, the landscape is "an accumulation of life lived and life's traces," always prone to "weathering" and "erasure." Even the structures, vehicles, and objects seem to carry this burden of accumulation—when toppled and crushed, Kinsky's descriptions conjure up corpses. Their loss is just as devastating. Indeed, for Lina, this landscape is her life, where she knows everything, "every stick and every stone." Every dwelling and every path. Kinsky's novel also incorporates the anecdotes of a nameless narrator—akin to ethnographic diary entries—about the land, its flora and fauna, and shared myths. The reader moves from the oral history of a villager to a careful examination of a moorland orchid to an investigation into the myth of Riba Faronika. Photographs and found objects also play an important role throughout Kinsky's work on memory, and Rombo is no exception. Each chapter is preceded by black-and-white images of a fresco discovered in the cathedral at Venzone—engravings of a bygone era from a people insistent on leaving behind a trace of themselves. Out of context, these heliographic images also remind one of the traces left behind on carbon copy paper—an apparatus of retaining the past's traces. The effect of these entries places these villagers' accounts, their stories and myths, and the minutiae of the region's flora and fauna on an equal plane. In this way, Rombo offers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of a landscape, inhabited by the traces of innumerable people, creatures, tales, and objects. If landscape is an accumulation of our histories and our memories—our identities, too—Rombo asks us to consider the trauma of what is lost, destroyed, and warped in seismic disasters that forever alter this mighty landscape which too can forget, and which can erase every trace of us. Rombo...

Three Streets by Yoko Tawada

Reviewed by: Three Streets by Yoko Tawada Kevin Canfield Yoko Tawada Three Streets Trans. Margaret Mitsutani. New York. New Directions. 2022. 64 pages. IN "MAJAKOWSKIRING," the second story in Yoko Tawada's Three Streets, an unnamed narrator encounters an undead writer. Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, but in contemporary Berlin, on a street that bears his name, the Russian poet—or perhaps his ghost—is having his say on matters great and small. "A moment ago, he'd been talking about lost love and pineapples," the narrator notes, "and now he was going on about 'terrible times' and politics." This might seem like a bizarre cameo appearance, but within the context of this slender, captivating book, it's perfectly reasonable. Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, writes a singular, uncanny brand of fiction. In Three Streets, women, men and human-adjacent beings land in [End Page 60] slow-simmering metaphysical adventures. Her characters face predicaments and puzzles that present the reader with interesting new ways to think about language, inspiration, history, and chance. Each of the book's three stories is set in Berlin, where the author, who was born in Tokyo, now lives. Each takes its title from a street named for a dead artist. Each features a nameless narrator. In "Kollwitz Strasse," our narrator is in an expensive grocery store filled with affluent young families when a "ghost-child" materializes and drags her to the candy aisle. The young specter uses antiquated words and seems unfamiliar with post–World War II products. The narrator, noting that this is plainly "not a child of this age," is reminded of Käthe Kollwitz; the artist's black-and-white prints depicted Germans who, like Kollwitz herself, lost nearly everything during the world wars. Outside, the narrator sees a city with no discernible colors. Has she become a figure in a Kollwitz etching? Like Tawada's other stories, this one doesn't spotlight a single, easy meaning, though it seems clear that she's remarking on complacent twenty-first-century consumerism, the transformative power of art, and the wounds of war. "Pushkin Allee" opens with the narrator disembarking from a subway, only to see that her "body had shrunk to the size of a child's" (like many strange developments in these dreamlike stories, this happens without warning or explanation). She spots a girl on a bike, which evokes vivid recollections of her own childhood. For a moment, it's the 1960s, and a Japanese TV broadcaster is talking about the anniversary of the end of Second World War. This leads to dark musings about secret police and blood-drenched borderlands. In an open field, which she imagines might've once been the site of carnage, people practice yoga. Her walk through the present-day city becomes a reflection on Cold War Berlin, occupying armies, the plight of innocents during periods of deadly strife, and the ways in which nations confront, or flee from, the past's harsh truths. "Majakowskiring" is just as thought-provoking, if even less straightforward than the other two tales. Haunted by the doomed Mayakovsky, the story centers on another discombobulating walk through a Berlin that may have "slipped back in time." She watches an antinuke march, notes that today's clouds "all have human faces," sees that Mayakovsky appears robust—and quite talkative. What follows is an oblique rumination on randomness, political resistance, and language. Apropos of nothing specific, the narrator laments that she rarely hears "words like 'imagination' or 'creativity' anymore." Tawada herself would never say so, but few writers embody these words better than her. "The mystery of what it means to be human"—this phrase, which pops up early in "Kollwitz Strasse," is an apt description of what Tawada aims to explore in these stories. From one moment to the next, her narratives can be mystifying. In time, though, they cohere into engrossing meditations on historical memory and the oft-baffling nature of life in this century. Kevin Canfield New York Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

First-Person Point of View in Contrast to Globalisation in Somerset Maugham’s ‘Mr. Know-All’

This paper discusses the first-person point of view in Maugham’s ‘Mr Know-All’. It particularly analyses the narrator's position in relation to the story told in this short story, with the intention of disclosing the latter’s prejudice against Mr Kelada, the protagonist, and consequently, its hindrance to globalisation. It thus underlines the fact that this protagonist and other travellers are different colours, but one person on this ship epitomises globalisation. The general attitude of readers is that they are inclined to easily believe the narrator while forgetting that fiction is the work of a taler, a teller, but, first and foremost, a liar. The audience, whether it is disconnected from the setting or not, also tends to forget that ‘‘travellers from afar can lie with impunity’’. In fact, the nameless narrator in Maugham’s short story has a persona that leaves a lot to be desired. He is prejudiced against Mr Kelada, known as Mr Know-All, as will be evidenced by the scrutiny of his diction. This paper finally purports to show that those who proclaim globalisation loudly are not ready to live together.

Swimming in the Dark

Swimming in the Dark

This Essay is a Manipulation of Matter

This Essay is a Manipulation of Matter Jax Connelly (bio) POINT OF ORIGIN: The fuck yous are booming through my sun-dappled neighborhood, threatening to shake branches from trees. The man is doubling over with rage, halting every few feet to bend his imposing body in two, hold his phone in front of his face and fuck you into it as if it has taken something from him he'll never be able to recover. It was a compliment, he's bellowing, over and over, so many times the words become a bassline: dada-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da. It was a compliment it was a compliment it was a compliment fuck you fuck you you fucking bitch. COMPONENT: Seated on a block of cement, she is exactly as tall as I am. Her thighs are pressed together, legs stiff, knees bent at ninety degrees, toes pointed toward the floor. Her lap, wooden and flat and skeleton-narrow—uninviting. She sports a bland checkered coat, black squares alternating with grey, some tan, some brown. She leans backward, away from herself, arching her back like bark splayed out from a droughtracked tree, and where her sternum should be, an explosion: strips fanning out from her chest like a child's interpretation of a lion's mane, or Medusa's snakes scared still and straight, or the flames of a paper sun. Margaret Wharton's sculpture Leopatra is not a crime scene, just dissonance—what the body remembers and what it presents, contradictions occupying the same space because they have nowhere else to go. Half neatly composed—the dainty feet, the polite posture—but before the gaze even reaches her neck, she's come undone. She's lost her head and she's lost her hands, so here is her heart, revealing all the things she can no longer speak, or hold. COMPONENT: I once watched a woman's head explode. In the arthouse sci-fi film High Life, a shuttle's trajectory is altered by a molecular cloud and subsequently dives into a black hole. The pilot, Boyse, dies by spaghettification—the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long, thin shapes in a non-homogeneous gravitational field. This does not happen in an instant. The scene is impossibly slow, Boyse's face beginning to crumple almost imperceptibly, her brain unspooling like it's reluctant to let go. Earlier, Boyse is violently raped. As part of a crew of death-row inmates sent on a mission to extract energy from the black hole, she sleeps with her limbs strapped to her bedframe. She wakes up and it's already happening, she wakes up and understands immediately, in that waterline strip between unconsciousness and consciousness, that there's nothing she can do to stop it. Google tells me spaghettification is "caused by extreme tidal forces." According to some dude on a Quora forum, the process isn't painful: "The black hole will pull you so fast that electrons transmitting [End Page 115] the pain signals will not be strong enough to escape the gravitational pull in order to make it to the brain." POINT OF ORIGIN: My dog and I are close enough, now, to observe how the wrath has colored the man's face slap-red, how it's screwed his features in tight like they're bolted to a table. Carefully, I avert my eyes. I hold my breath. I move my limbs stiffly, quietly, I don't want him to notice me, but I can't help flinching as he passes by, not noticing me at all: da-da-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da da-dada-DA-da-da fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. COMPONENT: In her novel Milkman, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2018, Anna Burns explores the consequences of a disconnect between language and experience—what happens when we don't have words to describe and transcend trauma. It's Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and the nameless narrator, middle sister, is stalked by a paramilitary known only as the milkman. He doesn't explicitly threaten violence but shows up unannounced and uninvited when she's alone and...

Big and Learned and Far From Simple: Intellectual Narration in "The Plain People of Ireland" and The Third Policeman

Brian Ó Nualláin is a man of many names and many voices. The narrative power he posseses is exemplified when comparing 'The Plain People of Ireland' segments of the Cruiskeen Lawn columns in The Irish Times, penned under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, and the voice of the nameless narrator in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Within these two works, the position of the intellectual in Irish society is portrayed through quite different lenses: the self-confident, perpetually correct Myles, and the timid, obsessively rational narrator. While both voices are erudite and authoritative, their positioning within the environments they inhabit could not be more different. This article examines the positioning of the 'intellectual narrator' in Ireland, as portrayed by the various voices of Ó Nualláin, focusing specifically on the tone utilised throughout the respective pieces to differentiate the social standing of the narrators from those they encounter. The mastery of language apparent in both 'The Plain People of Ireland' and The Third Policeman subverts the expected portrayal of a public intellectual, destabalising the inherent class politics that imbue both works without dismantling them all together.

STUDIES ON PERSONA OF THE THREE PROTAGONISTS IN REBECCA

Rebecca, written by Daphne du Maurier, the well-known British female writer in 20th century, is a masterpiece suffused with suspense and mystery. Since its publication in 1938, it had caused quite a sensation among readers and became an instant best seller that had never gone out of print. In the existing studies of the novel, most scholars laid their emphasis on character analysis, feminism criticism, narratology, gothic writing and psychoanalysis. However, the analysis of the personality of the Protagonist from Carl Jung’s Archetypal theory is rarely seen, moreover, no one has yet made a comprehensive study of the persona of three protagonists under Jung’s persona theory. By analyzing the persona of both the male protagonist, Maxim, and the two female protagonists, Rebecca and “I”, and exploring reasons resulting in their imbalanced persona, hopefully this paper could render a new approach to reveal the theme of the novel and interpret Daphne du Maurier’s dilemma in her bisexuality. In this paper, three parts are presented. The first part initially makes a survey of previous studies on the novel both at home and abroad, and then introduces Carl Jung’s persona theory. The second analyzes the three protagonists’ persona in detail: Maxim’s overdeveloped person, the nameless narrator’s underdeveloped persona and Rebecca’s well-balanced person; the last part explores reasons resulting in their different personas, mainly from two perspectives: the social background and Daphne du Maurier’s ambivalence about her bisexuality.

A Chronic Nightmare: Dream Interpretation as the “Royal Road” to Understanding the Trauma of the Nameless Narrator of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman

A Chronic Nightmare: Dream Interpretation as the “Royal Road” to Understanding the Trauma of the Nameless Narrator of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman

Blacking Out: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the Historicity of Antiblackness

Blacking OutRalph Ellison's Invisible Man and the Historicity of Antiblackness Sean O'Brien (bio) There's a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell either of death or of spring—I hope spring. But don't let me trick you, there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me. And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stenches of death. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Since the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. labor markets have crept sluggishly toward recovery. Official unemployment rates have fallen from 10 percent in 2009 to 3.6 percent as of May 2019, even as real wages have stagnated and productivity growth has been negligible. Black unemployment rates, however, have remained high—at a nearhistoric low of 6.1 percent, they are nearly twice the national average—while the discrepancy between black and nonblack unemployment, regardless of educational background, has hardly budged in fifty years.1 This figure skyrockets and the racial gap becomes a chasm when it is adjusted to account for black underemployment and incarceration rates, both of which began to climb with deindustrialization and spiked following the crash in 2008. African Americans swell the ranks of a bloated and precarious service sector, while the rate of imprisonment for black men has increased by more than 500 percent over the past four decades, giving the lie to claims that black precarity has simply become more visible in recent years through the proliferation of new media.2 Meanwhile, in the post-2008 period, antiblack police violence once again took center stage in America: in 2015, black Americans were nine times as likely as nonblack Americans to be killed by police.3 Under generalized conditions of rising precarity—and in [End Page 80] response to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland—a wave of riots swept the United States. This triangulation of black unemployment, antiblack police violence, and the spread of riots in moments of financial crisis suggests that racialization—the set of ascriptive processes that produces race as a sociological category and naturalizes dispossession along lines of phenotypical difference—mediates the unfolding relationship between cycles of accumulation and cycles of struggle. Turning to the early postwar period to historicize the entangled forms of racialized precarity and proletarian self-activity that characterize the present, this essay reads Ralph Ellison's visionary 1952 novel Invisible Man in relation to what Giovanni Arrighi identifies as the U.S. systemic cycle of accumulation. For Arrighi, the economic shift in the second half of the twentieth century from industry to finance signals a crisis in American hegemony—the latest in a series of systemic cycles of accumulation, each with its geopolitical center—wherein capital, having exhausted the profitability of manufacture, abandons commodity production and leaps into liquidity.4 In his structuralist account of late-twentieth-century developments in the capitalist world-system, Arrighi adopts Fernand Braudel's model of the longue durée, with its seasonal logic of hegemonic transition whereby autumn for one declining hegemon means spring for the next. For Ellison's unnamed narrator, whose struggle for visibility is presciently tied to the rise and fall of American growth, spring too carries its "stenches of death" (580). When the United States faces its own crisis of accumulation in the late 1960s and the long American century enters its autumnal downturn in the early 1970s, the expulsion of labor from the site of production will sound the death knell for African American bildung. Anticipating the coming of autumn in terms of exhaustion and abjection, Invisible Man envisions the end of American economic expansion as a crushing experience of social death. In what follows, I trace the relationship between racialized precarity and the African American novel across this transitional period, revisiting Ellison's literary milestone to chart the decline of the American century from within its zenith. Invisible Man stages a series of expulsions from conventional sites of entrance into twentieth-century American civil society. Living in exile beneath the street, the nameless narrator recounts how he was expelled...

The wretched of the diaspora: traumatic dislocation in Brian Chikwava's Harare North

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore Brian Chikwava's depiction of the trauma of displacement in Harare North by harnessing the trauma theory, as well as the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Laing, in order to represent the psychological experiences of the nameless narrator and other characters in his narrative. I argue that the loss of ontological security they experience occurs from the trauma of non-belonging as they attempt to deal with the cultural and psychological trauma of living in metropolitan London. Significantly, the article reveals that the existential disorientation that nameless narrator suffers is from his refusal to reconstruct his identity as he attempts to deal with the tensions of life in the Diaspora after having had a mainly rural upbringing in Zimbabwe. By the narrative's end, the alienation and fragmentation caused by the trauma of dislocation affect Chikwava's protagonist to such an extent that he completely falls apart and succumbs to the sanctuary of insanity.

Refusing the Referendum: Queer Latino Masculinities and Utopian Citizenship in Justin Torres’ We the Animals

The U.S. Supreme Court decision of June 26, 2015, which ruled the ban on same-sex unions unconstitutional, created, for the first time, equal marriage rights for same-sex couples in all states, thus changing the civic status of members of the LGBTQ community in important ways, ranging from visitation rights to inheritance law. Justin Torres’s 2011 debut novel We the Animals performs Puerto Rican queer masculinity at the precise moment when the first formal challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as expressed by then Attorney General Eric Holder, intersect with growing and increasingly aggressive hostility towards Latinx in the United States regardless of their legal status, and when Puerto Ricans on the island continue to be second class citizens ineligible, for example, to participate in presidential elections. In ongoing limbo as an unincorporated territory of the United States, the legal condition of Puerto Rico always already queers the myth of an egalitarian, democratic nation. A queer coming of age/coming out narrative, We the Animals features a first person narrator, the youngest of three Puerto Rican brothers, who grows up in a working class home in upstate New York and emerges as someone who rejects the very values that strive to “normalize” queer life via assimilation into legally defined and sanctioned coupledom. Embracing what José Esteban Muñoz has called a “queer utopia” the nameless narrator rejects the predetermined path of puritanically “virtuous,” materialistically productive, culturally assimilated, and politically predictable American masculinity and citizenship, and ends his narrative at the beginning of an alternative queer vision that does not depend on majoritarian approval, but unapologetically celebrates the possibilities of a “queer planet” (Michael Warner). In doing so, Torres, via his narrator, creates a model of queer Latino masculinity that offers an alternative to assimilationist narratives of “Americanization” and encourages us to imagine a utopian space in which civil and human rights are not tied to a compliance with heteronormative lifestyles.

Hédi Bouraoui: Transculturalism and Maghrébinité

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 4, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources HÉDI BOURAOUI: TRANSCULTURALISM AND MAGHRÉBINITÉ ELIZABETH SABISTON* Hédi Bouraoui, native of Sfax, Tunisia, and adopted son of Canada, has been described variously as multicultural, cosmopolitan, ethno-cultural (his least favourite description), a citizen of the world. It needs to be emphasised, however, that he is, and remains at heart, a Maghrebian writer. If he is most famous as the promoter of literary and creative Transculturalism, the concept is based on his native region, and his connections with it. If Virgil’s Georgics, unlike the epic Aeneid, was based on the region where the poet was born, Bouraoui, similarly, never forgets his roots throughout his long literary and academic career. The American Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote that to know the world, you must first know the parish, and Bouraoui knows his parish well. If Tunisia, and Sfax, appear front and centre in works like Retour à Thyna (novel, 1996), Sfaxitude (poetry, 2005), and the iconic, allegorical Rose des Sables (conte, 1998), it is never absent from any of his works. He is sometimes not included among Maghrebian writers because his work does not focus on exile and alienation, on exoticism; nor does he see himself as a postcolonial writer. He views his own background as an advantage, not a disadvantage, and displays throughout his work and his career the Tunisian rich humour, the love of storytelling, conviviality, family, the passion for the Mediterranean Sea, and the surrounding fertile land of olive trees, figs and dates. These provide the basis, the standing-ground, for his explorations of other cultures, for his attempts to find the unity in diversity which is the reality of his native land, a crossroads of cultures from ancient times, as well as of his adopted land, with its ideal of the Canadian mosaic. In every one of his works, fiction, poetry, narratoème, there is always a strong Maghrebian presence, whether it is set in the Far East, Egypt, Paris, Italy, the Mediterranean islands, the Caribbean, Canada, the United States. Haïtuvois (1980) represents a turning-point in his work, where the identification of Self and Other, formerly colonised North African and Haitian, of African descent, is foregrounded. Vers et l’Envers (1982) finds kindred souls even in eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, during the International Year of the Child – for are children not the same everywhere? To name just a few characters and narrators of Maghrebian lineage in his novels which are set elsewhere, there are Virgulius (Bangkok Blues, 1994), Barka Bousiris (La Pharaone, 1998), the nameless narrator of La Femme d’entre les lignes (2002), Tassadit (Paris berbère, 2011), Jasmin (La Réfugiée, 2012, whose titular character is Laotian), Samy Ben Meddah (Puglia à bras ouverts, 2007) and Le Conteur (2012). And of course, there is Hannibal Ben Omer of the * York University, Canada 388 ELIZABETH SABISTON Mediterranean trilogy (2008, 2009, 2010) – a wanderer with a purpose, in quest of father and mother in the Mediterranean islands. I propose to examine the Maghrebian presence across a number of these works, but I will focus particularly on La Composée (2001), whose heroine Héloïse returns constantly to Tunisia, not so much because of birth but by choice. At the end of La Composée she is definitively settled in Tunisia, by the sea. But after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, as his heroine returns to her source, her creator Hédi Bouraoui returns to La Composée in a new work, La Plantée (2017), where Héloïse addresses the question of whether she has made the right choice. Tunisia, and its destiny, haunt Bouraoui, as they do his heroine, who is herself a visual, if not a verbal, artist. MEMORIES OF SFAX Tunisia, and particularly Bouraoui’s native city of Sfax, appear prominently in Retour à Thyna and Sfaxitude. If the novel Retour à Thyna offers the reader an introduction to the history of the city, Sfaxitude is a poetic hymn to the town, whose title parallels Bouraoui’s project with ‘Négritude’, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s naming...

A Tribute to Professor Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.: Professor Emeritus of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

A Tribute to Professor Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.: Professor Emeritus of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst James Leheny (bio) My tribute to Joseph Skerrett begins by drawing people’s attention to his early and excellent 1975 Yale dissertation, entitled Take My Burden Up: Three Studies of Afro American Fiction. There and in articles derived from it one gets a solid sense of his many talents that flourished as his interests broadened during his thirty-year academic career. [The full text of his dissertation is available at the Thesis and Dissertation Database website, available in most research libraries.] Skerrett’s dissertation focuses on James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. He describes his methodology as “psychobiographical criticism” and credits the theoretical work of Kenneth Burke and Harold Bloom for informing his critical perspective. His essays approach the three authors in different ways, often incorporating psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology to illuminate his subject. His essay on Johnson explores the relationship between the nameless narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Johnson’s only novel, and his autobiography, Along This Way, published over twenty years later. The essay explores the ambivalence towards black identity, both in Johnson’s fiction and in his life history. His essay on Wright describes the author’s psycho-social situation. Examining Black Boy and Native Son, he addresses how Wright’s fiction enabled him to express his ambivalence towards his mother and other female authority figures. By killing two women—one white, one black—Bigger Thomas achieves a sense of freedom from repression embedded both in his own black culture and in the white racist society that surrounds it. His third essay discusses Ralph Ellison’s reading and criticism of Richard Wright. His distortions of Wright’s work are critical to understanding how Ellison came to envision an antithetical and competing image of Afro American culture. After achieving this substantial and original scholarship Skerrett published articles and presented papers on other Afro American writers: James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison, to name a few. He chaired the MLA’s Executive Committee on Black American Literature and Culture in 1999. While he never lost interest in Afro American literature, Skerrett broadened his scholarly focus to include issues of ethnicity and literature in America. He was elected President of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States in 1984, and he served as editor of MELUS, the Society’s scholarly journal, from 1987 to 1999. With Amritjit Singh and Robert Hogan, he edited Memory, Narrative, and Identity: Essays in American [End Page 8] Ethnic Literature (1994) and Memory and Cultural Politics (1995). In 2001 he published a book-length study, Literature, Race, and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities. Those of us fortunate enough to have known and worked with him recognize what an extraordinary person Joseph Skerrett was. A real polymath, he was able to examine issues from various, often quite different, perspectives, drawing, when appropriate, upon history, the social sciences, and even popular culture. He was an avid movie-goer, a talented cook, a wonderful gardener, and a fan of grand opera. He loved people as he loved life. And the mantle of his learning rested easily upon his shoulders. He enjoyed talking with students about their everyday lives, interests, and concerns. He was as eager to learn from them as he was to have them learn from him. [End Page 9] James Leheny JAMES LEHENY is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a former Associate Chancellor of the Amherst campus. He is editor of Joseph Addison’s The Freeholder (Oxford University Press, 1979). Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Torture, violence and apartheid in André P. Brink’s A Dry White Season

The preoccupation with skin color and other physical qualities of black men to legitimize colonialism and imperialism were of significance in South African history. The implementation of racism, discrimination, and exploitation in South Africa was unprecedented because apartheid was employed to the majority of blacks systematically and institutionally by the colonizer countries. Apartheid regime, as an official policy of the Afrikaner government between 1948 and 1990, created huge disparity and discriminations between the whites and non-whites. Published in 1979, A Dry White Season is Andre Brink’s fifth novel and it presents the enigmatic events that happen to Ben Du Toit and other black characters. The novel is the account of subjugation, illegal detentions, and murders of black people under the custody of the security police during and after of the Soweto uprising in South Africa. Setting his novel within the backdrop of the Soweto riots, Brink chooses a nameless narrator to narrate the turbulent events which reflects the brutality of apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. Contented with his wife and his three children, Ben is killed mysteriously in a hit and run accident. The mysterious death of the protagonist and the events are narrated by a nameless narrator who was Ben’s former university roommate. By disregarding the intimidation and seizures, Ben assumes responsibility to research the illegal detentions and tortures individually. This study explores the issues of torture, state violence, and arbitrary arrests of black peoples during the apartheid years in South Africa.

Beyond the Logic of Solidarity as Sameness: The Critique of Animal Instrumentalization in Margaret Atwood'sSurfacingand Marian Engel'sBear

The question of how to stand in solidarity with the animal and respect its “divergent agency” (Plumwood 201) without instrumentalizing it as an extension of the human self is one that has long preoccupied Canadian writers. In her seminal work of literary criticism Survival, Margaret Atwood observed that Canadian literary texts often rely on images of suffering animals as symbols of Canada's status as a “nearly-extinct” nation threatened by American imperialism (Survival 95). According to Atwood, such representations are driven not by a genuine concern with conservation ethics or animal agency but by a compulsion to police the integrity of the national self against external cultural others. In Surfacing, Atwood ironizes this logic of incorporation through the figure of a nameless narrator who attempts to consolidate her individual and national selfhoods by aligning herself with animal figures whom she regards as victims of American imperialism. Confusing human–animal solidarity with human–animal sameness, Atwood's narrator eventually feels herself morphing into an animal. Her transformation is ironized, however, by revelations of her own complicity in the colonization and exploitation of the very animals with which she identifies. Marian Engel's Bear similarly dramatizes the dangers of confusing human–animal solidarity with human–animal sameness, highlighting the political and ethical implications of this instrumentalizing logic: the protagonist's identification with the title character of the novel, Bear, often borders on a dynamic of indigenization that echoes troubling episodes of Canada's settler–invader history.

Exploring Bergsonian time in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl

This article aims to explore Henri Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1937), a prominent Modernist narrative in contemporary Iranian literature. Bergson refutes the logical and linear sequence of time and regards it as an indivisible whole that simultaneously posits the past, the present and the future on the same plane – the eternal present. Likewise, for Bergson, consciousness is characterized by flux and continuity as it processes all previous memories and experiences synchronously, as if they were all parts of a unified and organic whole. This article argues that certain features of the narrative structure of The Blind Owl, in particular the relativity and subjectivity of time and place and the constant intersection of memories and experiences, can be aligned with Bergson’s interpretation of temporality and consciousness. In the nameless narrator’s stream of consciousness and interrelated visions and reminiscences, characters, settings and incidents – which drive the narrative into a timeless and placeless context – constantly melt into and echo one another and ultimately become irreducible and radically interrelated constituents of an organic totality that resists temporal, spatial and cognitive divisibility.

Creating the New Man: Coercion and Torture in Eginald Schlattner's Novel Rote Handschuhe (2001)

At the center of this article lies the idea of creating the New Man, a formative idea in any authoritarian regime. I claim that, in their drive to create the New Man by any means necessary, decision‐makers of Communist regimes strove to transform those who did not adhere to their ideal into non‐persons. To illustrate this, I focus on Eginald Schlattner's autobiographical novel, Rote Handschuhe (2001), which depicts the process by which the Securitate (Communist Romania's secret police) re‐educates the first‐person narrator of Transylvanian‐Saxon ethnicity and bourgeois origins and trains him to be a loyal Communist. The nameless narrator succumbs to the violent pressure exerted by the Securitate and becomes a witness for the prosecution in a trial against fellow ethnic German writers in Romania in the late 1950s. Yet he finds that the very system that required his re‐education as a means to ensure its absolute control excludes him from full membership after he has served his purpose. In so doing, however, the regime undermines its own tactics and opens up the possibility of the individual's survival.

“The White Man’s Bruce Lee”: Race and the Construction of White Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999)

“The White Man’s Bruce Lee”Race and the Construction of White Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) Brian Locke (bio) Born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more. —Leslie A. Fiedler There is something at least a little bit odd about the representation of Asian American masculinity in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999). The film’s only Asian American character with a significant speaking part appears just once; and even though he looks unambiguously Asian, he has a European family name. A Korean American actor, Joon B. Kim, plays an unlucky liquor store clerk whom the hyper-masculine Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), one of the film’s two male leads, drags into a dark alley. Forcing him to his knees, he tells the weeping young man that he will shoot him in the head. “There’s going to be nothing left of your face,” Tyler intones, causing the Asian American man to emit a high-pitched squeal. “Raymond K. Hessel,” Tyler asks as he inspects the clerk’s expired community college identification card, “what did you study?” Raymond’s terror prevents him from responding. Fearing a violent outcome, the other male lead, the film’s nameless narrator (whom Edward Norton, the actor who plays him, calls Jack),1 implores him to speak. “Answer him, Raymond!” “Animal s-s-s-stuff,” stutters the clerk. Tyler wants to know why he quit. “I-I don’t know,” Raymond stutters some more, “too much school.” Tyler continues the interrogation, “Would you rather die here on your knees in the back of [End Page 61] a convenience store” or finish school? Under threat of death, Tyler orders him to complete his veterinarian education. “I know where you live,” he whispers to Raymond. The camera pulls in tight to Jack’s face, which registers disgust. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he mutters. After Tyler orders Raymond to run away, the scene takes a turn. “That wasn’t funny,” Jack shouts, “what the fuck was the point of that?” By way of a response, Tyler shows Jack that the gun has no bullets, retroactively turning his sadism into benevolent paternalism. Even though Tyler had earlier identified Raymond as a “human sacrifice,” implying murder, Raymond was never in any danger. “Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life,” says Tyler, “his breakfast will taste better than any meal that you and I have ever tasted.” Jack’s affect changes from disgust to quiet admiration. It turns out that Tyler perpetrated the charade to force Raymond out of a self-defeating passivity. By Tyler’s logic, once Raymond had faced death, what he had formerly considered to be insurmountable would seem much less so. “He had a plan,” says Jack’s voiceover, “and it started to make sense.” From Tyler’s point of view, Raymond represents the many American men emasculated by an American society circa 1999 dominated by corporations and consumerism. The “plan” to which Jack’s voiceover refers involves helping such men to recover their masculinity through physical violence. With Jack’s help, Tyler founds Fight Club, an underground group in which men recoup what they take to be their inherent masculine selves through bare-knuckle brawling. Fight Club starts off as a loose association with a handful of members grappling late at night in a tavern parking lot. But because contemporary society has marginalized so many, it quickly gains members and momentum, eventually replicating franchises across the nation. The “human sacrifice” scene emphasizes Raymond’s emasculation by rehearsing the stereotypical gender binary that defines feminine behavior as weak and passive and masculine behavior as strong and active. Tyler’s domination of Raymond is total. He stands rock solid while holding the gun to Raymond’s head; Raymond’s body undulates with fear. Tyler is calm; sweat glazes Raymond’s face. Tyler’s voice is low and composed with no articulated pauses; Raymond’s speech alternates between stuttering [End Page 62] and high-pitched whimpering and crying...