Nameless Woman Research Articles

An Ecocritical Reading of Muinar by Latife Tekin and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

This study aims to analyze ecocritical explorations and ecofeminist diologics inherent in Muinar by Latife Tekin and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. These novels portray female characters who undergo important changes in awareness in their pursuit of their identities as both novels have a primary emphasis on critiquing patriarchal perception of women and nature. This study sheds light on how the authors’ sensitivity and concerns about women and environment are manifested with the phases of the modifications in female protagonists Elime through her interaction with the internal voice of Muinar, who enters the minds of many women, in Muinar and a nameless woman through her spiritual journey to her homeland in Surfacing after their closeness to nature. This affiliation consequently results in the characters’ independence, self-sufficiency, resistance to oppression, self-discovery and environmental awareness. Focusing on female characters’ encounter with patriarchal oppression and the necessity of their physical immersion with the land, the authors criticize the harmful and destructive effects of modernized and technologized city life. Asserting alienation from nature and separation between body and mind have brought about the current crisis, these novels concomitantly put the emphasis on the wholeness with all beings on earth in order for women to complete their recuperation and recover from the all the sickness threatening their lives.

The post-traumatic in the story “My Star, My Wormwood…” by Tetiana Lavrova

The need for a literary interpretation of the manifestations of post-traumatic stress determines the relevance of the study. The purpose of this article is to characterize the manifestations of the post-traumatic issues in the short story “My Star, My Wormwood…” by Tetiana Lavrova (2002). To achieve this goal, contextual and psychological analysis, comparative, structuralist methods were used. The novelty of the article consists of the introduction of a story by the little-known writer T. Lavrova (married Mitsinska), which was published in the pages of the magazine “Vitchyzna”. The results of the study. The manifestations of the post-traumatic disorder of the character of the story at the mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral levels were analyzed. The following emotional reactions to trauma were identified: despondency, anxiety, disorientation, denial, emotional swings, intrusive thoughts about trauma, lack of control, a tendency to isolate, feelings of alienation, a decrease in interest in everyday activities, or depression. The results of the study prove that the manifestation of the character’s post-traumatic disorder is the lack of verbalization of emotions, realized due to the incompleteness of sentences. It is noted that T. Lavrovа realizes the reflection of the psyche of a person affected by trauma by resorting to the techniques of direct psychologism (“stream of consciousness”, “inner speech”). The writer uses forms of self-narrative with numerous self-reflective passages. The traumatic bifurcation of the character of the story “My Star, My Wormwood…” by T. Lavrova is revealed linguistically. The writer focuses on the individual issues (in this case, the tragedy of the nameless woman). At the same time, the namelessness of the character indicates the orientation towards the typicality of the tragic situation. It turns out that the author presents not the image of the events themselves, but the image of how they are reflected in the mind of the character. The analysis of fragments of the story makes it possible to understand the search for answers to questions of existence, the main categories of which in this work are sin and atonement. Special emphasis is placed on disclosing the donor zone of the ontological metaphor with the “liquid” element.

The Nameless Daughter of Saul

Abstract The roles of Michal and Merab in the received tradition of the Book of Samuel are complex. This study examines the literary embeddedness of Saul’s daughter within several passages in which she appears (1Sam 18:17–19*; 1Sam 19:11–17; 2Sam 3:12–16*; 2Sam 21:8). In many cases, the names of Saul’s daughters—Michal and Merab—can be easily excised without doing significant damage to the surrounding text. This article concludes that some episodes featuring one of Saul’s daughters may originally have assumed only a single, nameless woman.

Modernism and Non-translation

“An arresting, recurrent feature of modernist literature, especially that written in English,” declare the editors in their introduction, is “its incorporation of untranslated words and phrases.” True enough, and it is astonishing that more has not been written on the phenomenon of foreign-language citation in the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and many others. The Waste Land, for example, as Harding points out in his own contribution to this essay collection, is a veritable tissue of allusions, inserted in the original Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Provençal and even Sanskrit forms. It is as if the Cumaean sybil's prophecy, in the poem's epigraph, could not be rendered in English.How and why writers felt compelled to insert foreign phrases—Henry James, Daniel Karlin notes, included numerous French locutions like à contre coeur (“reluctantly”) even in his own personal notebooks—makes for a fascinating study, but unfortunately Harding and Nash refer to the process as non-translation, a term implying that the word or phrase in question could have been translated but was not. Non-translation, however, is misleading. If I write a letter to friends who, like me, have a special love for things Italian, and address them as Carrissimi, it is not because I could not say “Dearest ones.” It is because the Italian phrase feels more intimate, more authentic. James, who had lived abroad for many years and regarded French culture as much more sophisticated than our own, loved to use their phraseology, which often seemed to him more succinct, more to the point. Or again, Pound could have translated the repeated words “Dove sta memoria” (from his beloved Cavalcanti's Donna mi prega) as “Where memory lives,” but then he would have lost the entire tone and affect of the phrase.Citing Christopher Ricks, Harding, discussing the opening of The Waste Land, notes that the “non-translation” of line 12—“Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch”—allows Eliot to emphasize the “tonal recesses of foreignness,” the “strangeness of the voices of the displaced.” But the citation has, I think, a much more obvious function. The nameless woman in the Hofgarten is meant to epitomize the rootlessness and mongrelization of culture of the postwar years: her casual, colloquial sentence is, of course, absurd: she is not echt anything. The German phrase guarantees authenticity and irony. Similarly, in Joyce's Ulysses, we meet a Stephen Dedalus whose mind is full of Church Latin, even as Bloom comically mistranslates snatches of Italian opera. The modernists were responding to an age of increasing linguistic alterity.Equally interesting, as Stephen Romer shows in his excellent essay, is to speculate why certain poets then discontinued the practice, as did Eliot by 1930, when he evidently longed to assert his new status as a “royalist” and “Anglican” Englishman. Romer finds that Ash Wednesday contains a single foreign reference—Dante's Sovegna vos.

Exploring Love, Sex, and Loneliness in Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's "Panty"

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (b. 1974), a modern feminist writer, promotes and celebrates women’s freedom that the women seek to enjoy both physically and psychologically. Bold and candid, Bandyopadhyay exposes “hardcore sexuality” into her work, going against the flow in society. Panty, one of her best-known works, is a novella about a nameless woman who goes through surreal experiences. The novella is set in contemporary Kolkata, a boisterous metropolis, where women work at part with men, but still the women feel a sense of inferiority. The woman in the novella enters a dark apartment, owned by a mysterious man with whom she has a complicated relationship, at night and finds a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. Circumstances force her to wear the panty, and just then she begins to imagine its original owner along with her wild sexual life. The rest of the story evolves around the woman’s imagination, her love, sex, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and so forth. This article analyzes how a woman struggles to achieve a secure space in society as well as an established identity. The article also explores how a woman navigates between love and sex, freedom and dependence, and continues to search for a life that she has not yet lived.

Dare (Again) to Not Speak Its Name? Translating "Race" into Early Twentieth-Century Western Armenian Feminist Texts

Dare (Again) to Not Speak Its Name?Translating "Race" into Early Twentieth-Century Western Armenian Feminist Texts Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (bio) Revolutions only snap dried branches, and trim old trees. Whatever has life and is good will remain, and if it too dies, it will regenerate. Today always has a claim over yesterday and tomorrow always on today. —Vartouhie Calantar, "A Response to Hay Gin's Question" (1921)1 I In an empty room with beige walls, a middle-aged woman with black skin and ear-length curly hair sits at a table set against a wall. Although her back is to the camera, her reflection faces the audience through the rectangular mirror that rests atop the table. Her eyes are cast down. "No one sees me," narrates the voiceover of a little olive-skinned tomboy who enters the frame. She fidgets uncomfortably in a pink dress. She's just escaped a moment of awkwardness among her peers and skips behind the woman in the mirror, "wait[ing] for a moment of belonging."2 They are in the kitchen of an Armenian church, [End Page 607] somewhere in North America, 1970s. The woman fixes herself in the mirror as the little girl watches, inquisitively. The voiceover continues, in English: I see too much. Words come in our direction, and I overhear them talk about the woman near me. I stand apart from mouths that slant slurs. That she doesn't belong here. Noses turn up at her. "Why is she here?" they say over again. "Black, sevamort, who has brought this black woman here, inch gene gor hos? This odar." Other, they call her. "Sev e." Why do they say that? … She … ignores … them … pretends this language is alien to her. She is silent and waits for the awkwardness to leave the room … No discrete gestures made by others, no welcomes uttered to the Sunday guest … lips suck words of hate against her. This is not the first time I have heard this before.3 So unfolds artist Tina Bastajian's short film Pinched Cheeks and Slurs in a Language That Avoids Her (1995); as the DVD jacket's epigraph riffs, it is "An Ethiopian blend." With its main protagonist played by an actor who, by the film's end, speaks flawless Western Armenian, the short tells the story of exclusion through a tedious, predictable, and well-weathered trope: nationalism. In the frame, the little girl's voiceover, expressing its own gendered discomfort as she gravitates toward the outcast woman, struggles to speak or remember the language of her ancestors. At the same time, the adults who chatter in the background cannot even consider how this woman with dark skin sitting in their church kitchen could be Armenian. She is sev, a Black; a foreigner-Other, odar, who has no legitimate place among their kin. The nameless woman is mocked, in a language the viewer later learns is all-toomuch her own. Even during the film's various screenings, Armenian audience members were unconvinced: "How did you so perfectly synchronize the Armenian dubs with her lips?" viewers often asked the filmmaker.4 We learn two things from this question: while the codes of normative gender are subverted by the (trans) actor who plays the woman (viewers don't cast doubt over the protagonist's status as a normative "woman"), her "race" remains unquestioningly fixed and unsubvertible. Due to the material-discursive practice of difference-making by the name of "race," in the film "race" is understood as inherited (through blood) and indelibly tied to visible somatic qualities like skin color. For the background voices, a black-skinned Armenian is a logical fallacy, lest the racialized boundaries of their normative or purified [End Page 608] Armenianness begin to blur. Thus, she remains an outsider; as a woman with black skin, she cannot "pass" as Armenian. Once considered nonwhite in the United States, through what turn of events has blackness for Armenians stateside become a slur? That nationalist discourse is predicated on exclusion is not a new story; it is imperative, rather, to trace its contours.5 Feminist scholarship in particular has shown that the imagined community of the nation, a collective...

Wzniosłość i gniew

The article endeavours to characterize key issues raised by Ananda Devi (1957), a francophone writer and poet born in Mauritius who has been living in France for many years. The analysis is based primarily on two novels that were translated into Polish by Krzysztof Jarosz: Le sari vert / Zielone sari and Ève de ses décombres / Ewa ze swych zgliszcz. Already these two novels enable us to perceive the uniqueness of Devi’s writings, whose clear commitment to the discussion about burning social problems equals its commitment to the discussion with literature: its tradition, present status quo, planned future. Devi poses questions about national, linguistic, cultural, and sexual identity; about wasted opportunities of emancipation from the shackles of colonialism; about possibilities of freedom in the environment of systemic subjugation. The micro perspective enables her to show some macro phenomena: continuous production of “dispensable people,” human robots exploited to produce goods for the rich North and the rich West, sacked overnight when using cheap labour force stops bringing profit; systemic racism used by the law-observing state to perform illegal acts. In the world based on the economy of profit, literature, and particularly poetry, becomes a unique weapon, because it serves no purpose. Reading and writing are revolutionary activities, looking for brothers and sisters in poetry is a chance to build a radical International that includes also (or rather, first of all) men and women who have experienced rupture, life in two different dimensions, languages, groups (choosing French by a Mauritian was a declaration, Devi describes the experience of splitting when portraying Sad in Ève de ses décombres). Devi is particularly concerned with the fate of children doomed to failure due to their “bad” descent, skin colour, or sex, children who are guilty from birth. Systemic inequalities and inherited violence in humiliated and ashamed communities mainly afflict women, who are reduced to bodies that may be conquered, beaten, exploited as labour force. Devi succeeds in presenting silent or nameless women not as victims (although she does not underplay their suffering, on the contrary), but as heroes who become reborn after traumas or in next generations, able to take revenge, risking the scraps of stability and false safety to show their presence, to exert influence, to reverberate. The flame of wrath experienced by Devi’s characters, also those burnt alive, as the character in Le sari vert, should (and will) be a seedbed of change, because you cannot burn all women pregnant with silence. Devi accuses (like the author of Les Misérables), she is not afraid of elevation, as panache is necessary for a coup, for changing the status quo, the order based on lawlessness, for social, common awakening.

Commemorating the Nameless Wives of the Bible: Midrashic Poems by Contemporary American-Jewish Women

A proper name individualizes a person, the lack of it making him or her less noticeable. This insight is apt in regard to the nameless women in the Hebrew Bible, a resolutely androcentric work. As Judaism traditionally barred women from studying, many Jewish feminists have sought access to the Jewish canon. Much of American-Jewish women’s poetry can thus be viewed as belonging to the midrashic-poetry tradition, attempting to vivify the biblical women by “revisioning” the Bible. This article examines two nameless wives who, although barely noted in the biblical text, play a significant role in their husbands’ stories—Mrs. Noah and Mrs. Job. Although numerous exegetes have noted them across history, few have delved into their emotions and characters. Exploration of the way in which contemporary Jewish-American poets treat these women and connect them to their own world(s) is thus of great interest to both modern and biblical scholars. Herein I focus on five poets: Elaine Rose Glickman (“Parashat Noach”), Barbara D. Holender (“Noah’s Wife,” and “Job’s Wife”), Oriana Ivy (“Mrs. Noah,” and “Job’s Wife”), Shirley Kaufman (“Job’s Wife”), and Sherri Waas Shunfenthal (“Noah’s Wife Speaks,” “The Animals are our Friends,” “Time,” and “Arc of Peace”).

Naming the nameless woman of Jerome’s Vita Malchi

One of the common methods for side-lining women in literature is to leave them nameless. This is the case with the woman in Jerome’s Vita Malchi. However, this woman is also vital to the narrative and the progression of the title character, Malchus. The aim of this study was to assist in giving this important character an identity by examining the many ways in which she is actually named, firstly in terms of the roles assigned to her, and then in terms of the associations that can be made between her and other people and characters from Jerome’s experience. Using a variety of literary techniques, including close-text, intra- and intertextual readings, it was possible to make many such identifications, turning the nameless woman into the nameful woman.

Pater Don't Preach: Byzantine Theology, Female Sexuality, and Histories of Global Encounter in the "English" Paenitentiale Theodori

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: IN THE LATE seventh century, a woman asked Theodore of Tarsus (602–690), archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England, a question about marriage. She was one of many people who flocked to Theodore and his learned companion, the North African–born Abbot Hadrian (d. 710), after their arrival in Canterbury from Rome in 669/670. This nameless woman revealed that she had been married previously and, after the death of her husband, had vowed never to take another spouse. However, eleven years later, she was now remarried but still felt conflicted about her earlier vow. Her question reflects a deeply Christian understanding of marriage as a union making two people literally into carne una (one flesh), as Jesus had put it in the gospel of Matthew. Theodore would have been familiar with local debates over the interpretation of this passage, though [End Page 1] he was probably even more familiar with Eastern Orthodox theological opinions, such as John Chrysostom's influential treatise De non iterando coniugio (Against Remarriage).

"Horse Dress, Anonymous"

"Horse Dress, Anonymous" Jessica Hudgins Rather than wear her hospital gown, a nameless woman stitched a horse's knotted eyes in the fabric that would fit her chest; a snout, nostrils flared, across her ovaries; and a tail, lengthening her spine. She lived for decades in the hospital, where she was likely misdiagnosed (the insert reads), and where, with no pattern, she crocheted the dress that survives her name. On September 30, 2015, Kelly Gissendaner became Georgia's second woman to receive the death penalty. Because she told him to, her boyfriend stabbed and killed her husband. Her children were given a choice between saying goodbye and fighting for clemency, and took the latter. She sang "Amazing Grace" as she received the injection. While marching from a forced labor camp to a hospital, Míklos Radnóti wrote ten poems. World War Two was ending. The Germans knew they'd lost. His wife exhumed the grave (twenty-one men), and found Found soaked in the fluids of the body and blackened by wet earth the journal in his back pocket. The coroner wrote: Cleaned, dried in the sun. The lines come sloping across my page. I write my poem in half-dark, blindly, in earthworm-rhythm. We aren't allowed to know the alleged schizophrenic who created a horse to hold her body. We have what details we're given. We have what a person's made, or what they've done, or both, or none and, with it, make what we can. [End Page 124] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Dealing with Don Juan’s Legacy: Rebellion and Inheritance in Lídia Jorge’s O vale da paixão

This article analyzes how Lidia Jorge’s nameless woman narrator in O vale da paixao reconstructs through a story of resistance the legacy of her donjuanesque father/uncle. Dealing with the father’s legacy becomes a priority for a narrator who wishes both to affirm her feminine identity and appropriate her father’s memory. However, remembrance is not devoid of perils. To rescue her father’s life from slander, the narrator must find ways to reinterpret the myth of the rebellious, globetrotter womanizer he impersonates in the traditional patriarchal unit. Using Jacques Lacan writings on drives and Alenka Zupancic’s reading of Don Juan, I will show how Lidia Jorge’s narrative rewriting of the myth of Don Juan disrupts the patriarchal system of values from which it draws its strength. This article is published under a CC-BY license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Traditional imagery of women as seen through female visual art: Hung Liu

This paper examines the work of Liu Hung (1948–) a Chinese-born contemporary painter living and working in America. A significant part of her prolific artistic production focuses on what she calls “mythical poses” of women, taking inspiration from the old images of prostitutes and nameless women from the nineteenth and twentieth century China. Assuming that old photography is the source for Liu’s visual narrative, this paper intends to analyse how traditional woman imagery is seen through the eyes of the artist. I argue that in her visual narrative, the woman imagery goes through a double process of deconstruction and reinterpretation. The artist extract some descriptive elements from old photos, in order to isolate the most distinctive traditional symbols of Chinese society. Then, she depicts these elements in the canvas, using them as a visual a citation quoted in order to represent the image of woman in traditional China, and to describe the way the Chinese culture has looked at them. These symbols are reinterpreted and given new meaning, acting as a critique about the same imagery. Focussing on some works of art, this paper will analyse this process of deconstruction and reinterpretation.

The ‘woman-in-conflict’ at the UN Security Council: a subject of practice

Since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the woman-in-conflict has emerged as a central figure in the discourse of the UNSC Women, Peace and Security policy community. She is an ever-present referent in discussions, the person in whose name critique is launched or action demanded. This figure is a representation of the needs and interests of the uncountable, faceless and nameless women affected by and living through war; a representation that takes place through imbuing her with particular meaning or characteristics. These meanings shape how the figure is understood in Women, Peace and Security discourse, which, in turn, constructs the horizons of possibility for both current and future policy and its implementation. This article explores how this figure is produced as a subject through layers of representation and is deeply embedded in the practices and relationships of power in the policy community. It suggests that accounting for these will offer an opportunity for feminist advocates to engage in this institutional space in more considered and effective ways.

I Refuse by Per Petterson

that owes as much to the trials of adolescence as to a prophecy. “Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis. . . . Though he was no longer accessible, he began to leave shattering traces of himself around the house in actions that left lasting impacts on our lives.” At times Obioma’s craft falters: the beginning of the novel is marred by clumsy foreshadowing and the prose is at times overwritten, as in this description of Ben’s father: “His word—like an overloaded lumber truck caught in Lagos traffic—slalomed through the pockmarked dirt of his moving speech, halting and jerking and slumping.” At his best, Obioma offers compelling portraits of characters who discover that their place in the world is far from secure: “It dawned on me for the first time that Father, the strong man, could not help me; he’d become a tamed eagle.” Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Per Petterson. I Refuse. Don Bartlett, tr. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2014. isbn 9781555976996 I Refuse begins with the chance meeting of former best friends Jim and Tommy after thirty-five years. The narrative then meanders them back and forth through time, even within precisely dated chapters, as the “I” and omniscient narrators reveal hidden dimensions of their most seminal moments. In his latest novel, Petterson again explores dysfunctional or broken families adrift in the suffocating provincialism of 1960s working-class Norway, whose mantra is “refusal.” While Jim is fatherless, Tommy’s too-visible father protests his fate by abusing his family. Tommy’s mother, Tya, abandons her young children “so as not to lose her life”; Tommy injures his father, whose subsequent departure leaves his children parentless; and Tommy’s sister, Siri, spurns adult connection but works for Save the Children. Jim rejects Tommy, disdains his religious, conservative mother (whose fatal cancer later unites them briefly), destroys an early relationship, and endures a painful divorce, while Tommy remains alone too. Only hard-working bachelor Jonsen, one of Petterson’s tough but generous mentor figures, futilely tries to bond with Tya, aids her escape, and later “adopts” Tommy. The boys refuse Norway’s rigid norms, embracing American culture and Western literature. But Jim, who studied English literature , no longer lets books guide him. At forty he rejected D. H. Lawrence’s “thirst for life” as it “burned” in his hands while his mother lay dying. Working-class Tommy has stopped reading fiction but still treasures World Literature in Review 64 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 Jim’s long-ago gift, Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down (whose unnamed village resists “occupiers ,” evoking Norway during World War II), as an emblem of Jim and freedom. Their initial encounter contrasts the men’s psychic and socioeconomic conditions. Excited to see Jim, Tommy recognizes the badly worn jacket that when new signified Jim’s exotic hero status. But now Jim lives austerely, refusing to seek employment after his year’s medical leave (for panic attacks and undiagnosed pains) from his position as head librarian. Tommy, meanwhile, developed Jonsen’s work ethic, prospering in high finance. But he finds no joy in his many “things,” and his unexpectedly fine clothes and car sharpen Jim’s sense of failure. The text eventually reveals what ended their friendship. At twenty, Jim, like Conrad ’s Lord Jim, longed to be “worthy.” Instead, in a moment of fear, he endangers Tommy. His sense of failure and harsh selfjudgment , despite his friend’s supportive stance, lead him to attempted suicide, hospitalization , and paranoia: he imagines that Tommy means to poison him. Thereafter, Jim’s mother moves them away. A haunting beauty suffuses this spare, nuanced text whose final sections, “The Last Night,” portray two forms of refusal. Both men have embraced negation, filling their voids with drink and nameless women. Jim has the last word, following the “narrow, slippery rope from childhood” to fulfill his self-pronounced sentence. But in the penultimate chapters, Tommy bonds with Berit, the girl behind a café counter, stagnant in her deadly marriage. About to seek the doomed Jim again, Tommy feels Berit’s “sensational, warm, living breath”: “I have a girlfriend now. . . . life is different now.” Refusing “dead ends,” they embrace Lawrence’s “thirst,” daring...

Little Bastards in Springtime by Katja Rudolph

Jim’s long-ago gift, Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down (whose unnamed village resists “occupiers ,” evoking Norway during World War II), as an emblem of Jim and freedom. Their initial encounter contrasts the men’s psychic and socioeconomic conditions. Excited to see Jim, Tommy recognizes the badly worn jacket that when new signified Jim’s exotic hero status. But now Jim lives austerely, refusing to seek employment after his year’s medical leave (for panic attacks and undiagnosed pains) from his position as head librarian. Tommy, meanwhile, developed Jonsen’s work ethic, prospering in high finance. But he finds no joy in his many “things,” and his unexpectedly fine clothes and car sharpen Jim’s sense of failure. The text eventually reveals what ended their friendship. At twenty, Jim, like Conrad ’s Lord Jim, longed to be “worthy.” Instead, in a moment of fear, he endangers Tommy. His sense of failure and harsh selfjudgment , despite his friend’s supportive stance, lead him to attempted suicide, hospitalization , and paranoia: he imagines that Tommy means to poison him. Thereafter, Jim’s mother moves them away. A haunting beauty suffuses this spare, nuanced text whose final sections, “The Last Night,” portray two forms of refusal. Both men have embraced negation, filling their voids with drink and nameless women. Jim has the last word, following the “narrow, slippery rope from childhood” to fulfill his self-pronounced sentence. But in the penultimate chapters, Tommy bonds with Berit, the girl behind a café counter, stagnant in her deadly marriage. About to seek the doomed Jim again, Tommy feels Berit’s “sensational, warm, living breath”: “I have a girlfriend now. . . . life is different now.” Refusing “dead ends,” they embrace Lawrence’s “thirst,” daring to forge real connection. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Katja Rudolph. Little Bastards in Springtime. Hanover, New Hampshire. Steerforth Press. 2015. isbn 9781586422332. Katja Rudolph’s Evergreen Award–nominated first novel follows the Serb-Croat Andric family—journalist father, pianist mother, teenage son, six-year-old twin daughters, and younger son, Jevrem, eleven—as the siege of Sarajevo destroys their happy lives, forcing them to flee to Toronto. Exploring how violence and diaspora shape youths who fight the status quo with their own misguided violence, Bastards promises a new thread in Balkan literature. But despite many lyrical passages, a solid plot framework , and historical accuracy, this ambitious novel reflects some unfortunate choices that diminish its power. First, too-familiar tropes proliferate, for example Sarajevo as multiethnic paradise, music as resistance, grotesquely injured children, raping Serbs, disaffected youths, clueless westerners, and hippie sages. This distances the reader from Rudolph’s fictional universe, which lacks the singular images and nuanced stylistics of, say, Shards (Prcic), How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Stanišić), or The Question of Bruno (Hemon). Further, pacing is uneven. Section 1, the most effective, slowly constructs the rich lives of Jevrem’s family until the siege impels the narrative forward, while section 3, showcasing Jevrem’s escape from the juvenile prison and the transcontinental road trip that follows , moves quickly toward its dénouement. Section 2, the longest, slows to a crawl, lingering on Jevrem’s angst and the repetitive escapades of his disaffected, multiethnic “bastards,” teenaged Bosnian transplants who drink, do drugs, “liberate” goods from haves, and give randomly to have-nots. Although Jevrem narrates this first-person account, issues emerge about speech modes. While its epigraphs urge resistance to “official stories,” the novel itself appears Tomas Espedal Against Nature James Anderson, tr. Seagull Books Tomas Espedal’s writing is wonderfully descriptive, flowing freely from one sentence into another. Such a style is fitting for a novel that seems to glide between thoughts as it questions whether society is natural and what should be done about it. Drawing particular attention to themes of work and love, Espedal’s book invites readers to ponder what is natural in life. Louis-Philippe Dalembert The Other Side of the Sea Robert H. McCormick, tr. University of Virginia Press Dalembert weaves three voices into a single stirring narrative tapestry, revealing a unique look at Haiti’s rich and often troubled history impossible to conceive from foreign shores. The first major novel of Dalembert’s...

Ghostly Predicament

This essay explores the connection between spectrality and historicality in Rabindranath Tagore's short story ‘The Hungry Stones’. I bring this ghostly story in a dialogue with Tagore's prose essay ‘Historicality in Literature’ to argue that the function of the ‘spectrality effect’ deployed by Tagore is to exteriorize the discourse of realist historiography. My argument here is twofold: first, I argue that Tagore, through this ghostly story, questions realism's attempt at turning literature into a totalizing narrative. Aesthetically predicating his narrative on the limitations of recorded history, Tagore tries to reach at an understanding of ‘human history’ by invoking the spirit of a nameless woman who never found her place in ‘national history’. Second, I claim that the spectrality of this narrative is not limited to the content only. The casual beginning and the abrupt ending of the story not only reaffirm the ghostliness of the narrative, they also spectralize the literary form itself. By questioning the finitude of literature in its realist, representative role, this story also enables an understanding of the limitations of the assumed and linear relationship between postcolonial literature and history.

Non-anxious Presence of Jesus Through Mother-like Composure

In Mark 5:21–43, Jesus encounters two individuals who are in a dire need and abruptly approach Jesus for healing. Like anxious children running toward their mother for security, the nameless woman and Jairus run towards Jesus for a miraculous comfort. In response to them, Jesus offers a non-anxious presence through his composed attitude, which allows a safe-enough space for them to grow in their faith and become autonomous. I propose that such composed attitude of Jesus is comparable to a secure mother who cares for her anxious child. Consequently, I examine such mother-like response of Jesus by making correlations to D. W. Winnicott’s understanding of composed mothers and anxious children. Exploring how Jesus disables anxiety in the two individuals may have helpful implications for pastoral caregivers who are abruptly approached by those who are overwhelmed with anxiety.

"And Thou Shalt Bind Them as a Sign upon Thy Hand": Eve's Tattoo and the Holocaust Consumer

"And Thou Shalt Bind Them as a Sign upon Thy Hand":Eve's Tattoo and the Holocaust Consumer Rob Baum (bio) The eponymous Eve of Eve's Tattoo acquires a tattoo based on a photograph of an anonymous woman from Auschwitz. New York writer Eve Flick seeks to memorialize all victims of Nazi genocide by performing their death stories, but instead plays out her own personal and political dramas before a backdrop of contemporary U.S. concerns, urban chic, and German reunification. Emily Prager's contemporary novel interrogates the Judeophobia prevalent in the most artistic and educated of milieux. The novel exemplifies a postmodern malaise I call the "Holocaust reader." The "Holocaust reader" actively pursues an empathic obsession with victims (and sometimes survivors) of the Shoah. The syndrome is ontologically "postmodern" in its pathology, as the "Holocaust reader" reads the Shoah as a secondary or tertiary text, and projects herself into the literature of torture and gratuitous death. Let your absence be the latest shape of your being felt forever.—Rilke When Eve Flick acquires a tattoo at the age of forty, she does not choose a butterfly, rose, or dragon to curl around her shoulder. Eve's tattoo resembles that of an unknown woman murdered at Auschwitz, matched to a photograph found hidden in the recesses of her boyfriend's closet; the tattoo is placed on her left forearm, six small numbers from a dead stranger. Why was this photograph in the closet, and what does Eve mean by transferring a dead woman's Ka-Tzetnik number onto her own limb? Eve intends to memorialize Hitler's female victims, to create archetypal death narratives, postmodern performances of memory. Around the imagined name "Eva," Eve invents myriad fictional selves, fragments of horrible truth. The brave, stupid gesture of emblazoning [End Page 116] Auschwitz on her arm initiates a spiritual journey as Eve hunts for the nameless woman she desires to embody. But she does not glimpse the decadent Gentile European body she has actually conjured from silence—a body that gives voice to racist and homophobic hatred in the name of a "living," loving god. Content in North American privilege and a generation away from war, Eve's painful dramas of private alienation, public betrayal, and self-denial testify to the contemporary allure of Nazism. Nazism exerts a dangerous fascination in these times, not least because of its association with the erotic. Nazi symbolism elides in the simplistic shapes of monster and maiden, discolours Jewish lives, whitens Gentile lives. In the twenty-first century, Nazism inspires the décor of Asian restaurants, fashions on Milanese catwalks, costumes of famous rock stars, national prize-winning novels, tags of Polish gangs.1 The resonance of Nazism with postmodernism governs a brisk market in secret photos, Judenstern crisp with age, Nazi china, shrivels of Torah scrolls reduced to swastikas. Fifteen years ago I handled a silver soupspoon with an incised lightning bolt of the SS, touched the dim dent made in its bowl by SS teeth. Hate memorabilia is very good business. You can buy it on the internet if you can't make it to the conferences, meetings, trade fairs, and club dinners where such goods are brokered, along with concentration camp uniforms, prisoners' tools, Jewish talismans, soap, flesh, and other Nazi family heirlooms. The Jewish Holocaust, the Shoah,2 has become a commodity, something to consume, to want, to want to possess. Emily Prager's novel Eve's Tattoo3 forms the basis of my exploration of Holocaust consumption, the visitation of a neo-trauma on the Jewish body. This insightful novel shapes my discussion of performance and embodiment, the iconography of the Ka-Tzetnik (concentration camp) tattoo, the Nazi erotic and the dangers of Holocaust consumption. [End Page 117] Performing the Jewish Woman The central character of Eve's Tattoo is Eve Flick, a tony New York magazine writer known for her witty, acerbic pen. In Eve's mind, "memorialization" is not the same thing as "immortalization"; the dead live in, rather than apart from, Eve, who incorporates the narrative. Attracted to, yet repelled by, the woman in the photograph who (blonde, blue-eyed, and Germanic) looks so much like...

Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon (review)

Reviewed by: Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon Roland J. Teske, S.J. Judith Chelius Stark , editor. Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 326. Paper, $35.00. This present volume is the twenty-ninth in the Re-Reading the Canon series, the title of each of which volumes begins Feminist Interpretations of . . . . Surprisingly, the volume on Augustine has appeared relatively late in the series. The editor has collected eleven essays plus a poem on feminist interpretations of the bishop of Hippo, who has certainly exerted a powerful influence on the view of women in the Western Christian churches of all major denominations. Besides the essays, Stark has provided a substantial introduction to the volume in which she touches upon the principal events of Augustine's life and briefly sketches the main points of each essay. The feminist interpretations of Augustine included in the volume represent a broad spectrum running from quite radical to fairly moderate or even tame approaches. In "Augustine, Sexuality, Gender, and Women," Rosemary Radford Ruether presents a call to critique the views of Augustine from which women and men have suffered for over 1500 years in Western Christianity. Anne-Marie Bowery argues in "Monica: The Feminine Face of Christ" that Augustine's portrait of Monica allows us to "reframe the masculine image of the divinity" (70) that is basic to Western Christianity. In her essay, Felecia McDuffie examines Augustine's rhetoric of the feminine in a literary and historic analysis of the Confessions and concludes that, since Augustine does include some aspects of the feminine, his postmodern daughters may enter into dialogue with him on this subject. "Confessing Monica," the joint work of Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, presents the Confessions as a meditation on Monica from a literary and historical and from a theological and exegetical perspective. In "O Mother, Where Art Thou? In Search of Saint Monnica," Rebecca Moore struggles to discover what we can really know about Monnica and comes up with a quite limited view of the facts we can known about Augustine's mother. The other unnamed, but not nameless woman in the Confessions is the topic of Margaret R. Miles's essay, subtitled "The Woman Torn from Augustine's Side." In "Augustine's Letters to Women," Joanne McWilliam surveys Augustine's letters written to women, which fall into the following groups: letters of condolence, letters of advice, letters on religious matters, and finally letters of theological content. She notes that the letters are not condescending or patronizing and even in some cases reveal considerable respect for the talents of the addressee. E. Ann Matter's essay, "De cura feminarum: Augustine the Bishop, North African Women, and the Development of a Theology of Female Nature," a brief essay with so long a title, finds that Augustine's letters to women show kindness and consideration for them and suggests that the women involved in the Pelagian controversy may have contributed to his later more negative views. Stark's essay, "Augustine on Women: In God's Image, but Less So," reviews the texts and current literature on Augustine's view of women as made in God's image in their rational souls, but inferior in terms of their bodies. In "To Remember Self, to Remember God: Augustine on Sexuality, Relationality, and the Trinity," Julie B. Miller attempts to explain his teaching on God and the Self as well as to offer "a feminist psychological critique of Augustine's early relationship with his mother," in an alternate view to that of "traditional non-Freudian analyses" (245). The final essay, "The Evanescence of Masculinity: Deferral in Saint Augustine's Confessions and Some Thoughts on Its Bearing on the Sex/Gender Debate," by Penelope Deutscher, explores "a by-product of the sex/gender debate, namely, [End Page 480] attempts by some authors to maintain a terminological distinction between the terms 'man' and 'masculine' and between 'woman' and 'feminine' (282). She argues that one can understand the opposition of such terms as theologically grounded in a particular sense. The closing poem, "To Aurelius Augustine from the Mother of His Son," by Ann Conrad Lammers...